Some Advice About Becoming a Philosophy Professor

hello there I'm Greg Sadler and I'm guessing that you probably have come across this because you've been watching some of my youtube videos you might be a subscriber to the channel you might also be somebody who subscribes to one of my blogs or is connected up with me in some other way this is a more personal video and I'm going to start doing more and more of these I haven't done too many of them to this point but I'm getting a lot of really good questions and queries and expressions of interest in in the aspects of my my story essentially how I got into this this philosophy racket and why it is that I do what I do and one of the questions that people have been asking me that that I've been wanting to answer for quite a while I had to do some thinking about it actually is this I like what you're doing they say how can I do that and a lot of times a question is framed in terms of I want to become a philosophy professor I see what you're doing you seem to like it a lot how can I actually become a philosophy professor so I'm going to start out thinking along those lines and give some advice about well if you wanted that to happen what would actually have to take place at this point this point this point but then I'm going to broaden it because that's not the only way to to think about what it is that we're doing here there's a lot of potential for connecting up with people for bringing philosophy into everyday life in a way that that goes beyond academia and that has much more to do with what philosophy was about in the sense not not the subject matter per se but the way philosophy was done throughout most of history I mean academic philosophers are kind of a a new and minority thing they've been really prevalent in the 19th and then even more in the 20th and 21st century but people have been doing philosophy in very public and personal ways really since the doughnut time and even when it was taught in schools there's there's a lot more to the picture than academic credits or degrees or things like that so I want to talk about that and give some advice about you want to be a philosopher here's what you want to do according to me so I have to give a disclaimer right off the bat these are my views my reflections my assessments of it a lot of people are not going to agree with me I'm probably leaving a lot of stuff out because you know I'm one person and and you tend to forget important things but be that as it may I'm going to try to plow through this so let's start by thinking about academic qualifications if your goal is to teach philosophy classes like intro to philosophy all the way up to you know graduate level classes you know seminars say in Plato or Aristotle or Nietzsche or people like that you need a degree and so this is the first thing that we should we should really get clear about at the start if you want to teach in a college or a university these days you could teach with an MA a master's degree it's unlikely you're going to get a chance to unless it's during your graduate studies and you're sort of on your way to the PhD or you're what they call a abd and all but dissertation student who's got their MA and is currently writing their dissertation and expects to defend it probably in the first year that they get hired why is it I mean if there was 20 years ago 50 years ago you would see a lot of people with amazed and philosophy and not so many people with PhDs well you know the market has become saturated with a lot of newly minted PhDs out there from a lot of different programs and so if you want to get your foot in the door you really want to have that that PhD so that sounds kind of daunting let's break it down then into you know what would have to happen along the way because then it might not seem quite so so you know mountainous climb or something like that you know it's not going to see them like this this impossible task so the first step on the way to a PhD is a bachelor's degree an undergraduate degree you get that in a college or university and you don't necessarily have to major in philosophy although that I think that's very helpful if you want to go on to graduate work in philosophy there's a lot of philosophy actually getting done and I can do a whole other video about why this is the case and what it looks like there's a lot of philosophy not being done in philosophy departments but being done in political science departments history departments English departments sociology departments psychology departments and a few others and so I would say you know if you're an undergraduate you want to take a wide range of classes and you don't necessarily need a degree in philosophy per se as a matter of fact at certain schools it might not actually be worth studying philosophy because all they do is this one little narrow thing here and and you don't get much out of that but let's say you actually do get a degree in philosophy myself I actually got a degree in philosophy and in mathematics and double majored and I really enjoyed the math stuff because I was doing a lot of theory work that coincided with philosophy so you get your bachelor's and now you have to go to graduate school and the words of advice that I would give about graduate school then again I could do other videos you know going into these topics and in greater depth some other time so I'm just going to kind of skim them here the two things I would say are the most important pick a graduate school that is as high of a tier as you can go to now what do I mean by tier there's kind of a stratified class system in academia shouldn't be like that but but there is and it's not fair and it's it's in many ways your rationale and not evidence-based because I got to tell you having met a lot of people from these Ivy League schools