I got an award for being a pioneer yesterday from my faculty in Manchester. I feel a bit embarrassed because I tend to scoff at this kind of thing. But being on the receiving end of warm words by one's colleagues is a different experience and very meaningful. And these are colleagues who are dear friends. Increasingly I find my professional satisfaction comes from the immediate collegiality of the university, the department and my students. This constrasts with what we are told about academic achievement - the papers, projects, money, etc. Collegial support beats that hands-down in my view. The papers, projects, money tends to be bureaucratic, divorced from students, and often rather selfish.
Of course being curious, thinking and reading are fundamental to any academic life. But the slightly shocking fact is that publishing and projects are strange kinds of game which should reflect curiosity and originality, but tend not to. There is an enormous amount of path dependence and groupthink in the system which pushes originality away. REF is partly to blame. What are we to do? Well, what we can do is to "pass the message on" - and that is what the collegial thing is really about. It's particularly powerful if we can pass the message on to our students - by changing their lives, the world is changed. By changing the thinking of colleagues new possibilities for collective organisation are created.
Strangely, these intangible things are hard to measure - but it can be done, and I am deeply grateful to be the subject of some kind of intangible measurement. We should probably concentrate on doing more of this, and far less in the nonsense metrics of citations!
