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We’ve returned once again to an exciting season of year! No, I’m not going to be writing about football again… I’m talking about Application Season. For anyone thinking about entering an academic institution next year (either as an undergraduate, graduate student, or faculty member) now is the time for laying your plans. Actually, as anyone who’s done it knows, applications mostly involve a series of painful jobs: fretting about different programs, agonizing over personal essays, and begging letters of recommendation from people who, well, seemed to like you. As anxious as this time is for anyone, serious Catholics have an additional reason to be worried, because the academic world is not famous for being positive about the Catholic faith.
I thought it might be worthwhile to open a thread about the concerns of Catholics considering applications to graduate school. My main reason for focusing on grad school (as opposed to college or the academic job market) is because it’s the area that I’m best qualified to speak to, being myself a Catholic graduate student at a major research university. And, in fact, all the members of the Cornell Society for a Good Time either are, or have recently been, Catholic graduate students. So this is a subject we ought to know something about.
But there’s another reason for talking about grad school… I’m inclined to think that would-be graduate students are especially likely to be in need of advice. They’re in a particularly precarious position. Though college students do need help of a kind, their primary challenge is to avoid being discouraged or confused by an unsupportive environment. They might encounter the occasional professor who grades them down for their outspoken anti-modernist comments, but I think the truth is that most college professors are delighted just to have students who are interested, motivated, and able to generate discussion. Young Catholics who are insecure in their beliefs might certainly have their convictions are shaken by the immoral lifestyle and modernist philosophies that they’re likely to encounter in college. But if they persevere, academic success is within reach for the vast majority of them. On the other side of the spectrum, would-be faculty members already know all about the challenges of the secular university. There may be conflicts between their careers and their Catholicism, but they already know that. They don’t need advice from me.
But applicants to grad school are on the cusp. They don’t yet know very much about how the academic world works… but they’re about to throw themselves into it in a do-or-die sort of way. And this really is something of a dangerous game. Graduate school is not like college, where you take a course, get a grade, and move on in life. In grad school, you undergo a sustained process of “professionalization.” For doctoral programs, one of the main goals is to initiate the student into the assumptions, conventions, and particular practices of the discipline. You’re being trained to join in an intellectual conversation, and to do that you need to see the world through the eyes of a (historian, philosopher, physicist, classicist, etc.) In some cases, it may not really be possible to do that as a faithful Catholic. The assumptions may be seriously in conflict with the faith, and the prevailing attitudes in some fields may be such as to make it extremely difficult for a Catholic to be taken seriously. In short, it’s entirely possible for a graduate student to find himself choosing between his faith and the academic career to which he aspires.
I anticipate in advance that the reaction of many of our readers is likely to be: don’t go to grad school. It’s a near occasion to sin; just stay away! Well, I admit that this might often be the wisest course of action. If you know yourself to be easily influenced by your environment — or if you just don’t want to deal with this sort of adversity — it really might be better just to forget about grad school, or at the least, to look for one of the very few programs (mostly at smaller schools like Dallas) where Catholicism might be viewed more favorably. But I can’t distribute that advice universally to all bright young Catholics. The Academy has many problems, but it remains extremely influential within our society, and it is thus an important battleground in the fight for souls. We need some soldiers on the field! Without orthodox Catholics among their ranks, our scholarship will sink even further into the depths of modernism, to the detriment of many. Most especially at risk will be the undergraduates, who need to see that Catholics can be intelligent, articulate and courageous — at least as much so as their more liberal professors. And so, for the sake of those preparing to take the plunge into academia, I’ll offer a few pieces of advice. I invite my fellow bloggers (and any other academics who like to visit here) to add to the list, and perhaps we can get a good discussion of the topic.
Don’t express interest in a field merely because the questions interest you. Find out what sorts of answers are being offered by contemporary scholars.
This is important advice for any prospective grad student, but especially for religious ones. Here’s the bare truth: most prospective grad students don’t know very much about a field when they declare an interest in dedicating their lives to it. Even if they’ve spent years browsing as an amateur (for example, the prospective English student who can quote whole pages of Shakespeare or the prospective philosophy student who has spent years lost in Platonic dialogues) that won’t necessarily prepare them for the realities of the discipline as currently practiced in the Academy. On one level that’s okay… that’s what graduate school is for. It teaches you what you need to know to be a working academic. But there’s this liability: loving a subject as an amateur is no guarantee that you’ll be at all interested in the conversations that are going on on the professional level.
