The Philosophers' Cocoon

The Happy Sophist (guest post by Eric Schliesser)

This is a guest post by Eric Schliesser, University of Amsterdam

Because my dad resented being shunted into the family business – and disguised his anger at himself for not escaping this fate – he made it very clear that unlike his parents, he was willing to support me in my education ‘whatever I would choose.’ (He had received an Associate degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC, but no other higher education.) 

My dad had assumed I would be prudent about my freedom, and was aghast when in my mid-twenties I was pursuing a PhD in philosophy partially subsidized by him. I had opted for a PhD because Professor Eichenberg (my Intro to IR teacher) had asked me to teach a number of sections of his intro to IR course. I loved that vastly better than any of the ‘real jobs’ I landed in the early 90s (the so-called ‘jobless recovery’); academia beckoned.

At The University of Chicago even junior PhD students were given the opportunity to teach their own classes in the required undergraduate great books/Humanities sequences. During one winter session in the late 1990s my dad visited my class, and sat in the back of the room. He had no idea what we were talking about, but after class he was beaming, and he said something like ‘you have really found your calling.’ After that frigid morning in Hyde Park, he only spoke with pride about my career choice (and gleefully remained ignorant of the content of most of my work until he died). 

Back in those days, we received no teacher training, and I was not an especially good teacher. I have some evidence of that: my dad himself often referred back to the class visit by telling people that apparently I had called on a student by asking “is that your hand or are you scratching yourself?” He thought that genius (and ridiculous). I am sure part of his joy in sharing that story is my obvious discomfort about it. But the other part was the shared joy in my vocation.

At Chicago, and also in my first few temporary jobs, I generally taught students who were obviously much smarter than myself. In these jobs, classroom sizes were small; ‘teaching’ basically involved sitting in a small circle and learning from my students while discussing the reading and facilitating discussion. Yes, there were lots of papers to grade, but basically I was being paid to read books with bright, articulate students.

In reflecting on my graduate and undergraduate teachers – remember I had received no teaching training  – I decided that good teachers used an exaggerated feature of their character to connect with their students and, thereby, re-direct their focus to facilitate mutual learning. Plato calls this (more highfalutin-ly) the turning of the soul; Adam Smith (a very successful lecturer), ever so practical, suggests it’s directing vanity to its proper ends. In acting on this insight, I became a classroom character, and my teaching evaluations were polarized. Later I realized that the student-critics had a point: I was teaching to my better students – the ones who would be teaching me – and not to all my students.

So much for introduction. A few years ago, I was disabled and spent almost year in bed with debilitating headaches and general lack of conviction I could ever be professionally active again. (Check out my long covid diaries on this.) I had plenty of time to reflect on my career and the existential choices that had brought me where I was. After discussing it with my occupational physician, and soul searching, I realized that in my job I was passionate about three things: undergraduate teaching, having my research read, and learning from my peers at workshops or conferences. Being denied all three was clarifying. There were also things I enjoyed not strictly part of my job description (like blogging). Things that on refection I really didn’t like: both ends of peer review, administrative tasks, being a PhD supervisor, and a few others. 

Mid-career moves?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader ('feeling stuck') writes:

I have a question about mid-career growth and/or moves. I'm up for tenure soon, and all signs suggest I will be successful. I should feel relieved and grateful, but I don't see much room for growth at my very, very small institution and feel a bit stuck. My position is primarily teaching and service with very little research support, though I've tried to establish a robust research trajectory. I love teaching, but I don't want to only teach.

I'm super burnt out, but feel like I need to stay competitive (whatever that means) in case something else comes along. But I'm also in a good location and close to family, and reluctant to give that up. Are these just normal growing pains? Is it okay to feel like I'm settling? Any advice from others at small institutions?

