Academic travels: Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig

As I continued my travels last weeks around Germany, I had a short stop to Leipzig (more about the university in a separate post), I also passed around the Saxonian Academy of Sciences in Leipzig. The academic network in Germany is decentralized and each 'Land' has its own academia. 

Initially created as the Royal Saxonian Society for the Sciences and Humanities in 1846, the academy has over 200 members. In order to be elected, they should be located in Saxony, Saxony Anhalt or Thuringia. The majority of the projects developed by the Academy are mostly focused on humanities, but there are also some about natural sciences and engineering. 

One of the main activity is the compilation of scientific dictionaries and an impressive collection was started with the creation of the Academy. Another strong point of interest are the history and regional studies, especially Saxony history and medieval legal history. Short term projects were recently introduced as well, covering the impact of technology on daily life and various technical-related issues about the Internet challenges for the academic world. 

Evernote for academics

Yesterday evening, I attended a very good workshop in Berlin about basic and advanced features of Evernote. I started to use it a while ago, but without continuity and as my projects diversify - especially the blogging ones - I felt the need to find out a good alternative to a multiplicity of files, dossiers, hand written notes and notebooks. 

I will refer here strictly to the the offer for the academic projects, as I intend to write a detailed description of the lessons learned of the workshop on my PR and communication blog later in the day. 

Evernote is available in three versions: free, business (5Euro/month) and premium (10 Euro/month). Its keyword is 'organization' as it mostly allows to set up your files around various tags. For the business and premium versions, extended collaborative features are available, allowing the possibility to share and work a file as part of a larger team. For the academics, it can be a relevant option for peer-reviews and multi-authors articles.

In case that you are looking for specific materials in your archives, the 'search' option make possible to find out what you are looking for browsing not only .word docs, but also PDFs and Excel among others. Another good option that I intend to use frequently is that allowing to save articles of interest for a later lecture. Right now, I do have a long list of bookmarked items on my computer, but it goes very slowly and very often I have no idea what I saved. With the help of the tag, Evernote makes possible a better management of the material. The texts can not only be saved, but also annotated, and it suits academics very well. The Skitch app, that can be downloaded from Evernote's website, gives even more options of editing and annotation of pictures.

Further on, the files can be organized up to their priority status, around a large array of tags, describing both the priority status as well as the main topics covered. The latter may be very helpful when one needs to search for specific terms later on.

Another app allows the photographic transfer of hand written notes. From an academic perspective, this can work not only for the scribbles notes in the library, but also for documents necessary for the historical analysis that can be automatically scanned and saved for later. I know some people that will be more than happy to find out that such an option exists, as an alternative to hand writing documents. The document saved like this can be annotated. The integration of the document may last more than usual, 15-20 minutes. 

I am always interested to save as much time as possible and the yesterday presentation outlined a couple of advantages for time management freaks like me: once you are part of a team, one can set up deadline calls and automatic updates of the status. Thus, you should not spend hours sending e-mails and asking everyone what's going on and waiting for answers. Everything can be done with one click. 

As for the e-mails, those unanswered can be saved in a special file, tracking their status. No more worries that you forgot something, it seems that Evernote can do a lot of work for you now. 

With so much work to manage I most probably transfer now part of my files on Evernote, because even for academics, times can really be money. 

Academic book review: The lost world of Rhodes, by Nathan Shachar

There is a special fascination of the South-Eastern European areas, often praised as paradises and melting pots of multicultural worlds and at the first layer view the things are always so: where else can you find such a wide diversity of cultures, languages and histories, all brought together in the same pot? On the other hand, the multiculturalism is rather the consequence of various policies and historical occurrences, political abuses and accidents of all sorts.

The lost worlds of Rhodes is from this point of view an interesting read. Constructed with the acribic fervour of the historian and with the final touch of the curious journalist, it succeed to bring back to life an unknown world of ethnic identities and diversities, mostly centered around the fate - tragic, as always - of the Jewish communities. 

