Curtis Bowman

Advertisements for Myself - #11

I haven't blogged much for the past couple of years, but I intend to change that. If you go to my academic autobiography and scroll down to the latest installment, you'll see that I've had some health issues that have gotten in the way of my work in general, and not just my blogging. But I've been feeling better recently, and so I should be doing more with my blog from now on. At least that's my hope.

Infrequent Blogging

Since late 2008 I've been having trouble with a pinched nerve in my back. Consequently, when I completely finished one big project in February 2010 and then finished the hardest part of the work on another big project a few weeks later, I decided to take time off from working at my computer. As a result, I haven't been blogging much in recent months. Fortunately, my back is getting better, and so I hope to return to more regular blogging later this year.

Thomas H. Benton on Going to Graduate School in the Humanities

One of my former students from my years at the University of Pennsylvania recently directed my attention to this article by Thomas H. Benton. Mr. Benton (who is actually an English professor named William Pannapacker) has this simple advice for anyone who is thinking about going to graduate school in the humanities: just don't go.

My former student says that Prof. Pannapacker's reasoning in support of his advice sounds very much like what I told her when she was considering becoming a graduate student in English. So she wanted to be sure that I read this particular article.

I find myself in complete agreement with Prof. Pannapacker's views. This post on my blog will give you a few of my thoughts on the subject of graduate school. You might also want to read my academic autobiography. I haven't updated it in over three years, but it amply covers my ten-year experience as an adjunct. (Yes, ten years.) My example should serve as a warning to anyone thinking about graduate school in the humanities.

Oh, one last thing. As you read Prof. Pannapacker's article, you'll come across a reference to the infamous Bowen/Sosa report. I say something about this laughable piece of scholarship in this post.

Reflections on the Past Year - #3

I've gotten into the habit of posting an autobiographical entry to mark the anniversary of my return to Texas. This year is no exception.

For those of you who don't already know, I flew back to Texas on June 21, 2003. If you aren't familiar with the story, then you can look at my academic autobiography. It will explain why I left Philadelphia after seventeen years and returned to Denton. My earlier autobiographical posts tell the story as well.

The previous two anniversary posts concentrated on my academic writing and my efforts to get settled back in Texas. The latter mostly consisted of my dealing with the house that I inherited from my parents. Fortunately, the work on the house was completed well over a year ago. Consequently, this time around I won't need to write about the many renovations that took up so much of my time in the past.

Towards the end of 2005 the Fichte chapter that I described in last year's post, i.e., the introductory piece on Johann Gottlieb Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre, appeared in volume 3 of Central Works of Philosophy. The series is edited by John Shand and published by Acumen Publishing.

I have to confess that I caused to the volume to appear later than the publisher had planned. Because I was so overwhelmed by work and the house, and because I had hurt a tendon in my right hand in the summer of 2004, I fell behind on my chapter. Both editor and publisher were patient, and so by early 2005 I had managed to complete my contribution. It turned out fairly well, I think. It's a good place to begin to understand Fichte's philosophy, if I do say so myself.

Another overdue project appeared in 2005. Many years ago Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher, and I began work on what would eventually be published as volume 13 of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant in Translation. This time, though, I was way ahead of everyone else! My collaborators were the ones who had to catch up, because I had finished my translations in 1999.

Things were in a bit of a lull in the summer of 2005. The Fichte chapter was done, and I decided to take some time off to work in the yard. (Oh, how I miss Philadelphia! Everything green belongs to the city!) I also decided to delay resuming work on the translations that I've been preparing for a volume on Fichte and the atheism dispute that Yolanda Estes and I started years ago. It seemed to me that I should instead begin to make good on some plans that had been on hold for a while.

If you look at my CV, you'll see that the philosophy of art is one of my academic interests. For several years I'd been thinking about taking music lessons. There are any number of ways in which a technical knowledge of music could fit into my future writing and translation projects. For example, I might begin to write about Theodor Adorno's views on music. The thought is hardly far-fetched. As I write this post, I'm in the middle of writing a proposal for a book on Dialectic of Enlightenment, a book that Adorno co-wrote with Max Horkheimer in the early 1940s. In the future I could easily branch out into Adorno's aesthetics of music. I've also given some thought to re-translating some of Richard Wagner's prose writings. Doing so would require some technical knowledge of music.

Besides any possible academic use that I might have for a technical knowledge of music, I thought that I should just do something entirely new to me. My current situation as an independent scholar — once again, see my academic autobiography and my autobiographical posts for the full story — gives me the opportunity to do things that I've never done before. So I started taking piano lessons at the end of August 2005. I'm no musical genius, but I've been making progress.

That same August I started going to a gun range in Dallas to do some shooting. I've always been interested in military history, but I've never really known much about guns. I inherited several from my father when he died in 2002. I kept them, of course, although I didn't know much about how to use them. When I moved back to Texas in 2003, I started to do some on-line research to determine whether any of them were of any value. I figured that they wouldn't be worth much, and my research confirmed my suspicions.

