The Philosophers' Cocoon

Public Philosophy for the Common Good

This is a guest post by Mike Austin (Professor and Coordinator of Philosophy & Religious Studies, Eastern Kentucky University):

I’ve always wanted to do something meaningful with my professional life (the lack of scare quotes around the term meaningful is intentional!). With all of the caveats and qualifications, being a professional philosopher has turned out to be an excellent choice for me and my family. It’s enabled me to spend my days doing things I love, at least mostly. It’s given me great freedom to pursue questions I’m interested in, as well as the flexibility as a parent and spouse that I’ve really valued over the years. I’m certainly fortunate that I received a tenure-track offer and have found a professional home for the past 15 years at Eastern Kentucky University.

Being a tenured full professor means I have less time for research than I had during the early years of my career. I have a 4/4 teaching load and teach one course every summer. Other responsibilities eat into research time as you progress in your career, at least at a teaching-focused institution. I’ve continued to make scholarship a priority. I’ve also made writing for a popular audience a priority for over 10 years now. I was able to begin doing public philosophy back in 2007, editing a book on running and philosophy. I contributed to several books in the popular philosophy genre, and edited or co-edited several more volumes on popular culture and philosophy. I also regularly write a blog at Psychology Today, Ethics for Everyone.

I think all sorts of philosophical writing has value, from the highest levels of scholarship to the trade publication or blog post aimed at a popular audience. Usually, my scholarly work is the foundation of my writing aimed at a popular audience.

I started doing public philosophy, and continue to do so, because I think philosophy has value for non-philosophers, if done in the right way. So many of the ideas we take for granted can be enlightening and even transformative for the general public. We can shed a lot of light, rather than merely increasing the heat, on a variety of significant or controversial issues.

How to Thrive on a 4/4

This is a guest post by Mary-Beth Willard, Weber State University

As I thought about Jason Brennan’s post on work-life balance, I realized that while I agreed with most of it, I was doing the automatic mental translations I always do when R1 people write advice aimed at more general academic audiences. I thought sharing some of those thoughts might be helpful for someone else who is on the tenure-track at a teaching-oriented institution. 

I’ve been teaching at Weber State University (say “Weeber”, especially if you’re applying for our job this year!) since 2011, having graduated in 2009 into what I’m told was the Great Recession but still feels like a dark abyss I can’t gaze into because it will eat me. 

I teach a 4/4, sometimes a 5/5/2 to pad the salary a bit.  I’ll have a 3/3 in the spring when I take over as Jedi Commander program coordinator. I’m eligible for full professor in two years.

I don’t like the phrase “work-life balance” but “how to have a well-rounded, full life while teaching a lot” sounds even like a TED talk that’s going to begin by telling you to make your bed and end with folding your sweaters while petting cats.

I have no idea how many hours a week I work, but I worked 55-70 hours a week in low-wage jobs once upon a time, and a typically day had me at work doing data entry starting at 7:30AM, working till four with a half hour lunch, then commuting across town to the sporting goods store, where I worked 5-11pm. 

I don’t do that as an academic. It might not be a stretch to say that the main attraction of this career for me is the autonomy over one’s time.  But with great autonomy comes great responsibility, so here are some thoughts:

1. The golden ring’s made of brass, Forking. Brass.

We are acculturated to think of an academic job as something that is supposed to be totally fulfilling, measuring our life out by coffee spoons and publications.  This feeling is intensified by a brutal academic job market that has more in common with a lottery system than any of us would like to admit, where one spends an absolutely stupid amount of time and energy trying to land a job.  We wind up thinking that the job, the job we are so grateful to get, must be the center of our lives, worth every sacrifice.

Meh. While having a tenure-track job is a very cool job that affords one a lot of autonomy and the chance to do philosophy every day, it’s also just a job.  Don’t let your job become your sole source of meaning.  The presence of other goods in your life does not make the good of philosophy valueless. 

