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Juan Ersatzman's avatar

I hope this becomes the reality for philosophy, and I hope (as I suppose almost every grad student does) to be able to contribute to that kind of philosophical project. Years ago, when I was the director of admissions at a tiny, struggling Christian college, it became clear to me that our strength as an institution was that the employees and decision-makers collectively cared more about the mission of the institution than we did about perpetuating its existence. That's not to say we wouldn't have mourned the loss of the college if it had been forced to shut down, but we weren't prepared to undermine our purpose to stay open. If our work had become financially unsustainable because another, definitively better option had come along for our constituents, we would've shed a few tears for our beloved community, shrugged, and gotten more remunerative jobs in industry. It also became clear that our mission had to permeate the work we did to promote ourselves: we had to care about young people enough to tell them so if we thought they might have better options elsewhere, and only bought giveaway items we thought were useful and high quality.

Caring more about our mission than our own success worked in that context; I'm not sure how to do it in philosophy. I want to; I plan to, but it makes me sad, because I get the impression that this time, it'll mean a host of desk rejects (I mean, I don't know that I'm good enough to avoid the host of rejections anyway) and a swift exit from academia having done no one much good except the undergrads I teach.

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David Collesano's avatar

See also: "Prophetic Imagination,"* by Walter Brueggemann, a kindred spirit. You are in solidarity with a renowned biblical exegete in an adjacent discipline.

* https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=walter+brueggemann+prophetic+imagination

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