Breaking Radio Silence
After more than three months of not updating this blog, I am not certain who my readership is. I have some people in mind who I hope will read this and I imagine a few readers who get here by following the randomised “next blog” button, as well as people who google things like “radio silence” and find themselves reading something that might penetrate the sternest of foil hats even if it is not technically about radio.
For those I hope find their way here, first an apology. I don’t mean to keep anyone in the dark and I don’t mean to make excuses – for today’s entry, inconsistent intentions. So, second, the explanation.
About seven weeks ago, I moved to a lovely village in the Northeast of England to take up a position as a lecturer in a good university. It was a transatlantic move. Moving always takes more time and energy than one plans for (yeah, excuses) and I have found myself pulled in too many different directions to manage to get important things done. The job itself is great – I’m having a ball but I’m working all the time. The real “culture shock” is that you expect to work hard at a new job – I’m teaching two courses that are new to me (though I am familiar with the material), I have examined one PhD thesis and have taken on a quasi-supervising role in another, I’m going to all the “induction” meetings for new staff (are we induced yet?), and I’m working on a research paper that is due to be delivered at a conference at the end of March. But for someone who has been working at a job for a while, there are demands that are just routine and that don’t necessarily get mentioned to someone who is new. So, for example, I’ve also had an unexpected parade of undergrads through my office looking for a supervisor for research projects and I’ve had some grading to do as a “second reader” for material taught last semester. All this in the first thee weeks of the term! Since I arrived, I have had to take care of all the ordinary things like opening a bank account, finding a place to live, getting a phone, gas, electricity, water and sewer, and internet access, as well as beginning a demanding new job. I won’t mention my personal life! There are a lot of fires that want putting out, and a few more that want stoking.
But I really don’t want to complain about my work. The thing is, many people outside of academia perceive us to be arrogant do-nothings: what do we have to do besides show up and transmit our absurd ideas to a captive audience once a week? Well, admittedly, there are a few arrogant do-nothings in this profession, but there are also a lot of really hard-working and self-sacrificing people. It’s all too rare that the latter folks get the recognition they deserve. Anyone in this profession (just as in most professions) can name colleagues whose work is copious but pedestrian and who succeed for those very reasons; and others with amazing minds and formidable talents who nonetheless find themselves feeling precarious. It’s not right when success depends so much on lucky breaks.
I really like coming across blog entries that point to other good entries. Last week, thanks to Holly, I read a lovely blog entry at woman in comfy shoes about ordinary lives. It got me thinking again about my interest in everyday life. I will be trying to reflect on daily life here in the future, as a way to process my experience.
For those I hope find their way here, first an apology. I don’t mean to keep anyone in the dark and I don’t mean to make excuses – for today’s entry, inconsistent intentions. So, second, the explanation.
About seven weeks ago, I moved to a lovely village in the Northeast of England to take up a position as a lecturer in a good university. It was a transatlantic move. Moving always takes more time and energy than one plans for (yeah, excuses) and I have found myself pulled in too many different directions to manage to get important things done. The job itself is great – I’m having a ball but I’m working all the time. The real “culture shock” is that you expect to work hard at a new job – I’m teaching two courses that are new to me (though I am familiar with the material), I have examined one PhD thesis and have taken on a quasi-supervising role in another, I’m going to all the “induction” meetings for new staff (are we induced yet?), and I’m working on a research paper that is due to be delivered at a conference at the end of March. But for someone who has been working at a job for a while, there are demands that are just routine and that don’t necessarily get mentioned to someone who is new. So, for example, I’ve also had an unexpected parade of undergrads through my office looking for a supervisor for research projects and I’ve had some grading to do as a “second reader” for material taught last semester. All this in the first thee weeks of the term! Since I arrived, I have had to take care of all the ordinary things like opening a bank account, finding a place to live, getting a phone, gas, electricity, water and sewer, and internet access, as well as beginning a demanding new job. I won’t mention my personal life! There are a lot of fires that want putting out, and a few more that want stoking.
But I really don’t want to complain about my work. The thing is, many people outside of academia perceive us to be arrogant do-nothings: what do we have to do besides show up and transmit our absurd ideas to a captive audience once a week? Well, admittedly, there are a few arrogant do-nothings in this profession, but there are also a lot of really hard-working and self-sacrificing people. It’s all too rare that the latter folks get the recognition they deserve. Anyone in this profession (just as in most professions) can name colleagues whose work is copious but pedestrian and who succeed for those very reasons; and others with amazing minds and formidable talents who nonetheless find themselves feeling precarious. It’s not right when success depends so much on lucky breaks.
I really like coming across blog entries that point to other good entries. Last week, thanks to Holly, I read a lovely blog entry at woman in comfy shoes about ordinary lives. It got me thinking again about my interest in everyday life. I will be trying to reflect on daily life here in the future, as a way to process my experience.
posted by spike at 6:12 am
4 Comments:
It’s not right when success depends so much on lucky breaks.
since when have lucky breaks not been a primary factor in success?
Hey bd -- I'm not certain how to interpret your comment. I don't imagine that you're suggesting that people need to resign themselves to their bad luck. Yes, luck is a primary factor in success. I just think it's wrong -- outrageous even. The UN estimates that one billion people have to survive on an income of less than $1.00 a day and another billion on less than $2.00. That's one third of the people on the planet in abject poverty, for no better reason than the bad luck of having been born in poverty. And luck isn't the whole story, of course: the top quintile holds most of the wealth and we take our luxuries so for granted that we have a hard time imagining even modest sacrifices in our lifestyles that would improve the chances for the poor. I don't mean to trivialize your objection. But the better question might be to wonder what should determine success other than lucky breaks, and what should the costs of failure really be.
I'm also not quite sure how to interpret your response. It seems to me that if we're thinking in terms of the number of people who live in abject poverty, anyone who manages to get a PhD is pretty damn lucky, whether or not they get tenure.
I certainly advocate a more just and balanced distribution of wealth, but that doesn't require me to discount the existence of serendipity, of managing to meet the right person at the right time, who has the right job to offer someone who has been lucky enough to acquire the right credentials. I've been lucky a few times and unlucky many others. There's no hard and fast formula for success.
Yes, I agree, no hard and fast formulas for success. And certainly, we can embrace a role for serendipity in our lives; I think that it's often the chance encounters between unexpected ideas or people or the juxtaposition of unexpected things that inspires much of our creativity. But should serendipity determine our security and safety? Or should being unlucky determine whether we can be successful? That was my point.
At the same time, at least as I see it, it is not clear what should determine our success. Liberalism is a powerful ideology in the cultures of the developed world, and liberalism understands society as an aggregation of separate and autonomous individuals. If success is only a matter of feeling like we accomplished what we set out to do, then in the end it's the individual's responsibility to do whatever he or she sets out to do. But I think that for most of us, the notion of success also includes the recognition of what we do by others. When we think about things like gettting a job or securing tenure, this is explicitly the case. So success can never be a simple matter of the aggregation of lucky and unlucky individuals. How can we understand and realize social institutions, like tenure in a university, in which recognition can be less capriciously distributed?
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