Service: The Saftey Net of the Dispossessed

One of the great ironies of academic life is that many bright young people pursue academic careers because they find the idea of administrative life in the corporate world to be less than desirable. And, then, they find themselves, after a productive decade or two, in the administrative life of the university. The reason for this is that it is very difficult to sustain your productivity in research over the long term. And it is equally as difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching.

There are three reasons why it is difficult to sustain your productivity in research. First, research requires mental energy. Mental energy declines as one ages and one is unlikely to engage in challenging new research as they get older. Second, research requires enthusiasm. Younger researchers are often driven by a desire to discover and be recognized for that discovery. As you publish paper after paper that few people care about, it is difficult to maintain that idealistic enthusiasm. Finally, the audience for research can be very fickle. What was a hot topic one decade can be a hard sell the next and an impossible sell after that. Since one is unlikely to embark on new avenues of research later in their career, they find that there is simply no audience for what they would like to write papers about.

Similarly, it is difficult to sustain your enthusiasm for teaching. Initially, it is a heady experience standing up in front of an audience of students and telling them things that they want to know or need to know. It is also quite satisfying to adjust over time to their challenges. Further, it is exciting to learn new things and pass them on. However, at some point there are no new challenges in the classroom. You have been asked every conceivable question multiple times. Students fade into one another as you have difficult remembering all the names. And you, some times, dread giving a lecture as you know you may very well bore yourself.

This does not happen to everyone. But it does happen to an overwhelming majority. This is really the point where one should move on to other things. But, if you have been an academic all your life and know nothing else, what can you move on to. The answer, of course is service to the university. There are any number of service roles from voluntary committee work to well paid administrative positions. Next time we will explore the richness of those alternatives.