They Know Not What They Do, page 9
You could sometimes corner a Finn in the break room. These lunchtime encounters did not, however, necessarily result in conversation. For those awkward two–three minutes you managed to chat the Finn up, it would remain rigid and hold its breath as it offered one-word responses, scanning the vicinity for an escape route, eyes wide with fear.
Fortunately Wallenberg wouldn’t flee when Joe stopped to chat. Joe had asked him where the department’s researchers met; they must have a physical space where they collaborated. Was there a secret meeting place somewhere Joe didn’t know about? Where did they hold departmental colloquia, guest lectures? Where did they discuss their results, help each other develop their ideas?
‘In the sauna,’ Wallenberg had said.
For the life of him, Joe couldn’t tell if the guy was serious.
In hindsight, Joe was amused to realize he’d advanced like a textbook case through all the stages of culture shock.
The honeymoon had been followed by a crisis. The little things that had initially struck him as cute started to bother him. Why couldn’t you get Mexican food anywhere? How come no one says hello? Why doesn’t anyone, especially men, introduce themselves or each other, and why do they act as if they weren’t in the same room? Isn’t it draining avoiding eye contact day in, day out – just so you don’t have to talk? Why is carrying a conversation a task relegated to women? Why isn’t anyone interested in what their colleagues are doing? Why didn’t anyone think it was rude not to show up at the faculty research seminar he’d tried to start up? In any of his previous jobs, the withering of scientific conversation would have signaled utter professional and social collapse, wholesale surrender.
Were these people really that afraid of each other? So afraid they’d rather do everything poorly by themselves than well together? Wouldn’t it be smarter to share their thoughts so they could refine them as a team? But apparently it was more important for Finns to do everything their own way, in solitude, without help, among old friends. Finnish men in particular wanted to do everything alone, be independent, tough, and brilliant, which is why offering feedback or asking questions wasn’t allowed, even those questions that would have helped their work be even more brilliant. For the same reason, they didn’t let girls play with them, except the most docile ones, in supporting roles. In the promised land of gender equality, women who were intelligent, educated, and too competent for their modest positions, were forced to the edge of the pitch, left at home for three, four years after giving birth, while everyone bragged about how much freedom of choice mothers had here. This was why Finns, in spite of their hard work and talent, hadn’t succeeded in taking their companies global, Joe thought: because they didn’t help each other, they just toiled away in solitude, and then when they failed, drank like teenagers and wallowed in shame.
Joe had decided not to get mixed up in university politics. But did Finns really think an alcoholic who had taken fifteen years to write his dissertation by himself in Helsinki was more competent than, say, a young woman who had just received her doctorate from Cambridge, when both of them were applying for the same temporary position?
Joe had tried to speak up on the woman’s behalf, and in retrospect this seemed like the turning point after which it was hard to feel the same way about Finland. The woman had a bachelor’s from NYU, a doctorate from Cambridge, and was interested in returning to Finland because she wanted to raise her child in her homeland. Joe had met her once at a conference; she seemed pleasant and had a sense of humor, and she had given talks that had garnered attention even in the US. She was an eloquent speaker, and her ideas had been well received, especially in the UK.
Joe had imagined the Finns would be drooling over her. She was even born in Finland, since apparently that mattered, blonde and Lutheran, a native Finnish speaker. Spoke Swedish fluently, too – Finland’s second official language was not Russian – as was mandatory in Finland if you wanted a government job.
In the end, the three-year position was not awarded to the woman but the man: the one incapable of tending to his personal hygiene, the one who had spent ten years skulking around the department’s corridors in his slippers. He hadn’t published in years, and never in an international journal. Even so, Joe might not have intervened – the Finns had a few academic journals of their own that were unintelligible to the rest of the world – but then he learned that the job description had been rewritten at the last minute so the male applicant was the only one who qualified.
After recovering from his shock, he questioned how it could be possible that a clearly stronger female candidate had been deliberately excluded from the running. The response was dismissive shrugs: qualifications are so subjective. That’s how these things go. No one was responsible for the decision, and above all, nothing could be done about it anymore. This is such a small country.
Joe had suggested a lawsuit be filed on the woman’s behalf: Mr Slippers was so patently unqualified for the position. But the idea was met with horror; such activism was not in the woman’s best interests, and certainly not in Joe’s.
He’d been dumbfounded that no one protested, that they couldn’t even talk about the decision – until he stumbled across the reason in a random comment used to describe the woman: the outsider.
The woman didn’t appeal the decision. She told Joe she had no interest in working somewhere she wasn’t wanted.
‘Besides, I am an outsider,’ she had said in an understanding tone, although to him there was nothing understandable about the whole situation: everyone lost.
