The Amateur Philosopher

So, I promised I’d do this. Gulp.

OK, a word of warning: This is long. So long, in fact, that I’m not going to post it all right now; in fact, I’m not even going to post about my actual decision to leave my field (academic philosophy), its reasons or its consequences, today. I started to write about background–and it really wasn’t my intention to write my autobiography, honest–and suddenly discovered that I didn’t feel like I could really give an account about why I left philosophy, and academia, without, well, a lot of background. If background bores you, you might want to skip this; I’ll start actually talking about the events that triggered the decision, and the decisionmaking process, in another post. It’ll probably take still another post to get to the consequences of the decision and my thoughts on the path not taken, and how it might compare to the one I ended up on.

Once upon a time, I was a child prodigy. College at 12, the whole works. And like a lot of child prodigies (at least, so I imagine), it was just generally assumed that I was going to grow up to do great things. I say this with neither pride nor shame, with neither gratitude to nor rancor towards the people who assumed this. It’s just a fact. I got to my college graduation, at 17, without anyone ever having seriously broached to me the possibility that I might be anything less than a leading light in whatever field I decided to pursue. I wasn’t, despite what many people assume, under tremendous pressure to succeed, because failure simply wasn’t an issue. It never really came up.

The graduate school admissions process was a minor, but only a minor, interruption to this. Despite my assumption, throughout my life, that I would go to an academic graduate school, and despite the fact that I had many contacts and advisors, both formal and informal, within the academy (including my own parents), my graduate school application process was haphazard at best. But I got accepted to all but two programs. One, the Ph.D. program in mathematics at Princeton, I had applied to in the mistaken belief that logic was one of their specialties (this shows you just how haphazard the process was; logic is a specialty of the Princeton Department of Philosophy). The other was the Program in Symbolic Systems and Philosophy, at Stanford University. For some reason–call it adolescent perversity–I became obsessed with attending the Stanford program, and when an NSF fellowship catapulted me out of the wait list, I jumped at the opportunity, turning down arguably more prestigious offers (with their own fellowships attached).

But, after an initial fairly isolated and isolating year, my prospects began to look up again. I had the advantage of loving Philosophy–really, truly loving it, and wanting to talk about it pretty much all the time. This made me something of a bore at parties, but once I found a community within the Philosophy department, it made me something of a hit there. I started reading and discussion groups, pushed (successfully) for greater access for graduate students during colloquium Q&A periods, and co-founded (with my friend and housemate, Tim Schroeder) a series of “Philosophy Research Support Dinners” for students and faculty. One of my professors pushed me to submit a paper (which became the centerpiece of my dissertation) for publication, and snorted derisively at the mid-tier journals I suggested as possible targets.

As you might expect, this played into an already pretty all-consuming narrative in my own head about my supposed brilliance. I became insufferably arrogant, and it showed up in my work–in how I spoke and, especially, how I wrote about philosophy. This probably wouldn’t have been noticeable if I’d stayed in a field as technical as the one I started with (a paper in logic gives relatively little scope for stylistic issues to show themselves), but I had drifted much closer to topics near the core of analytic philosophy–topics in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. And it was in this context that, in the middle of my third year, I went into my Departmental Oral Exam.

The Stanford Philosophy Department does not have comprehensive exams; students who have passed the program’s course requirements are taken to have thus demonstrated sufficient well-roundedness. Because of this, even the Departmental (first) Oral Exam is focussed narrowly on the student’s dissertation topic, on an outline plus 30 or so pages of content. It’s generally a pretty informal procedure, intended to make sure the student and his or her committee are on the same page about dissertation topic and direction.

But mine was, I believe, intended as a cure for the arrogance the faculty–quite reasonably–saw creeping into my work. It was a total–and totally unexpected–takedown of what I had submitted, with a particular focus on the dangers of the smugness that I showed throughout. It was fair. It was deserved. For many students, it would have been helpful–and certainly, something needed to be done. But for my 20-year-old brain, which had never seriously confronted the possibility of failing at anything, it was devastating.

I rather wish I had been older or, at least, more mature at the time of my Departmental Oral exam. I’m fairly certain that, if I had to face something similar today, or even, say, at 24, I would accept the criticism as deserved, parry the thrusts where possible, and, after perhaps some period of disappointment, walk away better for the experience. Of course, I like to think that I wouldn’t have been in that situation to start with today; I have a much more realistic sense of my own ability than that very self-important, very sheltered 20-year-old. But, alas, I wasn’t, and far from benefiting from the experience, I whiplashed into the polar opposite. My last couple of years of graduate school were many things, even many positive things, but not from an academic standpoint. I never did publish that–or any–paper, and while I still participated in the community, I stopped making any real attempts to move it forward. I finished a much-curtailed and less-than-polished dissertation and went on the job market.

My first–and only–trip on the market did not go well, unsurprisingly. The year was exceptionally bad for my field–many positions garnering upwards of 600 applicants–so even had I been in top form, my chances would have been questionable, and I was most decidedly not in top form. During the Eastern American Philosophical Association conference cycle–when the vast majority of tenure-track and longer-term temporary jobs are handed out–I got exactly one interview, with the University of Colorado, which I flubbed badly. I was driven out of my mind with worry and desparation–almost literally; that time period certainly ranks in the two or three darkest of my entire life, and many of the specifics of my experiences are lost, even to me. I remember the constant monitoring of the telephone, struggling desperately to control the tremolo in my voice with every answer, the obsessive checking of which positions were already filled. (In the academic job market, there’s simply no expectation of promptly informing rejected applicants of their status; I only got one actual rejection letter–from Cambridge–during the entire year; the rest of my rejections I found out simply by hearing, on the grapevine, that others had been selected to advance to the next stage of the process.)

I feel like I’m getting a bit whiny here, so I should point something out: I don’t, in any way, believe that the objective aspects of my experience on the job market were singularly unpleasant. The academic job market is simply a brutal process; it’s brutal to everyone except those few who meet with immediate and brilliant success. Some people handle this well; I like to think that, if I had the experience to face over again, I’d handle it well, or at least much better, myself. This was a third of my life ago, and I certainly feel like I’m a substantially different person at 33 than I was at a still sheltered and immature 22. But I’m not facing the experience now; I faced it then, and at the time it cemented my already fairly strong perception of myself as a failure.

Things looked up again in the spring–at least, the full wieght of the job market pressed on my shoulders a bit less. I got a job–a one-year job only, with a possible expansion into three, but a job nonetheless, so I at least knew how I’d keep body and soul together the following year. I started my first serious relationship, which gave me, for the first time ever, a sense of self-worth not tied to my academic and professional performance.

And that August, I packed up and headed across the country, to Rochester, NY, to take on that one year job. The relationship moved to long-distance mode, I stocked up on wool coats and firewood, and I resolved to leave any issues associated with my last few years at Stanford behind me. I wrote a couple of drafts of a couple of brand-new papers and headed into my (quite generous; a mere 2 courses/semester is rare for a temporary faculty member, and I was lucky to get it) fall course schedule with a gusto that lasted almost two whole months.

To be continued.