That Machiavelli passage is a great favorite of mine, but it's clear Brad is missing Adam's point. Kotsko needs to drop the hell out. He can put on garments regal and courtly after his 9 hour shift at the lawfirm, and he'll be much, much happier.
One of my greatest fears is that I'll one day lose my curiosity. I honestly think it would be worse than losing my eyesight or hearing or use of my limbs.
It seems self-serving of DeLong to suggest that what makes a great academic is someone who is more curious and engaged, doesn't it? Successful academics tend to be a bit defensive about such topics, for obvious reasons.
From my neck of the humanities (so-called 'analytic' philosophy), things look a bit different. True, there are analogues of the vices that Adam laments. But it's also clear enough that the viciousness marks a mere lapse: a failure to engage, both with the issues that perplex us and most fundamentally with each other. It's, in other words, human failure -- irritating, embarrassing, and unavoidable.
True, people pull rank in academia. People are sometimes impatient, rude, and mean. Much work is imitative and rhetorically fatuous. People sometimes -- alas, often -- feel they must 'produce' when they have little to say. (And the feeling is often justified: institutional realities too often force people to 'produce.' This is a serious but separate problem.)
But why not view this as failure -- as failure precisely at philosophy (or whatever the field)?
In philosophy people mostly fail. Adam is bearing witness to some of this failure. Since human institutions are imperfect, objective failure sometimes brings institutional success. But usually not for long.
I did myself spend a year or so very cynical about academic philosophy, along the lines of Adam's post. It was during my third year of grad school, and it almost led me to leave. But it gradually dawned on me that what I couldn't accept were not the norms (values, ideals) themselves but my interlocutors' failures to live up to them. I was cynical where I should have been disappointed -- disappointed that philosophy was not as institutionally codifiable as I'd naively assumed it must be.
But why should philosophy be institutionally codifiable? And why shouldn't I take solace in the appearance of something close enough to an acknowledgment of shame in my interlocutor's irritating triumphalism?
My interlocutor secretly knew it. We all knew it. We simply sucked at philosophy. We still suck at it. And it's that acknowledgment that enables us to do it. Most of the people who didn't acknowledge that they sucked have dropped out.
He can put on garments regal and courtly after his 9 hour shift at the lawfirm
"Hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner..."
ac, I think DeLong's point is more something like this: If you don't like the work you're actually doing, you won't be good at it even on its own terms.
Ted, I think the distinction between cynical and disappointed is really helpful. It accords too, I think, with Tim Burke's comment here about just doing the thing the way you think is right, and hoping for the best. A couple of questions though:
institutional realities too often force people to 'produce.' This is a serious but separate problem
I thought this was precisely the problem that Adam decried.
And it's that acknowledgment that enables us to do it. Most of the people who didn't acknowledge that they sucked have dropped out.
ogged, I read Adam as decrying a more general problem to which over-production contributes, not over-production as such. (One of the most forceful diatribes against over-production in philosophy can be found, oddly, in the preface to one of Michael Dummett's Frege tomes, I think the phil. math one.)
What I meant by "Most of the people who didn't acknowledge that they sucked have dropped out" is that when I go over the list of the triumphalist interlocutors who tormented me in grad school, I note with relief that they're almost all gone -- i.e. out of the profession. (Some didn't get the degree. Some didn't get a t-track job. Some didn't get tenure.) Most of my former grad school colleagues who are still in the profession -- some thriving -- were and are the opposite of that.
In other words, the people with the irritating manner of the guy who tormented Adam and his friends at the talk received, eventually, their comeuppance. That's what you don't see when you're still in school; you assume that the know-it-all loudmouths will win in the end. But they usually don't. In academic philosophy, at least, it's more often the self-doubting stutterer who wins the institutional prize.
Huh, if that's true, that's great. You still have to account for the fact that Labs has a job, but ok. I would like to hear from Labs and Weiner too; wondering if they've also seen it shake out this way.