As I looked into the matter, however, I thought that I should learn about them. A little carnage to go with my culture, you might say. It would be something else entirely new to me. So I signed up for a class, learned the basics, and started going to the range once or twice a month. I'll have more to say about this in future posts.

Towards the end of 2005 I resumed work on the Fichte translations. They're my main academic project for the next year or so. I hope to have my portion completed by this time next year, but, unfortunately, it will probably take longer than that.

In late 2005 horror film maven Steven Schneider contacted me again, this time about contributing an entry or two to a European horror film guide that he is editing for the British Film Institue. I chose to write an entry on Häxan, a thoroughly odd, but fascinating, Danish silent film from 1922. I wrote a 500-word entry by the end of March 2006. The book hasn't appeared yet. More on it when it appears.

A few weeks ago I noticed that Thoemmes Continuum had published a paperback edition of my three-volume Winckelmann set, which originally appeared in hardback in 2001. I say "noticed" because no one at the press had contacted me. I stumbled across the new edition while I was looking up some information on-line. Not being notified was a bit annoying, as you can easily imagine, but I'm glad that the set is available in paperback. I corresponded with the press, and I was quickly sent my complimentary copies of the paperback edition.

As I mentioned above, I'm working on a proposal for a commentary on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. I've been at it for a while, but only now have I really been able to do the serious writing. I'll soon have a draft, which I'll send to an editor who has expressed an interest in the project. If I get a contract after the usual review process, then I'll have two book projects, this one and the Fichte translations, to keep me busy.

So I seem to have come to terms with being an independent scholar who is no longer pursuing a career as a professor. At least for now I'm content to remain in Texas. I don't really see any compelling reason to attempt to return to academia. Besides, that whole guns thing would probably cause me problems at some schools, I reckon.

"How long should I search for an academic position?"

In an earlier post — "Should I go to graduate school?" — I related some of my experiences as both a graduate student and an adjunct professor to the issue of going to graduate school. At the end of that post I said that in looking back on it all I could think of only one major mistake that I had made during the decade when I searched in vain for a full-time, tenure-track position: I should have imposed a time-limit on myself and then left academia for some other type of career. But, instead, I hung on for ten years and then left academia to become an independent scholar a year after my parents died.

One of my former Haverford students wrote to me after he read that post, asking what might be a reasonable time period for searching for a job before deciding to move on to something else. Everyone's answer to that question is, of course, subject to innumerable qualifications. Consequently, if you're looking for a position, or intend at some point in the future to do so, your particular circumstances will play the most important role in how long you decide to conduct your search. But nonetheless I believe that something worthwhile can be said about this issue.

My own experiences should once again prove instructive. If you look at my academic autobiography, you'll see that I express some amazement that as time passed and I improved as a scholar and a teacher, it became no more likely that I would find a job. In fact, it became harder. Additional qualifications, i.e., teaching experience and publications, didn't help at all.

I started looking for a position in the fall of 1992. I was expecting to finish my degree in the spring of 1993, and so I had to think about finding a job for the fall of 1993 when I would no longer be a student. Since this is what most people do, it means that most people first go on the market without having finished their dissertation. I was no different in this respect.

I sent out my applications and was interviewed by four schools at the December meeting of eastern division of the American Philosophical Association. (My academic autobiography explains the application and interview process.) Two of the four schools brought me to campus in early 1993, but as you already know, I didn't receive any job offers. I then finished my dissertation and graduated in May 1993. Then began my years as an adjunct.

Well, I couldn't have known it at the time, but my first year on the market — when, remember, I hadn't yet received my degree, had only a small amount of teaching experience, and hadn't yet published anything — was the best one I was to have in a decade of searching. Never again did half of my APA convention interviews result in on-campus interviews. I've talked with other people about this, and many of them have told me that they too experienced the same thing. Most of them, fortunately, went on to find a job. The point, though, is that their first year was the one in which they caught the serious attention of the largest number of schools.

In short, if you don't get a job your first time on the market, your chances for getting one begin immediately to decrease. Schools begin to assume that something is wrong with you, that you aren't serious about academia, and so forth. Whatever the reasons may be, it just seems to be a fact that your prospects diminish dramatically if you don't have a position by the time that you receive your Ph.D. They don't disappear completely, they just decrease.

This is why I now think that I should have given up my job search after three years. I managed in early 1995 to get an on-campus interview for a tenure-track position. I didn't make another on-campus visit for a tenure-track job until the spring of 1999. By that time I had a more diverse teaching and publication record than many of the people who were interviewing me, and I was obviously going to do even more in the future. I can't imagine that those accomplishments made for better prospects of success. I had stayed too long, and so my efforts weren't going to be rewarded.

"Should I go to graduate school?"