The longer he worked there, the more incomprehensible Finland felt to him. Why did Finns talk incessantly about improving the quality of their universities when they fought against it tooth and nail? Why didn’t they hire ambitious people from better schools and set them up with proper labs, give them real positions instead of ridiculous three-year pretend professorships? Instead, they renamed their universities at two-year intervals and established more and more Centers of Excellence and Expertise and Extraordinary Expertise, populated by the same figures as the earlier ones, doing the same things with equally insufficient resources and as isolated as ever. Then the latest Center of Super-Extraordinary Expertise would get a new director whose name or responsibilities no one could ever remember and who would spend a year drafting their job description before the funding ran out and they moved on.
The ‘international connections’ that played such a central role in advertising the department proved to be Wallenberg, who had attended Stanford twenty years earlier on a three-month stipend. The department did have an exchange program with Berkeley for master’s students. A few had participated, Wallenberg assured Joe, but unfortunately he couldn’t remember who or when. And Oxford: someone from the department had done a postdoc there years ago, although no one seemed to know what he was up to now.
As long as your own work was going well, the Finns’ strange customs were nothing more than funny little curiosities. And the Finns’ tenacity, as navel-gazing as it was, was almost admirable in its own way. When you were only visiting, you could collect funny anecdotes about Finland like smooth stones at the seashore, polish them for recounting at parties, and appear cosmopolitan.
Center of Excellence.
If he’d had a tenure-track position and even a small team to work with, Joe could have stayed. There were so many good things about Finland that he could have perhaps sacrificed his own ambitions, dedicated himself to his family and the inherent satisfaction of his work. Learned to ski in the coniferous forests, dazzled by the sun bouncing off the February snow.
The longer the presentation went on, the more it seemed to fall apart. Joe sipped his coffee and did his best to concentrate. He knew Raj had high hopes for his experiments, and was even more eager than usual to hear Joe’s feedback.
The idea was interesting enough. Raj had lesioned selected pathways in cat visual cortex that communicated with higher-level processing areas. This was nothing new; it had been done thousands of times. But Raj had been able to apply a recently developed method considerably more precisely than those used in the past. In the first cat, the blinded cortical neurons had appeared to rearrange themselves in a completely unexpected pattern. Joe’s entire team had been roused as if out of a long hibernation. More often than not, their work was repetitive drudgery, but all of the sudden they’d catch a flash of something that made the dull days worthwhile.
Yet further experimentation hadn’t generated consistent outcomes, and when the cats were put down, the cellular-level results were contradictory.
Once again, all that trouble for nothing. Not that it was ever for nothing – it was often from your missteps and dead ends that you learned the most.
Joe found his thoughts drifting. Organizing the Freedom Media boycott had turned out to be a challenge. Everyone wanted to focus on their work – understandably so – and avoid any extraneous commitments, especially time-consuming ones. Joe had initially approached potential participants via email and social media, but the response had been tepid, so in the end he’d been obliged to call most of them. Many sounded as if they were hearing about the whole thing for the first time. They all thought the situation was untenable and unfair, but very few wanted to add their name to a public list of boycotters. ‘Reputation’ and ‘troublemaker’ were words that frequently came up. As well as: Thanks for doing such important work! Sorry I couldn’t help out this time! Good luck!
Most critically, no one was interested in resigning from the editorial boards; editing a prestigious publication was an academic merit. As long as researchers continued to submit manuscripts, work on editorial boards, and act as peer reviewers, the best journals would remain at the top of their fields. And as long as they remained at the top, researchers would continue to want to submit their manuscripts to Freedom Media, and libraries would be blackmailed into paying for a catalog of journals they didn’t need.
Bringing about change was frustratingly slow, even in matters everyone agreed on.
Yet for the moment the boycott needed to be put on the back burner, until the fallout from the vandals’ attack had been dealt with. They’d have to sift through the lab to figure out what had been destroyed, try to locate the missing data, draw up a list of the work that had been lost. What could be more frustrating? He was already behind with everything.
Facilities was supposed to come by to fix the door and install enhanced security systems. More surveillance cameras would be brought in, this time outside the labs. Until then, Joe would have to make do without an office. Great.
‘Joe?’
He was startled to find everyone looking at him. Apparently they were expecting him to comment on something that had just been said. What had they been talking about?
He responded with some vague remark that didn’t really have anything to do with anything and tried to remember what he’d been thinking at the start of the presentation, before his mind started to wander. But all he could think of was Roddy’s response to the grumbling undergraduates lined up in the corridor: you want credit for the course but you don’t want to do anything for it.
After the lab meeting, Raj stopped him in the hallway. Joe apologized for being so distracted and promised to offer more detailed comments on his results as soon as possible.
‘Keep up the good work,’ Joe said. ‘We’ll get something more solid soon.’
‘That’s not what I’m worried about,’ Raj said. ‘We just wanted to let you know that…, if there’s anything we can do.’
The others had gathered around behind him: Lisa, Sarah, Chen, Megan, Thando, Cheh-Han. Serious, silent, earnest.
‘We’re all happy to pitch in,’ Sarah said. ‘With the analyses or, say… If your office needs to be fixed up or something. Renovated.’
