What is a Liberal Arts College?

When I started at Bryn Mawr I was excited to be a professor at a liberal arts college. I loved the ideal of an education which focuses on the overall growth of the student, and I was eager to be part of structures which enabled that for students. As an undergrad at Cornell I got a liberal arts education, as it is commonly called, but the experience of the small, liberal arts college was foreign to me.

At Bryn Mawr I came to know students who chose to come there instead of going to a big university, either public or private. These students came with a contrast in mind between a liberal arts college and a professionalized university. Call this the contrast. As with any school, some students at Bryn Mawr seemed to find themselves there rather than actively haven chosen to be there. But other students seemed to thrive and revel in the fact that they were making a choice by coming to a college like Bryn Mawr, where they hoped that free of any professional training they could explore whatever they wanted and grow as human beings. As a professor, I was like these students. I had a choice to see if I wanted to teach at a university, and I chose the Bryn Mawr experience instead. I too, like the students, was driven by the sense of the contrast. I hoped the contrast was true, and that being at Bryn Mawr would offer me a different way of being an academic than I had seen at Cornell and Harvard.

The contrast was played up by administrators at Bryn Mawr. It was an easy thing to fall back on to sell the college. The reason to choose Bryn Mawr was encapsulated by two messages. First, a liberal arts college might be better for you than a university, and second, as a woman, being at a woman's college might be better for you than a co-ed school. I wasn't sure I believed the latter. Or, at any rate, I wasn't sure what to think about that. I thought it was good that students had the choice to go to a women's college. But naturally for myself it was the first message which moved me: yes, I thought to myself, universities are professionalized spaces, where one is dictated to by the professional norms, whereas at a liberal arts college one can be more free of that. I was in the grip of the contrast, and hoped it was true.

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.

Top 20 Anglophone Philosophers

At Leiter Reports there are the results of a poll of the "Most Important Anglophone Philosophers 1945-2000". Over 500 people apparently voted, which is really not that many people. Still, the results, and even the way the poll is set up, are fascinating in several ways.

The first thing that jumps out is that the top 20 people listed went to a very small number of schools. Of course, these philosophers taught, and were educated, at different schools, but here are some of the schools they were at:

Educated:

Oxford: Armstrong, Anscombe, Austin, Dummett, Grice, Ryle, Sellars, Strawson, Williams

Harvard: Davidson, Kripke, Kuhn, Lewis, Nagel, Quine, Chomsky (Society of Fellows), Putnam (before getting PhD at UCLA)

Princeton: Fodor, Nozick, Rawls

As Faculty:

Oxford: Anscombe, Austin, Dummett, Ryle, Strawson

Harvard: Nozick, Putnam, Quine, Rawls

Princeton: Kripke, Lewis, Nagel

MIT: Chomsky, Fodor, Kuhn

Berkeley: Davidson, Grice

Pittsburgh: Sellars

Cambridge: Williams

Sydney: Armstrong

When I forget where these philosophers were educated or taught, it can feel as if these philosophers' views are so different, as if they cover the vast expanse of the philosophical landscape. But then when I remember that these twenty philosophers went to a small circle of schools, were in classes with each other, took classes from one another, met each other at the same conferences, then they seem so insular, as if they are just the 20 top bishops of the Anglophone Church, groomed and chosen by from within so as to continue the institutional structures they were a part of.

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.

Institutional Understanding

Consider an academic philosophy book, say John McDowell's Mind and World. What is it to understand this book? Here are three kinds of understanding:

1) Biographical: We learn about McDowell's life and how he came to write the book. We understand the book by seeing how it came to be written in the course of his life.

2) Conceptual: We think about the arguments and reasons McDowell gives in the book (about conceptual content, second nature, etc.). We understand the book by tracing his ideas in the book to ideas of other authors, evaluating his ideas, trying to improve on those ideas, etc.

3) Institutional: We consider the institutional forces which shaped McDowell's writing of the book, such as who he sees as his interlocutors, which philosophers and philosophies he is able to ignore and still be taken seriously, how the book fits into his standing in the profession, and so on. We understand the book here by seeing it as shaped by broad institutional structures, many of which McDowell as the author might himself never have thought about.

Conceptual understanding is a standard way of understanding philosophical texts; standard at least in the kind of departments I was educated in and taught at. The skills concerning this kind of understanding are what I was taught in my classes, and which I was supposed to exhibit in articles I was to publish.

What was also standard in my education is the idea that biographical understanding is irrelevant to conceptual understanding. Just as the biography of a mathematician is irrelevant to evaluating her proofs, so too the biography of a philosopher is supposed to be irrelevant to evaluating her ideas and arguments. This view is plausible only if we take the product of philosophical thinking to be ideas independent of how one lives one's life. For if how a philosopher lives her life can be evaluated, then certainly knowing something about her biography, the trajectory of her life, would be relevant.