The night passed restlessly, with many bumps and nudges. It took a long time to get arranged into a passably comfortable position. The stiffness upon wakening passed quickly, however, and a big cup of coffee from the cafe made me feel mostly normal again. Now it's only the feeling of persistant, stickly, uncleanliness that feels out of order.
We're rolling through the Pennsylvania countryside. I haven't been keeping track of the cities we pass through very carefully. I thought I recognized Pittsburg, with its sharp ridges, steep divides, and air of 19th century industrialism, but upon reflection I don't think the train goes so far south. The train finds a consistent rythym as it hurries and waits, hurries and waits, negtotiating the switches that allow it to share the rails with the lumbering freight trains. Less frequently, the train slows to walk as it eases into a station to disembark passengers.
At the airport, the passegeways were clogged with middle-aged brisk suits. The train station and trains collect a diverse mix, but one which largely excludes the airport set. There are old and young, families, handicapped, and indigent.
The first time I attended BioQUEST was a profound experience. It was like drinking from the firehose. John took me aside after a few days and gave me a few words of advice. "Just relax and don't try so hard. It'll happen." I was somewhere past the middle of my dissertation and was nearly psychotic with tension over completing it and looking beyond to finding a position. I didn't go again for two or three years and since then I have attended three or four times. Each subsequent time it has felt like... I was going to say pulling on a piece of comfortable clothing, but that's not really right. I literally can't come up with any analogies that do justice to the experience. There is an aspect of comfort, of festival, of renewing connections with old friends and making new friends. There is also an aspect of flow, of being effortlessly productive. There is also an aspect of intellectual stimulation, of challenging and being challenged in a supportive way. It's an extraordinary experience.
My initial collaboration with Pat on the Crossing Boundaries project has been useful already at getting me to be reflective about the many social dimensions along which boundaries exist: economy, power, gender, age, expertise, etc. I was aware of many of these already, but only in an implicit way. Making them explicit is the only to begin to appreciate the number of potential interactions among them all. I've been most aware of the boundary between students and faculty related to power. Many of the resources I've built have been explicitly designed to empower students: mailing lists give students a voice, providing guest access to log into the quizzing system, providing chats and wikis to help students coordinate and organize. I was very interested when I read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom which provides a dystopic view of higher education. Grad students take over the undergraduate lectures, saying
We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is in charge. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be fun."
When the professors try to fight back it's revealed "that all of the new lecturers had been writing course-plans and lecture notes for the profs they replaced for years, and that they'd also written most of their journal articles".
I don't know where to begin in contrasting this vision with my experience in higher education in my department. The complexity of maintaining an active laboratory in the sciences is mind-boggling. It requires a strong ingredient of entrepreneurship that most people are unaware of. You have to hustle funding; manage political relationships with other faculty and administration; hire, lead, and direct staff; attract and mentor graduate students; and teach classes. And write. And that doesn't include any of the science you're suposedly doing. It takes a really extraordinary person to achieve a successful balance among all these things, because you can't ever really focus on any of them. It's way too easy to get drawn into trying to some of them well, but failure on any of the categories will be the death knell of the lab.
The most important skill faculty in the sciences need is the ability to attract funding. Publication and funding go hand-in-hand. Students may do a lot of writing, but without the funding for support and equipment, it wouldn't happen. Moreover, it's not easy to get writing published. The input an experienced faculty member can offer will often make the difference between a acceptance with revisions and a rejection: knowing where to publish, how to spin a particular audience, which references to trust, which to reject, and which to only subtly disparage.
The train finally got in almost exactly 4 hours late. After a brief wait for Valley Transporter, I'm home at last.