The Year of Our Lord 2025 is my De Morgan year.
Famed logician Augustus De Morgan was studying to become a lawyer when an opportunity to go into academia arose. He took it, and good thing–“De Morgan’s laws” are an important tool for developing (among other things) the device on which you are reading this (unless, for some reason, someone printed it onto paper for you, I guess). He also tutored Ada Lovelace, the woman known best for her work on Babbage’s proposed “computer.” De Morgan loved mathematical puzzles and would famously boast to others that he turned “the age X in the year X squared.” If you know he died in 1871 (and did not live to an unrealistically old age), then you can pretty easily figure out what year he was born using this information.
This year I will celebrate my 45th birthday, in the year 45 squared. As someone who was studying law when my wife presented me with an opportunity to return to academia, I feel a certain kinship with De Morgan, so it seems fitting that my De Morgan year should be an eventful one. My oldest child will graduate from college. My third child will graduate from high school. My fourth child will start high school. (My second child is proselyting in Brazil; his Portuguese is coming along nicely.)
And my employer, Florida Tech, has promoted me to “Associate Professor of Philosophy and Law,” complete with tenure, effective August 2025.
What follows is an unevenly paced, largely autobiographical reflection on how that came about. I have focused somewhat narrowly on my career aspirations and their progression over the years, without much attention to the substance of e.g. my own actual philosophical positions. It is extremely long for a “blog” and probably of little enough interest to people who know me, never mind people who don’t. Even so, it is something I felt I should write down; it may prove useful to others with similar goals. This is not to say that my experience has been typical. Rather the contrary. But if it is possible for others to profit from my ignorance and errors, then: good news! Ignorance and errors here abound.
Table of Contents
I. The Preliminaries: Why Become a Professor?
II. The Study of Philosophy at the “Lord’s University”
III. Maybe I Should Go to Law School
IIII. Three More Bites at the Appl-cation
V. Discere et Docere
VI. On the Market
VII. Catching the Brass Ring
VIII. Mischief Managed. Lessons Learned?
I. The Preliminaries: Why Become a Professor?
I was a “tween,” give or take, when my father–a civil engineer with a bachelor’s degree–did a brief stint as a college professor. He taught math and engineering at Coconino County Community College and Northern Arizona University. In those days, “work experience” and practical knowledge was somewhat more readily substituted for academic credentials. My childhood memory is that, as a professor, he was more relaxed and available than ever before in my life. Additionally, he got access to the pre-HTML Internet, which proved an enjoyable learning opportunity for me.
I did not consciously decide to become a professor at that time, but the seed was certainly planted. Rather, like most boys in my socioeconomic milieu, it was my aspiration to go into technology and become fabulously wealthy, ideally by making video games. But when I was 17 years old, during a game of Shadowrun a friend asked where I thought the “real world” version of me would be in an Awakened 2025. I thought about it for a moment and said, “Probably teaching at CalTech.”
In 1998, I enrolled at Brigham Young University (BYU–my mother’s and father’s alma mater) to study Computer Engineering. In my second semester, I opted to play StarCraft and EverQuest rather than sleep. This had a markedly deleterious impact on my academics. After failing two classes, I was placed on “academic probation” and chose to defer my studies for two years so I could serve a proselyting mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS–I will herein use “Mormon” to refer to the inchoate Utah-centered ethnicity, as related to but distinct from the incorporated Church).
The first thing I did upon completing my missionary service was get married. I was 21; Aprilynne was 20. Our courtship is, as they say, another story. But she accompanied me back to Provo (having completed an English B.A. at Lewis-Clark State College shortly after our wedding) and worked training waitresses and assistant-managing a Burger King to put me through school. I was still officially a Computer Engineering student, but on witnessing my enjoyment of some philosophy courses in the general education core, Aprilynne encouraged me to do what I enjoyed, rather than what I thought would be most profitable.
She spent the next 17 years literally paying for that bit of encouragement. I changed my major to philosophy, with a minor in psychology.
II. The Study of Philosophy at the “Lord’s University”
BYU is the flagship institution of the LDS Church Education System (CES). It is a good university as well as an unbelievably affordable one, particularly for members of the Church in good standing, which combination often puts it on “best value” lists. But its economic value, underwritten by generous Church support, comes second to its religious value. Alongside their “worldly” studies, BYU students study the Gospel of Jesus Christ, as restored to “fullness” by the prophet Joseph Smith and his successors beginning with the university’s namesake, Brigham Young. Many classes begin with a prayer. An “Honor Code” seeks to cultivate a campus of modest, faithful, virtuous believers. Not everyone finds this to their liking; BYU has no shortage of malcontents, and many of these find their way into the philosophy program by way of theological quandary. But being both married and employed part time as the Harold B. Lee Library‘s computer hardware technician largely removed me from BYU’s social scene, so most of the “Honor Code” drama happening in those years was irrelevant to me.
The same can mostly be said of the Philosophy Department drama, such as it was. The Philosophy Department at Brigham Young University has a remarkable history. A much abbreviated version can be found here; my understanding is that the Board of Trustees historically regarded philosophical inquiry as spiritually perilous, inspiring them to periodically purge it from the curriculum. This mistrust is enshrined in idiom; “the philosophies of men, mingled with scripture” are words most Latter-day Saints recognize as a condemnation of truth tainted by human error and over-reliance on the “arm of the flesh.”
(It bears admitting, as a matter of historical fact, that philosophy and law are both fields of inquiry packed with apostates from every faith. But the causal arrows are unclear–do certain kinds of study foment apostasy? Or are apostates-in-waiting attracted to certain kinds of study? Selection effects can be hard to spot!)
David L. Paulsen was, to the best of my understanding, instrumental in the eventual establishment of BYU’s philosophy department as it exists today. I took a Philosophy of Religion course from Dr. Paulsen, and he would occasionally reminisce about that process. He also once shared some thoughts about his role in disciplinary action against some colleagues who were at odds with the Church; I do not know for certain whether this was the group that would come to be called the “September Six,” but whoever it was, he claimed he was the only faculty member to vote against their dismissal. He also assigned readings by Sterling McMurrin, a fact which rather perturbed one of my Religion professors. But Dr. Paulsen once praised my analysis of apotheosis as “clear, careful thinking,” and so he became one of my favorite people.
(What is the difference between the BYU Philosophy Department and the BYU Religion Department? The Philosophy Department doesn’t mingle it with scripture.)