A representative example from my own past history can be seen in the philosophy of mind. This is a very large and active branch of philosophy these days; every year you’ll see scores of mind papers being published in prestigious journals. And the questions they work on are really fascinating (or at least I think so.) What is the nature of consciousness? How does an apparently non-material thing like the mind interact with the physical world (the mind-body problem)? Why are we so certain that other people really have minds like ours, when we have no access to them (the problem of other minds)? As an undergraduate, I was intrigued by all of this, and I eagerly signed on for a course in the philosophy of mind. Good thing I did it then, while there was still relatively little to lose! I walked away from that class with an A, and no desire whatsoever to study it again, at least from contemporary analytic philosophers. I still find the questions fascinating. But I discovered that those legions of philosophers of mind, spread all across the country, are busily engaged in trying to make sense of a thing called “physicalism.” In essence, they’re trying to puzzle out how people can be such complex, interesting creatures given that they (obviously) are really nothing more than machines of meat. Philosophers of mind try to determine where emotion might come from, and worry about what consciousness could really be, all the time assuming (because who could doubt it?) that the explanation must be purely natural, and that nothing could really exist beyond the material world. Well, my readers here will easily understand that I had no interest in getting involved in that project, and an undergraduate course was enough to make that clear. You’d be surprised, though, how often people throw themselves into a field without getting that kind of critical information beforehand.
It’s a good idea, obviously, to take some undergraduate classes in a subject before signing up for grad work. And most people do that, because they normally have to before they can get into grad school. But even this isn’t necessarily reliable insurance against the “is this what I signed up for?” problem. Professors usually have a lot of leeway in deciding how to teach their undergraduate courses, and at that level they aren’t aiming to professionalize. So, particularly in the humanities, they might select material just because they think it will be interesting and thought-provoking for the class, even if it’s not “cutting edge” in the field. An undergraduate English major really might have spent his college years discussing Shakespeare and Dante… only to get to grad school and discover that “literary theory” is the order of the day. You can’t know what it will be like to be an academic until you get some idea what people are writing in the field right now. One way to do this is by seeking out some current academic journals in the field you think you want to enter. Another way is just by talking to working academics — possibly including ones who don’t actually work in the field, but who interact somewhat with people who do. Outside perspectives from knowledgeable people can be useful.
Don’t expect to transform the Academy overnight.
It’s not necessarily bad to enter Academia with a hope of making it better with your presence and your work. Indeed, I would hope that young scholars would have that goal before entering grad school. But you should also be realistic. Students who were praised as undergraduates for “breaking the mold” are sometimes surprised to find as grad students that their originality is no longer appreciated. Actually, this shouldn’t be so surprising. Most professors do, to a certain degree, hope to “mold” their undergraduates (usually in their own image). But they teach lots of students over the years, and they know that they can’t win them all. Moreover, when you’re standing in front of a classroom, you’re often relieved to find anybody who’s interested and willing to talk, regardless of what that person actually says or thinks. So students with minority views may find themselves tolerated or even praised on a college level.
With their graduate students, professors have a lot more responsibility, and also a lot more at stake. Undergrads will move on at the end of the semester, and most likely will never be heard from again. Most of the things they learn from humanities courses will not be directly relevant to their future careers. Grad students, by contrast, stick around for much longer, and if they succeed in their academic ambitions, they will then be a part of the same intellectual community in which their professors work. If they’re trying to advance theories that have been discredited or dismissed, it’s the job of the faculty to point this out. It’s the job of a thesis advisor to make sure that the student can do work that other academics will consider important and “relevant.” Furthermore, the student will be representative of the school in which he was educated, and his work will reflect back on his mentors. All this is to say: students with unorthodox (from the academic perspective) views are likely meet with much more resistance once they get to grad school.
The bottom line is that you shouldn’t go into a field if your main goal is to debunk everything that is presently being done there. You needn’t approve of all of it, obviously, and you should try to maintain a critical perspective throughout. But if you can’t say anything that will be viewed as “part of the conversation,” you’ll never get a PhD. That’s not to deny that it can sometimes be very refreshing to have someone walk in and say, “Everything this group of scholars is doing is complete garbage. It’s just a total waste of time.” Sometimes that assessment is absolutely right. The problem is that you need a certain amount of status before you can attract any attention by saying that. Status is one thing grad students definitely do not have.
Talk to people who might sympathize with your concerns.
If you’re an orthodox Catholic seeking an advanced degree, you’re in a minority. But you’re not the first person who’s ever tried it, so get some advice. In this department, it’s more important to find people who sympathize with your worries, than it is to find people who know you well. Just trust me on this: even people who seemed to like you in college might prove disappointingly unhelpful if they don’t share your religious convictions. So find people who will understand. I’m not saying that you should write a letter to Robert George or Alasdair MacIntyre asking for advice. But there are lots of lower-level people who would know how things are in a particular department or field. If you wanted to study philosophy or classics or physics or engineering or chemistry, for example, you might try sending an email to the Cornell Society for a Good Time. I think any of us would be glad to offer a little help, even if we’d never met you before.
