Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Professors
Remnant Review
Stephen Covey made a fortune with his book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
I don't think I will make any money with this report. Enemies, maybe, but not money.
I grew up inside the conservative movement. I wanted to be a scholar. I wanted to be a conservative scholar. I wanted to be a conservative Protestant scholar. I learned in the early 1960's that there were none. I was alone in a wasteland.
There were a handful of conservative scholars. They had written a few books. Most of the books were published by obscure book publishers. They were monographs on narrow topics, such as how Roosevelt lured the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor. Even here, the most prominent of the revisionist historians were liberals, not conservatives: Charles A. Beard and Harry Elmer Barnes. There were a few footnoted books against Communist philosophy. The most eloquent of these books were written by former Communists, such as Frank Meyer. There were a few Roman Catholic scholars who wrote from a Thomistic outlook. The most famous conservative academic book when I was an undergraduate was Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind (1953). Kirk had no university position. He was highly productive, but he was outside of academia. After 1965, when the neoconservatives began to appear, this began to change. They gained some influence in academia. But they were mostly converts from liberalism . . . or worse.
If you are talking about scholars who started out as conservatives in the 1930's or early 1940's, there were almost none. What is now known as the old right had disappeared. Even here, some of the advocates were more libertarian than conservative.
The scholars in academia who were known as conservatives prior to 1965 were free market economists. They were not really conservatives, as F. A. Hayek wrote in the Postscript of The Constitution of Liberty (1960). They were classical liberals.
As for Protestant Christian scholars with academic credentials who wrote heavily footnoted books on politics, the arts, history, or economics, there were none. I am not exaggerating. It was a wasteland. Rushdoony's Intellectual Schizophrenia (1961), a critique of humanistic public education, was a landmark. It was published by an obscure publisher: Presbyterian and Reformed. He was not in academia. He was a pastor who happened to have read 250 books a year for 15 years -- a pace he kept up for 35 more years. If I had not discovered that book in 1962, I would have flown blind for another decade or more.
It is a lot better today than it was in 1965. But if we are talking about the number of full-time conservative academics in colleges and universities who lecture 12 hours a week or fewer, and who have free time on a scale that workers and no other profession possess, the output of conservative scholars is minimal. Compared to the output of the humanistic Left, it is a trickle. The humanistic Left took over the universities after 1945, and they have been the beneficiaries of vast amounts of taxpayers' dollars. They have taken advantage of this. Yet even here, if we are counting the number of full-time academics in universities, and we compare this with the quantity of carefully researched books other than narrow monographs, we find that the output in terms of the monetary input is pathetic.
A friend of mine in graduate school later became the head of the history department at a large tax-funded university. He has published some important books. He was also a highly effective teacher. He retired a decade ago. He told me something a few years ago that I had suspected, but I could not prove. He said that most of the people with Ph.D.'s in history do not write much. At best, they get their Ph.D. dissertation published by some university press, and perhaps a couple of articles in professional journals that are based on their dissertations, but that's all. They don't write again. If they are not in a university that has a policy of publish or perish, they stop writing.
MY KEYNES PROJECT
A decade ago, I got the idea of the Keynes project. This would be a project for one dedicated free market economist. Presumably, he would teach at a college, but not necessarily at a major university. He might teach at a second-tier university. Austrian School economists don't get hired by Ivy League schools and top-tier universities. They never have, Hayek excepted -- and he was blackballed by the economics department at the University of Chicago.
I outlined a lifelong project for refuting Keynes. Any young man who was willing to adopt this program at the age of 25 or 30, and who spent the next two decades pursuing it, would establish himself as the only critic of Keynes inside academia who has covered all the bases. In 2009, this had never been done. Let me assure you, in 2019, it has still not been done. It involves 16 steps. You can read them here.
One person could do all of this. If I had been younger, and if I had not had other fish to fry, I could have done it. But I wasn't in academia. I had to support myself. What I am proposing is not high-level scholarship. This is not pioneering scholarship. This is basically steady Eddie scholarship. You put in three hours a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year, for two decades, and you could do this if you had a Ph.D. in economics -- or even a B.A.
I offered $5,000 to an economist nobody knew who taught at a college almost nobody has heard of, who had plenty of time on his hands. I wanted to get a workbook on how to implement Hazlitt's Failure of the "New Economics". Initially he agreed, but then he backed out. He said he was just too busy. Here was an unknown professor in a third-rate institution teaching 12 hours a week, with three months of summer vacation, a month of Christmas vacation, probably two weeks of Easter vacation, and he backed out. He was, predictably, an evangelical Christian.
He was and is lazy. He is intellectually lazy. He is lazy in terms of his basic work habits. He has no vision. He is my model for the consummate lazy bones -- an overpaid, underworked Christian scholar. His basic outlook is this: to do as little as possible with his life, and to enjoy upper-middle-class income for little work -- none of it original.
