You are a professor at a small liberal arts college. A bright student approaches you and says she is considering graduate school in philosophy. She loves philosophy and wants to dive deeper into it. She foresees a life of the mind where she might do this for a living.
Oh, your heart just breaks. This student is so excellent. Her final paper for your philosophy of science course blew you away. Still, you steel your heart and give her the advice that not only is sensible, but that strikes you as your moral duty to tell her.
"Just don't do it!" you say. "Just don't go to grad school. The philosophy academic job market is abysmal for years, and now with Covid it's gone even further down."
You might temper this advice by saying that maybe she can consider it if she cannot imagine doing anything else (this is terrible advice, btw, but that's for another time), or only if she can get into a top program.
On the face of it, it seems straightforward to give this advice. We might even think we have a moral duty to actively discourage a student who contemplates getting a PhD in philosophy.
But there is a fundamental problem–the advice takes away the student's agency. This piece by Tracy Evans, who started a PhD at age 60 is illuminating. Evans is privileged in many respects. She already had a long career already behind her when she "heeded the call to change". Yet, her reasons for embarking on the PhD are, I think, recognizable to many of us. As she writes, "'What do you intend to do with a Ph.D.?' [my colleagues] asked. 'It is all about the journey,' I responded. She goes on to quote one of her favorite authors, Ursula K Le Guin, who wrote “It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
When I decided to pursue a PhD there were many forces against me. I came from a working-class background, we were living paycheck to paycheck. My father was a bricklayer, my mother a homemaker. There was no culture for the life of the mind in our house. This is not to say my parents weren't creative or thoughtful. The main books in my house were cooking books, and my father is a fantastic cook making the most amazing dishes both of his native Malaysia, Belgium which is now his home, and many other places.
Still, ours wasn't an intellectual family. The local library was a lifesaver, offering a vision of alternative modes of being, existing, thriving, that I could only fully explore in college. I was struck, reading Zena Hitz' Lost in thought how different it must be to grow up in a household where parents encourage you to follow your intellectual passions. College opened my eyes as it does so many. I felt that I could make a contribution, that this was my calling, to become an academic–to impart the love of wisdom to others. I thought I could be good at it.
I had, beyond good grades, no evidence that I would be suited as an academic. The vast majority of my professors were male, and all were white. In such a fragile situation, your feelings can be a valuable source of insight. As Caleb Ward recently argued, analyzing Audre Lord's work on feelings as a source of knowledge, sometimes self-trust and trust in one's own feelings are crucial in the absence of a support network or of any role models. And so, I trusted my feelings and what I wanted. I went ahead applying to PhD programs, and later to the academic job market. I drew on intellectual passion and kept on going, like many of us do in the fraught years (unless we are very, very lucky) on the academic job market.
But what if a well-meaning professor had discouraged me right from the start and said "Just don't. Don't pursue grad school. The job market is abysmal." They might have done it for my own good. Still, this advice ignores the journey of the PhD and the amazing privilege that comes with deep intellectual study.
Of course, it is risky to go to grad school. I was lucky, but I don't think my hesitance about the advice "Don't go to grad school" is dependent on any particular outcome. The problem with "just don't do it" advice is that it takes away the agency of students, who we are stewards of, but whose lives we should not try to influence the outcome of. Rather, what this underscores is the importance for the student to find a graduate school that also pays attention to alternatives to academia, and that has good placement both in academia and outside.
So, rather than say "Don't do it", it is better to give advice to the effect that grad school is difficult, that the outcome is uncertain, that an academic job is uncertain even if you do everything right, but also, crucially, that it can be beautiful and rewarding to get to study something in depth for a number of years, something you are passionate about. That preserves the agency of the advisee and recognizes the importance of the journey.
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