Be prepared for the possibility that it might just not work out.
Actually, this is good advice for any grad student, whether religious or not. Given the state of the current job market (particularly in the humanities) there’s no guarantee that your fancy degree will actually get you anywhere. But it’s particularly important if you have strong religious convictions, because it’s easy, once you start down the path, to fall into an “anything it takes” mentality in your desperation to succeed. If you work hard enough to figure out the conventions of your field, you may find that you’ve ceased to care about the truth. Instead, you may just be working to determine the accepted thing to think, and once you reach that point, your soul is likely in a bad way.
Help yourself out by accepting this hard truth from the beginning: an academic career may turn out to be impossible for you. It could happen because you discover that you don’t really have what it takes to be an academic, or that the life isn’t as appealing as you expected. Or it could be that the job market is too tight and you can’t find a job. But you might also realize that finishing the degree, or seeking employment in the field, is going to undermine your faith — or, conversely, that persevering in the faith will make it virtually impossible to find a job. Lots of things can happen. Try to keep enough perspective that you can realize when it’s time to call it quits. You don’t want to trade your soul for a job with tenure, and there are lots of other worthwhile things to do in life. I know of too many people out there who are 1) in grad school, 2) utterly miserable, and 3) unlikely to ever find a job anyway, and yet they still don’t leave. I don’t know whether it’s fear of failure or lack of imagination that keeps such people traipsing down this long dead-end, but don’t let that be you. Quitting grad school doesn’t necessarily show a lack of character. I think, in fact, that the healthy grad student is the one who remembers that it’s always an open option.
I could add some more, but this is already pretty long, and I’d like to encourage others with relevant experience to add their own points to the list. You might note that I haven’t given general advice about how to get into grad school. There are plenty of good books and websites that provide information on those topics. But for the sake of those with particularly Catholic concerns, I thought we might put together a list of pointers.
In case my words have sounded excessively dire, I wanted to add for the record: I was terribly ignorant about the state of my field when I applied to grad school… and I knew it, but since I was applying from Uzbekistan, where the resources were obviously rather limited, it was hard to rectify the situation. I was largely shooting in the dark when I did my applications, which terrified me at times, but Providence must have been watching out for me, because I ended up hitting something pretty good (and not just because I met my husband at the first department social event I attended!) Things do work out, sometimes.
St. Louis-Marie de Montfort,
Pope St. Pius X,
St. Joseph,
St. Ambrose of Milan,
St. Thomas Aquinas,
St. Francis (and St. Clare),
St. Catherine of Siena,
St. Alphonsus Ligouri,
St. John Chrysostom,
I can second each of Clara’s recommendations here heartily, and add that its emphatically a terrible idea to go to graduate school out of anything other than a very eager desire to study in your field. By this I mean: there are very many people in graduate school who are there because they were successful undergraduates who were encouraged to continue in academia and who never much thought about whether they really wanted to. The professors they liked were, naturally, academics themselves; they have, generally, never done anything but go to school. These people should flee graduate school! Poor pay, poor prospects, and a partly-poisoned atmosphere are no place to be unless you have a strong positive reason to want to be there. Graduate study should never ever be undertaken to “kill time” or to put off making other decisions. It’s too dangerous — once you’ve put the time in for a year or two, it’s frightfully hard to convince yourself just to leave, and the next thing you know you’re 34 years old, still living in a hovel, and still lacking a graduate degree. Obviously, this doesn’t happen to everyone, but it happens often enough!
One further bit of advice: once committed, it’s well for any aspiring academic to make EXITING graduate school among his primary goals. A temporary, unfixed, unpromised position is not a place to grow comfortable; and yet, bizarrely, some people do grow comfortable being graduate students: it’s my suspicion that many of these people got in the position they’re in because they became graduate students mainly because they were a bit afraid of leaving school, where they’ve been since they were young ‘uns. Hence my emphatic earlier advice to think long, hard, and critically before entering graduate study. In fact, some of the most dedicated and successful graduate students are those who delay entry to graduate school to acquire other experience, or working to pay of school loans, or (a la Clara) to make the world a better place. It gives one perspective, and it allows the spell of school to be broken: if you can go out to the regular world and still desire to return to the ivory tower, the odds are far higher that you’ve a real taste for scholarship.
I’d offer a slight modification. Ph.D. study can be dangerous, sucking one into a vortex, yes, but not so terminal master’s programs. Now they may not count as “graduate study” along the lines we’re discussing here, but if they do count, they can be excellent ways to pass the time, meet people, or learn something about a subject rather different than or beyond the experience of undergraduate school.
