On Moving Tables

Divide academic reputation up into three types. There is prestige attached to position -- the department one works for, the career stage one is at, whether one has a named chair, just in general the prestige attached to occupying a role. There is prestige attached to achievement -- here I mean prestige attached to publishing, and especially in certain venues, and being cited, or winning awards, or having established priority on some novel discovery of interest, or being known to have given a talk at conferences of sufficiently high standing, etc. Then there is prestige attached to persona -- this one is a bit harder to succinctly summarise with examples, but it happens that one can get a general reputation for skill or brilliance that precedes one's publications or which is not especially attached to any office one holds. An unpublished grad student in a lowly department can none the less have a high reputation if there is a "buzz" around them, and I mean the prestige attached to persona to pick out whatever makes this possible.--"The Perception of Merit" @The Sooty Empiric

Prompted by this blog post by Daniel Hicks (congrats!) [HT Dailynous], Bright writes about the intersectional uncertainty caused by the interaction of three kinds of prestige.* The whole post is worth reading (including its judicious quotations from Auden). I agree with his phenomenology, but I want to start with a nitpick. I have not yet encountered the third type, "the buzz" surrounding an unpublished grad student in a lowly department. And while it is dangerous to infer from personal experience, I seriously doubt this phenomenon exist.

Of course, I am not denying that buzz around a grad student exists. I have encountered such (the "boy wonder") buzz around the unpublished grad student in a prestigious department (with prestigious supervisors, etc.) And for all the changes in the profession--this phenomenon still exists. Such boy-wonder buzz is a joint construction of the person principally involved and the folk pushing it (by pushing it, we don't need to think of illicit stuff; I just mean invitations to high profile workshops, attendance at the parallel session, inviting buddies to come along, offers to co-author, etc.) So, the buzz surrounding the grad student is not really prestige of the person--it requires skilled anointing by others.

Sometimes such anointing is not very subtle. I have discussed the miserable time I have had on the job-market (2001-2005). The market then was in some senses less brutal -- there were (recall) fewer expectations about publication --, but I did experience being invisible at the smoker, being told at a ball-room interview that the interview was only a courtesy to one of my supervisors, being rejected while being the inside candidate, the cancellation of one of two APA interviews a week before the convention (with the request if I "could remain on standby"), and a number of other indignities (recall here and here). Don't cry for me. 

During this miserable run, my lovely and kind senior colleague Dennis Des Chene (later we became partners in blogging crimes) convinced me to present a paper in a workshop on the emotions he was hosting at WashU. I was very ambivalent about this because I was depressed about being passed over for a job in the department (and did not want to present in front of the folks who had just rejected me for undoubtedly sensible reasons), and the early word after the APA was not promising. I was reflecting primarily on my career options outside academia. But when it rains it pours. As Spring progressed, I was suddenly the back up candidate in multiple tenure track searches. By the time the conference came around, and as the top picks settled on their dream jobs, I started to receive multiple tenure track offers at excellent departments and attractive grants for post-doc positions. When Dennis introduced my talk, he made a point of listing my multiple job possibilities. 

I'll never forget the whatitislike of what followed next. During the subsequent meals I went from the side tables to the main table at the workshop. (It was not a big conference so the effect is undoubtedly exaggerated in my memory.) From being barely noticed, I was suddenly of interest to (ahh) my peers. I recall being quite astonished about this. In the small universe of early modern, I had been anointed. To be sure, at that point I had multiple publications -- precisely because I did not  get a tt job out of graduate school I started publishing, a lot --, and I had landed a job at a very good department. So, it's not like I will ever know what it's like to have a boy-wonder buzz. (I always imagine that such boy-wonders fail to be astonished at attention.)   

My response to this was a weird mixture of gratification and suspicion. I was self-aware enough to recognize that with a few more bad breaks I was going to leave the profession; and that I was no better a philosopher in the Spring of 2005 than in the Fall of 2004. I had been very invisible at all the APAs--to this day I cherish the two minutes of interest by John Perry in my work, while we were both waiting in line at a hotel Starbucks. 

Bright notes correctly that "the quest for prestige is miserable - in our hearts we know we want the wrong thing." But he does not note it is also a bad delusion. Our profession has extremely steep prestige hierarchies. This means prestige is an extremely scarce good. Only a few will come close "to be loved alone," but the rest of us not.  While this state of affairs may produce social benefits, and undoubtedly generates some goods for those at the very top of those prestige hierarchies (although near the top, the peaks undoubtedly stand out more vividly and, so, annoyingly), participation in this professional state of affairs is irrational for the individuals involved. And yet those who claim to embrace the love of wisdom, reconcile their professional fates, like hamsters in a running wheel, to it.

*I am unsure that 'prestige = academic reputation' is true but let's leave that aside.

 

 

 

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[Howard]

On a distant shore of your stretch of land, you could imagine a training analyst or resident in psychiatry who dazzles with brilliance in interpretations and handling tough cases, but remains a mere training analyst