Back to School
Back to School
It is now twelve years since I stopped teaching philosophy, after thirty-eight years of doing it. There is no back-to-school for me. That always meant stopping work on my own stuff, beginning to teach classes again, meetings and hellos. What are my feelings on the subject? Many–some good, some bad. I think of my ex-friends and erstwhile colleagues back at work; I feel no fondness for them, only a simmering contempt. But on the broader question my main feeling is a sense of freedom: I don’t have to waste my time and energy on footling tasks. I don’t have to evaluate, grade, assess, reward and punish. I don’t have to stand there and spout, give my opinion, decide someone else’s fate. I don’t have an office to keep tidy, a mail-box to manage. I don’t have to pretend to like people I don’t like. I don’t have to write excruciating letters of recommendation full of artful unmerited praise. I can be genuine now, not diplomatic. I don’t have to be a “good citizen” (dreadful phrase). I don’t have to compromise my values in order to keep people happy. I don’t have people sucking up to me in order to gain my good opinion of them. That is all to the good.
But twelve years is a long time; memory fades. I can hardly remember most of it, spread across half a dozen departments on two continents. It would feel strange now to go through the motions. It would be positively surreal to set examinations, read them, and hand out grades—what a grisly job that was! Although I have given thousands of lectures and taught untold numbers of students, it now seems like another person performing that role. Because that’s what it was—a role. The benign yet principled professor, attentive to the students’ needs and to my nervous junior colleagues. I am amazed now at how nice I was to everyone: but it was my job. I became absorbed in my professional role, a kind of adopted (and fake) identity (see Erving Goffman). I think it affected my philosophical work, making it more socially conscious in the bad sense—less really me. Less honest, real, cutting, bold. I won’t say it was shit, but it was infected by the need to fit in—to conform, in a word. I am a different person now, and one I greatly prefer. I am not a department-member, that wretched specimen of academic life: smarmy, dull, vulgarly ambitious, mediocre. I am now the real thing, not a pale copy of it. So, I am glad not to be going back to school this fall—not to be treading the linoleum halls of academe. Did I hate it? Good question. Sort of. I sort of hated it. I sort of hated myself in it. Being a professor is no way to be a professor. The phrase “professional philosopher” verges on the oxymoronic.
You were truly one of the kindest and most easygoing professors I’ve ever had. Many years ago, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into your Wittgenstein course at Rutgers University. I’ll admit, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the class and was admitted only after submitting what must have been a reasonably thoughtful response to a screening question. You were gracious and never made me feel out of place or unqualified to be there.
At the time, you were at the height of your public “fame,” with several New York Times bestsellers and frequent appearances in glossy magazines that seemed more interested in the lifestyle of an author than in the work of a philosopher.
I remember visiting you during office hours once. You mentioned that your department chair had admonished you for giving out too many good grades. As you handed back my rather thin paper—which I felt deserved a D—but which you gave a B. You also mentioned that having taught Rutgers and Princeton students, you did not see a difference in their abilities.
What I remember most about the seminar, aside from your generosity, was the atmosphere in the room. There were always one or two students who seemed determined to challenge you, coming to class ready to go toe-to-toe in defense of some opposing school of thought. What struck me was how you handled those exchanges—you engaged fully, always willing to address questions with patience and respect, while preserving the dignity of the student. It was remarkable to witness, especially knowing you could have so easily chosen to be aloof or dismissive.
You give a very accurate description of my teaching style and general demeanor–quite at odds with the image of me that has been created in recent years (the power of stereotypes!). Do you find it surprising that I have been cancelled by the American philosophy profession?
Very interesting reflections. This kind of fakery that academic philosophers are forced to engage in must be a large part of the explanation why so much of what is written is bullshit. One of the reasons why you are one of my favorite philosophers (as I said previously, you are perhaps the only living philosopher left) is there is pretty much zero bullshit or fakery in your writings, just brilliant analysis and judicious discrimination of philosophical problems and the various responses to them.
Well said (though I’m not sure about “pretty much”).