[FRIAM] NOW IS: Oh, Woe, Academia! WAS: gene complex for homosexuality

[Steve Smith]

glen wrote:
> The non-disjoint distinction between scholar and academic is useful 
> for me. I'm neither. And watching my scholarly and academic friends do 
> their jobs can be fascinating. The academics spend a huge amount of 
> time raising funds, writing proposals, playing psychologist with 
> colleagues, etc. ... everything one does in other bureaucracies like 
> corporations and what I imagine the national labs are like. The 
> scholars spend the majority of their time pushing pencils, but in the 
> service of deeper patterns they (think they) see. One scholar who 
> happened to be a colleague at a dot-com I worked at studied ancient 
> texts and artifacts. At work, he was a typical IT guy. But at home, he 
> was driven by cataloguing things. A guy I met the other day is a 
> cryptozoologist who is driven by taxonomies of mythological beasts 
> like bigfoot. I guess I'm more bedazzled by scholars than academics, 
> regardless of where they find their home.
Amateurs then?   Done (studied) for the love of...