One of life’s great ironies I’ve been pondering is how I earned a Ph.D. in a world-class university only to find myself unemployed, and apparently unemployable. Never one to rest on laurels – my own or anybody else’s – I nevertheless feel a sting whenever an alumni magazine arrives in my mailbox. All those successful, smiling faces depress me. Some of them have even studied religion and found a place in the field. When my advisors encouraged my aspirations in the academic world I wish they’d told me that it is really an old boys’ network of drinking partners and back-room favors. The university days I dream of ended long ago. I still look through the magazines to try to understand what went wrong.

So it was that the article on FREDDY in the Edinburgh alumni circular caught my attention. As the flummoxed president of Team 102, the local high school FIRST Robotics team, I was glad to be reminded of my alma mater’s hand in the field. FREDDY was developed in Edinburgh as the “first automated industrial robot to integrate perception and action” (according to my alumni rag). This meant that robots would be able to perform complex tasks in industry and earn lots of money the university would never see. So it is that we build our own nemeses. We look for progress and find the creature no longer requires the service of the creator. Those who gaze too deeply into the light lose their vision.

I am awaiting the automated university professor. I sing the soul electric (with apologies to Walt Whitman and Ray Bradbury). Should we not be honest about what we want? Universities seek entrepreneurs and sports stars: real learning takes place in the market and on the gridiron. Never mind the current economic meltdown; it’s all part of the classroom experience. Meanwhile the number of adjunct instructors nationally now outnumbers the full-time faculty of the university world. We have built a machine designed to deconstruct itself. As more and more colleagues join me on the sidelines we will always have something to read, as long as we share. I have enough alumni magazines to last any victim of academia a lifetime, and everyone in them seems destined to live happily ever after.