When did it become okay to bend or break the rules?

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Not that being a college professor is a bad thing, especially in this economy.

not a bad thing anytime really, but the college eliminated 100 tenured faculty last year, and without the stimulus package threatened 100 more per year until things improve. they call them surgical cuts, and seems the state law is written that tenured faculty can be fired in times of "economic distress" without respect to seniority, for the good of the university. who reads the fine print?

you can bet we are all kicking up our level of productivity trying to show how much we are needed!

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[BobK]

not a bad thing anytime really, but the college eliminated 100 tenured faculty last year, and without the stimulus package threatened 100 more per year until things improve. they call them surgical cuts, and seems the state law is written that tenured faculty can be fired in times of "economic distress" without respect to seniority, for the good of the university. who reads the fine print?

you can bet we are all kicking up our level of productivity trying to show how much we are needed!

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Bummer for you tenured guys. My company just laid off about 500 engineers, not a one with tenure. Guess they can't feel as bad since they didn't get that guaranteed for life position ...

On topic. Finding many dead divers over the years with no gas in their tanks and many times no continuous line to the surface probably indicated that at least one of the basic rules was broken. You, in the academic world may think this is not causation, but as an engineer in the real world I'd believe that either the divers had poor gas management or got lost due to no continuous line. Either breaks the rules. Sometimes empirical data really is the answer.