Other thoughts…
Being a “Christian” in graduate school isn’t so much of a challenge, thinks I. Being a committed Catholic, yes, maybe. But if you’re a Catholic and you swing left on the political spectrum, I don’t think that you would feel much pain, especially if you’re in the history of philosophy.
So in philosophy, at least, my advice would be: go to a school that is comfortable with history. Some schools just aren’t. Rutgers is a good example: not a school fond of history, but as for being a “Christian”, Zimmerman, Hawthorne, and Sider are all “Christians”. And you don’t get bigger than those three (well, and they’re still young). But you can’t profess to study medieval philosophy and then gag everytime someone mentions the possibility of an immaterial soul.
Or go to a school which understands that there are such entities in the world as Catholics. St. Louis University is a good example. I’ve been given to understand that, whatever the commitments of the faculty are at present, the graduate students number many a solid novus ordo catholic. Conversions, too. I don’t see any reason why even a traditional Catholic with his wits about him (or, “her”, to speak the parlance) shouldn’t be intellectually comfortable at a place like St. Louis.
Or again, another approach to take is to think, before you decide which offer to accept, about a future supervisor. The whole committee matters, yes, but at least a solid supervisor, who is sympathetic to your commitments, can make all the difference.
Iosephi comments match my experience. I did an M.Div at St. Michaels Faculty of Theology /University of Toronto/ Toronto School of Theology. It did not have the intensity or potenential endlessness that apparently accompanies more advanced degrees. And, under these circumstances, being a Catholic was not a problem.
Iosephus is, of course, quite right about the difference between the Master’s and PhD experience. This is why it is a great pity — a crime, almost — that the Master’s has nearly vanished at many schools in many areas of study.
Many good thoughts here… the “take a break from school” proposal is always controversial, with the obvious downside being the loss of time. Graduate degrees take so long anyway, and particularly once you start getting into family life, you want to get that stage behind you as quickly as possible. However, striving for “efficiency” won’t pay off if you start before you’re ready, or end up in the wrong place. So if you have serious doubts about graduate study, you really should take at least a year to do something else. This is even more true if you’re one of those people Ambrosius mentioned, who can’t imagine what they’d do with themselves if they weren’t in school of some kind.
A Masters can be a great way to get a feel for a subject without getting too committed. Or you can just learn about something semi-random for a year or two while you figure out what you’re doing with your life. The downside there is that a lot of Masters’ programs (where they do exist) cost money, and it’s a bad time to incur heavy debts. But sometimes fellowships or TAships can take care of that problem. So yeah, that’s always something to think about.
I, of course, spent two years in the Peace Corps and then plunged straight back into school. For me, I think that worked out very well. In my senior year of college, I was somewhat attracted to grad school, but I really was not ready. I hadn’t figured out quite what I wanted to do, and the length and seriousness of the whole endeavor terrified me. The two years abroad were very good ones, from many angles, but most relevant to this conversation: I left confused and doubtful, and came back more mature, more motivated, and genuinely excited to start my graduate studies. Perhaps most importantly, I was no longer terrified, because I’d gained the perspective I needed to say: “this is something I want to try, but if it doesn’t work out, life goes on. There are other worthwhile things to do in the world.”
I think you’re right, Iosephe, that there are niches within Academia where you can be reasonably comfortable, or at the very least functional, as an orthodox Catholic. But I think there are a lot where you can’t. And I suspect our discipline isn’t the worst on this score — in some, it might really be intolerable. Could you survive as an orthodox Catholic in, say, a Women’s Studies program? What about those fields that are up to their eyeballs in postmodernism? I freely admit that I’m not qualified to say, but… I have serious doubts.
That’s why I started this thread. The sort of advice you offer is exactly what people need to find… for whatever field they want to go into. If you’re going to try the grad school route, you need to take care, and try to find a place where you can at least survive!
Pursue a revenue producing degree. Self study the touchy feely stuff if those kind of things interest you.
Ha! Friend, you clearly have never dabbled in analytic philosophy if you can dub it “touchy feely stuff.”
Whew, is this a timely subject. Thank you for bringing it up! I have both a) started Graduate school, only to have to quit with an MA in Latin and Greek after family health problems called me back to the west coast; and b)Am now probably going to apply to three graduate schools in the area this Fall, for admission for a Ph.D. program next Fall. More Classics, or Classical Archaeology, or general History. I am most concerned about graduate history programs; all kinds of mischief abound there.
