Re: [tlug] Journals, Authors and 'Free Peer Review'

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Benjamin Kowarsch writes:

 > > No, but you probably have to hide 2 of the 3 articles you *did*
 > > publish from the senior faculty interview. ;-)  At least that was my
 > > experience when I interviewed at MIT....
 > 
 > Haha :-)
 > 
 > Did you get the job?

No.  The back story is that my advisor was buddy-buddy with Nobelist
Ken Arrow and huge grants -- he'd fund really senior people for 8
weeks at an annual summer conference, to give you an idea.  So when he
said "you ought to interview Steve" they did.  But that was as far as
they were going to go, and this particular character decided to be a
jerk about it.  So just before the interview ended, I said "So, should
I go to MIT, who would help develop my career now that (not quite
Nobelist) Prof A and (now Nobelist) Prof B have left (for Harvard and
Toulouse, respectively)?"  He said "what makes you think they'd talk
to you, anyway?" and I said "they already have" (which was true, see
"advisor with lots of money who invites famous people" -- Prof B I had
a real conversation with *and* he remembered me a couple of decades
later in Toulouse, Prof A, some introductory pleasantries but he slept
most of the way to the hotel after I picked him up at the airport :-).

I have lived a more or less charmed life.  Just starting at MIT would
have been a feather in the cap, of course, but I doubt I could have
gotten tenure there.  No big deal.  In the long run, just meeting
those people ... as the MasterCard commercial says, "priceless".

 > There is an interesting anecdote about Einstein.

Good story!  There are so many like it about Einstein, though, I can't
be sure if I've seen it before.

 > When he applied for a position at Bern University, they rejected
 > the thesis he had submitted with his application.

Happened to a kohai of mine, now at Kobe.  They now accept theses
written in English, but at the time they made him translate to
Japanese, add a chapter, and pay to have 100 copies printed so they
could advertise it as a "book published by a University faculty
member". 0_0  Apparently quite common at the not-Todai, but equally
pretentious, national and private universities. :-(

 > In those days, you needed a PhD from the university you were
 > teaching in order to be a professor there. Einstein had a PhD from
 > Zurich, but that was no good in Bern. It was thus customary to
 > submit a new PhD thesis along with applying for a professorship at
 > another university. The University of Bern rejected the first
 > thesis, so he had to submit another one, which was then accepted.

Either of them famous?  (If it works the way it does here, it's very
likely the first is much more widely known and cited! ;-)