In academic jargon a Festschrift is a volume of learned contributions prepared by friends and students to celebrate a scholar’s birthday. This volume can be a collection of specific studies about the person in question, in which case, if a great effort is required from those taking part, there’s a danger that the contributions will be from faithful students rather than eminent colleagues, who have little time or inclination to carry out such a demanding task. Alternatively, in order to attract famous names, the essays may be on any topic, and the volume will not be “about Joe Bloggs” but “in honor of Joe Bloggs.”
In practical terms it’s easy to imagine how an essay written for a Festschrift gets lost, especially in the latter case, since no one will know that you’ve written on the specific topic in a publication of that kind. In any event, it’s a sacrifice that contributors may willingly make, perhaps hoping they can recycle what they’ve written elsewhere. Except that the Festschrift used to be presented when the subject reached sixty, a reasonably good age, and if all went well he’d die before seventy. Today, thanks to medical advances, the subject is in danger of living to ninety, and his students will have to write a Festschrift for him when he reaches sixty, seventy, eighty, and ninety.
Moreover, since international links have been strengthened over the past half century and each academic has many more close colleagues than used to be the case, the average academic receives at least twenty or thirty requests a year for volumes celebrating colleagues throughout the world who have happily reached ages of biblical proportions. If we bear in mind that a paper written for a Festschrift, if it’s not to look too mean, must be at least twenty pages long, each academic would be writing an average of six hundred pages a year, every page ideally original, to celebrate those long-lived and much-loved friends. The demands are clearly impossible, yet a refusal might be mistaken for lack of respect.
There are two ways of avoiding this quandary. Establish that a commemorative volume is produced only for those who have reached eighty and beyond, or alternatively, do as I do and send the same essay for every Festschrift, altering the first ten lines and the conclusion. No one has ever noticed.
2010