Honor in the Academic Profession: How Professors Want to Be Remembered by Colleagues

Abstract

Achievement in the professions is situated relationally. Work comes to constitute contribution only by the judgments of colleagues. This is paradigmatically the case in science and scholarship, where colleagues not only sanction others but also create their legacy. Normatively, it would stand to reason that colleagues would be held in high regard; the work of academia, and the careers of academics, depend on them. The present work, however, examines how professors value colleagues in actuality. Taking the field of physics, the article examines one aspect of the social significance of colleagues by asking how physicists might desire being remembered by them. Data came from interviews with 60 physicists at distinct career stages and employed at distinct university types. The results reveal a highly delimited number of ways physicists wish to be remembered. In addition, their responses vary by departmental tier, age, and productivity. The discussion exposes two sets of purportedly unequal and contradictory social codes used by academics to project a legacy: professional attributes that are code for “charisma” and personal attributes that are code for “morality.” Anticipation of the self in memoriam is argued to constitute a principal means by which people intersubjectively construct status.