Here are the seven habits of intellectually lazy professors.
1. NO VISION
This is the key for virtually all forms of laziness. The individual has no long-term vision of victory. He doesn't have a vision of victory regarding his life, especially his career. He doesn't think that his work is that important. He doesn't think that he can make a difference in the lives of anybody else. He has no concept of a personal legacy that will live on beyond his retirement and then death. He doesn't intend to leave anything behind that others can put to use in their lives and careers. Basically, he doesn't think that he is worth much, and he is correct.
This lack of hope for the future is comprehensive. These people lack hope in their own careers. They lack hope in the productivity of publishing. They lack hope that their peers will ever be able to do anything productive to change the world. They lack hope that the conservative Christian message will ever gain traction in academia or any other area of life. They lack hope that scholarship as such can significantly change society.
They lack the hope expressed by Karl Marx in 1845 at the age of 27: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." That was the 11th point of his theses on Feuerbach. The 11 brief theses were published as an appendix to Engels' book on Feuerbach, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, which was published five years after Marx's death. That 11th thesis is one of the most famous sentences he ever wrote. It has been quoted by his followers and his opponents ever since.
Conservative Protestant scholars do not share Marx's vision of victory. They do not have such hope in the future.
2. NO SELF-ESTEEM
The whole movement of self-esteem has had a bad press, and for good reason. But self-esteem is important if this esteem is based on two things. First, it must be based on actual performance in a competitive environment. Second, it has to be based on esteam that has been imputed by competent people in the field to the output of the individual. In other words, it's not autonomy. It's not self-made self-esteem. It is imputed self-esteem. It is based on actual performance that has been evaluated by people who have themselves achieved significant victories in life.
Conservative scholars lack this self-esteem. Conservative Christian scholars lack it even more. They don't think that they are competent. They don't have self-confidence in what they are doing with their lives. They have not received praise from competent people who have evaluated their work. If anybody has given them encouragement along the way, that encouragement has dribbled out over the years. They don't think much of themselves, their work, their careers, and their opportunities. They are not looking for new worlds to conquer. They are hoping only to avoid new threats to their income.
I don't think they are paid much, but they are paid more than a competitive marketplace would pay them. They know this. They have a job in a nonprofit institution that is the beneficiary of all kinds of state preferences, most important of all, accreditation. They don't think they could be competitive outside of the protected environment of the campus, and they are probably correct. The older they get, the more correct they are. They get rusty, and they know it.
3. NO WORK ETHIC
Protestant scholars lack a Protestant work ethic. I find this ironic.
Protestant scholars in academia do not see themselves as owing their employers a minimum of a 40-hour work week. I stress the fact that this is a minimum.
They do not go home after work and invest another hour a day, and several hours on Saturday, to putting up a website, or producing YouTube videos, or working on a textbook in their field, or working on a monograph in their field. They do not do anything beyond delivering lectures to students that are based on notes they compiled 10 years ago or 20 years ago. They do not stay up with their field. They don't read academic journals. They don't read major monographs. They are on the fringes of academia, and they have no internal incentive to get out of the fringes and into the fray. They prefer safety, quiet, and a life lived in obscurity to the kind of intellectual conflict that is required for a conservative Protestant scholar to enter into the mainstream of academic debate.
4. NO DESIRE TO GET A BETTER JOB
They work in underfunded private colleges that are on the ragged edge of bankruptcy. They don't care. They have no idea that they could get a promotion by getting into a better school with better students and better opportunities to expound their world and life view. Because they have no vision of victory, they don't think taking such risks is worth it. They have little self-esteem, so they don't think they would survive in a competitive environment anyway. They prefer obscurity. They know that this costs them in terms of a pay scale that is lower than what they could get in a larger, more competitive academic environment. But they are content living in the shadows of academia in institutions whose names are not known by the major performers in their academic field.
Other men do have a desire to get promoted in their fields. They want recognition, and they want more income. But conservative Protestant scholars seek neither recognition nor greater income. If they did, they would start putting in a 50-hour workweek or a 60-hour work week. 40 hours would be given to the college that employs them, and the other 10 or 20 hours would be devoted to research, writing, and the production of YouTube videos.
5. NO CONCERN FOR THEIR PEERS
Somebody who writes a book does so in the hope that somebody in his field is going to read the book. After reading the book, the person may actually rethink some of his presuppositions, or at least rethink some of his conclusions.
Scholars write for scholars. When they don't write for scholars, they write for budding scholars: bright young men and women who may decide to go into the field and achieve something important.
I found in my own career that the most important sources of motivation in my life were competently written scholarly books that addressed some of the problems that I was struggling with. I found such books as an undergraduate, but they were not written by conservative Protestant scholars, with the exception of Rushdoony's book. I was an upper division student when I read it.
