How I Won a Nobel Prize by Julius Taranto EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Julius Taranto
- Language: English
- Genre: Literary Satire Fiction
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THE RUBIN INSTITUTE had nothing to do with high-temperature
superconductors, so I cannot say I had spent much time thinking about it.
Hew explained the whole drama: We thought we had purged our moral
grotesques—the harassers, racists, bigots, zealots. The problem was these
people technically had contracts. They held equity, tenure, real estate. They
were hanging around the universities we thought we had shooed them from.
Important conferences on graph theory and seventeenth-century Welsh
agriculture were being derailed by disconcerted whispers that he had
showed up and had the temerity to ask a question of the panel.
So there was some appeal to the idea that these people would now go
live on an island in the North Atlantic. This new Institute said: Give me
your cancellees and deplorables, your preeminent deviants, we’ll take them!
The popular vision, at the beginning, was of an academic prison colony
where the worst-behaved of great minds would live out their days, closed
off from the pleasures of civilized life.
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We had not, Hew said, expected them to have such a good time. We had
not expected the footage of one probable bigot and one confirmed groper
strolling across lush seaside lawns, sitting on a slim white beach, clinking
their Fields Medals in a taunting toast, it seemed, to every despicable act
they had never paid for. It turned out the last thing these people wanted was
our civilization. At the Rubin Institute Plymouth they had their own. It was
a libertarian, libertine dream: bottomless funding, unencumbered by
institutional regulations. They screwed students and eschewed trigger
warnings. The enticing promise the Institute made to faculty was: No Code
of Conduct, no Human Resources, only Your Work. The promise it made to
students—wait, there would be students??—this promise was: Learn from
geniuses, graduate sans debt, feel free to carry mace.
The Institute was shooting the moon, taking the human discards that no
one else wanted, and winning. The place became a media fixation. Its
faculty were enemies of the people—we had wanted them exiled—but then
they had not been sent to Siberia! It was Sandals for scandals, with taxexempt status.
The prior year 122 Presidential Merit Scholars had passed up Harvard to
go there for free. It was an outrage. It could not go on.
Demonstrations ran perpetually on the New Haven pier. This was where
the ferry departed for Plymouth Island, which the Institute had purchased
entire. The pier was ground zero for all the wrong the Institute represented.
It was a nuclear testing site, an oil pipeline on Indigenous land; now and
then someone chained herself across the gangplank.
Hew and I watched the ferry’s burbling stern nudge into the dock.
Meanwhile thirty or forty protesters, probably Yale undergraduates,
waved signs along the lines of Benefit Is Complicity; Attendance Is Assent.
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