Background info about Jeff Schmidt and Disciplined Minds

By Chris Mohr and Marlowe Hood

Former Physics Today staff members

In Disciplined Minds, Jeff Schmidt challenges professionals to view their role in society in a new and unsettling way. He argues that professional work has both technical and political components, and that salaried professionals are expected to be technically creative but politically subordinate. Such subordination does not occur without a fight, the book maintains, and so the workplace becomes a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as does graduate school, where professionals are trained.

Jeff has a PhD in physics from the University of California, Irvine, and he draws many of his examples from the predicament of employed physicists and physics graduate students. (In one chapter, he examines the physics PhD qualifying examination and shows how the ostensibly value-neutral test can identify candidates who will likely have a compliant attitude toward their employers.) His book details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to advance one's own social vision in today's corporate society. It offers practical advice on how to make employment more than an exercise in knowing your place, and how to make graduate school more than an abusive "intellectual bootcamp" that breaks the individual in to playing a conventional role. You can avoid the cynicism and intellectual timidity that afflicts so many professional employees, he says, but doing so is not easy, and he discusses how it can be done.

While at Physics Today, Jeff played the most prominent role in staff efforts to improve working conditions, increase staff participation in decision-making, and broaden the range of viewpoints allowed in the magazine. He also led an effort to force Physics Today to live up to its advertised claim of being an affirmative-action employer, noting that the magazine was hiring and training only whites as editors, a pattern that eventually left the magazine with an all-white staff of 16 professionals and a non-white secretarial staff of 3.

In firing Jeff, the managers at Physics Today cited a statement, at the beginning of Disciplined Minds, that he had spent "some office time" writing the book. That constitutes "misconduct," they said. Jeff's colleagues, however, saw this charge more as a pretext to get rid of someone who was persistently pressing for changes in workplace policies. Indeed, the fact that the magazine's managers dismissed Jeff after so many years of service not only without a hearing, but also without asking him a single question about his work on the book, suggests that they were looking for an opportunity to remove him.

By the time Disciplined Minds was published, Physics Today's managers had already tried unsuccessfully to silence Jeff with measures just short of dismissal. At one point, for example, they put gag orders on Jeff and another outspoken staff editor, warning that they would be fired if they said anything "counterproductive." These orders were eventually lifted due to pressure from coworkers. Physics Today even banned private conversations in the workplace, announcing that all conversations between staff members must be open to monitoring by managers. Jeff was not alone among his colleagues in finding these measures repressive.

The managers at Physics Today apparently thought the book would be perceived as so provocative that no one would object if they fired Jeff. They were wrong. Those lodging protests to date include sixteen former Physics Today staff members (including us), the National Writers Union, and 160 scholars, writers and educators in a wide range of fields. Even the State of Maryland, after an unemployment benefits hearing, rejected AIP's charge that Jeff's work on the book at the office constituted misconduct, finding that Physics Today fired Jeff without evidence that his spare-time writing interfered with his work for the magazine. (During the years that Jeff was writing Disciplined Minds, Physics Today gave him two promotions and 19 salary increases based explicitly on the quantity and quality of his work for the magazine.) Details of the state investigation are posted on the Web at http://disciplined-minds.com, along with the protest letters, reports in the press and reviews of the book.

Physics Today has hired what union activists and labor lawyers describe as the most notorious union-busting law firm in the country (Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler & Krupman) to deal with any legal challenges in this case. That's revealing, but it doesn't mean that the law is a likely source of justice for Jeff. The law generally favors employers, and so Jeff's best chance for justice is support from the physics community.

(The above is based on information from Jeff and other former Physics Today employees, and on relevant documents.)