Flourishing in the Academy: Complicity and Compromise
From the first week of graduate school, my friend Richie Kim and I were inseparable. People thought we were cliquish or dating. Neither was true. We were accused of thinking we were too cool for school. That might not have been far from the truth. Richie and I were an unlikely pair—he, a well-dressed, baseball-loving, club-hopping Kantian; I, a slightly disheveled, bespectacled, bookish empiricist. And, yet, our senses of humor existed on the same wavelength, one inaudible to our classmates. But something far deeper anchored our bond. We were both first-generation students and the only two racial minorities in our cohort. When Richie would tell me about his complicated family life, I was not taken aback. I too had stories to tell. When I would roll my eyes at a question during the colloquium, I knew that when I looked up, Richie would be smirking with me. Our friendship was a safe space from an academic world that we both wanted to succeed in but which neither of us wanted to belong in. This is the paradox for so many first-generation and working-class students. Academic institutions are social institutions. Our success depends not just on our good work but on the approval, support, and acceptance of those who command the classrooms and seminar rooms. And, yet, for people like Richie and me, that social world feels foreign, sometimes hostile, and often kind of dull. We are caught between wanting to gain the approval of those who set the terms and suspecting that their approval means that we have turned into precisely the people we do not want to be.
Jennifer Morton is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
This contribution is an abridged version of a piece which was previously published in the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, edited by Arianna Falbo and Heather Stewart. Please find the full version of Morton’s paper here.
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6 Though as I argued in “The Miseducation of the Elite,” Journal of Political Philosophy (2019), the way in which this is carried out is often diversity-undermining rather than diversity-amplifying.
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8 Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why It Pays to Be Privileged (Policy Press, 2020).
9 G. A. Cohen, Paradoxes of Conviction. If You’re An Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 7–19.
10 Kristie Dotson, “How Is This Paper Philosophy?” Comparative Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2013): 3–29.
11 Sukaina Hirji, “Oppressive Double Binds.” Ethics, forthcoming.
12 Harry Brighouse, “Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You’re Lucky),” Dædalus 148, no. 4 (2019): 14–28. 13.
13 Robin Zheng, “What Is My Role in Changing the System? A New Model of Responsibility for Structural Injustice,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21, no. 4 (2018): 869–85.
Published 2 Dec 2024