Indeed the Philosophy Department left me with no shortage of favorite people. From Mark Wrathall (lately of Oxford) I took courses on Continental thinkers including Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, and–most memorably–Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. From Darin Gates (who is still on faculty, and does not appear to age) I took introductory ethics and British empiricism. From Codell Carter (now emeritus) I took logic and Kant. And from James Faulconer (also emeritus) I took history of philosophy. Actually Dr. Faulconer was not one of my favorite people, as early on he got rather short with me for constantly citing to Robert Pirsig, whose books (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and its sequel Lila) had substantially inspired my initial foray into philosophy. Specifically, Faulconer called Pirsig a “bad philosopher,” which may arguably be true but which I was not then equipped to understand, and which claim Dr. Faulconer did not take time to substantively elaborate. Nevertheless Dr. Faulconer’s courses were rigorous, and eventually foundational to my earliest teaching experiences. I can’t really speak to the department’s strengths today, but in the early 2000s BYU did a great job teaching the history of philosophy–while unfortunately leaving me broadly ignorant of philosophy’s contemporary practice norms.
Drs. Carter and Faulconer were also influential on my thinking about what to do next. Dr. Faulconer ended every semester with an admonition that, if we were philosophy majors who enjoyed doing philosophy, we ought to consider graduate work. Dr. Carter ended every class with a similar admonition: don’t go into academic philosophy, the job prospects are terrible.
(What’s the difference between a philosophy professor and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.)
I took Dr. Carter’s advice. By the time I graduated, though I wanted to be a philosophy professor, I also had one child, and Aprilynne was pregnant with our second. So I applied to a handful of Creative Writing MFA programs. Embarrassingly obtuse of me, really, but here’s how, at 24 years old, I figured this would go: an MFA is (was?) a terminal degree, and it only takes two or three years to finish. A PhD is a terminal degree, and straight out of undergraduate work will take anywhere from five to ten years to complete. I had taken creative writing courses from Patrick Madden, Louise Plummer, and Brandon Sanderson. My GRE scores were very good, and all of my professors praised my writing; Brandon even singled me out to tell me that I genuinely had what it took to become a professional novelist, if I were to pursue it. He was at that time under contract but unpublished, hedging his own vocational bets by pursuing a master’s degree so that he could teach in addition to writing. It seemed to me a canny approach.
I was not accepted into any of the three programs I applied to. That I only applied to three programs should tell you something important about me at age 24: despite completing my studies (and being a straight-A student but one, after that first unfortunate year), I was absolutely clueless about pretty much every aspect of everything I wanted to achieve in my life. Even had I the wisdom to know that I should have applied to twice or thrice that number of programs, I would likely not have been accepted into any of them. My writing was good, poetic even, but it wasn’t what anyone was looking for. Whether this was ultimately a matter of missing life experience, or accumulating it idiosyncratically, the end was the same.
Indeed, despite not really knowing anything, I seemed to struggle less than others, giving the impression of competence. I think perhaps I was just better at improvising than most, and often simply lucky. Consequently, no one ever really made an effort to ensure I wasn’t in completely over my head, and I didn’t even know enough to grasp the depth of my own ignorance. That’s a significant failing for anyone, but especially for an aspiring philosopher. I could not seek assistance I did not know I needed! This left me to piece many things together on my own, and I was often slow or simply bad at that. Even when I was successful, it took a lot of time.
I completed my degree in December of 2004. After graduation, I moved my small (but growing) family into my parents’ spare room and went to work at GoDaddy, Inc. in Scottsdale, Arizona–first in the tech support call center, and then as the supervisor for the internal desktop support team. After 18 months as an IT professional, I would not have a full time job again for 13 years.
III. Maybe I Should Go to Law School
I had been at GoDaddy for a few months when it occurred to me that, like an MFA, a JD is a terminal degree that can be earned in just three years. I didn’t really want to practice law. I was not raised with much respect for lawyers; I was taught to view litigiousness as a serious vice, second perhaps only to doing philosophy. But I knew that Drs. Paulsen and Wrathall had JDs in addition to their PhDs, and (I discovered) many JDs were teaching philosophy classes in the Maricopa County Community College system (where I once attended some classes, the summer I turned 14). At that time, if you had any terminal degree at all, you could teach any course in which you held a sufficient number of “upper division” credit hours. I had the credit hours to teach philosophy! All I needed was a terminal degree. And if I couldn’t find work as a professor, why, lawyers make more money anyway.
It’s a pretty bad idea to go to law school if you have no intention of becoming a lawyer.
I didn’t know that, so I signed up for the LSAT, which I took a few weeks later. The full extent of my preparation was one “LSAT prep” workbook, which I halfheartedly skimmed. This was foolhardy; my score was good enough to suggest that if I had seriously prepared, I might have secured admission to a top tier law school. But maybe not, and in any event, BYU was nearly an order of magnitude more affordable than any better-ranked school. I had learned a little about graduate school by now, courtesy of some Internet message boards, and applied to six schools rather than three. Four law schools offered me admission, and of those BYU was both the most affordable and the highest ranked (#34 in U.S. News that year, if memory serves–though it has been as high as #22). So it was that I moved my family back to Provo so I could attend the J. Reuben Clark Law School.
There were some remarkable people on faculty then–some still remain today. Lynn Wardle‘s family law course was highly topical at the time. Thomas Lee‘s courses in copyright and trademark law resulted in an opportunity to work with his brother Mike on my first real life legal dispute (a copyright case)–this was before Mike became a U.S. Senator. John Fee‘s class on First Amendment law was memorable, enjoyable, and led to my first law review publication–but J. Clifton Fleming‘s course on federal taxation is the one I have actually applied most frequently in my life. Cole Durham once patiently explained to me who the “glossators” were and why most of my classmates would spend their lives in that profession. He and Brett Scharffs were key supporters in my bid to return to academia. Fred Gedicks acerbically observed that while there were very few choices I could make, as a law student, to permanently damage my expected lifetime earnings, pursuing a philosophy PhD was definitely one of them. (He wasn’t wrong!)
But the highlight of attending JRCLS was my classmates. They were interesting and willing to argue with me. We would talk politics and religion and even, at times, philosophy. They were amazing well-informed, particularly on matters of legal practice and judicial import. Many were the children of lawyers, or had spent time working for law firms, or had been chasing this dream since childhood. I didn’t even know how to pronounce “appellate.”
The first week, we all got a bit of a “crash course” in how to study law. We were given sage advice like “don’t buy commercial outlines, they won’t help you succeed” and “careful reading and class participation is the key to success.”
It would be uncharitable to say that these were lies, but certainly these things proved false.