and big state schools and having met a lot of people from other places talent is pretty evenly distributed there's there's a slight preponderance at these higher tier schools but there's a lot of duds that hire to your schools too and there's a lot of people who are just sort of you know connected can we know well connected and they got got good positions there's a lot of brilliant people teaching at lower to your schools that that could be teaching at Harvard if they knew the right people applied at the right time if things have worked out a bit differently for them but if you're a graduate student you want to go to as high as your school as you can and why because quite frankly that has a lot to do with hiring especially for when you first go out into the job market that's one of the things that is part of the class system if you go to one of these top-tier universities that prestige that reputation attaches to you and may open a lot of doors for you whereas if you go to I can tell you this from personal experience if you go to lower to your school you are fighting an uphill battle and you'll have to do all have to publish more and you'll have to work a lot harder than somebody who came from a better you know better connected better better prepared background in that sense so you know I might be seen as being a little cynical here but I you know if that's the way the game is played that's what you have to do so go in and if you can you know if you can go to Marquette instead of going and I'm not going to start naming low tier schools because I don't want anyone to get upset if you can go to Marquette go to Marquette if you can go to University of North Carolina Chapel Hill go there if you can go to Yale go to Yale if you can go and study overseas go ahead and do that the second thing that I think is just as important as is worrying about all this connections and and you know job worrying you know business is this you want to look for a place that is going to teach you is going to lead you into text is going to help you develop help you grow as the kind of philosopher that you want to be so you know a lot of philosophy departments are doing analytic philosophy if that's not your thing and it's not my thing I'll tell you right off the bat don't go to a place that only does that or only has one person who is doing American philosophy or continental philosophy or something different if you're really into the history of philosophy like I am there's certain schools that you should be looking at and you don't want to look for just one professor that you want to study with you want to go to a place where you can get some cross infusion from different people who are teaching about the same thinkers the same you know subjects and the same text maybe even but are approaching it from different angles so if you're really really into Hegel try to find a place that actually has not just one Hegel scholar that this is kind of tough I know but but multiple ones or multiple people who are at least interested in that and also you should be aware that you want you don't want to be too narrowly specialized going into graduate school because your your interest may change over time so on the way in graduate school that's all that advice stuff now what's going to happen in graduate school if you go to graduate school you can expect to take a lot of upper-level classes and generally you got to take 30 hours at the Masters level and then another 30 hours of the PhD level you're not really thinking 30 hours per se because some of that is master's thesis credits and some of that is dissertation credits but you know if you're going to do it I would actually say take as many classes as you can possibly fit in don't just be satisfied with doing the bare minimum because you're preparing yourself at a unique time that you're never going to have the chance to do again if you're going to actually be a professor you're preparing yourself to do research and to to dig into these texts and you're doing it with somebody who's a great guide at the Masters level you might have to take some sort of comprehensive exam I know I did on the history of philosophy three hours a set of questions you got to pick one from this call one from this column one from this column one from this column and expect it to the grading on that to be rather arbitrary it's kind of like part of the hazing process but it's good because it makes you work hard it makes you dig into these texts and get get certain things down cold because you need them to be down cold for when you're going to go into the profession later on and start teaching at the PhD level you're going to be taking more classes of course you're probably going to have to take some preliminary examinations I know I took for one was on metaphysics and philosophy and religion one was on epistemology and philosophy of science one was on what we call value fields which would be ethics political philosophy and aesthetics and the fourth one at that time was on what we called special thinker and I picked my special thinker to be Hegel and so how did I prepare for that I basically memorized the phenomenology of spirit all the different gestalt inand and how they took place I made myself this gigantic map so I could keep it stuck in my head and then I also you know intensively studied parts of Hegel's science of logic and then the same deal you know three and a half hours writing out these these massive essays that's good for you them because that means that if you can do that you know for these people that are holding you to very high standards when you get in the classroom later on or when you're doing research on your own you know that you have have adequately prepared that some things are almost burned into your brain I mean you can ask me certain questions about