I read a lot of fics where these two have serious trouble finding new jobs, and that’s fine. But while I don’t know exactly how academia functions, I think they’d be in very high demand as guest lecturers at every single major university on the planet. They’re both at the cutting edge of fascinating new fields and they both made amazing new discoveries.
These lectures would extremely informative and extremely entertaining/disastrous. No matter how much they like each other, they’re still them.
Aki, care to weigh in?
OK, as someone in academia, they would have absolutely no problem finding academic jobs. It’s a rough market out there for people without celebrity and without status/cred (i.e., young academics) but academia was specifically built to accommodate people like them, the famous people who did something real-world significant and now need to lecture for a while. If post-post-apocalyptic academia works anything like it, they’ll have cushy tenured jobs before you can say bob’s your uncle.
THAT BEING SAID.
Usually it’s a rather big deal to get a joint hire—two tenure track jobs at one go—and it’s always for married academics. BUT I WOULD BET SERIOUS MONEY THAT THESE TWO JUST BULLIED THEIR WAY THROUGH. Like, probably a Dean was like, “—so we can talk funding packages in th—” and Newt (because I’m imagining NYU at the mo’, this process would work differently if Hermann was bullying them into an Oxbridge position) would interrupt and be like, “Yeaaaaaah, I’m gonna need two packages.“
And the Dean would be like, slow blink, “I didn’t realize you had a spouse.”
And Newt would shout something like, “YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH,“ and then there would be a lot of shouting and door-slamming and Hermann would call later and be like, “yes, let’s talk about the funding package in the spring. Also, we’re definitely not married.” And then he’d cough politely. “But we will only need one office.“ Another polite cough. “And we’ll be co-teaching all of our courses.”
Reblogging this back over here because I have to look at this commentary
…this thread demonstrates perfectly why I wrote HKU having the good sense to not even try to fight Hermann on his demands, dear God. Although let’s just ignore the fact that it was probably Hannibal Chau who put up the fortuitously anonymous grant money that permitted them to hire Newt as well.
