I frequently read Corey Robin's excellent blog, and I came across something there today that really struck a chord with me. Professor Robin was asked by The American Spectator to offer recommendations for Christmas reading. He prefaced his recomendations with this gem:
One of the great embarrassments of being an academic is that I seldom have time to read for pleasure. My reading is instrumental and opportunistic. Even my bedside table is stacked with books related to current projects. (I’m soon going to be writing on various ideas about markets and mobility in 19th-century France. At night I’ve been re-reading Madame Bovary and The Red and the Black. It pains me to read these classics with such a purposeful eye, but what are you going to do?)
I really admire his candor. Anyway, I'm now in my second year as a full-time professor at a community college. When I first took my job, I wasn't sure how long I would stay, but I've since decided for many reasons that this is where I want to be. I teach a 5-5-2. That's five courses in the Fall, five in the Spring, and two in the Summer. Two preps, sometimes three. And there is plenty of serivce work on top of that. This does not leave very much time to develop any sort of research agenda, but the job does not require me to develop anything of the kind. I need not publish a thing in order to keep my job (thank God, because between the teaching load and raising a child, the job wouldn't be mine for long).
I'm probably a bit unusal in that I find the above arrangement attractive. In many ways, it is liberating. One of the ways in which it is especially liberarting is that I do not quite suffer the same embarassment which Robin laments. I do have time to read for pleasure. In fact, I just read a great novel that has nothing to do with any philosophical problem I'm working (or not working) on – because the semester is over, and I can. And my reading is neither instrumental nor opportunistic. I can take in whatever I read and appreciate it for its own sake, independently of whatever particular philosophical problem I happen to be working (or not working) on.
When I was working on my dissertation, I had a feeling similar to the one Robin describes having. I often worried that I was approaching the literature with *too* purposeful an eye, possibly distorting my view of it. But what was I to do? I had a question that I needed to answer, and so it was imperative that I read with an eye to whether and how the author was adressing my question. I think that, because everyone has his or her own research-agenda-axe to grind (and it *is* important that you grind that axe – careers depend on it!), we run the risk of misunderstanding or in any case not appreciating each other's work. Wondering if any cocooners agree, or at any rate if Robin's remarks resonated with anyone else as they did with me.
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