I just had a flashback to my worst academic experience ever. I think it was a combination of my recent posts about all those scientists losing their jobs and that cool video of Pakistani mechanics cutting and shaping steel.

In the 1990s, I was an assistant professor at Temple University, and I had a magnificent custom microscopy rig. A top of the line Leica was at the heart of it, but I had modified the heck out of it. I’d built an air table — a massive 2cm thick sheet of steel resting on a cushion of tennis balls — that had been a huge effort to get cut and hauled up to my lab. I had hydraulic actuators for single cell injections. The microscope itself was modified with a motorized stage and a UV filter wheel (thanks to my friends at Applied Scientific Instrumentation, who are still in business, I’m pleased to see) all programmable and controlled by custom software I’d written. It was beautiful, and unique.

Unfortunately, I did not get tenure at Temple. You may not be aware of this, but if you’re hired by a university for a tenure track faculty position, and you do not get tenure, you’re done. You have one year to clear out your stuff, and then the axe falls, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it. You’re a dead man walking, still ambling zombie-like about the university, still obligated to do your teaching and committee duties, but there’s a deadline ahead of you, at which time you have to vacate your office, your lab, everything, it all comes to an abrupt close.

Yeesh, but that was a miserable year, with all my former colleagues cutting ties. Fortunately, I landed another job in Minnesota, but that gorgeous microscope was not mine, it belonged to the university. I had to abandon it.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. At that time, there was a political crisis: HMOs were consolidating and going bankrupt, and many of them had associations with research universities that they were abruptly shutting down. Temple saw that they could buy up entire research groups for a song! It was time to shuffle out the peons working at their university already, and instead bring in all these big biomedical people who already had research grants. And so they did.

One day, in the waning days of my employment, a pair of these new hires walked into my lab, zeroed in on my microscope (that I was using at the time!), and started taking photos, writing down part numbers, and measuring stuff with a tape measure, while talking to each other about where they could put it in their lab space. They looked a bit puzzled by the filter wheel and the weird piezoelectric stage and the strange camera I was using, but they didn’t ask about any of it. They didn’t talk to me at all. They didn’t even acknowledge my existence. It was a strange experience that left me feeling like a ghost, and also sad, because these clueless twits were no doubt going to carve up my microscope for parts.

It was a dehumanizing experience that poisoned all my good memories of working at Temple. It did make me feel better about saying goodbye to that place.

Academia is a cruel and heartless beast, and overpaid biomedical researchers who lack the basics of human interaction are the worst.