Flourishing in the Academy: Complicity and Compromise

From the first week of graduate school, my friend Richie Kim and I were inseparable. People thought we were cliquish or dating. Neither was true. We were accused of thinking we were too cool for school. That might not have been far from the truth. Richie and I were an unlikely pair—he, a well-dressed, baseball-loving, club-hopping Kantian; I, a slightly disheveled, bespectacled, bookish empiricist. And, yet, our senses of humor existed on the same wavelength, one inaudible to our classmates. But something far deeper anchored our bond. We were both first-generation students and the only two racial minorities in our cohort. When Richie would tell me about his complicated family life, I was not taken aback. I too had stories to tell. When I would roll my eyes at a question during the colloquium, I knew that when I looked up, Richie would be smirking with me. Our friendship was a safe space from an academic world that we both wanted to succeed in but which neither of us wanted to belong in. This is the paradox for so many first-generation and working-class students. Academic institutions are social institutions. Our success depends not just on our good work but on the approval, support, and acceptance of those who command the classrooms and seminar rooms. And, yet, for people like Richie and me, that social world feels foreign, sometimes hostile, and often kind of dull. We are caught between wanting to gain the approval of those who set the terms and suspecting that their approval means that we have turned into precisely the people we do not want to be.

I. ECONOMIC, SOCIAL, AND CULTURAL CAPITAL IN THE ACADEMY

To understand the dynamics of philosophy as a set of institutional practices, we must understand the broader social dynamics at play in the educational institutions within which our departments exist. Inspired by the work of Bourdieu, who argued that social and cultural capital is critical to understanding hierarchies of class,¹ social scientists have been seeking to understand how these forces operate in American colleges and universities. What they find is that these social and cultural dynamics often benefit those who arrive on campus already at an advantage. Nicole Stephens’s work shows us that first-generation college students often experience a mismatch between the culture they bring to school and the one that they find reflected within its walls.² Whereas many students from working-class backgrounds grow up with an interdependent culture in which they understand their own flourishing in relationship to others, upper-middle-class students grow up shaped by an independent culture that puts their individual autonomy at the forefront. She suggests that this mismatch is responsible for the achievement gap between first-generation college students and those whose parents attended college. Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton’s devastating ethnography of a flagship public university shows us how such institutions are organized to satisfy the paying customers—out-of-state students seeking “the college experience.”³ The collateral of this model are women from working-class backgrounds who end up falling through the cracks of a set of institutional pathways that are not designed for them. And, finally, Anthony Jack’s incisive work uncovers the work that culture, as distinct from economic class, plays. He finds that not all low-income students of color face the same challenges at selective universities.⁴ Some attend private, well-endowed high schools that prepare them for the culture of the upper-middle-class milieu that dominates highly selective universities in the United States. These privileged poor students flourish, while their disadvantaged counterparts have trouble making friends, developing mentoring relationships with faculty, and feeling at home on campus.

