The Grant Application: Part 1

Few understand the terrifying perils that academics face. This is a story about one of them.

Professor Ladbrook was on a call to his research team on Friday morning.

He struggled to keep his voice calm. He was more frustrated than he had ever been before — even more than on Tuesday!

It didn't help that he had forgotten to take his blood pressure medication at breakfast. Or that he was taking the call while on his bicycle, pedalling uphill.

“Don't argue with me!” he wheezed into his headset.

He waited to confirm that indeed no-one was arguing, and to catch his breath after reaching the top of the hill.

“We have two weeks to complete this grant application. The application is sunk without preliminary calculations demonstrating that our method is feasible. In the next two weeks we need those calculations. With a paper. Submitted to a journal and up on the preprint server. And the results incorporated into the grant. Also written! You know all this! And you know what it means... shit, wait a minute, I'm about to go through a tunnel.”

His team waited.

They sat at the large conference table in the large meeting room. Ladbrook had demanded that they be there by 8.30am for a group meeting. For every meeting he insisted that every single one of them be present in person, because he hated online meetings, and at almost every meeting he announced at the last minute that he would need to join them online.

There was one junior faculty member, one postdoctoral researcher, and two PhD students. There was also a departmental secretary, Mrs Ebert, whose job description most certainly did not include taking minutes at some despotic professor's meetings, but she agreed to attend purely in the hope that one day Ladbrook would do something she could have him fired for. Time was running out, though: in six months she was getting the hell out of here, and taking early retirement to embark on a PhD in Post-Colonial Literature.

The junior faculty member was Rob Grey. He was relaxed and cocky, because despite being told at length how incredibly difficult it is to achieve a successful research career, he had found it preposterously easy, and concluded that this meant he must be a natural genius. He was in fact lazy and ineffective and unaware that he was hired only because all of the other candidates for his position, on being offered the job, suddenly thought better of working in the same department as Professor Ladbrook. Grey's only redeeming feature was that he was good at looking after the postdoc, Lucy Hornby.

Lucy was currently a recovering drug addict. The drugs she was recovering from took the form of an eclectic collection of pills, all so cutting-edge and with such poorly understood psychological effects that it was tempting to believe that she developed them herself. This was entirely possible because, in stark contrast to Grey, she was a brilliant scientist. This was the reason why Grey's one job, and thankfully the one job he was so far good at, was to keep Lucy away from her pills.

It helped that Ladbrook’s latest frenzied grant-writing push meant that they now spent pretty much their entire lives in the one massive research office that Ladbrook had secured for them, napping in shifts on the two sofas. There was at least one person awake to watch Lucy 24 hours a day.

That was the group. And the two PhD students, but we can ignore them. Everyone else did.

Ladbrook presumably emerged from the tunnel, because his raspy voice burst again into the room. He repeated exactly the words he had said before he entered the tunnel, only this time louder.

“... And you know what it means! It means everyone needs to be working every available second. Tonight — Friday night! Tomorrow! Sunday! Next week! Whatever it takes! I already bought a great big coffee machine on the old grant. I can pay for pizza delivery as well. We need those calculations! Hornby! Tell me the progress!”

Lucy had been awake since 4am, thanks to the random fluctuations of her withdrawl symptoms, and coffee. She was now in the final stages of extreme nervous agitation.

“It's great! It's great! It's great!” she chirped. “I rewrote the entire code last night, and now it's giving completely different results.”

“Is that good?” barked Ladbrook.

“I don't know. There might be some bugs.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“I'm going to get the PhD students to check through it today.”

“That'll take forever! They're useless!”

The two PhD students sat motionless. Ladbrook was their academic guru, and they knew that they must learn to become like him. If he could be so perfectly oblivious to their presence, then they must learn to be perfectly oblivious to his.

“No, they're really very good,” said Lucy, which produced feelings in the students' brains that were unfamiliar and disturbingly euphoric, and in some ways it was a relief when Lucy extinguished them by adding, “Of course, it would be faster if Rob has time to take a look.”

Back out on the streets, Ladbrook was struggling to process this information — not a single piece of which was in the least bit encouraging — while also navigating the denser traffic as he approached the campus.

“Certainly not! Rob needs to be working on the grant case. Rob! Have you got the finance costings?”

Rob did not have the finance costings.

“Yes!” he said. “They're almost ready.”

“They need to be ready TODAY!” roared Ladbrook, weaving up the middle of two lanes of cars waiting at a traffic light.

“Don't worry, they will!” Rob looked desperately towards Mrs Ebert, who sighed, but also nodded back to him.

“And don't trust any numbers you get from Ebert! She's got no idea what she's doing. Her head's stuck up Edward Said's rear end!”

There's no need to report the silent reactions in the meeting room. Let's stay with Ladbrook and his bicycle. He was on a nice long stretch of straight road, on a slight downward incline, so he could both build up speed and get his breath back.

“I'll be there in three minutes. I need to see that code myself. I need to see the finances. And then I need to write while you people work like you've never worked before and try to finally make some progress. Without these results we have no funding, and Hornby is out on the street and Rob is up to a full teaching load and however many PhD students we have will be lucky if they see their supervisor once every six months!”

That was a good speech — impassioned, rousing, almost certainly inspirational — and it fit exactly into the amount of time it took Ladbrook to reach the next intersection. He was very pleased with himself, in fact so pleased that he ignored the red light and cycled directly into a car driving across the intersection.

It was a spectacular crash. His bicycle hit the side of the car level with the front windscreen and sent him into a clean summersault that terminated when his back bounced on the windscreen — or it would have bounced if the windscreen were made of rubber — and then flipped him over into the road, where a second car was fortunately less eager pulling out from the traffic lights and managed to stop after only lightly propelling Ladbrook forward into a crumpled heap in the middle of the intersection.

If Ladbrook had instead been applying for a grant in experimental techniques in stunt choreography, he would have been guaranteed a large award. Or perhaps not, since the key aspect of stunt work is that the stuntman is unharmed. Ladbrook, by contrast, was sent into the hospital for a week.

His grant application was now in some peril.

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Can the grant be saved? Can the professor be saved? Stay tuned!