Good Colleague Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Issue: Modeling as Application versus Modeling as a Way to Create Mathematics

This special issue of IJCML is dedicated to our good friend and colleague, Jim Kaput. In many ways, each article was inspired by collaborations that involved Jim; and, they also are examples of some of the most important directions that Kaput’s research was moving at the time of his untimely death. For example, the article by Lehrer, Kim, and Schauble emphasizes ways that expressive media (which may vary from technical languages, to paper-and-pencil notations and sketches, to computer-based tools for communication, collaboration, and conceptualization) shape and empower the ways that people think. The article by Konold, Harradine, and Kazak emphasizes Kaput’s longstanding mission to use technology to provide all children with democratic access to powerful ideas; and, the article by Lesh, Caylor, and Gupta emphasizes the infrastructural nature of the preceding kinds of conceptual tools. That is, the conceptual tools that humans develop to make sense of their experiences typically have both expanding and constraining influences on thinking; and, the same conceptual tools that have been developed to describe and explain existing situations also tend to be used to create new systems, artifacts, and tools. So, as soon as people develop better ways of thinking about things that currently exist, they tend to change these things in ways that make the development of conceptual systems a neverending enterprise. Furthermore, this is especially true in a technology-based age of information. It is well known that Kaput was a futurist who had a deep interest in history. Consequently, when we, like he, investigate how concepts develop in the thinking of students, our research is informed not only by information about how relevant concepts develop logically, psychologically, and pedagogically—but also historically. Yet, a fact that is not as well known about Kaput is that he was once a literature major who especially loved Don Quixote. So, it is not surprising to hear that many people considered him to be a ‘‘knight for the right.’’ For example, his mission was to use the best available technologies to go

One Last Editorial to Say Thank You to so Many Good Colleagues

One Last Editorial to Say Thank You to so Many Good Colleagues

Presentation of the Mineralogical Society of America Award for 2006 to Daniel J. Frost

It is a very great honor to present my good friend and colleague, Dan Frost, the recipient of the MSA Award in 2006. Dan is first and foremost an experimental petrologist who studies problems relating to the mineralogy, petrology, structure, and evolution of the Earth’s mantle and core. He got off to an excellent start during his Ph.D. by studying the properties of H2O-CO2 fluids under mantle conditions at Bristol University under the supervision of Bernie Wood. He then moved to the Geophysical Laboratory for one year where he greatly expanded his experience by working with Yingwei Fei on the crystallography, stability, and equations of state of hydrous mantle minerals using a broad range of high-pressure experimental techniques. He moved to the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in 1997 and is a tenured Staff Scientist responsible for pursuing research, supervising and developing the …

Life in Organizations: The Case of Women in Taiwan

Little is known to the Asian and Western readers about Taiwanese women's life in organizations. This paper is an attempt to narrow the gap by sketching women's work life in Taiwan. Traditionally, women are a secondary gender in Chinese society. However, gender differences may be narrowing because Taiwan has operated a capitalistic system in the past decades. In this paper, we summarized results from a few domestic studies with an emphasis on women in organizations, and present the findings of two surveys we conducted. Our analysis indicates that (1) gender idiosyncrasy is becoming less pronounced, particularly for those men and women who experience similar organization socialization; (2) gender stereotypes may be a barrier or a facilitator for women's career development; and (3) while performing organizational citizenship behaviors, women appear more as good colleagues, but less as good soldiers. We hope this study will further our understanding of Taiwanese women's life in organizations and eventually help democratize the work culture in Taiwan in a new era.

Engaging Robert Rodes

I am a lawyer turned theologian turned goat and hog farmer who finds himself attempting to make sense of a path from social ascent to intentional social descent. An economics major who studied just enough philosophy at a Christian college to think he wanted to continue that work while in law school, I found my life captured by the life and work of Stanley Hauerwas. It has all been all downhill from there. As a good friend of mine from law school days who has followed a similar descending path recently suggested, “Stanley Hauerwas ruined my legal career.” Add in required readings by John Howard Yoder and Wendell Berry during graduate school, and you find yourself on a path toward political and economic radicalism, farming, and just maybe, a church for which it is worth living and dying.But, of course, the voices of Hauerwas and Yoder were not crystallized in isolation. They were forged in the midst of conversation with good colleagues. In this collection of essays we celebrate the life and work of Robert Rodes, a colleague of both Yoder and Hauerwas at Notre Dame in the 1980s. I have learned a tremendous amount from Rodes's historical work on the shape of English law during the period of the Reformation. But in engaging Rodes here, I focus on his constructive work on the role of the law in liberation. What I offer is a set of questions and potential alternatives in response to that work, largely learned from Hauerwas and Yoder.

