Yikes!

Just when I thought things were bad enough, I've been laid off! But don't worry, I've landed on my feet. More on that in a bit.

OK, let me back up a bit. If you haven't read it already, go back and read my story, The New Job. This is not only the story of my coming out to my wife, but it chronicles the story of my career, too. Although the story is fictional, the scenario is close enough. After finishing university, graduate school and medical school, I did my residency out west, and that's when I met my wife. I then joined the National Institutes of Health, and eventually went into academic medicine, planning a career in medical research. I did very well, eventually becoming a department chair. Big mistake. After suffering through three, count 'em, three deans in five years, I wound up with a dean who knew nothing about my field, could have cared less about it and, in the end, decided we were too small and too much of a bother. He basically decided to consolidate our department with a much larger one, scrapping fiver years of hard work spent building a world-class program.

Everything I wrote about in my story is true. When you step down as a department chair, even under these circumstances, everyone wonders why. Since no one is ever fired - they always "resign", there's no way to tell if they resigned because they quit out of disgust, they were eased out because of politics or they were fired because of incompetence. People ought to be given the benefit of the doubt, but it's human nature to steer clear of such people - to treat them as damaged goods. Some people have a natural charisma and manage to pick themselves up and move right on, securing an even better chairmanship, but I'm not one of those and, besides, I've had my fill of politics. I ended up taking a friend up on an offer to head up a division in an academic department in a city I would have never previously considered calling home. :wacko:

I'm not going to name the city. It's in the Midwest, and it doesn't have the best of reputations. It's known for violent crime and for corruption in government. The good news is that it has affordable housing. My wife and I were able to buy a condo in a beautiful art deco building, right in the city, within walking distance of work. Of course just about everyone I know told me I should be packing a piece if I intend to actually walk to work. :2hands: Now that's a gross exaggeration - I've walked to work many times when the weather's nice and it's quite safe, but you do have to choose your route carefully or you will be stopped multiple times and asked for money. When I told my wife it was more a matter of when, not if, I would eventually be mugged, she told me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn't walk to work. OK, so maybe it's not completely safe. :sword:

In any case, I've been here 2 1/2 years now, and absolutely hated it. My "friend" thought he was doing me a favor, but he was bringing me into a political mess in which I was expected to replace and ultimately fire an unproductive colleague who had been entrenched for years. I didn't really know that at the time and it only became apparent after I'd been here a while. The problem with entrenched academicians is, there's usually a reason they're entrenched, even if they don't have tenure. Either they know the system well enough that they can manipulate people to keep from being fired, or they have enough dirt on people to guarantee job security, or a combination of both. I'll tell you, when I even suggested to the colleague that he might want to complete his subspecialty boards while he could still be "grandfathered" in, I immediately received a long diatribe of an e-mail from one of the senior associate deans on the inappropriateness of anyone but the department chair dealing with career development issues. My boss quickly cleared things up by explaining on my behalf to the dean's office that subspecialty boards were a job requirement and I was only doing my job as the head of a clinical division, but this certainly showed me what was in store any time I attempted to do what I was hired to do.

The long and short of it was that at the end of the day, there wasn't a single thing I could really do to fire the guy that was ethical and I wasn't about to become a target in my own right in the interest of making it easy on my boss, who was too chicken to pull the trigger on the guy himself. :wacko: When I failed to do what I was really hired to do, I was removed from my position as division chief, relegated to a low-level clinical position that someone just out of training might get, at a significant reduction in pay, I might add, and prevented from spending any time on research grants. Talk about punishment. To say this sucked big time is an understatement. I've been looking for a better job ever since, but now everyone's really suspicious. First I resigned as department chair, and then I resign as division chief after less than a year, and now I'm looking for a new job after only a couple of years? It certainly looks like I'm bad news, doesn't it? :wacko:

Of course, there are always two sides to every story and there are a lot of crazy things that have been going on here besides the drama between myself and my colleague, and besides that between myself and my former friend, my boss. The CEO of the medical center is a former prosecutor who takes no prisoners, and he has his own agenda that is heavily at odds with that of the dean of the medical school. I would say it's fairly accurate to say the CEO and the dean are at war with each other. Recently, the CEO announced a retroactive cut in something called the DISH payment - payment his hospitals receive for taking care of the destitute - to the medical school. He's supposed to pass this money on since it's the physicians that actually render the care, but he's decided to hold on to it. The dean is crying foul and claiming he'll have to lay off physicians and stop serving the poor. Well, guess what - the dean's quietly circumventing union regulations for laying off faculty by simply pulling the plug on approving contract renewals, and guess whose contract was up for renewal on July 1.

Does my life sound like a soap opera or what?

I've had it with academia for the time being. Much as I'd like to help humanity, the politics in academic medicine just aren't worth it. If I had my life to do over again, I would have stayed at the NIH. Although you have to put up with the changing priorities of each presidential administration, once you rise though the ranks, you can pretty much do what you want and you don't have to compete to nearly the same extent for research funds. Now, however, I have to move on. I received a very good offer from a large private practice group on the East Coast and I've decided to take it. I won't be rich by any stretch of the imagination, particularly when one considers the cost of living where I'll be going. In fact, after factoring in the cost of housing, We'll be living in less space than most people would consider acceptable, so from that standpoint, I guess you could say that at best we'll be middle class. The most important thing is that I'll have freedom, and I'll actually have better opportunities to get back into medical research than I've had for the past five three years.

And now an important announcement about my upcoming story, Out on a Limb. Because I have a major cross-country move coming, up, it will obviously be impossible to start posting the story as originally planned in mid-May. Only the first three chapters have been written and edited, but I can at least say that I'm very pleased with the way they've turned out and with the direction of the story so far. OoaL is a much darker story than LiaC, and much truer to life, but I think it will be very fulfilling and resonate with a much wider audience in the end. Something about it just resonates with me as I write it, much the way it did when I wrote The Un-Christmas, so I know it will turn out well. In the interest of doing it right, I'm postponing it's initial release date until the fall.