To the Scientists Now Losing their Jobs
To the Scientists Now Losing their Jobs:
Let us dispense with pleasantries—
I know you feel terrible and I’m sorry. There are people who are going to pat your shoulder and tell you this is bad luck and things will go back to normal soon. Or they’ll say you’ll find a better job, and then they’ll pass you a burnt piece of meat at the barbecue and make a joke about it being “good enough for government work” and laugh uproariously because they always thought you were a patsy for working in the public sector, hahahah. Then they’ll disappear from your life and pretend they don’t see you in the grocery store because they think failure is catching and also that you failed, which you didn’t, to be clear.
At this point in the instructional video it is customary to give my qualifications. In 2006 I was for all purposes pushed out of my PhD program, and it wrecked my life. I have written about it a few times and it’s too boring to recount but when I read another article about the striking from the ledger of another obscure government agency that employs 300 scientists who were collecting data about x ecological problem that the greater public knows nothing about but that kills babies, I am back in that hot forest below the lab where I went to drown my laptop bag in tears in 2006. I don’t want that for you, even if you were the cause of my tears (you know what you did, Karen).
The writers who even try have talked about all these cuts as being revenge by the billionaires who felt snubbed—by academia, by the establishment, whatever—which I guess is supposed to make sense and/or elicit sympathy in the rest of us, since, as it happens, the vast majority of people are losers to someone. In spite of having a longstanding fantasy about rising to the top of the NSF’s administration so I could prevent my former PhD committee members from getting funded ever again, the revenge of This Time leaves nothing but ash in my mouth. Too many people have already been hurt or killed by this stupid shit and too many irreplaceable intellectual resources are vanishing through a malign casting-off too vicious and heavy-handed to make it through the most rudimentary editorial process. It even looks like my brother, a diligent reader of rooms and worker of connections who actually finished his PhD, is probably going to lose his job.
The problem, or at least the problem at somewhere around #384 on the list, is that you have to build a career to be a scientist. You need someone in the system or maybe a lot of someones to choose you and wrap you in their cloak and pull you into a hostile institution where you can bipple your data all day and all night. A science career is a fragile, fragile thing, and knocking so many people out of theirs is going to cast many of them out forever, more or less. Oh sure, the high h-index people and prestigious awardees and big cheese hotshots with large research groups will be fine, they will be scooped up by institutions in East Asia, they will displace resentful Europeans who have been waiting their turn for years. But most of the workaday scientists aren’t that, especially if they work in the federal government, because serving the public generally does not involve spoils.
For those people, I have a couple recommendations, hear me out—if you have some insurance through your settlement, or through your spouse, or even a little bit of savings—go to bereavement therapy. I know, nobody died, but you’re grieving, and you’re going to need help about it. The Open Path Collective offers inexpensive memberships that allow you to access therapy sessions for less than the usual cost. I went to therapy through them years and years after I should have, and it was so helpful, and I am not a joiner, so.
My other one is to talk to other people. This shit is happening to a lot of people. There are unions, there are coffee shops, there are smart people with a lot of time on their hands walking around in the woods, idk, there’s the internet. I am convinced that I still have something to give using my years of training and I think we should figure it out. There’s still so much to do.
Look, I hate this, I’m sorry. The worst has happened but you still have everything you came with, and it was good and helpful then. There is so much to do! And I need you to help me start.