Literary fantasies and raw realities

The book reviews mostly the last two centuries, but with a long view on the variety of historical traces left by different empires and reigns. The fascination with the Mediterranean spaces is long and will hardly cease to exist, but through the literature, mostly travel books, it created a certain parallel world, not necessarily fit to the immediate reality: 'their penchant for regarding the most quotidian phenomena as echoes and reflections of eternal Attic, Etruscan and Minoic harmonies, bred a seductive illusion of a Mediterranean firmly moulded to its glorious past; of a world when the gestures, habits and arts of present-day farmers, water carriers and politicians were taken straight from a schoolboy lexicon of mythical, architectural and poetic references. Such a mindset may become quite a drag of understanding, once you start to wonder about how these societies now spread out over the classical map really function'. (pp.6-7) 

The big sin of many literary descriptions is the avoidance of everything that must trouble the beautiful aesthetic balance - 'there are times when the studied avoidance of brute realities becomes bad taste' (p.7). One example given by the author is Durrell who avoided to mention anything about the Jewish heritage because, he assumes 'it would have ruined the setting for his light hearted aquarello musings' (p. 8)

Under the cultures

France has written a long 'love story' with the minorities from the South-Eastern part of Europe, especially with the Jewish communities. Through Alliance Israelite Universelle, the young Jews were learned not only a language, but also a mental system that intermediate the transfer of modern ideas about citizenship and secularism. Many Jews will be tempted and will either abandon their cultures, mostly moulded after the Sephardi society patterns, or Rhodes altogether, looking for a wider horizon outside. The Zionist ideas did not enter this world before WWI, except Bulgarian and Salonika. However, it seems that the French influences were rather superficial when it was about real support for the French policies and this is mostly available when we think about the failed colonial policies in North of Africa where Paris left almost intact educational systems and the hope of the French citizenship, but without a real 'patriotic' attachment to the political France. 

Regardless of the historical circumstances, the Sephardi world of Rhodes, created following the expulsion from Spain in 1492, indicated serious convulsions and predicted geopolitical resettlements. 

And then, there were the Italians and the Germans coming up, that put an end to the diversity through cultural assimilation and racial policies. 

Although a Holocaust memorial of the old Juderia (the Jewish quarter) was inaugurated in the summer of 2002, the full history of the Jewish community in Rhodes is still to be written. The coming of nearly 10,000 Germans brought the murder of 1,769 Jews. Some of them already left, for Latin America, USA, Africa - in Congo, for instance, they contributed to the consolidation of the state - or Israel. Only 160 survived and most of them left the country shortly after. At a certain point, I was expecting more about the fate of Sephardi Jews in Rhodes, maybe a dedicated full chapter.

Layers of memory

What is interesting from the point of view of the methodology is the mix between journalistic tools and investigations and numerous personal observations following visits on place, and the historical references. It seems to be the best recommendation for reading correctly the different memory layers of the coexistence: 'Each location had its very own background noise of recent and distant memories, suspicions and passions, its own parochial blend of prejudice and tolerance, reason and unreason'. (p. 184)

The travel memoir and historical scholarly observations alternate, but not always the dosage is the right one which might make the reader confused between subjective assumptions and doct references. But this confusion can be the result of the profile of the place as such: 'Inter-ethnic routines in multifaceted cultural settings are always less clear-cut than the categories of social history will reveal'. (p. 185)

The methodological choice is interesting and looks as the only available option, but can be dangerous for the exquisiteness of the historical discourse. Valuable is the repertoire of personal interviews made with former inhabitants of the Juderia, nowadays spread from all over the world. 

Despite some ups and downs, the books is an interesting read for the Jewish historian and the historian interested in the modern history of South-Eastern Europe, as well as in minority issues. 

For me, it created an interest for further investigations of the topic and the book has a long list of bibliographical recommendations that will help me further.

