Don't Let Academia Stop You Being an Intellectual
22 Tips to Maintain an Independent Mind
Academia presents itself as the surefire path to an intellectual life.
But it ain’t necessarily so.
Academia often forces scholars to conform to prevailing ideas. Ph.D. students must study increasingly narrow topics. They are often diverted from attending to what interests them or is important to mankind. And hanging over their heads is the demand to secure one of the few and vanishing academic jobs.
This is no recipe for the intellectual life.
Given my own experiences in academia (two masters degrees, a couple years adjuncting, and five years of a Ph.D.), I can confirm that the pressures of academia are often at cross-purposes with the intellectual life.
Nevertheless, I persist in the belief that academia does not have to prevent you from becoming an intellectual.
So, in this post, I offer twenty-two (22) tips to maintain an independent mind amidst the demands of the ivory tower.
1. Resist specialization.
The stereotype is that academia forces people to narrowly specialize in a subfield of a subfield. This is unavoidable in the writing of a dissertation, but it is possible to resist in the cultivation of one’s own interests and abilities.
Insist on being a generalist. Learn things you are not required to learn. At least, try to be educated in all the major areas of your discipline.
2. Learn another discipline.
While the most efficient way to an academic career is to focus on a single discipline, this is not the path to being an intellectual. An intellectual must have a grasp of multiple disciplines and a sense of how they are related to one another.
I originally studied philosophy to have a neighboring discipline under my belt when I pursued my first love, theology. Then, when I entered the discipline of theology and heard a great number of falsehoods about philosophy, I was equipped to maintain an open mind and not to accept these dogmas.
Knowledge of other disciplines also helps in recognizing the limits of one’s own. Many fields cultivate a kind of chauvinism: Science praises itself while demeaning the humanities; critical theorists demean the sciences, while thinking themselves social revolutionaries; theology falsely claims to be the foundation of all other disciplines; and even social scientists look down on other soft sciences.
If you know something of another discipline, you recognize how much you would have to learn to know something beyond the field in which you specialize.
3. Read independently of your studies.
Many people in academic studies profess being unable to read books beyond their assigned readings. While study can be demanding, the intellectual simply must have a regime of independent reading. (A simple way to make time for this is to exercise judgment about which of your academic readings are really necessary, and how closely to read them. — Skimming is fine, as is skipping.)
Reading and writing motivated by your interests and intellectual aims will be the core of your intellectual life. You cannot delay in giving free rein to your mind.
During my masters of divinity, I read a great number of books of philosophy. I had an intellectual life independent of the seminary curriculum. During my masters of philosophy, I read a great number of books of theology, especially of theologians who had not been assigned at seminary: Brunner, Bonhoeffer, and Pannenberg. My own intellectual trajectory has been shaped, perhaps most, by my independent reading.
4. Read Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton
Academia is a steep status hierarchy. As a result, its incentive structures align perfectly with the pursuit of a place in that hierarchy and imperfectly with the pursuit of wisdom and attainment of knowledge.
If you want to secure a place in the hierarchy, academia has demands upon you 24/7. Publish or perish. Apply to dozens of high-ranked programs. Fraternize with high-status academics. Present at conferences. Cultivate academic recommendations. Write a killer dissertation. And so on.
But if you do all those things, you will fail to live an intellectual life. Honestly, you would have no time to do so, and you would be caught up in another pursuit, that of academic status. Academic status confers the appearance of being an intellectual, but it is an imperfect signifier of this reality.
Read Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety to reflect on your own desire for status and the danger of confusing intellectual excellence with academic status. (Or watch his TV series based on the book.)
5. Locate individuals who are less concerned with status.
Academia can feel too much like a dinner party in NYC or LA — you’re there to make a good impression, get in with the right people, impress others with your accomplishments.
If you’re to be free of status anxiety and pursue real intellectual excellence, you need to surround yourselves with others who are doing the same. Locate other academics who have an appropriate disdain for academic niceties and dogmas. Find the true intellectuals among the striving valedictorians.
The same goes for professors. One reason I click with my dissertation advisor is that he has sacrificed progress on the status hierarchy to pursue truth and to devote himself to his family. It is not unrelated that he doesn’t care about footnotes and does care about good philosophical arguments.
