Where do you see yourself in ten years? (3)
Or: always blame others, especially for bombing campaigns
In a future world ravaged by war and devastation, one lone academic attempts to depose his head of department. See here for Part 1 and Part 2.
On an overcast mid-morning one week later I was stationed in a top-floor office in the safest building on campus, watching to see if my brilliant plan to depose my head of department would work.
The safest buildings on campus are of course the administration buildings.
We have a complex relationship with the administrators. While we wait for the missiles to arrive, let me summarise one aspect, because it is important for my devious scheme.
One of the main reasons the university remains financially viable is that we charge exorbitant fees for non-UK PhD students. We have attempted this profiteering wheeze for decades, of course, but now, finally, in a shocking reversal of all reasonable expectations, it is suddenly revealed as a genius move.
Postgraduate study is now the number one escape route for refugees from the former US and Europe. Any fat cats who managed to liquidate their wealth before the troops rolled in can now whisk their pampered progeny off the gulag waiting list and into a UK PhD programme. As the avenues to do this rapidly close, the numbers of new students plummet, but that’s fine because the fees rocket up. You could say that the more killing that’s done, the bigger the killing we make.
The best part of it? Physics is one of the most popular subjects for these arrogant little shits.
And the worst part? They are all utter morons. They couldn't perform a fast Fourier transform if you copy-and-pasted the command for them. No matter how hard we try, we cannot find a project simple enough that they can make the least progress on it. Even our most reliable fallback for the most hopeless numpty — training neural networks — is too difficult for them.
The only solution that works is to give them interdisciplinary research projects with the admin department.
The downside is that in the end we don't get any actual physics students, and we don't get access to the vast profits these people bring to the university, and we have to accept the shameful reality that the physics department continues to exist only as a wing of university marketing. The upside is that we do continue to exist.
The other upside is that, on paper, I co-supervise a phenomenal number of students who work in the admin buildings. They all believe, deep down, that they really are doing a PhD in fundamental physics, and treat me as a minor god. They are ideal pawns for my schemes.
Here is my scheme. My minions will broker a deal with the Russians to blow up the Classics department, but lay the blame on our own head of department, Professor Farmer. His motivation? To send a threatening message to the Vice Chancellor, who is a former Classics professor, and also widely suspected of holding a grudge against the Russians for flattening Rome.
You might wonder how I could do that, without getting blamed myself. This is where my loyal faux grad students come in.
The key is to make contact with the occupying forces. This should be easy, because they continually send us messages soliciting collaboration. The tricky part is that we are also inundated with spam messages offering the same thing. Some are traps sent by the opposing side, but most are just, well, spam.
My grad students, although hopeless at physics, can be trained to identify spam. This may seem miraculous, but the explanation is simple. The war between AI spam generators and AI spam filters long ago bounded off into such a bizarre algorithmic hinterland that, although identifying the latest spam scam is only possible with the very latest spam scan, an actual spam message is blindingly obvious to a real human. No-one knows this, of course, except those of us with contacts at the highest levels of spam research, i.e., our own computer science department.
The only problem is volume. You have to parse through tens of thousands of messages to identify one that is not spam. This is where an army of grad students is useful. And since the task quickly becomes mindless, it is easy to rope in the grad students co-supervised by Farmer; they have no idea what they are involved in. And given that a message from a real Russian agent is so deliciously rare, it is also trivial to make sure that when said message is forwarded to one of Farmer's students, they are so excited that they pass on my plans under the assumption that they came from Farmer.
You still think it's risky? That's why I first tested the plan on spam from predatory open access journals. You might have thought that those journals would have ceased to exist after Springer expanded its business interests to include arms sales and drug running, which, although not quite profitable enough to match their earnings from academic publishing, nonetheless provided them with sufficient wealth to buy Gibraltar outright, and from their fortress on Publishing Rock wipe out all competitors. But no: the predatory open access servers were sufficiently autonomous and semi-sentient to not only write and publish their own volumes of articles even though their despicable human operators were now all dead, but also continue to spam academics with invitations to join their exponentially multiplying number of editorial boards.
My test was a roaring success. In an exact analogue of my Farmer plan, I was able to trick another colleague's grad student to accept a real Springer editorial board invitation on their behalf. It's true that this was a more dangerous test than I had anticipated — that colleague was shocked to discover that the eye-watering board member's fee was in fact paid by the board member to Springer — but it nonetheless worked perfectly.
And, needless to say, my follow-up plan was equally successful. Farmer's students were on hand in the top floor of the main administration building, to film the moments when the Classics building was obliterated at 11.46am, just as all of the staff were assembling for a key faculty meeting, and to immediately forward him the video with a congratulatory message.
Later in the afternoon I stopped by Farmer's office to observe the aftermath.
I was told that he was busy on a call with the Vice Chancellor, but of course I was more than happy to wait.
I took the liberty of polishing Alexander Brady's cryogenic storage chamber, since its care would soon be my responsibility.
When Farmer eventually came in, he looked wonderfully miserable.
“I just had a very difficult conversation,” he said.
“Oh no. What happened?”
“The Classics building was bombed this morning.”
“Why do we care about that?”
“The VC thinks I arranged it.”
I had been practising my look of horror for days. “That must be terrible for you.”
“It is. I've never heard him so happy. He's acting like I'm his divine saviour.”
What what what!? This didn't make any sense.
“He's been desperate to get rid of them ever since they discovered that he plagiarised his PhD thesis. He thought there was no way to stop them before they went public at today’s faculty meeting. Everyone who knew about it was conveniently crushed by falling rubble a quarter of an hour before the meeting was due to start.”
Now my look of horror came without effort. “And why is this terrible for you?”
“He begged me to accept a position as his assistant. It was almost impossible to turn down.”
I couldn't understand what was happening. “But you did turn it down?”
“Of course. I have to stay here. It is my duty. If I left, just imagine what kind of clown might take over.”
I nodded, and thanked him for his loyalty to us, and backed quietly out of the room.
As I went, my gaze rested on that ridiculous cryogenic storage chamber, and I came up with a new plan.
That chamber is the symbol of the HOD's power. If I steal that, then the power will be all mine!
All! Mine!
Could his new plan possibly be even worse than the last one? Find out in Part 4!