This research shows us that the internal social and cultural forces at play in academic institutions determine how social and economic background influence students’ experiences. That feeling of discomfort many first-generation and low-income students feel reflects the social dynamics that dominate many academic institutions, in particular, the sort of elite places that are a fast-track into positions in the academy. Those who grow up with parents, neighbors, and peers who resemble the faculty, administrators, and students at those universities, unsurprisingly, find them comfortable and welcoming places in which to flourish academically and socially. For those of us who do not come from that world, the experience is that of being an outsider. In theory, being an outsider should be an advantage. Universities are devoted to the pursuit of knowledge and insofar as they draw the people carrying out that research from a narrow slice of the population, the resulting work will be epistemically impoverished. Because students from first-generation or low-income backgrounds arrive on campus with different cultural models and different educational trajectories, they have the potential to contribute to diversifying the epistemic viewpoints that are represented. That is, if educational institutions are an important site of epistemic injustice,⁵ then redressing our epistemic blinders requires that we actively recruit those whose capacity to contribute knowledge has historically been sidelined. Or so the theory goes, and many efforts to diversify faculty are driven by something like this argument.⁶ Yet, there is a disconnect between this widely accepted argument and the social reality. The institutional practices of admission, hiring, promotion, and the rest are often driven by word of mouth, social networks, and institutional reputation: all factors that contribute to the entrenchment of those with the economic, social, and cultural capital in positions of power.⁷ In advertisement after advertisement, working-class, first-generation, and minority students are encouraged to apply for faculty positions, but their success in getting the job and succeeding at it is often a function not only of their work but of how well they play along with the expectations and interests of those who dominate the profession. My impression from being a part of many hiring committees at both less selective and highly selective places is that the ideal candidate for a philosophy job is a woman of color who has been trained at Princeton or MIT and works in metaphysics, epistemology, or, maybe, philosophy of language or science. Pedigree, in the words of sociologist Lauren Rivera, attests to one’s capacity for the kind of work that is seen as “core” to philosophy. As sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison argue in The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged, the path into elite professions for those who come from working-class backgrounds is not just a matter of merit, but of having the social and cultural capital to present one’s merit in a way that is easily recognized by senior figures many of whom come from more privileged backgrounds.⁸ Faculty on hiring committees often want to diversify their faculty not by truly diversifying the educational experiences and perspectives of those they hire, but by hiring someone who broadly shares their perspective of the world despite coming from a different background than them.

II. THE HIERARCHY OF RESEARCH AGENDAS

The social and cultural forces that entrench advantage not only influence who is in the profession and who receives prized academic positions, but which research agendas are celebrated. The profession confers prestige on projects that have little to no connection with issues that matter to the public and often marginalizes projects that do—practical ethics and applied philosophy of all sorts. (Though I am happy to see that this is changing, albeit slowly.) To be clear, I am not simply talking here about the prestige of ethics over metaphysics or philosophy of language. Even within philosophy of science, for example, some projects have more practical relevance than others, but the prestige is not conferred on this basis. This happens both at the level of which research topics are deemed “important” but also at the level of how this research is conducted. It’s true that in most years there are more faculty jobs in practical subjects, but this is because students want to take those courses and departments need somebody to teach them. Most of the people who teach these courses end-up having to prove their philosophical mettle by doing research in areas that are considered more “serious.” So even within ethics and political philosophy, the prestige falls on those whose work is opaque to your average intelligent person. The vast majority of philosophers write for other philosophers who uphold standards of good scholarship that have little to do with, and in some cases are diametrically opposed to, standards of relevance, accessibility, or even sheer interestingness. We claim to aim for clarity and rigor, but, in fact, what we aim for is work that is only intelligible to those who are already in the profession. For all the talk of clarity, few educated non-philosophers can pick-up an article in Mind or Noûs and figure out what the central argument of a given research paper is or, crucially, why it matters. Work that is written for a non-specialist audience or the general public is tolerated as long as the person can show that they can play by the rules of the specialist audience. It is no coincidence that the elite institutions who play a big role in conferring prestige have an interest in incentivizing the kind of work that has little connection to those outside of those institutions. This is part of how we stay complicit in an ideology that sustains exclusivity. Plato argued that philosophers who had gained knowledge by becoming familiar with the forms had a duty, as citizens, to come back and explain what they knew to others. In the ideology that dominates our profession, we are encouraged to fail to fulfill this duty. Our research keeps elevating and perpetuating the importance and centrality of projects within the profession that keep us in the cave. As philosophers we are reluctant to think that our interests and preferences could be influenced by non-rational factors, but, of course, they are.⁹ The social and cultural forces at play in educational institutions play a role in what we find interesting, important, and a “contribution” to the literature.