Being in law school often felt like playing a game where everyone but me already knew the rules. For this I had only myself to blame; like many humanities students who eventually pursue legal education, I had matriculated more by default than by design. I had never taken a Philosophy of Law class, never read One L or watched The Paper Chase. My grasp of jurisprudence was grounded in my father’s ongoing subscription to National Review. I spent my first semester asking a lot of questions–often, to my classmates’ audible dismay. Over time, my confusion abated, somewhat.
(I once heard that the essence of humor is the ability to identify similarities between things that are different, and differences in things that are the same. Elsewhere I was told that legal reasoning is the ability to distinguish the similar and connect the disparate. As it turns out, attorneys and comedians are engaged in essentially the same practice! This may explain why there are so many jokes about lawyers.)
But certain puzzles persisted. American legal education primarily proceeds by the “casebook method.” This approach puts landmark judicial opinions in front of law students and challenges them, supposedly via Socratic questioning, to find the rule–the common principle or strand of reasoning that binds judicial opinions into a transcendent, internally consistent whole. This is the Law, the great Platonic corpus of justice. Case after case, lecture after lecture I felt challenged to discover something that I simply could not see. Judicial reasoning was almost always easier to explain in terms of political expediency and ideological bias than principled reasoning or logical consistency. As far as I could tell, the Platonic “Rule of Law” to which my professors continually appealed was pure kayfabe. Had I taken a Philosophy of Law class, I might have known that this was a question to which many of the 20th century’s greatest minds devoted significant attention. Alas, I did not even know what I did not know, and so I set about reinventing the wheel through cocurricular research.
It took at least two grueling hours to unearth the secret. Critical Legal Studies–or “CLS”–was summoned to our plane of existence by a cabal of 1970s intellectuals who discovered that the levers of American political power were hidden away in judges’ chambers. Wielding forbidden techniques recorded on ancient scrolls plundered from the wizened Continental masters of literary criticism and the mummified remains of Legal Realism, the Crits (as they were actually called!) plotted to infiltrate the judiciary, seize the levers of power, and bring about a revolution in social justice, casting out the stultifying tyranny of stare decisis forever. But a rival cabal in Chicago won favor with the political elite and packed the federal courts with economists instead. The Crits retreated into their ivory tower strongholds, where they were, so far as I could determine, still licking their wounds, perhaps plotting some future vengeance.
…it is possible that time has tarted up the memory, some. But in the moment it certainly felt as though I had unearthed an epic secret. No one had told me about the Crits, and spending time in the archives, poring over their methods, had a dramatically positive influence on my academic standing. I did not immediately grasp why their attempt to dominate the judiciary had failed, but by their own lights, there wasn’t much to say. Power was power, if sometimes clad in a veneer of legitimacy, and the Crits simply hadn’t acquired enough of it. A few, having undertaken related endeavors in “Critical Race Theory” and “Critical Gender Theory,” were still out there, teaching law students (even in Chicago!)–perhaps someday I would meet one, and ask them to fill the gaps the stacks left in my understanding. Meanwhile, my grade point average was benefiting from their insight.
What was this amazing, performance-boosting insight I’d unearthed? CLS encompasses a body of literature too vast to do justice here, but the primary notion that salvaged my GPA was simply that lawyers and judges do not always, or even usually, care about the law (or Law). Consequently, it would be impossible to overstate the centrality of empty rhetoric to successful legal argumentation. As an undergraduate studying philosophy, I’d internalized habits of truth-seeking through charitable reading and argumentative steelmanning. My initial approach to case law had been to actually do what my professors asked, namely, to look for the Law. But this was wholly callow and did not win me enviable marks, because it is not what people actually pay lawyers to do.
What people pay lawyers to do, is to win. For all the Socratic method is touted in American legal education, it is worth noticing that Socrates lost at trial. He protested his innocence but was found guilty. At sentencing, he argued for a fine but was ordered to die. As a law student, I had been aiming for principled understanding when what I should have been aiming for was victory. What my law professors most often rewarded was not my ability to discern truth, but my ability to rhetorically strengthen weak arguments, or weaken strong ones. They did not want Socrates; they wanted Protagoras. By abandoning principled reasoning in favor of unapologetic sophistry, I was able to raise my GPA so sharply it attracted interest from prospective employers, who wanted to know how I’d managed such an unusual rally.
If my explanation was more pathos than logos, this is only evidence of a lesson learned.
(In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts visited BYU campus and sat for a Q&A with my classmates. I asked the first question: “Is there a particular judicial philosophy you seek to adhere to in your decisions? Like, do you regard yourself as a positivist, or law and economics judge, or anything like that?” He first responded “I guess I don’t know!”–possibly to the chagrin of then Dean Kevin Worthen, who had introduced the Chief Justice with the praise “I don’t think there is a question about the law that he cannot answer.” The Chief Justice then went on to describe his decision-making process as “very end of the day,” and explained that he hoped to preside over a court known for shorter, more technical, and more unanimous opinions. Alas, things haven’t really turned out that way for him.)
I would eventually acquire something of an antidote to CLS, in the writings of conservative and classically liberal critics who argue that, for all the facts of power may be true, it is in our aspiration toward objectivity and impartiality and even, perhaps, Law itself, that justice may be found–that however warranted our cynicism, our aim should be to transcend it. Unfortunately, in law practice almost no one seems to actually hold that aim, which may be why the title of (former Dean of Yale Law School) Anthony T. Kronman’s most famous work is “The Lost Lawyer” (Professor Scharffs was a student of Kronman’s, and is mentioned in the acknowledgments of the book). I worked a summer externship at the Utah Supreme Court, where my general impression was that lawyers at every level of the legal process are overwhelmingly guilty of every criticism generally leveled at them, and that the cloak of deference the judiciary demands from others in the interest of the dignity of the office and the “rule of law” is often depressingly undeserved. Which is not to say that all judges, lawyers, and clerks were uniquely awful–indeed, many were individually quite admirable!–but even the best of these were frankly complicit in the misdeeds and excesses of their colleagues and their profession, all too often under the banner of courtesy and collegiality. I once signed a paper agreeing that I would not reveal in detail things that happened “in chambers” and apparently I am better than actual SCOTUS clerks at keeping my word, but I do not think it a violation of that commitment to suggest that pretense may be the greatest and most universally lawyerly sin of them all.
