Few people understand the psychology of dealing with grant rejection. Your normal academic will panic and immediately set to addressing the shortcomings detailed in the white sheet. Subservient in every way.
This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the reviewer-heart. The thing to do when you have missed the payline by a full radian, when you see the tragic notification topping your inbox, what you want to do then is accelerate. Call the bastards on their bluff.
Begin by questioning their qualifications, individually and as a group. Ask if the study section was assembled from bus stop vagrants. Demand to see their credentials. Make them rue the day they listened to their guidance counselor when the topic of college admission was broached.
Lead them to believe you have punctured their thin veneer of protective anonymity, that you are on the first flight. Give them the mental image of you appearing unannounced with a bad look to you and rope. Engage them in licentious name-calling. Interrupt your narrative at random locations with meticulously detailed rantings about the gold standard or an enormous list of prime numbers. The goal is to make them question their sanity.
Remember, you have three attempts before your rejection is irrevocable. Swing for the fences. Playing it safe on the second pitch marks you unquestionably as a bush leaguer.
"I heard your grant got dinged."
It was my department chair, abruptly materialized. Probably came in from the fire escape. We would keep the thing locked were it not for the meddling of the University Safety Officer.
He was using standard lingo. A stimulus I would comprehend and respond to. Dinged is the generic sound of academic failure. It's the sound of a paper that was not accepted, a failed bid for employment or tenure. The sound a sparrow makes when shot into a jet engine. It's also the sound a grant application makes when fate and the NIH decree it is not worthy of their cash dollars.
"Let me know if there's anything I can do." Then he was gone.
The long-necked bastard was pining for my lab space. Ever since our modified Nanopure had gone berserk and flooded his office he had wanted us gone. I could picture him sitting in his soggy ergonomic chair one floor down, shaking his fist at the ceiling. Now his aspirations of territorial expansion were within reach.
I had a solemn duty to inform my postdoc of the impending disaster at earliest opportunity. This came later in the week. I found him at the bench engrossed in a schematic. He had disassembled our centrifuge, the parts leading across the floor in a solemn progression to what appeared to be a freshly minted kompressor from a five series BMW. I didn't ask. It would be surrendering plausible deniability.
The news left him eerily unfazed.
"As your postdoc, I advise you to call your Program Officer," he said. A Teutonic upbringing was clouding his judgement. It had given him a childlike faith in government.
An ethereal creature, a Program Officer is. Like a gryphon or a solar eclipse. I had never seen one in the flesh, but there existed far too much indirect evidence to dismiss their existence. Many believed they were an advanced form of artificial intelligence developed by the Pentagon to induce suicide in university faculty. Kill enough of us, they reasoned, and it would balance the budget. Once perfected, the algorithm would be burned into the EPROMS of next generation autonomous insectozoid drones released en masse to cull whatever misfit intellectuals remained. Sorry, the generals would later offer in mock apology. It was necessary to destroy academia in order to save it.
You had to admit, it all had a certain undeniable logic.
Penetrating the firewall surrounding your Program Officer was no mean feat. It could be accomplished using a landline if you owned professional SIGINT countermeasures and were competent in throat-warbling, the right collection of harmonics spoofing whatever backdoor security hole some hippy subcontractor had left behind. I did not posses this skill set, having misspent my youth in beer and dating. Instead, I began the long march through the septic wasteland of the NIH automated phone menu system. If Escher had gone into telecommunications, this would have been the result.
Day one. No joy.
Clearly I was in for a long night, my naive optimism leaving me inadequately prepared. My postdoc must have sensed my resolve was weakening. I looked up to find him dragging a well-stocked vending machine into the lab, metal legs cutting deep grooves into the linoleum like a time machine. Once it was was plugged in, he handed me a roll of quarters. We were, after all, not thieves.
Day two. No joy.
Rumor had it there were faculty who had spent their entire career attempting to contact a Program Officer. Someone would peel away from the retirement party and seek them out in their office, only to find the guest of honor clutching a phone, mummified, a recorded message rendered in 8-bit lossy compression assuring them their call is important. The grim discovery would be relayed to campus police by someone wearing a conical party hat.
Day three. A woman answered.
A mirage, I thought. One can only hold for so long before the mind goes. Like shipwreck survivors finally succumbing to the fatal urge to drink seawater. But the voice seemed human. I briefly considered probing it. Trick it into revealing its machine nature. Who won the 1947 World Series? That sort of thing. But what if I was successful? What then? A Program Officer doesn't see you and I like other people, it sees us as a series of ones and zeros. Also, I had no idea who won the 1947 World Series.
