I think my comments and Clarissa’s on this post are so important that they must be pointed to. The worst academic advice I ever got, and that I got repeatedly from two influential individuals, was that I should go faster and be more superficial.
I am already efficient and good at cutting wheat from chaff, and I already work a lot and quite quickly. All the lectures about going faster and faster and about how you did not really need to do research, just write something, anything, and as long as it was internally consistent and was published somewhere you would survive, which was the most you could hope for, was incredibly destructive.
It was why I finally just stopped; I threw away a good job and a good town because I was willing to do anything, anything at all just so as not to hear their frenetic voices and feel their goads, faster, faster, stay on the straight and narrow, run faster and you will perhaps have a faint chance of making it across the border to a safe country before the enemy soldiers close in.
For my sins I have paying guests this week, for whom I am not ready and whom I would rather not host. But I need the money and I will need to be taking in more paying guests as our effective salaries are cut further. I am not ready and I have only six hours, which is a lot if you think about it but I feel I should go faster, faster.
I am saying instead that I have plenty of time; each task only takes fifteen minutes or so and if you do not rush, you do not make mistakes. It is the prospect of having to go faster than I can that makes me want to give up entirely. I think both of the other subjects in question here felt the same – at the same time as they recommended speed and superficiality, they also recommended giving up entirely.
And they were speaking for themselves, of course. And I abhor people who use the pronoun “you” when they mean “I.” And I’ve run across internal documents written by both of the subjects in question this week, documents I had not known they wrote; I see that they did not in fact work in fear and pain but with care and love; they had their reasons to hide this but I am taking it for myself.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 