When I first started taking philosophy classes as an undergraduate, I was also taking classes in anthropology, sociology, and women’s studies. But I wanted in on philosophy, mostly, because I felt that philosophy classrooms were a place in which I was respected just in virtue of my intellect, not my class, race, gender, or anything else. This is the seductive promise of philosophy, in particular, for those of us whose identities, far too often, lead others to fail to see us as individuals. As I started taking more philosophy courses, I realized that the tacit culture of the department was that the “smart” students shied away from ethics or political philosophy and went in for the “heavy” stuff—philosophy of language, mind, metaphysics. As a curious undergraduate, I was interested in all of it. But I could tell that if I was going to show that I could do the hard work, I needed to cultivate my interest in some fields and not others. As a first-generation woman of color, I was particularly keen to gain respect and standing with this world by showing that I was capable of doing the most “difficult, rigorous, and abstract” work. I was genuinely interested in philosophy of perception, but I was also interested in doing well in the eyes of my professors. This ambition culminated in my enrollment in Philosophy Analysis in the Twentieth Century. It was known, informally, as a kind of analytical philosophy bootcamp and students interested in graduate school were encouraged to take it. Forty or so unsuspecting undergraduates signed up for the year-long course and by the end of the spring term, fewer than ten of us remained, mostly white men, but for my good friend Vanessa Wills, now also a successful philosopher. Of course, I was proud to have made it through the grueling experience. I learned a lot about how to do the kind of philosophy that got rewarded in the profession at large. I also learned to act assertively and confidently in class. The professor who taught that class brought me close to tears enough times that I developed the kind of thick skin that would serve me well professionally. But this training also shaped my philosophical instincts in a way that made me complicit with a professional hierarchy that often marginalizes rather than welcomes diverse points of view. I admired women who did the kind of philosophy that was seen as typically male—abstract, rigorous, and difficult. I found it insulting if someone suggested that gender, race, or class played a role in what I thought or why I thought it. In seminars, I acted confidently and aggressively even when I didn’t feel either. I looked down on work that was practical in any way. I’m ashamed to admit all of this, but I don’t think I was the only one because I saw many students who went through the kind of “elite” education I did develop many of the same attitudes and behavior. Nobody told us what the norms of the profession were explicitly, but we picked them up and internalized them, often to our own detriment. I felt torn when, in graduate school, I realized that I was more interested in moral psychology than the philosophy of perception. As my work took me further and further from the philosophical mainstream, I thought that maybe I should leave the profession. The nagging feeling that the work I was supposed to be doing didn’t matter was only made worse by my sense that I wasn’t doing a particularly good job at doing it, even as I succeeded enough to stay on the path.

This is only my experience, but the way in which the hierarchy gets reinforced is all around us if you pay attention. I was talking to a colleague recently who was telling me about how a woman in her department was upset that fewer people seem to attend colloquium talks when the speaker was a woman. Her colleagues agreed that it was unfortunate but that the topics that these particular women were talking about were just less “interesting” to them. Or, when I recently attended the first in a series of talks by one of my philosophical heroes and overheard other philosophers after the talk say that what she was doing “wasn’t philosophy.”¹⁰ I take that they meant this as a disparaging remark because they didn’t show up to the next lectures in the series. These little comments that the talk was just not “interesting” enough to attend or that the talk was “not philosophy” pervade our profession. And yet, as I grew tired of the sort of topics that were deemed worthy by philosophy’s elite, I found those ignored topics more exciting and compelling. In fact, if I hadn’t gotten interested in the philosophy of education, I might not have stayed in the profession.

