Grading

What I enjoyed the most being a professor was teaching. Being in the classroom, engaging with the students, pursuing collaboratively ideas and lines of argument, seeing the students discover their voices and doing what I could to help with that.

What I enjoyed the least about being a professor was grading. Even more than the pressure to publish. To not put too fine a point on it, but I hated grading. When I had a stack of papers to grade, I would go to the local Starbucks and some other cafe, fill myself with caffeine and sugar, and plow through the essays. 15-20 minutes per 5 page essay. If I had a stack of 20 essays, that's five to six hours. And more if I tried to not give the same set of hackneyed comments on paper after paper.

I was lucky to be at a small liberal arts colleges, where, compared to big universities, I didn't have that many papers to grade. I taught five courses a year. Two intro courses, with about 25 students in each. A couple of mid-level courses, with anywhere from 10-25 students in them. And a seminar with 6-12 students. So maybe a 100-125 students a year. Not bad. A semester is 13 weeks, and I had roughly 4-5 papers in each class. Since I wanted students to have the opportunity to write a fair bit, they had essays due every three weeks or so. Teaching 2 or 3 classes a semester, that ends up meaning grading every week or every other week. There were no teaching assistants, and so the grading was up to me.

However, what I disliked the most about grading wasn't the time, or reading similar essays over and over again. My current job is a bit repetitive, and I don't mind it. I can handle repetitive work; doing the same thing over and over again. No, what bothered me about the grading was the question which nagged me at the back of my mind every time I picked up an essay to grade: Am I being unfair in the criteria I am using to grade this paper? There are three aspects to this worry. A) What criteria am I using to grade? B) What justifies the criteria? And C) Can that criteria really be applied neutrally to all the students in the class?

Job Market

I went on the job market in the academic year 2007-08. If I am honest with myself, I realize I was ambivalent about whether I wanted to continue in academic philosophy. I was already not quite identifying with my dissertation, even though (as I note here) I believed in what I was writing. And I wasn't sure what academic philosophy was exactly, what it could be, and how I fit into it. The idea that for a year I would have to ignore such questions, and boil down my dissertation into bit sized chunks of 5 minute spiels, writing sample, job talk and so on was unappealing. I wasn't against the professionalization of the job process, since it seemed that was the only way to counteract the institutional biases in the discipline. But as someone who was already feeling unsure about my place and future in academic philosophy, I experienced the need to put a professional stamp on my identity as forcing me to identify with practices which I wasn't sure I wanted to identify with. I imagine there can be a way to enjoy the experience more, though at that time I didn't find it. To some extent my very ambivalence about getting a job protected me from the natural insecurity and self-doubt the job market can foster.

The eastern APA was in DC that year. I went down from Cambridge with 7 or 8 interviews. In a way I find bizarre now, back then I used to even resist tucking in my shirt as that seemed to be too professional or being part of the system. So wearing a suit seemed not an option to me. I got my best pant and dress shirt, put on a new sweater on top, dusted off some dress shoes I had bought for my brother's wedding and that was my uniform. I don't say this with pride. To the contrary, at least for myself, I see it as I was so generally confused, and seemed to put stock in irrelevant things so much, treating this minor thing as caving in and that minor thing as standing my ground, that I couldn't see the forest for the trees. I was not happy, but it cannot all be put on the job market. My own ambivalence was a part of the cause.

Friendship Moderates

In the previous post I said there are two ways in which academic philosophy is being professionalized: what I called Internal Push, which is academics trying to professionalize themselves so that there are some explicit, discipline wide norms, and External Push, which is the discipline being professionalized due to the broader commercialization of academia. Both Internal Push and External Push are a threat to Protection, which is the ideal that as an academic one is given some money to basically think about whatever one wants, and which is supposed to guarantee that an academic job will have the freedom unavailable in non-academic jobs.

I also distinguished in the last post three approaches one might take to professionalization in academia. A conservative is an academic who resists both Internal Push and External Push as a way to retain Protection in its old fashioned form. A moderate is one who tries to have Internal Push but without External Push; so which tries to have autonomy as a profession from broader economic forces, but then seeks to use that autonomy to legislate laws to itself which apply to the profession as a whole. And a radical is one who embraces both Internal Push and External Push, and gives up on Protection in the old-fashioned sense and accepts that in important ways an academic job is just another job like any other.

