Why I Left Academic Philosophy Parts of this article are interesting - as a currently practicing academic I am sympathetic to aspects of this but hesitant on others. To be sure: the publishing game is nonsense - we spend a tremendous amount of time working on papers just to have option to either submit them to a reputable journal and have them published behind the pay wall at no cost to us (where they will be read by maybe a total of two people ever) or shell out ridiculous amounts of money to make those articles free and accessible to everyone. Granted, publishing problems are not merely indexed to philosophy or the humanities more generally. I just read a paper yesterday entitled "Electric-Magneto-Optical Kerr Effect in a Hybrid Organic-Inorganic Perovskite" - it was published last year in a high impact factor chemistry journal, but - if I were to guess - probably only 20-30 people in the world will skim the paper, 10-15 will read it earnest, 7-10 will understand it completely (myself not included), and 3-5 will use it as a published citation.
Now the reason that matters to academics is two-fold, only one of which is identified in the linked article: first off, yes, academics do need those little CV notations so they can get a job and it behooves them to publish so they can have an increased chance of being able to afford groceries and pay their mortgage. The second component is ego, which was comically avoided in this article. I’ve spent a long term around other academics and many of them are ego-driven jerks – certainly not all of them, but many are. Interestingly enough a disproportionate amount of them do seem to come from philosophy departments. Part of it is the field itself: philosophy as an academic field is all about feeling intellectually superior to your peers; it’s about criticizing other’s work so your looks betters; it’s about trying to argue how correct you in opposition to other academics criticizing you; and frequently it is about the subtle sense of power you feel when you say you’re an “expert” and get to stand in front of a class and tell them how much you know.
The real joke to me has always been that if you say you’re doing academic work (specifically philosophy, but other fields in the humanities are similar) because you love it, you are immediately looked at as a liar, a buffoon, or as if your peddling the line you tell all your students for political purposes. If you commit to the “because I love it” approach in academia you likely will be very lonely because many academics do not love their field or the content which they study – they like having a job and, again, that feeling that comes from saying they are an expert in something.
On separate note: I do get a little irritated with the whole argument that philosophy writing is too complex and inaccessible. Sure, there is no doubt in my mind that a lot of writing done in academia is garbage – it’s often unnecessarily complex and many writers (old and new) often assume that by making a paper more complex in terms of readability it means they are necessarily smarter (and often times, making something incomprehensible does – in fact – lead to published papers). That’s absolutely an issue, and that mentally begins to form during your undergraduate career and is rarely stifled by professors and even encouraged during your tenor as a graduate student. Does that mean that all complex ideas can/should be reduced down to into completely accessible and simple terms? Of course not. What the author of this article is likely frustrated with is that there isn’t any balance to that type of writing academics are doing. Most academic philosophers simply run headlong into the realm of complexity without any care in the world that their writing is so opaque that it has no chance of making a greater philosophical impact on society. There are times when complexity is needed, and there are also probably more instances where simplicity is needed. Striking that balance is the issue.