Comments on: Of heresy, fun, and gatekeeping speech acts

By: Professor Zero

Professor Zero — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:11:34 +0000

It just hit me – although I do take Veleda’s point on complaining (it’s indecorous because it lowers prestige):

People are willing to complain, but not to stand up and say there are things they actually don’t like about the system in a calm way (because they have so internalized its values).

*That* is why I don’t like all those advice posts – it’s not that the suggestions aren’t good, it’s that they are ultimately (or often) about internalizing sets of values, saying everything is OK if you just understand the rules, etc.

Up until now I was always embarrassed that there were so many things I disliked about academia. It seemed like a moral failure. But perhaps it’s the opposite.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 14:59:12 +0000

Notorious — part of me loves the bf thing. But too many of my friends know the one who really was responsible for so much good, and only recently for damage, too!

By: Veleda

Veleda — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 23:39:58 +0000

Somebody wrote,

“I like ej’s suggestion–pointing out all of the support one wasn’t granted in the acknowledgements! But then, that might look like the culture of complaint that Prof. Zero also calls out in her post…”

Oh good grief, let’s not get caught _complaining_ that would be so unacceptable. It might lower our prestige!

What’s wrong with protest? I am not embarrassed to say that it makes my stomach tighten when someone lists all the funding and perks they enjoyed while turning out their opus. Good for them, but although i would not use the word gatekeeping, because this is not a conscious act of exclusion, the sum total of acknowledgement build up to create a feeling that this is how it must be done and this is what counts. Insiders, outsiders, all that.

I don’t mind saying so.

By: Professor Zero

Professor Zero — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 16:36:20 +0000

I say that wives who did so much of the work that their husbands say in acknowledgments that the book “couldn’t have been written without their help,” should be listed as co authors — not just listed in acknowledgments.

So what if that means the professor has to write twice as many books, since he only gets half credit for each … he only did half the work, too!

By: Rad Readr

Rad Readr — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 15:59:52 +0000

If I had not mentioned my wife and her labor in my acknowledgements, she would not have shaken the booty for a while.

The most negative responses to my acknowledgements came from non-academic people — my relatives who were not included. I come from a family where people do not regularly publish books — and I regret leaving out some people. Next book, everyone goes in. The dog, my 77 cousins and Marvin Gaye.

By: Professor Zero

Professor Zero — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 08:16:46 +0000

OK — my insight at this hour is that the 2 positions — “it is the best job I could imagine, I would do it almost for free” and “it is so, so hard, and I am starving and people are rejecting my manuscripts” are oddly complementary: it’s great if you’re in (or otherwise wealthy) and less great, or even awful, if you’re not.

I don’t necessarily think the conversation has gone beyond the post … in some moments it has gone back, with people trying to solidify in one these two classic positions.

The scandalous positions are different — as in, it’s a professional job like other professional jobs, with the attendant pleasures and displeasures, or OMG this can be fun — !!! — but only when also funDED!!!

I will freak everyone out royally if I write a post on how service is fun, and administration is creative. I note that one is also expected to groan about these things, because if you see their value it is supposed to prove you are not a scholar.

By: Homostorian Americanist

Homostorian Americanist — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 03:56:44 +0000

Professor Zero — My comment wasn’t meant to be a corrective to yours, with which I agree for the most part — especially about the elite lifestyles — just an addition to the conversation as a whole, which seems to have moved beyond simply what you had said.

By: Professor Zero

Professor Zero — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 18:31:57 +0000

ONCE AGAIN American Historian I never said do not give credit where credit is due. I said I was tired of people flaunting *elite lifestyles* and then using the phrase “without which I could not have written this book.”

Sisyphus, yes, it’s work and not the easiest work. Usually I think that people like Dead Voles are missing the point when they say “at least we are not at miminum wage” and “at least we are not digging ditches” BUT what they mean is it is *work*.

I am not saying it is a walk in the park, I am not saying it is not hard work and that it is often insufficiently. I am just saying it is not as impossible as I was always told it would be and that it is something I am interested in – and that sometimes the interestingness really does make it fun.

I am assuming that you are in graduate school because you were interested in your subject, correct Sisyphus?

By: Historiann

Historiann — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:25:02 +0000

Sisyphus, I think your perspective is what it is because you don’t yet have a job (and I wish you all the best in your job search.) For those of us who have jobs, we don’t have to defend what we do as *work* because we have paid employment. I think you’re right that the situation is more difficult for students–my one set of grandparents never understood what I was doing in graduate school, and always asked “when I was going to finally get a job and go to work?”

If you keep doing your scholarship, it gets more fun and easier because success breeds success. You may not be at “writing is fun, and publishing is easy” yet, but you may get there with time, and luck in finding a job.

By: Homostorian Americanist

Homostorian Americanist — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 15:16:05 +0000

I am *obsessed* with acknowledgments. The longer the better, for precisely the reasons that many people have already noted: the stories, the gossip, the sense that a real person exists behind the book. I read them first and then I read them again after I read the book. And I quote them to friends and long remember the funny lines. I still remember the very first book whose author acknowledged — by name — her nanny (Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal) and all the ones who have been absurdly cheesy about their partners/spouses that made me ever so slightly nauseated (I could go on and on and on and they should be embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed).

I wrote particularly long acknowledgments myself and while they did not dwell on my largely nonexistent funding, they did spend an inordinate amount of time thanking archivists and other archival staff by name. I am a big fan of this because I think these people — without whom historians couldn’t do what we do — often go unthanked but I also think (and I’m guilty of it myself) that the endless acknowledgment of archivists also serves the dual purpose of boasting about just how many archives one visited in researching a book. And this has surely got to be the ultimate historian’s pissing contest. Similarly, I always feel like looking at that list of archives visited in the first few pages of a bibliography is the moment that historians are basically whipping it out for comparison’s sake. It’s not that one *hasn’t* gone to all these places or that one *wasn’t* helped — sometimes very much — by these people, but it’s clear to me (maybe I’m projecting?) that there are also ulterior motives.