I actually enjoy service. I enjoy organizing events and troubleshooting climate-related stuff. It helps me feel connected and relevant. However, I have become increasingly aware of the different lifestyles between people who “see problems and try to solve them” versus people who “do not see problems”. I’d like to record some of these differences and how that may affect the academic lives of the people involved. I’d like to draw some broader, community-level morals at the end as well.
I’d like to emphasize that I don’t have an especially difficult time as a graduate student. Of all the people who struggle in academic philosophy (or academia in general), I belong to the more fortunate half, which might explain a lot of my optimism in a lot of things. Doing service, including the kind where I need to bring up climate problems to people who don’t see them, doesn’t especially take a toll on me (the way it does on some of my friends). My case is not an especially bad one, which is partly why I’m able to explain it.
I will not call for solutions in this post. In fact, I would like to encourage readers to reframe from trying to think up solutions. My experience has been that, when people are too hasty in jumping to problem-solving modes, they often overlook the complexity of the problems.
I’d also like to encourage readers to not make character judgments of the people I’ll be talking about. Some of them are jerks, but many are not, and their privileges are, just like mine, acquired through luck rather than through being jerks. It’s easier to blame the people than to accept the uncomfortable truth of structural injustice. I’d like to encourage readers to take a social-scientific curiosity, and I’d be satisfied if one of the things I say makes someone think “ah, that has never occurred to me”.
I’ll use the variable X to describe the person with whom I’m comparing myself. X is a combination of a number of people I’ve encountered, all happen to be white men. Hence I’ll use “he” to refer to X. That said, some of the “friends” I’ll mention later who also stand in contrast with X or help mitigate X’s behaviours are also white men.
The events I describe are modified recombinations of real events.
Something happened in my department. A few friends and I brought it to the attention of faculty and, to our luck, faculty have spent a lot of effort addressing it. My friends and I have been worried about this for a couple of weeks already, and we have met many times to discuss various aspects of it. I feel an obligation to protect many of my friends, however, because many of them are also juggling with classes and papers and I’m not. So I tried to take on some of the more time-consuming aspects of it, as well as the more confrontational aspects because I, due to strange optimism alluded to earlier, don’t especially worry about backlashes.
It was one of those days before the thing was settled. I sat in my office trying to think about whether there was anything else I missed. Professor A has been having meetings with a bunch of other people trying to work something out and, as A was done with them and was leaving the office, X walked by.
“Hey, A, how’s it going? How are the kids?” X asked.
“Oh, they’re doing well, thanks for asking.” A responded.
“I just heard back from B and he seemed to like my paper idea, so I’m going to make changes and send it off,” X said.
“Sounds good. Keep me posted.” A said and left.
B is some big-shot in the field (not at my school). X was writing a paper in that field and decided to cold-email it to B. B turned out to be nice and so they started a correspondence. Why would I never dream of emailing authors who write the papers I read? I ask myself. The idea of emailing a stranger is scary, but perhaps I’m wrong to be scared. But then I spent all my undergraduate years being terrified of professors. I never really talked to them (except for one who was willing to talk to me, who happened to be a PoC adjunct). It’s not like they knew that I existed out of the 100 students in the class anyway. X came from a small elite liberal arts college where classes had 12-15 students and he called all his profs by first names.
I also happen to work with A. But if I were to bump into him, I would not have asked after his kids. Part of this was that I feel weirded out asking others’ kids. Part of this was also that I would need to ask after the climate progress first, and perhaps mention another problem I’ve been thinking, and update him on this other thing I’m organizing. Isn’t it nice to only have to worry about academic work.
X and I were also in class together. In the first class, the projector didn’t work. Another student and I started trying to figure out what went wrong as X chatted away with the instructors. We couldn’t get it to work that day. I asked around and no one knew how this projector worked except for my partner, who has a habit of remembering how things work. I went to our administrator to double-check. I arrived at our second class a little early so I could test the projector. X had already arrived and started chatting with the instructors again. I worked the projector out. I’m in charge of the projector for the rest of the quarter while X consistently arrives early to talk to the instructors. One other person bothered to learn how it worked (and was in charge when I couldn’t make the class). Everyone used the projector every week. Part of me wondered what would happen if that one other person and myself both didn’t show up.
About 5 of us are collectively responsible for most of the events happening in the department but, every so often, X offers to help. The problem is that he shows up about 20% of the times for what he signs up to do. He’s always so apologetic afterwards, but we stop assigning tasks to him. So now, he shows up every so often, eats some food, talks to profs, and leaves. Profs really like him, by the way, because he talks to them. I don’t usually talk to profs, partly because I’m intimidated, partly because I usually have organizational tasks to perform, and partly also because I feel obligated to talk to the shyer students who stand alone in corners.
I was walking down the hall when professor C asked me, “are we still meeting?” C, X, myself, and a few others are scheduled to meet in a few days, and X has volunteered to arrange the logistics. I had been wondering about why we hadn’t heard anything for a few days then, but I wasn’t in charge. So I said to C, “I don’t know. I’m not in charge.” C asked, “oh, who is?” I said, “X is.” I felt a little weird, as if I was snitching on X or something. C then said, “oh, ok. I’m sure he’ll send something soon.”
X never did. It so happened that, for some other reason, we couldn’t meet anyway. I bumped into professor D, who was also supposed to be in the meeting, on the day when the meeting was supposed to happen. I asked D if we were still meeting, and D said, “oh we can’t. I meant to email about it. Sorry!”
That’s when it dawned on me: people will never realize that X does only 20% of what he promises to do, because people never realize that X has promised to do those things. I do a lot of things, and people expect that. I enjoy doing things, so I don’t particularly mind. However, when something isn’t done, people think that I haven’t done it. They tend to give me some slacks about it because they expect me to be overwhelmed. I’m not overwhelmed, however. I didn’t do it because someone else promised to do it.
All of this probably just reads like a long complaint, but it’s not. I don’t mind doing the things I do, and I get a reasonable amount of recognition for it. However, the truth of the matter is that some people are not expected to do things and they don’t realize how much freeriding they’ve been doing. Moreover, the community at large doesn’t realize it as freeriding, either. If I do service, it’s recognized (if I’m lucky) as something nice extra I’m doing on top of my academic performance. If someone never does service, however, they are only evaluated on their academic performance, and others learn to navigate around them. Their lives, free of service hassles, are often appreciated as scholarly focused and work-life balanced, simply because they have more time to do other things.
However, the “academic performance” part of the evaluation cannot exist if no one does service. “Doing things” in the sense of academic community-building is often treated as optional extra work that people can do if they have time. (I know that certain places require service for promotion or tenure, but I think the general attitudes are still that service is optional, or else we wouldn’t have a situation where women do more service disproportionately but don’t disproportionately get more tenure or promotion.) People who don’t do service are just people who don’t do extra work. There’s nothing wrong with them — they’re just not “over and beyond”. They are still evaluated as scholars like others, even though they spend more time doing scholarship than others. But scholarship needs a community. Their statuses as scholars are built on top of others’ “extra” work. I’m not even talking about people who don’t make an effort at making academia more inclusive, but people who refuse to contribute to a system that they then take advantages of. People who don’t do certain kinds of service are not similar to people who don’t give to charity, but are more similar to people who use the health care system, have the ability to pay taxes, but do not, and are praised for how much money they’ve managed to save. The community should recognize that.
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