things I haven't read for years and they will come back to me because I had to drill for you know all this time on learning this this material then you know at the Masters level you generally have to write a thesis and a thesis is anywhere from about 50 to 150 pages double-spaced of text and you're writing on some problem or some thinker you're trying to you know do some sort of fairly original contribution to the field but you know you're at the Masters level so you're not doing something that's radically new radically innovative as it turned out with my master's thesis I inadvertently ended up basically replicating the stuff that had already been done by Derrida in his study of who Searles phenomenology and applying disel sur to it because I hadn't read the Derrida at that time what I you know what I ended up doing was working on whose rules passive synthesis stuff and bringing in disel surd raising these problems about language and it was a good exercise though very very good to actually write that that up at the at the PhD level you have to write a dissertation now writing a dissertation means you're basically writing a book if I were to do things over again I would write a totally different dissertations and what I actually did instead I wrote my dissertation on this guy Maurice Blondell never published it it end up sprawling to something like 450 pages way too big it's not something I'm particularly proud of looking back at but it was a necessary discipline to go through it took me about three years to research and write it I think if I were to go back in time and do it I would probably write one of the books that I'd always wanted to write on st. Anselm in the history of the ontological proof through through the you know medieval period the early modern period the late modern period and tracing outs on some things a much more manageable project but you know you learn a lot of things in the process not just the content that you're studying but you learn about your own capacities you learn how to do research well and a lot of times you have to learn this stuff by screwing up by making dumb mistakes that then you won't make with the next thing down the line myself I have to make a lot of dumb mistakes because I think that a person who tends to listen to other people when I ought to and so they tell me hey hey don't don't do that do this instead I'll be you know I'll be like that it's not that doesn't apply to me I'm going to do what I want to do and then I do it and then I find out oh there was a good reason why they said don't do that hopefully you're not that sort if you're actually going to go ahead and try to get a PhD so that's that's what what's involved now after you get the PhD or you know if you're all but dissertation you go out on the job market and you try to get a job and so this is the second thing I'm going to talk about and this is kind of a this kind of a downer the job market right now for higher education is is pretty bad part of that has to do with the economic downturn but it's been bad for quite a while even during the sort of heyday stock market high days it's not been very good compared to previous generations I would estimate that every position I've applied for in the last three four years there are anywhere from three hundred five hundred applicants and a lot of them went to much better schools have better contacts may have a better publication record than I do you know are working at better schools all those are things that affect your job your job prospects because those are things that a lot of people whether they tell you they do or not aren't actually looking to when they're going through those 300 applications they want to see where you went to who you know who vouches for you what you've published and where you're currently teaching so if you're not already currently teaching somewhere you want to get some teaching experience when you're a graduate school graduate student you want to try to get teaching assistantships so that you can ultimately have your own classes and teach those get some experience when you go on the market it's tough to get hired and it's a very alienating process the profession actually makes it worse than it has to be there's you know for example if you go to the American Philosophical Association which is where they do a lot of the the early interviews the first stage of interviews or they'll interview anywhere from ten to sixteen people for one job that's usually over the Christmas holiday so you don't get to spend time with your family except at Christmas and then you know like the 28th 29th 30th you got to be stuck somewhere like New York or Boston or Philadelphia or Atlanta and you got to pay a lot of money for a hotel room you've got to fly out there and then they'll they'll have like this entire gigantic ballroom just filled up with tables the schools that are that are carrying on interviews and you know you got to go at this time meet with these people and they'll ask you a whole bunch of questions they're probably not happy that they had to skip you know a good portion of their break it's very alienating the whole process and intimidating but you know I guess I could do a video on tips on how to get through that sort of thing because because I think I get through that much better than some other people in my field and Park is a lot of times I just don't care right I'm you know somebody doesn't like me I'm not particularly concerned about that even what I should be but that's you know if you get past that stage then you do the on-campus interviews and they'll bring in two sometimes four people to do an on-campus interview when you go there you're probably going to be observed teaching you're going to do some sort of presentation you have to meet with a lot of people and then you know the