The text below is adapted from some writing I submitted for assessment while studying for the Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice at the University of Edinburgh. Our task for the assignment was to reflect on our “identities” as academics while referring to the published literature on this topic.
A senior colleague (who is really a very unsentimental and serious individual) recently showed me a beautiful discovery she and her students had made. She searched my face to gauge my reaction, to see if I was moved by it. She said, “This is what it’s all about, really, isn’t it?”. You can probably guess from this anecdote that the colleague in question is also a great teacher, whose former students have done important work in our field. Not because she has dutifully worked towards “stage 5” of Kugel’s (1993) rather quaint schema — “turning students into independent learners” — but because students learn from her example how meaningful it is to possess, to share, and to advance scientific knowledge. After that the problem is not how to become an “independent learner” but how to keep the rest of one’s life running smoothly in the background while one goes ever deeper into the woods.
The “ways of being a university researcher” outlined in some literature (e.g., Åkerlind, 2008) leave me cold. When Euripedes wrote “Happy the man whose lot is to know the secrets of the Earth”, he was not talking about “satisfying the researcher’s curiosity” (which can, of course, never be satisfied). In truth, while the best academic work is extremely technically rigorous, it is often driven by a powerful emotional current: the “cosmic religious feeling” that Einstein identified as “the strongest and noblest motive for scientific research”. And then there is the social aspect, a desire to participate in the great conversation between scholars in all times and places, which encircles the globe, reaches back at least to the original “Academy” of Plato, and stretches far into the future, propelled by new discoveries and new approaches.
It is important to say that this conversation happens outside universities, too! And I am not claiming that my own work is notably “strong” or “noble” or that it deserves any place in posterity. But when like many thousands of scientists around the world I use empirical tools to uncover the “secrets of the Earth”, we are continuing a project that Aristotle began 23 centuries ago. When we teach our students the importance of scholarly rigour, we are transmitting norms that would have been recognisable to Erasmus. This way of speaking about academic life and work may seem grandiose and a little pompous, but it happens to be true. “Curiosity” seems a meagre word for the force that drives scholarship forwards. To call it “love of one’s subject” (an often-cited motivation for academics, e.g., Kreber, 2010) is too parochial; it misses the importance of the academic stance itself as a way of being in (and apart from) the world. It is nothing less than a way of life; a way to make life meaningful.
Do I care about publishing articles in highly cited journals, winning grants, and all the rest of it? Not as ends in themselves. Insofar as I do these things at all, it is largely because they are the price of participation in the shared search for knowledge in one of the particular institutional forms that it has taken in our time, i.e., the modern university. The day-to-day work of a university academic is often as unglamorous as any other desk job, and in some ways it is unusually strenuous and demoralising. But one must not mistake the form for the substance, which has adopted other forms in the past and will do so again in future (indeed, the “modern university” is already a multiplicity of institutional arrangements, many of which are clearly unsustainable for a variety of reasons). What motivates me — and I suspect, most academics — is the thing that stays the same through all this change, the great common work of enquiry, discovery, and teaching.
References
Åkerlind, G. S. (2008). An academic perspective on research and being a researcher: An integration of the literature. Studies in Higher Education, 33(1), 17-31.
Kugel, P. (1993). How professors develop as teachers. Studies in Higher Education, 18(3), 315-328.
Kreber, C. (2010). Academics’ teacher identities, authenticity and pedagogy. Studies in Higher Education, 35(2), 171-194.
Sean McMahon 