2. Actually look at your tenure requirements.

If you’re at a teaching-focused institution like mine, chances are that your institution doesn’t expect you to be publishing like you’re at an R1, nor are they going to support you if you try.  One common trouble spot: we are all trained as if we will need to be publishing like we’re at an R1.  The job market encourages it, too, and it’s hard to get out of that habit.  So, look at what your job actually requires of you.  Of the three common categories of teaching, scholarship, and service, scholarship is likely to be discounted pretty heavily if you’re on a 3/3 or 4/4.

Achieving a Good Work-Life Balance

This is a guest post by Jason Brennan, Georgetown University. 

I have a dirty secret: I generally work under 40 hours a week. Despite that, I made full professor at age 38, publish a bunch, and receive great merit evaluations every year. I also am actively involved with my kids, play in two gigging rock bands, cook dinner, do the laundry, take multiple vacations every year, and have, if anything, far more of a social life than I’d like to. How?

Whether you have a good work-life balance is largely up to you. It’s a choice. Here are some principles to help think this through.

1. An academic job will take as much time as you give it.

I’ve had lots of jobs: implant operator, baker, dishwasher, GEICO insurance adjustor, computer chassis builder, and so on. They all had one thing in common, besides being boring: when I clocked out, I was done.

Academia isn’t like that. There is always more you could be doing. Shouldn’t you be writing, reading, and prepping?

2. Your job is a job.

The answer is no. Your job is a job. You are getting paid to do certain things. I respect people who go above and beyond—I mean, it’s not like I publish the bare minimum. But there’s no reason to make yourself a martyr to philosophy. 

You aren’t saving souls or saving world. Frankly, you probably aren’t going to finally solve the big problems your papers address. Your impact on your students is probably much lower than you think. (Read the empirical literature on how much students learn, how much they forget, and how little they transfer their learning outside of class.) Much of your service work is bullshit and useless. 

I say: Do your job. Do it well. But remember it’s just a job.

If your employer is paying you to work 2000 hours a year, you have every right to work only 2000 hours a year.

Your employer values what it rewards. If your school says it values service, but then allocates raises and promotions on the basis of publishing, not service, then it doesn't value service. Don’t feel like you must do what you aren’t getting paid to do or what you’re really getting punished for doing.

Being a philosopher from a working-class background (guest post by Adriel M. Trott)

This is a guest post by Adriel M. Trott, Department Chair at Wabash College. 

I grew up working class. One sign of my having grown up working class is that I don’t think it is a badge of honor. In the academy, it is generally something I hide. I’m writing this post to describe some of my experiences in the academy that I think come from being working class in the hopes that others might be able to learn from my experience. Another sign of my having grown up working class is that I tend to think of all the reasons not to think of myself as working class rather than all the reasons to think of myself in this way. When I posted something on Facebook about being working class – the post that led to this blogpost – a number of people responded by noting one or two factors that made their experience not working class, but then went on to say they were working class in the sense that their families did not make much money. It strikes me as odd, even though I do it, that people think that they are claiming a title to working class unfairly. I take it to be very working class not to want to get some unfair allowance for one’s situation, and very American, in the sense that Sartre observed when he said “here a worker never considers himself a ‘proletarian’ in the European sense of the word.” Even as a socialist movement in the United States is gaining momentum, it strikes me that so many workers and their families don’t want to think of themselves as sharing experiences or interests that might bind them together, particularly in the sense of being oppressed. Fortunately, I think that is changing. The first thing I want to say then is that it is fine to consider yourself working class even if there are various factors in your background that don’t stand up to the ideal of the working class.