As for Classics, at any credibile school, it remains as stodgy, challenging, and wonderful as it always was, even when Classics professors try to inject New Criticism or whatever into it. Even at UC Berkeley, one of the most rigorous programs in the country, a Catholic could enter the Classics program and probably encounter fewer problems than anywhere else on campus. It’s been criticised for being “too conservative.” Not that that is saying much in Berkeley…
Unfortunately, I’ve been out of school long enough to have to RE-take the dang GRE, in addition to all of the other steps that you listed above, Clara. Through it all, may God’s will be done- if a student fails to get into the graduate program(s) of choice, then it is not the end of the world.
And a final note to eodsix: “revenue producing”? Are we just worker bees? Or cows making milk? Going to school “to make revenue” turns the whole idea of Liberal education, from its start to its perilous current state, on its head. One cannot be “liber” if money is his prime motivational factor in life.
No, I have never dabbled in analytic philosophy (whatever that is), but I have read philosophy on my own time. In almost every case, one’s formal education investment is better made studying things that cannot be easily self taught. Not only can you self-teach philsosphy, but by doing so you will not be subject to the liberal indoctrination of the professors.
While there’s certainly something to be said for the amateur, it’s not really a replacement. Deciding to be a lawyer and read philosophy in your spare time is basically deciding not to be a scholar — which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it would be bad if all Catholics did that.
In the first place, I’m rather bemused by your claim that philosophy can be “easily self-taught.” If my students are any indication, most people have a lot of trouble making heads or tails of philosophy even when they have a competent teacher to help them. And come on, even Aristotle had a teacher to get him started. But seriously, it’s pretty darn tough for a normal person to just sit down and read, say, Wittgenstein, and get much out of it. The same is true for someone like Dante, or Faulkner, or a slew of other brilliant writers. Maybe you’re just unusually brilliant, but most people need to be trained to read well, and to think and write critically. This involves, among other things, criticism from other intelligent people, and the opportunity to ask questions of people who know more than you. And it’s also good to have people with whom to discuss your ideas. Scholars need these things; this is why universities were organized to begin with.
Another factor is time. After you select your revenue-producing career and start making money, you probably won’t have a lot of outside time to devote to these “touchy-feely subjects.” A serious scholarly project (say, doing your own translation of the Summa) is extremely time-consuming. You can’t do it in the hour between the kids’ bedtime and yours, or in the down time on Sunday afternoons. But see, we want some people to do stuff like that, and we don’t want all those people to be liberals and modernists. So somebody’s got to go to grad school.
By the way, if philosophy can be self=taught, what can’t be? Save perhaps for the sort of practical skill that literally needs to be learned through physical demonstration (i.e. dancing or auto body repair), I can hardly think of any subject that would be more difficult to really learn on one’s own. Business or law would surely be much easier… and note that professionals in these fields were training themselves for centuries, whereas schools of philosophy have existed since, well, ancient Greece at the latest.
I think going to graduate school for these “touchy feely” degrees can be highly irresponsible for Catholic laymen.
Traditionally, these fields were almost always the realms of the religious — so these are the men and women who should be translating the Summa and the other such things.
Why should your family be living on raman noodles, just so you can pursue your medieval Arabic literature degree or some other such thing?
I suppose if you have no family and are committed to the single state or if you are independently wealthy, then there is no real danger in pursuing whatever degree you want.
Regarding “self-teaching” – the fields such as law, medicine, business, government or military service are self-regulating professions that require aspirants to learn and adhere to certain standards, customs, ethics, and practices. These things cannot be self-taught. And even if they could be self-taught, the professional organizations have a responsibility to control access to only qualified members.
I don’t want my taxes done, or a triple-bypass done, or an Apache helicopter, armed with hellfire missiles, flown, by self-taught hacks.
“I suppose if you have no family and are committed to the single state or if you are independently wealthy, then there is no real danger in pursuing whatever degree you want.”
First, my own field, classics, is not touchy-feely. Secondly, I am single, but not “committed to the single state.” You do realize that many grad students eventually get jobs in academia, and that the pay there is enough to raise a family on, right? I don’t know any professors who eat ramen noodles. Heck, I don’t eat that garbage.
“I think going to graduate school for these “touchy feely” degrees can be highly irresponsible for Catholic laymen.”
Theology, classics, and philosophy are not intrinsically “touchy-feely.” Back in the “good old days” when “only the religious learned them,” I’m sure you wouldn’t call them touch-feely. I realize you’re picking up these terms from someone else’s comments, but enough is enough. Sociology (for the most part), women’s studies, queer studies, literary theory — *those* are the touchy-feely subjects. They simply should be eradicated.
As for the claim, I think joinging the military “can be” highly irresponsible. So can becoming a lawyer, an accountant, a banker, etc. “Can be” just admits possibility. Given particular circumstances, virtually anything “could be” highly irresponsible.