6. Find open-minded professors.
There are lots of dogmas among academics. Professors tend to be extremely open-minded in certain things, and close-minded about everything else. Academic philosophers, for instance, tend to be open to a wide variety of possible answers to philosophical questions. However, their political beliefs tend to be completely doctrinaire.
While you’re unlikely to find open-mindedness about absolutely everything, seek the open-mindedness that will allow you to pursue what you want to learn. My dissertation advisor, again, is very open-minded about philosophical questions, even if more settled on political and religious ones. No matter — I’m studying philosophy with him! He is more open-minded than many professors even on philosophical questions. This has given me freedom to explore questions in my studies without worrying about being penalized for some small inaccuracy.
7. Study with people you disagree with.
The coherentist model of thought suggests that you need to get the correct worldview before moving to exploring the details of that worldview. I criticized this model in my piece for American Reformer, “Having the World in View: An Alternative to Worldview.”
A realist model suggests that you encounter reality at the limits of your worldview. One way to encounter the limits of your worldview is to work together intellectually with someone who has a different worldview. If you find convergence with someone whose worldview differs radically from your own, there are great odds that you’ve encountered reality itself.
With my advisor, we find convergence on metaphysical realism and epistemological empiricism, in spite of our different worldviews, scientific agnostic, and Christian theist.
8. Study what you find interesting, not what is popular.
Given the pressures of academia, we can be tempted to focus on topics that are of interest to others, rather than to ourselves. If you’ve been cultivating your independent reading and thought as I suggested, you will have a sense of what you think is intellectually significant. Allow this to direct your studies, rather than what is academically popular.
This does not mean that you should disregard the interests of fellow academics. The best intellectual exchanges occur over topics of mutual interest. Finding an academic topic may require looking for a convergence between your independent interests and the topics of your academic field.
Still, there remains a distinction between switching from what interests you to what interests academia and finding the convergence between yours and their interests.
9. Marry. Your spouse will give you perspective and a value-hierarchy outside the academic one.
It is one thing to read a book, like Status Anxiety. It is another to be constantly reminded of the folly of the academic accounting of value by your life-partner. If you want to free yourself from one status hierarchy, you need to intersect with another hierarchy. And in its way, marriage and family are such an alternative hierarchy.
Academia doesn’t deserve your soul. There is nothing like a spouse to keep you from selling your soul to the ivory tower.
10. Take actions based on what will make you the best intellectual, not the most employable academic.
If you recognize that academic and intellectual are not-so-subtly distinct job-descriptions, you need to take sides. At various decision-points, the choice to be an intellectual above all else will require sacrificing something the academic hierarchy demands.
I’ve been subjected to pep-talks about how to succeed in academia. I’ve decided to tune them out more or less to, 1) be free of anxiety, and 2) write a great dissertation. I guess we’ll see whether those choices actually hamper my academic career.
Other times, a decision that feels an obvious step toward being an intellectual will seem like a step backwards academically. In such moments, you need to go with your gut. I can’t say that my two masters degrees in distinct academic fields helped me academically. (Though I’m glad I heeded the advice of a friend: “Don’t do three masters degrees.”) But they were formative and irreplaceable intellectually.
11. Write a dissertation on something you couldn’t study with your own resources.
If you’re independently minded, you may start to think, “Who needs academia at all?” And indeed, time and books can take you a long way. However, if academia is to play a role in your development as an intellectual, play to its strengths. In my case, I actually pivoted away from areas of philosophy that were more interesting and natural to me, namely, moral psychology and ethics.
I decided instead to write my dissertation on the area of philosophy I hated: philosophy of language. I thought that was boring and a distraction from talking about reality itself.
However, I also recognized 1) that it was one of the things analytic philosophers did best (analysis of language), and 2) that I found it really difficult to understand the philosophy of language on my own. It also helped that 3) I started to think that philosophy of language was secretly at the root of all philosophy. :)
Still to this day, I have the feeling that I am using academia to help me learn the area of philosophy that I could not study on my own.
12. Develop a career plan in case you don’t get an academic position.
While it’s easy to say you should disregard the demands of academia, disdain for the economic structure of intellectual life can be rather short-lived! If you want to act with abandon in your pursuit of an intellectual life, you’ll want to consider the possibilities of a non-academic career.