In 1999 I created a set of pages on my homepage that dealt with the sad state of affairs in academia. The pages — collectively entitled "Biting the Hand that (Barely) Feeds Me" — were meant to do several things at once. They offered advice to my students, attempted to inform people about what was happening in academia, vented some of my frustrations, and the like. I maintained the pages for two years and then removed them from my website. I didn't have the time to keep them current, and so I took them down.

After a few years passed, I restored my academic autobiography to my site. I had originally intended that page as nothing more than an introduction to the other "biting" pages. I figured that there ought to be some way for readers to orient themselves to my situation before they proceeded to read my advice and mull over my somewhat jaundiced observations. Much to my surprise, my autobiography turned out to be the most popular of my pages. I received a lot of email about it. Therefore, I eventually decided that I should put the page online again and update it on a regular basis. I've been gratified by the positive feedback that the page still generates.

But I never did anything with the other "biting" pages until today. There didn't seem to be any pressing reason to put them online again. I've changed my mind, and here's why I've once again made available the page containing my advice about going to graduate school.

A few weeks ago I had a conversation with an intelligent young woman who had contacted me through my blog. She told me that she had been thinking about going to graduate school, but also that she hadn't been able to get very helpful advice from her professors. I met her at a coffee shop and told her what I could about going to graduate school. When I mentioned that I had once had a page on my website dedicated to this question, she said that she would like to see it, and that she had friends who would also like to see it.

Well, I'm happy to help when I can. I've posted the original page and appended a brief update. Although I last updated the old page in March 2001, I don't see any reason to make any major changes to it. I still believe what I believed five years ago. Nothing has changed in academia to make me change my mind. Things are as bad as they've ever been.

In the update you'll read a few bits of advice that you won't find in the original page. When you read the original page, please keep in mind that it was first composed in 1999 and last updated in 2001. I was still in academia at that time, dividing my teaching between the University of Pennsylvania and Bryn Mawr College. The update reflects my current opinions, and so to a certain extent they are the product of the past two and a half years, during which time I've been an independent scholar without any academic affiliation.

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The Original Page — From 1999/2001

"Should I go to graduate school?"

Students who are thinking about pursuing an academic career ask me this question all the time. This is hardly surprising: I attended graduate school, received my Ph.D., and began an academic career, all within recent memory. As a result, I should know something about what it's like to attend graduate school nowadays. From my point of view, it's fairly easy to decide who is or isn't cut out for graduate school. Success in a graduate program is as much a matter of character as intelligence, and it's generally not too hard to see who possesses both qualities. Such judgments aren't infallible, of course, but they're more or less dependable.

But this really isn't the sense in which the question is intended. Most students are confident of their abilities (some, alas, are too confident), and thus they don't need me to reassure them. Instead, what they want to know is what they can expect once they've finished graduate school and have begun looking for an academic job. Most people who decide to get a Ph.D. initially do so with an eye towards an academic career, and so they naturally want to know what the job situation is. Unfortunately, the current situation is a such a disaster that it beggars belief.

Believe it or not, roughly half of all professors in this country are now employed on a part-time basis. An academic employed in this fashion is typically known as an adjunct professor or, more simply, an adjunct. I can't cite any statistical surveys to prove that the percentage of adjuncts is so high (although such data no doubt exist somewhere), but a figure of fifty per cent squares with what I have observed on my own and with what I have read in newspapers and magazines. Most people outside of academia have no idea that the percentage is so high. This is truly odd. Universities, of course, have good reasons for failing to publicize such figures, but one would think that the mass media would pick up the story and aggressively report it. Imagine how the media would howl if they learned that half of all doctors and lawyers were employed on a part-time basis.

For example, I taught part-time at La Salle University, a Catholic school in north Philadelphia, for two and a half years, and during the Fall 1995 semester, which was the last time I taught there, the adjunct faculty in the philosophy department outnumbered the full-time faculty. (If I remember correctly, at that time there were eight part-time members and seven full-time ones.) My colleagues across the country tell me similar stories. At some schools the percentage of adjuncts actually exceeds fifty per cent.

This is a scandal. Given how much students pay to go to a college or university, they deserve to be taught by full-time faculty receiving the salary, benefits, and institutional support that make it possible for them to do their jobs properly. Increasingly, however, this isn't happening, and so students are being cheated.

But universities aren't letting on that this is the case. Can you imagine what the recruitment brochures would look like? If they were honest, they would sound something like this:

Here you'll be taught by some of the finest professors in the country, although it was decided that it would be more economically efficient to exploit half of them as cheap labor. But don't worry! Academia is a genteel profession in which everyone works for a higher good, so trivial things such as money and hope for the future don't matter, especially to those who actually do the teaching and research that together constitute the primary mission of the university.

My point, overwrought as it is, is clear, I hope. Parents would not be happy. Students would not be happy. Alumni would not be happy. The happiness of a large portion of the faculty apparently doesn't matter. So the scandal is simply not mentioned. Decorum demands as much.