My initial reaction, though, is skeptical. Aren't the ones who do best precisely the ones who are most careerist about the enterprise? That's my recollected impression, anyway.
Part of the problem with the rude DePaul student may be the difficulty of texts like Zizek and Kerkegaard and the resulting difficulty in understanding and evaluating arguments and papers concerning them. People may use status indicators as a first cut to determine whether to even engage another person in discussion. This can lead to the rudeness Adam describes.
Baa may be joking but he has a point. Horace said that there is no use for mediocre poets, but people need mediocre lawyers. Even if it turns out you don't really like the work you are doing, you still can be a service for people if you work hard. And, it isn't like you would be killing people like a mediocre doctor. Come to the dark side.
shorter Ted H.: What is best in life? To crush your enemies. To see them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women
It seems like success in almost any profession - but particularly academia - is dependent on attracting a powerful mentor and having them look after you and push for you and make your case. Getting jobs after grad school has a lot to do with who your advisor is, and how much they like you, no? Part of attracting that person in the first place is no doubt brilliance or a certain spark, but there are many more personal elements involved as well, which have little to do with the quality of your work.
I feel sheepish about what will strike many as my naivety, but getting a job has, I think, mostly to do with assessments of the quality of your work. This has been true of hiring decisions I've been party to and of hiring decisions that I've witnessed at one remove. It was also confirmed by the fact that I couldn't get a job, or even many interviews, when I first went on the market with a body of work that hadn't yet come together. Better work produced much better results, with the same set of 'powerful mentors' in my corner.
Departments can and do read the work of applicants to their graduate programs and of job candidates. They can and do make decisions on the basis of those readings. Sometimes (often!) they decide wrongly, but it is always primarily on the basis of the work -- not on the 'power' of the recommendation. (Anyway, how can a recommender exert his or her 'power' if he or she doesn't think highly of the work? Quality of work is at each stage the paramount consideration.)
I hate to be so unfashionably uncynical about it, but that's how it strikes me in my small world. Again, I'm not saying that people don't decide these matters wrongly.
But still: if you're a power-tripping status-mongering meanie, it may well distract you from producing good work and force you out of the profession.
Of course some may read that and think 'Well, Ted H. is himself a counterexample, since he hasn't been forced out yet.' True enough: I'm sure I have at times come off as a power-tripping status-mongering meanie myself. But I don't think Joe O.'s summary version above captures quite all I'm saying here.
Well, admittedly, I'm just going by the experience of people I know, but it seems to me at least some of the energy flows the other way - people give up because they are not getting support or attention. This might be because they're not seen as brilliant, but my sense is that's not the case. Or it's hard to determine if the particular subject is not interesting to the advisor or if the advisee lacks spark.
I'm thinking of one successful academic I know who writes in a very similar style to his advisor, and in fact has collaborated on a book with him. And my sense is that this person is almost channeling his advisor, and the advisor approves of this and goes well out of his way to help him.
To give a counterexample, a history PhD I know could not get much help from her advisor (who is a very big deal), and she was afraid without his help she was doomed. She went to her undergraduate advisor (who also happened to be a very big deal), got help from her, the graduate advisor noticed this, and then decided to help her, and then she got a job. So he only saw she was "brilliant" after someone else recognized this in her. These things can be very subjective.
I'll support Ted at least partially: I think you need good work to succeed. I don't think it's always sufficient. Having a powerful mentor making your case will help, certainly, but it won't do you any good if you don't in fact like what you're doing.
Well, maybe sometimes people do pretty well in part because they seem promising--they've got their dissertation and maybe one paper, but they haven't done a lot else. Still, you're not going to seem promising unless you're actually enthusiastic about what you're actually doing. Smooth, cynical BS won't stand up (as opposed, perhaps, to smooth BS you believe in).
