do I work hard?

I frequently use my own career and experience to illustrate issues in my Professional Ethics class. Today, after a discussion of ethical problems in academic publication and conflict of interest, a student approached me and asked about my own record of academic publication. (I have had a handful of run-ins with questionable publication practices, not surprisingly.)

What he asked, in fact, was how he could find the things I've published, so he could read them. I replied that he might not find them all that accessible, since they are, after all, academic publications (which is an ethical issue in its own right), but if he was really interested he could search for them. He mentioned Google. Hmm.*

Anyway, it led me to think about my CV and how up-to-date it might be. I checked it out this evening. There are things missing, and I'm editing it, but what this brief exercise has really made me think about is my record of academic and scholarly achievement, and what it means.

I've presented around 40 papers at academic conferences. Almost all of them have been international conferences of philosophical scholarship or phenomenological investigation. Is that a lot?

I've had several peer-reviewed publications. Only three or four have been peer-reviewed articles in academic philosophy journals. The rest have been in little off-beat publications I thought were cool, like the late, lamented Journal of Mundane Behavior. I guess that's pretty good, considering where I work and what the mission of my university is.

I've served on a dozen university and college committees, served on the academic senate for 10 years, and have been a peer reviewer for several conferences, and editor of conference proceedings, a board member of a couple scholarly societies, etc. etc. etc.

It looks like a lot of work, all listed up like that.

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* The "Hmm" is due in some small part to the fact that, if he actually does look me up, he might find not only this blog, but a reference to my Journal of Mundane Behavior article on the phenomenology of pornography, or some of the other weird things I've published. He might also find some of the terrible things that people have, no doubt, said about me on teh Interwebs.