whole process is one kind of big black box either you'll not hear anything which means that they're probably trying to get somebody else to take the job or they make you an offer and I got to tell you you know it's it's tough getting jobs my my first two main jobs that I I've taught and my situation was a little bit different than many other people I taught a maximum-security prison for six years teaching philosophy and religious studies classes for Ball State University and then I had to get on the job market right away and then my next job was at a low tier historically black college that was really really struggling Fayetteville State University now I'm teaching from Maris but I'm just teaching part-time and there's not a lot a lot of positions open right now I keep my eye up but I don't want to relocate myself unless it's like a the ideal job so I'm not applying to very much stuff currently if you get a PhD in philosophy and you want to work in the field you're going to have to be willing to apply all over the place so you might have to teach someplace that's very far removed from where you currently are just because of the way the market is currently you get a bit more leverage the more people that you know the better place that you're teaching the more experience you have the more that you publish the more central and or important your publications are that gives you a bit more leverage there's other things that can give you a bit more leverage to you know doing administrative work is a really smart job because that that you know shows that you have a sort of flexibility there's other things to I mean you want to devote a lot of time to being a good teacher because most of the places that are hiring are not hiring you to do this top tier research you know just focused on Aristotle and the problem of this or that they're eyeing you to teach a whole bunch of service classes that's probably enough about that so like I said you know that's that's a bit of a downer now let's talk about stuff that I think is a bit more fun and and should make you a bit more optimistic do you actually need a degree in philosophy do you need to go to university and pump in all these years and and you know write a master's thesis and write up in order to make philosophy a central part of your life and engage with others in philosophy and perhaps even do some teaching no absolutely not I mean look at what's going on right now I'm talking to you through the medium of this flip cam now that flip cam is over there and this flip cam is here but I mean this is a 70 or 100 dollar piece of technology the tripod costs another 10 bucks at Staples and you have to have a computer to hook it up to granted but you know most people have computers these days and video software isn't very difficult to get your hands on and if you want to talk philosophy well you can do it through this sort of thing do it through YouTube I mean just go and look at some of the comments on some of my videos we sometimes get these these really deep philosophical conversations going on if somebody asks a great question and I want to make a video response kind of like I'm doing right now that's available to me Google now has these hangouts where you can actually you know Skype you could do this before but now you know Google has these hangouts where you can share data with each other and you can you can talk about something and you've got all these different people on video at the same time it's like a classroom Google actually now has online classes I've just started exploring this but they have online classes that you could actually create and then teach not for credit of course but you know credit is not the most important thing in the world if what you're really interested in is studying philosophy because it's something that's worthwhile it brings value to your own existence you like it you have a passion for it you don't have to do it in a university or a college you can do it online you can do it by by finding the people who are willing to to do that sort of work and you can become that sort of person you know I got to say when it comes down to it a lot of the the study that I did that goes into the kind of work that I do and what I know and what I'm passionate about that didn't happen through my my graduate study let alone my undergraduate I was a screw-up as an undergrad I you know spent more time drinking and chasing women and and you know gallivanting around doing all sorts of crazy things and you know playing bass and stuff like that that I did studying and I really read whatever I wanted to read rather than just what the professor assigned but in graduate school I buckled down but even what I learned in grad school that's just a small portion of what it is that I decided I wanted to learn on my own you can do that too and there's all these great resources out there one of the ones I've been experimenting with lately and that I think shows a lot of potential is learnis and you can create courses and you can connect it up with material that's available on on the net anybody can do it because they're I think they're on beta now so if you want to teach philosophy I would say you you can do that without having a PhD you might not get as many people necessarily coming to you but I don't know that even having a PhD unless you have like a name or reputation helps you out too much with that you have to generate quality content you have to give other people something that improves their life that helps them understand their issues or helps them understand this philosopher in this text that entertains them to some degree that they find compelling and if you do that people are going to watch or if you're say blogging if you want to do a philosophy blog start one up bloggers available WordPress is available I know