The creamy blossom and verdant lawns of a manicured cottage in the Gloucestershire countryside will serve as a potent salve after two years’ pillorying by the identitarian Gestapo.
An excellent summary of the operation of academia today. Not only does it go a long way into making the argument for the need to use merit in hiring/promotion. It also demonstrates that academia has not practiced merit in hiring for a long time!
Leigh - Thank you for your absolutely delightful tale. All Kafkaesque, except the delightful ending. My version of your story left me in the Pinot Noir vineyards of northern California. Please visit any time.
I am glad to hear that your colleague had a hood that was a textbook example. Tis not always so. I have seen hoods that were quite opposite. I remembered, while reading this, a flip side incident in the USA at UCLA. . You are probably aware.
She was wearing a fluffy synthetic sweater and hairspray with no lab coat handling pryrophoric material. Fashion over survival.
The University of California did nothing until criminal charges were filed against the gentlemen of leisure who warm the chairs known as the Regents of the university of California. Only then were changes made to safety education.
UCs have a habit of collecting "Responsible Officials" in settlements with the courts. I met one in grad school. They know that their job is to protect the university from doing anything meaningful. It's all about protecting the reputation and money stream.
I did some digging at UC Davis. There were a number of serious chemical injuries. All of them young women. At UC Davis, all of them due to not using the chemical shower correctly. Phenol causes skin necrosis and analgesia. The complete destruction of skin tissue was caused by underwear collecting and keeping phenol on the skin, without pain. And failure to use soap or detergent. The result is genitals turned to scar as if a blowtorch was applied.
The obvious remedy is to require regular drills requiring stripping and use of soap and detergent in the chemical shower with a simulant, overseen by female members of the fire department, which has responsibility for coming to collect people. An optimal simulant would be something like oil emulsified pepper spray. But no. The chemical showers remain dry in their hallways. Part of the objection to drills was that most showers had no drain. So it was a mess to clean up. So it goes.
In the revised curriculum, Sheri's name is not mentioned, supposedly out of respect for the feelings of the family. It's horsemanure of course. I rather imagine the family could be fine with her burned body being used to educate how serious this is. We see worse routinely on cop shows like NCIS.
The worst UCDavis incident in "lab" was in the social 'sciences" though. A student died in South America. She was raped and murdered. She went out one night dressed in skimpy attire that she was used to wearing on campus. There was mention she wanted to score some cocaine. This was in a culture in which women cover up from ankle to neck.
The parents were lied to by the professor. The grad student who talked to me about it was told that if she even told the next year's students that it happened, she would not graduate. She would be cut from the program. She was also told she could not tell female students how to dress. I told her to call his bluff. She did not.
The system works sometimes. This above postdoc had an interest in plastic explosives. He was first caught making small samples on campus. After being told more than once, he set up a hood in his on campus apartment. Then he blew up his hand. The ER doctor knew what he was looking at and notified police.
This incident was responded to by every law enforcement agency that could horn in on it. A real live "terrorist lab" like training exercise! All the toys! The guy was a brilliant chemist.
I am also reminded of the physics TA PhD who did a memorable class demo at UC Berkeley IIRC. He clamped a steel bar to the shaft of a 1 horsepower electric motor. He stood on the end. He turned it on. This was almost as memorable as the Distenfeld troop training incident. In that one Mr. Distenfeld did his demo with a pistol aimed at his head. He said, "Never do this!" and pulled the trigger. But the safety was off. He survived with a plate in his head.
As you said, foolts can be well educated. People who are smart can also do dumb things, and usually get away with it.
I can also tell you without any doubt, that nobody of lesser academic credentials from industry attending a class in a college would look askance at having a person overseeing things with less academic credentials than the students or the instructor. Quite the reverse. Engineers and scientists in industry tend to respect practical experience. In my life experience, labs run smoothly because of that guy or gal who has done every procedure. I've seen (and been) PhD credentialed people lost at sea doing complex protocols.
Regarding the busy body who wrote up the incident of unsupervised chemistry sample work; that writeup was separate from the union. Responsibility to do that in response to a report (complete with photograph) was probably in his or her job description. Not doing the job (even while on vacation) could be grounds for firing. So with proper notification, that person had to write the report.
This incident is not about unions, it is about lab administration and procedures. There should have been a procedure to clear the diligent instructor. Instead, in classic stupid and passive aggressive fashion, the person that did their job was punished.
The result of that down the line will be a serious injury. And if possible the fall guy for that injury will include the supervisor with responsibility in their job description who has been trained to not do their job by incidents like this
Although I can sympathize with this comment, I can also present plenty of counterexamples as well. At some point, professionals are allowed to be professionals, or should be.
