The following is an invited guest-post composed by Sam Duncan (Tidewater Community College):
Whether we admit it or not, we philosophers think a lot about how other philosophers view us and our academic positions. In fact, many of us often weigh this more than we should other considerations like the day to day reality of jobs and their larger impact on the world. I worked as an adjunct and as a lecturer on a year to year appointment for many years and one of the thoughts that dogged me was that my professors and colleagues from grad school thought of me a failure. When I finally landed a full-time gig at a community college I couldn’t shake that thought that even though I liked my job, other members of the profession would view me as a failure. The reactions of some of my former professors only reinforced this. I remember writing one to tell her about the job and her reaction was basically “Well you deserve a better job but it’s a step up.”
The thing is, it’s actually a really good job by almost any objective measure. The pay is good, and my workload and stress levels are much lower than my friends working in research focused jobs. I also have a lot of autonomy in the way I do my job. In fact, not only does administration not meddle in how I do my job but they’ve been extremely supportive of my own ideas and responsive to the few concerns I’ve had as a faculty member. For instance, I wanted to offer a bioethics course here and a number of deans and other administrators did a lot of work to help me through the process and to drum up interest in the course once it was offered. This is a huge contrast to the relationship between the administration and faculty at the research focused school where I worked as a lecturer, which could only be described as acrimonious if not poisonous. And while I don’t have to do much research to keep my job, the college is extremely supportive of research. I get a pretty good travel budget and my dean is overjoyed when I present papers at conferences. So I can do research if and when I feel like it, but there’s none of the publish only to publish pressure that many faculty members feel at research focused institutions. To me at least that seems ideal. Why then would my former professors and others respond in a tone of commiseration? And why would I care?
I think a good part of the answer to the first question is that faculty at institutions with PhD programs generally have little to no idea what jobs at other sorts of institutions are like. The vast majority of faculty at such institutions have never worked at any other sort of institution and very few of them even have experience of other sorts of institutions as students. When I was a graduate student only two of the faculty members in my program had ever taught at non-research focused schools. My suspicion here is borne out by the fact that the perspective of many of my former professors changed when they found out the details of my job. They were honestly shocked at how good it actually was, and my dissertation adviser told me he realized they should actively direct their students to look for community college jobs. Now just to be clear I wouldn’t say that every job at a community college is great, but neither are all jobs at R1s. I would wager there are some terrible community college jobs out there, but on the other hand I know for a fact that there are some terrible jobs at R1s and R2s.
This is one of the reasons the Philosopher’s Cocoon is so valuable. Graduate students and early career philosophers often can’t get good advice about jobs outside of research focused institutions from their graduate school professors, and often they simply don’t know other established philosophers who might give them perspective. It’s certainly been valuable for me. For many of my years on the job market I didn’t apply to community college jobs, and one of the things that finally made me do so was Basil Smith’s post on being a philosophy professor at a community college and Anthony Carreras’s comments on those posts in the discussion.
Now of course there are many philosophers out there who have complete disdain for jobs like mine, who simply don’t care what jobs like mine might actually be like. The question though is why should I, or any other sensible person, care what they think? The only thing that can possibly be behind such a view besides plain old ignorance is an obsession with prestige and one’s place in the imagined hierarchy. I believe Aristotle is quite right that a concern for reputation or prestige in itself is simply mistaken, and it only makes sense to be concerned with the things reputation is supposed to track (but often doesn’t). And anyone who has read Rousseau should know that an obsession with one’s position relative to others is a surefire recipe for both personal misery as well as strife and a whole host of other social ills. But we’re only human and it’s hard not to care what others think even if we ought to know better. On the individual level I’ve tried to focus on the fact that not only do I have good working conditions but I find my job deeply meaningful, and to remind myself how irrational, and yes ugly, concern with position and prestige are. I have a chance to make a difference at this institution and in the lives of my students that I didn’t have in my previous jobs, and I think many academics couldn’t say the same of their current jobs. I can’t say I’m fully free of my own concern for prestige and reputation, but at least I do recognize that it’s a concern I shouldn’t rationally endorse.
But at the risk of closing on a slightly sour note, I have to add that I don’t think individual virtue (or an attempt at it) is the whole and entire answer to this problem. This concern for prestige and hierarchy seems built into academia as a whole, and from what I can tell it’s worse in philosophy than it is other fields. It’s terrible in so many different ways though. As job seekers it clouds our perspective on the job search and keeps us from making rational decisions and once we have jobs it keeps us from being satisfied. It’s also a betrayal of the left wing values most academics claim to subscribe to. If you look down your nose at community colleges and the students they serve, then I for one can’t take seriously any claims you might make about holding egalitarian values. It also undermines our support from the public at large. The ugly truth is that the stereotype of academics as elitists that some politicians and pundits get so much mileage out of is hardly without a firm basis in fact. So what can we do? On that point I sadly don’t have any real ideas, but I do think we need to do something.
Anyway, that’s enough editorializing. I’d really like to hear what other people think on this point. Have you had to struggle with similar feelings about how you’re viewed in “the profession”? How have you dealt with them? Do you have any ideas how we as a group might get beyond such concerns? Or are they simply human nature?
Thanks for the great post, Sam – I share very similar sentiments, and hope your thoughts give rise to a good discussion!
Leave a Reply