No, strike that–I think the lawyerly obsession with pedigree is probably the greatest lawyerly sin of all. Is that more or less specific than pretense? Well, a couple years ago I shared the following comment on Brian Leiter’s blog, in connection with an article on grade inflation at Yale. It is one of my favorite law school anecdotes:
One winter I was working in the Law Review office with a classmate who had some Yale law student friends visiting Utah for the skiing. I overheard the Yalies ask for copies of their friend‘s course outlines, so I made a joke about Yale (US News #1) students cribbing notes from BYU (US News #22) students. This generated the smiling response, “At Yale we understand there are more important things in life than studying.”
I have reflected often on that conversation, partly because I agree that there are more important things in life. There is also something to be said for the approach taken at Yale’s law school (which, for those unaware, is essentially pass/fail, though some further non-alphanumeric designations are available after the first year). I have decidedly mixed feelings about the proper role and execution of learning metrics generally.
Bryan Caplan’s book, The Case Against Education, is perhaps the clearest collection of empirical evidence for what is happening at Yale (whether or not one accepts Caplan’s ultimate conclusions). Grades, which in the ideal case furnish consequential feedback to enhance the learning process, are increasingly interpreted by would-be employers as signals of overall candidate quality, even though research suggests that college performance is a poor long-term predictor of job performance. Potential employers relying on signals rather than substance causes students to focus on signals rather than substance. Even assuming that Yale provides a better education than Generic State University, virtually no one is applying to Yale because it offers a better education, whatever they might say in their personal essays. Thus: the hardest part of graduating from Yale (among others) is getting in.
Higher education has gotten stuck in an equilibrium where no single institution can benefit by deviating from the status quo. A university–even, apparently, an old and respected one like Yale–cannot unilaterally cast off ubiquitous grade inflation without being punished by students, parents, peer institutions, and so on. How this relates to legacy admits or student athletes is an interesting question, but I think the much larger problem is just that universities were not created to function as arbiters of future employment; learning metrics are supposed to exist in service of improving education, but the metrics have become the focus for pretty much everyone (students, parents, admins) except the professors (and, probably, even some of them).
Goodhart’s Law states that “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” If that is so, then grades have not been a good measure of anything in quite some time. And I offer that, in the instant case, as both a criticism and defense of Yale.
What is true of grades in this sense is true of universities in a larger sense, and law schools especially. There are many problems with legal education–for starters, a law BA or even short MA program would be quite sufficient, if crafted carefully; the three year JD is a wildly expensive and unnecessary barrier to entry. But without a coordinated departure from the current model, no single university can benefit by unilaterally deviating from the status quo. Likewise: I could value “truth” and “principle” all I liked, but I was not going to single-handedly reform the practice of law in the United States; my unilateral deviation from the status quo would be both costly and, ultimately, to no avail. If I wanted to really succeed in law school and, presumably, as a lawyer, I would have to stop trying to be correct, and start trying to win arguments. This realization is partly what improved my GPA–but not, probably, my attitude toward lawyers.
(The other part is that, as 2L, I was able to take more classes requiring papers rather than final exams. I could usually land the top grade in writing intensive courses. Apparently those creative writing courses weren’t for nothing!)
And then, deus ex machina, I was delivered from such dilemmas. In my second year of law school, my wife inked a lucrative publishing contract with HarperTeen. She asked if I wanted to drop out of law school and do a PhD instead. I suggested that, as I was already halfway into the woods, I may as well walk the rest of the way out. Never mind that I’d never actually managed to secure admission to a philosophy PhD program.
The best advice I have for aspiring academics is unfortunately the least actionable: marry money.
IIII. Three More Bites at the Appl-cation
I spent my final year of law school applying to PhD programs in philosophy–six or eight schools, to the best of my recollection. I was admitted without funding to Arizona State University, so I prepared my family to move back to Phoenix. But Aprilynne’s debut novel went to #1 on the New York Times list of best selling children’s books, and suddenly she was busy with travel and promotion and writing sequels. I had also learned by now that unfunded PhDs are widely considered a Bad Idea, at least in the humanities, so I did not enroll at ASU, instead spending two years as a homemaker–a stay-at-home dad to our three, then four children. I did take and pass the Arizona Bar Exam at this time, and practiced law part time–some family law, trust law, business and tax law… but mostly contract review for Aprilynne’s burgeoning IP empire.
(Hi, I’m Kenny, this is my wife Aprilynne. I’m a lawyer, she’s a novelist. That’s right–one of us makes up fantastic fairy tales for a living, while the other writes books!)
During this time, I also pursued my original plan–teaching for the Maricopa County Community College District, or any other community college in the country that would have me. I had a professional doctorate and all the necessary credit hours! This pursuit proved entirely fruitless. Indeed, one department chair, on receiving my resume, binned it immediately with the comment (related to me by a third party several years after the fact) “I would never hire a BYU graduate to teach philosophy.” But this was 2009; I was not yet aware that almost 30% of professional philosophers are “slightly, moderately, or strongly unwilling” to hire Mormons.
Additionally, MCCCD was moving away from the “any graduate degree (plus sufficient credit hours) will do” model, toward preferentially hiring subject matter MAs or, when possible, PhDs. With the Bar Exam behind me and my wife’s career settling into a less manic phase, I decided to re-apply to graduate study. Arizona State got back to me quickly, but with a catch: their PhD program had been shuttered, but they were still offering a terminal MA. This wasn’t ideal, but it did further my aims; I decided to take them up on the offer. Aprilynne and I purchased a house situated closer to both our children’s school and an ASU satellite campus with free transportation to the Tempe campus where my classes would be held.
(The day we made the offer on the house, I received a letter from the University of Utah offering me admission to their PhD program. This presented an agonizing choice! But it was another unfunded offer, and Aprilynne doesn’t really care for the snow, so ultimately I turned them down. In hindsight, a great many things would have gone more smoothly if I’d chosen Utah’s PhD over Arizona State’s MA, but presumably some other things would have gone worse. After all–“there are no solutions, there are only tradeoffs.”)
Like my law school classmates, my graduate cohort was full of people who seemed to already know so much more than I did. I was a bit older than most of them, and already a lawyer, married, and a father, so I wasn’t completely outclassed. But arriving at law school without knowing how to pronounce “appellate” was nothing–now I had arrived at grad school without really knowing who John Rawls was. (I’d seen his name, from time to time, but never read any of his work.) Of course even today there are surely thousands of philosophers whose names I don’t know, but the point is that I was still operating very much at the level of seeing philosophy as “reading interesting things and then writing thoughtful responses to those things.” Aside from Camus, Sartre, and (oddly enough) Christine Korsgaard, my grasp of non-legal philosophy at that point basically stopped at the Year of Our Lord 1900. Law school had furnished me with some contemporary theory–H.L.A. Hart, Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Fish, some other usual suspects–and this was a useful crutch for me. But even here my knowledge was substantially bounded within a jurisprudential frame.