As for the substance of the claim, yes, the majority of people should pursue a revenue-oriented career track. A nation or economy of academics could not exist. Only a minority of people should get jobs in the liberal arts, I think, as the liberal arts are not designed to support people. But some people should be teaching them, as they are worthwhile. Of course, having religious teach them would have the benefit of driving down the costs of university education.
Certainly, I think that theology should be the domain of folks in clerical collars. And I wish that the majority of my professors at Marquette had been Jesuits, instead of just one (out of maybe twenty different profs I had, only one Jesuit?!).
Most Academic fields, if pursued in a truly scholarly manner, are NOT touchy-feely at all; and as TP says, those that are touchy-feely should be eradicated.
Is my friend JSP really suggesting that what we need are more priests who are touchy-feely? I can’t think so!
I think, sir, you are not thinking about this enough. If a study is worth pursuing, then its worth having some laymen pursue; if it’s not worth pursuing, then why should clerics waste their time in it? Your remarks are implicitly critical of the clerical state (it’s for people who do “useless” labors, who can’t be “helpful” to society). And if liberal study is only for clerics, is it only for clerics that it is being preserved? Modern market economies and contemporary technology have provided the possibility of true leisure to a larger number of men than at any time previous in history. The liberal arts are, following Pieper, the study of the right ordering of leisure. As TP says, it’s only for the few to teach and profess the full-time study of such things; but the leisurely pursuit of them is the proper ordering of what time is not spent in labor, familial duty, or prayer. To be sure, when we have again a surfeit of clerics, it were well that they should fill the scholarly ranks again; but that time is not near, and until then it is not only permissible, but vital, that Catholics of good faith and sound mind hold such positions that are so vital to the formation of young minds and to the direction of elite opinion.
As a coda: I understand that JSP’s concern is with making sure a Catholic man provides well for his family, and with that concern I do concur; but JRR Tolkein, inter alia, provided for his family well as a scholar; for those who _can_ “make it” as professional scholars, such a job is no poor place for fathers.
“Regarding “self-teaching” – the fields such as law, medicine, business, government or military service are self-regulating professions that require aspirants to learn and adhere to certain standards, customs, ethics, and practices. These things cannot be self-taught.”
Business degrees are a relatively recent innovation, and “reading for the law” (i.e. training yourself to be a lawyer) used to be possible in most states, and in a few still is. That’s what Abraham Lincoln did. Of course these professions have standards, customs, etc., but why couldn’t such things be learned from books? I realize that the system doesn’t allow for self-teaching these days, which on the whole is probably good (though I wish we did more to formally distinguish programs like that — which are essentially trade schools — from the liberal arts, which are the traditional concern of the university.) But there’s a lot more historical precedent for self-teaching those subjects than there is for self-teaching philosophy, which was the point I wanted to make to Eodsix.
I’m in favor, at least theoretically, of priests and religious being academics, though I would wait until we have more of them before beating that drum too hard. At the moment, the highest priority is to make sure the faithful have recourse to the sacraments. Even if we had lots of priests, though, there’s no historical precedent for your plan of leaving the liberal arts entirely to priests and religious. Even in the high Middle Ages, there were laymen doing philosophy. Everyone here is agreeing that we can’t have everybody doing this, but as someone who was myself fed and clothed on a professor’s salary, I can say that it works out well for some.
Actually, you might be interested to know that my own father left a stable and lucrative job and went into academia mainly because he thought it would be better for his family. He had three children already and would eventually have two more, and we had a few lean years just after the switch, but I have absolutely no doubt that he made the right choice for all of us. As a lawyer, he was coming home after 9 most nights, working weekends, and being sent out of town on a regular basis. We barely saw him. As an academic, he could spend virtually every evening and weekend with his wife and children, and his schedule was flexible enough to plan family vacations, to take us to school on his way to work in the mornings, and to be available for school plays or soccer games. Families need more than just money, and an academic job, if you can get one, can be fairly ideal for a parent.
“Traditionally, these fields were almost always the realms of the religious — so these are the men and women who should be translating the Summa and the other such things.”
Apply this logic universally: “Traditionally, military opposition to Mohammedans was almost always the realm of military orders and of men on Crusade — so these are the men who should be resisting jihad and other such things. It can be highly irresponsble for a lay man, without the crusader’s cross, serving in the national military of a non-confessional, secular state, to resist Mohammedan jihad.”