Hans Singer: The Gentle Breeze of Development Economics

Development and ChangeVolume 37, Issue 6 p. 1379-1387 Legacies Hans Singer: The Gentle Breeze of Development Economics Louis Emmerij, Louis Emmerij City University of New York and Co-Director there of the United Nations Intellectual History Project.Search for more papers by this author Louis Emmerij, Louis Emmerij City University of New York and Co-Director there of the United Nations Intellectual History Project.Search for more papers by this author First published: 29 November 2006 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7660.2006.00533.x With thanks to my good friend and colleague Sir Richard Jolly, a great admirer of Hans Singer, who saved me from one or two faux pas. Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume37, Issue6FORUM 2006November 2006Pages 1379-1387 RelatedInformation

Acceptance of the Dana Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America for 2006

Alex, thank you for your kind words—all the more meaningful coming from a good friend and colleague. Concerning the UNM English major and the poetry contest, he went to Edinburgh and finished third. More importantly, he now has a new perspective on the relation of science to literature. Every research group should have a poet laureate. This is a moment when one reflects on their career and whom they should thank. For me, it is certainly the collaborators from different disciplines over many years. Some are here today in this first session—Alex Navrotsky, Lumin Wang, Bill Weber and Allison MacFarlane. Each of these four come from a different sub-discipline—and each have added considerable breadth to our research interests and capabilities. Other colleagues and collaborators will appear in later sessions—all were important to our research program. I certainly want to acknowledge the talented group of graduate students and post-docs who have been members of the research group. Bryan Chakoumakos was the first post-doctoral fellow, followed Takashi Murakami, Janusz Janeczek Wiliang Gong, Peter Burns, Mostafa Fayek, Shixin Wang, Donggao Zhao, Keld Jensen, Satoshi Utsunomiya, and Jie Lian. The first Ph.D. graduates were Mike Jercinovic and Greg Lumpkin, followed by Mark Miller, Ray …

Uncle Wuffle's Advice on Job Talks

Giving a job talk has multiple aims. Most important of these: to get a job. But, it also makes sense to think about a job talk as (a) practice that will improve your skills for future job interviews, making it more likely that you will eventually get a job, even if not this one, (b) a kind of initiation ritual into the profession, and (c) a way to broaden your academic network and make new friends. It is your chance to persuade your peers (and perhaps your future colleagues) that you are a promising/accomplished scholar, a potentially good colleague, and a good teacher—not necessarily in that order. Priorities attached to these desiderata will vary from department to department (with major differences to be expected between research-oriented departments and those with a more liberal arts focus), but even within any given department, different members of the department will undoubtedly attach different weights to each of these three concerns. Such relevant information will be conveyed in a job talk.

Beyond anoxia: The physiology of metabolic downregulation and recovery in the anoxia-tolerant turtle

The freshwater turtle Trachemys scripta is among the most anoxia-tolerant of vertebrates, a true facultative anaerobe able to survive without oxygen for days at room temperature to weeks or months during winter hibernation. Our good friend and colleague Peter Lutz devoted nearly 25 years to the study of the physiology of anoxia tolerance in these and other model organisms, promoting not just the basic science but also the idea that understanding the physiology and molecular mechanisms behind anoxia tolerance provides insights into critical survival pathways that may be applicable to the hypoxic/ischemic mammalian brain. Work by Peter and his colleagues focused on the factors which enable the turtle to enter a deep hypometabolic state, including decreases in ion flux ("channel arrest"), increases in inhibitory neuromodulators like adenosine and GABA, and the maintenance of low extracellular levels of excitatory compounds such as dopamine and glutamate. Our attention has recently turned to molecular mechanisms of anoxia tolerance, including the upregulation of such protective factors as heat shock proteins (Hsp72, Hsc73), the reversible downregulation of voltage gated potassium channels, and the modulation of MAP kinase pathways. In this review we discuss three phases of anoxia tolerance, including the initial metabolic downregulation over the first several hours, the long-term maintenance of neuronal function over days to weeks of anoxia, and finally recovery upon reoxygenation, with necessary defenses against reactive oxygen stress.

