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Overcoming fear of judgment in a harsh field?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

Philosophy is such a harsh and judgmental field and as an early career philosopher, it's debilitating to think that I am constantly being nitpicked at when I apply to jobs, submit to journals, give talks, etc. (I have friends who are scarred from hearing faculty discuss job candidates). Can anyone give me tips on how to overcome this fear of judgment, especially since this is what makes/breaks your career?

This a good question, albeit a tough one for me. I have to confess that this is something I've long struggled with, and continue with to this day. Although I've been in the profession for many years now, I still dread opening decision emails from journals, as like most people I've received my share of brutal referee reports. I've also had rough talks and Q&A's that left me incredibly discouraged. Having witnessed my spouse's career in a different academic field, attending some of her talks and dissertation defense, my sense is that some other fields can be far less harsh than philosophy. Some research suggests this too. And wow, did I sure have some bad experiences on the job-market. 

My only real strategy has been to inure myself to harsh judgment as much as I can and "keep on keeping on." I just take my lumps, so to speak, and try to enjoy the good moments/successes when things go better. But, in all honesty, this has been one of the more difficult ongoing parts of a career in the field for me. There's so much about doing philosophy that I love, but this is one of the areas that I don't. So I'd be keen to hear strategies that other people have come up with, and how they work.

Do any readers have any helpful tips to share?

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13 responses to “Overcoming fear of judgment in a harsh field?”

  1. anon

    Two years ago, I gave a talk at a graduate conference (as one of the graduate students), where the keynote speaker ripped me apart in Q&A. She said she didn’t read any of the philosophers I talked about like I did (“Not A, not B, Not C, Not D–none of them”) and knew almost all of them personally. She didn’t give me a chance to reply to that comment–cut me off and said “I didn’t ask you to respond to that”–and proceeded with another question that didn’t really have to do with my paper. It was undoubtedly the most humiliating experience of my career (and probably my life).
    How do you overcome the fear of cases like these? Here are a couple of things I’ve tried to remember:
    A. In “Advice on Giving Talks,” Adam Elga says this about these sorts of cases: “Don’t be flustered. This sometimes happens and most of the time the cause is not you but rather something that is going on with the questioner.” I think this comment generalizes not only to aggressive questioners, but also angry or dismissive reviewers.
    B. Here is one trick that has done wonders for me. Suppose you’ve done something bad: you gave a bad talk, wrote a bad paper, etc. And imagine you get brutal feedback about it. You might start catastrophizing (e.g., “I should drop out,” “I’m a terrible person,” “I don’t belong in this program,” etc.)
    Imagine your best friend made the same mistake and said these things about themselves. How would you respond to them? You would probably try to get them to see they’re thinking irrationally. In these cases, treat yourself as if you’re the other friend.
    C. This one might be plainly irrational, but it’s also helped me. Whenever I get feedback–whether that’s from an audience member, a reviewer, someone on my committee–I assume as a default that they are trying to help me. That makes the feedback easier to take. If I get a devastating objection from a friend, I know they’re doing so in part to help me see a glaring problem and figure out how to revise it. But if I get a devastating objection from someone I know who hates me, it’s a lot harder to take. So, try to assume as a default that the feedback you get is motivated by a desire to help you. I actually think in most cases, that is exactly what the motivation is. And if you have good reason to think that is not what’s going on, then maybe refer to A-B.