Roger Scruton describes his own trajectory from academia to independent ventures in his memoir Gentle Regrets. (Scruton writes, “It is impossible to be a philosopher in academia.”)
I have also been greatly helped by Justin Murphy’s online community Other Life and his flagship course Indie Thinkers (now “Indie Scholars”). Murphy has profiled many writers, intellectuals, and independent scholars over the years in his newsletter, Other Life. The fact is that many of them were not academics. Some held down day-jobs; some were well-to do. History has starving intellectuals as well as starving artists. Some found patrons.
Academia is not the only career path for the intellectual.
13. Read “The Ph.D. Octopus,” by William James, and “Literature and the Doctor’s Degree,” by Irving Babbitt.
The Ph.D. itself was never designed to produce well-rounded humanists and intellectuals. At the turn of the 20th century, both William James and Irving Babbitt bemoaned the rise of the Ph.D. in their respective essays. They spoke of a time when a master’s degree equipped one to teach at Harvard. They described the origin of the Ph.D. in the German research university with its specializing and narrow mentality.
Meditate on the mismatch between our system of academic training and the cultivation of an intellectual life. Approach the Ph.D., if you choose to do so, with appropriate distance and disdain.
14. When you’re ready, write for the public as well as for academics.
While I have been a long-time consumer of online blogs, I am glad I did not begin to write on the Internet much sooner than I did. The temptation is to spout-off about things you know little about, and to write things in one’s 20s one will later regret.
However, I am equally as glad that I have begun to write for the public and not only for the academy. The academic style is dry and stilted. The intellectual must cultivate a human voice, as well as to communicate graduate-level results in ordinary language (which many of us have forgotten how to speak).
Also, non-academic writing affords the opportunity to write in an integrative way, without respect for disciplinary boundaries and scholarly niceties. Academia can help to cultivate disciplined thought, but at some point, the scholar needs to simply tell us what he thinks.
15. Look for fruitful cross-pollination between popular writing and academic writing.
Now that you’ve cultivated an independent reading list and a medium of popular writing, it is time for your academic writing to feed into your independent, popular writing. Likewise, your popular writing and independent intellectual life should feed into your studies.
In my own case, I’ve made several attempts to translate my academic writing to a Substack audience, most recently “Do People’s Different Beliefs about God Mean They Worship Different Gods?” I am also interested to take material I originally wrote for Substack, beef it up, and turn it into academic papers, as I’ve begun to do with my series on faith and sexuality.
16. Live life, even while you study.
The demands of academia tempt one to study or otherwise focus on one’s academic career 24/7. However, if you succumb to this temptation, you will become less human.
This will obviously affect other areas of your life. Your love life and family life may suffer (or fail to exist). You may cease to enjoy hobbies or build friendships. You will lose sight of the main parts of life which are outside the ivory tower.
But you will also cease to be an intellectual. An intellectual is, as Emerson put it, Man Thinking. An intellectual takes in the fulness of human experience and sets his intellect to work on understanding and speaking the truth about it all. “Only so much do I know, as I have lived,” wrote Emerson.
There are many philosophical and theological questions I once took very seriously. I could have written a Ph.D. thesis on one of these, and many other people do. But life experience has taught me that these questions are not worth my time, or that they are side-shows, distracting us from the questions behind them.
There are many academic trajectories unworthy of an intellectual. Only life can teach you the difference.
17. Refuse unnecessary demands on your time.
In order to live life while an academic, you must refuse unnecessary demands on your time. Some demands are necessary. There are obligations essential to one’s livelihood, and requirements of academic progress.
But academia has a way of encouraging you to do extra things that you don’t need to do. Only by refusing these perceived demands can you maintain the time to focus on the real necessities of academic life, one’s studies and thesis/dissertation, and the living of life itself. If you do this, you will have less to list on your CV under “services to the profession.” But you will have more to offer as an independently-minded intellectual.
18. Find intellectual colleagues beyond your academic institution and beyond academia.
It is important to have know the range of kinds of people and not get siloed among academics. This is a part of living life and remaining fully human.
