is academic celebrity the best kind of celebrity?

I finished reading Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. It’s a good book, and I’ll blog it later. For now, I’d like to focus on his description of celebrity. The way Martin describes it, celebrity is a two sided thing. Fame does help with money, jobs, and the like. But it also utterly destroys your privacy. Just going to the mall can entail battling paparazzi. Casual conversations are destroyed by autograph requests. You become paranoid about your friend’s ulterior motives. Room service – the pleasure of the tired traveler – is ruined when the waiters repeat your jokes, for the 100th time. Life is a monotonous battle to just be normal.

On this count, academia is a good deal. Academic celebrities can get the good side of celebrity, with none of the downsides. Academic celebrities are respected by their peer group, have relatively easy access to funds, and have some confidence that their work will be enjoyed after they’re gone. A smart academic can leverage their skills into high paying fields like consulting or popular writing and make quite a bit of income.

But there aren’t the down sides – no stalkers; average people treat you normally; etc. There is also a great deal of freedom to experiment. Sure, many academics will repeat themselves until they die, but you won’t lose your job if you start a quirky new line of research, much in the same way a musician or actor could lose an audience.