III. LEARNING TO TEACH

My work in the philosophy of education grew out of my dissatisfaction with my teaching. As a newly minted PhD, my first job was as a visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore College. And like many graduates of a well-regarded PhD program, I started teaching without any knowledge of how to teach effectively. I fumbled. I lectured too much. I let the most vocal students dominate discussion. In sum, I was not really teaching as much as mimicking what I had seen my own professors do. Worse, I was replicating the sort of classroom dynamics that privilege those students who come to college knowing how to take advantage of it. A few months in, one such student came into my office to calmly tell me that what I was doing in the classroom wasn’t working for her. She was right. But it was the fact that this student had the courage to talk to me and the knowledge about how to make her point in a polite yet firm way that stunned me. I would have never, ever had the courage to do what she did as an undergraduate. I did not know that I could take ownership of my own education in that way. In an effort to understand why, I started reading more about education and the ways in which social and cultural capital operate in educational institutions. I realized, perhaps for the first time, that I was a first-generation college student and that this had affected my own educational experience. When I took a position at the City College of New York, my lack of pedagogical training became ever more apparent, but so did the ways in which my experience of college had been an anomaly. CCNY was full of ambitious working-class kids striving to realize the promise of higher education. Teaching, which I had dreaded, became a joy. My students reminded me time and time again of how narrow and constrained my academic experiences had been thus far and how valuable being a good teacher was. I had received my education at the most elite institutions and yet I had never been so challenged in the classroom. My students pushed back on many of the core assumptions of the philosophical mainstream with humor. And to teach them well, I had to make explicit many of the implicit norms and expectations that I had been operating under. Yet, by far the most important thing I learned in the ten years I spent teaching in the City University of New York system was that the way we talk about higher education is distorted. We focus too much on admissions into elite colleges and not nearly enough on what is happening to students attending the institutions that are the real engines of transformative education—our public colleges and universities. The challenges I saw my students face had little to do with affirmative action, free speech, or the other ‘hot topics’ in the public discourse around higher education and much more to do with how to succeed at college while playing critical roles in their families and communities. The financial and academic challenges working-class and first-generation students face is but a piece of a broader set of hurdles. What I saw was that they often had to make painful ethical compromises in order to succeed in college and transform their life prospects. The students I taught were caught between, for example, taking a grandparent to the doctor or working fulltime to support their families and studying for an exam or attending class. Whichever choice they made, they felt like they were letting someone they loved or themselves down. This insight became the basis of my book Moving Up Without Losing Your Way: The Ethical Costs of Upward Mobility: a book that I would have never been able to write had I only been at the sort of elite institution I attended as an undergraduate and graduate student.