Since the use of part-time faculty is widespread (and maybe even accelerating), the odds are good that upon leaving graduate school freshly minted professors will be employed as part-time labor, perhaps after accumulating tens of thousands of dollars in debt. As adjuncts, they will probably have to teach too many classes at two or more schools, and they'll almost certainly receive no benefits, little or no computer support, and no research assistance whatsoever. If they have absolutely no luck at all, they might not even get an office in which to hold office hours. Furthermore, they'll have to go on the job market every year, which itself costs a lot of money, and compete with hundreds of other people in the same degrading circumstances.

I can attest to all of this from personal experience. I have been looking for a full-time job since the end of 1992. Since then I have sent out approximately five hundred and fifty applications, had twenty-two interviews, and made seven on-campus visits — all without ever receiving a single job offer of any sort. I'm not an idiot; in fact, I'm very good at what I do. I don't think that it's immodest of me to say so. Yet I can't find a job. It's very frustrating.

The Penn philosophy department does for me what it can with its limited budget: I make a decent amount of money; I have a nice office; and I have gotten some money to help pay my way to three conferences. But I receive no benefits and no computer support outside of the usual e-mail account. The computer equipment in my office belongs to me. I bought it all with my own money. Despite the terms of my employment, I very much enjoy teaching here, but I have no future at this institution. That's why I have to go on the job market every year. (I've also been teaching at Bryn Mawr College recently to earn more money. By the way, Bryn Mawr supplies me with a computer.)

If you're thinking about going to graduate school, it's naive to think that this can't happen to you. (If you've already gone and find yourself in my situation, then you have my sympathy.) Because this can happen to anyone (although I admit that my case is something of an exceptional one because of the length of time that it has lasted), this fact should give pause to anyone considering graduate school. Why spend five to ten years in a graduate program just to wind up badly employed at the end of it all, especially when there were always other alternatives?

There is at least one compelling reason to go to graduate school: simply put, it can be a wonderful experience. I'm not given to excessive rhetorical displays, but I will say that I genuinely enjoyed graduate school, and that my life would have been impoverished without it. I would look back with regret if I had not studied philosophy. There are a few things that I regret having done, but getting a Ph.D. in philosophy isn't one of them.

So if you find that you cannot imagine your life without having graduate school figure in it in some significant way, even if you don't want a career in academia, then I think that you should go to graduate school. While this isn't the only good reason for pursuing a Ph.D., it seems to me to be the most compelling one. But if you do go, make sure that you do so with both eyes open. Otherwise, you might regret it.

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Update — February 17, 2006

Here are some additional thoughts.

If you decide to go to graduate school, I strongly advise you not to enter a program that doesn't offer you financial support from the very beginning. Some programs admit students without offering them either a tuition waiver or a stipend. In such cases they usually say that it's always possible in a year or two to get such support, but even then it isn't guaranteed.

Face the following fact: some of the newly admitted students are being offered such support. So if it isn't being offered to you from the beginning, it's almost certainly because the department doesn't think that you're as good as the others who have been admitted with financial support. Why go into such a situation voluntarily?

My advice is to keep applying until a department agrees to fund you from the very beginning of your time in graduate school. Don't think that you have to enroll in a program just because you happen to have been accepted. If you don't have funding from the beginning, you'll have to borrow a lot of money (unless, of course, you or your parents are wealthy enough to pick up the tab). That's not a good idea, as far as I'm concerned.

So if you apply one year and don't get any offers of support, apply again next year. Wait until you get an offer that makes it worth your while to go to graduate school. Graduate school is stressful enough as it is. Having to worry about your financial situation will only make things worse.

If you go to graduate school with the intention of becoming a professor afterwards, you have to keep in mind the possibility that you will fail to find a long-term position. This is what happened to me, as my academic autobiography attests. I still have no regrets about having gone to graduate school. As I reflect on what happened to me, I can really only think of one significant mistake that I made. When I first ran into trouble finding a job, I should have set a time limit for my job search. I should have said to myself that after some number of years, I would just pack it in and turn to some other career. Instead, I stayed in the profession — rather tenuously, of course — for ten years. Well, that was too long. I should have left it earlier than I did.

When I finally left academia, I did so when I could become an independent scholar who had no need of either part-time or full-time employment. As my academic autobiography and my autobiographical blog posts point out, the untimely death of my parents left me in good financial shape.

It's unlikely that many people contemplating the prospect of going to graduate school will ever wind up in my current situation. So it's hardly something that can figure into your plans. That being the case, I recommend a self-imposed time limit for searching for a job. If you don't find one after a certain number of years, then move on to something else. Academia has its charms, but it's a deeply troubled profession, and nothing is happening right now that will greatly improve it. Not being a part of it isn't the end of the world.

More: Go to this post for what I have to say about imposing a time limit on your job search.

Carla Power on the Lawrence of Arabia Exhibit at the Imperial War Museum

This article by Carla Power of Newsweek alerted me to the recently opened exhibit on T. E. Lawrence at the Imperial War Musuem in London.