It did get somewhat easier in graduate school. I studied under Robert Nisbet, he was just beginning the second phase of his academic career, and he was beginning to publish a lot of books. That was because the neoconservatives liked what he wrote, and they published his books.
There should have been Protestant scholars around the United States in the second half of the 1960's who had put in 20 years of hard work to produce manuscripts or notes that could be used in the production of manuscripts. They did not have publishing outlets for 20 years, but, beginning in 1965, the opportunities began to increase. If they had been doing their homework for 20 years, they would have had their manuscripts ready to submit to publishers who were discovering that there was a market for such materials. But these men did not exist. They had not built up an inventory of publishable manuscripts. They had not cared about their academic peers. They had not seen their task as preparing themselves for intellectual combat in a world where it was easier to publish books.
I wrote my first book as a graduate student. I had the opportunity, so I took it. It was my book on Marx. I wanted other Christian scholars to understand what the real heart of Marxism was: the religion of revolution. I got that idea from Rushdoony, who did not apply it to Marx, but who saw its importance in history going back long before the days of Christ. I simply took that idea and applied it to Marx. If I can begin that process at the age of 25, in the midst of a graduate school environment in which I had to produce lots of term papers and take lots of exams, where were the scholars who had spent 20 years in obscurity teaching a handful of students for 12 hours a week. Where were their publishable manuscripts?
6. NO TIME-MANAGEMENT SKILLS
These people don't know how to budget their time. They don't know how to set a goal, set aside time to achieve it, and stick to that schedule. They do not have the sense that the clock is ticking, even though in our era, clocks do not tick. They do not have the sense that their time on earth is short, which means that they have got to budget their time carefully. Time is the only irreplaceable resource. They do not perceive this when they are 25, and they still have not perceived it when they are 65.
The older you get, the more productive you should be in most fields. Certainly this is true in the social sciences and humanities. You are operating with a much greater quantity of information. Your memory gets worse, but the volume of information is greater, and your ability to put seemingly isolated bits and pieces together ought to increase. Your judgment improves even if your memory fades. Judgment is more important than memory.
This is why older men should work harder than younger men in the area of producing manuscripts. It gets easier, but only if you have put in the time on a systematic basis over a long period. You put the compounding process to your advantage. But to do this, you have to be systematic in accumulating information, and this takes time. If you waste it, you cannot get it back.
7. NO APPRECIATION OF SCHOLARSHIP
College professors are certified scholars.
It means that they have gone through certain procedural hoops that scholars must go through. But this does not guarantee that they are themselves scholars.
I am convinced that most college professors have very little appreciation of the joy of scholarship. They don't like to dig into the materials required to produce scholarship. They don't spend time with primary source documents, at least not after their dissertations are completed. They don't read constantly in their field. If they really wanted to get ahead with their careers, they would force themselves to do this. But they don't want to get ahead in their careers. But why is this a reason not to continue to read a book a week and three or four articles a week. Why is this not part of their lives?
They do not appreciate the life associated with scholarship. The life of the mind is not what inspires them. Someone who is committed to understanding the world around him, especially in his narrow field of endeavor, will keep reading, irrespective of the fact that he cannot get his manuscripts published. That was the life of the mind prior to the Internet. But, with the Internet, anybody can get his ideas publish. He can learn to typeset his own books. He can create PDFs. He can write Kindle books. He can produce YouTube videos. He can set up a WordPress site. The world is literally open to him digitally, and basically at no monetary cost.
If he discovers something important, he can get it into print. Even if he doesn't get credit for it, at least he has made a contribution. The excitement associated with this ought to be constantly increasing. The opportunities to get your ideas in front of a larger number of people keep growing. The more people who come online, the larger the potential audience for whatever an author produces. It just keeps getting bigger. Social media can create viral effects.
Does any of this impress the average conservative scholar? No. Does it impress the conservative Protestant scholar? Even less.
CONCLUSION
The wasteland in conservative intellectual pursuits that prevailed in 1965 was the result of the seven habits I have listed. There was no body of scholarship ready to be published when the world of publishing began to open slightly for conservatives. Decade after decade, it became easier to get your books in print. But the quality of the scholarship remains visibly lower than the scholarship produced by the humanistic Left. The quantity is not impressive, either.
There is no conservative history of the development of American constitutional law. I have been waiting for that book since 1962. There is no comprehensive revisionist history of America, Great Britain, or the world. I mean a detailed scholarly history with footnotes, links to primary sources, and so forth. There are monographs. Some of the monographs are impressive. But I find that the monographs tend to be written by people who do not have full-time jobs in academia.
The life of the academic is comfortable. The rewards are not always there either financially or in terms of prestige. This means that people in academia who are on the fringes and expect to stay there have little incentive internally to produce top-quality materials that they are intellectually capable of producing, but which they are not temperamentally capable of producing. They have adopted one or more of the seven habits of highly ineffective scholars.
Things are getting better, but they are getting better slowly.