Now, I think that one of Adam's Kotsko's discontents was the lit search blues. Namely: He really wants to talk about some texts he cares about. But he's got to situate himself among a whole bunch of other interpreters, and he doesn't care that much about the interpreters. If you really do need to situate yourself wrt everyone else, that can be a problem--the people who don't like doing it won't be good at it, and will get weeded out. So the people who like doing lit searches will be the ones who remain in the field. I'm not saying that this is the case, or would be ideal if it were the case, but it's a way that DeLong's and Kotsko's points (as I understand them) can both wind up true.
It used to be possible, in philosophy, to become very prominent without actually publishing much of anything--just by being engaged with certain primary texts and philosophers and being an influential teacher. I don't think that's a viable career path anymore, because competition is so fierce. I also think there are good and bad things about that.
Yes, you need good work to succeed in many evaluative processes in academia. I've been largely very pleased with the results when I've been a part of grant-giving committees funding doctoral research--most of the people funded struck me as having the right combination of enthusiasm, authentic intellectual commitment and craftsmanship.
However.
I also think that graduate school in particular and research universities in general create a parallel economy of "the good" which sometimes, in some institutions often, collides with and overwrites the more authentic, meaningfully felt intellectual commitments and skills of aspirant and practicing academics. There's a kind of careerist, mandarin mode of academic practice that is all about the status-pursuit, callow productivity, and one-upmanship that I hear Adam talking about. Some people flash between that and a more authentic or satisfying habitus, some people live permanently in the mandarin world, and some are remarkably untouched and unruffled by the mandarin modus operandi. What happens to most of us i suspect is that we scarcely realize the mandarin or careerist way exists until after we're well into graduate school and then we find it slowly penetrating into our daily lives, working its way into our practice by subtle habituations. Then you may suddenly ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?" You may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house!" and you may ask yourself, "My god! What have I done?" Or something like that.
Smooth, cynical BS won't stand up (as opposed, perhaps, to smooth BS you believe in).
This is a key point. I suspect there's a lot - well maybe not a lot, but certainly a non-negligible amount - of work out there that seems misguided, shoddy, or even just plain wrong that the author truly believes in but that others see as BS.
I also think there must be at least some variation across disciplines. I don't know much about how philosopher's evaluate each other's work, but I suspect that they have more in common with each other in terms of training, approaches, and knowledge of particular texts, than historians do. If that's true, then it should be easier for them to weed out the BS.
I could be completely wrong about that, but it seems like - in this thread at least - the philosophers and historians have clearly different perspectives.
I also could have sworn that something like this came up at the Invisible Adjunct, but I went searching through the arvhives and the best I could come up with was this, which is not quite on topic but still interesting.
Just wanted to clarify. If it's b.s. and career opportunism that bothers you, stick with academia. b.s. and career opportunism, if you add in treating people like crap and mindless work, constitutes 85% of the practice as I have observed it.
Ok, so work for a bank, or something. And, as an aside, the-in house counsels I know seem pretty happy.
The despair unique to academia is seeing a pleasure turned into a numbing chore, and pushing yourself to write when you feel you have little to contribute, etc. This may not be true of economics, empirical psychology, or whatever, but there is much to be said for the pleasures of amateurism in the liberal arts. Many people are in the humanities because they "love ideas." That's not a sufficient reason.
there is much to be said for the pleasures of amateurism in the liberal arts
This is definitely true for many people. I'm reasonably sure I'm going to stick it out at least until the job market crushes whatever will be left of my spirit by the time I get there, but the idea of leaving academia and making my field a hobby definitely holds out a certain appeal.
It's not about the money, it's about returning intellectual pleasure to it's proper place in your life.
People often think "wouldn't it be great if the thing I loved could be my job?" It's not so clear that the answer to this question is yes. Just because you love God doesn't mean you should become a minister.
"Wouldn't it be great if I could get paid for doing the stuff I like?"