Fortunately, the faculty were heroically patient with me. If they were cross about the closure of their PhD program, they never mentioned it (though I occasionally heard about it from others). Peter French and Cheshire Calhoun (both now emeritus) each contributed significantly, in their own ways, to my thoughts on moral education. Joan McGregor was instrumental in connecting my understanding of jurisprudence to moral political and philosophy more generally. The late Jeffrie Murphy–who I had encountered previously as the author of one of my undergraduate textbooks–not only taught an excellent class on retribution and punishment, but had an interesting story about Robert Pirsig.
(As a professor at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Murphy apparently had Pirsig as a student. Dr. Murphy was not, however, consciously aware of this fact until many years later, after Pirsig had achieved some notoriety, and even then only because Pirsig sent Dr. Murphy a much belated “thank you” note for being a good professor.)
Probably my single most memorable MA experience took place at a guest colloquium. I no longer recall who the guest was, but I do know that the colloquium took place in 2012, because Mitt Romney’s name was on everyone’s lips–including those of the speaker. The speaker got into a bit of a back-and-forth with a member of the audience, eventually and rather crassly broaching the topic of “magic underwear” (in reference to LDS religious vestments more politely referred to as “garments”). At this point, the moderator (Bernard Kobes, now emeritus) attempted to de-escalate by observing that “some” members of the audience were in fact practicing Mormons. Instead of taking the hint and returning to the colloquium presentation, the guest rather brusquely demanded, “Who?”
Dr. Kobes was clearly (and, I think, understandably) at a loss for words at this aggressive breach of etiquette. Thinking (because I am stupid) that an answer might defuse the situation, I raised my hand and said, “He’s talking about me.” I no longer recall what the speaker asked me, precisely, about my religion, but I remember that it indulged some pretty unflattering stereotypes. My response was “I don’t think that’s really topical, I’d prefer we return to your presentation.” The speaker then repeated his question, so I repeated my response. At last he relented, and the colloquium continued.
I spent the remainder of the colloquium scribbling out a written conversation with the classmate sitting next to me–a Jewish woman who was seriously incensed on my behalf. I appreciated her camaraderie; at the risk of repeating myself, my classmates really were always the highlight of my graduate work.
The last class I took as an MA student was on T.M. Scanlon, as taught by Peter de Marneffe. I enjoyed the class, and Dr. de Marneffe, tremendously. He studied under Scanlon, as well as John Rawls and Robert Nozick, and it was here I first began–only began!–to grasp “political philosophy” as a matter of discipline and theory, rather than as background to people making ostensibly derived declarations of one kind or another. By the end, I still didn’t really get it–but I wrote Dr. de Marneffe a “thank you” email which said in part:
Thanks for putting on a very good seminar. I am still unconvinced by Scanlon’s rejection of aggregation in many cases but I found your interpretation of the texts to be very enlightening and often persuasive. Thank you.
Ultimately I approached my MA in much the way I approached my JD and BA: go to class, do the reading, write the paper. I was offered the opportunity to write a thesis project, but the availability of the “portfolio” option seemed more straightforward. Thanks to a referral from Kurt Blankschaen, I finally landed my first teaching gig. As adjunct faculty, I taught my very first Introduction to Philosophy course at Gateway Community College in the Fall of 2013.
(In the summer of 2013, I also published Jacob’s Journal of Doom, an illustrated middle grade novel for Mormon children. The project was partly written as an exploration of some things Dr. French wrote about moral education. It was crafted with Aprilynne’s brother-in-law, Isaac Stewart–who is probably best known today as Brandon Sanderson’s art guy. It’s a small world, in the Church.)
I think it would be difficult to overstate the importance of Dr. Blankschaen’s referral, here. Teaching Introduction to Philosophy at Gateway Community College landed me an opportunity to teach Introduction to Logic at Phoenix Community College. My hope was to get a position at Glendale Community College, which was just a few miles from my house. Nothing was open, but I was advised to make sure they had my CV anyway. This proved wise; when one of their adjuncts was (I swear I’m not making this up) hit by a car, I got my foot in the door. Soon I was teaching Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to Logic, and Introduction to Ethics, in person and online, for GCC. Sometimes I would also teach a weekend class for high school students.
Actually teaching introductory philosophy proved to be an edge-honing experience. “See one, do one, teach one” is (I discovered for myself) a true pedagogical principle, and the time had come for me to teach. I was reading introductory philosophy textbooks, something I had literally never done as an undergraduate. I was assembling lecture slides while simultaneously filling gaps in my own understanding. But I also wanted to internalize the material well enough to answer such questions as my students might think to ask, so often I found myself reading supplemental materials, too.
Circa 2014, I was getting paid about $2,500 per class. This is not a living wage, but then, it was not a full time job, either. While it was possible that my adjunct work would eventually evolve into a full time position somewhere in the Maricopa County Community College system, my colleagues were uniformly of the view that I would be more competitive for such a position were I to secure a PhD. Around this time I also had a conversation with Dr. Carter (by now approaching retirement from BYU), who suggested to me that BYU was having a difficult time finding philosophy PhDs to fill open positions on its faculty (I doubt there are more than perhaps several dozen practicing Latter-day Saints with philosophy PhDs in the entire world, and a large percentage of those already work at BYU). Fortunately, Arizona State had managed to get its PhD program re-started (and re-funded) under the “practical and applied philosophy” banner they continue to fly today.
I dithered a bit, but a conversation with my grandfather finally pushed me over the edge. I observed to him that, if I were to begin work on a PhD, I would be nearly 40 years old before I could start a career as a full time academic. His response was simple: “You’ll be 40 anyway!”
I’m sure you’ve heard it before–the time will pass anyway! But for whatever reason, hearing it from my grandfather really brought the cliché to life. So I went back to being stupid and applied to just one program. This was in part a deliberate choice to force fate’s hand (i.e. my own dithering self); it was also a choice to not force another move on my young children. If I was admitted, I would complete a PhD. If I didn’t, I would start looking more seriously for full time employment as an attorney, while keeping my fingers crossed for a suitable full time position to appear at one of Arizona’s many community colleges. In retrospect, my preferred outcome was obvious, but I was sufficiently terrified of the prospect of “comprehensive examinations” that I thought a rejection might serve as a relief.
