A few times each week, I get cool notices from Open Education Resource networks in Academia that someone very far away, from a completely different culture, has read a small piece of my social science labor...and has hopefully found it useful. As a scientist long interested in how teams can live and work together in extreme environments (like space) to do really complicated cooperative things (like rocket science or medicine), I take great joy in adding to academia. Not the ivory tower or professorial status of it that you're likely imagining since I said the word "academia" though.
Instead, my joy is the "academia" the dictionaries define as "the environment or community concerned with the pursuit of research, education, and scholarship." The harder-than-rocket-science-or-even-neurosurgery heroics of cooperatively building a community in pursuit of information about things that are difficult to learn (let alone humanly know).
There is no money in it. Rarely any fame. And contrary to what social media might tell you, there is no status in the academic ivory tower either. In reality, there is often ill-status even. Friends and family (and sometimes political parties too) dub me or my efforts by derogatory terms: egghead, boffin, out of touch, armchair expert, head in the clouds, ivory tower buffoon, sheltered, high-brow etc. Some terms are better descriptors than others. Yes, my head is often in the clouds, in space sweating with international teams of astronauts figuring out how to survive critical challenges in the harshest conditions known to humankind in fact. Yet, I'm never in that Ivory Tower. What I learn academically goes into immediate real word application, supporting the day-to-day work of teams of healthcare providers trying to save babies and in the team I was born into too, my family.
Why has academia become a bad word? Why is cooperating to build an applicable community of knowledge a bad thing to so many people now? Why is it made over to be a cold, detached devil in several cultures today?
I don't have answers to these questions, but I do know that I still derive great joy from knowing that others somewhere on this great spaceship we call Earth (that contains all of us) are using what I've learned to help us learn even more yet. Sure, rocket science is great. Awesome even. It's more than rocket science though...it's the even more difficult and beautiful cooperative seeking of understanding and building of knowledge. When the rockets are ancient history and no longer great technological marvels, the mass coordinated act of academia will still be a miracle.
