a new Linnaeus needed

a new Linnaeus needed
by doctorzamalek

Remark by P. Gratton, who incidentally is selling himself short in this post; he’s a whirlwind of activity in real life:

“I love this post on alibis. Oh, a latter day Linnaeus would be far better off working out a taxonomy of dissertation non-defense defenses than digging through the flora of the woods. There was a great NYT piece on this a year ago–how people set out their excuses for themselves before failure. My problem wasn’t my dissertation, which I finished in a year and a half, but afterwards. But I think there has been a nice delay in getting the next project done: I’ve been working on articles and setting out, slowly, philosophical positions not pinned necessarily to this or that philosopher. So I’m all for alibis–especially the post-graduate kind, since in the States the publish or perish system has led to too many bad books and not enough thinking.

Anyway, keep the advice posts coming since I got God-awful advice as a grad student (not necessarily where I graduated from): don’t publish until you’re nearly done with your disseration; don’t teach one-year positions; don’t do too much conference work… All, really really terrible ideas. First off, without both the teaching experience outside my university and my publications, I would never have gotten my current position. Secondly, I don’t what ‘being ready’ means–I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready, and I feel for those people hanging on to every word of the horrible advice of someone who went out on the market 30 years ago, when a 150 page dissertation was considered long and zero publications and no conference work was the norm. My advice to anyone is simple: ask the people who were on the market last year. What would they change given the questions they were asked and the type of people they saw get jobs? These are, of course, professional questions. As for getting thinking done and then writing done–well, work on alibis that even make yourself laugh. (That coffee maker sure could use a good cleaning…)”

Agreed that publish or perish is a bad thing. My one worry is that where it’s missing, what one often finds instead is “politically maneuver or perish.”

My job market experience was utterly atypical, which is why I’ve never done an advice post on it; my story would be of little help to others. But in case it’s of interest to readers of this blog…

I spent the last few years of graduate school with no intention of going on the market. I’d become somewhat cynical about the state of the profession, had saved up a bit of money, and was planning to ditch this career before even starting it. Success with translation and especially with sportswriting gave me the notion that I’d go live in Europe and carve out some sort of unpredictable literary odd jobs career. Lots of different kinds of people like to read the things I write, so I’ve always figured I could find a way to pay the bills in that manner. (There was never any intention of giving up my philosophical work; I just thought I’d do it in a non-academic setting.)

That was the plan as recently as the summer of ‘99. It’s always possible I would have tried it and not liked it, and a year later would have been back on the expected career path. I’ll never know for sure, but do think I could have pulled it off in some manner or other. Some interesting alternative opportunities were already on the horizon.

But chance intervened. I was offered a one-year full-time position at my doctoral institution. The salary was higher than anything I’d ever seen, and I still liked Chicago, so of course I didn’t turn it down. And that was a memorable year for which I am grateful. It was the doing of Professor Peg Birmingham, Department Chair at the time, whom I remember warmly for that opportunity.

It also knocked down an even heavier domino… Since I was hanging around Chicago anyway, I figured I may as well take a look at the job ads for that year, just in case. (They may even have funded my trip to the APA; I don’t recall.) There were a few interviews, no staggering number, but one stood out as special– and that was for the job that I still occupy today. Things worked out. Everything else followed randomly from that, and I liked it here even more than expected.

But no real advice can be gleaned from that series of coincidences as far as I can tell. I’m not the one to go to for that.

For what it’s worth, I went on the market with exactly zero publications, though admittedly I’d done a lot of conference papers for a new Ph.D. If you come out of graduate school with one article, or even one tiny book review, you’re ahead of where I was. (I’d written around 1,000 pages worth of sports articles, but that doesn’t count, except that it was a biographical forerunner of the sort of easy productivity that I’ve now acquired in philosophical work, after years of obstructions on that front.) I still had publication phobia at the time, even though my writer’s block was mostly gone. And now I’m a publication zealot. Quite often, character traits that we take to be durable features of our personality are merely surface expressions that can flip without notice when conditions change. It really makes you wonder what other potential ‘flips’ each of us contains, but which are simply never activated… What would it take for a very minimal drinker like me to flip into a hard-drinking thug, or is that out of reach? What would it take to flip me into a professional criminal, or is it truly unthinkable? I suppose there’s a tendency to think that we’re all so malleable that different social conditions could drive all of us to pretty much anything. That seems to me like a slight exaggeration. All of us would react very differently to a post-apocalyptic urban setting, for instance; we wouldn’t all aspire to be warlords or doomsday preachers or suicides. It would vary based on something internal yet unexpressed.

This reminds me of an interesting article I once read about crisis situations. Say there’s a plane crash with survivors, or say your Greyhound bus plunges from a bridge into a river. Many people will panic, while a small number will emerge as calm, steel-spined leaders who bravely direct others to safety. If I’m remembering correctly, the conclusion of this study was that there were no accurate predictive factors for this at all! No evident personality trait could predict who would have nervous breakdowns and who would show leadership in such crises. Shy people and outgoing people had an equal chance of being crisis heroes. Intelligent and less intelligent people. Physically strong and weak people. People of any age. (I can’t remember if there was a male/female control on the study, but that’s such an obvious one that surely they must have done it too and found no correlation.)

I think I’m remembering that study correctly. It’s stuck with me in that form, anyway. You can’t always know what you have inside. And if you enter new circumstances and discover new sides of yourself, they are new sides of yourself, not just of the circumstances. The circumstances simply unlock them. We all have real but unexpressed personal traits, and some of them will never be expressed.