I’m sure that you’d like military orders and Crusades to come back — so would I. I’d like it for all universities to be commissioned and “censored” by the Church, including state universities and Cornell. I’d like it for teaching orders to come back, and for there to be more clerics teaching theology at Catholic universities. I’d like theology to be the acknowledged queen of the sciences (and recognized as a science, not as “touchy-feely”), with philosophy as her handmaid. But that won’t happen for awhile, it certainly won’t happen if Catholics intentionally refuse to obtain graduate degrees, and when it does happen it won’t require that theolog, philosophy, and literature, etc., be the sole pursuit of the celibate and the independently wealthy.
“Sociology (for the most part)”
In my experience and judgment, that is. Of course, some people do pursue it seriously and without an agenda. It’s more scientific than what literary theory (as opposed to literary criticism per se) has become.
Those of us who work on medieval/renaissance music (or art, or architecture) are in a lucky position. Most of the raw material is unambiguously Catholic, and there’s no real taboo against studying it as such. I’m in my fifth year on the Duke music faculty, and I’ve found the classroom and research workshop to be much more open to the traditional Christian arts than the local church ever will be.
This can result in some cruel ironies. Our students devour Gregorian chant, Fra Angelico, and Chartres Cathedral in their classes. Then they go to the Newman center or local parish and are given Marty Haugen, felt banners, and thinly disguised lecture halls. Many of them simply stop going to Mass once the other shoe has dropped.
I’m a professor; this list is a useful resource that I will pass on to students.
It’s definitely true that in the humanities the historical period is a good way to be able to focus on the questions/answers one wants, and also have some respectability within the discipline (as a scholar, knowledgeable of texts).
It’s not so important that the material one studies be Catholic as such, but rooted in classical principles and imbued with a natural law ‘worldview’ (so Greece and Rome).
It could be good to have a list of “getting a job” and “getting tenure” tips as well, Clara…
It is interesting to note, in the arguments for laymen obtaining advanced degrees, that education levels in general is shifting from the secondary to the doctoral. I don’t know what students are taught from grades 7-12, but faith- and philosophy-wise, it is not as much as it used to be. Ditto for Latin and Greek. The simplest proof of the watering down of education is an older Catholic textbook- Voyages in English, for example, or the St. Joseph’s Baltimore Catechism- or a secular one- Chase and Phillips Greek Textbook- were intended for pre-secondary use, yet most high school students would struggle to master what is contained within. I used Chase and Phillips as an undergraduate!
In the absence of solid religious education in high schools, many Catholics learn about salvation history or moral theology as undergraduates- to a limited degree, depending, of course, which university they attend. Same with any philosophy at all.
Jesuit high schools, for example, used to provide the kind of introductory theological, philosophical or language courses that are now neglected in high school.
So what I’m trying to get at is this- if high school education isn’t what it used to be, and undergraduate education is only sometimes what it used to be, then it is not difficult to see why Catholics who want any immersion in theology or philosophy turn to graduate studies. Such mastery simply isn’t provided at lower levels anymore.
If we were to see a return to Catholic traditions of teaching in the high school classroom, then perhaps graduate school would be less necessary. But I don’t see that return happening any time soon.
Better to get another degree than remain in a philosophical or theological fog.
Thanks for that helpful post, Clara. You might want to distinguish choosing to go to graduate school from choosing to become an academic. For the former, if undertaken for the sake of education, masters programs can make a lot of sense. For the latter, a lot more has to be taken into account - including the things you helpfully discuss. I have a few to add. One is that being an academic is important; it means you are involved in a central institution for the shaping of culture. so there are no doubts about whether or not it is a worthwhile thing for a Catholic to do. The fact that Catholics are generally anti-intellectual and think that scholarship proper is a waste of time - and that the use of higher education is to provide a technical training that enables you to earn a good salary, while also giving you proper indoctrination in a superficial orthodoxy that will allegedly help you to protect your faith - is one of the reasons for the collapse of the Church and the ever more dominant secularisation of our culture. As a traditionalist Catholic academic I find that most of my Catholic friends think that what I do as a scholar is basically a waste of time, and that I should be doing something useful like writing rebuttals of Richard Dawkins.
Another thing is that you shouldn’t be too hopeful about getting a job at a Catholic institution, or have any expectations at all of such an institution if you get employed there. The ones that are not run by modernist apostates are all (as far as I know) faux-orthodox establishments where approval and advancement turns upon being one of the right group and being friends with the right people, not on scholarly achievement. (I would be grateful to know of exceptions to this generalisation.)
As for fields where Catholics can get along - some of the core areas of analytic philosophy, such as analytic metaphysics or philosophy of language, both have room for Catholics and have value in themselves; especially metaphysics. I think you could even make a mark in analytic philosophy of mind if you went about it the right way, as philosophers in that field are at least interested in arguments. You have to have peculiar interests and aptitudes for these areas though, such that if you have them you probably do not need this advice and are already interested.