I mustered as much decorum as possible. "LabKitty here," I said. "Applicant LabKitty," I quickly added. It was important to adopt a proper tone, as you might when addressing an inter-dimensional being or apex predator.
We exchanged pleasantries. Then, I steered conversation to the business at hand.
"Why have you weasels smothered my child?" I inquired.
"Hold on while I look up your file," she replied.
The sound of progress was replaced by smooth jazz, the bandwidth reduced for efficient transmission. This is how they get you. It lulls you into a stupor, then they send the Queen over to lay her eggs in your brainstem.
The Program Officer returned.
"Your submission scored a one."
This was confusing.
"A one? A one should have me titrating in silk," I said. "At this very moment I should be running roughshod over lesser faculty, lording my money over the unfunded masses. I should be picking out new snow tires."
"Unfortunately, you missed the payline," she announced with simulated condolence. It was as if a gouging tool had acquired sentience and taken a gender.
"Well, what's the payline?" I asked.
"The cutoff score for the current fiscal year is zero."
She must have misspoken. I pictured her impregnating some unfortunate woodland creature, molybdenum ovipositor wriggling in perverse ecstasy. The power surge had caused her speech synthesizer to malfunction. It was the only plausible explanation.
"Nobody scores a zero," I protested. "A zero is impossible. It's 17 in a round of golf. Negative Kelvin. Socrates himself couldn't pull down a zero."
"Sequestration," she shrugged. Her enunciation offered unmistakable body language.
There is was. The shibboleth. A word the fascists had invented to give the illusion they would make the trains run on time. All things raped for the greater good. No future for you, they would say if they were capable of coming clean with the truth. Instead, some think tank had concocted this linguistic sleight of hand. They dressed greed in a robe and expected us to call it justice.
"You can't do this to me!" I shouted into the phone. "I'm a doctor of philosophy!" Unfortunately, the accidental rhyming had drained my protest of its potency. The line went dead.
At that moment I understood: We had been beaten. Politically outmaneuvered while our attention was elsewhere, our minds occupied with thoughts of cures for disease and longer lasting light bulbs. We had no champion in this fight, no voice in the debate. There were rotten bastards in this business, and they were all working for the other side.
It had all been for nothing. The endless nights. The alienation. The visceral punishment of third world energy drinks. The grad student. The grad student! We had sent him to return the laptop. No small print would forgive the grievous harm it had suffered at our hands.
In my mind's eye I watched bookstore thugs working him over in a dingy back room.
Continue to Part VI
This is wrong. It arouses contempt in the reviewer-heart. The thing to do when you have missed the payline by a full radian, when you see the tragic notification topping your inbox, what you want to do then is accelerate. Call the bastards on their bluff.
Begin by questioning their qualifications, individually and as a group. Ask if the study section was assembled from bus stop vagrants. Demand to see their credentials. Make them rue the day they listened to their guidance counselor when the topic of college admission was broached.
Lead them to believe you have punctured their thin veneer of protective anonymity, that you are on the first flight. Give them the mental image of you appearing unannounced with a bad look to you and rope. Engage them in licentious name-calling. Interrupt your narrative at random locations with meticulously detailed rantings about the gold standard or an enormous list of prime numbers. The goal is to make them question their sanity.
Remember, you have three attempts before your rejection is irrevocable. Swing for the fences. Playing it safe on the second pitch marks you unquestionably as a bush leaguer.
"I heard your grant got dinged."
It was my department chair, abruptly materialized. Probably came in from the fire escape. We would keep the thing locked were it not for the meddling of the University Safety Officer.
He was using standard lingo. A stimulus I would comprehend and respond to. Dinged is the generic sound of academic failure. It's the sound of a paper that was not accepted, a failed bid for employment or tenure. The sound a sparrow makes when shot into a jet engine. It's also the sound a grant application makes when fate and the NIH decree it is not worthy of their cash dollars.
"Let me know if there's anything I can do." Then he was gone.
The long-necked bastard was pining for my lab space. Ever since our modified Nanopure had gone berserk and flooded his office he had wanted us gone. I could picture him sitting in his soggy ergonomic chair one floor down, shaking his fist at the ceiling. Now his aspirations of territorial expansion were within reach.
I had a solemn duty to inform my postdoc of the impending disaster at earliest opportunity. This came later in the week. I found him at the bench engrossed in a schematic. He had disassembled our centrifuge, the parts leading across the floor in a solemn progression to what appeared to be a freshly minted kompressor from a five series BMW. I didn't ask. It would be surrendering plausible deniability.
The news left him eerily unfazed.
"As your postdoc, I advise you to call your Program Officer," he said. A Teutonic upbringing was clouding his judgement. It had given him a childlike faith in government.
