Georgetown University philosopher Jason Brennan has, in a career of just more than a decade, published more books than some people have read. These aren’t half-baked vanity projects, either; his books come from major academic presses (e.g., Oxford, Princeton, Routledge, Cambridge) and are cited frequently. In his latest book, due out this May, he distills and synthesizes the advice on working in higher education that he has collected and implemented from mentors like Duke political scientist Michael Munger and University of Arizona political philosopher David Schmidtz, as well as revelations Brennan has had himself. He tells us what he calls “unpleasant truths about the world’s best job.”

I firmly agree that being a college professor is the world’s best job and is good work if you can get it. You don’t go into academia for the money, but the salaries are sufficient to put full-time faculty members safely within the upper middle class. And the non-pecuniary benefits for which most of us go into this line of work are simply unbelievable. We get to write, speak, read, and teach about subjects we find fascinating. Except for the time we spend in regularly scheduled classes, we basically get to make our own schedules. The intellectual tasks are cognitively difficult, but a lot of what we call “work” is what the rest of the world calls “leisure.”

It is, in other words, Good Work If You Can Get It. Brennan explains what one must do to get it.

Bleak realism / Some academics write as if entering the academy is like gambling and getting a tenured position is a matter of luck. But Brennan notes:

Academia is not a perfect meritocracy, but it’s not a lottery, either. The winners understand the system; the losers tend to make the same basic mistakes over and over again. My goal here is to help readers understand why the winners win, and the losers lose.

Presumably, those who take his advice will be more likely to find themselves among the winners. The book, again, is an exercise in bleak realism. After going through the statistics, he writes:

So, in deciding whether you want to be a professor, ask: Am I willing to spend the majority of my working life teaching mostly mediocre undergraduates, knowing that for the vast majority, my class will impart no increase in their reasoning or writing skills? You might end up with a better teaching situation than that, but that’s the typical deal.

It’s an uncomfortable truth, but a truth nonetheless.

Predictably, academic life is so appealing that the competition to get into it is insane and borderline debilitating. This reminds me of Gordon Tullock’s argument that something has to change in order to equalize rates of return in different occupations. In academia, it’s the “publish or perish” culture. This is, of course, a predictable consequence of the massive supply of doctorate-holders relative to demand. If wages aren’t very flexible and jobs have more-or-less fixed characteristics, how, one wonders, should institutions distinguish between dozens of applicants for a single job? A tenure-track faculty member can be a multi-decade, multimillion-dollar commitment for a college or university. It behooves hiring committees to choose wisely. They rely on a lot of sorting mechanisms, like pedigrees and publication records. Something has to change so that the marginal entrant is essentially indifferent between academia and the best alternative. That’s why “academia is a cult of busy.”

Maybe it’s not fair. Brennan’s task is not to evaluate the goodness or badness of the system relative to some kind of unattainable ideal. Rather, he is looking to advise potential graduate students based on the incentives as they are and the world as it is, and hence he offers us his guide to succeeding in academia — which he has done spectacularly.

As he points out, the aspiring academic is “competing against three hundred to one thousand people who are the best in the world at what you study.” Importantly, information is costly and if a hiring committee has a pile of diamonds sitting in front of them, they don’t have much of an incentive to hunt for diamonds in the rough. It’s your job not only to make sure you’re a diamond, but to make it absolutely clear to others that you’re a diamond.

Types of jobs / The book has just four chapters. In the first, Brennan asks his readers, “Do You Really Want an Academic Job?” and explains the on-the-ground facts about how many jobs there are and what it takes to get them. Most of the research gets done at major research universities, obviously, which is where we are trained. Most of us, however, will spend our careers at institutions where teaching and service are much more important.

You have to make yourself work even harder when you don’t want to and even when no one is looking over your shoulder.

He offers a discussion of the kinds of institutions and jobs that are out there and repeatedly reminds his readers that his “goal is to tell you what it’s like, not how it should be.” For that, I suspect, he will find himself tarred as a bourgeois apologist for the neoliberal, corporate university or something like that — but I don’t think that would be fair. He builds on the work he did with Phillip Magness for their 2019 book Cracks in the Ivory Tower on the ethical morass of higher education (see “Incentives in the University,” Summer 2019) and notes that, contrary to what you might read in the trade press (the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed), the academy is not being “adjunctified.”

Brennan offers an analogy to the Olympics that he attributes to his mentor, Schmidtz. What would you think of someone who loudly proclaims that he is training for the Olympics and yet does nothing that looks like training, instead goofing off because “after all, the Olympics aren’t for another few years?” We are, unfortunately, surrounded by graduate students who aren’t thinking about tomorrow and who are like our alleged Olympian. Importantly — and this, I think, is one of the reasons so many people fail to move from “aspiring graduate student” to “tenured professor” — you have to make yourself work even when you don’t want to and even when no one is looking over your shoulder.

