John Ehrett is a former student of mine from Patrick Henry College, which gave him a first-class classical education that got him into law school at Yale. Now he works at a big D.C. law firm. He is also all over the internet–writing about Christianity and culture, Lutheranism, political theory–on many different forums, including for awhile Patheos.
He recently wrote a post for Mere Orthodoxy entitled How to Have a Day Job and an Intellectual Life. He tells about many conversations he has had with twenty-somethings who are agonizing about their career paths. They are considering going into law or other professions, but because they are interested in big ideas and using their minds, they think they need to go into academia. John writes:
Here’s the problem: somewhere along the way, smart young people seriously interested in relatively unmarketable ideas—in theology, philosophy, political theory, or what have you—have gotten the message that the only viable career path for them is academia.
The further problem, as he explains, is “how dire the job market is for new academics.” He goes on to argue that you don’t have to be a college professor to be an intellectual. Indeed, in some ways a non-academic career can help you be an intellectual.
For one thing, having a career that will earn you more money than you can make as an academic is not to be despised. “You can be very satisfied having a job that pays the bills, that allows you to have a family, and you can always do your reading and writing on the side.” He goes on to suggest ways of organizing and disciplining oneself so that the day job can enable the life of the mind. Read what John has to say about that. I just want to focus on two points that he brings up.
First, academia is not necessarily all that intellectual anymore. The teaching load, service responsibilities, and bureaucracy take up a lot of time, leaving less room to pursue intellectual interests. More to the point, academia has become highly specialized, so that research that contributes to your career has to be narrowly focused. Attention to “big ideas,” which is what most young thinkers care about, won’t get you very far in today’s academic world.
I would add another factor: Much of the dominant academic worldview today, especially in the humanities, is actually anti-intellectual. If you reject objective reason, believe truth is relative, reduce culture to politics, assume reality is just a subjective construction, and think “the true, the good, and the beautiful” are just masks for the imposition of oppressive power, then there is not much point to the life of the mind. All you can do is “critique” existing ideas, traditional institutions, and acclaimed authors to unveil their hidden evil. But that is a purely negative exercise. Once you do that, anything positive you might “construct” will be subject to the same critique. And if you go into academia because you love Shakespeare or the Federalist Papers or American history or classical philosophy, you need to know that many graduate programs will try to show you how bad they are.
Let me back off a bit. Academia doesn’t have to be this way. I have had a long, productive, and happy academic career. When I went to grad school, this kind of anti-intellectualism was just getting started, so I could see it coming. I had a good grounding in traditional scholarship and actually made my mark by challenging the postmodernist wave.
More importantly, I was a “letters major” as an undergraduate–that is, a classical liberal arts degree consisting of substantial coursework in literature, philosophy, and history, plus a classical and a modern language–and I used that to my advantage in graduate school. Everyone else in my cohort had a narrow specialty in literature, but I was able to bring to bear history and philosophy, which set me apart and let me make some original contributions to the field.
Also, after a stint teaching at a state college, I went into Christian higher education. This was liberating. And because the schools I taught in were liberal arts colleges that didn’t care all that much about publishing, I was free to pursue my own interests: Christianity and literature, which expanded to Christianity and the arts, which expanded to Christianity and culture, which expanded to Lutheran theology and culture, and on and on.
So an academic vocation is still a viable option for young Christians who would like to pursue the life of the mind. Big graduate-degree granting universities nearly always have traditional scholars on their faculty. You just need to identify them and learn to work with them. Also, I have great hope for Christian colleges to preserve learning through today’s dark age, as the Christian church did in the first dark age when the Vandals and other barbarians ruled supreme. As someone who rose through the academic ranks to provost–an administrator concerned with hiring–I can say that while the job market is indeed “dire,” in the niche of Christian universities we were always on the lookout for committed Christians with graduate degrees who could serve on our faculty.
Back to John’s essay. . . He concedes that non-academic jobs that are intellectually demanding create challenges of their own. Sometimes, after a long day of mental labor at the law-firm, all you want to do when you get home is just watch TV. He has suggestions for that, but he observes, “Countless thinkers have produced brilliant work while working jobs that have nothing to do with their creative interests.” Very true! Wallace Stevens sold insurance. T. S. Eliot worked in a bank. A whole slew of great authors worked as collectors of excise taxes and customs fees, beginning way back with Geoffrey Chaucer, through the 18th century Scottish poet Robert Burns, through the 19th century American novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.
And, of course, clergy. Part of the genius of the Christian church was to require its ministers to be well-educated. That put an intellectual in every village. Typically, the best-educated man in the parish would be the pastor, someone the village atheist would be hard-pressed to argue with.
Non-intellectual seeming jobs can be quite conducive to the life of the mind. One of the most intellectual people I have known was my Uncle Charles. He was a farmer. His house, which he designed and built himself, had multiple levels, and the entire stair well was lined with bookshelves crammed to the rafters, literally, with books. Uncle Charles, who could fix his equipment when it went down, had well-formed opinions on just about everything. He was a true Renaissance man.
The brand new Luther Classical College, where I am a visiting professor, in addition to offering a B.A. that is good preparation for church work and other professions, has an agreement with the local vo-tech school in Casper, Wyoming, whereby students can learn to be an electrician or a mechanic, while also getting a Christian, Lutheran education in the classical liberal arts.
This is in line with Luther’s insistence that all Christians, no matter their trades or positions in life, deserve a liberal education. A corollary is that, whether or not they had that advantage, all Christians, in their study of God’s Word and their reflections on Christian doctrine, have a calling, to one degree or another, to be intellectuals.
Illustration: Rodin’s The Thinker,(1904), photograph by Todd Martin, via Flickr, CC by-NC 2.0
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