Mental health in academia

I am not necessarily qualified to muse about academic life, but the long-term friendships and my never ending curiosity about intellectual life, often brought me in the vicinity of stories that might involve a drop of mental health. How much mental illness is part of the daily academic life all over the world might probably the topic of a big book dealing not only the statistics and social-economic information, but also the ways in which the 'normal' outside world is seeing the 'intellectual', most often as a strange, unusual, at the limit mentally ill person.

There are a lot of reasons mentioned usually as the cause of the overall alienation of academics: social pressure, the academic pressure towards productivity, sometimes the scarcity of funds or the anxiety of waiting for new sources of incomes, the lack of proper jobs and the high competitiveness of an oversaturated market. The 'illness' that can include various degrees of depression, anxiety, sleep issues and also various addictions, from alcoholism to drugs, is part of a repertoire that I assume there were always around the corner of universities. And I am relying upon not only various literary descriptions, but also various inside stories I kept hearing about academics of all colours since my early years of life. 'Date but not marry an academic' - an advise that sounds so painful when refers to women - is a kind of course that says a lot about how academics can be sometimes perceived in various societies, including in our so-called highly developed Western world. 

Is mental health a real problem in academia?

So, is mental health a real problem after all? Of course it is, and it is very important to discuss about it and find proper networks of support. Although I am a big lover of science and medicine, I am not always sure that therapy is a cure-all. Obviously the qualified help is very important when it comes to dealing with serious mental disorders - how to define them is another issue that has to do with the social perception of different maladies - but it is not enough to help, as long as the academic is going back to the same environment and unsolved problems - among others, how to pay a huge debt and how to find a good decently paid job, while trying to have a minimal social interaction. 

What I think it creates a lot of opportunities for the long-term installation of mental problems is the solitude. Intellectual work is supposed to be done alone, and the many hours spent documenting your articles request almost perfect solitude. The tight deadlines, the crazy schedule of conferences and the long hours of teaching and counselling rarely leave too much time for a normal family or relationships. The academic friendships can be problematic, as long as everyone is focused on his/her own work and competitiveness oblige, there is always a need of privacy and secrecy about what we read and write. 

Life and social challenges

As for the family, maybe they are too far away, maybe we consider ourselves too sophisticated to enjoy their simple and not intellectually challenging company. We assume that we are always in the right company, with our very interesting academic peers, but once the discussion is over, everyone is going home and not many will have too much intuition to call you when you feel sick or lonely.

Maybe such considerations put me in expectation around the real academic circle and always in between worlds. But there is always something more than that. There is something wrong with the intellectual models publicized via academic institutions and works and this should maybe explain some of the failures of intellectual involvement in the 'real life'. The sooner we open the floor to a honest discussion about such issues, the better for the sake of our academic and social sanity.  

I (finally) published my PhD paper. Now what?

Exactly 3 years ago, I was still sleeping trying to get the best mood for the PhD exam the next day. It was the achievement of around 6 full years of study, with many ups and downs, without ever considering giving up. I did start my doctoral studies as part-time, while working in a non-academic domain, but relatively connected - at least for a while - with what I was studying, while exploring my identity, taking care of a family and traveling intensively.

My PhD topic, the intellectual histories and minority relations in Central and Eastern Europe fascinated me for a long time and I felt that I should keep write about it, despite the scarcity of time, the lack of proper academic resources and the indifference of some academic representatives I went in touch with during my study. I am still fascinated by it and I am ready in one year time to produce an updated and even more interesting English version of my thesis.

Due to the permanently changing circumstances of my life, the last three years did not have too much academic focus, and with the exception of a couple of book reviews, I did not 'produced' anything new or interesting in my beloved domain of study. But, on the other hand, I think that this time was wisely used for improving the knowledge of some international languages that might help me to have access to various original publications, as well as to a different readership. I also had enough time to improve my style and get in touch with realities I was not too familiar with during my long years of study.

