In a paper I was reading last night, the author made reference to the article forming the basis for a much longer book-length work. The essay appeared in 1990. Eighteen years later, the book has not yet appeared. I decided to email the author and enquire about the work – did it stall? is it still in progress? did it morph into another project? did I just miss reference to the book? So, I set out to find the author’s email address only to discover that the author does not do their own correspondence – at least initially. The contact address is to a departmental administrator who also acts as a personal secretary to the author. I’ve never hesitated to email others before, but having to go through a secretary feels a bit strange. In Canada, at least, it is extremely rare for academics to have secretaries (perhaps more common in business, law and medical schools than in academic departments). Often research centers have administrative staff of some sort who will handle correspondence, but I’ve never come across an academic in Canada who has a personal secretary. Is this common in the US? Not publicizing your email address on account of being a celebrity is one thing, but having a secretary vet your correspondence seems like another!
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This is the personal website of Craig McFarlane, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Sociology at York University, Toronto and a lecturer in the Department of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa. I also contribute to The Inhumanities.
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3 Comments
The biggest academic celebrity I’ve worked with, Stanley Hauerwas, has his own secretary who handles his email. But that’s because SH still types on a computer that looks something like a commodore and probably has no idea how to do it himself. His email address is listed on the duke div website and you might never know that the secretary is involved. The old secretary was quite the colorful character, the kind of older eccentric you might run into at an anti-war rally, writes letters to the editor all the time …
The new one is a much younger woman who was in the same masters class as I was. She is quite striking and both my room mate and I (both single at the time) were quite interested until we found out before classes even started that she was married. And then realized that she was married to the drummer from a gospel rock band that had recently had two or three hits that had made it big on regular old radio.
Many big name scholars in the US do not have secretaries, or at least not the ones I am aware of. Maybe the big shots at Princeton, Harvard, Chicago, etc. do, though.
I know one big-name scholar who has a secretary (or PA, as I think she’d be more accurately called). But you wouldn’t necessarily know it: you write to his email address and it may seem to be him replying, but in fact the PA constantly ventriloquizes his voice. It can be quite disturbing, and you don’t always know if she’s consulted him before she replies in his name. Sometimes I think she believes she *is* him…
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