Of course there are counter examples. If you read my post, you didn't read very carefully. But two things here:
1. I don't see any DEI influence in the guest post. This post conflates DEI with frustration with regulation that grew up in response to deadly incidents and things that looked like potential terrorism support. Rather than DEI, this guest post describes glee that a person was punished for doing their job correctly. In the real world, PhDs do boneheaded things. The job of safety RO is high stress, worse than thankless (as exemplified by this guest post), and not paid enough.
2. The thing to do is NOT to punish the "union employee" through back-channels for doing their job. That is nasty and shows complete lack of comprehension of why that job exists. The way to deal with it is to work out a reasonable procedure for using the lab during the manager's vacation. Yes, it should be straightforward to do that. At UC Davis, they have an RO and ARO. The ARO is the alternate responsible official. The university this guest poster fled should have that in place.
Accountability? It's a thing when someone dies and police get involved. Trust me on this. When Sheri Sangji turned into a human torch in Patrick Harran's lab? Guess what? "NOT ME" finger pointing. The prosecutor criminally charged Patrick and the UC Regents. Please join the real world. This "professionals are allowed to be professionals" doesn't exist because of incidents like Patrick Harran and Sheri Sangji. (And a lot more.)
Consequently, today, there are "responsible officials" (ROs) who have to do a job to make the workplace safe and free of criminal activity. May I humbly point out this BETTER for you when the fecal material hits the fan? When some grad student gets killed or maimed in your lab, or turns it into a manufacturing hub for some drug or other?
Many a chemist and biochemist got interested because of (gasp) drug synthesis or purification.That can yield money too. I know of several grad students and post docs who have done things like LSD synthesis. PIHKAL and TIHKAL are freely available. I walked into a lab in grad school where I am quite sure they were making LSD. I walked away from that one. I was already dealing with enough at that point. I could go into more detail.
This guest poster is frustrated. I get that. But this person has no awareness of the big picture. And I don't think that you have any awareness of the big picture either. No awareness of why things are the way they are. No awareness of what happens when law enforcement shows up.
I go to bat for things. I've done it and risked my career. There are real criticisms of DEI to make. What is discussed in this post is not DEI. I say this with sympathy for his frustration.
I will also note that at many institutions like Stanford and Yale, the number of bureaucrats and supervisors and administrators now outnumber the students, let alone the actual technical staff. These organizations are well on their way to becoming vacuous embarrassments.
As the MBA program has become. I see you contribute to that fraudulent and meaningless degree yourself. Well, I would expect nothing less from someone of your ilk.
There are currently ~18,000 staff and faculty at Stanford, with ~1700 administrative staff. 18,446 students with 8,054 undergraduates and 10,392 graduates. That's pretty darn close to equal. An alumnus from Stanford found it to be a coddling experience, not having to deal with any paperwork.
UC Davis had 2175 academic staff, and 24,000 employees total, which includes a teaching hospital that accounts for around 20,000. UC Davis has 40,848 students. I can't search up the number of administrative staff, but it's a fair number.
Neither Stanford nor UC Davis would leave a lab without an ARO to make it easy for a temp faculty to aliquote samples.
I never said you had an MBA degree. So you claim you have nothing to do with instruction of MBAs? You brag that you do. Or were you lying?
The reason these organizations are so obscenely expensive and inefficient is that voluminous body of administrative leeches that effectively do nothing and cannot be fired.
As many have said, Harvard has essentially turned into a hedge fund that has an academic institution associated with it. But the academic part is increasingly irrelevant.
My mentor has opined that 99% of these administrative staff, at a minimum, should be fired. And I would tend to agree with him. He also feels that well over 95% of all faculty should be terminated. That might be an exaggeration, but is not far wrong.
If you are so desperately frantic about safety, why not terminate ALL teaching and ALL research and just have a bunch of nincompoops running around screaming that no one is allowed to do anything whatsoever? That seems like it might be to your taste.
Whoa bro. Chill. Yes, I did teach MBAs. I attempted to bring them into the real world. MBA has nothing to do with bloating of administrations. Quite the inverse, as a good MBA will streamline the organization, focus it on its primary mission.
Would that the excess administrative staff were actually effective at doing nothing. ;-)
If you bother yourself to read through my posts, those positions created for regulation are in response to legal requirements, mostly legal cases. That's all. Nothing to do with DEI, or the rest of administrative bloat.
Wow. That is quite a rant. You have no idea who I am or what my experiences have been.
