I was forwarded an article recently from Inside Higher Ed on the need for a Humanities counterpart to the lab environments in the sciences. In an even more recent column, Donald E. Hall suggests that it is the job of endowed chairs to foster these kinds of environments in sites like faculty working groups, designed as regular meetings to discuss pedagogy, workshop research, and generally build intelelctual cohesion.

Well, Hall is an endowed chair in my department, and I have been more than eager to join in the fun. As a member of our Faculty Research Group (FRG), I have been both humbled and invigorated by the opportunity to read and respond to the work of full professors, endowed chairs, and fellow assistant profs.

Shoe's on the other foot today, though. One of the two pieces we'll be workshopping is a piece of mine that has been through the revise-and-resubmit wheel one too many times. It's a smart piece, I think, but it suffers from 1) being an idea that is no longer terribly fresh in my mind, and 2) having had too many cooks in the form of various benevolent, and not so benevolent readers.

Right now it feels like a mish-mash, and it's entirely possible that today's workshop will only add to the too-many-cooks phenomenon. But the greater anxiety is that, as a first-year faculty member on the tenure track, this feels like something of a test, and the choice not to submit something more polished that requires little revision, but might be more impressive feels like a risk.

Add to this the fact that at least two of my colleagues in this group are potential mentors for both my career and my work, and this feels dangerous.

Of course it will be fine; the theory isn't completely flawed, and these are generous folk, but it's the first time since the job talk that anyone's gotten much of a chance to look at my work.