Arnold Zwicky's Blog

As regular readers will have noticed, things have not been good for me in recent days — physically just hanging on, barely getting through the days; spirits so low I’m almost frozen in discouragement. Many things have no doubt contributed to the fix I’m in, but one part of the story has to do with the late-career recognitions that sum up the accomplishments of the most significant academics: publication of their collected works; a Festschrift from colleagues and students celebrating the influence of their works; honorary degrees; and prizes or awards. I travel in circles where such recognitions are common, but never expected to get them myself: I have genuine talents, with teaching and research ranging over a huge array of topics, and I can pull off an engaging style of presentation, but my achievements are modest.

I’ve had plenty of career recognitions  — a University Professorship at Ohio State; election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the presidency of my learned society, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA); the Sapir Professorship at an LSA Linguistic Institute; an assortment of  grants and fellowships — but these are, as a Stanford dean once explained to me, more than a little haughtily, in what I think of as Harvard Talk — merely what Stanford expects of its faculty members, nothing at all special.

And then, astoundingly, I got a late-career recognition: not an award, But an award named after me, which I’ve bubbled on about on this blog for three years now. The LSA’s brief description of this award:

The Zwicky Award recognizes LGBTQ+ linguists who have made significant contributions to the discipline, the society, or the wider LGBTQ+ community through scholarship, outreach, service, and/or teaching.

So I’m famous for being queer — well for being publicly, usefully, significantly gay — and that strikes me as just wonderful. Even better than that: the LSA created it in 2021 at the instigation of its LGBQ+ committee, composed of enthusiastic young people (of an age to be my grandchildren), who also proposed that it be named after me (making it the first LSA award named after a living linguist). To my mind, this was a huge thing.

But then, except in bulletins from the LSA, the whole business vanished almost immediately from public view. Press releases went to Stanford and Ohio State (which have campus reports originally created as faculty/staff news bulletins but over the years converted to press reports enthusiastically advertising the university) and to the Princeton Alumni Weekly (which supplies news about alumni and also solicits aggressively for the university). But they paid no notice.

Now you could argue that the creation of an award by by a learned society is small potatoes, not worth mentioning in campus reports or alumni news. Ohio State would no doubt say that emeritus professors no longer on campus are simply not faculty. Stanford would maintain that I am not now and never have been a member of either its faculty or staff, but merely someone on an accessory appointment (with one or another label) since 1985.

But it’s also likely that the public information offices of universities view visibly celebrated queer faculty (especially ones as outspoken and plain-speaking as I am) as something of a liability, better kept at arm’s length when you’re trying to rake in money for the endowment.

Still, I was hurt when the news of the Zwicky Award didn’t even make it into my class notes in PAW.

Now, to the recent news, which included working with my Princeton class secretary on a forthcoming class note, in which I put in an appearance as a still-working linguist, with a link to this WordPress blog (but no warning about what my classmates might encounter here). I was already way down in spirits; these negotiations were, on the one hand, a welcome counteraction, but they also evoked my distress at the column’s earlier disregard, and helped send me down into the hole.  Which is where I am now, having taken eight hours to eke out this note.

This entry was posted on February 21, 2024 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Academic life, Awards, Gender and sexuality, My life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.