The Outsider Perspective
At one point in his 2017 Dewey Lecture (the audio of which was recently posted at the Blog of the APA), William Lycan (UNC) remarks on a comment of Dave Chalmers‘ (NYU) that “the age of the greats has passed.” Lycan agrees. He says
there are still fine philosophers who have produced very important work and whom I greatly admire—some are in this room, and in my own mind I have a top two or three, ranked—but, I think it’s fair and probably uncontroversial to say, no Quine, no Rawls, none who has changed the course of philosophy itself.
René Magritte, “La Victoire”
Lycan identifies the culprits: specialization and professionalization. “The former has the obvious effect. The latter, I believe, is deeper and more insidious, with a bigger downside.”
He elaborates:
What do graduate admissions committees look for in an applicant? Demonstrated accomplishment in philosophy. (They don’t take music majors anymore.) That’s understandable; what better predictor for success in philosophy graduate study? And nowadays undergraduate majors are encouraged to behave like little graduate students; they write papers on the professional model that sometimes are even published in real philosophy journals. But the result is predictable: their topics, their styles of argument, and their conception of philosophy itself are inherited directly from their teachers, and they self-perpetuate.
Lycan is opposed to these elements of professionalism. He favors what he calls “the outsider perspective”:
I am a great believer in the outsider perspective, both in small areas and in the large. An outsider to a small subliterature is more likely than is an insider to make an interesting or even important contribution to it. And the same for an outsider to a whole problematic within an area of philosophy. And possibly the same for an outsider to a whole area. I can think of many examples, and I’m sure you can too. And the outsider perspective is what we’re not getting.
Readers: how about some comments with examples of this?
He then makes what he thinks will be received as an outlandish suggestion:
I would like to see every graduate admissions committee reserve at least one place for someone who is demonstrably brilliant and accomplished but in some field other than philosophy, and possibly who has no background in philosophy at all. I’m not holding my breath.
I like that idea, and I think its value can be detached from a complaint about the absence of “the greats”. (I don’t think philosophy is getting worse, and certainly don’t think any decline in it can be inferred from the passing of the age of the greats. Some have even suggested that there are reasons to think this may be the golden age of philosophy. See also this post on philosophy’s “greats”, written by an “outsider”.)
However, its implementation would face various practical problems. So perhaps there are other ways for philosophy to reap the benefits of an outsider perspective. Your suggestions are welcome.
P.S. The lecture is interesting throughout, and in parts quite amusing, for example, in recounting what led Lycan’s wife, Mary, to come up with the following:
The Mary Lycan Maxim will hit really hard to any philosopher who has done any amount of xphi
Do most (or even most very good) philosophy departments get many, or even any, applications from people who are “ demonstrably brilliant “? Or maybe Lycan just has a lower standard than I would for “brilliance”? And that’s even leaving aside whether the person has a background in philosophy or not.
As for that aspect, I’d worry that, if the person literally has “no background in philosophy at all” that it would simply be too hard to “ramp up”. I do think it would be reasonable to consider smart (not necessarily “brilliant”!) people from other areas with some background in philosophy and some strong philosophical interest, but who were not philosophy majors, but I’d guess that for the vast majority of people, if they literally had “no background in philosophy at all” it would just be too hard to do the work.
The SFU MA program actually does this sort of thing. We have utterly fantastic students from other fields who come here to get up to speed in philosophy, and then apply to PhD programs. So the PhD programs are not good at this, but some MA programs, such as ours, do it effectively.
It’s true that PhD programs rarely take applicants straight from a BA with a major other than philosophy, or at least something philosophy adjacent (HPS, PPE, Cog Sci etc.).
But plenty of MA programs do take people with very little undergrad philosophy, and plenty of PhD programs take people from those MA programs.
Is that too much of a barrier to outsiders? It’s a bit of a barrier, and I can see a case for lowering it some, but I don’t think it’s as hard for outsiders who want to get in as Bill makes it sound.
Fwiw, I agree that more outsider perspectives are good. More philosophers should read outside philosophy, co author with non philosophers, take classes outside philosophy (as Michigan requires grad students to do) and so on. I’m just a little dubious that taking more students direct from a history BA (or whatever) is needed to make that happen.
For what it is worth, I have known a number of philosophy graduate students at the University of Western Ontario who were accepted to work on the philosophy of science X, where their background was only/primarily in that scientific field. Conversely, those with philosophical backgrounds are expected to learn the relevant science if they are going to work on a given philosophy of science X. In fact, the Rotman Institute of Philosophy is explicitly set up to foster interdisciplinary work.