Great questions, and I'm curious to hear what other readers think. My sense is that it can be very difficult to move institutions after tenure, particularly if you're at a small institution--as most senior jobs seem to be at research institutions, hiring people from other research institutions. I do know a few people who moved from small institutions to senior positions at R1s post-tenure, so I do know that it can be done, at least in principle. However, these cases seem few and far between, and in today's market environment it seems to me one probably has to be a 'rock star' of sorts at research to be competitive for these jobs.

In terms of the OP's final questions ('Are these just normal growing pains? Is it okay to feel like I'm settling?'), my sense from talking to people is that it is totally normal, and quite a lot of people feel this way. Most of us were educated in top research departments, and so it can be natural (even for those of us who value and enjoy teaching) to wish that we had more time and resources for research. Still, as natural as these wishes may be, I guess my thoughts here are three-fold: (1) One shouldn't look a gift-horse in the mouth as it were. Those of us who have full-time tenured (!) jobs are in general very lucky to have them, and it is entirely possible to be a good and productive researcher even with a high teaching load; (2) If you're that burnt out (as the OP says), then one of the great things about tenure is that it provides a lot more freedom to decide where to invest one's energies (one can, for example, back off from particularly intensive teaching practices to focus more on research); and (3) Although there's nothing wrong with 'settling', it's entirely up to you whether you want to keep pushing (as it were) to publish in top places in pursuit of a potential move to another institution (again, I've known people who did it!).

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours?

What kind of colleague do you want? (Or, why we don't want passionate teachers and kind people as academic colleagues)

Imagine you're a tenured faculty member at an average sort of department, not super-prestigious but still with some aspirations for research excellence. You're hiring a new tenure track faculty member. Although people do sometimes move from tenure track positions, it is still a safe bet that a new hire will stay and will be your colleague for many years to come.

What kind of colleague would you rather have? Would you like someone who is ambitious, puts their research first in everything they do, certainly does not have a passion for teaching? Or would you like someone who is an excellent scholar but who also is kind, considerate, collegial, cares about their students?

Supposing you're hiring someone for a senior position, such as an endowed chair, or a Reader or Professor or Department Head (in the UK the latter is not uncommon). Would you like someone single-minded focused on their next excellent book with a prestigious press--OUP or Cambridge, perhaps a few select other publishers for subfields? Or would you like someone who is an excellent research but who is also caring, compassionate, who thinks about the wellbeing and prospects of the graduate students and about the department's wellbeing, who serves the department and puts other people's needs (regularly) above their own? 

Going by advice for cover letter writing and for writing letters of recommendation, it would seem we want a colleague like the former. We want the ambitious, single-minded person for whom teaching is a necessary evil. Take the following handy advice sheet for how to write letters that don't show gender bias, from the University of Arizona (pictured below).

Mid-career reflections - part 8: on fear in the discipline

When I started the Cocoon a little over six years, I didn't have many hopes for it. I was just a struggling early-career scholar with few friends or professional contacts in the discipline (due, admittedly, to some bad choices I made early on). I started the Cocoon not because I expected anyone to read it, but simply because I was sick of feeling isolated and alone in a discipline that seemed to me to incentivize those things. My only hope in starting the blog was that I might find a few similarly-minded others: people like me who were sick of feeling alone, and who wanted to help each other make their path through the discipline just a little bit better.

In some ways (many ways), the Cocoon succeeded beyond my wildest hopes. It seems to be widely read, at times has had a good stable of contributors, has been a wonderful way to get to know other people (and helped me feel far less isolated), and I've often heard people say complimentary things about it (though maybe they're just being nice). However, there's one major thing about the Cocoon that has been a persistent disappointment, at least for me--and that is how few early-career people have joined as contributors. I will be frank: since day 1, I've always hoped the Cocoon would really bloom--that early-career people would come out of the woodwork left and right to congregate here to post regularly and speak their minds: sharing their work, discussing their career struggles, and so on. Yet, while there are many commenters--as well as people who have (mostly anonymously) shared professional questions and career struggles in our "how can we help you?" series--the blog has consistently had few official contributors...and these days it is basically just me and sometimes Helen.

