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Sunday, June 30, 2019

What is your superpower?

It could be the ability to write very well. It could be intellectual brilliance or erudition. It could be an endless stream of energy and motivation, or the ability to focus strongly. It could be consistency of effort, the ability to work for months at a time. The ability to focus on intrinsic motivation and forget about external rewards for scholarship.

You probably won't have all of these things at once. For example, I am not particularly erudite and have a serious lazy streak. I am able to come up with interesting ideas and have a high internal standard for what I want to produce. I can sometimes write very quickly, even though I know that slowness is actually preferable. I think my writing is very good, verging on excellent at times.

So you want to develop two or three things at are your scholarly superpowers. Are you able to organize your research materials super well at all times? Then you have an advantage over me in that respect. It would be easy to be more self-disciplined than I am, or have a better grasp of theory. Maybe you have developed a very strong ability to construct perfectly organized 6,000 word articles with everything in place.

Everything you read is going to have strengths and weaknesses. I do about two tenure or promotion to full evaluation a year; I read articles for journals, and I read book manuscripts for presses. I see work of a wide range of quality. Intellectual brilliance is probably what I see the least of, in terms of these superpowers. I am rarely blown away by someone super smart, though that happens too. A recent book I read was very good, checked all the boxes in terms of erudition, novelty in the field, writing, and organization. I was left strangely dissatisfied, though, because the whole didn't add up to anything exciting to me. I feel that this is almost too much to ask at the point. The book does what it's supposed to do and that should be enough.

10 comments:

Leslie B. said...

Aha, interesting. So if I say what I think is objectively true, rather than what I think I should say, it will be:

- I am more organized and focused, and have more follow-through than the average person does or can even attain with effort;
- I have leadership and also presentation skills that far outstrip most peoples';
- I've got a really incisive intellect and a good prose style.

***These things remain my characteristics no matter how many publication deadlines I have missed, and I have missed many. I can tell they are because I cannot repress them completely, they will out one way or another.***

What I am not is particularly well read. I am about to become much better read, however, because I have decided it is not my responsibility to read more than an absolute minimum amount of prose fiction. This is very freeing.

Leslie B. said...

ALSO: note how I said organized first. I'd say organizing and vision are the superpowers, the unusual ones I have; I'm also very smart but so are others. But I haven't seen organizing and vision like what I have except in certain graduate students in exact sciences I knew when I was also a graduate student. That then, is why I don't like academic advice books: their presupposition is that these are *precisely* the powers one lacks, and what they present as good is actually lackluster. Other kinds of how-tos I like, and information on how other people do organizing and vision I also like, but attempts to take over existing organizing and vision, or discount their existence, feel terribly invasive / destructive.

Jonathan said...

I see your powers as being solid training / intellectual formation and intellectual brilliance / vitality. You are a good writer as well. You don't think in the exact same way that everyone is supposed to think. That kind of intellectual independence is not that common from what I see.

Leslie B. said...

I suppose also true but having lived my post grad school life in very conservative areas I would say that a/ the brilliance part is what makes me unsuited to be woman faculty; b/ the solid training is what makes me unsuited to be faculty *except* where others have similar training; c/ the vision and organizing make me unsuited to be faculty anywhere. You should see, for instance, how the AAUP national leadership hates me due to not thinking as one is supposed to AND having vision/organizing powers. And they're Yankees, but still professors.

Jonathan said...

I never got along with the AAUP people around here...

Leslie B. said...

Why? (And who else is there to protect academic freedom and produce these smart policy statements that are taken for granted at public R1s but that they will sorely miss when they lose them? I would *love* to have a different organization.) But what were they like?

Jonathan said...

Just kind of creepy on an individual basis. I agreed with a lot their agenda, theoretically,, but they tended to be politically conservative and a bit odd, sometimes dishonest in what they said. When the provost tried to make our interim dean permanent in order to keep him from being hired away by Penn State, they made statement about a "plantation system." The only problem was that the interim dean was a black guy, so that didn't go over well.

Jonathan said...

https://www2.ljworld.com/news/ku/2019/jan/14/faculty-group-adamantly-opposes-bypassing-hiring-protocol-for-ku-dean-likens-administration-to-plantation-overseer/

Leslie B. said...

Interesting. They are right, of course, about the shared governance issue. And calling the provost autocratic isn't racist even if the person he's trying to put in is Black.

(The plantation analogy is made here not by AAUP people but by those who are giving reasons not to hope for any kind of democracy. It's not accurate although I suppose there are elements of it [cf. "Leland Stanford Jr. *Farm*"], and of feudalism of course, universities are medieval. But more I would say we're like a hybrid of an oil company and the Church. When you can see that this is where you are, not in a Humboldtian or even other kind of university, things make a lot more sense.)

I find current national leadership of AAUP authoritarian and conservative, for sure. The organization itself is conservative in that it's conservationist and I'm not against that -- it's in fact what I am interested in professional associations for, a lot of the time. I am very concerned about where we'd be without its resources, and at the same time also concerned that the university it promotes and supports no longer exists, except in the lives and imaginations of the most privileged faculty (who don't even need the AAUP to keep their situations). I am further concerned that the AAUP leadership may know this although they do not say it, and that this is why they are turning toward collective bargaining and dropping the advocacy states in the same way as the DNC does not fund candidates in states it thinks are destined to go Republican.

Leslie B. said...

STILL thinking about superpowers. Tolerance of place is an important one to have. Very.

I don't have it. I like all sorts of places but I remember vividly my first meditation on academic superpowers -- in a dark student union in an ugly town, everyone else seemed happy and bright and I thought: they do not need beauty to be happy, they are from Ohio and other dark/flat places, this might even be sunny by their standards, they are GODS and they can DO ANYTHING and I am still in awe. This was the first time I thought about real superpowers.