Objects and Arrows

One of my undergrads sent me a link to an old entry in Brit’s Blog where she talks about discouraging people from going on to grad school in philosophy. What she says about the pitfalls of “the profession” is reasonably accurate from a certain point of view. But I think it overestimates the costs of spending time in graduate school and the risks involved with respect to one’s future prospects and happiness.

A short anecdote:

Michael Martin was assigned to me as an advisor when I first started in the grad program at BU. He gave me the standard grim warning about the hopeless prospects for employment in philosophy and what he saw as the dismal state of “the profession.” It was a bit of a shock. Not because he’d disabused me of my fantasies of having a job at Princeton, but that he had assumed that such things were motivating me! Did he really think that the long-haired freak sitting in his office cared about the APA, the JFP or acceptance rates at Philosophical Review? Like most of the philosophy students I knew, I was deeply into philosophy but I would not have thought of myself as having an interest in ‘professional philosophy’ (or professional anything for that matter) I didn’t know what a 403b was and I certainly didn’t care about a six figure salary. I was very happy to be in a city filled with like-minded freaks being paid to do philosophy for a few years in my 20s. As the job market loomed larger, the dark side of the business was unavoidable, but the longer I could defer having to work for a boss, the better.

We jaded pro-philosophers forget that from the perspective of a 20-something who is seriously interested in philosophy, grad student life beats the hell out of working for an insurance company or God forbid, going to law school. For most of us, failure to find a job in philosophy means having to find a regular job. This might be a disappointment to some, but it is not really a big hardship relative to our regular-job-having peers.

A little sociology:

My sense is that the warnings about the unhappy state of philosophy are really evidence of the unhappy state of assistant/associate level professors of philosophy. American academics tend to identify strongly with the ethos of professionalism (white-collar lifestyles etc.) and tend to associate with those they see as their kind. This means that by the time we’re in our late 30s we tend to have (relatively) wealthy friends: lawyers, doctors and the like. Our salaries are modest by these standards.  According to Glenn Firebaugh and Laura Tach, one’s reported level of happiness correlates strongly with one’s relative place within one’s age/peer group. They have a nice paper on this effect (here).

They write, for instance that “Families whose income earners are in jobs with flat income trajectories are likely to become less happy over time. Thus the relative income effect observed here implies adverse effects for some individuals over the working years of their life cycles.” Given our salary trajectory, the future looks pretty grim. But there is hope. Given that we enjoy being philosophers, the secret to avoiding the crankiness of American academic life lies in not having rich friends and not reading our undergraduate alumni magazines. At least that’s what I’m counting on.