But you must also cultivate intellectual colleagues and interlocutors outside your field and outside academia. Man Thinking can be found in many walks. By speaking with open-minded and intelligent people outside academia, you remind yourself of the very purpose of intellectual life, to live, and to live an examined life.
19. Have a home study.
The academic can work with a laptop and an academic library. But the intellectual must have a private location in which to embody his individual intellectual life.
Why? I don’t exactly know. But I have a sense that having a place to work and books to reference separate from any academic institution is part of being an individual. You cannot be completely dependent on academic institutional life, and as a physical being, this independence must be manifested spatially.
20. Cultivate a personal library.
As to the purchasing of books, do not purchase every book that piques your interest. You do not need to recreate an academic library in your home collection. Rather, purchase books that are part of your personal canon.
After seminary, I found myself looking askance at many books on my shelf. Per academic requirements, I had purchased them, thinking also that they would help to form my personal library. But they did not belong in my personal canon, so they were useless. Many of them I knew I would never reference again.
Be selective about book purchases, but do purchase books that are part of your personal canon.
21. Don’t worry, but at least once you are in a PhD, do not worry again.
There are many stages of one’s academic career at which to experience worry. Getting into programs can be like roulette. You can always try to do one more thing to boost your CV, improve your grades, doctor your writing sample.
But here’s the thing: You cannot fundamentally control or change your location on the academic status hierarchy. By the time you are worrying, it really is too late.
This is even more true once you have entered a Ph.D. Many students continue to get caught up in their coursework and to worry about grades. The funny thing is, no one will ever look at the grades of a Ph.D. student. They do not matter. The only line that matters is that between having a Ph.D. and not having one.
This is true beyond the Ph.D. as well. While you can enter the rat race of “publish or perish,” if you ignore that entirely, you will still end up with a Ph.D. And that is the difference between someone who can be hired for must academic jobs and someone who cannot. There is no amount of hustle that can guarantee an academic position. The completion of a Ph.D. is the only thing that makes a concrete difference. Be content with that.
22. Do not conflate the role of an academic with that of an intellectual.
An academic is a member of a scholarly guild. His success as an academic is measured by what matters to the guild, including institutional prestige and publications. He will find his place in the status hierarchy based on this.
But the intellectual is measured by the truth, the depth, and the humanity of his thought. Academic success is no proxy for these. As a result, while the academic may be an intellectual, the intellectual need not be an academic.
If your aspiration is to be an academic through-and-through, perhaps a specialized researcher, that is a wonderful thing. Some people are just built to be research machines or practitioners of academic politics. More power to them.
But if your aspiration is to be an intellectual, don’t conflate the role of an academic with that of an intellectual. I, for instance, have long harbored the desire to be a theologian, that is, a certain species of intellectual. But it can be tempting to think that the way one does that is by getting a Ph.D. in theology and getting hired at a seminary or graduate school of theology. If this is how it is done, the path truly is narrow.
But the way to be an intellectual is to embody an intellectual ideal. The demands of academia do not ensure that one will embody that ideal. And the ideal can be realized apart from an academic position.
So if you’re not an academic, pursue the ideal of intellectual life. By so doing, you may become an intellectual.
And if you are an academic, do not despair. It is possible to navigate academia while remaining an intellectual.
But to do so, you must choose the road less traveled.
Some Questions for You
How have you experienced and navigated the conflict between academics and intellectual life?
Have you become an intellectual apart from academia?
Have you had to leave or distance yourself from academia in order to maintain your intellectual integrity?
Or have you discovered a convergence between the academic and the intellectual?
Let me know in the comments below.
In many ways this has been the advice I've followed for most of my life. Except I made the bad mistake of not seriously planning for an alternate career. I was able to land one anyway, which was lucky, because I think that in the end following this advice was ultimately part of the reason I didn't get a faculty job. (Above all, I was too much of a philosopher for the religionists and too much of a religionist for the philosophers.) I don't regret following this path, though - I see how for so many colleagues the faculty life is not what it was cracked up to be. Because I didn't have children, I've been able to keep pursuing my real interests on my own time - and the hardcore preparation that is a PhD has made me a lot better at doing so.
There is alot here that applies to the pastoral ministry as well.