I have chronicled only a small portion of a percentage of the shit I have gotten, and still get, for my education.  I don’t like talking about it because one of my worst (and probably unfounded) fears is for people to start believing that I define myself by three letters or — even worse still — that I look down on other people because of it.

But, nonetheless, and in case you were wondering:

Mean-spirited teasing toward too-educated people marks you as resentful, jealous,petty and, well, stupid. Because if you don’t realize how jealous and petty this kind of shit makes you look, you must be stupid.  Or you don’t care.  And everyone I’ve met who cares that little about being an asshole has also been, one and all, stupid.

This includes:

“You [sic] got a PhD, and  you can’t XXX.”

(Actually, I can XXX, and I can do it while reading Kant.  Can you?)

“All that education and XXX.”

(Fuck you. You didn’t pay for it or help me or, if you’re talking like this, support me. Once again: fuck you.)

“Well, I don’t have a PhD, so XXX.”

(Am I supposed to feel badly that I traded my 20s, a large part of my sanity and a student loan debt that could literally buy a house to get a PhD I thought I needed for a career I thought I wanted to pursue forever?  What’s it got to do with anyone else that I need to hear what people feel about it so fucking much?)

“What, are you stuck-up now that you’re a Doctor?”

(No. Are you insecure now?)

“[Perceived shortcoming of mine] And you’re a Doctor?!”

(Well, shit, I was busy studying philosophy and shit, not learning to XXX. Silly me. I guess I got into the wrong fucking program.)

In conclusion, there is nothing magical about a PhD — except it’s magical ability to often turn “Doctors” into assholes and — more often, I’ve found, unexpectedly — to turn everyone around said Doctors into assholes.

And that is all I have to say about that.

P.S. Call me “Doctor” please. : )

1) Be careful who you’re nice to.  You never know who’s on a grant committee.  That person you blew off two autumns ago might be the deciding vote on your so-so grant application.

2) There really will be some stickler who judges you for typos, formatting errors (everyone knows by now that Word 2007 does to spacing) and spelling mistakes.

3) The quality of your writing really does matter.  Maybe there is no real connection between the ability to produce serious, quality, formal writing and completing a proposed project.  But there sure is the implicit perception.  “Don’t fun that.  He can’t even use a thesaurus.”  There’s worse, too.

4) It does make a difference if you staple, paperclip, merely stack or use a report cover.  Not connecting  your papers at all makes readers find the beginning and end of your application and might have them annoyed when they start reading it.

5) BE CONCISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

6) When asked for a very short statement about your project, don’t just paste your opening two sentences.

7) Don’t call yourself “visionary” in the third person when the application has your signature on it.

8) Don’t list the grant criteria, say that your project fulfills them all, and then not say how or why.

9) Shorthand and abbreviations are unwelcome in an essay that is asking for thousands of dollars.

10) Realize that when you ask for mos of a grant for salary (“consulting”) for yourself when you already work 40 hours a week and will do all the grant work during those 40 hours, that’s called stealing.  You will get rejected, maybe laughed at.  And, you know, people remember you the following year.

Don’t ask me for positive recommendations, or how to actually get a grant.  Sheesh.  If I could do that, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now.  I get paid under a grant, but I didn’t apply for it.

I was also struck by how I was reading them: as interesting bits of information.  Not wisdom — interesting paragraphs.  I thought that, perhaps, it was the text.  Maybe it’s not as awesome as I thought.  But I’ve noticed in recent months and years that I seem to gloss over even my favorites like Thoreau, the Buddha, Emerson, Nietzsche, et al. Am I getting dense?  I don’t think so — though that is certainly a possibility, and there are certainly people who would say so.  (Ahem.)  I suspect that this is a result of studying philosophy for my entire adult life.

On the one hand, I think I might be somewhat numb to wisdom literature!  I’ve read so many wise things that other people have written and acted on so little of it that it’s all just a bunch of clever words most of the time.  When Aurelius reminds us that stupid people act stupidly and that we waste time and energy being upset about it, I still get upset when selfish people act that way.  How else do selfish people act?  Selfishly!

On the other hand, my philosophical undertakings have largely been academic ones.  By that I mean that I also read and have read immense amounts of bullshit.  We don’t act on philosophy; we write about it! And then we read about it and then write about that.  And then read that and write about what’s been written about, etc.  I think a part of me suspects that all wisdom and philosophy that we can read or learn from other people is just bullshit.

Am I claiming that a piece of philosophy that no one acts on is bullshit?  Yes.  Read some of my graduate papers that pissed off some of my professors (I was, after all, attacking their profession).  I’ve felt that way for a long time, and that’s a large part of the reason I decided not to pursue a career in academic philosophy. Why, then, did I pursue a doctorate?  I don’t know.  You imagine that you might be a different case, that you can keep your integrity and still gitterdunn.  Maybe I thought I would feel differently or that I might be wrong.  Maybe I was just too stupid and stubborn to stop.  That’s certainly the case now, where I’m finishing my PhD just to finish it and justify my time, energy and debt. (And, for the record, I got offered a spot teaching my own class at the exact school I always dreamed of teaching at just after my dissertation prospectus defense.  So, ahem, for the record, I didn’t simply wimp out of the search for a job.  I might have hurt the feelings of someone I care about who was looking out for me, too. I don’t know if I ever mentioned this.)

What’s my point?  I don’t know.  Maybe that the bullshit that gets forced on people in the academic discipline of philosophy poisons us against actually acting in a wiser fashion because the bullshit gets mixed in with the “real” wisdom (assuming that some of philosophy is actually wisdom literature, which I think is true).  I have known tons and tons of philosophers, and only a scant few of them acted like wiser people for their study of philosophy.  More likely, we just turn into snarky smartasses.  I wish I could count myself among the people who have studied philosophy and thereby act wiser for it.  Maybe it’s not philosophy.  Maybe it’s me.  Maybe it’s a flaw in the “type” of person who chooses to study philosophy for a living, since so few of us do anything about philosophy.  But something’s amiss.