Professor Emmett Lazer, who led the Stanford University Dept. Of Physics to a number of Nobel Prize nominations, has been fired, according to Academics Director Lance Andrew “Slim” Pickens. “We feel it was time to move in another vector,” Pickens told ESPN in an interview earlier today.

   The firing literally sent shock waves throughout the National Physics League (NPL) which literally caused a brief shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

   Once the highest compensated Professor in physics (comparable to the pay level of an offensive line coach at a Division III college) Pickens alluded to Lazer’s continued failure to deliver a Unified Field Theory during his tenure, and the continued corrosive controversy surrounding wave and particle light theory as reasons for the termination.

   “It’s all about discoveries in this league,” Pickens said. “And what have you done for the multiverse lately that counts.”

   When asked about the firing, Lazer simply shrugged during his press conference and said,  “It’s not just about x’s and o’s anymore, but it’s down to bosons and muons. In today’s game, it’s about Dark Matter rather than the simpler time of Quantum motion and whether or not God does play dice with the universe,” he said to a roomful of reporters, none of whom were taking notes any longer.

Pickens also confirmed the search will conform to the league’s Relativity Rule, “and we will interview candidates from minority fields such as English and Art History.”

   When asked if his remarks meant the game had passed him by, Lazer thought for a moment and said, “At 186,000 miles per second, I guess I’m just too old school to try to keep up anymore.” (Reporters regarded each other as to who would do the math to figure out what, if anything, that meant.)

   The search for a new professor to replace Lazer is already underway, according to Pickens. Pickens also confirmed the search will conform to the league’s Relativity Rule, “and we will interview candidates from minority fields such as English and Art History.”

   Meanwhile, a former professor of physics at Miami University has filed suit claiming a climate of aversion to the very existence of  Dark Matter pervades not just the Miami physics department but the entire NPL. “I believe as much as 95% of the entire league is infected by a prejudice against both Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

   In his suit, the former professor charges that two members of the physics department at the University of Denver showed up late and disheveled as if from a night of drinking for his scheduled interview. The University countered that the professors were on time, and the disheveled appearance was due to an “all-nighter” debate over string theory.

   In other news, Academic legend Dr. Stuart Haymaker of the Arkansas College of Agriculture and Desertification surprised the academic world with the announcement of his retirement after 22 years as head of Animal Husbandry at the college. Considered the GOAT (no periods) for his tireless work in the field of feta cheese, Arkansas Agricultural President Orval Hamhock said, “What Dr. Haymaker has contributed over the years  to the study of soil erosion and chemical pollution cannot be measured, except in terms of climate change. “

   Finally, Washington State University has announced it will be changing the name of its Indigenous and Bonded Peoples Studies Program to the Colonial Settlers Civilizing Progress Studies, in response to long-standing complaints that terms such as “genocide” and “slavery” were no longer appropriate in the modern age, and are meant to simply scare children.