I’m reading L.D. Burnett, from her recent paper at the USIH meeting. I most often encounter her via a quick quip on Facebook or Twitter. So I was all the more moved to find her here, in long form, thinking out loud about the meaning of our life’s work as academics. I am always eager to link arms against cynicism and its related world view. Thanks for L.D. for sharing this:
“Because we don’t live in the abstract. We are alive for one another, concretely, completely, complicatedly, in the round – friend and foe, enemy and ally, adjunct and administrator, student and professor. Yes, the battles and skirmishes of academic politics have always been about ideas, about the life of the mind. But they have also been about the very means – our very means – of living. Academic politics matter, just as ideas matter. They matter because we do.”
You can read the full text on the USIH blog site here.