"Where Have All the Ideas Gone?"

This e-mail message, copied from the acw-l archives, was posted by Fred Kemp on June 3, 1998.

Coming back from C&W . . . charged as usual. Always an exciting group of people.

I found lots of soul-searching, lots of "where are we now?" thinking.

So where are we now? I saw these categories:

1. The "nobody's doing research" crowd.
2. The "nobody's doing my kind of research" crowd.
3. The "nobody's doing anything at all useful" crowd.
4. The "who the hell are we?" crowd.

Amongst all these crowds I didn't see anybody saying much invigorating about we are doing to make something new.

I think an attitude of critique is killing our world-changing ambitions. Do you want to change the world, or do you want to gain some kind of moderate fame by tripping up those who do?

Fred Kemp
f.kemp@ttu.edu

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