IV. DOUBLE BINDS

Sukaina Hirji has recently written a thoughtful paper about how people from oppressed social groups are often caught in oppressive double binds—no matter what they do they become complicit in the oppressive mechanisms that function to oppress them.¹¹ She argues that what is bad about such situations is not simply that they undermine our autonomy, but rather that they present us with choices that are self-undermining no matter what we do. To truly diversify the academy would require that we welcome people that have backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives that are truly different than the philosophical mainstream. And yet those who fit this description must convince those who are in positions of power to recognize their contributions in order to be given the positions and support required to advance their intellectual agenda. This pushes us to contort ourselves to fit into a social world in which we do not feel at home. To pursue research agendas that are more connected to the concerns of those outside of the academy, we need to embrace and pursue those projects that relate to aspects of our experiences that make us different. And yet those are the sorts of projects that will not be seen as valuable or understood as properly philosophical within our profession. This pushes us to pursue other projects that will make it easier for us to succeed professionally. To resist the ways in which colleges and universities privilege those who already arrive on campus with the skills and knowledge critical to thriving in the academy, we need to invest time and energy in learning to truly teach all students. And yet the institutional incentives are set up so that doing so comes at the expense of our own position in the academy.¹² As Hirji argues, whether we give in or resist, we are compromising our own success in the long run. I write this as a professor with tenure at a well-regarded research institution. In what ways have I compromised? It is too early in my career to provide a definitive autopsy but let me provide a preliminary one. First, I benefit from and my success reinforces a system whose continued existence makes it harder for people from marginalized backgrounds to succeed. I am a person of color and a first-generation college student, yet I have been credentialed at elite institutions and been mentored by people whose word is trusted by the gatekeepers. This has been critical to my success in the academy. This is not to diminish the work I’ve done, but to acknowledge that I am a part of a system that is exclusionary and elitist. I know that my mere presence within these institutions makes those around me feel better about the fairness of the flawed system that brought them there. I made instrumentally rational choices in the pursuit of my professional goals, but nonetheless my success in doing so buttresses the prestige economy that pervades much of higher education. Second, I have chosen to take up opportunities for career advancement at the expense of being in a position where my teaching had a direct impact on first-generation, low-income, and minority students. When I was at the City College of New York, my teaching mattered. I became a more empathetic, open, and motivated teacher and I could see that in doing so I was making a concrete difference in the lives of my students. And yet, I no longer teach there. I chose to pursue opportunities that had more research support and prestige. In part my choice was a response to institutional constraints at CUNY that made it increasingly hard to be a good teacher—larger classes, crumbling infrastructure, and less support for students. It was also an intentional move to ensure my work was taken seriously. But though I think my choice was reasonable, it too was a compromise. The third and final example is the most painful. I have continued to increase the distance between myself and those I love for the sake of my career ambitions. Not only did I decide to pursue higher education thousands of miles away from home, but I became more and more like the people I could not understand growing up—the ones that prioritize work over much of their lives. The pandemic has made this all the more apparent as I am now unable to go see my mom, grandmother, or sister even if I want to. My family doesn’t quite understand my drive and I don’t know how to explain it. We love each other, but I am now part of a world whose logic is mysterious to them. This makes it hard for us to be a part of each other’s lives in the intimate way that we used to be. Despite having compromised in these ways, I have also refused to compromise in others. I have pursued a research agenda that is, by the professional standards of many philosophers, peculiar. I read more social science than I do philosophy. I value becoming a better teacher and invest my time in doing so. And I make no secret that I think all academics should invest much more of their time in improving as teachers instead of writing papers that hardly anyone reads. I have gladly taken on many “service” jobs within the profession that focus on teaching even as this is seen as a professional dead-end by some. I care about the profession becoming more inclusive and do my best to mentor students who need it inside and outside of my university. I try to extend the excellent mentorship I received to others even as it takes time from so much else on my plate. Even as my career has played out largely within the confines of academic practices that too often exclude and marginalize, I have tried my best to push on some of those boundaries from within.¹³ To be the first person in your family to pursue higher education is to embark on an exciting, but, in many ways, obscure path. You really do not know what you are going in for—the compromises you will have to make, the challenges you will confront, and the person you will become in the overcoming. The way to get through is to find your Richies—those people that can laugh along with you at the absurdity.

Jennifer Morton is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.

This contribution is an abridged version of a piece which was previously published in the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, edited by Arianna Falbo and Heather Stewart. Please find the full version of Morton’s paper here.

¹ Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984).
² Nicole M. Stephens, Stephanie A. Fryberg, Hazel Rose Markus, Camille S. Johnson, and Rebecca Covarrubias, “Unseen Disadvantage: How American Universities’ Focus on Independence Undermines the Academic Performance of First generation College Students,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102, no. 6 (2012): 1178.
³ Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura T. Hamilton, Paying for the Party (Harvard University Press, 2013).
⁴ Anthony Abraham Jack, The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges are Failing Disadvantaged Students (Harvard University Press, 2019).
⁵ Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2007).
⁶ Though as I argued in “The Miseducation of the Elite,” Journal of Political Philosophy (2019), the way in which this is carried out is often diversity-undermining rather than diversity-amplifying.
⁷ Lauren A. Rivera, Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs (Princeton University Press, 2016).
⁸ Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged (Policy Press, 2020).
⁹ G. A. Cohen, Paradoxes of Conviction. If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7–19.
¹⁰ Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2013): 3–29.
¹¹ Sukaina Hirji, “Oppressive Double Binds.” Ethics, forthcoming.
¹² Harry Brighouse, “Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky),” Dædalus 148, no. 4 (2019): 14–28. 13.
¹³ Robin Zheng, “What Is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21, no. 4 (2018): 869–85.