I've often wondered why so few early-career people blog. It could of course be anything: maybe people think they have better things to do (like, you know, research and teaching). However, I've asked people about this on occasion, and every time I've done so the dominant answer seems to be very different: fear. Fear of what search committees might think. Fear of what other philosophers might think. And so on (see the comments section above). If this is the truth--and it appears to be--I think it is just terrible. It is the reason why I began the Cocoon in the first place: because I was sick of living alone and in fear. I wanted a better profession than that. And yet--or so it seems--the fear is still there. Why? And how should we grapple with it?

Mid-career reflections, part 7: ask for help

If there is one guiding theme behind my mid-career reflections so far, it is that while our careers in the profession are subject to a great deal of 'life and luck', adaptation is key. As I explained in my post on bitterness and resentment, early in my grad career I didn't adapt very well to some unlucky events and aspects of the profession I found frustrating. I let bitterness and frustration get the best of me for a time, mostly to my own detriment. Similarly, as I wrote in my post on why people matter, I didn't get it early in my career why people matter. Finally, I've explained why I think it is important to adapt to the fact that quite a bit of conventional wisdom in the profession seems dubious at best. If one just follows conventional wisdom unreflectively, one may inadvertently adopt counterproductive job-market strategies. 

In a sense, none of this should be very surprising. What is true in philosophy seems true of life in general: uncontrollable events aside, the better one adapts the better off one is likely to be. But this in turn raises the question: what strategies can one adopt to better ensure that one adapts well to things in the profession. When I reflect on my career so far, one thing stands out: the importance of asking for help when you need it. Allow me to explain.

Mid-career reflections, part 6: trajectory matters

In my first post in this series, I explained why I have come to doubt some common pieces of conventional wisdom in the discipline: conventional wisdom about program rankings, publishing, putting research in front of teaching, and blogging. In brief, a lot of things that seem intuitive--things that just 'seem like they should be right'--are in my experience not right.

Today's post is about the other side of the coin: something that doesn't appear to me to be widely disseminated conventional wisdom, but in my experience probably should be. The issue I want to discuss is the importance of one's perceived career-trajectory. Allow me to explain what this means, and how in my experience it matters.

Mid-career reflections, part 5: people matter

In the comments section of my Top 5 Job-Market Tips post, Postdoc wrote:

I think another tip worth mentioning is network and find an advisor or mentor who is going to work on your behalf to help you get a job, to help you publish, talk you up, introduce you to the big names in the field, and so on. Many of those I know who managed to get somewhere were great networkers, or had a lot of help from more senior faculty...if you think you can get a job based simply on your own merit, especially if you don't have the pedigree, I think you'll be disappointed. So, I guess this tip could be summarized like so: As unintuitive as it might seem to some of you (I know it never occurred to me), don't spend all your time during your PhD reading and writing. Rather, be sociable, and find out how to get people to like you, remember you, think you're smart, and so on. (I've found that a good way to get people to think you're smart is to 1. use big words and 2. be fast on your feet, e.g. maybe memorize a series of witty but not condescending rejoinders). These things are as important to finding a job as your philosophical outputs...

Funny thing, even before Postdoc wrote this comment, I had planned to write a post in this series on how people matter. In brief, though I deeply disagree with Postdoc's point about sounding smart, my overall experience has been much the same as Postdoc's. The people I know who have the most successful in the profession have indeed been, by and large, those who developed good  relationships, not just with mentors but with people in the profession more broadly, including other grad students. More than that, though, I've found good relationships in the profession to be intrinsically valuable, in ways I underestimated early in my career. Allow me to explain.

Mid-career reflections, part 4: bitterness and resentment, a self-fulfilling prophesy?

