I finally saw the names of the people who will be contributing to the edited volume for which I’m writing an article, and those are some famous names. And I mean, really famous names.
Editors of such volumes want their book to be successful and attract attention. And I obviously can’t bring any value to a volume with the name of my university. To be honest, the university’s name actually detracts from the prestige of the volume. So I need to compensate for the lackluster university name with the quality of my work.
This makes me very happy.
Clarissa's Blog 
Congratulations! But please, do not enter into that fame and prestige game. Real academics judge the quality of your work, not the ‘quality’ of your affiliation.
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I don’t care about prestige. Fame, however, is a whole different thing. 🙂
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How about infamy?
The “notorious” Clarissa has a lovely ring to it. 🙂
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OK, what have you heard? I thought that chapter of my life was gone from human memory. 🙂
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Ah, so you are already infamous.
Mission accomplished! 🙂
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An academic star is born!
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I’ve known the school since the third building was under construction back in the 1960s. My mother arrived when the school was new, never left, and shrank into the space. (We have different last names so that won’t help anyone else.) The school suffered several decade-long droughts in funding and salary increases. (She chaired her department, ran several committees and still went something like 16 years without a raise.) The financial problems aren’t due to this governor; they’re attributable to being too far from the only city in the state that counts and the only state campus that counts.
Back then, there were movies around like Peyton Place and Days of Wine and Roses; while good, some of the faculty used them as role models with frequently pathetic results.
I saw one promising young faculty member who worked on the JFK election campaign and who bunked at the Kennedy compound in Hyannas morph into something unrecognizable. My favorites were a couple in your department who had escaped Nazi Germany, now long passed. Crossing the Rhine in the dark. Great people.
This is an interesting waypoint on your journey, but it’s not your destiny. The schools able to support good work are tier 1/2 private universities as well as primary state campuses.
I’m not a name snob. You want a decent income, support for your work. You shouldn’t have to compensate for the school’s reputation. You would be an asset anywhere.
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This is a great story, Vic Crain, thank you!
I just find it sad that this university doesn’t understand that sending me to speak at Oxford is great exposure for a very modest sum of money. This is something you can’t buy because I make a very good impression at conferences. And the university just doesn’t get it. So I’m annoyed. I love this place but I need to have my needs met.
I also don’t want to be teaching 3/3, let alone the 4/4 we are being threatened with.
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That threat has been there forever. The school has never had political clout; the other end of the state values education. It’s not necessarily worse than in the past, there’s just no realistic chance for improvement. Never has been. The votes and the money are up north.
Nor does the school have a “sugar daddy” alum to bless it with money.
When I saw it the first time, it was a handful of buildings on a small hilltop surrounded by a ring of parking areas and then pastures — remote and rural and beautiful. It’s not what it was and those times as tough as they could be aren’t coming back. Sad.
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