Both of my parents went to college. To very good colleges. And three of my four grandparents finished college, while the fourth had some college. So I knew what the good books to read were. My dad enlisted in the army in the early seventies to avoid the draft. When my parents came back from Japan where my dad was stationed, my dad became a mechanic, and then later a roofer and a sider, and then later, a self-employed subcontractor. My mother was a homemaker. My family income was under the poverty line. I was Pell-eligible. My parents trash-picked and my mother got food at a food bank. We shopped almost exclusively at thrift stores (which I still do). I distinctly remember my older sister’s birthday one year when my parents didn’t have money for ice cream. One of my parents found a box in someone’s trash that had a bunch of things including a canister of tennis balls. I think my mom was thinking about giving the tennis balls to my sister as a birthday present. My mom opened the can to see what shape they were in and found 14 dollars at the bottom of the can. So the birthday cake had icing and ice cream.

I grew up the second of six kids. When there were only five kids, we lived in a small twin in Olney, which was then an Irish-Catholic working class neighborhood in Philadelphia. We weren’t Irish, or Catholic, and the other kids called us “publics” because we went to public school. My parents were conservative Presbyterians, which I mention, because I think I became a philosopher in conversations around the dinner table about theology. Calvinism is systematic if nothing else, and I learned how to be a systematic thinker talking and thinking about Calvinism. I mention this also because despite what Aristotle seems to think of farmers and “vulgar craftsmen”—that they do not have the leisure for the kind of thinking and reflection necessary to be citizens or philosophers—my experience observing my dad and my own experience in working on projects around my house is that there is a certain kind of reflection and thoughtfulness made possible by working with one’s hands. I think we should hesitate about considering the working class without thought and reflection both on their own lives and on big ideas. Often I hear people say things like, well my parents are well-educated or thoughtful so I’m not really working class as if those things are mutually exclusive. While it can be the case that a college degree is a steppingstone to the middle class, I think it is more and more the case that it is not necessarily so. Cultural capital does accrue to the experience of college and reading good books and thinking that museums are better culture than television, something my parents knew – we didn’t have a television, but I only went to museums on field trips as a kid. But I think there are mindset issues at work in being a poor kid even if you did have some access to cultural capital. As I say at the outset, I caution against talking yourself out of being working class if you did grow up poor.

How to start with a big project that causes stress

This is a guest post by Rebecca Kukla, Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University

I have severe anxiety disorder that often incapacitates me. Often, my anxiety builds up around particular writing projects and professional tasks, for whatever reason. At the same time, while I often finish things much later than I planned or than I am supposed to, I have a pretty excellent track record of getting things done and being professionally productive. I want to share with you my actual magic trick for dealing with big projects that cause stress. I mean this trick to be taken very seriously and literally. There is nothing facetious about this post. I know many of us struggle with anxiety around unapproachable projects, and I am just sharing, as someone with intense anxiety who is pretty good at getting stuff done in the end.

My trick is to schedule a day - seriously, a whole work day - just for opening the file for the project. You are not even allowed to work on the file or look at it in detail that day. You just open it, maybe skim it at most. You are allowed to combine files if your stuff for this project has gotten fragmented, so it’s all in one file, but you aren't allowed to think hard about it or work on it in any way. If it's an incredibly stressful project, schedule two days for this. That’s one day to fail at it because of anxiety, and a second day to open it, or one day to open it, and then a special reward of a day off, because you met your goal and it's time to treat yo self. Once you do this, guess what? You already started successfully working on the thing! The next day that you work on it will be so much less stressful.

Supporting non-academic careers (guest post by Kevin J.S. Zollman)

Kevin J.S. Zollman is an associate professor and director of graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is on the application of mathematical models to social behavior, and he is author of the popular book The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting. 

When I was a kid growing up in Kansas, someone asked me “what church do you go to?” While (perhaps) not intended, the phrasing of this question communicated volumes to me. The presumption of the question is that I go to a church, not a synagogue, mosque, or temple. What’s more, it presumes that I visit houses of worship regularly. Being raised atheist, it stayed with me: I was so unusual for my time and place that one should assume me away. Many of you reading this post have had similar experiences, especially those of you who are members of groups historically excluded from western philosophy.