I sure do wish I could get paid for smoking pot, surfing the web, and playing with babies. I tried to come up with my three ideal jobs once and the list pretty much came down to wine critic, lottery winner, and kept man (not necessarily in that order). I've found the hiring prospects in all three fields to be quite dismal.
I stopped with the schooling after the bachelor's degree so perhaps my comments deserve an asterisk in this conversation, but I have never had a job that I actually enjoyed. I've had several (including the current one) that weren't unpleasant, but that's not really the same thing.
Part of me is jealous of folks who get to do what they love for a living. On the other hand, I don't feel any existential angst about my working life, either. I show up between 8 and 9, I go home between 5 and 6, and once I leave the building I don't stop to think about work again until I re-enter it. That seems like a fair enough trade to me. Many of my college friends went on to graduate school; about 1/3 of them finished it. Almost uniformly, the 2/3 who dropped out (who were usually the ones in the humanities) list the day they did so as one of the happiest of their lives.
I'm just about certain I had a point when I started this comment, but now I can't for the life of me figure out what it was.
DeLong's response is outstanding.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 04- 4-05 10:53 PM
Ha! I'm commenting at Brad's right now to tell him that he missed Adam's point. But yes, it's a very good post regardless.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 04- 4-05 10:56 PM
That Machiavelli passage is a great favorite of mine, but it's clear Brad is missing Adam's point. Kotsko needs to drop the hell out. He can put on garments regal and courtly after his 9 hour shift at the lawfirm, and he'll be much, much happier.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 6:43 AM
baa-
Gawd help me, sometimes I fall a little bit in love with you.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 6:46 AM
And so, prove yourself -- for nothing, to no one, to no end.
Wow.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 7:16 AM
One of my greatest fears is that I'll one day lose my curiosity. I honestly think it would be worse than losing my eyesight or hearing or use of my limbs.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 7:50 AM
It seems self-serving of DeLong to suggest that what makes a great academic is someone who is more curious and engaged, doesn't it? Successful academics tend to be a bit defensive about such topics, for obvious reasons.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 9:33 AM
From my neck of the humanities (so-called 'analytic' philosophy), things look a bit different. True, there are analogues of the vices that Adam laments. But it's also clear enough that the viciousness marks a mere lapse: a failure to engage, both with the issues that perplex us and most fundamentally with each other. It's, in other words, human failure -- irritating, embarrassing, and unavoidable.
True, people pull rank in academia. People are sometimes impatient, rude, and mean. Much work is imitative and rhetorically fatuous. People sometimes -- alas, often -- feel they must 'produce' when they have little to say. (And the feeling is often justified: institutional realities too often force people to 'produce.' This is a serious but separate problem.)
But why not view this as failure -- as failure precisely at philosophy (or whatever the field)?
In philosophy people mostly fail. Adam is bearing witness to some of this failure. Since human institutions are imperfect, objective failure sometimes brings institutional success. But usually not for long.
I did myself spend a year or so very cynical about academic philosophy, along the lines of Adam's post. It was during my third year of grad school, and it almost led me to leave. But it gradually dawned on me that what I couldn't accept were not the norms (values, ideals) themselves but my interlocutors' failures to live up to them. I was cynical where I should have been disappointed -- disappointed that philosophy was not as institutionally codifiable as I'd naively assumed it must be.
But why should philosophy be institutionally codifiable? And why shouldn't I take solace in the appearance of something close enough to an acknowledgment of shame in my interlocutor's irritating triumphalism?
My interlocutor secretly knew it. We all knew it. We simply sucked at philosophy. We still suck at it. And it's that acknowledgment that enables us to do it. Most of the people who didn't acknowledge that they sucked have dropped out.
