Daily Nous / Justin Weinberg

By Susan Haack: Looking back over my fifty-plus years in the academy I realize that (...) I have always been something of a misfit. For one thing, I never quite fitted in socially. (...) No one in my family had ever been to university; my accent betrayed my lower-middle-class origins; I hadn’t, like most of my classmates, attended a private school; and I hadn’t been well-prepared for the level of work expected of me. I didn’t even know what the meals were called—what I had grown up calling “dinner” was “lunch,” and what I had grown up calling “tea” was “dinner.” (...) But it wasn’t until many years later that I understood the extent to which Oxford was about “contacts” and pedigree rather than education. (...) Moreover, I have learned over the years that I am temperamentally resistant to bandwagons, philosophical and otherwise; hopeless at “networking,” the tit-for-tat exchange of academic favors, “going along to get along,” and at self-promotion; that I have very low tolerance for meetings where nothing I say ever makes any difference to what happens; and that I am unmoved by the kind of institutional loyalty that apparently enables many to believe in the wonderfulness of “our” students or “our” department or “our” school or “our” university simply because they’re ours. (...) And I am, frankly, repelled by the grubby scrambling after those wretched “rankings” that is now so common in philosophy departments. In short, I’ve never been any good at academic politicking, in any of its myriad forms. And on top of all this, I have the deplorable habit of saying what I mean, with neither talent for nor in clination to fudge over disagreements or muffle criticism with flattering tact, and an infuriating way of seeing the funny side of philosophers’ egregiously absurd or outrageously pretentious claims (...) (In "Not One of the Boys: Memoir of an Academic Misfit")