I would imagine most of the people involved have been to a park precisely once and the entire time they were thinking, "It would be great if I could privatize this place and make a ton of money off it, first need to kill off that meddling NPS," and voila, you get policies like this.

Also seems like it fundamentally requires that all visitors provide proof of their residency status. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, so much US media was devoted to the contrast between the freedom of movement in the US and places you needed "papers" to travel. Seems laughable now thanks to the GOP.

"Do you want hallucinated papers and made up DOIs randomly interspersed with your next literature review results to liven up your day and interject a little extra error and chaos into your life? Try searching with Scholar Labs!"

AMAZING. The real question is will the 👻 reviewer (or are they a 🧟 reviewer now?) ghost for a second time?

If she follows the Gul Dukat arc, I'm assuming MTG will soon start asking why there are not statues of her all around DC.

"Bless the maker and his... OH SHIT, SHAI-HULUD JUST EXPLODED"

Yep, same. I get a lot of emails that quote one line from my website as to what the student is interested in and then go on to describe experience in a totally unrelated field and no indication that they are actually interested in what I do. Those don’t get a response.

Best bet (though it feels sort of oddly petty, though justified given the context) might be to try to assemble funding estimates of others in your unit to highlight that this criteria is not being applied equally and bring that to the higher ups.

And maybe the interim is basically going to your chair (who is presumably the person telling you this) and asking to see the policy statement / bylaws section / etc. that sets up the criteria for maintaining lab space. If they cannot produce them and won't reverse, then time to see the dean.

I.e., if there is not a document that states "lab space allocations are contingent on [insert funding metrics]", I feel like a case could be made that there is no basis for their demands.

Yeesh. I guess in the more tangible advice, is there, to your knowledge, any actual policy at either the department or institutional level dictating criteria for maintaining lab space? If there is no policy, that seems a basis on which to go the next admin level up and ask for a resolution.

That's nuts. Here we have emeritus (some of them dead) who still mostly have their lab/office space.

If they wanted to acknowledge that they might lose your stuff in a less annoying way they could reverse it. I.e., standard rate includes lots of insurance and guarantees, but you could pay less for an, "I actually don't care if this arrives" parcel class.