Anti-Climacus

Wholheartedly agree with Tim Burke on both the generational shift in academia, and the implications of blogging on academic output:

Maybe it’s also generational. I take a visceral delight in reading past generations of scholars and writers ripping each other to shreds in print, but I’ve never been much of one for playing dodgeball myself, and I think a lot of academics my age feel the same. They just don’t want to live like that.

Maybe what blogs and other digital publications are starting to do is provide an ongoing record of the real-life gaps between idealized descriptions of the dispassionate production of scholarship and the death-of-a-thousand-cuts pettiness of how it sometimes gets debated, deferred, and discouraged.

Again, for my generation, I think this is part of what I'm now tagging "revenge of the organization kid." The increasing professionalization of all the disciplines means, I think, that people are coming less to view them as the fundamental end-all of their existence. Good work matters, and working hard matters, but other things matter, too. There's a certain extent to which I am acutely aware that the five other political theorists who entered grad school in my cohort at Duke are my competition: we all want jobs, and however much our specific career goals may differ, an interview for one of them is an interview I will probably not get. They're also friends, and people whose work I've followed (and done my best to help) for almost a decade. When it comes down to it, I'd rather that everyone do respectably well than do anything that might directly aid my career path by wounding theirs. It's just a job, after all.