I've long been interested in Lawrence's life. When I first visted the IWM in March 1990, I was struck by the fact that virtually nothing on permanent display was devoted to Great Britain's imperial history. The two world wars were the main emphasis. They had imperial aspects, of course, but the European aspects of those two conflicts were the chief focus. There was also a small exhibit devoted to the war in the Falkland islands.

I had been reading about Lawrence at the time, when I was studying in Munich, and so I knew that a portrait of Lawrence painted by James McBey in October 1918, right after Damascus was captured by the British and the Arabs, was in the IWM collection.

Well, I wandered around the entire museum but couldn't find the portrait. There was, however, a post card of it in the gift shop. I showed the card to the cashier, asking whether or not the painting was on display. She said that it wasn't, but that she could send me to someone who could show it to me. I was led through a door and spoke with a man who worked as a curator of some sort. He took me into the storage area and showed me the painting. I noticed that the painting's background is actually blue, although it appears in the photos that I've seen to be brown.

In January 2003 I went to the IWM again, this time to see its exhibit devoted to British poets from the First World War. The museum had been expanded to include a Holocaust exhibit, among other things, but there still wasn't much on the military history of the British empire that didn't relate directly to the two world wars.

Reflections on the Past Year - #2

Today is the second anniversary of my return to Texas. A year ago I posted an entry — "Reflections on the Past Year - #1" — that told the story of my first year back in my hometown of Denton. I thought that I would make such a post an annual event, and so here you have the second entry — "Reflections on the Past Year - #2".

As is the case with my online autobiographical writings, I'll mostly stick to topics that relate to my academic work in some fashion or other. My personal life typically enters into the story only insofar as it somehow impinges on my scholarly efforts. It's not that I'm shy about writing about my personal life, but I figure that the other people who would necessarily have to be mentioned might not want to turn up in the bits of autobiography that I post every once in a while. Hence my decision not to say very much about my personal life.

Last year's post mentioned that in the the previous year I had resolved to remain an independent scholar, and thus not to make any attempt to return to academia. The same is true of the past year. As I continued to settle into life as an independent scholar, I felt less and less of a desire to go back into the classroom. Ideally, I would like to return to teaching, but I don't see how I could possibly do so on terms that I would deem favorable. Consequently, I haven't set foot in the classroom since I finished teaching at Haverford College in the spring of 2003. I'm reconciled to the likelihood that I'll never teach again.

The work on my house has continued off and on during the past year, but on a much reduced scale. There wasn't much left to do once the extensive renovations of mid-2003 and early 2004 were completed. But in September 2004 the central air system was replaced with more efficient modern equipment. I immediately noticed a drop in my electricity bill, which was nice, especially given that I have to endure the Texas summer. That was easier for me to do twenty years ago, I might add.

I bought a new sofa and made arrangements for re-upholstering three chairs and a couch. (That takes more time than the previous sentence lets on. Picking out fabric is almost as agonizing as choosing paint colors or wallpaper patterns.) Everything was delivered by the beginning of November 2004. Decorating the walls became the next priority. I put up a lot of pictures, bought a tapestry for the den, and did the many other things that accompany re-decorating an entire house. Fortunately, none of these tasks was especially time-consuming, and so my scholarly work wasn't disturbed very much. Recently, I've been restoring some old pieces of furniture. It's time-consuming, but the results are worthwhile.

During the summer of 2004 I began writing a chapter on Fichte's Foundations of the Entire Wissenschaftslehre. (My Fichte entry for The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy will bring you up to speed on this particular book by Fichte.) I had to compress a complex and obscure work into a chapter of only 10,000 words. The writing went very slowly, partly because it's the nature of such a task to move at a glacial pace, partly because I injured a tendon in my right hand, probably from working in the yard. The injury made it difficult for me to sit in front of the computer and type for any length of time. Even today, as I write this post, my hand still bothers me. It's gotten much better, of course, but I'm surprised that a tendon takes so long to heal.

I finished the draft of the chapter by the middle of December 2004. It was sent out to readers for comments, and I also asked several friends to read it as well. I gathered up all of the comments and made the appropriate revisions by the end of March 2005. The chapter is now in production at the press, and it will soon appear in volume three of Central Works of Philosophy, edited by John Shand for Acumen Publishing.

While I was grappling with the Fichte chapter, Paul Guyer, Fred Rauscher and I finally completed our volume of the Cambridge Kant Edition. Ten years ago we began to translate a selection of Kant's posthumously published notes and fragments, which is why our book is entitled Notes and Fragments. I had translated my assigned portion of the material by the middle of 1999, but the project stalled for several years. Eventually, however, the translations were completed, and by the fall of 2004 the volume was in page proofs. We read the proofs, sent the corrections to the press, and the book was published about two months ago. It was quite a relief to bring that project to an end.