Raj’s and the other PhD students’ sympathy was like a ray of sunshine in the heart of winter. Joe realized that, this whole time, the break-in had felt more personal than he’d wanted to admit.
He wasn’t in the habit of going for happy hour with his students the way some of the younger assistant professors did, but today he took the whole gang to PJ’s for tacos and pitchers of beer. He felt an unexpected warmth inside as he looked around at his bright, socially adept, funny students, playing pool in the windowless basement bar and trashing the right wing of the Republican Party; suddenly he wished them well in a way that, despite his attempts, he couldn’t describe.
More threats appeared in his departmental mailbox. At first occasionally, then every week. He was a Nazi, a concentration camp general, Goebbels, Mengele, Todesengel. Some of the notes made mention of Miriam and the girls.
Nazi.
Although Joe tried to take the harassment seriously, these attacks felt surreal. What good would it do to get upset? If he wanted reasons to be outraged, he didn’t have to look far: across town, people were being murdered every day and drug debts were being repaid with firebombs. War was being waged in the Middle East, still. It was horrible – but what could you do? From this perspective, the vandalism was a relatively minor nuisance.
He forwarded the notes to campus security and reported them to the police. He didn’t know what else to do, nor did he have the time. He couldn’t leave his PhD students in the lurch. Pugilistic undergrads were lined up at his door, there were talks to prepare, papers to comment on. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t finally finish the book this year, and he had to make it home every night by eight on the dot to relieve Saara. With Saara, punctuality was a must.
But his feelings changed after that Saturday night a brick hurtled through his office window. The tapes from the surveillance cameras showed a figure in dark clothing, average height, running straight towards Bloomberg from the upper quad, hurling the brick, and sprinting off. The assailant had a beanie pulled down over their face, and apparently even the police had no way if determining his or her identity.
It was all incredibly frustrating. Was it that hard for the police to find one vandal in Baltimore?
A departmental staff meeting was held where they discussed what action should be taken. In the end, the decision was unanimous: none. The police were investigating the matter. But how actively? Joe felt like asking. In nearly a month since the break-in, they’d turned up nothing.
A part of him wished someone would do something, no matter how trivial or pointless. Indicate that he wasn’t the only one affected by the incident. That someone threatening his life and the lives of his family members, even as an empty gesture, wasn’t a matter of no consequence.
After the meeting, Joe had wondered out loud why he was the one being targeted. What had he done that was so different from everyone else? Dozens if not hundreds of others were doing comparable research, thousands across the country, tens of thousands worldwide.
Barb Fleischmann immediately had the answer:
‘You’ve been too successful.’
The National Science Award.
The year before, his name had appeared in all the media. Every paper reported the same details: extrastriatal refractive amblyopia, a previously unknown, unilateral visual impairment caused by a developmental disorder in the secondary areas of the visual cortex, was now, thanks to the research of Professor Joseph Chayefski, treatable in children. Professor Chayefski’s work significantly increased the chances that, in the future, it would be possible to treat other forms of visual impairment, too, perhaps even some that currently led to blindness. He had been awarded a medal and prize money of half a million dollars.
The possibility of ending up a target for hate mail had never occurred to him. He’d been embarrassed by the prize money, since so many others were constantly producing equally good or even better work. It felt just as awkward to say he’d given half of the money to UNICEF. as to leave this intentionally unsaid. He remembered being amused by the reporters’ implication that he had performed – and in the worst instances, through a single experiment – a Herculean feat, when the reality was it had been accomplished through the mundane work, the toil, put in by tens of thousands of people. No one accomplished anything alone: there wasn’t a single experiment that meant anything in isolation, and all well-executed experiments benefited everyone. But no matter how hard Joe tried to emphasize the work of other researchers, without which he never would have come up with his idea, it was ignored in all the media.
The reporters were curious about blind children – how soon would they be able to see? In how many years? Can I put down three? You can’t say? Hmm, whom could I ask? They were just doing their job, searching for a story about a specific disease and a lone hero. It was fiction, journalistic expertise.
But was that what he was being punished for now – for succeeding? They were attacking him because his work had been beneficial, because he hadn’t sacrificed his animals in vain on useless experiments?
Why didn’t they harass researchers who bungled their tests? Attack those who administered painful electric shocks to dogs but botched the design so that the results were inconclusive? Or forced rats to swim slowly to their death in basins with slippery sides, in order to produce yet another generic version of a drug with dozens of variants already on the market? He received such studies to review every week; they were appearing with accelerating frequency in new journals launched every month; they were being churned out across the globe faster than anyone could read them; they were published in increasingly mediocre journals without the tiniest iota of scientific rigor; they were supported by taxpayers in every Western country, because it was important to conduct research; they were produced in such numbers that wading through them was nothing but a hindrance.
That’s what he felt like shouting at whoever vandalized his office: if anything was unfair to animals, wasn’t it this, goddammit?
