editorial
Collegiality Among Chemists
I
have always placed a high value on collegialityOwith my professional faculty colleagues at UNC Chapel Hill, with the family of ACS Editors and especially with the Associate Editors of this journal, and with my acquaintances in the fields of analytical chemistry and its boundaries (the rest of chemistry). This indeed includes people with whom I am acquainted only by their research papers, as a respect for the good science in those papers. So I thought that this month I would write about this thing that I value. Collegiality is a complicated idea. It can be described in many ways. “Getting along with one another” is a Southern way of putting it. An attitude of respect, helpfulness, cooperation, and unselfishness are other elements of collegiality; yet others are an absence of rancor or undue criticism. While I speak of collegiality in context of the professional chemists’ workplace, it is a universal quality that embraces almost all professions. By happy chance, while thinking about this editorial, I ran across a column in the New York Times (December 31, 2009) that quoted a writing of a recently deceased federal judge, Frank M. Coffin, in his The Ways of a Judge: Reflections From the Federal Appellate Bench. It was: “In applying the term collegial to an appellate court, we are using it with maximum precision, for the judges on such a court are a small and intimate band of brothers and sisters.... Collegiality has several faces. One is intimacy. But it is intimacy beyond affection. It begins with a deep if selective knowledge of one another; no one knows our societal values, biases and thought ways better than a colleague, even though he may never master the names of our children. It is fed from the spring of our common enterprise. It manifests itself in an abiding concern for each other and the court, with the ardent
10.1021/AC1000288 2010 AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY
Published on Web 01/12/2010
hope that there need never be a choice between the two. If there were, however, the latter would prevail, not despite intimacy but because of it.” This elegant expression fits my personal view of the pinnacle of collegiality and also brings out the importance of scale. It is easier to maintain a collegial spirit in a small group of professionals, closely working together and knowing one another well, than in a larger band of co-workers where the discourse of opinions and values is thin. Why do I so value collegiality? Its presence means that opportunities for positively serving one’s professional calling can be seized upon without expending unnecessary energies on personal differences, i.e., focusing on the topic in impersonal debate. This requires mutual respect. In a journal, in the course of considering manuscripts for publication, the collegiality opportunity lies in the peer review evaluation and critique of the manuscript. The evaluation impersonally and impartially assesses the magnitude of the manuscript’s contribution to the field (relative to the journal’s standards for publication), and the critique serves to improve the presentation of the manuscript and its analysis of the meaning of the research results. Seldom can these goals be attained if the author and reviewer and editor do not adopt a stance of professional respect. It’s not an ethical matter; its one of collegiality.
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