Brennan is explicit about what professors do and what they are expected to do. He recounts a story about a graduate school colleague who said he didn’t like teaching and didn’t like research, he just wanted to sit and think about philosophy. That is not, as Brennan points out, what we get paid to do. A professor’s job is to teach and to create new knowledge. Academicians tend to be a rather self-absorbed bunch and Brennan throws some cold water on our inflated self-images. Why, one might wonder, would a college or university choose to hire you to sit in your office, stare at your navel, teach poorly, and produce no original scholarship when it could, for a similar price, get someone who will teach at least competently and produce at least something? I have said before that irony is a faculty member at a liberal arts college complaining about students having a sense of entitlement. Brennan disabuses his readers of the notion that the world owes us something. While he doesn’t get into this specifically, there is an important ethical question we must ask: are we doing right by our students, donors, taxpayers, and others if we expect them to feed, clothe, and shelter us in exchange for doing essentially nothing? To ask that question is to answer it.

The job you want / The second chapter is titled “Success in Graduate School Means Working to Get a Job.” A lot of students think the goal of graduate school is to graduate. However, graduation is one step among many in the goal of actually getting a tenure-track job (which is in turn a step toward earning tenure, which is in turn a step toward promotion to full professor, which is usually going to be a prerequisite for the Rich Benefactor Chair in Your Discipline at Prestigious University).

It requires backward induction: know where you want to end up (in an academic job!) and what it takes to get there (publications). Consider the aphorism, “Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” Brennan’s exhortation is to take a clear-eyed look at what, exactly, we are getting ourselves into as graduate students and scholars, and not lose sight of it.

Teaching and writing / In Chapter 3, he explains “How to Be Productive and Happy.” Brennan is, as far as I can tell, both. It is perhaps surprising that so many academics are unproductive and unhappy. Frankly, it is because we manage our time and energy poorly and because we fail to keep things in perspective. As he puts it, “Academia is a cult of busy.”

He explains how email is the enemy of productivity as well as why you should say “no” to more things — service “opportunities” in particular — when they get in the way of you doing your most important work. He goes on to explain some principles of great teaching, again employing what we know about diminishing marginal returns. He gives two pieces of advice that, if followed, will substantially increase the quantity and quality of your academic output and, therefore, your likelihood of success in academia: “Writing is thinking,” and “Write first, edit second.”

Overwork, Brennan explains, is the enemy. You don’t make good choices or do good work when you’re tired. He is an economic literate among philosophers — a distressingly rare bird — and he points out how a couple of basic economic ideas help us out: diminishing marginal returns and the idea that we’ve optimized when marginal benefit is equal to marginal cost. Think about how you work when you are tired. My guess is poorly. Knowing when to stop requires maturity most of us are still learning.

Getting a job / Chapter 4 explains “The Academic Market, Tenure, and the Job Market Outside Academia,” along with a discussion of exit options for people who have read the book and decided that the academic life is not for them. Again, this is a guide to succeeding in a fiercely competitive enterprise where people have a lot of options other than you.

How many unread books do you have on your desk? How many journal articles do you have in your “Read Me” folder that you’ll get to someday? Think about that as your competition. You must convince a potential colleague to read your paper when she could read any of a practically infinite number of others or just watch TV. If you realize that you’re competing with a re-read of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, the latest issue of your field’s top journal, and the new season of Stranger Things, your task becomes a bit clearer.

Some of the best advice I ever got was at a teaching conference after my first year teaching at Rhodes College. I paraphrase: “Don’t do what you need to do to get tenure. Do what you need to do to get a better job.” That is likely a superset of what will get you tenure.

Conclusion / I hate to sound clichéd, but Good Work If You Can Get It is the kind of book every aspiring academic should read. Some might decide to do something else with their lives and that is fine. (I had a student decide not to pursue a doctorate after I hosted a reading group on Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues.) We would spend less time spinning our wheels. The academic enterprise would become more efficient and more effective.

Brennan’s book is, to use its own description, “a no-punches-pulled, frank, data-driven book telling you what academic life is like and what it takes to succeed in academia.” It is also, perhaps, a useful read for well-meaning friends and family members who don’t know how academia works. (We’ve all had the “Why don’t you just teach at [nearby university]?” conversation over the holidays.) As he notes, the choices people are making right now will manifest themselves in consequences a decade or two or three down the road. His book is refreshing and, I think, a valuable service to the academy.