What it takes to succeed in academia

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

I’ve just been promoted to (junior)* full professor in Groningen, and while I’m still duly enjoying the accompanying feeling of achievement and recognition, it got me thinking about how I got here. It does not take much to conclude that, while I've worked incredibly hard for this, I was also *extremely* lucky. I know countless  people who work just as hard as I do (or more), and who are as good as I am at what they do (or better), and yet do not get similar professional recognition. It takes an incredible amount of luck and, yes, privilege, for things to work out. So let me comment on two kinds of luck that may play a role in one’s professional development. 

The first kind is simply the luck to have been dealt rather generous cards in life. While I am a woman in a male-dominated field, and while I had to overcome hurdles related to coming from the ‘periphery’ of academic action (originally from Brazil, and then developing my career in the Netherlands, which is ok but frankly not Top of the Pops), for the rest I’ve been extremely privileged. My parents were both academics (my mother still is), so in terms of academic support at home I was particularly well served. For a number of reasons, I also never had to worry about economical hardship and financial stability, and thus I could choose the risk of an academic career without having to worry whether one day I’d have no food on my plate. And, last but not least, I am white, not differently abled, cis, and I fit reasonably well within certain stereotypical standards of beauty.

Let me refer to this kind of luck as privilege-luck, and it is still a matter of luck because I might just as well have been born in different circumstances, and things might have been very different. One way in which privilege-luck manifests itself very conspicuously is with the so-called ‘pedigree’ phenomenon; depending on where you go to school (both undergraduate and graduate), your career will develop in very different ways. But we all know very well that the school you end up going to is almost entirely determined by the kind of socio-economical background you can fall back on.

The second kind of luck is more properly called luck, and is related to fluke developments that can have profound consequences for one’s career, especially through a cumulative effect (one is reminded here of the Matthew effect). In this respect, I was extremely lucky to have been awarded two major research grants (for those familiar with the Dutch grant system, a VENI and a VIDI), which in the Netherlands go a long way towards ensuring success in academia (although they are not sufficient for success, these days it almost seems like they are necessary). One might of course object that it is not a matter of luck, that I deserved to be awarded these grants in view of the quality of my research proposals and the robustness of my CV. Well, this is not entirely false, but having been a member of committees deciding who gets these grants myself, it became glaringly obvious to me that a considerable amount of luck is involved. The number of truly outstanding proposals goes far beyond the number of proposals that can be awarded grants, and at some point the dispute really boils down to a number of rather insignificant, almost whimsical factors. Quite conspicuously (and quite obviously), it will to a great extent be a matter of who happens to be in the committee and the kind of research that committee members are sympathetic to. In my own experience as a committee member, I was sharply aware of how my own personal preferences (both conscious and unconscious) largely determined my opinions on the proposals, even if I tried to compensate for them somehow (for example, by reading and grading the research proposals before looking at the CV at all, and thus in the most anonymous way I could).

I was also very lucky that the Faculty of Philosophy in Groningen announced a Rosalind Franklin Fellowship just as I had received my second, much more substantial research grant, and was eagerly looking around for who could offer me a permanent position ‘in exchange’ for the money I would bring along with me. This fellowship is a tenure-track position, which is still rather unusual in the Netherlands; here, many excellent academics spend their whole careers at the assistant professor level, if there are no openings for higher positions in their areas of expertise at the right times. And so, this is how I ended up a full professor without having to wait for the right people to die before I could apply for the position.

(Btw, I also consider it lucky to have been invited to join the original NewAPPS crew back in 2010! The visibility that blogging and social media have brought to my ideas was certainly an important aspect in how things developed.)

Also within this kind of luck, which we may call fluke-luck, there is the phenomenon of being interested in the right topics and questions at the right times. Today I was listening to the latest installment of the Unmute Podcast, hosted by Myisha Cherry, and this time with Kristie Dotson as interviewee. (It's really great!) As she recounts, Kristie lacked the kind of privilege-luck discussed above in many respects: she is a black woman coming from a socio-economically (though not intellectually) disadvantaged background (if I understood it correctly). But she was lucky in that the questions she had been interested in since junior high, as she puts it, are the very questions that are at the core of mainstream philosophy, namely questions pertaining to knowledge (epistemology). And so, it just so happens that the topics she wants to work on are topics that naturally attract a lot of interest from others. (In this respect I’ve been a little less lucky than Kristie; it started with my interest in the history of philosophy, and in medieval logic of all things!)

And thus, it seems to me that the moral to be drawn is that a necessary (but again, not sufficient) condition to succeed in academia, and in philosophy in particular, is a colossal amount of luck of different kinds. Surely, it is not going to be sufficient, as academic success also seems to presuppose an inordinate amount of effort and hours put into it (to the point that it often really stops being healthy, to be honest). And of course, we cannot totally disregard something along the lines of ‘talent’, in that two people who are comparably lucky and comparably hardworking may still differ substantially in their calibers as scholars. But it seems to me that ‘talent’, whatever that is, will at best be the proverbial cherry on the pie, not what accounts for the large differences in professional recognition that we observe.

What this means is that all of us who have ‘made it’ should, in my opinion, recognize that luck is a crucial component in our professional success, and that there are countless people out there who are just as talented and just as hard-working, but who simply were not graced with the same amount of luck. It is not necessarily something to feel guilty about, but it may be a sobering reminder of how little it really boils down to talent and merit.

UPDATE: Another element of luck that now occurs to me, and which is a mixture of privilege-luck and fluke-luck, is encountering wise mentors along the way. I've been lucky to receive fundamental guidance from many people along the way, people who knew the ins and outs of the game of academia, and who were willing to spend time and energy on me.

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* If all goes well, in due course I will also be promoted to 'real' full professor. But this already gives me, among other things, the privilege to walk around in a black gown when I am the member of a PhD committee, and more importantly, to be the official supervisor of my de facto PhD students (recall that this is still a privilege of full professors in the Netherlands, which is infuriating).