Thoughts on an Ailing Colleague

I met him just two years after finishing my PhD. He was born, was educated, and spent his whole professional career in another country, but strangely I felt closer to him than most of my nearby faculty colleagues. He is one of my closest professional friends and collaborators, now fighting a very tough personal health battle.

As I have written in past posts, the pursuit of novel advances in every field has created schools of thought that become more and more detailed, deeper, and elaborated. It is common that in any one department there may be only one person who focuses on a given area within a field. Hence, their “real” colleagues are distant. For me, my friend became a portal to meeting a dispersed group of researchers that were working in the same area. Scholars who are “connectors” make important contributions to an area of inquiry, often overlooked when the awards are handed out.

Our work was inherently interdisciplinary; it needed contributors from different areas to advance. Hence, it met the typical resistance from established powers within the traditional disciplines. He taught me that research that is not disseminated has little value. He realized that new interdisciplinary fields need new academic journals. So, he started one, still thriving and pushing the field forward. His entrepreneurial spirit propelled forward a body of literature. Anyone who has edited a journal knows that the rewards from the community never match the work involved. We should appreciate those whose altruism is displayed thusly.

He was global in his orientation much earlier than was I. So, he taught me the value of global coalitions of researchers who are all working with diverse methods on the same goal. Because of him an international meeting of this small group of researchers was built in the 1990’s and is still vibrant, meeting annually. But in addition to the value of exchanging research findings, the group nurtures one another’s pursuit of the important questions in the field. Colleagues who nudge a global set of independent researchers into viewing themselves as a group make others better in ways that aren’t always recognized.

He flowed seamlessly across different institutions in different countries, sometimes teaching courses to practitioners, sometimes consulting. He advanced practice in every location he touched. Everywhere he worked he attempted to inculcate the culture with the need to teach the advances in our field to practitioners. There are hundreds of young scholars whom he has helped, as well as a few old ones. Given the evolution of the academy, it is rare to see scholars moving back and forth from research to practice.

His leadership derived partly from his humility. He was quiet always; listening, always. And when everyone had their say, he would invent ways to push good ideas forward. He would respect the idea and subordinate his role, if necessary, to promote the idea. Often, no one noticed he was leading us. One of the rarest, and thus most admirable, trait of scholars is humility.

Little known by those outside of academia is the fact that much emotional sustenance is provided among researchers pursuing the same research questions. When they meet in professional associations, they support one another; they share in individual accomplishments because each strengthens the field of inquiry they collectively want to promote among the set of disciplines represented in the interdisciplinary field. They become friends. Since academics’ programs of research are long-lasting, deep relationships have time to develop. They visit each other when possible. I know my friend’s children and spouse, and he knows my extended family. We stay in each other homes when visiting. We are family in all but blood relations.

I hope each of us have colleagues like him; they deserve our appreciation more often than we might display it. I wish I had communicated that to him more frequently over the years.