Then ASU let me know that, while my application was strong, they were only making funded offers that year, and they were not extending one to me. This was sufficiently panic-inducing that I reached out to the head of graduate studies–at that time, Ángel Pinillos. The upshot of already having completed my MA with ASU is that I had some personal relationships with faculty and they were clearly comfortable being honest with me about my position and prospects. Here is more advice you have probably heard, that I had heard but failed to understand and thus ignored: if you want to go to graduate school, take the time to get to know some of the faculty in your preferred program(s) beforehand.
Anyway, I begged. Well, what I said was:
I thought it might also be worth mentioning my willingness to begin the program unfunded, should the department see fit to reconsider its position on accepting unfunded students this semester. Though I would not prevail on anyone to change their mind for my benefit alone, and would of course rather participate with full funding, I would certainly rather matriculate unfunded than not at all. Though I do not expect this information to influence outcomes in any way, on the chance that it might I felt it would be better to say something than not.
Dr. Pinillos agreed to pass along my request. Eventually, he informed me that my request would be accommodated. He was actually extremely encouraging, and suggested that I would be placed on a wait list for funding, if any became available. But he also warned me that there was no guarantee I would ever receive funding. On April 9, 2015, I accepted the offer and its attendant conditions.
At long last: I was a PhD student.
V. Discere et Docere
On June 26th, 2015, I received a mass mailer advertising an opening for a Graduate Student Research Associate at the Institute for Humanities Research at ASU. The position included tuition remission and a $15,000 annual stipend. I applied immediately and was offered the position on July 7th. That was probably the moment when I accepted the possibility that I had somehow, finally, overleveled for the task at hand–at least in some respects. I worked twenty hours per week doing research for the IHR fellows and functioning as a bit of an office intern. In service of hosting the weekly fellows meetings, I did have to learn how to make coffee.
(You read that right: I accepted an unfunded offer, only to have funding basically fall into my lap two months later. Kids, don’t try this at home.)
Securing funding was an important logistical step. Substantively, though, I needed a dissertation. Since I’d completed an MA at ASU, I only needed another two years of coursework. If I could move quickly on my dissertation, I could complete my PhD in three years. My idea at the time was to try to say something about upbringing and moral development–specifically, I thought I could write about “eugogics,” my own neologism meaning “good upbringing,” as a contrast to “eugenics.” Since I’d previously worked on moral development with Dr. Calhoun, I figured I’d ask for her involvement again. But it was Dr. Pinillos who pointed me back toward Dr. de Marneffe. This turned out to be excellent advice.
When I asked Dr. de Marneffe to serve as my committee chair, he asked me whether I wanted my dissertation to advocate for a particular position, or in order to explore a question I did not yet have the answer to. I responded that the question I was interested in was what constitutes a “good upbringing.” He spent the next two years patiently guiding my inquiry toward something I could develop into an actual dissertation.
I really have to praise Dr. de Marneffe here. I was in need of a lot of mentoring, and I still didn’t really know it. He not only noticed, but noticed that I hadn’t noticed, and simply took it upon himself to gently steer me in the right direction. He was never unkind or inattentive about this, he never made any particular demands, he just made suggestions and held patient conversations and was in every conceivable way an absolutely excellent mentor.
Eventually, I was completing coursework while teaching as many as five courses per semester, between ASU and various Maricopa County Community College campuses. At the end of my first year, I was offered departmental funding and a position as a Teaching Assistant. At the end of my second year, after passing my comprehensive examination (which was intense, but no more so than, say, the law review write-on at BYU), I convinced the BYU Philosophy Department to bring me on as adjunct faculty for the summer. By now most of my contacts had retired, but interim chair Joseph Parry was very encouraging, and wanted the faculty to have a chance to see me teach before I completed my PhD and went on the job market. So I spent the summer of 2017 living away from my family, teaching at my alma mater. I knew better than to assume that I would have a job waiting for me at BYU at the end of all this, but it was certainly where I expected to end up. I knew that they would be hiring 2 or 3 tenure lines over the next 5 or 6 years. Given they had been unable to fill a tenure line for want of qualified candidates just a few years prior, how stiff could the competition possibly be?
(Yeah, that’s ironic foreshadowing.)
When I returned to ASU, I became a Teaching Associate and was permitted to run my own Applied Ethics course. That semester I was teaching one class at ASU and four more at GCC, all while working on my dissertation. It was quite something to realize that I was carrying a teaching load two to three times greater than that of most of my professors, while also producing original research at a rate two to three times faster than my professors, while earning perhaps a third of what my professors were getting paid. But something about eating, sleeping, breathing philosophy, at levels ranging from introductory surveys to upper division undergraduate courses to writing a dissertation, had a remarkable gelling effect on my understanding of philosophy–not just as a body of historical knowledge, the “history of ideas,” but as a practice.
At 37 years old, I had finally begun to glimpse the extent of my own ignorance.
This was excellent timing. I had gone into the PhD program hoping to complete it in three years. That proved unrealistic, but I had at least begun my dissertation. I was able to secure a completion fellowship, reducing my teaching load to a measly three community college classes per semester, and focus on getting the work done. My committee (Drs. de Marneffe, Calhoun, and Elizabeth Brake, now at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, by way of Rice) was extremely helpful. In particular, Dr. de Marneffe furnished me with detailed and rapid feedback every time I provided draft chapters to him. I resolved to take every single suggestion to the fullest of my ability, both because I wanted to finish and also because honestly, Dr. de Marneffe is just that smart.
I won’t bore you with the details; if you want to read it, my dissertation is publicly available (PDF). It contains no mention of “eugogics” at all. My defense went well, and I graduated in the Spring of 2019.
VI. On the Market
But here I have to backtrack a bit. The academic hiring market is overwhelmingly cyclic; the vast majority of listings go up in the Fall for the following Fall. So while I was writing my dissertation, fully intending to complete it by Spring 2019, I was also up to my elbows applying for jobs on the promise of completion. I knew that BYU would be listing a position, but I wasn’t going to put all my eggs into that basket. I also–because I can apparently never do anything without being at least a little stupid–decided to not apply to any post-doc or visiting positions.
Let me explain.
By Spring 2019, I would have a JD and a PhD. I had two academic publications to my name–an undergraduate philosophy essay and a law review article–and a lot of teaching experience. I figured that should be good enough for a community college post, and arguably even for a junior faculty position in the right program (which I was still assuming meant BYU). My children were enrolled in school. I was willing to move them for a job, but only if I could do it once, not repeatedly. Better to continue teaching part time for Maricopa County, holding out for a full time position to open up, than to become an academic nomad with four children in tow.
(Moving is expensive!)