Clara’s post lays out many important considerations. I hope it helps people.
Two points:
1. I feel for John L., and I find his claims to be interesting. Does anyone know of data at a more general level regarding Catholic attitudes to the value of cultivation by means of the sciences and liberal arts?
I bumped into a link to and consideration of survey data on American Catholics with respect to a range of attitudes and behaviors here:
http://turnabout.ath.cx:8000/node/1633
That those attitudes and behaviors basically track those of other Americans leads me to expect that the degree of American Catholic anti-intellectualism, whatever it may actually be, will not differ much from that of Americans generally, whatever it may actually be. That expectation will be disappointed if there turns out to be something special about anti-intellectualism as an outcome.
2. Not regarding John L.’s friends who I don’t know, but rather people like them who prefer technical training:
Regardless of one’s ultimate understanding of reality and stance toward it, whether that be traditional Catholic, aleatory materialist, hybrid gender queer cyborg sex radical, or some other position, using philistine return-on-investment considerations to decide on graduate school need not be considered anti-intellectual. Something else might be going on.
That technical training seeker might be so “intellectual” that he actually attended graduate school, got into debt like a true believer because he could not accept any other way forward, but now considers it to have been a mistake precisely because of the anti-intellectual environment he found there, years before ever becoming one of those anti-intellectual traditional Catholics himself. He might see it as a money thing now because of lowered expectations, and not because he is incapable of grasping the great thing the academy might be in another world path dependent upon a history that never was. He might not confuse his lowered expectations with the value of scholarship proper.
Not bitter.
An anti-intellectual might want technical training, but not all those who want technical training are anti-intellectual. That claim has not yet been made, I know. I just want to prevent it.
Quite a few interesting comments here. Afraid I was a little confused by this last one by “Britney Houston”, though I surmised that it’s from someone who had a bad experience with grad school. But I don’t think John L was trying to throw the book at people who get degrees so they can make more money. As long as it’s pursued instrumentally and with appropriate moderation, the goal of making money is a perfectly good one, and indeed a necessary one for those responsible for supporting a family. I think he just wanted to make the point that academics do worthwhile work, too, even if their profession doesn’t yield the sort of obvious practical benefits that you get from a butcher, baker or candlestick-maker.
The survey you sent didn’t seem to be very directly related to this discussion; it just says that Catholics have become “mainstream” in general, so you assume that they’re not any more anti-intellectual than the rest of the population. But when we talk about Catholics on this site, we sometimes basically mean “orthodox Catholics” or “traditional Catholics” (that being the sort of crowd that mainly comes here.) Lots of people self-identify as Catholic, including many who basically don’t even go to Mass, but I don’t think that’s the group John L was primarily thinking about. And that sort isn’t likely to help much in halting the advance of modernism in the Academy. Among traditional Catholics, I think there is sometimes an anti-intellectual bias; people don’t trust that university jobs are really worthwhile work. Anyway, that seems to have been his concern, and we see a little of it on this same thread, i.e. in the references to “touchy feely subjects.”
By the way, do you mind telling us, John L: what do you do, exactly? You seem to have fairly definite opinions about the state of philosophy these days, which makes me curious. Do you really think an orthodox Catholic could make it as a philosopher of mind?
Finally, I think the anonymous professor and Andreas are quite right that turning to history (not necessarily in history departments per se, but anything to do with the medieval period, ancient Greece, the Roman Empire etc. is likely to give you some wiggle room) is a good strategy for a Catholic. And, Anon, I’ll be glad to write up some tips on finding an academic job as a Catholic… as soon as I have some. Haven’t really cracked that nut yet. :)
Right now I teach theology, but I’ve studied and taught philosophy in the past, and done a postdoc at St. Andrews that was basically philosophical in nature. I don’t think it would be totally impossible for an orthodox Catholic to make it in philosophy of mind, but it would admittedly be very difficult. You’d have to get a job by publishing something that attacked some popular current theory in a successful way, without tipping your hand too much about what you thought yourself. You could however I think get in to the same area in a more oblique way, by specialising in the philosophy of language and looking at questions about content and reference - which to a great extent amount to questions about the nature of thought, which in turn amount to questions about what the mind is. Looking at the issue of (say) content externalism and the arguments for and against it is crucial for the philosophy of mind - and a lot of the discussion in this area, while often driven by the effort to promote physicalism, does not actually require it to be presupposed as a basic premise. It’s more interesting than standard philosophy of mind as well.
I don’t think one should go to college,
because it is near occasion of sin–not only for the faith but also for purity (and I don’t mean fornication–I mean just consenting to bad thoughts and self-abuse.)