Re. independent bookstores: I KNOW. It’s like, you’re a scrappy, independent, local store, so yay for you, but I’m still not going to buy your weird used cookbook.

A new mode of conferencing is called for! If only there was some kind of … camp, where people could, like, interact with each other informally. I shall call it THIScamp!

MP

FWIW, I get annoyed by the same thing in NPR interviews.

Thanks for this thoughtful reply. The question of service is an interesting one. I do recognize that faculty and students need things from us, in ways that resist my science lab analogy. And it’s really important to me that the university feels that we’re providing a benefit. It’s just that the way to provide the greatest benefit is clearly not to incubate a profusion of one-off sites.

Your CLIR take-away was also one of my big take-aways, especially after talking to Bethany. I hadn’t put the pieces together before, but after speaking with her, I think I get the importance of insisting that people recognize me as a scholar. No, I’m not shielded from the necessity of day-to-day politics, responsibilities, and hierarchies, but neither are professors, really, and neither are adjuncts, really really.

Anyway, thanks again, and sorry for spamming you. Try to be more corporeal, OK?

Miriam

The resistance to the service model is also quite important. One interview I had this year put me in a room with a PI who wanted to know what I would do to help him as a “customer.” My every attempt over the hour that we spoke to put the Center where I might be working and his scholarship onto parity was summarily rejected in favor of this service model. I believe some of this insistence on his part was due to his grant having just been rejected, and he wanted to make sure that the new guy would know that the “customer is always right.” What it added up to, however, was a feeling that I did not in any way want to be working with him in the future. It’s strange that people in such staff-like positions seldom get recognition, even when they have the same advanced degree and other specialties besides.

One of my big take-aways from #clir camp was this importance of recognizing alt-academics in the roles they occupy. We need to broaden the idea of what scholarship is and what scholars look like. What’s more, forward-thinking universities will work to put people like yourself, Bethany, and Tom into joint appointments within “regular” departments. Such actions need not mean that these individuals go on the tenure track–Tom’s vision of the third way should be preserved. Instead, what these appointments would do is help to create a vision of multiple futures for those graduate students who enter a program. Universities are in a position to provide more role models given the people that are already working there. Why not maximize them?