Philosophy jobs lump into roughly four categories: value theory (including identitarian positions, like race and gender theory), metaphysics and epistemology, history, and “other” (including community college posts, but also less common stuff like Continental philosophy). Here is a map of all the jobs I applied to in the 2018-19 cycle, which should represent a pretty comprehensive map of all the non-identitarian value theory, history, and community college, full time, non-visiting philosophy jobs (with several “this might fit, too” law and/or humanities positions thrown in) listed that year:
There are about 75 tags on this map, though some are covering others. Orange and red tags are places I applied which outright never responded to my application, not even with a rejection. Black and grey tags are no-interview rejections. Light and dark blue tags are first round interviews. Green tags are second round (fly out, in person) interviews–one of these, in Virginia, is covered by other tags. The one gold tag is (spoilers!) the one job offer I received, but set that aside for now.
As you can see, what I overwhelmingly got was “no.” I had several things working against me. First, pedigree! ASU typically hovers just outside of the putative “Top 50” anglophone graduate programs in philosophy. It’s not quite so bad as in the legal profession, but even so, there is a fair bit of prejudice in professional philosophy against graduates from lower ranked programs. Second, publications. I had not made it a priority to publish as a graduate student, and publications are the coin of the realm; my law review publication did not count for much and was also a decade old. I did manage to have one philosophy publication “forthcoming” in early 2019, but that was it. Third, connections: community college positions often go to current adjuncts or other insiders, which I might complain about if I hadn’t been partly banking on benefiting from that tendency myself. Fourth, I assume at least occasional identitarian reasons. Most schools wanted a “diversity statement” and while I did my best to highlight my extensive teaching experiences with underserved populations (including poverty-afflicted high school students) in Hispanic-Serving Institutions, the realpolitik is that diversity statements are primarily employed as a pretext for dubious and even technically illegal hiring practices. I’m a white male with a wife and four children, and with BYU front-and-center on my CV, it’s difficult to conceal my sociologically haram affiliations.
(As the cycle progressed I did find myself looking for ways to downplay my religious connections; such is the reality of being an approved target in the culture wars. Coincidentally or not, the job I eventually got resulted from a CV that omitted almost all reference to BYU, in part by referring to the law school simply as the “J. Reuben Clark Law School.”)
In January of 2019, two things happened in the same week. BYU flew me out for an interview, and my wife sold our primary residence, moving us from a lovely 3100 square foot home into a 1200 square foot property we’d invested in as a rental. Half our belongings went into storage. This was our “crossing the Rubicon” moment: either I would get a teaching position and we would be moving that summer, or I would not get a job, and we would need to pare down our expenses while I continued to teach part time and figured out my next steps.
The interview at BYU was a good experience. My sample teach won applause from the students. My research presentation seemed well received. The LDS General Authority who interviewed me was encouraging. I was optimistic about my prospects, and the school had been soft recruiting me for years (though by now, Dr. Carter had of course retired). But I think, to the extent that my own shortcomings played any part in what transpired next, where I fell short was a matter of fit. This is largely guesswork, but: when asked what I would anticipate teaching at BYU, I pointed toward ethics and law. BYU’s upper division philosophy courses, however, tend to be figure-oriented. Although they do have courses like Introduction to Ethics and Philosophy of Law, these are often taught by adjuncts, while most upper division classes have nominative titles like “Plato” or “Kant”–emphasizing particular historical figures. One senior faculty member followed up by asking which major figure classes I felt most qualified to teach, and I do not think he was entirely impressed with my response–a hastily-improvised list of contemporary political philosophers. While I feel comfortable claiming an “Area of Competence” in ancient Greek philosophy, and could competently teach an upper division course on many major figures given a few weeks to prepare, “breadth” is not often seen as an academic virtue, and sometimes seen as a vice.
Of course, it would not be difficult for you to figure out who they hired instead, and decide that his CV was more impressive and pedigreed than mine, and that might well be the only difference that ultimately mattered. He was also the younger candidate, with more recent ties to the current faculty, while my own mentors had largely moved on from the department. Or maybe the problem was simply that I’m strictly anglophone, and BYU is known for its polyglots! Whatever the case, on March 5, 2019, BYU informed me that I was not their preferred candidate–but also that they would be hiring again the next year, and hoped I would apply. Although I had continued to apply to openings through February, by this point I did not have any really plausible leads, and the spigot of new listings was running dry. I would continue teaching 3 or 4 classes each semester at GCC, but it was with some sadness I began looking toward the next hiring cycle.
The very next week, however, Florida Tech posted an opening for a prelaw professor. They wanted someone who could teach law, but who held a PhD in history, philosophy, literature, or some other suitably related humanities field. They also wanted a candidate with at least five years of teaching experience. The position was tenure track, and Florida Tech is a private non-profit R2 institution–primarily a STEM university, and the premiere university of Florida’s “Space Coast.” Given my unusually substantial teaching experience, background in technology, general geekery, and JD/PhD, this looked like a surprisingly good fit. They flew me out in May, and again the interview process went very well.
I would learn later that there were also things working for me in the background. The Humanities Chair at Florida Tech had been a classmate of Dr. Brake’s, so he felt comfortable reaching out to her directly for further reference information beyond her letter of support. There were (I am told) apparently three “finalists” flown out for in-person interviews, and one of them (I don’t know who, and I don’t know the details!) was reportedly the odds-on favorite at the beginning of the process, but not after the interview. Additionally, after the interviews were completed, someone on faculty announced that they were leaving Florida Tech. The Associate Dean sought permission to hire not one but two of the prelaw finalists, and administration approved tenure lines for both positions. I don’t know whether I was the “top” candidate or not, or whether the hiring committee even ranked us, given that they ultimately didn’t have to pick one candidate–just one last rejection. But I am told that it was my JD that really sold my candidacy, even though 2/3rds of my teaching load is philosophy courses.
On June 3rd, 2019 I took a Zoom meeting with the Dean of the College of Psychology and Liberal Arts (CoPLA). When I came out of that meeting I went directly to my wife and said, “We’re moving to Florida.”
VII. Catching the Brass Ring
So it was that I landed a tenure track position. I would be teaching undergraduates, occasional prelaw majors and minors (and the exceedingly rare philosophy student), but I would also have a role to play as external advisor to graduate students in business and psychology. I would teach Intro to Law, Constitutional Law, Philosophy of Law, Law and Technology, Bioethics, and other such courses–but the bulk of my teaching would be general education philosophy surveys.