I never mentioned DEI. Show me explictly where I mentioned DEI. Come on, put up or shut up.
But, in the case of discarding merit in favor of DEI, I think there might be some issues. This might make you so insanely angry that you become homicidal (and I suspect you are one of "those people").
Oh well, people can have different opinions on things. If you do not like it, then...
This guest post was written about "identitarian Gestapo"? You know. Up there? At the top of this thread? He makes reference to the "you go girl" feminism as one of the theories for the removal of said said lab manager.
Get a grip bro. I just brought an alternate lens that this incident can be seen through.
I hope Broad Campden provides the quality retirement you desire. It’s still a relatively sane area and likely will given your age, but as I’m sure you’re aware these things can change quickly. Advice for a quality experience would be to enjoy the walks, the pubs and the locals but avoid at all costs the newspapers, the BBC, ITV, C4 and, of course, local politics.
Regulation grows up in response to incidents, typically when people die. In lab safety, Sheri Sangji is one of those. David Snyder is another, but has concerns about terrorism. His buddy who disposed of the chemicals illegally in the nearest dumpster was from Lebanon, and is still in the wind.
The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is also onerous, and invasive---far more so than a mere safety manager for a lab. The IRB system was put in place because doctors were free to be professionals and trusted. Then Tuskegee took place. And others. Here is a paper that covers the history fairly well.
In Canada there was an LSD experiment that took place in prisons. The result of it was much higher recidivism. And the experimental group was diagnosed psychopaths.
I knew a professor who gave an experimental drug to a client. No paperwork on it. The man died within half an hour. I reviewed it and saw no reason to believe the two things were related. That person was fired, lost license to practice for life, lost spouse, lost house. It's not fun when that happens.
Accept that regulation exists, and understand why it exists. Help to make it work better. Don't punish the responsible people doing their jobs. It's there for a reason, and it protects YOU from going through criminal prosecution.
Beautifully written, but I pain for the Canadians who are not insane, and suffer under the tyrranny of the defectives.
‘Ideological monotheism’
❤️❤️
An excellent summary of the operation of academia today. Not only does it go a long way into making the argument for the need to use merit in hiring/promotion. It also demonstrates that academia has not practiced merit in hiring for a long time!
Leigh - Thank you for your absolutely delightful tale. All Kafkaesque, except the delightful ending. My version of your story left me in the Pinot Noir vineyards of northern California. Please visit any time.
I am glad to hear that your colleague had a hood that was a textbook example. Tis not always so. I have seen hoods that were quite opposite. I remembered, while reading this, a flip side incident in the USA at UCLA. . You are probably aware.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheri_Sangji_case
She was wearing a fluffy synthetic sweater and hairspray with no lab coat handling pryrophoric material. Fashion over survival.
The University of California did nothing until criminal charges were filed against the gentlemen of leisure who warm the chairs known as the Regents of the university of California. Only then were changes made to safety education.
UCs have a habit of collecting "Responsible Officials" in settlements with the courts. I met one in grad school. They know that their job is to protect the university from doing anything meaningful. It's all about protecting the reputation and money stream.
I did some digging at UC Davis. There were a number of serious chemical injuries. All of them young women. At UC Davis, all of them due to not using the chemical shower correctly. Phenol causes skin necrosis and analgesia. The complete destruction of skin tissue was caused by underwear collecting and keeping phenol on the skin, without pain. And failure to use soap or detergent. The result is genitals turned to scar as if a blowtorch was applied.
The obvious remedy is to require regular drills requiring stripping and use of soap and detergent in the chemical shower with a simulant, overseen by female members of the fire department, which has responsibility for coming to collect people. An optimal simulant would be something like oil emulsified pepper spray. But no. The chemical showers remain dry in their hallways. Part of the objection to drills was that most showers had no drain. So it was a mess to clean up. So it goes.
In the revised curriculum, Sheri's name is not mentioned, supposedly out of respect for the feelings of the family. It's horsemanure of course. I rather imagine the family could be fine with her burned body being used to educate how serious this is. We see worse routinely on cop shows like NCIS.
The worst UCDavis incident in "lab" was in the social 'sciences" though. A student died in South America. She was raped and murdered. She went out one night dressed in skimpy attire that she was used to wearing on campus. There was mention she wanted to score some cocaine. This was in a culture in which women cover up from ankle to neck.