I have been wanting to write this post for a while, as it deals with what I think is one of the most important lessons I've learned--both personally and professionally--in my career. Alas, I've never felt like I knew how to write it properly. The post, as readers will see, is on resisting professional bitterness and resentment. I will be honest: I've been afraid to write this post. I've been afraid to write it because I don't want to come off as preachy, or self-congratulatory, or as engaging in hasty generalizations based on one case, or as implicitly singling anyone out for criticism. While these are very real dangers--and I hope the post that follows avoids them--I want to be clear here at the outset: none of these things are my intent. My only intent in writing this post is to share a set of experiences that I personally found important, and which I hope someone going through a difficult time in their career might find helpful.

Mid-career reflections - part 3: making the profession your own

Today's post is something of a follow-up to my first post in this series, where I explained how my experiences have led me to doubt several things that appear to conventional wisdom in the profession. In the comments section of Helen's follow-up post relating various philosophers' answer to the question of whether they would choose a career in philosophy again, Amanda wrote:

professional philosophy is not what I thought it would be. I loved it in undergrad because I was enamored by intellectual honesty, a genuine search for truth and meaning, the good life, etc. That hasn't been my experience of professional philosophy. It is more like a super competitive sports game of one uping each other.

I will be honest. I shared this perspective early in my time in grad school. I got incredibly frustrated--temporarily losing my love of philosophy--in part because of just how far the priorities of the discipline seemed to depart from what made me fall in love with and want to pursue a career in philosophy in the first place.

Mid-career reflections - part 2: life and luck

Yesterday, one of my philosopher friends on facebook hosted a thread on the question, "Knowing what you now know, would you do it [i.e. seek a career in philosophy] all over again?" Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answers people gave were all over the map, with some saying of course they would, others saying of course they wouldn't, and others (including me) saying they weren't sure. Here is what I wrote:

I find the question undecidable. If I knew things would turn out the way they have, then yes - I love what I do, and find meaning and enjoyment in it that I don’t believe I would be able to get in any other line of work. I’m a philosopher at heart, through and through. But of course I could never know things would turn out the way they did. I struggled to finish the PhD, and then struggled to get a job—and I suffered greatly for years for both reasons...and things could have turned out very badly. In which case, no, I wouldn’t do it again. Hence why I find the question undecidable, even in retrospect. It’s a complete shot in the dark of the sort Laurie Paul has written about. The question itself is sort of like asking roulette winners and losers at a casino whether they would do it again. How are they supposed to answer?

In today's post, I want to explore in a bit more depth why I find the question undecidable: namely, due to the roles that 'life and luck' have over whether the choice turns out well--roles that I do not think can be rationally anticipated in any reliable way. Allow me to explain. 

Mid-career reflections - part 1: doubts about some conventional wisdom

On several occasions I've been asked, "What will happen to the Cocoon once you're no longer an early-career philosopher?" The short answer is that I plan to continue it as long as early-career people find it helpful. There wasn't much support out there for early-career philosophers when I was a grad student and job-marketeer, and there still isn't today. So as long as people who fit those descriptions seem to find the blog useful, I hope to continue it.

However, although I do my best, one thing I've worried about is that the further I progress through my career, the more out of touch I may become with respect to early-career realities. Perhaps that is inevitable, though I hope not. In any case, a recent encounter I had with a grad student at a conference suggested to me that, with respect to a number of things, not a lot of things have changed for early career folk. He asked me if I had any early-career advice, and I learned through our discussion that he was taught a lot of the same conventional wisdom that I was. So, we had a talk, I explained my doubts about some of that wisdom, and he seemed thankful.

That got me to thinking. When I started this blog six years ago in 2012, I was pretty lost and trying to find my way. I didn't know what to believe--about the profession, job-market, and so on. Today, I'm in a very different place. I somehow got a job, got tenure, and am now a department chair. Weird. Anyway, while I don't have "everything figured out" by any means (I'm still trying to find my way through this life like everyone else!) I feel like I've learned some surprising things about academic philosophy that it may be helpful to share. At any rate that's my hope for this series. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, in today's post, I'm going to share my doubts about some things that still appear to be conventional wisdom for early-career people...