Cliff Lampe on the joy of academic service, faculty meetings & peer networks

Jan 20, 2017

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Cliff Lampe is an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. He also plays numerous key service roles in the HCI and CSCW peer communities. He talks about faculty meetings and peer service being joyful, the importance of social capital and relationships, how he decides what to say yes/no to, how he manages his work. He also talks about concerns around the production of busyness, the push for quantity not quality, and the increasing community burden of peer review. He challenges to think about new models and to play our role in making academia work. If nothing else, he will change the way you think about faculty meetings and peer service.

“Academia runs on social networks and relationship development is something we spend not enough time training PhD students to do”

“Academia requires a rich heterogeneous set of people to make it work and we can all play different roles”

He talks about (times approximate) …

01:45 On being a Michigan boy… building a career in Michigan

04:44 On being willing to work hard and having 80 different jobs

06:38 On work being its own reward… being joyful … and loving faculty meetings

09:51 Being a better participant in meetings by attending to what is being talked about

11:00 Experiences in coming back to Michigan as a faculty member after having been a student there

15:00 Being a bad grad student by only having one paper published but being good at knowing what makes an interesting research problem

18:00 His first faculty job, what was challenging eg re-establishing work-life-balance in a different way, and what clicked eg building relationships

21:34 Social capital building and reciprocity in academia

23:20 Taking network building out of the shadows – Phil Agre’s paper ‘Networking the network’

24:42 Mentors, Judy Olson, and the generosity of senior researchers

27:10 Paying it forward with his research group, advisees

28:38 Various peer service roles

30:10 Always being dedicated to service – “if you can do something you should do it”, loving the service work

33:00 How he decides what to say yes to – and saying no to things that he thinks he won’t particularly add to or if someone else can do a better job or if he’s just not interested – working to his strengths

35:32 How he fits it all in, being unwilling to rob time from his wife and son, and his practical strategies

38:02 High commitment to teaching as well, doing client-based classes, and his service learning perspective – the intersection of teaching and research and service being compelling

40:38 Practical strategies for managing the work, differentiating between managerial work and creative work, setting up bundles of like work in the same day, delegating and letting go

44:08 The importance of humour, not taking anything too seriously, having a strong capacity to let things go – “if you project positivity everything becomes more positive; we can choose how we react to things”

48:12 The problem of the “production of busyness” and the “cult of being overwhelmed”, and wanting us to slow down - artisanal craft research - where we take our time, and appreciate the heterogeneity of different types of research, the willingness to listen to each other

51:38 Also concerned about the burden of review and service load for volunteers; the continuous amping up of expectations re numbers of publications that is going to break the community or degrade its quality - thinking through options to make this more sustainable

54:40 Over the next 5 years we need to fundamentally re-think how we disseminate our work

55:44 What a good academic life will be, what sort of senior professor he wants to be

58:02 Encouraging everyone to get involved in service and to choose how we think about service – academia requires a rich heterogeneous set of people to make it work and we can all play different roles

1:00:27 End

Phil Agre’s article on Networking the Network: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~ksheth/astr8500/networking_the_network.pdf

Cliff and others serving SIGCHI: http://www.sigchi.org/people/officers

Cliff's article on Citizen Interaction Design: https://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/november-december-2016/citizen-interaction-design