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Truthiness about Busy-ness

We’ve been having discussions about how to regain a sense of collegiality among faculty and staff at Georgetown. Faculty who’ve been here longer remember getting together in group lunches, where the conversation was informal and unstructured. They remember learning about their colleagues’ work (an inevitable topic among academics). They remember discovering unexpected intellectual synergies with colleagues they hadn’t previously met.

Some remember a time when seminars within fields were deliberately designed to inform one another about current work that people were pursuing. In some units, there was a strong cultural norm to attend such meetings. Some of these events survive in some units; some of these are facing low attendance; and some have died.

Most think these events are more difficult to mount now than previously. The hypothesized causes are many. Georgetown faculty tend to live far away and commute into campus. Their moments on campus are packed with work; many have their lunches at their desks, working through the noon hour. This has long run effects. I’ve been in many social gatherings in which I learn that staff who’ve been at Georgetown many years have not met a colleague in a different school or even a different program within a school.

Many acknowledge the tyranny of email, texts, and other electronic demands for instant attention. We all have stories of colleagues who telephone 10 minutes after sending a text or an email, asking why we haven’t responded. We all attend meetings in which half of the participants are typing into smart phones during the discussion. The world demands attention to mundane features of life more aggressively than previously.

For some faculty, their day is spent in frequent contact with students. Georgetown faculty tend to spend more time in one-on-one sessions with students than what occurs on many campuses. This seems to compete with time spent with colleagues. We take seriously the devotion to cura personalis when dealing with students. It often trumps the obligations to our colleagues.

Some think that part of the problem results from the evolution of academic disciplines. As fields mature, subfields grow. Increasingly, academic excellence requires very deep, but narrow expertise. The course of least resistance is to seek international fame in a very well-defined area. Some notice that they too infrequently attend seminars outside their disciplines. They devote their free time to drilling further into their areas of specialty. Maybe we place lower value on having a broad understanding of multiple fields.

My last post noted the permanent tension on academic campuses between basic theoretical work — the knowledge-for-knowledge sake goal — and applied work — the problem-solving goal. In a way, I see a link between the perceived busy-ness of our academic lives and this dichotomy. What we’re missing in this busy-ness is what Jesuit education values highly — moments of reflection. We’re cheating ourselves of opportunities to assess what we’re doing from another vantage point — the vantage point of the other, the vantage point of another field. Moments of deep reflection can make important differences in an academic’s career. Just as devotion to theory requires deferred gratification regarding problem-solving, taking time to learn about colleagues’ work delays completing the obvious next step in your own work. However, it might also provide insights into that work never achievable by doing only the “urgent.”

Most costly, perhaps, is that this sense of busy-ness is keeping us away from each other. That is a great loss. We miss the collegiality, but it takes real courage and discipline to regain it.

12 thoughts on “Truthiness about Busy-ness

  1. This is really a historical footnote to Sarah’s excellent contribution: it wasn’t always as bad as it is now. There used to be a partly subsidized faculty lunchroom, operated by the university not by Marriott, that was often filled. There were FAR more opportunities for the faculty to come together (on a Saturday night in the fall for a annual dinner, for example, that even Tim Healy would attend — though whether such an event could be resurrected now I rather doubt; the attempt to do so on a Thursday afternoon has only produced a shadow of what used to be).

    My sense is that it all broke down under Leo, when times were indeed hard, and the decision was made to save money at all costs — this took place, alas, at a time when the faculty was increasing greatly in size, and such contacts were all the more needed. Now, of course, it’s difficult to meet colleagues outside of one’s own department — and has been so for 15 years or more.

    • Ineterestong comment. I think as we have gotten more successful we have lost some of the low key informal times which improved relationships and with it generation of unique ideas. Would be good to look at the old days. Just a thought.

  2. The McCourt School is now having (irregular) ‘no agenda’ faculty lunches for social/intellectual/professional conversation. I’ll be sure to invite you to our next one….