Barney's version: Observations from the edge

My good friend and colleague Barney Sneiderman died yesterday. A few months ago he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer; the day before yesterday, after failed trials of chemotherapy and staying at home—with community palliative care supports—as long as possible, he determined it was time to enter one of our city's inpatient palliative care units. Less than a day later, he was gone. Some readers of Palliative & Supportive Care may actually be familiar with Barney, through his various published works. As a professor of law at the University of Manitoba, he was known for his expertise in health issues and the law and biomedical ethics. He was a frequent speaker to medical professionals on medico-legal subjects, and had a cross-appointment with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Manitoba. Besides his many publications, the book he coauthored, Canadian Medical Law: An Introduction for Physicians, Nurses and Other Health Care Professionals, third edition, is considered an authoritative work on legal issues relating to patient care and treatment and addresses the most frequent and pressing concerns facing health care professionals and the lawyers who advise them.

Teaching ethics in engineering education through historical analysis

The goal of this paper is to stress the significance of ethics for engineering education and to illustrate how it can be brought into the mainstream of higher education in a natural way that is integrated with the teaching objectives of enriching the core meaning of engineering. Everyone will agree that the practicing engineer should be virtuous, should be a good colleague, and should use professional understanding for the common good. But these injunctions to virtue do not reach closely enough the ethic of the engineer as engineer, as someone acting in a uniquely engineering situation, and it is to such conditions that I wish to speak through a set of specific examples from recent history. I shall briefly refer to four controversies between engineers. Then, in some detail I shall narrate three historical cases that directly involve the actions of one engineer, and finally I would like to address some common contemporary issues. The first section, Engineering Ethics and the History of Innovation, includes four cases involving professional controversy. Each controversy sets two people against each other in disputes over who invented the telegraph, the radio, the automobile, and the airplane. In each dispute, it is possible to identify ethical and unethical behavior or ambiguous ethical behavior that serves as a basis for educational discussion. The first two historical cases described in "Crises and the Engineer" involve the primary closure dam systems in The Netherlands, each one the result of the actions of one engineer. The third tells of an American engineer who took his political boss, a big city mayor, to court over the illegal use of a watershed. The challenges these engineers faced required, in the deepest sense, a commitment to ethical behavior that is unique to engineering and instructive to our students. Finally, the cases in "Professors and Comparative Critical Analysis" illuminate the behavior of engineers in the design of structures and also how professors can make public criticisms of designs that seem wasteful.

A special issue of Palliative & Supportive Care: The lessons of the Terri Schiavo case

This past fall (October 2005), my good friend and colleague Lewis Cohen, M.D., of Baystate Medical Center, helped organize a unique conference (cosponsored by the Smith College of Social Work) that represented an early attempt by psychosocial palliative care clinicians, ethicists, and legal experts to grapple with the issues raised by the Terri Schiavo case, which had so captured the attention of the nation and raised tremendous disagreement and debate. As editor-in-chief of Palliative & Supportive Care, I was, of course, quite thrilled when Dr. Cohen proposed the possibility of our journal publishing the main papers from this unique and timely conference. As the readers of Palliative & Supportive Care will recall, this journal has expressed the opinion that the case of Terri Schiavo represented a watershed event in palliative care practice and research (Breitbart, 2005), and we called for more research into the experience of patients who die of dehydration. Of course, the issues raised by the Schiavo case are so much broader and do, in fact, range from palliative care practice and research to ethics and spiritual issues to legal issues regarding decision making at the end of life.