The appeal of Conservatism is obvious: if one has a very robust sense of academic freedom, then one doesn't want anyone, including fellow academic philosophers, telling one how one should be an academic. The problem with Conservatism is equally obvious: without a push to have discipline wide norms, the status quo remains as it is, and so doesn't address the pressing issues concerning minorities, lack of jobs, etc. A conservative in this sense, like conservative Republicans in politics, can acknowledge that academic philosophy has many big problems, but sees doing anything that endangers Protection as going from the frying pan to the fire. The process of change has to be slow and individual: over time the norms will change if each person chooses to be different, but, on this view, no one should be forced to change. Forcing change, either from the administrators or from people sympathetic to, say, Feminist philosophy, is seen by a conservative as akin to coercion.

I can understand the conservative's argument, but I am not moved by it. The concept of freedom and Protection that underlies Conservatism is too extreme, and I don't think it is worth retaining. The conservative makes it seem as if the freedom as an academic is something intrinsic to each academic, as if just in virtue of being an academic one acquires a special freedom. But here intrinsic is being used just as a code word for untouchable, as if no one should disturb it. There is, however, nothing intrinsic about academic freedom in the sense that it is granted from on high, or from within one's soul as an academic. The freedom one has as an academic is bought at the cost of other academics not having such freedoms, and the ideal that every academic can have the freedoms of a Wittgenstein or a Rawls is a fantasy. Fill in here one's favorite liberal argument for welfare, universal healthcare, etc., and apply it to academic philosophy.

If one gives up Conservatism, and wants to be a moderate, then one faces a pressing question: what binds all academic philosophers together such that they can agree the laws they legislate to themselves bind them all? It can't be something as abstract as rational beings, since that would apply to non-academic philosophers as well. And it can't be something as concrete as culture, since academic philosophers come from a variety of cultures and backgrounds.

What is Academic Philosophy?

Dear Earlier Self,

I am writing this to you as you are taking your first philosophy courses in college. You are seventeen, a freshman in college and you are trying to make sense of it all: what is academic philosophy and how does it relate to the broader society. I am now thirty-seven, went through academic philosophy as a student and a professor, and I am trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps what I say might be helpful to you.

You are in America at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, taking courses from people called "philosophy professors". What is this institution and how did this designation of philosophy professors come about? While you are in the class it feels as if the institution of philosophy is thousands of years old, as if what is happening in the classroom is directly tied to the beginnings of human civilization in a direct, unbroken chain. In a sense, that is true. In another sense, it is necessary to see the historical changes which created the classrooms you are sitting in.

Where should I begin the history? With the big bang 14 billion years ago, with the Neanderthals 500,000 years ago, with the rise of agricultural societies 15,000 years ago?  There are many perspectives, temporal and global, from which to tell this story.

In order to connect it to the story you are being told in classes, I will begin with Socrates around 500BC in Greece. What happened then? A miracle when the first philosophers were fully formed out of nothingness? No. Every society has its grand narratives: where it came from, where it is going, what obstacles it faces. The prevalent grand narratives at a given time are tied up with the main institutional structures of that time. Over time, institutional structures come and go, and during such times of changes, questions come up about the meaning, nature and future of human beings. This is the renewable source of philosophy: the transition from one institutional framework to another, and it has been happening as long as there have been human beings. And it happened once more in Ancient Greece.

Retire the Word "Minority"

Why is there not more progress in academic philosophy on the issues of diversity and plurality? According to one view it is because tenured professors are not doing enough. If only the people with job security did more for the cause, things would be better. I am tempted by this idea myself sometimes. But the trouble with it is: What should the tenured people do? They should do something, and they should do much more of it than they are doing. Yes. But what is that something? That is not so clear.

Another view is that the terms in which diversity is being discussed are confusing the issues, and making it hard to get a perspicuous understanding of the problem itself. I am starting to subscribe more to this view. What is needed in addition to actions for institutional change is reflection to gain philosophical clarity about what exactly the problem is. As the old saying goes, when the problem becomes clear, the answer too will be clear. Right now the problem itself is not so clear.

