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San Francisco, California
Parking around any urban university was a bitch. UC-Berkeley was no exception while the semester was underway. So McRory decided to stay in San Francisco instead, at Fisherman’s Wharf.
Most federal agencies operated under travel rules and regulations that would never permit an employee or contractor to visit UC-Berkeley and stay in a more expensive San Francisco area hotel let alone in the tourist mecca of Fisherman’s Wharf. McRory liked the restaurants and vibe of Fisherman’s Wharf. It was a nice counterpoint to living in Overland Park. Elsemere didn’t much care. The in-house travel agency made the travel arrangements as requested. The airlines, hotels, and rental car companies direct billed the firm. No paperwork for McRory.
McRory loved big city mass transit, especially subways and trolleys, and San Francisco had more than its share. The BART trip from the Oakland Airport to the financial district and the Embarcadero Station ended way too quickly for his taste. The escalator deposited him at street level. The evening air very cool for this time of year, but hey, that was San Francisco.
The first thing McRory noticed was the gleaming new Ford F-150 pickup parked at the curb. It was a distinctive vehicle in the city. Bright red, shiny with tinted windows. This was no tradesperson’s or corporate vehicle. It had those run-flat skinny tires and chrome wheels. Plus, someone spent a pretty penny putting the high gloss shine and freshly blackened tires on its face. Cognitive dissonance was a big part of agent training back in the day. If something looked out of place, good chance it was. This truck, now, was a full-page newspaper ad for dissonance. Who’s paranoid now? McRory reflected with a tad of irony. He was on the ground researching a paranoid subject and a bright shiny truck threw him into a full-scale atavistic reaction.
It was a short jog to the Ferry Building, and from there a nice walk around the wharf area to his hotel. The Ferry Building had some great eateries and specialty shops with choices that Kansas couldn’t match. At this late hour, some of the shops were closed and dining options limited. So, he settled for a take-out meal courtesy of an excellent Vietnamese restaurant.
He saw the Ford truck through the commercial glass exit doors.
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UC-Berkeley Campus
The next morning McRory grabbed a quick breakfast from the self-serve marketplace at the hotel. He opted for a more direct route to the Embarcadero Station via Columbus Ave. The escalator offered one last glance at the street outside the BART station before descending to the subway below. And there it was again. The bright red truck, parked in the exact same spot, no less.
McRory enjoyed the short jog from the UC-Berkley BART station to Le Conte Hall, home of the Physics Department at UC-Berkeley. Flashing his fabricated federal credentials to the department’s administrative officer, “I’m here to do a background investigation on Todd Adams. His firm is performing some work on a federal contract requiring a security clearance.”
“Sure. We get these requests all of the time,” the admin officer replied. “Todd Adams? That must be before my time. I don’t recall the name.”
The mention of Adams’ name caught the attention of the other staffer sharing the office. “Lisa, I remember Dr. Adams. He was a post-doc a few years back.”
McRory redirected his attention to the second staffer. “Would you mind answering a few questions?” He conducted the traditional interview. After obtaining the staffer’s name, position, and contact information, McRory asked whether Adams was the type of person loyal to the United States, trustworthy, and the sort of person who merited a security clearance.
Lisa, the admin officer locked her desk drawer and shutdown her PC, picked up her purse, and interrupted the discussion. “Sue, I’ve got the monthly process improvement meeting at the L&S Dean’s Office. I won’t return until after lunch.”
Turning in Lisa’s direction, Sue nodded in the affirmative and returned her attention to McRory. Waiting for Lisa to complete her exit, Sue briefly paused and continued sotto voce, “Well, there was that incident with two of our post-docs. It was all sort of hush hush, and both left quietly a short time later.”
“Was one of those post-docs Todd Adams?”
Sue shook her head slowly for emphasis. “Yes.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
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The Physics Department at UC-Berkeley featured a competitive culture. It was a place of distinguished scientists. Several Nobel Laureates visited, one was in residence. Science research was a tough and demanding gig. Those with international reputations had first call on resources and always brought grant and other funding along with their prestige. The place was more like a specialized hotel with famous guests who stayed for varying periods of time. The truly distinguished stayed in the large penthouse rooms on the top floor. Lesser personalities resided in the progressively smaller rooms on the lower floors. And, like a hotel, the service workers kept the place functioning and habitable for their guests.
There was a definite hierarchy to the place. Full professors outranked associate and assistant professors. Everyone in the professoriate outranked the graduate students, and even the least among those outranked even the most promising undergrad.
By contrast, post-docs are a special breed of creature. They reside in a very special corner of hell.
Post-docs are the prey in the academic hunting preserve. The predators include less than stable sources of funding and negligent advisers—often the two can be one and the same. This places the typical post-doc in a tenuous set of circumstances. Literally, the value of a post-doc to an adviser is best reflected in the loathsome query, “What have you done for me today?” Therefore, becoming a post-doc is to enter a state of constant performance anxiety.
Post-docs graduated from the state of “aspiring doctoral candidate” upon completion of their doctoral thesis. Unable to secure the entry position to the profession—the assistant professorship—they pursued a research regime in hopes of improving their chances to one day join the professoriate. There’s an old joke told by faculty about post-docs. It was said the best way to banish a post-doc from your presence was to boldly ask, “Shouldn’t you be in the lab?”
