Yesterday was the first year anniversary of D&I. But I could not bring myself to celebrate or boast. Yet, it is vital that, especially in times of terror and masses calling for action, to keep participating in, and support, the arts, including cartoonists (yes!), philosophy, science, medicine, and all the other activities that ennoble and nurture the world and make life worth living!* And, because I want to cheer myself up, this post is a description about a professional activity that I very much enjoy.
I love attending and participating in a Fest. A Fest is a celebration of another's academic career. (It is not the only way such a career can be honored and celebrated.) Often it is held to mark a particular advanced birthday (65, 75, etc.) or a significant professional milestone (i.e., retirement). The first Fest I witnessed, I think, was around 1994 or 1995 in honor of Hugo Bedau at Tufts with lectures by Thomas Nagel, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and Jeffrey Reiman. (Maybe there were more speakers.) In reflecting on my dim memories of the event the least famous one of the lot, Reiman, stole the show (without overshadowing the Fested), in part, by talking at length about Bedau's work and also by the (jazzy) humor of his delivery.
The participants show their respect (admiration, friendship, debt, etc.) by committing their time and energy to honor the celebrated person. How they do so can reveal subtle distinctions of status as well as how they perceive their own relationship (friend, former mentor, star witness, etc.) to the person celebrated. So, sometimes the paper presented at a Fest has only tangential and tenuous connection to the life and work of the celebrated person. (Sometimes the connection, if any, is only visible to a few.) Thus, the paper can be no different in character than any other paper; this is often also a necessity--modern successful academics are often too busy and over-committed to simply start projects afresh that are wholly occasion pieces. But as my remark on my memory of Reiman at Bedau's Fest suggests, I get greater joy out of Fest-papers that engage with the work of the person Fested, although I do not deny that this is a bit irrational: it may entail missing out on path-breaking work. (I return to this below.)
But one need not present a paper; just showing up can do the job. Moreover, other performances at a Fest may also : the papers and Q&As at the Howard Stein-Fest (many collected in Reading Natural Philosophy (Malament, editor) were really impressive, but so were the musical performances by Nancy Nersessian and Geoffrey Hellman.
Leaving aside practical constraints (money, time) on who can be invited, the invited participants of a Fest honor the celebrated person by their presence. This (being so invited) entails a judgment on the quality of their work and, perhaps, professional status or celebrity. So, the Fest is an occasion to honor not just the career or person, but also confers honor on those invited, who in turn honor (etc.). There are tricky status-issues in the vicinity here, especially in light of the fragility of academic egos. Not unlike a wedding, there are also questions about the extent of the academic family (students, teachers, colleagues, etc.) to be invited. Be that as it may, the celebration entails a (often privileged) circle of honor that, if all this honor is worthy, indirectly honors the discipline and the ends (truth, justice, beauty, etc.) to which our activities at their best are dedicated. So, while I have no desire to crash weddings, I wouldn't mind crashing Fests regularly.
As I have hinted like a refrain so far, a Fest is also a chance to measure a person's achievement. In fact, other than the academic job-interview, it is just about the only time in one's career that one might expect one's work to be taken seriously by others. (Yes, there are author-meets-critics sessions, and we all know some folk whose work gets devoted academic attention along the way.) While I do not wish to relive the experience of having to look for an academic job, I found that many of the best questions I ever received on my work were during job-interviews a decade ago. (I can't say that I produced my best work between 2001-2005.) I have no doubt that the repeated intense scrutiny of my writing sample (and job-talks) eventually made me change some of my official positions (e.g., the switch from Hume the Newtonian to Hume the sometimes anti-Newtonian). From that vantage point, it's sad to have to wait until the (relative) twilight of one's academic career to receive some such scrutiny, if at all. This sounds sad (or pathetic), perhaps, but it is also a great incentive to be worthy of some such honor one day.
*I thank Anna Alexandrova for facebook discussion.
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