Post-job rant #1

I begin to see what jobs are for. They keep you on an even keel. They give you a pack to run with and a common purpose. They’re a social drug, and a useful one, but the line of work must be chosen very carefully. Otherwise, the job is just an escape. A person doing a job for years, straphanging, say, in New York, commuting to the office, putting on a face to greet the faces that he meets, getting uptight about deadlines, suffering the company’s losses as his own, savoring its victories, that person is like Schroedinger’s cat, superposed between two states. He is either being himself, or he is living in a fantasy world where the only real objective is keeping himself on an even keel. Only when he quits the job does he discover what was going on. He couldn’t know, fully, while he was working the job, because jobs are narcotic, and they are self-justifying. They are self-justifying because of cognitive dissonance. Even when a person knows his job is inauthentic to himself or, worse, pointless for anyone or, worst, immoral, the very staying at the job invests bits of himself in it, like a child putting a penny from each allowance into a bank account to learn the value of a dollar. Upon quitting a job, the person who has not chosen wisely peeks inside the bank account to find that the money was all fake, that nothing of self-worth has accrued from his numberless subway rides and corridor smiles and painstakingly crafted emails.

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Finally

Finally heard back from school X: I’m in. Most excellent news, and I think I’ll probably be going there. By the way, school X is the CUNY Graduate Center. I won’t dwell on the other schools, except to say that my CUNY advisor was right when he said schools ranked equal to or above CUNY but with which I had no contact would be unlikely to accept me. The Ivies were never in the cards, and I more or less knew that, although I had secret hopes that Penn might cast a favorable glance upon an old Kantian altar-boy. No such luck. Several of the other places I applied to were ranked (on Brian Leiter’s Philosophical Gourmet Report, make of it what you will) about equal with CUNY, and they turned me down.

One wonders to what extent high-profile rankings determine a department’s applicant pool, regardless of actual quality. The school I went to as an undergraduate, the University of Kansas, doesn’t make the Gourmet list, and I’m sure it suffered similarly “Eh” status back in the day. The faculty when I was there was varied and competent. We had a British analyst and Hume scholar, a mathematical logician, a phil of science guy, a superb Kant scholar, a couple of metaphysicians (good for what ails ya), an ethical and political philosophy specialist, and a couple of well-known Heidegger/Nietzsche/continental exponents, among others. All the faculty had degrees from places more famous than KU, and I found almost all of them impressive. The curriculum was thorough yet adventurous, and the bevy of grad students seemed pretty stoked about what they were doing. Still, KU would have been considered a middling, if not mediocre, department.

How can that be? Presumably a top department has people in several areas participating in the most interesting research. How well those top people teach and how much they’re devoted to teaching is probably secondary. In a large department, there’s probably a mix: top research people and good teachers, with some intersection between the two sets. And, one imagines, mediocre or simply less stellar (or ambitious) teachers and writers rounding out the roster. This begins to show how a department like KU’s, with a lot to offer and few outright weaknesses—but no “stars”—could fail to show up on Leiter’s radar.

The primary significance of these rankings seems to be not quality of education but prospects for employment after graduation. The two should have something to do with each other, and they probably do up to a point. I have no doubt that one learns a lot of philosophy at Princeton, or that I’ll learn a lot of philosophy at CUNY, or that I would have learned a lot at UConn. I just wish there were additional rankings based on teaching. No doubt those would be much harder to come by, since philosophers read one another’s published work all the time but hardly ever watch each other teach.

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Easy as XYZ

Still no word from school X. It’s getting a bit close. The deadline at my number two school (‘Y’, let’s call it, and I’m not even sure it’s number two but for its location) is April 15. If I get nothing by end of day tomorrow, I’ll have to ping X’s department head again. Unless he can give me a yes or even a strong maybe, then Monday I’ll ask school Y for an extension. Is that even done? It doesn’t sound kosher, but then neither does X’s sluggishness in responding to me. Unfortunately, X and Y are independent agents. I think I need game theory.

Meanwhile, things are winding down at work. I’m if anything less active than before. My boss moved my official farewell lunch to a dim sum place in Chinatown (Golden Unicorn)—an auspicious gesture of recognition for me, perhaps, but also an eagerly awaited supplement to our Chinese New Year’s lunch, which was held not at the Unicorn but at Joe’s Shanghai, a perfectly good spot but more familial and less festive. These are the things that count at work, especially when half the techies are Chinese.

There is a school ‘Z’, by the way. Z has one major strength, aesthetics, and among out-of-town schools the best location. But no buckaroo bonzais would I get from them, at least in the first year, and my savings and Roth IRA would they drain. I thought it would be easier than this when I decided to go back to school, but in retrospect I don’t know what gave me that impression.

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Beginner’s mind

A glimmer of hope. I ping’d the department head of school X about my application status, and he replied that some offers had been sent out, many applicants had been rejected, and I was still in the running. In addition, he was “fairly optimistic” that I would be let in but could make no promises.

This is more good than bad, and I’ll take it. I entered the application process confident, for reasons alien to me now, confident about my chances with some pretty good departments. That has all been torn down, and now I’d be content to be the Little Difference Engine That Could.

As long as I can.

But maybe I can’t.

If I can’t, then what will I do?

Why, then I will Rage Against the Dying of the Light with APOPLECTIC FURY!

No, no, that’s not what we discussed.

Oh, right.

So what will we do?

I will take a deep breath.

Yes, a deep breath, and what else?

Go to my Happy Place?

To your Happy Place. That’s right. And…?

And Do the Time.

Yes. The Time.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

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