The parents were lied to by the professor. The grad student who talked to me about it was told that if she even told the next year's students that it happened, she would not graduate. She would be cut from the program. She was also told she could not tell female students how to dress. I told her to call his bluff. She did not.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/uc-davis-chemist-sentenced-to-four-years-over-explosion/7992.article
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/uc-davis-chemist-sentenced-to-four-years-over-explosion/7992.article
The system works sometimes. This above postdoc had an interest in plastic explosives. He was first caught making small samples on campus. After being told more than once, he set up a hood in his on campus apartment. Then he blew up his hand. The ER doctor knew what he was looking at and notified police.
This incident was responded to by every law enforcement agency that could horn in on it. A real live "terrorist lab" like training exercise! All the toys! The guy was a brilliant chemist.
I am also reminded of the physics TA PhD who did a memorable class demo at UC Berkeley IIRC. He clamped a steel bar to the shaft of a 1 horsepower electric motor. He stood on the end. He turned it on. This was almost as memorable as the Distenfeld troop training incident. In that one Mr. Distenfeld did his demo with a pistol aimed at his head. He said, "Never do this!" and pulled the trigger. But the safety was off. He survived with a plate in his head.
As you said, foolts can be well educated. People who are smart can also do dumb things, and usually get away with it.
I can also tell you without any doubt, that nobody of lesser academic credentials from industry attending a class in a college would look askance at having a person overseeing things with less academic credentials than the students or the instructor. Quite the reverse. Engineers and scientists in industry tend to respect practical experience. In my life experience, labs run smoothly because of that guy or gal who has done every procedure. I've seen (and been) PhD credentialed people lost at sea doing complex protocols.
Regarding the busy body who wrote up the incident of unsupervised chemistry sample work; that writeup was separate from the union. Responsibility to do that in response to a report (complete with photograph) was probably in his or her job description. Not doing the job (even while on vacation) could be grounds for firing. So with proper notification, that person had to write the report.
This incident is not about unions, it is about lab administration and procedures. There should have been a procedure to clear the diligent instructor. Instead, in classic stupid and passive aggressive fashion, the person that did their job was punished.
The result of that down the line will be a serious injury. And if possible the fall guy for that injury will include the supervisor with responsibility in their job description who has been trained to not do their job by incidents like this
Although I can sympathize with this comment, I can also present plenty of counterexamples as well. At some point, professionals are allowed to be professionals, or should be.
Of course there are counter examples. If you read my post, you didn't read very carefully. But two things here:
1. I don't see any DEI influence in the guest post. This post conflates DEI with frustration with regulation that grew up in response to deadly incidents and things that looked like potential terrorism support. Rather than DEI, this guest post describes glee that a person was punished for doing their job correctly. In the real world, PhDs do boneheaded things. The job of safety RO is high stress, worse than thankless (as exemplified by this guest post), and not paid enough.
2. The thing to do is NOT to punish the "union employee" through back-channels for doing their job. That is nasty and shows complete lack of comprehension of why that job exists. The way to deal with it is to work out a reasonable procedure for using the lab during the manager's vacation. Yes, it should be straightforward to do that. At UC Davis, they have an RO and ARO. The ARO is the alternate responsible official. The university this guest poster fled should have that in place.
Accountability? It's a thing when someone dies and police get involved. Trust me on this. When Sheri Sangji turned into a human torch in Patrick Harran's lab? Guess what? "NOT ME" finger pointing. The prosecutor criminally charged Patrick and the UC Regents. Please join the real world. This "professionals are allowed to be professionals" doesn't exist because of incidents like Patrick Harran and Sheri Sangji. (And a lot more.)
Consequently, today, there are "responsible officials" (ROs) who have to do a job to make the workplace safe and free of criminal activity. May I humbly point out this BETTER for you when the fecal material hits the fan? When some grad student gets killed or maimed in your lab, or turns it into a manufacturing hub for some drug or other?
Many a chemist and biochemist got interested because of (gasp) drug synthesis or purification.That can yield money too. I know of several grad students and post docs who have done things like LSD synthesis. PIHKAL and TIHKAL are freely available. I walked into a lab in grad school where I am quite sure they were making LSD. I walked away from that one. I was already dealing with enough at that point. I could go into more detail.
This guest poster is frustrated. I get that. But this person has no awareness of the big picture. And I don't think that you have any awareness of the big picture either. No awareness of why things are the way they are. No awareness of what happens when law enforcement shows up.
I go to bat for things. I've done it and risked my career. There are real criticisms of DEI to make. What is discussed in this post is not DEI. I say this with sympathy for his frustration.
I will also note that at many institutions like Stanford and Yale, the number of bureaucrats and supervisors and administrators now outnumber the students, let alone the actual technical staff. These organizations are well on their way to becoming vacuous embarrassments.