“IT'S OYSTERS, DEAR!” PROFESSOR CARNEGIE'S PRESCRIPTION AND THE SEEMING FATE OF ACCOUNTING HISTORY IN THE UNITED STATES

It is always a thrill to find someone who is familiar with one's work. I well recall the time that someone first came up to me at a conference and advised that she/he had read my work during Ph.D. studies, had thought it marvelous, and so on. I will not embarrass the colleague in question by naming names; suffice it to say that he/she is now a well-known academic at an institution not far removed from my own. The question, I suppose, is, who should be more embarrassed in reviewing such a navigation of the tropes of conference life, the then student bent on making a good impression or the lonesome academic who so very much wanted to believe what was being said? It was with a frisson of excitement therefore that I found that our good colleague Carry Carnegie had penned a response to the recent review paper written by Dick Fleischman and myself. I have not had a comment on a paper come quite so soon before, and so there were loud echoes of that first conference encounter and exchange of familiarity in work when I first heard of this note. Unfortunately, the frisson of excitement is gone, and the familiarity with the work in question seems distant. Whether more or less distant than that of my earlier interrogator is for the reader to decide. Carnegie starts well enough with a strong precis of arguments made in the piece regarding the seeming decline of accounting in the He notes a series of factors including the apparent exclusion of accounting from major journals, a failure to renew the accounting professoriate in the U.S., the lack of available doctoral training in the U.S., and the declining membership of the Academy of Accounting Historians. Carnegie lists these factors without apparent disagreement and then wishes to share in the hope that the authors, Dick and I, came to in wanting not to believe that the nineties might become known as ending with the quiet but discernable of accounting in the U.S. Carnegie mentions that he added the emphasis here, but in a way he need not have; the original manuscript used the term death but as with any co-authorship, a more measured colleague (in this case Dick) called on a less measured colleague (in this case me, I admit) to cool it. So rattles might have been too strong, but a sense that the end of the 1990s marked a tipping point in the trajectory of accounting seems to hold true. In a way, I wish I had not cooled it for the sounds of the rattles are, quite honestly, clearly there in each of the gatherings of friends that constitute the Academy of Accounting Historians' annual research conferences and in the lovely ice cream socials held at the annual meetings of the American Accounting Association.1 I say this despite the promising inclusion of accounting in the body of the AAAs annual meeting program even though this comes under the delightful title of History, Integrative and Other.2 So next on to Carnegie and to the other. What is Professor Carnegie's prescription to cure that which ails the accounting academy in the U.S? It is to write popular works of the type he lauds in his text (e.g., Parker, 2005; Brewster, 2003; or Squires et al., 2003). In other words, a blast of populism should show the public interest benefits of a keen understanding of accounting and should allow us all to join friend Carnegie in his belief that answer of whether accounting in the faces should be overwhelmingly negative. Where to begin? An immediate observation would be that a similar prescription of populist appeal is hardly of attraction or interest to capital market researchers, agency theorists, or others who toil in their allotments within the AAAs intellectual array. So in that sense, we are different people with a different lot.3 A further observation, and as a trained field researcher who combined this with historical work that did not quite meet the 30-year rule alluded to by Carnegie (and so had a closer link to practice, or a history of the present, something Carnegie seems to like) I would simply say, there is no substitute for lived experience. …

Organizational Citizenship Behaviour as Performance in Multiple Network Positions

This paper employs structural role theory to theorize why and how the performance of organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) may be associated with an individual's occupation of social network positions. OCB is modelled as behaviour related to the occupation of position–role combinations in the informal structure of organizations. It is proposed that the performance of OCB occurs in conjunction with informal role enactment at a given network position because such performance is characteristic of position occupancy. A given actor may occupy multiple network positions, which profile the actor's links to the informal organization and place him or her in the position to perform OCB. An empirical study of employees in a telecommunications company showed that cohesiveness, centrality and network bridges predict two different types of OCB that characterize a ‘good colleague’ and a ‘good employee’ role.

Guest editorial

Five years ago I found myself, more by chance than design, at a conference in London called "The First Neuro-psychoanalycic Congress." I was going to a conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and my good friend and colleague, Geraldine Lakeland, who was going to the same conference, found that this event in London fitted perfectly with the schedule. So we went. The name alone is remarkable - it really seemed as if, for the first time in over a hundred years, neurologists and psychoanalysts were having a constructive dialogue. This is of course too extreme a description, but it was certainly a significant event. Chaired by Oliver Sacks, it featured a series of stars on both sides, including Antonio Damasio, whose books (1999; 2003) I immediately began devouring. An analyst gave a presentation, a neurologist replied and there was a discussion. Then it was the other way round - first a neurologist, then an analyst, and another discussion, for three days. I was enthralled, and began a serious round of reading about the brain in relation to psychotherapy.