“But plenty of MA programs do take people with very little undergrad philosophy, and plenty of PhD programs take people from those MA programs.”
More anecdota: CSULB’s philosophy MA program does this routinely and I’ve already encountered students like this in Maryland’s philosophy PhD program after being here just over a year.
Is he implying that I’m not so great?
While professionalization and specialization have something to do with this, it’s crucial to remember that the number of philosophy PhDs awarded in the USA went from 229 in 1987 to 523 in 2012. This has declined a bit since but is still almost double what it was in the older days (now ~400/yr). Tuition-hungry universities have ballooned and the number of active faculty has gone up significantly since the 1960s and 70s.
There are far, far more of us now, and the digital world ensures that “the conversation” doesn’t remain confined to a few select journals. There is almost no way for a single individual to come along with a voice big enough to radically alter this kind of diffuse, democratized conversation.
I knew I wanted to study philosophy for my PhD, but my degree is actually in religious studies, because I wanted to study non-Western philosophical traditions – and, at least in 2000, that was way easier to do in a religious-studies department. Harvard’s religion program happily accepted me; the philosophy program would have laughed at me. I had already become an outsider just for studying the wrong philosophers. And I think in the end that was the reason I didn’t get an academic job, even one related to my specialization: religion departments preferred not to hire someone who was a philosopher at heart, and philosophy departments wanted someone whose degree was actually in philosophy.
Meanwhile, in the ruthlessly practically minded culture of 21st-century North America, the news for the academic humanities never gets any better, as programs close and adjunctification continues its relentless pace. It seems to me that the future of philosophy is going to be on the outside: in the republic of letters that now exists online in places like blogs and Substack. Ted Gioia, the best writer on the music business, gives a lot of examples of how the humanities are flourishing outside universities these days, and I think that’s going to apply to philosophy.
There are philosophers these days who don’t fit the mold and who have popular followings and fan clubs: Costin Alamariu (Bronze Age Pervert), Aleksandr Dugin, Wang Huning, in some ways René Girard. I don’t like their right-wing politics – but I also notice how they’re making more of a difference in the world than the academic philosophers are, and few are the academic philosophy departments that would have hired them.
Dugin is an out-and-out fascist, and the “difference” he’s making in the world is basically all for the bad. His “philosophy” is also laughably bad, apart from being vile. (And, he writes all in Russian, so of course no department outside of Russia would hire him, even leaving aside the fact that his views are both vile and dumb.) The bits of Alamariu I’ve read have also been sophmoric philosphically, so again, it’s no surprise no academic department would hire him (beyond the fact that his PhD is in political science, so it would be unusual for a philosophy department to hire him.)
I’d like to lend my support to Matt’s take on Dugin, with the very technical qualification that Dugin does not self-identify as a fascist. He claims (somewhat laughably, in my opinion) to be developing an unprecedented “4th political theory” that defies historical categorization. With that being said, I would argue that at a certain point his ideas become functionally indistinguishable from fascism. The quality of his Heidegger scholarship is also highly debatable at best. At any rate, I’d agree with Matt that the reasons for Dugin’s exclusion from mainstream western philosophy are, in the main, good ones.
I’ve heard from sources I trust (mainly the guys on the “Know Your Enemy” podcast) that people on the right badly misread Girard. Supposedly he’s not only much more interesting than you’d expect from a guy Peter Thiel admires but reading him as a straight on right winger of any sort is an oversimplification. I haven’t had a chance to read him so that could be wrong.
Is there a reason that you omit Žižek from your list? If we’re looking for a prominent philosopher who flouts traditional academic practices and has a sizable fanbase outside of academia, well, I can’t think of anyone who fits that description better. And if, as you say, the right-wing politics of the figures you’ve listed bother you, Žižek is certainly no right-winger.
Amod, your comment resonated for me on multiple levels.
First, I was in the philosophy program at Harvard in 2000, not trying to study non-Western philosophies, but at least trying to understand the relation between Western and non-Western philosophies. So we missed each other. I wasn’t laughed at in the department, but more like seen with incomprehension. I was too on the outside of the department in a sense and didn’t know how to express that back then.
