The Guardian reports that Johannes Haushofer, who is assistant professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton, has published an alternative CV of his career failures up to now. Publishing an anti-cv like this might, of course, just result in his adding to the list.
The CV contains sections on failures in relation to ...
- degree programme applications
- academic positions and fellowships he applied for
- research funding bids
- papers sent to academic journal,
- his getting awards and scholarships
... so it's pretty wide-ranging. Haushofer, who said the idea came from an article by Melanie Stefan, at Edinburgh, says that he created the document to give some perspective:
“Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me. As a result, they are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days.”
Indeed they are / do.
We could all do this, and also be much less uncritical in our own tiresome, gushing self-promotion. I was reminded of this tendency to never being knowingly undersold when I read the Pelican history of Tudor England by Professor Stanley Bindhoff earlier in the year – I was seeking some historical perspective on the relationship between the UK and the near European continent in the context of Brexodus and the forthcoming referendum. I found the book (which was published in the 1950s) insightful and well written, and I was struck by the author biography on the inside front cover. Here's an extract:
"S. T. Bindhoff has enjoyed a career remarkable chiefly for its uneventfulness. ... During the several years which it took him to live down his failure to achieve the expected First Class (degree), he was in turn research assistant, professional indexer, publicity agent, and history tutor to a Crown Prince. ... He undertook to write the present volume in partnership with his wife, Dr Marjorie Blatcher, who, he maintains, knows far more about the period than he does; but her family pre-occupations limited her role to that of critic."
I think we could all, like Bindhoff and Haushofer, write that first sentence.
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