We are sensitized to these micro-aggressions against marginalized demographic groups.  But we may miss how we do similar things to those who ultimately leave the academy. Just think for a moment about all the ways philosophical culture talks about getting a PhD. “Placement” means “academic placement”, “a job” is synonymous with “an academic job.” Even that phrase I just used, “leave the academy” implies something like abandonment or at least departure from expectation. Happy, important, and gainful employment outside the academy is treated as abandoning one’s path and is the equivalent to unemployment.

It doesn’t take much effort to realize how cruel this is. In a field where more than half of our students won’t get academic jobs, we are actively creating a culture where most of our students will view themselves as failures. Even those that manage to escape the self-hating trap may still worry that others view them that way.

While I still often make mistakes, I have tried to change the way I talk with students in our graduate program. I always preface relevant sentences with “For those interested in academic employment, …”  I ask students, when I first talk with them about employment, if they want a job in academia. I repeatedly reinforce the question (“are you still planning for a job in academia?”) giving students the opportunity to change their minds.

When you have no time, edit a volume or special issue (guest post by Eric Schliesser)

This is a guest contribution by Eric Schliesser, Professor at the University of Amsterdam and blogger at https://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/ where this post will be simultaneously posted. 

The blogpost is a contribution for our series Once Out of the Cocoon, which aims to provide support for midcareer academics in terms of time management, wellbeing, and helping and empowering others (more information on the series and its aims here). 

Once you have received tenure or (in Europe) a permanent position, the time available for research often goes down drastically. You will be expected to take on more leadership, mentoring, and service positions in the department and university. With job security you are more likely to start a family. The challenge is that parenthood, even when joyful, can make constant demands on your time. In a discipline like philosophy (and most of the humanities and social sciences), where ‘research’ primarily presupposes having continuous, uninterrupted stretches of time to think, read, and write, you find that this simply evaporates in the period you are most eager to develop your ambitious projects into a (second) book, an ambitious grant, etc.

Being a good parent, partner, colleague, director of graduate studies, teacher, and researcher is demanding in the best of times; it feels nigh impossible when you are also sleep deprived because one of your kids has night cramps and your spouse is on rotation at the hospital. It becomes really difficult to maintain good cheer when the subject of ‘research’ comes up. Even when you can ignore office email on intersessional holidays, these offer little respite because this is now key ‘family-time.’

Flourishing as a mid-career academic – some initial thoughts

“I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” ― Toni Morrison

You’ve finally landed that elusive tenure track job. Or, even better, you’ve handed in your tenure dossier and have been granted promotion and tenure. Now what? The tenure track job was for you perhaps this Holy Grail and you’ve been focused in your efforts to obtain it at the expense of many other aspects of your life. Many graduate students (and their advisors, unfortunately) still equate not getting an academic job with failure. So one might expect that once one has the academic job, all is well and one can walk into the sunset and live Happily Ever After. How, though, should we live happily ever after?

The implicit idea seems to be to just continue doing what you’ve been doing.  There is little advice for mid-career academics or early-career academics other than goal-directed advice on how to keep one’s productivity up and continue to write on a daily basis, for example. The problem is that doing what you have been doing is detrimental to mental health and to one's flourishing.

Here are the words of Thi Nguyen, a successful and well-published academic (reprinted with permission):

“I have apparently forgotten how to relax. I used to be good at relaxing. I used to be kind of a Very Chill Fellow with many entertaining hobbies. But a few years ago I kind of put the petal to the metal and now I’m... approaching some sort of exhaustion. There’s a place in my brain where I can usually reach and find ideas and words, but when I reach there now, there’s just sort of a screaming angry void.”

Learning how and when to say 'no'

This is a guest post by Kevin Timpe, Jellema Chair of Christian Philosophy at Calvin College 

My writing a post on how to say ‘no’ is roughly like my writing a post on how to drink less coffee. In some ways, I'm the last person that should do it given that I struggle with it so much. But I’m hoping that my own struggles (which, to be honest, continue) might provide some useful guidance or discussion.