  3. Important topic how to connect faculty to stimulate ideas and cross pollinate. The GU alumni association had an all campus engagement committe which instituted monthly brown bag lunches open to faculty staff alums etc to discuss ways of collaborating. It led to some very creative cross campus ideas which would not hacmve happened without human personal contact. Hard to set up but without the personal touch points great possibilities may be missed. But I am a shrink and am prejudiced that people need to meet and spend time with each other !

  4. Thank you for this, Bob. It certainly captures what many of us experience, and regret, about our otherwise satisfying professional lives. Two important thoughts. 1) As Sarah suggests, the availability of campus spots to meet up for a drink, coffee or a meal would be a big help. But 2) we need to find ways to incentivize going outside the narrow confines of our immediate research and engaging with each other more. As you well know, the forces of tenure, promotion and the merit system all push against the time and effort it takes to truly engage in inter or cross disciplinary work. I hope we can find ways to move forward on both these points.

  5. As in many things, we could all learn alot from physicists. I remember as a grad student in a physics dept that we had tea every day at 4 pm. God awful tea as I recall, and most of us didn’t attend every day, but we attended enough. Because you never knew who you would bump into, and you caught your second wind for the day. Some of my most productive moments were at 5 pm after tea. Tea is cheap, perhaps every dept should just set up a regular tea time … if it works for physicists it could work for all of us.
    Cheers
    Paul

  6. This is why most universities of Georgetown’s stature have humanities centers. It’s not a panacea to the cultural problem of incessant online busy-ness but it does send a strong signal that cross disciplinary, reflective time is valued by the university, not just in words (which do matter too) but in deeds and investment.

    • To underscore Christine Evans’s point: I am posting this from Cornell’s Society for the Humanities, where I am a visiting fellow this year. Lively cross-disciplinary exchange is the norm here, and the university makes space for that in numerous ways–but dedicated space, and funding for both visiting and on-campus fellowships as well as events, is crucial. Lunches are nice, but the university needs to invest more than the cost of a table if it is going to overcome the many distractions, and the widespread sense of demoralization, keeping us apart.

  7. So right!

    One question: what can the institution do to support such exchange, to allow for and promote that valuable experience, the regular encounter with “the vantage point of the other”?

    Many of us try: try hard despite the darn commutes and rush hours: we make plans to meet each other for a drink at the end of the day, for instance, in one of the ugly and unaccommodating places on or near campus (Epicurean: so loud! so filled with rowdy students! blasted with TV screens of football games etc!; or the Tombs: the same). It is, with all due respect, hard to imagine a a less congenial campus than Georgetown’s for faculty to actually meet, for coffee, lunch, or a drink, in that easy way that facilitates cross-disciplinary thinking or the serendipitous spark from an unlikely corner (neuoroscience for English lit professors, or vice versa).

    So: it’s an excellent thought, an important idea: this is THE reason why many of us have dedicated our lives to academic work, because we love ideas, love talking to informed, intelligent, creative colleagues. There are institutions that support this kind of exchange: places that recognize the importance of The Table (Harvard Society of Fellows, Villa I Tatti, Dumbarton Oaks, American Academy in Rome, the Getty, etc etc). All the Oxford and Cambridge colleges, too, make lunch for the fellows/dons an integral part of what the institution values and supports. NYU, Columbia, Harvard, Berkeley: there are faculty gathering-spots within easy reach).

    Would it be so very difficult, so very expensive and impossible, for Georgetown to provide that most fundamental of features (as Socrates/Plato and on realized): a Table? If subsidized faculty housing close to campus is an idea that will never, ever, materialize, what about this much more modest provision to support the life of the mind?

    Make it a priority, Bob! Thanks!

  8. There are proven ways to facilitate this kind of informal contact, which as you point out is lacking and badly needed. The law school has weekly free faculty lunches. Perhaps deans and provosts could institute this in individual schools or at the university level. At the old World Bank dining room, there was a singles table (not free), where you sat down and talked with whoever was next to you. The Faculty Club could have such a table at no cost.

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