I work for the research branch of a University. My department has had a lot of problems over the past several months. Now, we’re shutting down because the U. pulled our funding.
For the past three years, this University has been building a new research/medical campus. The transition has been paced with the completion of buildings, so while the local media talks about this “new” campus, people like me have been working here for a couple of years already.
The U. hospital has been moved to the “new” campus and now there are ads on television about this great place! :rolleyes: They end with “Its not just buildings, its the people in them.”
Well, fuck me! I never knew you cared. There are good people here who are scrambling for jobs because researchers are leaving like rats from a sinking ship.
You don’t give a flying fuck about the people in these buildings! You just want to look good. After all of the trouble Churchill and the football team has caused, I don’t know why you fucking try! This place is an academic shit hole and you think a bunch of poorly built high-rises in the middle of a gang-infested neighborhood is going to help. (I’m not sure, but I think the area around John Hopkins went to hell after they were established there. In case you think that being in a nasty area makes you look good.)
Fuck you! Fuck your ad campain with a seed beetle’s dick after it’s been made enormous and enraged by radition! I hope you’re pulling radioactive bug barbs out of your colon for years.
Mouse_Maven, there’s a part of me that’s wondering if you could use the various ‘equal time’ laws for TV spots for politicians to let you share with your locality the joys of working for your U.
I know, I know, it’s likely far, far too expensive to be practical.
But I’d think it would be a fun little revenge fantasy.
Well, considering that the Johns Hopkins Hospital was built in the late nineteenth century, i think it’s pretty safe to say that the surrounding area “went to hell” after the establishment of the hospital, especially considering that Baltimore’s urban decline is largely a product of the postwar era. But that really doesn’t warrant any conclusions about cause and effect regarding the hospital’s role in that decline.
As someone who lives in Baltimore, and is also affiliated with Hopkins (although not the medical campus), i think that there are some valid criticisms that can be leveled against Johns Hopkins regarding its role in the city, and its attitude to the city’s problems. But implying that the presence of the hospital is somehow directly to blame for the poverty and violence of the surrounding area is pretty silly.
I started a thread about whistleblowing in MPSIMS and I’m seriously considering do so. One of our post-doc’s had her salary grant mysteriously “disappear.” Pulling money from a department is one thing, losing (or taking) someone’s pay is just fucking sick.
What I was trying to express was that the U here wants to be a Big Institute. The only similarity I could see was this we’re in a bad neighborhood and Johns Hopkins is also in an impoverished area. I do not know what the areas are like around other universities and their research branches and I did not mean to imply that Hopkins directly caused the area’s decline. My apologies.