PRESENTATION OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY MEDAL TO MARTIN A. BUZAS

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon! It is both an honor and a privilege to present a brief summary of the career accomplishments of my very good friend and colleague, Dr. Martin A. Buzas. Putting together the nomination for the award that Marty will receive today, I was impressed by the warmth of feeling that emanated from the letters of support I received from 13 paleontologists, workers in four countries on three different continents, who wrote on his behalf. Let me briefly summarize the thoughts of that group, and add a few of my own. Marty was introduced to foraminifera at Brown University by Dick Cifelli. He moved to Yale, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1963 after just three years. His broad education under Karl Waage (paleontology), G. Evelyn Hutchinson (ecology), and Hilary Seal (statistics) established the intellectual basis for his research career. One letter of support was right on the mark in noting that the beginning of Marty's career at the Smithsonian, in 1963, coincided with the shift from a world of primarily qualitative investigation to the era of quantitative analysis in paleontology. Marty helped to lead the charge. His early work centered on the distribution of foraminifera at various scales, from a few centimeters (laterally and vertically) to the scale of biofacies, and then to ocean basins (his work on diversity with Gibson). To these studies, Marty brought a statistical rigor that was new to paleontology. This characteristic permeates the whole body of …

The Season of Our Discontent

The first time I met Howard Goldstein, our good colleague and former editor, was at a board meeting for this journal several years ago. We had great discussions about old pocket watches, good novels, and the state of social work thought. He only half jokingly asserted that there was a creative malaise in our profession—and that he hadn't seen anything new in 30 years, just variations on the same themes, the same topics, over and over. Further, he said, he thought that some textbooks were written as ain't it awful litanies of maladies that happen to people and that others were written with a hodgepodge of contents selected simply to meet accrediting requirements. He backtracked a bit, saying, well, maybe the strengths perspective was a little new. I vividly remember that more extensive conversation and think that his assessment of the state of our thought and work is still worth considering. Are there exciting new ideas to come that will set our profession on a new course with renewed vision or, conversely...

Islam and the West: The Challenge to the Human Family

I am very honoured to deliver this year’s Sternberg Lecture. Sir Sigmund Sternberg is not only a very good friend and colleague but a man I very much admire; not only for his human qualities, but also for the distinctive and wide-ranging contribution he has made over many years to inter-faith collaboration and harmony at both national and international levels. He is one of the most perceptive and persistent men I know; perceptive, in his eye for what are important issues for our time; persistent, in his pragmatic approach for solutions that work. He is known the world over for his desire to create a peaceful world in which all faiths may co-exist in charity and understanding. I need to explain the background to my lecture this evening. Last autumn, in order to deepen my own understanding of Islam, I decided to offer four lectures on various aspects of Islam and the West and tonight’s address is the fourth in the series. The first two caused not a ripple of excitement. The third lecture, given at the Gregorian University in Rome, attracted a great deal of attention because of newspaper reports of it that seemed to suggest that I was particularly hostile to the Muslim world.

The Rise of the Creative Practitioner

Good afternoon, Polly and colleagues. Thank you to the Education section for granting me the honor of giving this presentation, and to Mr Jeff Martell, Polly's nephew, who has supported it over the years. He and his family send their best regards to all of you. In a recent discussion with Jeff, he told me that he and his wife and three children visit Polly regularly, in a small home-type residence in New Hampshire that meets all her needs. While Polly is essentially wheelchair bound, she moves throughout the home, followed everywhere by the resident dog named Whiz. Jeff says Polly responds expressively to the cards that she receives, and which he reads her when he visits, and she appears to be uplifted by them. The surrounding land is enough to be called a mini-farm, and has chickens, rabbits, and sheep. The electric fence around the grounds doesn't appear to phase or shock the sheep that carry a very thick coat. Recently, Jeff related that when an emergency vehicle came to transport a resident, they found one of the sheep had hopped into the vehicle when they were inside the home. But of course they foiled that resident's attempt to take it on the lamb. So Polly is not without access to some fun around her. We are here to honor Polly Cerasoli for her tireless and dedicated professional work as an educator, administrator, and mentor. It also attempts to reflect Polly's personal demeanor, who she is, and what she stands for. The lecturers who have gone before me have accomplished this. Each of those presenters (some of whom are with us today . . .) has deepened our insight through their individual contributions, and in doing so, has deepened our insight of our profession. Each past presenter structured their presentation according to an attribute descriptive of Polly. This presentation follows that pattern. I count Polly as a friend, and have chosen to highlight an attribute that I observed as a result of an experience I shared with Polly. I first met Polly in the early 70s, when we attended a workshop for on-site visitors sponsored by the Association's Accreditation Department. She and I were randomly assigned to work on a mock problem we might encounter on an accreditation visit and report to the group the next day. As Polly was staying outside the hotel about 5 miles away, I envisioned work over breakfast the next day. Polly envisioned work that night. I envisioned describing our problem to the group. Polly envisioned posing solutions. I envisioned 8 hours sleep. Polly envisioned completing the task. We worked on the task for some time until we stalled. Polly said, Donna, let's imagine we are these people. Let's be them in their environment; then what would we do? In that moment everything changed. The problem became ours. We became fully engaged. We were the people with the problem, and we were the people with a stake in the outcome. Our perception of our own role changed. That immersion within the problem, and the true reversal of roles, fostered creativity within us and we were able to address the task constructively. The experience, of itself, left me changed. Our life experiences prepare us for future action and they are the basis of our vision for the future. Each life experience that triggers feeling within us is accompanied by incremental change. To the descriptions that have been offered of Polly, add . . . creative. Physical therapy today faces many challenges, as do other health care professions. The challenges and the problems they present in the delivery of health care to society do not appear to be responding to solutions that have been applied to such issues in the past. We seek creative solutions for change. The motivation to be creative comes more readily when we recognize that we really do have a stake in the outcome. Many of the problems we are now experiencing in health care delivery are directly linked to changes in society itself.1 The more we are genuinely part of the environments in which we live and work, and the more closely we identify with the issues presented by those environments, the more we will be able to affect the direction of the environments and our future. …