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 9:40 AM
He can put on garments regal and courtly after his 9 hour shift at the lawfirm
"Hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner..."
ac, I think DeLong's point is more something like this: If you don't like the work you're actually doing, you won't be good at it even on its own terms.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 9:43 AM
Ted, I think the distinction between cynical and disappointed is really helpful. It accords too, I think, with Tim Burke's comment here about just doing the thing the way you think is right, and hoping for the best. A couple of questions though:
institutional realities too often force people to 'produce.' This is a serious but separate problem
I thought this was precisely the problem that Adam decried.
And it's that acknowledgment that enables us to do it. Most of the people who didn't acknowledge that they sucked have dropped out.
Can you say more about this?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 9:51 AM
ogged, I read Adam as decrying a more general problem to which over-production contributes, not over-production as such. (One of the most forceful diatribes against over-production in philosophy can be found, oddly, in the preface to one of Michael Dummett's Frege tomes, I think the phil. math one.)
What I meant by "Most of the people who didn't acknowledge that they sucked have dropped out" is that when I go over the list of the triumphalist interlocutors who tormented me in grad school, I note with relief that they're almost all gone -- i.e. out of the profession. (Some didn't get the degree. Some didn't get a t-track job. Some didn't get tenure.) Most of my former grad school colleagues who are still in the profession -- some thriving -- were and are the opposite of that.
In other words, the people with the irritating manner of the guy who tormented Adam and his friends at the talk received, eventually, their comeuppance. That's what you don't see when you're still in school; you assume that the know-it-all loudmouths will win in the end. But they usually don't. In academic philosophy, at least, it's more often the self-doubting stutterer who wins the institutional prize.
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 10:23 AM
Huh, if that's true, that's great. You still have to account for the fact that Labs has a job, but ok. I would like to hear from Labs and Weiner too; wondering if they've also seen it shake out this way.
My initial reaction, though, is skeptical. Aren't the ones who do best precisely the ones who are most careerist about the enterprise? That's my recollected impression, anyway.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 10:33 AM
Part of the problem with the rude DePaul student may be the difficulty of texts like Zizek and Kerkegaard and the resulting difficulty in understanding and evaluating arguments and papers concerning them. People may use status indicators as a first cut to determine whether to even engage another person in discussion. This can lead to the rudeness Adam describes.
Baa may be joking but he has a point. Horace said that there is no use for mediocre poets, but people need mediocre lawyers. Even if it turns out you don't really like the work you are doing, you still can be a service for people if you work hard. And, it isn't like you would be killing people like a mediocre doctor. Come to the dark side.
shorter Ted H.: What is best in life? To crush your enemies. To see them driven before you. And to hear the lamentations of their women
Posted by joe o | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 10:43 AM
Eh. It's all just the spaces between Harry Potter book releases.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 10:53 AM
And I thought Brad's post was really condescending. Though I'm sure he meant well.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 10:58 AM
It seems like success in almost any profession - but particularly academia - is dependent on attracting a powerful mentor and having them look after you and push for you and make your case. Getting jobs after grad school has a lot to do with who your advisor is, and how much they like you, no? Part of attracting that person in the first place is no doubt brilliance or a certain spark, but there are many more personal elements involved as well, which have little to do with the quality of your work.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 11:23 AM
I feel sheepish about what will strike many as my naivety, but getting a job has, I think, mostly to do with assessments of the quality of your work. This has been true of hiring decisions I've been party to and of hiring decisions that I've witnessed at one remove. It was also confirmed by the fact that I couldn't get a job, or even many interviews, when I first went on the market with a body of work that hadn't yet come together. Better work produced much better results, with the same set of 'powerful mentors' in my corner.
Departments can and do read the work of applicants to their graduate programs and of job candidates. They can and do make decisions on the basis of those readings. Sometimes (often!) they decide wrongly, but it is always primarily on the basis of the work -- not on the 'power' of the recommendation. (Anyway, how can a recommender exert his or her 'power' if he or she doesn't think highly of the work? Quality of work is at each stage the paramount consideration.)