In early 2005 I spent a lot of time re-organizing my library. What I want to study and write about in the next few years has become clearer to me, and so I had to acquire quite a few books, which demanded in turn that I sell some of the old ones in order to make room on my shelves. Anyone interested in academic books can tell you that they're best acquired deliberately and slowly. There are so many secondary works that look good at first glance but turn out not to be especially helpful that one has to be cautious when shopping for them. Consequently, I did a lot of research into what I really needed to own before I ordered anything.

I'm already under contract (in collaboration with Yolanda Estes) for a volume of translations and commentary relating to Fichte and the atheism dispute of 1798-1800. My library was already adequate for that project. But since I've definitely decided to write a book on Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, I had to make the appropriate adjustments to my books. If you look at my academic autobiography, you'll see the ups and downs of this project, which has been on my mind for quite a while. Fortunately, I'm now in a position to devote myself to writing that book. I'm currently working on the proposal to send to an editor who has expressed an interest in the project.

I'm also toying with the idea of writing a book on horror film, but it will be a while before I have a more concrete plan. The theme of the book will certainly be that of an essay that I published about two years ago, an essay in which I discussed what I call the Heideggerian uncanny. (My essay is in a book entitled Dark Thoughts: Philosophic Reflections on Cinematic Horror.) For the moment, though, I'm simply watching horror films in an effort to choose the right ones to discuss in the book that I hope to write. At least that's what I tell myself while I'm watching movies instead of working on philosophy. It's good to be able to rationalize one's less than exalted inclinations, isn't it?

I'll close this post on a more personal note. I've been back in Texas for two years, but not, as many readers already know, because it was where I most wanted to live. After my parents died — the necessary details can be found in my academic autobiography — I didn't really have much choice but to leave Philadelphia and return to my hometown. Nonetheless, I've often thought that I made a mistake by coming back. For many months I wasn't sure that I could stay here and do the work that I would like to do. But I've learned that I can in fact stay here and work as an independent scholar. After all, I've managed to complete or begin several projects. Consequently, as long as I stick to my resolution not to return to academia, I suspect that I'll remain in Texas.

Advertisements for Myself - #6

Some readers of this blog already know that I used to be a philosophy professor, but that I'm now an independent scholar. From time to time I receive emails from readers asking me what it's like to be an independent scholar, inquiring about my current projects, and so forth. The easiest way to get an answer to these questions is to read my academic autobiography.

I began this autobiographical essay in 1999, and from time to time I revise and expand it. I updated it recently, adding material about the past several months. It's become fairly long by now — roughly 9500 words. If you're interested in the sad state of academia nowadays, or if you're considering going to graduate school, then you might want to take a look at what I've written. At the very least, though, it will explain to you why I became an independent scholar.

Update - February 17, 2006: If you go to this post, you'll find some autobiographical remarks relating to my time in academia. The post as a whole is dedicated to the issue of whether or not to go to graduate school.

Reflections on the Past Year - #1

I flew back to Texas on June 21, 2003. Today marks the anniversary of my returning to live in my hometown. Since anniversaries are occasions for reflection, I thought that I would post a few remarks about this past year. I'll mostly talk about getting settled after the move and getting back to work on my various projects.

The biggest difference between this year in Texas and the previous seventeen years in Philadelphia is that this year was the first one in which I was not in the classroom, either as a student or a professor. In fact, it was the first year that I had not been in the classroom since, believe it or not, I was in kindergarten. I went straight from kindergarten to public school to college to graduate school and then, finally, to teaching philosophy in the Philadelphia area. That's roughly thirty-five years in a row, without a pause or break.

It's been odd, although not as odd as it could have been. I finished a year as a visiting assistant professor at Haverford College right before I moved back, but I haven't had a job since then. Although I haven't been teaching, I've been very busy. Here are the year's highlights.

When I returned to Texas, I moved into my parents' house, which they bought thirty-three years ago. We moved in on April 7, 1971, as I recall. The house was a bit run-down, because my father had been preoccupied with my mother's multiple sclerosis for a long time. He hadn't been able to take care of the house or the yard properly, and her wheelchair had banged up walls and furniture over the years. In short, the place needed a lot of work. I asked friends to recommend a builder to me, and I settled on someone who turned out to be fantastic at his job. (A nice guy, too. Very easy to get along with.) I told him what I wanted done (and I became increasingly ambitious, since I figured that I might as well do as much as possible as quickly as possible), and he lined everything up with his subcontractors. I didn't have to do too much, except choose fixtures, appliances, carpet, and tile.

Oh, yes, I can't forget to mention the colors! I had to choose colors. I never knew that there were so many colors in the whole goddamned world. For example, when I had to choose the paint for the walls and ceilings, my builder gave me a sample block that must have contained 5000 shades of every color known to mankind. The number of shades of white alone was mind-boggling. Literally, I couldn't think. I asked myself, "Where's a queer eye when a straight guy needs one?" I soldiered on, nonetheless. I didn't spend all those years teaching aesthetics for nothing.

My most important task, though, was to stay out of the way, which I did admirably, if I do say so myself. It was easy, despite the fact that the contractors preferred to show up early in the morning. I lost a lot of sleep during the renovations.

