Hide or Flee Scholar

The Hide or flee scholar is the seeker who is a true academic, think Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.  This movie shows Indy in his closet-academic office hiding from students and secretaries and then escaping out the window. This is actually not a dishonest scenario.  My oldest son had a professor/mentor who was very much like this.  When a student saw him across the parking lot and tried to catch his attention, the professor confessed to actually sprinting to his car, fleeing from the student who sought to introduce him to family (Harris, 2006).

This information seeker likes privacy.  He builds his own library, has a small network of close colleagues, is a traditionalist.  He prefers to write notes rather than use tech applications.  He has a keen memory and voices concern when old yet vital collection holdings are removed primarily for his students’ sake rather than his own. He prefers print journals to electronic ones.

The implication  of this information seeker for the librarian is initiative and familiarity.  The librarian must become personally acquainted with the Hide or Flee scholar.  Creating a rapport and comfort zone for this individual scholar is a must.  Respect and careful listening will pay off when working towards future collaborations.  As Dr Lamb quotes Blazek & Aversa, 2000, “On the other hand, it has also been suggested that it is not necessarily the content of the scholarship in the humanities which yield to independent and solitary work, but rather there is something different about the training and education of humanistic scholars that leads to the lack of collaborative work” (Lamb, 2015, p. Seeker).

Recommendations for this librarian liaison is to develop the collection covering the scope of this seeker’s taught courses.  Keep in mind the historical sweep and overlap of disciplines.  Pay attention to the journals this professor cites and requires on his syllabus.  Look for new titles as well as retrospective primary works.

For example, The Hide or Flee scholar is looking for more resources on the question of Identity for a lecture on self.  He has a good library which holds books by specific authors, but he doesn’t have many of the expensive reference volumes available. Not wanting to tarry, he wants a quick answer.  The librarian first consults the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Edwards, 1967)  available and reviews the article on Identity.  The scholar is provided with the cited works on the article.  The librarian also consults the Great Books Syntopicon volume to find the specific passages from classical writers which can be given to students for review.  Modern literature is consulted by checking the online Philosopher’s Index.

Humanities encompass many disciplines and can be organized within university schools under a variety of names.  Some universities have a school of liberal arts, which includes most humanities fields.  Others, such as Staffordshire in England encompasses many of the humanities under the umbrella of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Creative Technologies.  Subsumed under this umbrella, the student will find a mix of disciplines in the School of Journalism, Humanities and Social Sciences (Staffordshire University).  No matter how the disciplines are organized within the university, the humanities are concerned with people -- their time, their language, their habits, their religion, their culture, and how they think about the world.

The field of philosophy is often associated with the school of religious studies; however, the two fields are totally different and for the philosophy scholar purist, they should not be organized together. When disciplines are grouped together, many times it is due to organizational or budgetary constraints.  Also, these types of groupings are related to the origins of the university or the budgetary constraints.  You will notice many Catholic and Christian universities group these disciplines together.  Philosophy as a discipline studies the great questions of humanity:  who are we? why are we here? what is knowledge? what is reality?