Maitlin's research group were fiercely loyal, and turned out in full force at the awards dinner. They were let in even though they weren't invited and were already appallingly drunk, because everyone knew that Maitlin would win. The organisers could hardly deny them this moment of celebration, regardless of the cleaning bill.
They were given a table near the back, where their rowdiness wouldn't bother anyone, except for the surrounding band of tables of astronomers, who were guaranteed to be extremely bothered, so it was a win all round. Maitlin immediately sent away the two bottles of complementary wine and ordered three bottles of good wine. When the waiter explained that he would have to pay for the better wine, Maitlin laughed and answered so loudly that he must have hoped the entire room could hear, “Of course! Money is no object!” His research group cheered. They loved him.
No-one else loved him, but they did respect and envy him. How did he do it? His group were loyal and enthusiastic, and consistently produced incredible science. They appeared to be chaotic and undisciplined, yet strategically placed themselves on every key funding and policy panel, and were positioned to take advantage of every new innovation, every twist in research discoveries, and every grant opportunity. Their only real competition were other members of the same group, yet they also collaborated as a vast coherent team on some of their most impressive results.
No-one could understand them and no-one could stop them, no matter how hard they tried. The most focussed, determined, talent-packed research efforts failed to beat them. Competitors refused to write reference letters when their top people applied to Maitlin's group, but he hired them anyway. Then they switched tactics and tricked him into hiring their stupidest and laziest students and postdocs, but that didn't work, either. Six months later the same knucklehead was lead author on a ground-breaking paper. How? How!
He must be a monster. That was the only explanation. Every member of his massive team must be living in fear. Email demands at all hours, and unrelenting omniscience on all of the chat channels and WhatsApp groups and the wiki pages and issue-monitoring of the version-control repositories. Regular invitations to a one-on-one dressing-down in his office, reinforced by insults and humiliations at group meetings, seminars, lunches, coffee breaks, and compulsory-attendance dinners. He must have them working nights and weekends and public holidays, and in a state of perfect continuous terror and panic.
Those were certainly the tactics employed by his desperate rivals.
And yet everyone knew that could not be true. His group were the most joyous and relaxed bunch of people you could ever hope to meet. At conferences they were always laughing, and always out latest, and if you ever saw them around Maitlin, it was most likely to play a prank on him. And yet they gave the clearest and most interesting talks, and during all of the other abysmal talks they asked the best questions.
The only counter-measure that the collective envy of the rest of the field had managed to muster was to block him from any awards. And tonight they had failed to do even that.
Or had they?
When Clare Ruskin, one of Maitlin's senior research fellows, who recently secured a faculty position that would start in twelve months and was thus able to enjoy a heavenly last year in Maitlin's group without the slightest anxiety about her academic future, got up to go to the bathroom after the disappointing appetisers, she was stopped in the corridor by Richard Howell. Richard worked for one of Maitlin's rivals, Tobias Greengarde, as a Project Manager. Meaning: scientifically useless and politically lethal. When you're a coward disguised as a bully, it's useful to employ an evil shit disguised as a thug.
“Good evening, Clare.”
“Excuse me, Richard. My bladder is about to burst.”
“Then I'll make this quick. Maitlin will decline the award.”
“Did one of your computer models forecast that? Haven't you learned never to trust your useless codes?”
“He will either decline the award, or we will publish something he doesn't want to see.”
“We never want to see anything you publish. That hasn't stopped you before.”
“This one will be the end of his career.”
“Get out of my way, dipshit.”
She pushed past him, and made it to the bathroom just in time.
Probably he would be waiting outside when she left. Any normal person would give up when the main course was served, but Richard Howell was anything but normal. He would wait out there until he had starved to death. Or, worse, come in looking for her. That settled it. She would have to make a run for it.
Could he actually have some dirt on Maitlin?
Maybe financial shenanigans? Maitlin won preposterous amounts of grant funding. There was no doubt that he stretched and tangled the arcane spaghetti of funding rules to their very limit. It was easy to believe that somewhere in there a strand or twenty was broken.
Or that guy who was fired last year? That wasn't pretty. Sure, technically he wasn't fired, he just didn't have his contract renewed, and that was entirely defensible because the guy was phenomenally useless along with being personally unbearable, but that didn't stop him raising almighty hell on the way out. Had he fed some lies to Howell or Greengarde?
Whatever it was Howell thought he knew, neither she nor the rest of the group were going to be stupid enough to take it seriously in the corridor of a downtown hotel ten minutes before Maitlin was presented with a career achievement award.
Clare readied herself, and barrelled out of the bathroom and down the hall.
Howell could not block her way on his own, but now he had acquired six friends. The corridor was impassable.
“Ok guys, I'm not interested in your muckraking fantasies. Out of the way!”
“We're serious, Clare. You're going to want to hear this.”
“Can you say it in one sentence? With no sub clauses?”
“Easily.”
“Fine. Get it over with.”
“Maitlin has no PhD. He didn't even finish his undergraduate degree. He has absolutely no scientific training. He's a fraud.”
For some reason Clare failed to point out that that was more than one sentence.
Could this be true? Will Howell be thwarted? Will Maitlin be thwarted? Who, exactly, should be thwarted? Read Part 2 to find out! But before you do that, feel free to press the heart button and share widely.
This actually happened to Quincy Troupe, who was quite an effective professor of Literature at UCSD and Miles Davis’s biographer. Faking a bachelors degree was his downfall. He went on to collaborate on The Pursuit of Happyness, which was turned into a Will Smith film.
And my wife was part of an arts organization connected to University of Arizona that couldn’t hire the most qualified administrator because he maybe had a GED, if that. (He’d run away to join the circus as a teen.)
Of course, this isn’t the sciences, where a degree is much more important!