PZ Myers. 2004 Sep 06. Academic parties. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/academic_parties/>. Accessed 2008 Dec 01.

Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Monday, September 06, 2004

Academic parties

In my career, I've wandered through a handful of universities for varying lengths of time, and one of the indicators of the health of the place is the faculty social event. All the academics out there know what I'm talking about: in some places social interactions between the faculty are rigidly formal, and the academic hierarchy is preserved and codified in the kinds of conversations that go on. In others, the departmental party is full of whispers and maneuvering and backstabbing. One university I attended had mostly pleasant relationships between its members, but the faculty were scattered all over a couple of states with horrendously high traffic density, so social events were almost nonexistent, and I left knowing most of my colleagues scarcely at all outside of a professional context.

UMM is at the other extreme. We have a university-wide floating party at someone's house every week. And they tend to be well attended, go on for hours, and are generally loads of fun. Maybe it's just our relative isolation that forces us to rely on each other a bit more, but UMM is a fairly amazing community, in the strongest sense of that word.

It's not just the regular weekly events, either—there are other affairs that go on more infrequently. We spent yesterday up at a colleague's lake cabin, with a mob of UMM families, for instance, a yearly event. Nothing makes an academic party more humane and pleasant and fun than a beautiful, quiet lake and turning everyone who wants one loose on the dock and the boat with a fishing pole. That's the cure for the stereotypical stilted, gossipy university event: More Fishing.

And look, here's our young Italian houseguest, Rossella, catching her first American fish!

1. While no campus I have been at has ever had weekly parties (I'm envious), one of my fondest teaching assignments was an intro course where a bunch of the faculty teaching it would go out every other Friday to a local bar and chat it up.
   #: Posted by Radagast  on  09/06  at  04:57 PM
2. They'd chat up the entire bar? That must have improved relations with the locals.
   #: Posted by Andrew Brown  on  09/07  at  01:50 AM