Thursday, January 09, 2014

A spoonful of kindness makes the snarkiness go down

I love College Misery, the dysfunctional group blog that allows--yea, encourages whining and griping about every little thing that's wrong with academe, but today I'm enjoying its opposite: Academic Kindness, which offers contributors an opportunity to provide a "record of unsolicited kindness, unexpected goodwill, and excessive generosity in academia."

Excessive generosity? In ACADEMIA? What are they smoking?

But wait: I've seen plenty of generosity in academia, and I've been on the receiving end of generosity that at the time may have seemed ordinary but that others might view as excessive--and not just when I was in the throes of cancer treatment. Just this week I received a surprisingly laudatory note from a colleague, edited photos I took with a lens that was a gift from a class of students, and was offered an unexpected opportunity to contribute an essay to a collection. If there are other motivations besides kindness lurking behind these boons, I don't want to know about it.

I won't give up College Misery because sometimes I need that little dose of snark, but today I'm grateful to be reminded of the unexpected acts of kindness that make my job possible. If I read both blogs, will they cancel each other out or will they react like matter and antimatter? There's only one way to find out.     

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