I separated the work into two phases. The first phase, which occurred mostly in July and August 2003, but small parts of which dragged into October 2003, was devoted to renovating the interior of the house. The second phase, which occurred mostly in January and February 2004, first involved getting several new doors inside the house as well as a new garage door and then getting new windows and metal siding for the exterior of the house. By the time all the work was finished I had spent . . . well, a great deal of money. But all of it was money well spent. The house is much, much nicer to look at and to live in.

Furthermore, since I made changes of some sort to about 90 per cent of the interior, I'm not reminded as much of my parents as before. That's more important than you might realize, especially if you haven't had to live in a house filled with memories of people who are now deceased. I found the place rather oppressive when I moved back, but now, what with the renovations and an additional year to grieve for my parents, living here isn't a problem anymore, at least not on account of thoughts of my mother and father. I would have been willing to pay twice as much for the renovations if it had been necessary for making the house a more congenial place to live. Fortunately, that wasn't necessary.

Between the two phases I started to work on philosophy again. I began researching an introduction for a reprint of a translation of a book by Moses Mendelssohn. (See these earlier posts here and here for more information on this project.) I also began translating an essay by Johann Gottlieb Fichte for a book of translations and commentary that I'm doing with my friend Yolanda Estes. (She recently received tenure at Mississippi State University. Congratulations, Yolanda.) I'm about two-thirds of the way through that piece by Fichte. And, finally, I researched and began writing a chapter on Fichte for a book. I'm in the middle of the first draft as I write this. (I'll have more to say about the Fichte projects in the future, but this page contains some very basic information about them.)

I've been thinking a bit about two book projects, one on philosophy and horror film, the other on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's book entitled Dialectic of Enlightenment. (The latter project is another long story, but this earlier post contains some basic information. I also once gave a lecture on the first two chapters of Horkheimer and Adorno's book.) Once I finish the Fichte chapter, I'll be able to devote more time to my book ideas.

Looking back over the year I realize that I haven't been sick once, not even for a single day. I've had some mild problems with allergies, but that's just because of the change in climate. I never had such problems in Philadelphia. The sort of stress that I felt several years ago, especially in late 2000 and early 2001, is long gone. (See the relevant portions of my academic autobiography for the story of my experiences with stress.) I'm convinced, by the way, although I could never prove it, that my father became susceptible to cancer because of the many years of stress associated with taking care of my mother.

For the first time in a very long time, I've been able to sleep without having to drag myself out of bed to go to work. I mean that word 'drag' quite literally. During my ten years as a professor I was severely sleep-deprived, since I routinely had a teaching load that exceeded that of a full-time teaching position. Furthermore, I didn't just teach the same handful of classes again and again as many professors do. Because I was an adjunct, I had to develop many new classes in order to find work. Since my academic autobiography explains all of this, I won't go into it here. None of the foregoing includes all the time spent looking in vain for a job, nor the time devoted to my scholarly writing and translating.

The only potentially restful year was my year at Haverford, but I had to deal with legal and estate business while I was teaching there, and therefore had to travel back and forth between Philadelphia and Texas quite a bit. Consequently, I didn't get much sleep then, either, although that wasn't the fault of anyone at Haverford.

Here's the irony, though. Now that I'm no longer sleep-deprived, I'm having trouble with insomnia for the first time in several years. If it's not one thing, then it's always another. The human body — or, perhaps in this case, the human mind — is truly perverse.

One of my former students from Haverford recently asked me a question that I wanted to take up in this post, since it essentially relates to my experiences of the past year. He asked me whether or not I ever intend to return to academia. He wanted to know how I feel about it now, seeing that I've been out of it for year.

Don't think that I don't ask myself the very same question from time to time. Not long ago I had to consider the issue quite seriously. Here's the short version of the story.

At the beginning of March 2004, much to my surprise, I got a call from a friend of mine at a school that had interviewed me in December 2001. (The school isn't in Texas. I'll say only that much regarding its whereabouts.) That search had been canceled in early 2002 because the state had instituted a hiring freeze on account of the budget problems that many states have experienced in the past three or four years. His department had conducted a new search in late 2003 and early 2004, but they had come up empty. If I understood my friend correctly, they hadn't been able to get someone to take the position; and so they wanted to go back to the results of the aborted search from 2001-2002, that is, to the one that had involved me, among other candidates, of course.

When that search was terminated, I was one of two finalists. In the meantime the other finalist had found a job. Consequently, I was the only one left standing. My friend was more or less, kinda sorta, offering me a job, even though a lot would had to have been done before a real offer could have been made. I told him that I wasn't interested, and I thanked him for thinking of me.

I thought seriously about what my friend was saying, but I didn't have to think very long. I've moved three times in the past four years, twice within Philadelphia, once back to Texas. By the time my friend called I had spent a lot of money on my house. I was in the process of getting settled, and it was nice to live in a house of my own for the first time in my life.