Time for a new academic life

On the other hand, I did not change my mind considering my limited interest for a classical academic career and I still think that bureaucracy kills the creativity and bothers the academic. I am not keen to apply for an academic position and not ready to practice intensively academic tourism. I rather prefer to use my time for reading more academic article or to get enough money for supporting my travel tips or the expensive studies that I prefer to read at home than at the library. 

As usual, I keep the track of my book projects and I will not give up any of them - including the fiction books that require for a good time already to be given free ticket to the literary life. From now on, with my PhD published, I know I will enter a completely new stage in my intellectual and academic life. Despite my limited satisfaction with the final form and the results, the 400+ pages of the thesis are my work and deserve to be published. My hesitations from the last years about publishing it blocked at a great extent my further researches. I was always thinking that I cannot start writing to a new project as long as my biggest one is resting hidden in a folder on my computer. 

After so many reading and self-editing, I knew that it was too late to change anything. Even if I would read the draft over 100 times, I am sure there will be always something to change. Once it is published, all I have to think about is how to improve my research skills and how to find out more interesting topics to cover. 

That's all. After 3 years, I'm done. 

Time for a new academic refresh. As for my new projects, at least for the next months, all of them will be in English and I will intensively cover on my blog and social media.

Academic Boycott has nothing to do with academia

It took me some time to write about this, even though I could hardly control myself not to do it. In a very radical way, I was able to describe and diagnose the entire situation in only a couple of words, but I wanted to wait a little bit more for recording more than my own impressions.

The facts

On 15 December 2013, the American Studies Association (ASA) voted the boycott of Israeli academic institutions. The decision, that is only symbolic, as there is no possible to compel the members to follow it, was endorsed by the largest number of participants in the history of the organization.  

In its guidelines, the members are encouraged to get involved in supporting resolutions against the state of Israel - apparently, not too much time for research and publishing books or articles for those academics - to promote the isolation of Israeli academic institutions and to boycott their funding and to refrain from participation in joint projects with academic institutions from the state of Israel. It might not affect directly the collaboration with individual Israeli academics, but as usual - not only in the US - those critical against the state of Israel - with a strong self-hate component - will be always welcomed open arms. 

ASA is the largest US academic organization to support anti-Israel boycott. The vote was supported by two thirds of the members. Almost the entire Ivy Leagues is part of the declaration.

One of the references ASA relies upon is the notorious anti-Semite Richard Falk, UN Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories that even the Palestinian Authority rejects due to his not less notorious biased reporting in favour of Hamas. 'Qui s'assemble se ressemble', isn't it? 

As for the strength of the ASA and the relevance of its activities, most probably the 'boycott' issue is their chance to get more visibility and importance. It publishes the American Quarterly.

The reactions

On 20 December, the Association of American Universities (AAU) issued a public statement according to which: "Academic Freedom is the freedom of university faculty responsible to produce and disseminate knowledge through research, teaching and service, without undue constraint. It is a principle that should not be abridged by political considerations. American colleges and universities, as well as likes institutions elsewhere must stand as the first line of defence against attacks on academic freedom". 

Leon Wieseltier called the ASA appeal a 'travesty of academic freedom'. The Palestinian issue is 'a political problem that requires a political solution', he reminded. 

Ronald Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress said: 'This vote to boycott Israel, one of the most democratic and academically free nations of the globe shows the Orwellian anti-Semitism and moral bankruptcy of the American Studies Association'. 

On December 31, Robert Sugarman and Malcolm Hoenlein, the chairman and executive vice-chairman of the Conference of President of Major American Jewish Organizations, said in a declaration: 'This is now a clarion call to reject the BDS movement, and assure thjat American campuses are not subverted for extremist political ends'.  

The latest news is that around 90 universities rejected the boycott, among them Penn State Harrisburg, Indiana University, Kenyon College, and Brandeis. 