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In 2004, Todd Adams and Achmed Al Hami constituted the entering class of two post-docs at UC-Berkeley’s Department of Physics. Both gentlemen were fresh from filing their approved doctoral theses in their respective university libraries having first secured the signatures (in order of importance) of the members of each candidate’s examining committee, thesis adviser, the department chair, and finally, the dean of their school or college. Both wrote outstanding theses which would undoubtedly be mined for the future publications in peer reviewed journals on their march to tenure, but first they needed to satisfy one critical prerequisite: An appointment as an assistant professor.
And, not at just any university. For not only was the recent doctoral graduate’s reputation based on the quality and reputation of the university offering an assistant professorship, the reputation of their thesis adviser depended on the merit of that first appointment as well. Settle for an appointment at a lesser institution and your adviser’s reputation suffered. Your adviser would receive calls and notes of condolence from peers across academe. You would become that student. The student whose promise and hard work, performed under the vigilant eye and thumb of his adviser, was squandered in an academic program falling short of expectations.
Top-level physics departments were fully staffed. Retirements were slow to materialize and university administrators continued to grapple with the mechanisms encouraging senior faculty to give way to the new generation. Consequently, the post-doc position grew to become a much larger and acceptable purgatory between graduate student status and the first faculty appointment. The stigma of only securing a post-doc appointment became less so. In fact, many newly minted doctorates in physics did a stint in purgatory. So, one would think the science professoriate, in general, and physics would possess an empathy for post-docs. Not so. Like most fraternal groups, subjecting others to the same hazing he experienced as a novitiate became its own special rite of passage.
No one prepared either Adams or Al Hami—especially their thesis advisers—for the transition to post-doc status. Each had to learn through the process of trial and error to volunteer for the committee scutwork that too often abounds at colleges or universities. With committees ranging from “B” for Boilers to “S” for sidewalks, there are committee assignments to lust after and those to avoid. If it wasn’t clear which, you asked your adviser. Failure to consult with your adviser, and your choice was certain to be more the latter rather than the former served along with the admonition, “Shouldn’t you be in the lab?”
The whole purpose of a doctoral thesis is to demonstrate the doctoral candidate can undertake, complete, and defend a substantial independent research project. Group work is not the norm for a doctoral candidate. Just the opposite, in fact. Post-docs often worked on the periphery of their adviser’s research interests. Each post-doc walked a fine line between demonstrating their competence to pursue independent research and fealty to their adviser’s research methodology, orthodoxy, and portfolio of theory. To use a sports metaphor, a good post-doc drafted behind his adviser.
A post-doc did not dare to appear to be too needy. They received attention from their adviser in short bursts of interest and interaction. The long intervals in between had to be productive in the only opinion that mattered. Periodic written evaluations of a post-doc’s work could be generally positive and yet contain dreaded phrases, like “Should make better use of scarce resources.” Parsing an adviser’s written evaluation of a post-doc for the true hidden evaluation was an acquired skill typical only to department heads and deans.
In the second year of their post-doc purgatory, both Al Hami and Adams met with the Dean of UC-Berkeley’s School of Letters and Science. It didn’t go well for either gentleman.
Al Hami was asked by a group of undergraduates to serve as an adviser to Middle Eastern students. His collegiate and university survival skills served him well to that point. He understood the petty tyrants in student affairs. Thus, he was very successful in guiding the group, and several of their more infamous members, to navigate what would otherwise be the dangerous shoals of an academic degree program. Unfortunately, a “win” for a student, or student group, was always seen as a “loss” for the folk in student affairs, and by extension, the university. Al Hami gained the reputation for being “too cultural,” “overly sensitive to arcane cultural issues,” and the more than subtle suggestion that his time would be better spent in the lab.
Adams fell into a very different trap.
Adams’ research field was in statistical mechanics. He gained a well-deserved reputation in graduate school for developing computer models used to investigate the application of probability theory to better understand the behaviors of systems and particles. To Adams, the physicist theoretician, the algorithms he employed in his models were a means to an end. The problem: He became too enamored of the tool rather than the purpose for which the tool was used.
This was a common problem throughout the sciences. Physicists, chemists, biologists, and others, ran the danger of crossing their respective disciplinary boundaries to be perceived as computer scientists. Publish an article in a computer science journal and you gifted your adviser with the prima facie evidence of abandonment of your discipline. This was exactly what happened to Adams. Worse yet, his article received wide acclaim among computer scientists. In effect, he got caught spending too much time in the wrong laboratory. A tenured professor could leverage this work outside the discipline into a joint appointment with the computer science department. Joint appointments were considered prestigious accomplishments—the conquering of two disciplines. For a post-doc, however, this was the career ending event.
And so, it was for Adams.
Unfortunately for Al Hami, beyond his undergraduates, no person or group saw value to his efforts. There was no “other job” into which he could regress. So, he retreated from academe ultimately securing employment as an environmental safety officer for a large hazardous material recycler.
His colleague Adams was courted by Apple.
For the physics department at UC-Berkeley the failure of both of its post-docs was a blot on an otherwise enviable reputation for transforming post-docs into successful academicians. The blowback was even worse for each of their thesis advisers.