Tenure at my friend's school probably would not have been much of a problem. I already have a significant publication record, one that would only grow in the next few years. The teaching load would have been heavy — four classes in the fall, and four in the spring. But I wouldn't have had to teach as many different classes as I had done in Philadelphia. And so on. It wouldn't have been a bad job, but it wouldn't have been a great one.

Since I don't need a full-time job anymore, I don't have to take whatever job might come my way. Most of all, though, I didn't want to move again, especially for a tenure-track position (which it was) that might dry up and blow away if the state had another fiscal crisis. As I said, I thought about the job, but declining my friend's preliminary offer to start the administrative ball rolling was an easy call.

I had to laugh, by the way. The closest I've ever come to a full-time position was in a year when I hadn't even applied for a job of any sort. I'm still somewhat grimly amused by the whole affair.

If someone wants to hire me as an associate professor with tenure, then I'll sell my house and move across the country. I'll even consider a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at a school like Haverford if I'm ever offered one. Until one of those offers knocks on my door, I'll stay here and work on my writing and translating.

But let's face facts. I'll turn forty-one in less than a month. Say that I finish the Fichte translations in the next two years (my deadline is in 2006) and write at least one book of my own in the next three or four years. That's quite possible, almost a certainty, really. I could then return to the job market that much more accomplished. Well, who's going to hire a forty-five year old white man who received his Ph.D. when he was twenty-nine, and who hasn't held an academic job of any sort for at least five years, regardless of how accomplished he may be? No one, I suspect. Hell, I couldn't get a job when I was twenty-nine and fresh out of graduate school.

Even if I could get a desirable position, would I want one? I mean, would I really want one? This returns me to the question of my former Haverford student. Recall that the academic job market progressively worsened during the economic boom years of the mid- to late-1990s. The percentage of full-time positions sank to roughly 50 per cent. There's no reason to think that things will ever get better, especially now that the country is facing increasing deficits and gargantuan Social Security and Medicare liabilities once the baby boomers begin to retire.

Many of the people in academia who have full-time jobs and are tenured are unhappy. Some of that, of course, is just whining. But when I talk with mature people with reasonable grievances, I get the impression that they're always fighting some battle to establish a decent defensive position to fight a second battle simply so that they won't be completely routed in the third battle. What sort of professional life is that?

The quality of students is not improving, funding is shrinking, and indifference to anything not blunt-headedly careerist is growing. Philosophy departments at all but the best schools are increasingly serving other departments to the exclusion of promoting philosophy as an end in itself. I miss teaching. I miss talking to students and colleagues. I miss the academic lifestyle, even as gnarled as it was for me. I don't have to get involved with the hassles anymore, and I doubt that the good things are good enough to make an academic career desirable for someone like me. Consequently, I doubt that I'll ever go back.

Maybe I'll change my mind at some point, but at the moment I don't see myself returning to academia, assuming that I might be allowed to return in the first place. Just because I show up looking for work doesn't mean that anyone will actually give me any. I might teach a class or two again, but the pay would have to make it worth my while. When I was in Philadelphia, it wasn't too hard to get work that paid decently, even though it was work as an adjunct. That won't happen in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, unfortunately. If I stay in Texas, then it's extremely doubtful that I'll go back to teaching. If I move somewhere else, perhaps I would start teaching again. But it's too early to tell what I'll do. For the immediate future, however, I can say that I'll stay at home and not teach.

Therefore, I now assume that my teaching career is over and done with. The past year has helped me to see that I'll probably never teach again, and, more important, that that fact doesn't bother me too much anymore. It did at first, believe me. But I came to realize that I always enjoyed teaching interesting subjects to excellent students; as for the other subjects and the other students, well, sometimes I enjoyed the experience, sometimes I didn't. All academics are that way. Unlike most of them, however, I have a choice about whether or not to keep teaching. Right now I choose not to teach. I'm comfortable with that decision, which I find a bit surprising, since I never expected that I would have to make such a choice. But interesting subjects and excellent students aren't the rule. They're the exception. I've been spoiled by teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, and Haverford. I don't know that I could teach, say, at the state university that employed my father for thirty-two years. I wonder how he managed to stay sane for so long.

I plan to start attending conferences again and to keep reading, writing, and translating philosophy. I like to think of myself as a gentleman scholar. Clearly, I've read too many books from the 18th century. But you get my meaning, I'm sure.

So, to put an end to this post, I'm settled in my hometown in Texas and content not to be teaching any longer. I'm not happy about not teaching, but I can live without it.

P.S. Overall, by the way, I should mention that I liked Haverford best of all the schools that employed me. Haverford treated me decently, and it's a nice place with serious students. Lots of ducks, too. Students at the other places I taught were often serious, of course, but the combination of things at Haverford made it my favorite.

P.P.S. I finally chose egret as my paint color, but my walls and ceilings don't look like a bird's plumage to me. They look off-white. I can't claim to understand the difference. It's just a mystery.