Recent histories of boycotts

Most of such 'calls for boycott' are moulded according to the Boycott Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement. 

At the beginning of 2009, in the wake of the Operation Cast Lead in Gaza it was launched the US the Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. It has 963 faculty members across the United States. Five years before that, in 2004, it became active the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, having the same aim. Why so many organizations that - no wonder - have almost the same membership and messages? Because the more high the number the more convincing their 'messages' for the public.  

Early 2013, the Association for Asian American Studies appealed for a similar move.

On December 15, the Native American Studies Association called for a similar decision. In January, it is expected a similar announcement from the Modern Language Association.

The conclusion

The BDS movement has quite an efficient PR machine, trying to use any opportunity to get more popularity and who is playing a lot of dirty games, especially in the field of academia. Let's say it openly: I bet that many of the people considered as 'supporters' not even have the slightest idea about the Middle East. Mancur Olson has an interest theory regarding group solidarity, according to which, only a limited number of members are actually active in emergency/limit-situation (such as strikes) the rest being rather trend followers. But this is not an excuse, and many of the academics that enrolled in the Nazi party were explaining in a similar way their presence on behalf of the murderers. 

The US academia has a problematic bias regarding the so-called 'Middle Eastern studies' and chairs and the subsequent academic reports issued. Important contributors from the Gulf Area are supporting generously the chairs and thus, the political and even religious neutrality is highly problematic, although not very often outlined publicly. 

Did that ASA and other anonymous organizations and their even more anonymous members write anything valuable about the real dangers of human rights and academic freedom in Iran, Russia, North Korea, Belarus or Latin American countries. Never heard about. Did they ever launched at least a funding campaign on behalf of the libraries affected by the ongoing massacre in Syria or supporting the intellectuals under threat in Yemen? I doubt. 

Sources:
http://www.timesofisrael.com/top-us-academic-association-decries-israel-boycott/
https://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=14859
http://www.jewcy.com/news/atleast-90-universities-reject-the-asas-boycott
http://www.jta.org/2014/01/02/news-opinion/united-states/dozens-of-u-s-university-heads-have-slammed-asa-boycott-of-israel-presidents-conf-says
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115961/american-studies-association-boycott-israel-travesty
http://www.usacbi.org/guidelines-for-applying-the-international-cultural-boycott-of-israel/

Being an academic while working

Here we are again! No, I didn't mean at the beginning of the year, as I usually don't count my life from a January to another. It means that the beginning of the new working season brings a lot of challenges for my already fragile academic life. 

Since I left high-school and started the university, I cope over and over again with the same problem: the balance between my long hours of work and the need to catch up with my academic interests. Even though I followed the à la carte academic menu, I didn't give up my freedom for a full time career in the academia, as what interests me the most now and in the future is to write, not to teach. I may consider this option soon as well, but for the moment, the need to do proper research and finish a couple of very interesting projects started a couple of months and even years ago is my main priority.

My morning enthusiasm to have everything done in due time was significantly diminished when shortly after I finish my first coffee I realized that I also need to do some non-academic chores, for being able to pay my freedom of writing and doing research. 

As I didn't reach yet the impressive level of being able to self-sustain my daily needs only from my books and academic achievements, I still need to keep some projects that eat a lot of time and without a drop of high-thinking in them, but serious enough and financially important to secure 4-5 days the month when I don't need to do anything else but focus on my writing, or allowing me to buy online the books that I cannot read at the library.

It is a schizophrenic reality but not so dramatically demanding for not giving me the hope that I should continue one more year, or maybe two. Today, for instance, I continue the research for my next book, while I stop every 30 minutes to check if new freelance gigs are available on my online platforms. This will continue tomorrow too. But there is always a price for a free life and I am ready to wait a little bit longer till, finally, I can enjoy the luxury of being nothing else but an academic. Meanwhile, I know that it's all for the good and trying to get the best of my experiences.

Happy academic life everyone!