Look up. The next thing I’m going to post is a job ad…you need a job, right?
I’m going on sabbatical next year, leaving a small hole in our staff that we need to plug up with someone as clever and resourceful and pedagogically exciting as me. Don’t be intimidated, though! We’ll take someone who knows cell biology and microbiology well, would like to join our team at a university that values education highly, and doesn’t mind a little spatio-temporal isolation in our remote corner of the universe. It’s a good career step for new graduates to take, too — a year spent here looks very, very nice on the teaching section of your résumé.
By the way, you won’t actually be replacing me (I like to imagine I am irreplaceable). My colleagues have juggled their schedules to cover the essential courses I teach, and we’re also trying to fill the job of a retiring faculty member…so you’d actually be taking the place of two faculty members and helping fill the gaps left by my colleague’s shifting of schedules. Think how important you’ll be to us! (Don’t worry, though, it’s still just a 1.0 FTE position. We’ll try not to overwork you.)
we need to plug up with someone as clever and resourceful and pedagogically exciting as me.
And as atheistic, I hope.
WOOOO! BOOK! BOOK! BOOK! BOOK!
(I mean…right? We can haz book? Plz?)
Uh-oh. Are you going to tell them this means they also have to teach Driver’s Ed?
Strange coincidence, Mr. Kwok threatening your livlihood, and now this.
There are absolutely no religious prerequisites for the job. There might be the occasional insane email (you can ask my colleagues about that in the interview, if you want), but even there there isn’t too much.
And yes, job #1 on my sabbatical is The Book.
What a great opportunity to assuage my PZ Envy!
@5: What’s the title going to be? Kooks, Crackers, Christians, and Cephalopods?
Well, John Scalzi already took Your Hate Mail will be Graded as a title for a book reprinting blog contents, or I’d suggest that as a possible book idea. Otherwise, I have no doubt you could have gotten enough for a book out of that title.
PZ said:
I thought The Book was already written thousands of years ago. Actually there are several of them. Fictional works, full of delusions.
I heard John Kwok is looking for a job…
Wouldn’t it be a little intimidating to be that new person when you knew that the person you were replacing was such an extraordinary professor like PZ Myers? That is a hell of a lot to live up to.
As long as you can write a book while sitting on the beach in Maui sipping Mai Tais…
will it make me an asshole shit professor????
Is Ken Ham busy?
It would make you a professor, but the first two modifiers are attributes you already possess.
Will the person hired be taking over Pharyngula, too? I can see no other way about it.
Ken Ham writing Pharyngula might be a whole lot of fun.
Can somebody please translate that one from the Idiotic?
Bjørn Østman (16) makes an interesting point. With this leave from your professorial duties, will you be stepping down from the blog for a time as well, or will we still be able to enjoy your trademark blend of snark and science?
Wait, a basic graduate degree is all you need to be qualified?
you aren’t leaving the blog too are you? I need my daily fix of awesome.
will you still be blogging?
after all, SI always WOTI
Come on. PZ is going to be sitting around at home in the middle of frozen nowhere trying to write his first book. So of course he will still be blogging. That’s what he’ll do when he gets stuck, because he can tell himself it’s ‘research.’
When Reginald Finley, who does “The Infidel Guy” radio show, went on Wife Swap tv. show a few years back, his new ‘wife’ — a raving Christian fundamentalist minister — took over his show for a few nights when it was her turn to change things at the new house. She did some standard preaching, and then the phone calls lit up. Reggie’s audience rather enjoyed debating her on air.
But, of course, it was only temporary. PZ has already let some of his students do some biology posts. Perhaps one of the enticements for the professor position would be occasional guest-blogging on Pharyngula.
Though, come to think of it, you may not want to consider the sort of person for whom this is a huge incentive to change jobs and move.
Sabbatical, sweet sabbatical. I too am counting the days.
I think he wants to know if his asshole is going to shit professors…or something.
Happy monkey :)
Yeah!!! A PZ BOOK!!
And please tell me you will continue the blog? It provides me with my daily moment of sanity.
PZ, I’m shocked. You tell us you’re going on a sabbatical but you don’t tell us what it’s for?
Matt H. Books.
I had a temp assistant professor position at UMM a while ago and can confirm that it is a very nice place to work with friendly colleagues and bright students. For me the location without a lot distractions was a real plus because it allowed me to focus on my writing. If you are qualified and looking for a job, I would encourage you to apply!
Oh, chaos … it is so tempting. If only I had the slightest experience in biology or would live anywhere neare the United States … why do they have to let us suffer about inaccessible dreams?
Whatever you do, enjoy it.
And, if you travel around, you have enough friends around the globe to make it more interesting.
Mebbe I don’t understand the mechanics of sabbatical well enough, but isn’t the point to get away from one’s ordinary routine? And is not the Myersnest currently empty? I was imagining PZ and the TW heading off to some gorgeous, temperate, cephalopod-graced place to contemplate (and write about) the glories that evolution has given us. In this age of laptops and wi-fi, it seems that one of the very best things about taking a year off to write a book is that you can do it in shorts and sandals, with a Mai-Tai in your hand. Jus’ sayin’…
“Can somebody please translate that one from the Idiotic?” ..i’ll match my doctorate against yours anyday. xo
OK: Biology, UCLA, 1993.
your turn
Ahh good I decided to wait at least a year before going to UMM! Maybe there is a flying spaghetti monster!
While on sabattical could you visit the Southern Hemisphere and take a while to enjoy the effects of global warming? The fishing is fun too – sometimes you catch fish to eat and sometimes fish catch you to eat. Of course you can restrict seafood harvesting to farmed oysters (free of the lovely bacteria we’ve all grown to enjoy in the USA) and Atlantic salmon – the best I’ve had and it’s grown in a river on the opposite side of the planet from the Atlantic ocean. Then there’s the lovely lobster, and of course your cephalopods – gorgeous cuttlefish and the pretty blue-ringed octopus.
Heavy technical book for professional biologists, or a book that we can all read?
Will you still be blogging while on sabbatical?
Of course I will. How can I stop?
“OK: Biology, UCLA, 1993. your turn”……. ornithology, U of M 1974 (not the minnesota pretender either). and what part of “asshole she ate” don’t you understand???
“It would make you a professor, but the first two modifiers are attributes you already possess.” PZ Myers 2009…………just remember son, god is nothing more than energy anthropomorphized.
As PZ wanders the Earth on sabbatical, righting wrongs and doing great deeds that later generations will repeat as legend, any chance we could get occasional “Where the Hell is PZ?” style updates?
http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/
I mean, the dancing thing has been done, but maybe you could post videos of you doing something notably PZ-y, like getting thrown out of creationist propaganda films or throwing crackers in trash cans?
and while we are at it, can’t you cellular guys come up with a better name than “tunneling nanotubes”????