there's a lot of other ones I encourage everybody who wants to do this this sort of work with taking philosophy and making it more accessible to other people and saying what you think about it and telling people what what excites you about this text or this thinker and exploring examples all that sort of stuff you want to do that go ahead and do it if you're watching this you probably have a YouTube account get yourself a flip cam and a tripod and start shooting some videos and don't expect it to be great from the start if you look at some of my earlier videos I don't like them very much at all you know sometimes the camera is shaky or they end too early because I forgot to charge it fully but you know my point here I guess I'm rambling a little bit my point here is if you want to do this kind of kind of work if you want to get into this racket use the educational technology and the social media networking stuff that's out there and just start doing it I I'm you know totally surprised at how much this this could take off I have to credit my wife - my wife was one of these these people who said if you build it they will come and I was very skeptical about the idea of putting videos up on YouTube or starting a blog or any of that sort of stuff who's going to be interested in this you don't know until you actually put it out there so you know go ahead and do that and if you want to go to university and study philosophy and get a PhD go ahead and do that but if you want to read philosophy on your own in your own home there's nothing to prevent you from buying the same books and if you want to study epictetus you can read Epictetus and if you want to learn how to read epictetus in greek you can learn how to read Greek and then you know you can you can get yourself one of these Loeb classic that has the Greek and the English on facing pages so that way you know if you can't figure out sometimes what's being said over here you look over here for a little clue but my point is this is within everybody's reach if you really have a passion for if you really want to to do it then nothing stopping you other than time and resources and juggling priorities so the fourth thing I want to say is you know if you're going to study philosophy if you're already studying philosophy and you want to teach it to other people here's what I think is really necessary having a degree that's not really necessary having intellectual curiosity having a hunger for knowledge having that sort of attitude of nothing nothing philosophical nothing valuable is alien to me that you know you want to know you want to find out what different people have thought you want to engage them you want you know after you've read one text you want to read the next text if you have that kind of desire that's going to cure you a very long way that's the kind of desire that we professors love to see in students because I think that's kind of a sign that hey that person they're kind of like me I mean we get into this racket at least those of us who love what we do because it lets us read books and commune with the great ancient and medieval and modern thinkers for a living to get paid to actually talk to people about Aristotle and Plato I mean how cool is that so you need that intellectual curiosity you also need some training you know before you want I always tell my students before you you tell me about your opinions tell me what Aristotle thought because Aristotle probably is smarter than either one of us and I'd kind of like to hear about what he has to say before I hear your shtick and then you know see if your shtick actually lines up with his or you know if you disagree with them tell me why and have some reasons if you want to do philosophy well this is one of my beefs actually within like philosophy I think you there's no substitute for actually studying a wide range of thinkers across the ages who comprise what we can call the Canon of philosophy you have to read Plato you have to read Aristotle you have to read Augustine you have to read Thomas Aquinas you have to read Thomas Hobbes and we can keep going on from from there and if you're not willing to do that you know if you say I only want to focus on Nietzsche well you know hey Nietzsche spent a lot of time studying Aristotle and Plato and Conte and all these other people before he started writing his own stuff so if you really want to understand Nietzsche and you want to get all the references to what he's talking about you want to be able to evaluate it you got to read the people you've read there's there's no way around it you know you don't want to specialize in this tiny little niche here and say I'm only going to read you know these these thinkers who are only talking to each other and only reading each other because that's like being in a clique I mean this entire vast world of philosophy has opened up to you it's free on the web I mean if you want to read Kierkegaard you can find him online if you want to read Plato you can find him online if you want to read Saint Anselm hey go to Jasper Hopkins website where he's got his own translations in PDF form these beautiful little little book things for free if you want to know what people think about this google it and and you know blogs and YouTube videos and other things all these sort of resources will pop up you can you can study what you want to study so it's important to engage ideas but it's important to engage thinkers in text there are certain things you should keep going back to I mean I'm still teaching the Republic semester after semester and I'm still finding stuff in there that I missed the last time and I've been reading that book for over 20 years and I can say the same thing about a lot of other texts as well you also want there's another tip you want to find ways to connect philosophy