    Reply
  2. Daniel Weltman

    I think there are lots of things that can make dealing with this difficult, and thus lots of things one can do to make it less difficult. This will depend a lot on what kind of person one is and what kind of challenges one faces. So there is not going to be much in the way of one-size-fits-all answers. Below I mention some things that may work for some people, ranked roughly in order of how likely I think the advice is to be helpful:
    1) Divorce the fact that these judgments make or break your career from their status as judgments. Lots of things can make or break your career: that a certain department happens to want to hire someone working on what you work on, that you have experience teaching exactly the course a department needs taught, that the department’s first choice got an offer somewhere else and accepted that, etc. These things might be hard to cope with in the way any chancy and momentous stuff is hard to cope with, but it probably doesn’t strike you as anywhere near as damaging as harsh judgments. So, try to think of harsh judgments like this: things which have an effect on your career but which otherwise you don’t need to take personally.
    2) Some harsh judgments (like the one anon experienced from the keynote speaker) clearly reflect badly on the person passing them and not at all on you. They’re working out their anger or fear or resentment over something that has nothing to do with you (perhaps harsh judgments passed on them when they were a grad student – I’m sure there are many cycles of trauma in our field that are being perpetuated through the generations). Treat this as an opportunity to feel sympathy or at least sadness for the other person and to feel nothing at all about your own merits.
    3) Some harsh judgments are obviously mistaken. I know there’s a kernel of truth in all those unfavorable reviewer comments etc. but really I think a lot of the time people are just wrongly critical of each other. To the extent this happens to you, just ignore it, because they’re wrong! (One can of course lean too much into this and wrongly reject good criticisms. But probably if you’re freaking out about being judged, you’re not someone who leans too much into wrongly rejecting good criticisms.)
    4) Some harsh judgments are from people who do not see what they are doing as harsh. They may have been raised in a culture where one shows one’s love by acting like this, or they may have drunk the analytic philosophy Kool-Aid and they think this is how philosophers are supposed to act as a matter of course. These people are just talking in the way they want to talk. At worst they aren’t actively trying to harm you and at best they’d be horrified to learn they’re harming you. Knowing that other people are saying these things from a place of trying to help you develop your views, or at least minimally from a place of habitually acting like this, can help mitigate the bad feelings.
    4a) Like many Ashkenazi Jews, I grew up in a family that debated constantly, not because we were jerks to each other but because this was how we liked to behave. I think you can see the dynamic in e.g. a bunch of Woody Allen movies. I experience the analytic philosophy nitpicking/sniping/sparring stuff as something like a warm bath or an enjoyable romp, depending on my mood. This doesn’t mean I think it’s good – indeed it’s bad that analytic philosophy caters to people like me because the result is something that is very exclusionary to people who grew up in many other sorts of circumstances – but it is to point out that one’s attitudes are perhaps not set in stone: there are other ways to be out there, if one can manage it.
    5) Pretend you’re talking with Socrates? (And then either marvel at your luck or gloat about how he’s going to have to chug the hemlock soon.)
    6) Reflect more on what makes these things hard to take, and work on fixing that. It’s hard to say more without knowing why you find them hard to take. But I think often there is good work to be done here.
    6a) For instance, if your self-conception depends on being a great philosopher, and the nitpicking hurts because it suggests maybe you’re not great, one option is to abandon the idea that it’s good to be, and that you are or ought to be, a great philosopher. I think I’m pretty crummy at philosophy and because I think this, it doesn’t hurt me if others agree!

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  3. The Real SLAC Prof

    I endorse much of the good advice above. A few additional thoughts:
    1. When it comes to talks, think about how you are framing the talk and the attitude you project going into the Q and A (and, no, I’m in no way attempting to blame the victim here!): If the talk itself is presented as a kind of “takedown” of one figure or group, it is more likely to generate hostile pushback. If you go into the Q and A genuinely interested in exploring the questions with your fellow philosophers, rather than rigidly seeing yourself as defending your thesis, it is harder for an audience member to be an asshole. I understand this can be challenging in a job talk since you need to project authority, but even in this context you can encourage the sense that this is a collaborative exploration. Perhaps this is controversial, but I think it can be helpful to sometimes ask the questioner how they think their question should be answered, which can deflate some of their ire by putting them on the spot and then you can have a bit of a back-and-forth which is less Captain-Subaltern, and more like two colleagues. Of course, you need to be judicious with this tactic, but I do think speakers have more control over the vibe of the Q&A than they often appreciate.
    2.But assholes are still sometimes gonna asshole. One approach to dealing with people being rude at talks is humor. This obviously takes some skill, but some sort of humorous response can help to quickly put the jerk in their place. Remember: the room is on your side and against the jerk!
    3. The more general fear of judgment strikes me as more challenging to combat since being judged is an inescapable part of being in academia (and life). I’m not someone who sees judgment in itself as bad or something to be avoided, so it is hard for me to understand the fear. I wonder how much experience the OP has in judging others in a professional context? When you teach or grade as a grad student, you must judge your students, and when you serve as a referee you must judge the submission. If you regularly engage in these activities, I think, over time, you will learn that judging is normal and OK, and that one can be judged while still being respected as a person.

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  4. Michel

    This isn’t going to be very helpful for a while (if at all), but when I feel the anxiety creeping up, I turn around and dwell on my successes for a minute. Bad referee report? Well, look at all the other papers I managed to publish.
    Earlier on, I drew comfort and security from just having the PhD: Imight have made a fool of myself, but nobody was going to revoke the PhD! (Having a job, when you get one, can be a similar comfort.)

