A real pro

After three days of sitting in my bedroom office working on Preventable Surprises stuff, I took today off. I went into town and had tea with Diarmuid, a librarian at Queen’s. He told me that professors each have to hit an annual fundraising target, whereby they attract research money for the school. It started in the medical school, where there are plenty of grants to be had for pharma research. But then all professors were expected to bring home the research bacon.

Diarmuid said there just isn’t as much money sloshing around outside pharma and a lot of professors’ futures are in doubt. Can you imagine the morale problem this causes? I thought of how professors are almost like prostitutes, having to distort their native talents and interests to serve whoever they can squeeze money out of. No surprise: the current chancellor isn’t a big fan of humanities. It’s like the whole university is for sale to, I don’t know, the defense industry? the food industry? Whoever has a good R&D budget going.

Then I had lunch with Nigel, whom I went to high school with, and I heard about the vacation he took with his family to Orlando for three weeks in July. Sounds like hell to me, but they enjoyed it. They had some kind of passport that let them go from theme park to theme park. I didn’t know there were so many theme parks in Orlando.
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