Crisis and Collegiality

The idea of collegiality—of one's interaction with others in the professional workplace—is a profane concept modeled on the idea of free linguistic exchange. A good colleague participates in a process of reciprocal exchange—a conversation—that produces a whole greater than the sum of its parts. The idea of collegiality thus stands in contrast to the idea of the sacred. In sacred interaction, the individual is not an equal participant in a conversation but, on the contrary, a speck in the face of the infinite, a mortal confronted by immortality. God gives commands: he does not cast his vote among a democracy of equals. But this way of putting it suggests the inseparability of the concepts of collegiality and hierarchy. In the scene of human action, the equality of "peripheral" linguistic exchange is fundamentally related to the hierarchy of "central" sacred exchange. What makes this relationship essentially scenic is the inseparability of the central object's significance or sacrality from the profane "linguistic" attentions of those on the periphery. For instance, for 99.99% of the population, voting in an election means granting someone else power, power that may be used against the very same voters responsible for electing the person in the first place. Or, to shift from politics back to religion, God gives commands, but you have to believe in him first in order to hear those commands. More precisely, you already have to be capable of "profane" dialogue in order to understand God's "sacred" instructions. Thus, whether or not God exists, the very fact that we are able to talk about him indicates that the question of his existence is in the first place a question of his sacred designation within the general scene of human representation, which is to say, of his central significance among "profane" or "peripheral" language users. Nietzsche's slogan, "God is dead," depends upon this anthropological analysis for its philosophical bite. The slogan is really a backhanded complement toward religion, because it acknowledges the superior generative power of the sacred over purely "metaphysical" abstractions such as Being. As Durkheim realized, the difference between sacred and profane is a generative difference, from which all other cultural differences derive. [End Page 158] In the compact ritual societies studied by Durkheim, reciprocal exchange among profane equals remains strictly separated from sacred exchange with the gods. It is tempting to believe that modern societies have dispensed with the old hierarchical forms of sacred exchange, upon which so-called "primitive" people appear irrationally to depend. But this is to take a needlessly parochial attitude toward the sacred by assuming that its often bizarre appearance to the outside observer is an indication of its ultimate uselessness. By describing the sacred as functionless, we do not so much explain it, as explain it away. The sacred becomes an epiphenomenon of history. Like purgatory, it is destined to decline and fade as people become progressively more enlightened as to religion's ultimate basis in the supernatural. If, on the contrary, the sacred is taken seriously by an anthropology, it must be understood as a constitutive category of anthropology itself. In this analysis, I assume that the sacred exists in muted form today, just as it did at the origin of humanity. If we listen carefully, its distant reverberations can be heard beneath the general turmoil and profanity of modern life. I will not, however, seek to show how the sacred appears across the spectrum of professional organizations. The purpose of this essay is to analyze its manifestation in one particular group: among professors of literature. I hasten to add, however, that I think my remarks are generalizable to other areas of university life, in particular, to the other disciplines in the humanities and "soft" social sciences. In extrapolating to those disciplines which share the same general anthropological focus as literature departments, I certainly do not wish to imply that individuals in the "hard" natural sciences of biology, chemistry, and physics are not every bit as...