Ah, you might think, now this is the sort of job that requires real education, intelligence, and communication skills. So Crawford goes back to college, gets a PhD and ends up at a think tank. It is the worst sort of anti-intellectual work you can imagine. Now imagine the feeling of doing that job day after day. It was obvious to Crawford, as it should be obvious to everyone else, that Crawford’s twenty-minute summary of a paper far beyond his expertise is precisely worthless. Then repeat that process over and over all day every day. Imagine a political philosopher trying to read and then write brilliant summaries of a technical paper in biology in twenty minutes or less. Crawford was expected to write twenty-four abstracts a day on research papers far from anything resembling his area of expertise. You get assigned an article, read it, and write a one paragraph summary for an audience too busy to read all these articles in their entirety. In theory, this is the sort of job that requires a high level of education, intelligence, and an amazing ability to communicate.
First, with a Master’s degree in hand, he took a job at a firm that provides abstracts of technical academic articles. He chose this life.Ĭrawford’s life is a tale of three jobs, all described in the book. Note: he wasn’t repairing motorcycles because he couldn’t get another job. Crawford’s job when he wrote this book? He repaired motorcycles. As one of my students put it, “This is a book which could only have been written by one person who ever lived.” Crawford has a PhD in political philosophy from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, one of the most selective PhD programs in the world. The most important part of this book is the author himself. Let’s begin by considering a rather curious book: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, by Matthew Crawford. Is it still worth going to college at all? But his question can be applied more broadly. The answer depends on what is meant by “scholarly life.” Dolitsky is specifically asking about whether it is worth entering a PhD program in strategic studies.
“ Is the Scholarly Life Still Worth Pursuing?” Phillip Dolitsky recently asked at Public Discourse.
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