Truth to power, academic style

Truth to power, ACADEMIC STYLE

By Noel Bouck

She couldn’t deny that she suffered from occasional bouts of arrogance.  Not frequently, she thought.  Although perhaps that thought is itself a tad arrogant.  Recently she asked her husband who is usually painfully frank when given a chance to comment on his wife’s failings, if he thought she was arrogant.  “No one would ever think you were arrogant, really” was his reply, “especially not in academics.”  Whatever the situation now, she did recall usually being a very humble academic professor.

            But there was this one incident in the early 1990’s that belies this assessment.  She was an assistant professor in the basic sciences at a medical school in Chicago when the dean of the school, charming, kindly Dr. Robin Powell retired.  He was the one who had OK’d her hiring.  It was not an easy call as she was ten years older than an equivalent man would have been, had three children and thus did represent a bit of a risk for the university.   Dr. Powell liked to talk to researchers now and then so she got to know him and came to feel that he was someone who had her back, was pleased with my success.  She would miss him keenly.

            Whoever was dean of the medical school, she did so love her job there.  She had learned to cope with the varied and often overweening egos of the physicians who populated the Cancer Center where she worked.  They were definitely considered more important that the basic scientists, but this didn’t bother her.  Truth be told, most of them were oncologists who tended to be humbled daily by their frustrating inability to cure most of their patients, so they often needed sympathy, more than deference.  To get the big grants for either basic or clinical research the Cancer center had to be recognized by the NIH as one of the best in the country in patient care and in basic research so the PhD’s needed the MD’s and vice versa; we tended to appreciate one another’s contribution.  

            About a year after Dr. Powell left, a new dean was appointed, one Henry Sadler.  Jolly, avuncular Dean Powell was a hard act to follow.  The new dean, a pediatrician by training, was an excessively bland individual, beige from head to foot.  Light skin and hair, no eyebrows, weak chin.  In his steel grey lab coat, the standard dress for physicians, he could blend with ease into any wall.  He showed little interest in basic science so she saw him only at formal University events and seldom gave him any thought.  

            That is until one winter day when a seminar notice came across her desk announcing that Dean Sadler would be giving a basic science seminar in the Pathology Department.  That’s odd she thought.  That guy hasn’t published a paper in 20 years, doesn’t have a lab, what is he doing on the schedule?   And his subject:  genetics.  That was her field.  How could this scientifically over-the-hill physician think that he had anything to say that would be of interest to basic scientists like me?   His chutzpah appalled her.   I wouldn’t try to present clinical Grand Rounds, she groused to herself, why didn’t he leave the science seminars to actual functioning scientists? 

            On the appointed day, she joined about 60 people in a sunny classroom to hear his talk.  She could not shake the feeling that he was intellectually fouling the little corner of the academic community that belonged to serious research as thoughtlessly as the neighbor’s dog fouled her front lawn.  She found a seat half way up the small amphitheater, about at the speaker’s eye level.  As he launched into his talk on genetics research, she found herself mentally taking issue with everything he said that might possibly not be exactly right.  Soon these thoughts began to show.  As she felt doubtful, she raised an occasional eyebrow.  Later, slightly, almost imperceptibly, shook her head.  Eventually there might have been a touch of modest eye-rolling.  

            Slowly Dean Sadler began to unravel.  She could see him starting to worry if he should have checked his facts more closely, if he might have actually misstated something., and if so what it could be.  His talk continued, but his confidence evaporated.  He got untracked and couldn’t get back on.  As she recognized the phenomenon, she stopped her pantomimed critique, recalling that it happens to everyone now and then.  Occasionally during a talk something occurs that you can’t stop thinking about so you lose your focus on what you are saying and in the end the audience drifts and the lecture is a flop.  

            It had happened to her one early morning while lecturing 150 first year medical students.  About 10 minutes into her 8 am talk, five students in the back row of the huge lecture hall, got out their Chicago Tribunes, unfurled them to their full width in front of their faces and began reading.  It had really thrown her off.  She started fretting—am I that bad for God’s sake?  Is this too much detail, am I emphasizing stuff they really don’t need to know as physicians?  As she fretted, she drifted off track, slowly losing the whole class.  But she did have an advantage that poor Dr. Sadler lacked—she was talking to students, not contemporaries.  She got her audience back in a flash with a quick aside:  “I just want to mention here three things that always show up on the final.”   And they were hers again.

            Dean Sadler was not so lucky.  He finished, but it was not a successful outing for him.  Got what he deserved she supposed as she drifted back across campus to her lab.  

            She thought no more about him for months, actually years.  That spring she went to her chairman’s office for her annual review.  The chair seemed pleased and said everything was going well and she would put in a request for a raise.  It never came through.  She assumed budget constraints had changed the school allocations and thus blocked raises, and did not inquire further.  In private schools where everyone’s salary is secret, it is hard to get a true read on what is going on.  

            The following year at her next review, again she was told that she was really doing quite well.  “I’ll put in for a raise again” said the chairman, “but Dean Sadler blocked it last year and he might do the same this year”.  

            And, indeed, he did.  

            And she so deserved it.