If you’re around academe long enough, you’ll develop a network without even trying. You’ll get to know people by way of conferences and other professional activities, through publishing, by connecting with friends of friends, and simply being plugged in to the life of college education in the United States.
Since I wound up as an administrator, my career has taken me to several institutions. In turn, many of my colleagues there have moved on to other places, taking on different professional roles as they go. Added to this group are all the people with whom I went to grad school who have found their way into academic positions, along with the smaller number of undergraduate friends who have done the same.
Once I account for most or all of these people, it’s interesting to see that I have friends, acquaintances, or former colleagues at a large array of institutions around the country. It is now rare to meet someone from whom I am professionally separated by more than two or three degrees. For example, I recently wrote about going to my 25th college reunion, where I went to the reception for alumni of the department of English and met the new chair, who’d been hired from the outside. As we chatted, and he asked me about graduate school, we discovered that he knew my dissertation director’s husband quite well.
That kind of thing happens all the time, which is all the more reason to be careful about how you act and talk, since someone almost always knows someone who knows you.
Tell us about your most interesting and/or surprising connections.
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2 Responses to Degrees of Familiarity
asingh - May 27, 2010 at 12:20 pm
This is proof, if proof were needed, of just how incestuous academia is, a place where key career issues are clearly not determined on the basis of merit but on “who you know.”
david_r_evans - May 27, 2010 at 4:20 pm
How is it proof of that? It just shows that if you hang around long enough, you get to know a lot of people.Moreover, getting to know a lot of people professionally is a valid measure of merit. It means that you go to conferences, participate in other professional activities, etc.I’m pretty sure I’ve never received a professional benefit in terms of “key career issues” from the people I went to college or grad school with. None of them are really in a position to do me those favors, nor am I for them. I certainly have benefited, as has anyone who does a decent job, from impressing the people I’ve worked for and worked with. That’s how it works. It’s not a result of professional incest, it’s the result of actually having a career.Take an example. I’m somewhat active in the Council of Independent Colleges, which is an excellent organization. I am working with a group of fellow VPAAs in my region on an assessment consortium as a result of a panel I saw at the CIC CAO meeting last fall. So, a bunch of us got together subsequently at the HLC meeting in Chicago to discuss this plan. We now all know each other. We’re doing our jobs, and (at least one hopes) engaged in an activity that will enhance all of our institutions. Are we supposed to pretend that this isn’t happening? Are we supposed NOT to do it because it might lead to “incest”? Or is it part of meritorious professional activity of the type that someone who’s decently good at his job should be doing?