I hate to be so unfashionably uncynical about it, but that's how it strikes me in my small world. Again, I'm not saying that people don't decide these matters wrongly.
But still: if you're a power-tripping status-mongering meanie, it may well distract you from producing good work and force you out of the profession.
Of course some may read that and think 'Well, Ted H. is himself a counterexample, since he hasn't been forced out yet.' True enough: I'm sure I have at times come off as a power-tripping status-mongering meanie myself. But I don't think Joe O.'s summary version above captures quite all I'm saying here.
Posted by Ted H. | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 12:40 PM
Well, admittedly, I'm just going by the experience of people I know, but it seems to me at least some of the energy flows the other way - people give up because they are not getting support or attention. This might be because they're not seen as brilliant, but my sense is that's not the case. Or it's hard to determine if the particular subject is not interesting to the advisor or if the advisee lacks spark.
I'm thinking of one successful academic I know who writes in a very similar style to his advisor, and in fact has collaborated on a book with him. And my sense is that this person is almost channeling his advisor, and the advisor approves of this and goes well out of his way to help him.
To give a counterexample, a history PhD I know could not get much help from her advisor (who is a very big deal), and she was afraid without his help she was doomed. She went to her undergraduate advisor (who also happened to be a very big deal), got help from her, the graduate advisor noticed this, and then decided to help her, and then she got a job. So he only saw she was "brilliant" after someone else recognized this in her. These things can be very subjective.
Posted by ac | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 1:08 PM
I'll support Ted at least partially: I think you need good work to succeed. I don't think it's always sufficient. Having a powerful mentor making your case will help, certainly, but it won't do you any good if you don't in fact like what you're doing.
Well, maybe sometimes people do pretty well in part because they seem promising--they've got their dissertation and maybe one paper, but they haven't done a lot else. Still, you're not going to seem promising unless you're actually enthusiastic about what you're actually doing. Smooth, cynical BS won't stand up (as opposed, perhaps, to smooth BS you believe in).
Now, I think that one of
Adam'sKotsko's discontents was the lit search blues. Namely: He really wants to talk about some texts he cares about. But he's got to situate himself among a whole bunch of other interpreters, and he doesn't care that much about the interpreters. If you really do need to situate yourself wrt everyone else, that can be a problem--the people who don't like doing it won't be good at it, and will get weeded out. So the people who like doing lit searches will be the ones who remain in the field. I'm not saying that this is the case, or would be ideal if it were the case, but it's a way that DeLong's and Kotsko's points (as I understand them) can both wind up true.It used to be possible, in philosophy, to become very prominent without actually publishing much of anything--just by being engaged with certain primary texts and philosophers and being an influential teacher. I don't think that's a viable career path anymore, because competition is so fierce. I also think there are good and bad things about that.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 1:14 PM
Yes, you need good work to succeed in many evaluative processes in academia. I've been largely very pleased with the results when I've been a part of grant-giving committees funding doctoral research--most of the people funded struck me as having the right combination of enthusiasm, authentic intellectual commitment and craftsmanship.
However.
I also think that graduate school in particular and research universities in general create a parallel economy of "the good" which sometimes, in some institutions often, collides with and overwrites the more authentic, meaningfully felt intellectual commitments and skills of aspirant and practicing academics. There's a kind of careerist, mandarin mode of academic practice that is all about the status-pursuit, callow productivity, and one-upmanship that I hear Adam talking about. Some people flash between that and a more authentic or satisfying habitus, some people live permanently in the mandarin world, and some are remarkably untouched and unruffled by the mandarin modus operandi. What happens to most of us i suspect is that we scarcely realize the mandarin or careerist way exists until after we're well into graduate school and then we find it slowly penetrating into our daily lives, working its way into our practice by subtle habituations. Then you may suddenly ask yourself, "Where does that highway go to?" You may tell yourself, "This is not my beautiful house!" and you may ask yourself, "My god! What have I done?" Or something like that.
