Hello Bitch Persons
 

A belated welcome to anyone coming here from Bitch PhD. I thought I'd take this opportunity to sum up my relationship to the academy.

1. I've always had an obsession with scholarship, but a combination of the vicissitudes of life,  my  personal weaknesses, and certain aversions I feel kept me from going to grad school. I am presently retired and trying to do scholarly work outside the university, using the internet as my way of slipping past the gatekeepers.

2. I think that the liberal arts are in crisis. A liberal arts B.A. might be intrinsically a nice thing, but it's probably not worth going in debt for unless you plan on professional schooling later. Many in teaching, including the adjuncts but not only them, are dissatisfied with their lot. (As "Zizka", I spent many months on the late lamented Invisible Adjunct site, and IA has my best wishes wherever she may be). The system seems to work best for a thin layer of research PhD's with small or no teaching loads at the best schools. I have no animus against PhD's and professors per se -- though I do think that Ivy League wunderkinder have too much weight in the present Democratic party, and should be balanced by people with broader life experience.

3. I think that professionalization via paradigm-enforcement has had a very negative effect on the humanities and the social sciences. I would hope for a broader, opener, more engaged, more generalist, more imaginative, and more constructive discourse. My role models include Montaigne, John Dewey, and Nietzsche. I feel that disciplinary narrowing has been especially harmful in analytic philosophy, as you can read elsewhere, but postmodernism and "theory" often seem just as bad.

Many thanks, B.P.! (Comments are invited).