Pace the dolce far niente and Paul Lafargue (who, as I have just learned, was born in wealth on a coffee plantation in Santiago de Cuba) we will ask the question: do you think anyone has the right to desire or to aspire to inspiring work? Or, should people simply be grateful for “the opportunity to eat,” which was what the official written advice for job hunters said in one of my departments at my graduate institution?
This is the academic advice I have gotten:
– be grateful for the opportunity to eat
– be grateful, you could be on the street
– be grateful, you could be home with small children
– be grateful, you could be at the salt mines
and a few things like:
– if you do not demand the right to good conditions you are complicit in your own oppression and have only yourself to blame
– if you do not already have good conditions it is that you did not make the grade and have only yourself to blame.
What is behind the extremism and Manicheism here? Why have I so often found people unwilling to consider a middle path? Also, I appreciate being glad to be alive but are we to desire nothing, aspire to nothing?
I also do not know any more, at this point, how to define adequate or reasonable conditions.
Unspecified Whiteman, one day not today: Over the long term, yes, your visible research is more important to the University than is any amount of administration or service. Over the long term.
Z, silently: So my original intuition was correct. We are shock troops or FEMA doctors, here to help clear up the wreckage and create conditions such that the next set of hires might focus on research, but not us. We will sacrifice ourselves and it and then do penitence for having done so. I will not let them get away with that.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 