Posted by Timothy Burke | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 2:08 PM
Smooth, cynical BS won't stand up (as opposed, perhaps, to smooth BS you believe in).
This is a key point. I suspect there's a lot - well maybe not a lot, but certainly a non-negligible amount - of work out there that seems misguided, shoddy, or even just plain wrong that the author truly believes in but that others see as BS.
I also think there must be at least some variation across disciplines. I don't know much about how philosopher's evaluate each other's work, but I suspect that they have more in common with each other in terms of training, approaches, and knowledge of particular texts, than historians do. If that's true, then it should be easier for them to weed out the BS.
I could be completely wrong about that, but it seems like - in this thread at least - the philosophers and historians have clearly different perspectives.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 2:18 PM
I also could have sworn that something like this came up at the Invisible Adjunct, but I went searching through the arvhives and the best I could come up with was this, which is not quite on topic but still interesting.
By the way,
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 2:22 PM
Please strike "by the way" - that was left over from an earlier way of phrasing the comment.
I must remember to preview.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 2:24 PM
Being a lawyer is not better.
Just wanted to clarify. If it's b.s. and career opportunism that bothers you, stick with academia. b.s. and career opportunism, if you add in treating people like crap and mindless work, constitutes 85% of the practice as I have observed it.
It does pay well though.
Posted by textualist | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 3:36 PM
Word.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 3:44 PM
Ok, so work for a bank, or something. And, as an aside, the-in house counsels I know seem pretty happy.
The despair unique to academia is seeing a pleasure turned into a numbing chore, and pushing yourself to write when you feel you have little to contribute, etc. This may not be true of economics, empirical psychology, or whatever, but there is much to be said for the pleasures of amateurism in the liberal arts. Many people are in the humanities because they "love ideas." That's not a sufficient reason.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 4:13 PM
there is much to be said for the pleasures of amateurism in the liberal arts
This is definitely true for many people. I'm reasonably sure I'm going to stick it out at least until the job market crushes whatever will be left of my spirit by the time I get there, but the idea of leaving academia and making my field a hobby definitely holds out a certain appeal.
Posted by eb | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 4:34 PM
But baa, I'm a Christian, so I am not allowed to become wealthy. That's part of the reason that academia seemed like an answer.
Posted by Adam Kotsko | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 5:59 PM
It's not about the money, it's about returning intellectual pleasure to it's proper place in your life.
People often think "wouldn't it be great if the thing I loved could be my job?" It's not so clear that the answer to this question is yes. Just because you love God doesn't mean you should become a minister.
Posted by baa | Link to this comment | 04- 5-05 7:40 PM
Right, what we really mean is "Wouldn't it be great if I could get paid for doing the stuff I like?"
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 8:06 AM
"Wouldn't it be great if I could get paid for doing the stuff I like?"
I sure do wish I could get paid for smoking pot, surfing the web, and playing with babies. I tried to come up with my three ideal jobs once and the list pretty much came down to wine critic, lottery winner, and kept man (not necessarily in that order). I've found the hiring prospects in all three fields to be quite dismal.
I stopped with the schooling after the bachelor's degree so perhaps my comments deserve an asterisk in this conversation, but I have never had a job that I actually enjoyed. I've had several (including the current one) that weren't unpleasant, but that's not really the same thing.
Part of me is jealous of folks who get to do what they love for a living. On the other hand, I don't feel any existential angst about my working life, either. I show up between 8 and 9, I go home between 5 and 6, and once I leave the building I don't stop to think about work again until I re-enter it. That seems like a fair enough trade to me. Many of my college friends went on to graduate school; about 1/3 of them finished it. Almost uniformly, the 2/3 who dropped out (who were usually the ones in the humanities) list the day they did so as one of the happiest of their lives.
I'm just about certain I had a point when I started this comment, but now I can't for the life of me figure out what it was.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 04- 6-05 10:28 AM