But isn't the problem clear enough? What about this as a statement of the problem: there are the majorities, the while males, and the minorities, the rest of the people, and academic philosophy is dominated by the while males, both in terms of who is taught and who is doing the teaching, and we need to get more minorities into both groups until things are equal. On this idea, minorities are oppressed by the hegemony of the white males, and if only the minorities all stand together, then the problem can be solved and a new age of diversity and equality can be ushered in.

The trouble with this formulation is that "minority" as used in it is a catch all phrase which obscures much more than it illuminates. Think of this distinction: slave owners and slaves. When one says "the slaves should stand up against the slave owners" it is clear what this means because it is clear enough who is a slave and who is a slave owner - one just had to walk through a plantation to know who is who. That distinction was helpful because whether one was a slave owner or a slave was not itself the kind of identity which was up for debate. It was perspicuous to all.

In contrast, given the number of dimensions along which minorities can be understood, it is not at all clear who counts as a minority. I have brown skin, my family is from India, most curriculum in America doesn't have Indian authors. But, then again, I am also a male from a middle class family who is heterosexual and have no obvious disabilities. Still, because I am Indian-American, it is pretty clear I am a minority. Now consider Shiela, a Indian women who comes from poverty, who is gay and is blind. Obviously Shiela counts as a minority. But given how much is different between me and Shiela, how illuminating can it be to put us in the same category? All slaves can recognize their common experience as slaves, and so have genuine solidarity. What is common to me and Shiela such that instantly we can recognize each other as tied by a shared situation? Perhaps at least this much: that neither of us is a white male.

Wolff's Top 25 List

Robert Paul Wolff has on his blog a list of what he thinks are the 25 must read books for philosophy graduate students (he has added clarifications here and here). Every book on his list is of course a classic. Any philosophy graduate student would benefit from reading those texts. No arguing that. And yet... And yet what?

Reading Wolff's list it was hard for me to pinpoint how I felt as there were so many mixed emotions. There was anger, frustration, confusion for the imaginable reasons: what, just these entries again?  Really, these are the top 25 texts any graduate student in philosophy has to read, irrespective of their philosophical interests, and irrespective of contingent features such as gender, culture, race, etc.? There is a faux universality to the list which it is almost hard to believe anyone could take seriously. And yet, here is a person who is genuinely putting it forward as what he sees as a kind of normative list for any graduate student. Could Wolff be really so oblivious to the issues of diversity? It is hard to believe, as he has himself made clear on his blog how much he had been involved in making academia more open to minorities.

Pondering this juxtaposition - an utterly conservative list made by someone who is otherwise open to issues of diversity, and who is a marxist even - turned the anger into disbelief, which in turn turned into comic relief. Ha! Yes, there is bound to be a limit to every rebel, and Wolff is generally, in a wonderful sense, a great rebel within academic philosophy. And yet, dear rebel, here your age and limits are shining through: you got your PhD at Harvard fifty years (1957) before I did (2008). And it is hilarious that the list is itself being put forward in a spirit of rebellion, as a way to go against these-young-philosophers-and-their-latest-journals-mindset, as if Wolff is standing up for the right and the good, against the forces of fashion. Bravo! Yes, let us fight against fashion. But to do that do we have to go back to that same old list?

At this point slowly the humor receded into a sadness. For I recalled how many times in my classes my professors trotted out a similar list, when in fact the curriculum more generally was nothing other than such a list writ large onto my education and my development as a thinker. I remembered how those books were introduced to me as what I need to grow as an intellectual, to free my mind from the tyranny of my cultural background, and how I just sat there in those classes, staring blankly, absorbing it all as if it was the Holy Word from the professors on high. As a student I put myself in the care of my professors - teachers no different in many ways from Wolff - and yet how much did my teachers really know, or care to know, about my situation, about where I was coming from? How much did they care about what it must feel like for me to see these same European authors repeatedly put forward as who I was supposed to grow into, and to hear the same silence about other philosophers and traditions that I knew existed, and which I knew that my professors were not so dumb as to not at least have heard of? But if they know of those other traditions, if they have heard of them, why do they keep being silent about them?