Second, absolutely agree the future of philosophy is going to be outside academia. In fact, the striking thing is how much great Western philosophy is outside academia even in the last 200 years (Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Pierce), and Wittgenstein and Heidegger had very complicated relations to academia. A main thrust of academic philosophy in the last 75 years has been coopting thinkers like Nietzsche as academics, instead of being more upfront about how they were outsiders to academic philosophy. One doesn’t need to get non-philosophy majors into PhD programs for an outsider perspective. Far better to actually reread the greats in a way more in line with their lives, rather than how they have been canonized in academia. Nietzsche as an outsider to academic philosophy probably has more to say than a brilliant history major who hasn’t read philosophy.
Third, Dugin etc. are one way of continuing that strain of philosophy beyond the classroom. A way I think is deeply wrong, but certainly a way. Dugin seems to me like someone continuing the energy of Heidegger in 1933. One can read Heidegger in a way that ignores his activities in 1933 as philosophy and that is the price Dreyfus et al had to pay to bring Heidegger into analytic departments. It is illuminating that in places like Harvard now it is more routine to have scholars of non-Western philosophy, but not one who would remotely engage with Dugin or Girard – even given the enormous cultural influence they are having. Also interesting that actually Dugin and Girard have definite views about the relations of Western and non-Western philosophies, but global in a very different way than Patil or Ganeri. That is a debate about visions of global philosophy very much worth having, and it goes to the heart of different conceptions of outsider at issue now.
I would like to see every graduate admissions committee reserve at least one place for someone who is demonstrably brilliant and accomplished but in some field other than philosophy, and possibly who has no background in philosophy at all. I’m not holding my breath.
Maybe I already am an outsider, but I think this is a great idea. A worry–given the reality of the job market–is that it is very, very difficulty already to become sufficiently professionalized in philosophy these days (e.g., the # of publications the typical successful hire has) along with the crunch that many schools have to complete the PhD degree within 6 years or 5 years (or lose funding…). This would make it difficult (not impossible) to make it work for someone without a background in philosophy.
As someone who had a non-philosophy background, I went to a well-known MA program and then to a highly-ranked PhD program. But, even with the MA, going into the PhD program, it was really challenging to sit next to people who had 3-4 years to develop their philosophical background knowledge, take wide-ranging courses across many areas of philosophy, etc. They had a grounding that I simply lacked and ability to put things within contexts I hadn’t even considered. The first two years were like learning a new language.
I’m very glad that I was given a chance at the PhD program where I attended (since even with the MA I really had a lot of development to go). That program seemed to do this on a somewhat regular basis (accept someone who was doing very well in some other field, whether humanities or sciences, and give them a chance). I’d like to think that was a real reason that many from the program succeeded (i.e., we were outsiders who had something different to say from a perspective that was distinct). Obviously, there are so many other reasons (amazing faculty mentors), but I think there is something going for the idea that outsiders are really a good thing (and have been in other periods of philosophy, too).
I often find myself wondering: What is the most recent piece of philosophy (or, alternatively, who is the most recent philosopher), which people will still be reading and studying 100 years from now, assuming we’re still doing philosophy at that point?
Derrida, Foucault, or Habermas if we’re looking at the Continent? Perhaps Kripke, if we’re looking at the Anglosphere?
Please, drop your hypothesis as a response to this comment. I will also note that, to Lycan’s point, it does seem that it’s been a while (maybe a few decades?) since we’ve witnessed the sort of ‘discipline-altering’ developments she’s gesturing at, and the current system of incentives governing academic publishing does seem to trend against that sort of thing, to some degree. But I’m not sure I agree that the solution to this problem – if it is a problem – is to admit more ‘outsiders’ to the discipline, at least as Lycan explains the term.
In anticipation of the usual sort of objection: No, I’m not suggesting that prominence in the ‘historical canon’ necessarily makes a text ‘good philosophy’ in any logical sense. Nor am I suggesting that the merit of a philosopher is best measured by looking at the attention they receive. And yes, it’s impossible to make such predictions with any real accuracy; just have some fun and make a guess, if you’d like.
You can find some predictions in volume 25 of Topoi; the topic for that volume was the future of philosophy. For instance, Graham Priest predicts Heidegger and Wittgenstein (and Jonathan Barnes thinks that philosophy is dying because people are taking Heidegger seriously).
I suspect there are several papers written every year that will still be read a century from now. I mean, I’m no historian, but there are papers I frequently read and/or cite written in 1879, 1881, 1896, 1905, 1912, 1926, 1931. I suspect that philosophers who have more of a historical understanding of their sub-field than I do probably have a larger number of papers from that era, so that a department of 15 people will likely have nearly every year in that period covered. I don’t think the next 50 year period is any lower, though perhaps the mid-19th century is less cited in contemporary literature.
