Clark’s smile stiffened for a moment, but he quickly recovered.
"Arthur, academic opinions can be debated, but I hope you won’t make irresponsible comments about a colleague’s work."
Penrose wanted to say more, but Rodnianski cut him off.
"That’s enough, both of you."
"This proposal is the result of the faculty committee’s collective discussion. If you have any objections, you can submit them in writing before next Wednesday."
"Meeting adjourned."
As Penrose left the conference room, his expression was particularly grim.
"A bunch of parasites obsessed with faculty politics!"
Penrose cursed under his breath.
Faculty politics.
In American universities, that term was a nightmare for nearly every pure academic.
It wasn’t politics in the true sense of the word, but it was more disgusting than politics.
Because it cloaked itself in the guise of academia.
Those people on the committee, the ones who knew how to play the game, always paid lip service to developing the discipline, nurturing students, and serving the department’s long-term interests.
But in reality?
Who got the lion’s share of the funding, whose students got the teaching assistant positions, whose classes were scheduled during primetime, who was assigned the office with a window.
It was all a goddamn transaction.
The more Penrose thought about it, the angrier he became.
Sometimes he really wanted to just burn it all down, but...
He couldn’t, because he was planning something.
Right next to Princeton University was the world-renowned Princeton Institute for Advanced Study.
Einstein, Godel, Von Neumann—all of them had worked there.
Professors at the Institute for Advanced Study had no teaching duties, allowing them to devote all their energy to pure research.
Penrose had long wanted to apply for a "long-term visiting scholar" position at the Institute for Advanced Study.
If he succeeded, he could retain a faculty position at Princeton University with a halved teaching load, while also having an independent research space and funding source at the Institute for Advanced Study.
This kind of dual appointment was not uncommon at Princeton; many top scholars had such arrangements.
The university and the institute had a cooperative tradition stretching back nearly a century. They shared academic resources, and students and professors could move freely between the two institutions.
But the problem was...
The approval process for a dual appointment required a recommendation from the department’s faculty committee.
And on that faculty committee, Clark and his cronies held the majority of seats.
Penrose could already foresee his application being delayed by the committee for all sorts of reasons, eventually fizzling out into nothing.
"Sometimes I really wonder if Clark is a mathematician or a university administrator," Penrose muttered as he pushed open the door to his office.
Inside the office, the blonde, blue-eyed Sarah was organizing papers. Seeing Penrose walk in, she quickly stood up.
"Professor! You’re back."
She had been Penrose’s doctoral student for three years and naturally knew his temper quite well.
Every time he came back from one of these administrative meetings, the professor was like this.
"Did you get into another argument?" Sarah asked cautiously.
Penrose didn’t say a word, but his dark expression said it all.
Sarah sighed.
"Professor, I remember you were in such a good mood when you came back from Huaxia."
"On the plane, you even told me that the young man, Li Dong, had a mind for mathematics that was as beautiful as a poem."
"How did you go back to this after just one day?"
Hearing this, Penrose froze.
Sarah was right. He had been genuinely happy for those two days.
He had listened to Li Dong’s academic presentation and witnessed the growth of a nineteen-year-old at the International Congress of Mathematicians.
Li Dong’s confident and eloquent talk had made even an old-timer like him, who’d spent decades in analytic number theory, feel a surge of excitement.
’Is the academic atmosphere in Huaxia... really that good?’ Penrose muttered to himself.
Sarah didn’t hear him clearly and was about to ask what he’d said when she saw Penrose suddenly open the laptop in front of him, a device he rarely touched.
He logged into X.
Penrose almost never used social media. In his view, it was all a waste of time.
But today, he suddenly wanted to see what kind of environment the young people in Huaxia were doing their research in.
#ChineseStudentsVSAmericanStudents
Under this topic was a series of conversation screenshots that left Penrose stunned.
An American university student posted a picture of their student loan bill.
120,000 US Dollars, 6.8% interest rate, estimated twenty years to pay it off.
In the post, he wrote:
"I graduated three years ago."
"But I owe more money now than when I first enrolled. What kind of education is this? It’s downright economic enslavement."
A Huaxian netizen replied below: "Wait, you have to pay to go to university?"
The American netizen replied: "A lot. My monthly loan payments are more than my rent."
The Huaxian netizen replied: "Bro, our tuition is about 5,000 yuan a year, which is about 700 US Dollars."
And then the thread exploded.
In the comments section, American netizens were having a collective meltdown.
"700 US Dollars a year? I spent more than that on textbooks last semester alone."
"I’m 35 and still paying off student loans. My friend from Huaxia who graduated the same year as me has already bought a house."
"The American Dream is just a dream now, and even the dream itself is accruing interest."
Reading these comments, Penrose felt a deep sense of helplessness wash over him.
He kept scrolling down.
Another post caught his attention.
An American postdoctoral researcher posted a screenshot of a rejection email for their NSF grant application, with the caption:
"Fourth rejection this year. The success rate is under 25% now."
"I spent three months writing this proposal instead of doing actual research. What are we even doing?"
A Huaxian PhD student replied: "...Bro."
Penrose stared at the screen, lost in thought.
He thought of Sarah, from his own research group.
Sarah’s family wasn’t wealthy, and she had taken on nearly 80,000 US Dollars in student loans during her undergraduate studies.
Although she had a scholarship and a teaching assistant stipend for her PhD, that bit of money was barely enough to get by with the cost of living in New Jersey.
She had told Penrose more than once that if she couldn’t find a faculty position after graduation, she might have to go work on Wall Street as a quantitative analyst for a couple of years.
Not because she liked it, but because she had to pay off her debts.
A young woman with exceptional talent in analytic number theory might be forced to leave academia, simply because of money.
And on the other side of the planet.
A Huaxian undergraduate from an ordinary family didn’t have to carry any debt.
He could sit there, free from distractions, and focus his entire mind on mathematics.
Penrose leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh.
He suddenly understood the purity he saw in Li Dong. It wasn’t just a product of personal talent.
Behind it was a system willing to foot the bill for its young people’s future.
Then he remembered what Li Dong had said in his room.
"When this algorithm enters the core optimization phase, I’ll probably work with a few professors from our Yan University School of Mathematics to refine it..."
"Professor?"
Seeing Penrose staring into space, Sarah called out with a hint of concern.
Penrose snapped back to reality and closed the X tab.
After a moment of silence, he suddenly spoke.
"Sarah."
"Yes?"
"What would you think... if I went to a university in Huaxia as a visiting scholar for a while?"
"You mean... Yan University?"

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