    Reply
  5. Michael Kates

    Exact same reaction as Prof. Arvan. Academic philosophy can be a very cold and harsh place. But sometimes you just have to keep soldiering on. For example, my job market paper got rejected about a dozen times and I thought I would never publish anything in the discipline. But then I got on a “hot streak” and published 5-6 papers in a row, with minimal rejections. You just have to have faith in your work and hope that the next break will eventually come along. Indeed, I never published my job market paper, although I still think it’s probably one of the best things I’ve ever written.

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  6. self-compassion fan

    A couple of things come to mind!
    First, I have had several friends speak very highly of the Mindful Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff. In general I like Neff’s work (she is a psychologist and has a lot of academic publications if the workbook seems too woo-woo for an analytic philosopher). The construct of self-compassion in general I find very helpful, and there are a lot of practices you can do to help treat yourself better (which seems important in how we respond to other people’s judgments). Like any skill, however, these things take time and practice.
    Second, one thing that was really helpful for me to learn by being on a hiring committee as a grad student was to see just how many of the make-or-break judgments were completely out of the candidate’s control. Someone I thought seemed great and kind came across as “stuck-up” to someone else on the committee. One of my favorite candidates was super extroverted and enthusiastic, and someone else saw them as unlikeable and overbearing. What I thought was an asset another saw as a liability.
    Further, we each have our own way of doing philosophy, which will appeal to some people and not others. Some candidates who were into super formal/high-level stuff just didn’t really spark my interest, while some of my favorite candidates were perceived as insufficiently “rigorous” by powerful committee members.
    Being on the committee really helped me reframe how I view such judgments. As others above have mentioned, these judgments often have much more to do with the person making the judgment rather than you. It’s something that takes time to internalize and doesn’t eliminate all insecurities and hurt, but I have found that it has helped me further accept who I am as a philosopher and accept that not everyone is going to like who I am or what I do.

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  7. Bill V.

    Ditto what everyone has said already. It is difficult, and unnecessary, for professional philosophy to be the way it is sometimes.
    I do see signs, in some subfields and demographics within the field, of a marked softening–an aim to be pleasant and helpful in conference Q&As, for example. I try to model this in my own interactions (even when giving a negative referee report, say).
    In my own professional life, I’ve also more consciously tried to detach from both the content and outcomes of outside negative judgments. All those people striving for status are going to be just as forgotten as the rest of us in 200 years, if not sooner. In that context, the effort to outcome ratio of academic philosophy is almost laughable (what’s the average, 6 readers per published paper?). I’m tenured so I have this luxury now, but I’ve started putting more of my philosophical effort into projects that have bigger, non-academic, audiences.
    Another point I’d make here is that really there are very few things that even can (let alone do) make or break a life or career. Sure, things can not work out, and something you try might not succeed in the way you hoped, and you might even have to leave the field you hoped to work in. But life is long, which is to say you have lots of chances, and there are many ways to live a fulfilling life.

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  8. Laurence B McCullough

    Let me pass on advice that I received from Ruth Macklin when I was in my post-doc at The Hastings Center on how to submit to journals and deal with reviews.
    1. Make a list of the six journals in which you would be glad to have your paper appear. Submit to the first.
    2. If you receive reviews, read them. Then get madder than hell, for just five minutes, no more. During this time period it is OK to entertain homicidal ideations but it is illegal to act on them, so do not do that. I would add that the more vivid the ideation the greater its therapeutic effect will be on you, so let loose and have some fun.
    3. Put the reviews aside for at least a day. (This is the most important next step. You will need to cool down, leave tour anger in the past, and concentrate on improving your work.) Then return to the reviews and read them closely, looking for comments that will help you revise the paper into a better paper. Ruth added that there will always be such comments and my own experience matched hers. Revise the paper accordingly.
    4. If you have been invited to resubmit, do so and explain to the editor how you have responded to the reviewers, being sure first to thank them for their work and valuable contributions to your work. (Always take the high road.)
    5. If not invited to resubmit, submit to the second journal on your list.
    6. Repeat steps 2 and 3, and also 4, if it is applicable.
    I asked Ruth whether she ever had to make a new list starting with journal 7. She said that she had not had to do so. My own experience has matched hers.
    7. Write reviews that adhere to the highest standards of philosophical work because that is what you owe colleagues in the peer review process, especially junior colleagues.