I don’t necessarily expect that the papers still read and cited a century from now are the ones that are most read and cited in the first few years after they were published, but it seems that plenty of them are doing similarly important work that will still be recognized as such a century from now (and/or will have generated similar literatures in which they have been made canonical, if you are more cynical about “classics”).
i agree with the diagnosis but not the proposed cure. surely the outsider would rarely complete the phd and even more rarely remain an outsider given that the system is geared toward manufacturing insiders.
Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that the two people Chalmers mentions spent substantial time outside academia? Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that Quine, who, as a codebreaker in WW2, spent years trying to figure out exactly what people were saying, would go on to develop the idea that there are countless ways to interpret words/phrases? Does anyone think it’s a coincidence that Rawls, who served as a soldier in the Pacific during WW2 and then during the occupation of Japan, where the post-war mission was to rebuild the society from the ground up, would go on to write about how to determine the principles of a just society behind the veil of ignorance? I don’t think this is a coincidence at all.
I don’t see any reason to think that those things are anything other than co-incidences.
Really? Rawls explicitly said that his experience in the Pacific led him to focus on moral and political questions.
It could be that there are also other ways to decide to focus on moral and political questions, like having read Rawls. I take it cecil burrow is not claiming that academia is the only way to philosophical insight, but rather than academia is not always a fruitless path towards philosophical insight. It is perhaps possible to do very good philosophy without having occupied Japan or whatever.
Sometimes I suspect people’s intuitions here are colored by their own life experiences. People who have spent significant time outside of academia perhaps think that only this can make someone into a stupendous philosopher, and people who have not are skeptical that this is required. In both cases the relevant judgments are self-serving.
Also, on a less cynical note, people who think life experience outside of academia is important to philosophical practice are presumably going to get that life experience first. Meanwhile, people who think it is not important will not seek that out. So even without any self-serving tendencies, we should expect the intuitions to sort out like this to some significant degree.
I don’t know much about Quine’s personal life, and what little I know is from the post-WW2 period, but I wonder if anyone is familiar with any statements he made on this topic, like “code-breaking significantly influenced my later thought” or “code-breaking was philosophically a dead end and if I had had that time to write papers I would’ve been even more influential.”
The other two people Chalmers mentions in the interview, Kripke and Lewis, did not spend substantial time outside academia, as far as I know.
I think Kripke may be an outlier. Lewis seems like a strong counter example. Wittgenstein, although not on Chalmers’ list, spent a significant amount of time outside of academia.
So, of course, did Bertrand Russell.
That’s right! Didn’t he spend time in prison? And then protesting the war?
Two stints in jail for his anti-War activities, once for his anti-War journalism in 1918 and once for participating in a protest against nuclear weapons in 1960. But for large periods of his life he was either living off inherited income (which gradually diminished as he gradually gave away his inherited fortune) or was earning his living as a free-lance writer, journalist , lecturer and broadcaster.
That’s very interesting. Do you know of any interviews where he talks about the influence of these experiences on his academic work?
Well he discusses the impact of the Great War on his life and thought in chapter 8 of his autobiography. Of course he was fired from his job as at Trinity College Cambridge because of his anti-war activities. which pushed him away from academia for the next twenty-two years. (By that time having given away most of his money he did not have much an income to fall back on.) But if you want to know more about Russell’s life and its relation to his work I suggest
a) his Autobiography,
b) Griffin’s two volume edition of his Selected Letters,
c) Pigden ed Russell on Ethics , a heavily annotated collection of his writings on ethics and meta-ethics with a good deal by both Russell and myself on the relations between his life and his evolution as an ethical and political thinker,
and
d) For the ethics (rather than the the metaphysics, the logic, the the epistemology etc), my ‘Russell’s Moral Philosophy ‘ on the Stanford.
Just added these to my reading list. Thank you! They all sound interesting, esp. C
Another example: Thomas Schelling, whose work on bargaining and the prisoner’s dilemma would influence Lewis and Parfit, worked as a negotiator for the Marshall Plan.
Their experiences tell us something about them but not about the general formative process. 99% of people who have had such experiences don’t go on to become philosophers, let alone working on corresponding questions; 99% of philosophers on these issues haven’t been influenced by such experiences. Together these two facts strongly support the claim that it is a coincidence at least by some interpretation of ‘coincidence.’ The overwhelming majority of philosophers work on topics for a whole bunch of potential reasons most of which have little to do with their outsider’s experiences.
I’m not sure how the two facts you mention (which I agree with) relate to the specific subset of philosophers that we’re talking about.
