Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

A Budding Thomist Seeks Advice

This from a reader:

I'm a junior year theology major. I recently found your blog and it's now one of my favorites. You are a voice of reason in this dark postmodern era.

As someone pursuing a BA in theology and considering grad school, I love learning, reading, and writing. I've always wanted to be the person to have ideas and spend my life thinking and writing about them.

Since you are someone who does this exact thing, I'm curious as to what it takes. How much time did you devote to studying theology or philosophy outside of classes and assignments? Did you ever write theological or philosophical essays for fun?

Any advice, especially in light of your personal experience, would be greatly appreciated. I eagerly await your response.

One question is whether one should go to graduate school in the humanities. I have addressed this question on several occasions. Here are some links:

Should You Go to Graduate School in Philosophy?

Graduate School and Self-Confidence

Thinking of Graduate School in the Humanities?

Is Graduate School Really That Bad?

Another question concerns the life of an academically unaffiliated philosopher. This is what I have been for over a quarter century now after resigning from a tenured position at age 41. So I don't conduct classes, give assignments, or waste time on the absurd chore of grading papers by students who could not care less about the life of the mind or about becoming truly educated. 

To be perfectly blunt, I found teaching philosophy to undergraduates to be a meaningless activity in the main. Philosophy is a magnificent thing, but to teach it to bored undergraduates with no intellectual eros is like trying to feed people who aren't hungry. Depressing and absurd. Of course I did have some great students and some memorable classes. But my experience was similar to Paul Gottfried's:

Having been a professor for over 40 years at a number of academic institutions, I find Caplan’s main argument to be indisputable. The vast majority of my students, particularly those towards the end of my career, had little interest in the material I was trying to transmit, whether classical Greek, European history, or modern political theory. [ . . . ] Caplan also rolls out statistics showing most college students spend shockingly little time studying, and when polled express utter boredom with most of their courses. The overwhelming majority who graduate admit to having forgotten most of what they learned even before graduation. 

It's a bit of a paradox: I would never have had the opportunity to enjoy the comfortable and relatively stress-free life of a professor for all those years if it were not for the fact that all sort of kids were attending college who had no business doing so. It is a paradox of plenty in the sense of Quine's great essay, Paradoxes of Plenty. The explosion of higher education in the 1960s, together with the Viet Nam war and other factors led to a glut of students which led to a need for more professors. So the good news is that guys like me got to be professors, but the bad news was that we had to teach people not worth teaching for the most part.

More on this in The Academic Job Market in the 'Sixties.

Things get worse and worse thanks to the Left's ever-increasing destruction of the universities, STEM disciplines excepted. Higher Education has become Higher Infantilization what with 'safe spaces,' 'trigger warnings,' and other incomprehensibly idiotic innovations.  

I say this so that my young reader has some idea of what he is in for if he is aiming at academic career.  The universities have become leftist seminaries. No conservatives need apply. Express heterodox opinions and you will be hounded and doxxed. Of course, it is not just leftists that do these things.

How much time do I spend on philosophy? Most of the day, every day. Do I write for fun? That is not a word I would use in this connection. Let's just say that I find wrestling with the big questions to be deeply satisfying and the meaning of my life. I see philosophy as a vocation in the deepest sense and a spiritual quest and something best pursued outside of the precincts of the politically correct present-day university.

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Bill Vallicella

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4 responses to “A Budding Thomist Seeks Advice”

  1. John Avatar
    John

    As a freshly minted Ph.D. currently employed as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at an institution I prefer not to name in public, I’m afraid that I must agree with Bill’s assessment of academia. Like Bill’s correspondent, I love learning, reading, and writing. But unless you are fortunate enough to land a prestigious position at a top-tier research university, you will do precious little learning, reading, or writing as a professor. More likely, you will find yourself at the mercy of a culture that values publishing for its own sake (as opposed to publishing when you have something worth saying) and treats students as customers who must be accommodated at any cost.
    Why am I still an academic then? Very likely I won’t be after this academic year comes to a close.

    Reply
  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Thanks for commenting, John.
    >> More likely, you will find yourself at the mercy of a culture that values publishing for its own sake (as opposed to publishing when you have something worth saying) and treats students as customers who must be accommodated at any cost.<< Exactly right. The triumph of the business model. Make as much money as possible from the customers by giving them whatever they want. An unholy trifecta: the government insures huge loans without oversight as to the courses of study; greedy administrators increase tuition and fees knowing that the loans are available; foolish students waste thousands and thousands on economically useless and intellectually vacuous majors. John, your leaving academe is probably a wise move for your ultimate well-being, but it is also too bad for the universities that the best leave.

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  3. John Avatar
    John

    The business model of the university goes hand-in-hand with the general attitude that an education is only instrumentally valuable. A current student of mine who is majoring in graphic design, but is taking a general education course with me called ‘Philosophical Thinking’, came to my office hours to ask why the university was requiring her to take such a course. Given that we were then reading several early Platonic dialogues, I took her question to be tantamount to “Why should I read Plato?” It is difficult to know what to say to someone for whom that is even a question. The gulf between her worldview and mine was probably too wide to bridge. There are, of course, the standard talking points that administrators peddle in response to such questions, about how the critical thinking skills one learns in a general education course like this will translate into higher earnings across a lifetime, but these points entirely miss the point of studying Plato.
    The business model also encourages students to challenge the curriculum in a way that I never would have dreamed of just fifteen years ago when I was about to begin my undergraduate education. I read what my professors assigned because I assumed they had a good reason for assigning it. After all, they were the ones with the doctorates, not me. They knew better than I did, and I was there to get an education from them. Now, students expect professors to justify their syllabi to them. While I can see some sense to this in extreme cases, questioning the value of studying Plato just strikes me as entirely ridiculous. If that’s what students are like these days, they are not worth teaching.
    I’m beginning to rant, so I’ll leave it there. Great thanks for your kind words, Bill, but I doubt I’ll be greatly missed in the halls of the ivory tower. Given how the job market has gone these past two years, my exit from academia will almost certainly be mutual.

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  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    It is amazing how closely we agree. I could endorse every word of yours above.
    >>It is difficult to know what to say to someone for whom that is even a question.<< I had similar experiences. And of course the stock responses that admins and even the APA peddle are worthless. http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com/maverick_philosopher/2011/10/should-one-stoop-to-a-defense-of-philosophy-or-the-humanities.html
    In your second paragraph you allude to the fact that the business model leads to the abdication of authority on the part of admins and faculty. The lunatics are now running the asylum. The Catholic universitites are now in total abdication.
    I think back to my reading of John Henry Newman’s *The Idea of a University* and reflect on how utterly irrelevant that book now is to what is going on at the universities, with only a handful of exceptions.

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