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  9. Robert Wallace

    Hi!
    Ditto to basically everything about the profession.
    I want to second the Kristen Neff stuff. I found it very helpful, especially when I was on the job market.
    I also want to add two things to all this good advice.
    First, find and cherish your fans. Having your work judged, and being judged yourself, is an inevitable part of this whole academic philosophy thing. So I think it’s incredibly important to try to balance out the harsh judgments we all face in this profession with the opinions of even just a few respected peers who openly like and admire your work. I would bet that at least one member of your committee is already your fan. A couple of encouraging words about your work won’t undo a bad talk or mean referee comments, but they can be surprisingly powerful. I will never forget an email confirming my suspicion that a referee report was, in fact, terrible, unfair garbage. It kept up my belief in the project, which did eventually get published.
    Second, I think an important part of cherishing the supportive colleagues you happen to find out there is to become a fan yourself. Part of why the field is experienced as so harsh and judgmental is because, I think, we so rarely, and almost never through formal channels, say what we like about what other philosophers are doing. I sometimes worry that many of us have been tricked into thinking we can’t say we like something because liking it compromises our ability to rigorously scrutinize it, which is, of course, nonsense. If we all start acting like the kind and supportive philosophers we wish were around us, maybe we’d all have a better time. But more importantly, by acting supportive, you can exert some control, however small, over the things about the profession that are genuinely fear-worthy.

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  10. Shay Allen Logan

    This advice almost certainly comes too late for most folks. And it’s advice that is hard to act on because the information you’d need isn’t readily available. But you might have mentors who know things, so I’ll say it anyways.
    The advice is that some subfields aren’t like this. So get yourself into one of those.
    I can’t tell you all the fields that are nice. But I can tell you mine and others might tell you theirs: I work on relevant logics. Our community is awesome. The sorts of things anon described at top would simply not be allowed in our community. Senior people in the room would intervene, the speaker and the rude commenter would be spoken after the fact, etc.
    Anyways, if any of you out there are part of good subfields in this sense, maybe it’d be good to tell folks about that.

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  11. lady philosopher

    Also, take subfield advice with a grain of salt. Logicians in general have a reputation for being nice. But they aren’t always nice, and they can be really crappy, and in fact some of my worst experiences at conferences etc. have been with logic folks.

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  12. Shay Allen Logan

    Oh I agree! Logicians can be really such-and-suches. No contest there. It’s relevant logicians I claim are nice. So maybe I’m talking subsubfields.

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  13. Mert Karaca

    In addition to all the great advice that’s been given, I’d like to point out the importance of solidarity among colleagues. The first step of building such a solidarity is to get to know each other and be aware of each other’s struggle. There are a couple of ways to do that: (1) There is actually a non-negligible literature in metaphilosophy addressing this problem. Anecdotally, one time when I was on the verge of dropping out, reading Kristie Dotson literally gave me a lifeline; not only because she was perfectly right about what’s going on within the discipline, but also because I realized she and others like her are out there in academic philosophy. So, one thing that can be done is to get into that literature.
    (2) I think opening up/listening to your colleagues and giving each other affirmations is another way to build that solidarity. This can be done on a more personal level, like complaining to your philosopher friend about the state of the discipline. But I believe this should also be done on a larger, more structural level. Departments should create exclusive spaces for socially oppressed and academically marginalized groups, like women, first-generation students, non-native speakers, and so on for experience-sharing. Those marginalized voices can be amplified in such spaces not only because they are safely expressed but also because the listeners are equipped with the social capital needed to really understand the speaker. Of course, I am not suggesting we should confine these groups to those spaces, but those spaces should be available.
    In my experience, the nasty tricks this hostile environment plays on our psyche loses its strength significantly when one knows that they are not alone in this. One last thing I can add is this: challenging this combative structure, even minimally, makes one feel good and empowered. I usually get to do this when I teach. For example, I always assign Robert Solomon’s very short piece, “What is Philosophy?” for syllabus day. I also give my students the flexibility to explore their philosophical skills on assignments, even if what they do doesn’t necessarily translate into formality and rigor we obsessively look for. Having little commitments like this that challenge the hostile environment in academic settings, whether it’s seminars, conferences, committees, refereeing, or even one-on-one conversations with colleagues also challenges one’s internal defeatist tendencies.

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