Now that the police have found a healthy and self-sufficient Phil Agre, I can make a snarky comment. He was a professor of information sciences at UCLA and then he just stopped coming to work. Finally after a number of months, his family noticed he was gone and took action. Here’s the great sentence fragment from the missing person alert:
“sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.”
Some sweatshop bosses fire people who go to the bathroom without permission and some companies are a bit more lenient. But imagine a business that can’t narrow down the window of disappearance to smaller than six months.
Perhaps he was off doing “research”. Maybe he was on a self-imposed sabbatical. I don’t know. There could be an explanation that I would accept, but the most plausible one to me is that Prof. Agre didn’t have any responsibilities between exams in December 2008 and May 2009. So no one at the university noticed when he wasn’t around. It was his family, not the boss, to notice that they haven’t heard from Uncle Phil in quite a few months.
President Obama wants the taxpayers to cough up more cash to support this world. Most of these taxpayers have bosses that will notice if you’re not showing up for work. I wonder if UCLA cut off Agre’s paychecks yet. Given what I know about universities and tenured folk, Agre’s checks could still be automatically appearing in his account every two weeks. Gotta love academia.
Somewhere there’s a university leader arguing that the taxpayers need to support more excellence like this.
Related posts:
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- College industrial complex notices the high price
- More on the salary-adjusted debt
- Washington starts to notice the strain
- Presidents give some money back?
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