An ethereal creature, a Program Officer is. Like a gryphon or a solar eclipse. I had never seen one in the flesh, but there existed far too much indirect evidence to dismiss their existence. Many believed they were an advanced form of artificial intelligence developed by the Pentagon to induce suicide in university faculty. Kill enough of us, they reasoned, and it would balance the budget. Once perfected, the algorithm would be burned into the EPROMS of next generation autonomous insectozoid drones released en masse to cull whatever misfit intellectuals remained. Sorry, the generals would later offer in mock apology. It was necessary to destroy academia in order to save it.
You had to admit, it all had a certain undeniable logic.
Penetrating the firewall surrounding your Program Officer was no mean feat. It could be accomplished using a landline if you owned professional SIGINT countermeasures and were competent in throat-warbling, the right collection of harmonics spoofing whatever backdoor security hole some hippy subcontractor had left behind. I did not posses this skill set, having misspent my youth in beer and dating. Instead, I began the long march through the septic wasteland of the NIH automated phone menu system. If Escher had gone into telecommunications, this would have been the result.
Day one. No joy.
Clearly I was in for a long night, my naive optimism leaving me inadequately prepared. My postdoc must have sensed my resolve was weakening. I looked up to find him dragging a well-stocked vending machine into the lab, metal legs cutting deep grooves into the linoleum like a time machine. Once it was was plugged in, he handed me a roll of quarters. We were, after all, not thieves.
Day two. No joy.
Rumor had it there were faculty who had spent their entire career attempting to contact a Program Officer. Someone would peel away from the retirement party and seek them out in their office, only to find the guest of honor clutching a phone, mummified, a recorded message rendered in 8-bit lossy compression assuring them their call is important. The grim discovery would be relayed to campus police by someone wearing a conical party hat.
Day three. A woman answered.
A mirage, I thought. One can only hold for so long before the mind goes. Like shipwreck survivors finally succumbing to the fatal urge to drink seawater. But the voice seemed human. I briefly considered probing it. Trick it into revealing its machine nature. Who won the 1947 World Series? That sort of thing. But what if I was successful? What then? A Program Officer doesn't see you and I like other people, it sees us as a series of ones and zeros. Also, I had no idea who won the 1947 World Series.
I mustered as much decorum as possible. "LabKitty here," I said. "Applicant LabKitty," I quickly added. It was important to adopt a proper tone, as you might when addressing an inter-dimensional being or apex predator.
We exchanged pleasantries. Then, I steered conversation to the business at hand.
"Why have you weasels smothered my child?" I inquired.
"Hold on while I look up your file," she replied.
The sound of progress was replaced by smooth jazz, the bandwidth reduced for efficient transmission. This is how they get you. It lulls you into a stupor, then they send the Queen over to lay her eggs in your brainstem.
The Program Officer returned.
"Your submission scored a one."
This was confusing.
"A one? A one should have me titrating in silk," I said. "At this very moment I should be running roughshod over lesser faculty, lording my money over the unfunded masses. I should be picking out new snow tires."
"Unfortunately, you missed the payline," she announced with simulated condolence. It was as if a gouging tool had acquired sentience and taken a gender.
"Well, what's the payline?" I asked.
"The cutoff score for the current fiscal year is zero."
She must have misspoken. I pictured her impregnating some unfortunate woodland creature, molybdenum ovipositor wriggling in perverse ecstasy. The power surge had caused her speech synthesizer to malfunction. It was the only plausible explanation.
"Nobody scores a zero," I protested. "A zero is impossible. It's 17 in a round of golf. Negative Kelvin. Socrates himself couldn't pull down a zero."
"Sequestration," she shrugged. Her enunciation offered unmistakable body language.
There is was. The shibboleth. A word the fascists had invented to give the illusion they would make the trains run on time. All things raped for the greater good. No future for you, they would say if they were capable of coming clean with the truth. Instead, some think tank had concocted this linguistic sleight of hand. They dressed greed in a robe and expected us to call it justice.
"You can't do this to me!" I shouted into the phone. "I'm a doctor of philosophy!" Unfortunately, the accidental rhyming had drained my protest of its potency. The line went dead.
At that moment I understood: We had been beaten. Politically outmaneuvered while our attention was elsewhere, our minds occupied with thoughts of cures for disease and longer lasting light bulbs. We had no champion in this fight, no voice in the debate. There were rotten bastards in this business, and they were all working for the other side.
It had all been for nothing. The endless nights. The alienation. The visceral punishment of third world energy drinks. The grad student. The grad student! We had sent him to return the laptop. No small print would forgive the grievous harm it had suffered at our hands.
In my mind's eye I watched bookstore thugs working him over in a dingy back room.
Continue to Part VI
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