As the MBA program has become. I see you contribute to that fraudulent and meaningless degree yourself. Well, I would expect nothing less from someone of your ilk.
There are currently ~18,000 staff and faculty at Stanford, with ~1700 administrative staff. 18,446 students with 8,054 undergraduates and 10,392 graduates. That's pretty darn close to equal. An alumnus from Stanford found it to be a coddling experience, not having to deal with any paperwork.
UC Davis had 2175 academic staff, and 24,000 employees total, which includes a teaching hospital that accounts for around 20,000. UC Davis has 40,848 students. I can't search up the number of administrative staff, but it's a fair number.
Neither Stanford nor UC Davis would leave a lab without an ARO to make it easy for a temp faculty to aliquote samples.
I do not have an MBA degree.
I never said you had an MBA degree. So you claim you have nothing to do with instruction of MBAs? You brag that you do. Or were you lying?
The reason these organizations are so obscenely expensive and inefficient is that voluminous body of administrative leeches that effectively do nothing and cannot be fired.
As many have said, Harvard has essentially turned into a hedge fund that has an academic institution associated with it. But the academic part is increasingly irrelevant.
My mentor has opined that 99% of these administrative staff, at a minimum, should be fired. And I would tend to agree with him. He also feels that well over 95% of all faculty should be terminated. That might be an exaggeration, but is not far wrong.
If you are so desperately frantic about safety, why not terminate ALL teaching and ALL research and just have a bunch of nincompoops running around screaming that no one is allowed to do anything whatsoever? That seems like it might be to your taste.
Whoa bro. Chill. Yes, I did teach MBAs. I attempted to bring them into the real world. MBA has nothing to do with bloating of administrations. Quite the inverse, as a good MBA will streamline the organization, focus it on its primary mission.
Would that the excess administrative staff were actually effective at doing nothing. ;-)
If you bother yourself to read through my posts, those positions created for regulation are in response to legal requirements, mostly legal cases. That's all. Nothing to do with DEI, or the rest of administrative bloat.
Good luck. I can see you are frustrated.
Wow. That is quite a rant. You have no idea who I am or what my experiences have been.
I never mentioned DEI. Show me explictly where I mentioned DEI. Come on, put up or shut up.
But, in the case of discarding merit in favor of DEI, I think there might be some issues. This might make you so insanely angry that you become homicidal (and I suspect you are one of "those people").
Oh well, people can have different opinions on things. If you do not like it, then...
This guest post was written about "identitarian Gestapo"? You know. Up there? At the top of this thread? He makes reference to the "you go girl" feminism as one of the theories for the removal of said said lab manager.
Get a grip bro. I just brought an alternate lens that this incident can be seen through.
You spewed nonsense and acted like a jerk.
Come on big shot, show me where I sounded off about DEI in my original post. Show me, you obnoxious jackass.
And please enlighten EVERYONE concerned why NO ONE with any merit or competence WHATSOEVER should ever be employed, for any job.
You only want to employ people who cannot do anything?
Wow, you are quite a piece of work.
As for PhDs doing bone-headed things, I might suggest your post is a perfect example of that.
I hope Broad Campden provides the quality retirement you desire. It’s still a relatively sane area and likely will given your age, but as I’m sure you’re aware these things can change quickly. Advice for a quality experience would be to enjoy the walks, the pubs and the locals but avoid at all costs the newspapers, the BBC, ITV, C4 and, of course, local politics.
Regulation grows up in response to incidents, typically when people die. In lab safety, Sheri Sangji is one of those. David Snyder is another, but has concerns about terrorism. His buddy who disposed of the chemicals illegally in the nearest dumpster was from Lebanon, and is still in the wind.
The Institutional Review Board (IRB) is also onerous, and invasive---far more so than a mere safety manager for a lab. The IRB system was put in place because doctors were free to be professionals and trusted. Then Tuskegee took place. And others. Here is a paper that covers the history fairly well.
https://gwern.net/doc/nootropic/quantified-self/2018-hanley.pdf
In Canada there was an LSD experiment that took place in prisons. The result of it was much higher recidivism. And the experimental group was diagnosed psychopaths.
I knew a professor who gave an experimental drug to a client. No paperwork on it. The man died within half an hour. I reviewed it and saw no reason to believe the two things were related. That person was fired, lost license to practice for life, lost spouse, lost house. It's not fun when that happens.
Accept that regulation exists, and understand why it exists. Help to make it work better. Don't punish the responsible people doing their jobs. It's there for a reason, and it protects YOU from going through criminal prosecution.