A Voss and Pike Casefile: The First Case
Section 19: The Cynical Paper
"Convenient and true aren't mutually exclusive," said Abara, though something in her jaw tightened as she said it. She turned the screen round: a departmental email thread, her own name on a promotion shortlist, timed suspiciously close to Candour's final sign-off.
"If the project collapses before the funding renews, that shortlist probably collapses with it," you said.
"I'm aware of the appearance," she said. "I'd ask you to separate the appearance from the argument. Postmodernism didn't invent the idea that funders shape findings, Dr Voss. It just admits it out loud, instead of pretending peer review makes everyone pure."
A draft paper arguing all research ethics are merely "a metanarrative like any other" - a genuinely-held theoretical position that happens, conveniently, to justify not objecting to a project her own promotion timeline depends on.