The Scholarly Affair is Self-Love

An anecdote: I was at a faculty in-service to discuss supervision practices. This was shortly after our dean’s email insisting that all such faculty functions were now obligatory, which followed the email stipulating that academics were no longer to work from home. The in-service involved splitting into discipline-defined small groups, discussing various issues and then reassembling as a collective to share with others the ideas garnered in discussion. As per usual, each group selected an individual to take notes and then deliver a summary to the collective. I have to say that I detest this method of collaboration; the reporter invariably ignores extreme
or conflicting opinions, on the grounds that they are not representative, and focuses instead on those banal commonalities that all agree upon. It is a sham parliament. Yet this time there was a perceptible difference. The reporters were not just offering commonplaces. They were doing that, of course, but they were also at pains to insist that their groups had done all they had been asked to do. They had been good.