A crude Sorting Hat for academic wannabes

1) "intellectual heft and curiosity" are certainly not sufficient -- and they probably aren't even necessary -- for an academic vocation. Yes, there are a lot of smart people in academia, and a lot of smart people outside of it. Part of my point in those posts was to try to disrupt the notion that smart people ought to go into academia simply because they're smart. So no argument there.

2) perhaps one might argue that the job of a research scholar or a public intellectual is a kind of "symbolic analyst" job -- even there, the term seems to be conceptually stretched a bit -- but I'm not sure how you'd fit teaching under that description. Teaching (and I'm talking about real teaching-as-letting-students-learn here, not the simple dissemination of information from the pulpit, um, I mean the lectern of a lecture-hall), which is central to the academic vocation, isn't anything like symbolic analysis, since the best teaching is that in which the teacher simply opens space and pokes and prods and steers and tosses out the occasional devil's-advocate kind of question, and students encounter the material and one another and themselves and therefore learn something. And on a daily basis, that's our job as academics: to teach these students who are paying, or whose parents are paying, immense sums of money for an intellectual, educational experience. A professor can easily impress her or his students with her or his insight and wit; we've been at this longer than they have. But as Max Weber pointed out about a century ago, that's just not fair to the students. Our job in the classroom is to set things up and get the hell out of the way, and then shape and redirect what transpires -- not to do symbolic analysis in front of a captive audience. If that's what someone wants to so, I'd advise them to get a better-paying job where they wouldn't have to deal with the existential crises and other transition moments characteristic of an undergraduate student who is actually being educated.

3) I've been like this since I was about three years old; my parents have video-taped evidence. Whatever socialization about the specialness of the academic vocation may have occurred while I was in grad school (and there wasn't much of that during my PhD years, in point of fact), it was less cause and more confirmation. This has been my path for decades, and I even say in the posts that I highly suspect that it is not that way for most people -- which why, IMHO, they ought to pursue other lines of work.

PS you can keep your Sox tickets, but speaking for myself I would be much happier to score Yankees tickets than to get a paper accepted without revision someplace.

I loved that you finished with fated to "trying out" for academia.

Dan, I found this post (and the links to Patrick and Peter’s responses, in particular) extremely insightful, although at certain points, while reading Patrick’s first post about vocation, I was having at the back of my mind images of 11th century University of Bologna students and masters. If an argument can be said to have a “patina”, the one about vocation definitely has it…

But in spite of the idealism of this argument about vocation, I think that Patrick is right when it comes down to the “dirty side of academia”, i.e. proxy wars between professors with the doctoral students getting caught in the middle… To my disappointment, this was one of the first things I learned after becoming a doctoral student: that alongside the intellectual struggle, there is as well a “political” one. Very often the latter takes over the former and students might end up paying a price for things that have nothing to do with their intellectual and academic performance, but with an imagined “political reality” – a situation where one reacts to things that actually have nothing to do with reality, but with what one professor or another imagines this reality to be.

It feels sometimes like an “Academe Godfather” movie, with the caveat that the Mafia heads were more likely to take action in face of real crimes and real turf battles. In academia, on the other hand, for instance, one does not really have to be affiliated with a “rival faction” for ending up caught in the middle. A mere suspicion of such “affiliation” is enough for getting one involved in the existing proxy war, and actually involuntarily pushing the “innocent bystander” in joining one “gang” or another.

I guess that this touches upon the “powerful socialization effects that take place in graduate school -- effects that can thoroughly f*** up people's priorities in unhealthy ways,” although I have a feeling that Dan was not having in mind this aspect of socialization effects when he wrote this post. But, I guess that this presents an alternative point of view to how “grad school socialization” can “f*** up people’s priorities” (shifting one’s focus from the intellectual and learning experience, which is supposed to be the main purpose of a doctoral program, to devoting time and attention to mundane “political” intrigues… but at the end of the day, maybe one should be grateful for the well rounded education received in grad school, intertwining “the abstract” with “the practical,” right?! :) )

I decided to go into academia when:

1) I realized I couldn't stand the thought of making other people money for a living.*

2) I got an A on an essay in my hardest political philosophy class during my undergrad.

3) I worked for a year at a think-tank and realized I would never get proper credit for my work unless I had the right credentials.

*(I realize that I do this indirectly, but I feel very much self-employed and very happy.)