To my relief, Florida Tech was quite clear in their guidance for promotion as a tenure track assistant professor in CoPLA. In my first six years, I needed at least six peer-reviewed publications, at least six conference presentations, good teaching reviews from colleagues and students, and a pretty standard list of service and scholarship activities that would accrue pretty naturally so long as I was diligent in my work.
(Regarding publication, I found much greater success responding to calls for papers, than I found submitting cold. In fact to date 100% of my CFP submissions have gone on to be published, while my success with cold submission to journals is probably 5% or so. But I know there is a substantial social element to the publishing game, and I am very bad at that part of the game, so: YMMV.)
Because nothing can ever be simple, in my second semester at Florida Tech the COVID-19 pandemic got into full swing. This was a stressful time for everyone, of course, but my initial contract was for just one year–the standard for tenure track employees at Florida Tech is (or was) a first year contract, followed by a three year contract, followed by a second three year contract which either runs through the “terminal year,” or is replaced with a contract with tenure. Given the financial concerns raised by the pandemic, untenured faculty faced the same employment insecurity everyone outside of academia was facing at the time. Ultimately, my employer did terminate a handful of contracts. To my relief, my own was not among them.
(Sometimes, you just get lucky.)
What mostly remained was to put my head down and get the work done–teach the classes, write the papers, give the presentations. But it is worth mentioning that, even at this stage, the guidance and perspective of others was crucial to my continued success. In particular, for a time my office was next to the office of Matt Ruane–then a professor of history and Director of Academic Program Assessment (now the Director of Accreditation & Assessment at the CIA). We spent a lot of time discussing university operations, accreditation, and program development and assessment. These are all important facets of higher education to which graduate studies rarely, if ever, expose students; I had encountered some assessment in my community college teaching, but only minimally. Dr. Ruane was a valuable mentor in developing my understanding of the job of being a professor–the administrative, bureaucratic portions of the work that receive little attention and no particular accolades.
After all that, tenure review was a bit of an anticlimax. A bit like Yale Law School, I suppose–the hardest part was getting in. Or perhaps it’s all just recent enough that I am still processing it? In any event, I met the necessary thresholds and assembled a dossier containing evidence and examples of my research, teaching, and service. In response, I was promoted to associate professor and awarded tenure, effective August 2025. The road was long and the labor was real, but in the end my own ignorance and dithering bore substantially greater blame for that than any particular hurdle I encountered along the way. Truly, with anxieties like these, who needs enemies?
VIII. Mischief Managed. Lessons Learned?
If you can manage to keep on going, you’re bound to get there eventually.
(This is also true of reading excessively wordy blogs.)
I’m not sure my individual story has a moral more robust than that. But for the patience and industriousness of my wife, I would have run out of money several times along the way. On the other hand, had I been unmarried and childless I would have been more open to relocation, which could have sped the process along. Numerous substantial benefits have accrued to me as a direct result of marrying young and having several children immediately. It is manifestly clear that this is not always how things go for others. As a PhD student, I had one memorable conversation with some of my classmates about my workload: to have four children, teach five classes a semester, and still make progress on a dissertation, all without the use of caffeine, alcohol, or nootropics, struck them as inhuman. But I pointed out that I rarely shopped, did my own laundry, or prepared my own meals, as these were all things Aprilynne handled for our household. Unlike most of my classmates, I also wasn’t at a stage in life where I was spending time dating or drinking or otherwise socializing much outside my own home. It was true that, in some ways, I had more to do than most graduate students–but in other ways, much less.
I definitely became a better student as I aged. Sometimes I think we would all be better off if we set a minimum age for college attendance–say, 25? On the other hand, I’ve now had some excellent students who were much younger than that, so possibly I was just a very late bloomer, intellectually. Unfortunately the other sense of the word tenure–“time spent in this position”–plays a significant role in how people judge worth and worthiness of promotion in most industries, including academia, and arriving “late” to my professorship has probably made it unrealistic to expect promotion to high administrative office. Even so, I think of “University President” as a long-term career trajectory, if not a specifically attainable goal. My next step is to seek promotion to full professor, and thence eventually to administration… or not! By then I’ll be at least 50 years old, and all of my children will be adults (half of them already have bachelor’s degrees). I can scarcely imagine it–much less what comes after.
One thing some readers might regard as missing from this travelogue is any real discussion of my substantive contributions to the discipline. Surely that is relevant to my professional development? To that I would say–yes and no! What I regard as my most philosophically important work to date is not on a very “trendy” topic. Maybe I will accrue some notoriety in my field, maybe I won’t, and the actual quality of my work is probably secondary to whatever cultural relevance it does or does not eventually accrue. When I say “sometimes you get lucky,” what I really mean is that many things are simply not up to me, and will happen or not based on developments outside my control. So I focus on writing about things that are interesting to me, especially if they seem likely to be publishable, and if that never intersects with philosophical fame, the more important things are that it puts food in my children’s mouths, and that I enjoy it. In that order. I am increasingly of the view that the best philosophers are the ones who are evidently good at living, whether or not theirs are, in the end, the most famous or influential ideas. So I aspire to be good at living.
And now I am a tenured professor of philosophy and law. Even though I nearly flunked out of college in my freshman year. Even though I’m a Mormon (and not employed at BYU). Even though I didn’t go to a “top ten” university or do a postdoc or visiting professorship. Even though I married young, had four children before starting my PhD, and then prioritized their geographic stability. Even though I was almost 40 years old before landing my first full time academic position. Even though I have the social instincts and awareness of a mossy boulder. All of those things complicated my progress and made it more difficult to get a job, and people’s prejudices were frustrating whenever I encountered them–and where I could only guess at them. But if I faced a higher bar than some, it was surely a lower bar than faced by others. The only life we can live is the one we’ve got.
Today I live half a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, in a lovely beach town situated a comfortable drive from Orlando, Florida. I get to see baby sea turtles hatch and watch rockets launch into outer space, occasionally at the same time, which is pretty amazing. My youngest child once told me “we don’t need to go on a vacation, we live in a vacation!” That is often how being a professor of philosophy and law feels, to me. I get to have interesting conversations with interesting people almost every day. Much of my work can be done from home, or wherever, but I have a cozy office lined with overstuffed bookshelves, so I still do most of my work there. My colleagues are friendly and easygoing. My students are bright and respectful. The pay is not stellar–you will never get rich teaching–but the quality of life really is unrivaled (by anything short of idle wealth). And if I arrived at a stuttering pace along a meandering road, well–in the end, I arrived.
It really is nice work.
If you can get it.
You must be logged in to post a comment.