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WHAT IS BEHIND THE ACADEMIC ELECTION?
work of women to its rightful place, without which some separate measures
will not work magic in themselves.”?1
ÍN SUMMA
Here he ponders things that were not [...] what might have been:
possibilities of the possible as possible: things not known:
what name Achilles bore when he lived among women.?"?
Scylla and Charybdis, the horrors chosen in the title of this essay are phenom¬
ena of the 12th book of Homer’s Odyssey. These immense dangers stood before
Odysseus when he reached a sea gate and had to enter it following his long and
exhausting travels. On one part of the strait the beast Scylla, on the other one
the whirlpool Charybdis threatened him. If he wanted to avoid one of them,
he had to navigate closer to the other. In the tale, even though he managed to
escape Charybdis (which was the more dangerous) Scylla still took six of his
people. The phrase reduced from this tale implies the difficult choice in the
case of two bad options, which cannot be avoided. We are trying to choose the
lesser evil to achieve the higher good.
But what might be the stand on this choice and problem of those who have
not made it to the Academy yet? What are the obligations of those who have
already made it? And how will those decide who have the chance to choose?
On the one side, we have the phantom of the female quota as positive
discrimination. On the other side, there is a long and tiresome journey that
would mean the slow and time-consuming process of changing the public
opinion, during which many female researchers’ careers might suffer and sink.
As Katalin Kamaras, a full member of the MTA wrote in her opinion-shaping
article Nők az Akadémián [Women at the Academy], to elect female researchers
eligible for nomination can be solved only in the distance of long years by
encouraging the younger generations.”?
Anyway, in either case there will be severe damage done to the female
academic sphere, because
the careers of many highly talented female researchers get stuck, and we will
never find out what they might have been capable of. Others, who have extreme
bearing capacity, who are enduring and maybe even fortunate in a sense that their
surroundings, especially their partner is supportive, accepting and helpful towards
a Csermely: A nők tudományos előmenetele, 624.
22 Joyce, J.: Ulysses, https://web.itu.edu.tr/inceogl4/modernism/Ulysses.pdf (accessed 21 May
2022), 347.
213 Kamarás: Nők az Akadémián, 866.
+ 71°