having been a graduate student advisor myself, and having watched faculty do both good and bad jobs at it, i’m convinced of two other things
1) it’s in your interest to take care of your students in all ways – you don’t and you end up with suicides, illness, drop-outs, and non-starters. and it makes you look bad – if you don’t have disciples, you aren’t a good academic
2) the system is set up to require more than a simple intellectual mentorship from advisors. the letters and the way they’re treated, the calls that get made from hiring department to advisors, the requests for support between members of a department (I’ll speak for your student x for the q job if you’ll speak for my student y for the p job), all of this speaks to a much more parental and less objective relationship than i think any of us care to thing about.
In some sorts of higher education – e.g. medicine – you don’t need this both because there are more objective ways to measure parts of ones qualifications (though i gotta tell you, Boards scores are no guarantee anyone’s going to be a good doc) and because the schooling program as a whole is so rigid and defined that it becomes the parent. you take x classes, you have x study hall, you read y books, everyone goes through together – it’s bootcamp basically. but for PhDs, both in the humanities and the sciences, we have the individual and lab relationships instead.

so i think you should give yourself more of a break, and your advisors less of one. they were remiss and irresponsible. at best.

The faculty certainly didn’t. Sometimes that fact makes me angry, but in calmer moments I of course realize that it wasn’t really their job. Faculty are not in loco parentis for their graduate students, and we probably don’t want to get into the business of requiring them to be.

I remember meeting your friend, and yeah, it sounds like he was seriously screwed by the narrowness of his department. That, at least, is something that didn’t affect me–modern Anglo-American philosophy departments may well be too narrow, but if anything that benefitted me, as a hardcore analytic phil language/M&E sort. Of course, the simple fact that he was an economist probably makes the change a bit less dramatic for him–after all, he’s still an economist, just not an *academic* economist. With the exception of the (small, and to me wildly unattractive) field of “philosophical therapy,” there’s of course no real path for non-academic philosophers.

From the inside, at least, I’ve got to disagree with you about the arrogance thing. Whether or not it was obvious to my colleagues, I really was an arrogant little squirt my second year and the first part of my third. And I have some reason–nothing dispositive, but some pretty suggestive indirect evidence–that at least some members of my committee, including my advisor, felt this way too, and that the conduct of my departmental oral exam was indeed intended as a corrective to this.

I’m flattered that you think my loss of passion was a loss for philosophy. I’m not quite as sure that it was–in particular, the sort of destructive philosophy I enjoyed (and was good at), while it has its uses, is arguably a lot less important to the field than work that involves a theory at the end of it.

But…I’m having some further thoughts about my “loss of passion,” and how much I did enjoy those conversations, and…well, I think I’ll save the conclusion of this thought for another post.

I suppose none of the above ought to have been a surprise, but I’m sorry to say that it was. And I’m sorry as well that your friends at the time, myself included, weren’t attentive enough to our surroundings to clue into what you were going through…

A joke we had back at Stanford involved the level of *confidence* that being successful in philosophy requires; I suppose a less funny part of that is how fragile that confidence can be.

I don’t remember you as being particularly arrogant early in your philosophical career at Stanford; perhaps because so many people were, myself included. I do of course remember our times on the job-market, my own included. I’ve gotten offered exactly two jobs that I’ve applied for — out of probably a few hundred applications — in philosophy, and I consider myself lucky in many ways.

I don’t know… But I do feel badly that we — all your friends and colleagues — weren’t more in tune with what you were going through, and weren’t more there for you and more supportive.

Not because I think *you’d* be better off if you stayed in philosophy — but because I wish that the choice had been made w/o the added stress of having gone through that without a network of people that were able to show that they cared about and supported you and the decisions you were making.

A close friend of mine here at OSU just left academia — he didn’t get tenure (because his department didn’t think of the kind of work he did as “real” economics). He’s working for the FDA, making decent money, able to spend time w/ his child, etc etc. Is he worse off? I don’t know — but I do know that I miss his being around and his being someone to work with.

And while your leaving philosophy may not have been a bad move for you, I do think it was a loss for philosophy, but not nearly as a big a loss as the loss of passion you describe as a loss for philosophy… Those *were* some intense and interesting conversations, weren’t they?

jk