I’m a pluralist about the kinds of scholarship we ought to engage in (e.g., for the academic guild, but also for the general public); the kinds of projects that people should engage in (e.g., I think that articles and books and edited collections and book reviews are all worth doing). As I tell my students when we discuss Augustine, most times we have to decide not between obviously good and bad choices, but between different good options. The trick is in figuring out how to weigh those goods properly, especially given their opportunity costs.

In terms of knowing what to do (and thus how to better know how to say know), one needs to know the details of one’s position. What you should say ‘yes’ to and ‘no’ to is shaped, in large part, by what your position expects of you. My department has a very helpful document on what we expect in terms of scholarship for promotion and tenure. It’s 8 pages single spaced, discussing the purpose, scope, audiences, and expectations for scholarship. It includes four different sample scholarly dossiers that might be sufficient for tenure in our department. It’s a very helpful document, and I’m grateful to the colleagues that put it together before I arrived. But my favorite line of the whole document is this gem from page 2: “Policy can never replace phronesis.” This is good advice.

If you don’t have tenure, your focus in scholarly projects should be those projects that are more likely to earn you tenure. (The pragmatic advice in the previous sentence is defeasible. Some things are worth doing despite the opportunity costs even if they won’t help earn you tenure.) Only do a book review, for instance, if you know it’s a book that you know you need to read anyway. And maybe not even then. Obviously, once you have tenure you have a fair bit more freedom to do what you want, and this makes it easier to say no to some things and harder to say no to others.

For me, the biggest trick has been to not let side projects get in the way of my main research focus. I’ve long used some papers, especially co-authored ones, as ‘fall-back’ projects—papers to work on when I have time and energy to write but am stuck on my main projects. I let my co-authors know this. I think having projects like these help increase one’s productivity. But one has to be careful to not have too many side projects—especially when they come with deadlines, such as for an edited volume. For the past three years, for instance, I’ve had an idea for a book I want to write and a press that’s interested in it. But I’ve taken on too many other projects that are keeping me from turning directly to it. Don’t do that. For me, focusing on the main trajectory makes it easier to say no to other things.

Sustaining Activism

This is a guest post by Mark Lance, Professor at the Philosophy Department and Justice and Peace Studies Program at Georgetown University:

Early in my activist career, I had a mentor, Molly Rush. Molly has done an enormous amount in her life, but was most famous as a member of the first “Plowshares” action. She, Dan and Phil Berrigan, and others broke into a missile plant in Pennsylvania and poured their own blood on documents and damaged Mark 12a first-strike nuclear nose-cones. She was sentenced to five years in federal prison. I worked with Molly a couple years after her release and one day was saying how much I admired her courage. She insisted that this was not the right thing to admire. She felt called to perform this action, but insisted that sustained lifetime involvement was much more important and harder than bold, dramatic, performances.

She told me about, and later introduced me to, a woman in her early 60s. Mabel had decided in her 20s that she could devote one evening a week to social justice work. Sometimes she attended a protest; sometimes stuffed envelopes or worked a phone bank; sometimes she organized teach-ins. But she had not missed a week. In 40 years. (20 years later, when I was organizing one of the large mobilizations around the IMF/WB meetings, she emailed me with a long apology, because her doctor had forbidden her from coming to DC on her broken hip for the protests. In introduced her to a bunch of young activists over the phone.)

I’ve had a second career in activism for roughly 35 years. I have seen hundreds of passionate committed young people jump into the work, doing everything, 80 hour work-weeks, nights in jail, enduring verbal and physical abuse, inspiring the hell out of me and others. And then disappearing after a total burnout, never to be heard from again. I’ve also come to know a smaller number of folks who have made movement work an enduring part of their lives.