We will fight them in the conference rooms...
Turf Wars continued.
A visitor once asked for a tour of the "Sigurdsson Labs" - I offered to show them my workstation, it was rather nice, until it broke. And there is the old one in the corner, of course. University inventory control wants to see it about every other year, they think it is worth actual money.
Ok, I think I have a student in some corner also, but they're working hard, I'm told.
Can't be having them disturbed by visitors.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Let's suppose you're the proprietor of a European tourist attraction. We're not talking about a Louvre or Uffizi here, or even a Leaning Tower of Pisa. No, you're in charge of a hidden gem: the scenic Church of the Saint No One Has Ever Heard Of, or the lovely little Museum of the Famous Artist…
ScienceWoman mused about the completion of her first year here, and I had hoped I would develop similar observations and reflections while on Isle Royale. Truth be told, rather than taking the hiking time to think, uninterrupted, about the last year, I did anything but. Think, that is. Instead,…
A Colbert Report re-run about the financial crisis has just ended, so I turn the tv off, grab my jacket and the leash, and head out for a walk with the dog. She's oddly pensive as we head up the street. After a little while, she stops and asks, "What was that all about?"
"All what?"
"All that '…
So, now you’re at university, and you’re thinking about heading for grad school …
A seasonal revisit of some old rumblings*
*NB: this discussion should not be construed to be anything but hypothetical ramblings, they do not reflect in any way the official position of any academic institution,…
Yes, somehow we students tend to get lost in the clutter of broken workstations and stacked hard drives with data from past students.
(But behold this graph...it's a nice graph...)
In the experimental areas it is serious. A friend of me left academia the next day after getting tenure. Some months ago I had heard him arguing about the years it takes to get some control of experimental resources; group thinking drives the experimental groups to locate experiments they know how to do and keep repeating and repeating the same with different substances and limits. And, let me add, even if a person is tenured the group never is: there are students needing to keep the publication slope high, and there is the question of renewing the group research grants, the external personal, etc.
It is extremely serious.
It is also very funny.
I appreciate the battle for square footage, power and fluid ducts, those are finite resources, things that are very hard to produce at short notice or with flexibility, and losing access to them can be a research death sentence, even temporarily.
But, a lot of people in academia are not experimentalists and do not run "labs" or need large facilities - it is an error to consider the "turf war" a universal in academia.
Not that similar issues can't come up - theorists suddenly get computing resources and need space, power and cooling; or need to bring in multiple students or postdocs to work on a project that has taken off, but there is no office space available... but the visceral need is just not there for most theorists.