The Curse of Soft Requirements

I suppose that soft requirements is an oxymoron. If something is required, it is a requirement. If it is not required, then it is not a requirement. However, I think most people would understand the phrase soft requirements as things that you need to do where the exact nature or criteria are unclear. As academics we have two soft requirements: keeping up with the advances in our fields and publishing our own advances in respectable outlets. Both of those soft requirements are worded vaguely on purpose, because in the real life of an academic they are equally as vague.

Keeping up with the field means that as new things happen, you stay on top of them. This, however, can mean many, many different things. Is it keeping up with research, or news events, or technology, or policy changes, or current trends among practitioners? It could be any of those things. In my field of Information Technology, you could spend all your time keeping up with advances in just one area of the technology. This is unusual, however, as most fields do not have as much in the way of evolving and emerging technologies. Most people believe, somewhat naively, that if you are an academic in a specific field that you will be on top of everything happening in that field. This would only be possible, of course, if there were 5000 hours in a day and you had several hundred clones. Nonetheless, people tend to be aware of what comes across their field of vision and unaware of everything that doesn't.

Publishing in respectable outlets is also a bit squishy. In an ideal world, it would mean respected peer reviewed journals published in paper form. However, the world is not ideal. Peer reviewed journals often have a long lag in publication and focus on concerns largely of interest only to academics. This makes their relevance questionable. If you are in a hard core academic discipline, this is not a problem. But in a professional school it is. On the other hand, if you go to web based publication or widely read practitioner publications, it is considered to be lacking in rigor. So, you can't win.

That should be the mantra of academics. You can't win. And that is the curse of soft requirements. No matter what you do, there will be a few who think it is great and many who think it is a silly waste of time. So, you can work long hours only to find that others think you are just wasting your time. And this causes many academic to simply not work long hours. It is a rational response. You can work like a fool and face criticism or you can do nothing a face criticism. As Mark Twain would say, the wages are the same and one way is a lot easier.

After a while you find that academics who are productive can't help being productive and academics who can help it stop wasting their time. But what do they do instead? They have to do something and most turn to service, the homeless shelter for the academically dispossessed. And that will be the topic for next time.