up with your own life now you don't want to just study things that have to do with you and your own life you want to instead you know read the philosophy and then bring your own life into connect with it make your own life grow you don't want it to start out okay these are my little narrow conceptions and here's my life and now that one over there that ties in with this I'm going to read that one and pay attention to it you don't want to do that you want your life to grow you want you your personality to to expand prosper to flourish right so what you want to do is when you're reading Plato you want to try to see the world the way Plato does not so that you could become a convert and now you know everything you know is is viewed through Plato color glass that's something like that but so that you can try on intellectually and imaginatively even experientially what it was that this guy was about what it was that drove him to write this stuff down what it was he shared with us same thing for Aristotle same thing for epictetus same thing for Khan from Nietzsche for Hegel for you know jean-paul Sartre for all these different thinkers you want to connect it up with your own life the last thing I'm going to say and this is really a fruit of my own bitter experience don't be too concerned with originality I'm going to say that again don't be too concerned with originality you don't have to do something radically new that nobody else has ever done before you don't have the pressure to come up with your own philosophy of life to be the next great star or something like that it's enough to actually understand just what the hell Plato was saying that's valuable by itself that's an achievement that's something worthwhile if you do that and you understand what Aristotle happen to say that's two big achievements now you get in epictetus Cicero or pick whoever you like these are these are great they - do you don't actually have to come up with something radically original in order for what you do to be valuable the stuff that you're studying if you're studying philosophy is is inherently worthwhile getting into these ideas is like entering into a Cathedral you don't need to build another cathedral one is good enough explore that see what's in there and then talk with other people about that I don't aim to do here I originally got caught in that originality trap originally got caught of the originality trap it's kind of funny and it produced a lot of anxiety and even something like a depression on my part when I was a graduate student and and I I got through it in part because I got thrown into teaching and just you know hit the ground running and couldn't look back for quite a while and it took me learning experiential II that going into these thinkers and texts by itself is going to make me happy you know mastering what Hansel said about this exploring what thomas aquinas is doing over here figuring out what the hell you know Heidegger or Hegel or Wooster ol or pick whoever you like is talking about that's going to make me pretty happy I'm going to be in touch with something I had to learn that the hard way I had to learn that by by years and years of experience so what I would say to you is just getting I'll skip ahead be okay with figuring out what Mark ooza or Adorno or Derrida is saying or we know what live Nets is saying and and you know digging into it and trying to unpack it and and you know figure out its structure and its purpose you don't have to reinvent the wheel there's enough people out there trying to do that all you have to do is get some things down and then you can talk about them with other people I mean I think there's a lot more people that are interests to hear what I have to say about what plato's saying than what I have to say as Gregory Sadler I didn't that makes perfect sense Plato's a much smarter guy who had you know contributed a lot more then then I you know I'm likely to do so you know what I guess what I'm saying here really boils down to a sense of cultivate a sense of humility originality the the need to to be original is really a form of intellectual pride I would say and its self destructive humility is it's very fulfilling you know getting to hang out with Plato for a while and then hang out with other people who like Plato and and you know expand on well what would Plato have said if if you know he ran into this that's fun that's engaging that's exciting and again to come back to the whole you know thing that ties it all together this is what you can do is so you know if you're asking me the question hey I would like to do what you do I'm sharing with you a little bit about how I got to where I am and what it is that I do what I do is is read philosophy and talk about it with people and hopefully get them get them to see what's going on over there not with me but what's going on over there with the text with the thinkers and how it might improve their own lives so is there anything that would keep you from being able to do that no and is is not having a degree barrier to that does that you know fence you out absolutely not because you can you know use the technology that that's there to engage with other people and so I encourage all of you who have an interest in doing that to do precisely that I would love to see tons of YouTube channels with with not necessarily professionals but just amateurs in the sense of people who love what they're doing talking philosophy

Channel: Gregory B. Sadler

Views: 42,503

Rating: 4.9394422 out of 5

Keywords: Sadler, Teaching Philosophy, Education, Talk, Lecture, Discussion, Academics, Story, Narrative, Teaching, University, College, Philosophy, Study, Personal, Advice (opinion), Student, School

Id: ailOeTE-bt8

Length: 39min 23sec (2363 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012