by Arun Misra

‘ He is Greg’s new post doc’ said Amy, professor Greg’s wife, in a party, after being asked about me, when I arrived in a sleepy city in the southern United States from a remote place in India, to conduct research on generating fuels and chemicals from coal.
It sounded to me like, ‘that’s Greg’s dog’, without a leash.
Then came another revelation, as I was told, that in some top ranking northern universities, it was a common saying, ‘ how can you win a Nobel prize, if you did not have ten or more Indian post docs working for you for years’, the secret of being Nobel laureate in sciences.
So much of slavery and exploitation at centers of learning was really disgusting. And the story of the top west coast universities, where the senior post docs, expecting to get a letter of recommendation from their professors’ in near future to eventually land a faculty position in a second or third rate school, after years of hard work and sacrifice
(really academic slavery), are asked to come to the school on Saturdays and Sundays
to check on the new post docs if they are working in the weekends or not, of course without pay. The illegal Mexican guy is paid for mowing our lawn, be it weekdays or weekends, but not the post docs working late nights and weekends.
Another shock comes to a bright self-respecting person when he/she hears, ‘ if you are so smart, how come you make so little money ?’ Being smart, intelligent and hard working has to translate in dollars, is foreign and astonishing to people coming from a different culture.
American dream is not materialism, not home and cars, can be hardly explained to an average American. Smart and noble people arrive here from other countries to achieve more with United States of America’s freedom, abundant resources, quality of life, and the facilities, to work, achieve and accomplish more based on their talent, and what they could not do in their native lands.
But the staunch materialistic set up of the society, the cruel capitalism and the rat race to accumulate wealth, toys and gadgets in USA make the foreigners to abandon their dreams and opt for ‘making money’. No wonder many intellectuals leave the universities
and end up setting grocery stores, ethnic restaurants, hotels, gas stations and other outlets to sell stuff to make money. They also divert into white collar jobs selling insurance, real estate, investments and achieve financial success, and get their children to
do more of the same.
Entrepreneurship and being financially savvy ( actually cunning and selfish)
is prized so much, while scholarship, knowledge and virtue all acquire a back seat.
The few who stay in academia or get into large corporations in the lure of stock options,
end up buying apartment complexes and rent them, purchase businesses as silent partners, or play stock market from the comfort of their office computers to make it big.
There are exceptions, but the trend and norm is towards setting up businesses, be it computer programming, manufacturing on an assembly line, doing landscaping etc, and using cheap/slave labor to make more money, use others’ money and generate enormous cash flow.
If this be not accepted as genuine social practice, why would we have over fifteen million of illegal immigrants, from the poor post docs on J1, to the temporary workers on H1, to the visitors on B2, and illegal aliens on a maze of various visa kinds, slaving and waiting for years to get a green card, and achieve ‘ the American dream.’