My time teaching in college is long past although a lot of photographic reminders were sent to me recently by my senior technician from that time. The building in which I created my own personal television transmitter lab – going a whole lot further than my much earlier amateur TV license as G6AAC/T – has been threatened by demolition but that whole time period is probably the subject of other, future, Editorial musings.
When I reached the level of Senior Lecturer I had a total of fifteen contact hours a week, contact time being lectures, tutorials, lab work, etc. With long vacations life in college is a great deal easier than, say, that of a high school teacher: with the added, major, bonus that your students - in my field, at least - actually want to be there!
During my copious spare time I wrote a lot for audio and video magazines, polished off two books, designed things like vehicle electronic ignition systems, consulted on RF cavity design, and did a lot of review work for audio manufacturers. One particular set of tests that were requested for publication, I remember, were for a pair of pocket loudspeakers. The vendor, Rank-Wharfedale, was really very unhappy when I described their loudspeakers sounding like “talking shoe boxes.”
The engineering faculties – unlike those of the mathematics and the arts departments – were continually teased by industry with money-making propositions. I resisted them at all costs because I felt they completely biased the way that you would approach your own academic work.
I was asked at one point in time for help by Eric Laithwaite, Professor of heavy electrical engineering at Imperial College – one of the colleges of the University of London until it went independent a couple of years ago – to design some basic telemetry for him in his tests of linear induction motors. His hands were rather tied because he had nobody to go to on the Imperial engineering faculties who had practical RF experience.
Laithwaite was a strange but delightful man. He had been a pilot officer during WW-II and had gone back to his roots after being demobbed by gaining three degrees at the University of Manchester before further incredible progress on his linear induction work and theories at Imperial. He was continually thwarted by government lack of funding, that, if allowed to go ahead, would have created in the UK the first maglev type of railway system. After continual baiting and rejections he and his work went slightly crazy with claims started by an amateur inventor of gyroscopes not obeying Newton’s Laws.
He had the audacity to postulate, or at least ask questions, about those laws at a presentation at the Royal Institution in London, speaking from the same spot as Newton himself has spoken. The press reported his lecture on gyroscopes in terms of a scientist suggesting anti-gravity space travel possibilities, and instead of gaining gold medals, a fellowship, and an almost guaranteed knighthood, his RI colleagues turned against him: his invited Friday evening lecture was the first, and only, never to be authorized for publication.
Later on, his bizzare love of moths – of which he had thousands – led to some very odd research ideas. He invited me to apply for a Readership (what would be called an Associate Professorship in a US university) in his department to study seabirds and how they extracted potable water from the ocean. In return he would guarantee zero contact hours and commercial possibilities from the research. I was heavily involved in an MPhil program at Southampton University at the time and declined.
Not much later on, one of my brothers, who was a Reader in Mechanical and Production Engineering at the University of Nottingham (and Warden of the undergraduate residence of Sherwood Hall – what an address that was! – perpetuated in oil on canvas) talked to me about an approach that had been made to him to apply for a Chair, also at Imperial (a Chair being a fully-funded Professorship) in mechanical engineering. He had not, and I believe did not, tell his family about this approach but, like me, he was hesitant to take up a role where the University’s main goal for the Chair seemed to be commercial profit.
Things have only gotten worse since those days with nearly every university encouraging outside commercial activities and the spinning off of companies to pursue profit from research.
I continue to be horrified by these activities. Being an academic should be just that, not the pursuit of activities to line individual pockets. The purpose of any college appointment should be to teach; the recruitment of research postgraduates should be to further knowledge instead of choosing projects that look like they might make money down the road. If there is such a commercial opportunity that the academic wants to pursue then he should leave his appointment.
I would rather be remembered, as my brother has been, by an academic prize: in his case, the Peter McGoldrick Prize.That’s class.
