THE NIGHT OF THE GREAT SALT, Quixote Magazine, 1967, Volume II, Number 7
Bernard Pyron
Clayton Bailey and I fired salt glazing kilns at night in Whitewater, Wisconsin, and when we shoved small paper cups of wet salt into the white hot heat inside our kilns, there was always a small explosion and white clouds of chloride gas billowed out of the kilns into the night..
On one night, in my short story, "...we drove up to Old Main on the hill and viewed the University as a Wrecking Machine." I meant this to apply to the University of Wisconsin in Madison......"Inside the kiln we could see several of Claythong's (Clayton Bailey's) critters, some dead with their feet sticking up.....Never forget that the University is like a mad dentist. It opens the mind and then slams it shut." Again, it was the University of Wisconsin in Madison that opens the mind and then slams it shut.
In The Night of the Great Salt the University of Wisconsin is viewed as being a wrecking machine which first opens the mind and then slams the mind shut.
At that time, in the sixties and seventies, the University of Wisconsin was called the Dust Bowl of Empiricism, where you publish or perish. However, many Assistant Professors published and perished.
Lionel S. Lewis in his book, Scaling the Ivory Tower: Merit and Its limits In Academic Careers, 1975, says image rather than merit is the most important criteria for selecting assistant professors to attain to tenure in the University systems.
In addition to the many Assistant Professors who churned out so much research in the Dust Bowl of Empiricism back then, there were the many recent Ph.D.s who did a great deal of the research, some as Project Associates, working on projects of ranking professors and others as Research Associates who had their own grants, usually from the federal government. I had one grant from what we referred to as Rat Killing Money - from the patents the University had on Warfarin. This grant was from the Wisconsin Graduate School. My other research projects as a Research Associate were funded to me by an agency of the federal government. The largest federal grant I got was in 1970 for about $65,000, which funded three grad student research assistants
The University of Wisconsin Project and Research Associates were paid at the same levels as Assistant Professors. But we were not tenure tract faculty. When our grant money was used up, we were out the door, out of the University, until we got a new federal grant or got some ranking professor to hire us to do his research project. Meanwhile, when we still had grant money, the Fat Cat departmental chairmen sometimes used our grant money for their own travel expenses And in some of the departments a Research Associate had to let departmental chairmen or other tenured professors put their names on his grant proposals as though they had actually helped write them. The closer the department was to hard science, though, this practice rarely happened.
Bernard Pyron
Clayton Bailey and I fired salt glazing kilns at night in Whitewater, Wisconsin, and when we shoved small paper cups of wet salt into the white hot heat inside our kilns, there was always a small explosion and white clouds of chloride gas billowed out of the kilns into the night..
On one night, in my short story, "...we drove up to Old Main on the hill and viewed the University as a Wrecking Machine." I meant this to apply to the University of Wisconsin in Madison......"Inside the kiln we could see several of Claythong's (Clayton Bailey's) critters, some dead with their feet sticking up.....Never forget that the University is like a mad dentist. It opens the mind and then slams it shut." Again, it was the University of Wisconsin in Madison that opens the mind and then slams it shut.
In The Night of the Great Salt the University of Wisconsin is viewed as being a wrecking machine which first opens the mind and then slams the mind shut.
At that time, in the sixties and seventies, the University of Wisconsin was called the Dust Bowl of Empiricism, where you publish or perish. However, many Assistant Professors published and perished.
Lionel S. Lewis in his book, Scaling the Ivory Tower: Merit and Its limits In Academic Careers, 1975, says image rather than merit is the most important criteria for selecting assistant professors to attain to tenure in the University systems.
In addition to the many Assistant Professors who churned out so much research in the Dust Bowl of Empiricism back then, there were the many recent Ph.D.s who did a great deal of the research, some as Project Associates, working on projects of ranking professors and others as Research Associates who had their own grants, usually from the federal government. I had one grant from what we referred to as Rat Killing Money - from the patents the University had on Warfarin. This grant was from the Wisconsin Graduate School. My other research projects as a Research Associate were funded to me by an agency of the federal government. The largest federal grant I got was in 1970 for about $65,000, which funded three grad student research assistants
The University of Wisconsin Project and Research Associates were paid at the same levels as Assistant Professors. But we were not tenure tract faculty. When our grant money was used up, we were out the door, out of the University, until we got a new federal grant or got some ranking professor to hire us to do his research project. Meanwhile, when we still had grant money, the Fat Cat departmental chairmen sometimes used our grant money for their own travel expenses And in some of the departments a Research Associate had to let departmental chairmen or other tenured professors put their names on his grant proposals as though they had actually helped write them. The closer the department was to hard science, though, this practice rarely happened.
The
cover photo on the May 1967 issue of Quixote Magazine is of four latex
rubber Hell's Angel masks made by Clayton Bailey. That photo as the
cover of the May 1967 issue of Quixote Magazine, edited by Morris
Edelson, is online. Google:
Quixote Magazine, 1967, Volume II, Number 7
Quixote Magazine, 1967, Volume II, Number 7
Or go to: http://www.betweenthecovers.com/btc/item/329098/
Or http://www.amazon.com/Quixote-Nemerov-Theodore-Cooperman-Crabtree/dp/B00BHP3NGK
A photo of some of Clayton Bailey's salt galzed dead critters of 1963 can be found at: http://www.claytonbailey.com/ceramics/critterdead.jpg
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