academic

James Paul Gee’s Advice to Academics

Academia is full of horror stories and advice. But this is awesome. This is James Paul Gee’s “Ramblings of an old academic: Unconfident advice for end-times academics”. It’s very much worth reading the whole thing but if you don’t then at least check out his advice:

So I have no real advice that you should take without a massive grain of salt. But here it is any way:

1. Your job as an academic is to have ideas and to put them together with other people’s ideas to make better ones with potential for real impact. This mission precedes thoughts of gain, publication, or fame.

2. Keep one foot in your college or university activities and one foot outside in a related but different activities that create fruitful and sometimes unexpected synergies.

3. Do not worry over much about protecting your ideas. Let them out in the world early and often so they can get tested and promiscuously mate with other people’s ideas. If someone steals one of your ideas and you were only going to have one good one anyway, then you would not have had a good career anyway—you have to have good ideas over the long haul.

4. Try to develop “taste”, that is, good judgment about which ideas, yours or other people’s, are tasty, deep, and have “legs” for impact into the future, even if at first they seem like weak fledglings. Champion tasty ideas even if others are skeptical and even if they are not your ideas.

5. Pick your political battles carefully. Academic politics and committees damage our minds, bodies, and souls. Pick only the battles really worth fighting for and fight them and them alone. How do you know which these are? They are the ones that when you really think about it are worth taking real risks of damage to yourself and your career for. They are the ones where winning means making the world a better place.

6. Good ideas often come from unexpected experiences, ones we are tempted not to follow up on because they might lead us away from our “field”. Every book I have written was caused by following up a lead that at first seemed marginal and strange from the perspective of how I or others construed my “field”. One example: I wrote a book on video games because my then six-year-old turned me onto them. While I was writing the book in 2001-2002 the whole idea seemed silly if I thought about it too much. I had Walter Mitty dreams of getting invited to the prestigious Game Developers Conference and creating a whole new field. None of this was likely to happen given that I was totally and utterly unknown in the world of games and given, too, at that time, no one much saw video games as relevant to literacy studies and vice-versa. But both things did happen.

7. The “game” of life is nine innings, to use another sports metaphor. Never give up if you are behind. Play out all the innings and quit only when the fat lady sings. (Sorry again for, continuing the sports metaphor that might now be seen as insensitive to over-weight people.)

8. In my life I have never worried that I was paid less or was less well known than other people. I have only asked myself if I am happy with what I have and acted to get more if and only if I wasn’t, not because other people had more. This has worked well, at least for me. I now know, having worked in education, that it is called a “mastery orientation” (competing with yourself and judging yourself by your own efforts and progress) and not an “achievement orientation” (competing to beat others and judging yourself by how you stand in relationship to others).

9. In my life, I have never cared whether I got the expected rewards others did at the same time as them or before them. I have always been a slow developer and arrived to each party, or stage of development a bit later than others. It seems only to have meant I got to savor some of the benefits later when others were already leaving the party.

10. The world is a mess. We need to at least put a finger in the collapsing dike until someone else can come up with a big idea to replace the whole thing. People will ask you how being an academic allowed you to do any real good in the world. Be sure that at the least your finger is in the dike and then tell them that’s the good you did. That is all I was and am able to do. I have just tried to put my finger in the dike. As I get older I have the fantasy that what will replace the breaking dike and stem the flood is just a wall of people side by side with their fingers in the wall. Standing there, all together, getting wet, but holding the flood at bay, they will come to realize that it is not true that individuals cannot do anything in the face of big challenges. They can put a finger in the dike and yell for others to join them. They may well come to realize then that that wall of fingers in the dike is the big idea we were all waiting for. An idea no one had but everyone contributed to. An odd picture, but the one I end with.

Ramblings of an old academic: Unconfident advice for end-times academics (PDF Download Available). Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/297675768_Ramblings_of_an_old_academic_Unconfident_advice_for_end-times_academics.

 

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Punishing the public academic

Nicholas Kristof wrote a very good op-ed in the Sunday New York Times called Professors, We Need You! The text argued that academics were becoming less relevant in the public sphere. Kristof identifies two important, and closely related, realities as to why this may be so. First in the creation of academics:

A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.

and then in the work environment:

A related problem is that academics seeking tenure must encode their insights into turgid prose. As a double protection against public consumption, this gobbledygook is then sometimes hidden in obscure journals — or published by university presses whose reputations for soporifics keep readers at a distance.

While I agree with both I feel they both address, and simultaneously miss, the most important detail. The arguments could be seen as the way it is among a tight-knit group with a specialized interest and vocabulary. This could be doctors, lawyers or fly fishermen… all more or less unintelligible to the outsider.

But what is especially problematic with the academic system is the way in which work is rewarded. Public communication and social engagement are often praised to varying degrees but when it comes down to promotion, tenure, ranking or anything that controls the future of the individual academic – they don’t count.

In academia participating in a public debate is a hobby that does not benefit your situation at work. In the worst case something that an academic states in a public forum in order to bring her knowledge to the public can harm the individuals chances within academia. As an academic I will not be criticized for writing yet another obscure article – it’s expected and will count towards a promotion or other reward.

However, as an academic, if I participate in a public discussion and say something that is vague or simplistic I will be criticized from within academia. And if I say nothing wrong but appear in the public debate too much I will be seen as lacking in a serious mindset, chasing publicity and being shallow – and be criticized both from within and outside academia.

So when Kristof ends with his appeal for us not to “cloister yourselves like medieval monks” part of me agrees, despite the fact that this is not the advice I would give to a young Ph.D. student.

Addition 17 Feb: After writing this text a fascinating article appeared in The Telegraph which really serves as a sad example John Yudkin: the man who tried to warn us about sugar A British professor’s 1972 book about the dangers of sugar is now seen as prophetic. So why did it lead to the end of his career?

The article is fascinating on many levels. The problem of sugar is important but for the purposes of the academic participation discussion this longish quote shows the harm it could entail:

“Yudkin always maintained his equanimity, but Keys was a real a——-, who stooped to name-calling and character assassination,” says Lustig, speaking from New York, where he’s just recorded yet another television interview.

The British Sugar Bureau put out a press release dismissing Yudkin’s claims as “emotional assertions” and the World Sugar Research Organisation described his book as “science fiction”. When Yudkin sued, it printed a mealy-mouthed retraction, concluding: “Professor Yudkin recognises that we do not agree with [his] views and accepts that we are entitled to express our disagreement.”

Yudkin was “uninvited” to international conferences. Others he organised were cancelled at the last minute, after pressure from sponsors, including, on one occasion, Coca-Cola. When he did contribute, papers he gave attacking sugar were omitted from publications. The British Nutrition Foundation, one of whose sponsors was Tate & Lyle, never invited anyone from Yudkin’s internationally acclaimed department to sit on its committees. Even Queen Elizabeth College reneged on a promise to allow the professor to use its research facilities when he retired in 1970 (to write Pure, White and Deadly). Only after a letter from Yudkin’s solicitor was he offered a small room in a separate building.

How many academics could both have the energy and the interest to fight something like this?

Posted on by Mathias Klang

Fresh First Monday out now!

The latest issue of First Monday is online. As always this journal manages to provide articles of interest every month. No exception this time. I am looking forward to reading The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information by Vivienne Waller, What value do users derive from social networking applications? by Larry Neale and Rebekah Russell-Bennett & From PDF to MP3: Motivations for creating derivative works by John Hilton.

Strangely enough even though First Monday has been around since 1996 – it was one of the first openly accessible, peer–reviewed journals on the Internet – and it has a focus on the Internet some students have managed to miss it and its impact.

Posted on by mklang