We’re not talking about all people or all philosophers. We’re talking about a specific subset of philosophers. If 25% of MPs attended Oxbridge (which is probably close to true), the fact that 99% of people who go to Oxbridge don’t become MPs and that 99% of people don’t go to Oxbridge doesn’t bear on the correlation between going to Oxbridge and becoming an MP.
This is a discussion about outsiders in philosophy and I’m saying that we should take seriously that 50% of the philosophers mentioned had substantive experiences outside of academia, and would likely be considered outsiders by today’s standards.
It bears on whether it’s a coincidence. 50% of a tiny sample of the greats is not a meaningful correlation.
I disagree about the relevance of the base rates you used, but I agree the sample size of “the greats” is small. But we obviously don’t get to choose the sample size, so we’re stuck with it. Even if all of them were “outsiders” it would still be a weak correlation because of the sample size. The recommendation at the end of the article is that admissions committees should choose someone demonstrably brilliant and someone who has no background in philosophy. Looking at the greats, you have at least one who is demonstrably brilliant (Kripke) and two who spent substantial time outside of philosophy. I think that’s a good reason to take the recommendation seriously. I’m also an “outsider,” so I’m almost certainly biased 🙂
You misread. The sample is four greats. That’s a small sample of the greats, of which there are many more. I didn’t say the greats were a small sample. The examples given here are just a N=4. You can’t use that as a sample to infer any meaningful correlations.
I guess I am an outsider. I went to graduate school for something else, but it just so happend that my interests gradually shifted from conceptual philosophy-adjacent work to proper philosophical work. Through sheer luck, I could find a philosophy postdoc. This allowed me to accrue enough grants and publications to find permanent academic employment in philosophy. My education in philosophy totals a few electives in college.
I don’t think I’m going to write the next great book. But I do think that my philosophical thinking is somewhat off the beaten path, using data and methods from my earlier studies that are uncommon in philosophy. Then again, it still sometimes happens to me that I set out to write something, only to find out there’s an entire cottage industry of literature that I was wholly ignorant about (although my “insider” colleagues assure me that this happens to everyone). Additionally, some jobs don’t consider people with the wrong PhD. I also never got interviewed for a teaching position, likely because I only had scant exposure to philosophy instruction myself. So my only chances were with the high-falutin research gigs that did occasionally fly me out. Finding employment was an uphill battle, up a very steep hill.
I can’t recommend that anyone do what I did. Getting a right proper philosophy PhD ameliorates most of the disadvantages, but also negates the advantages. Graduate school is where most “indoctrination” onto the beaten path happens. But a mere undergraduate degree in another field is (increasingly) unlikely to equip a student with enough depth in that field to make a big difference to their thinking. So I’m unconvinced by Lycan’s suggestion.
It would also not be reasonable to demand that philosophy department hire more people like me. That would be a disservice to our own graduate students. Perhaps we should be admitting to our graduate programs people who have a PhD already. But who in their right mind would want to get a second one?
If we value the outsider’s perspective, perhaps all we can do is continue relying on people who, like me, have outsized luck or, unlike me, have outsized grit and capabilities.
Lycan mentions specialisation and professionalisation. The former does all the explanatory work by itself. Specialisation means there no longer is a unified philosophy that a “great” can change the course of. I don’t know where the best of today stand compared to Quine or Rawls, but their influence today is always more local because there’s nothing much that unified us qua philosophers.
Whether that’s bad is a different question.
Sometimes changing the field is not something anyone can do, no matter how brilliant or outsider or potentially field-changing their work, because the field doesn’t want to change. The issue with an outsider perspective is that often, it also belongs to someone who is themselves an outsider – a member or often more than marginalized group. They don’t register on the field’s radar which is highly tuned to designating certain kinds of boy-genuises. Philosophy as a field has made some progress in this regard in the last twenty years but it has a huge distance further to cover. The field has to be ready to respond to such a perspective, not simply/only do more to cultivate such perspectives.
I had the interesting experience of being told, while a PhD candidate in Anthropology, that I “thought like a philosopher”. Since I had never even taken an undergraduate class in philosophy or anything philosophy-adjacent, I had no idea what this meant. But the comment was enough to steer me to a philosophy program (in England) that would take me in to write a doctoral thesis, without, it might be noted, any coursework of the kind built into American PhD programs. Subsequently, some philosophers think that I think like a social scientist. On the general question of what a diversity of backgrounds might bring to philosophy, it might be fun to quote Ronald Burt who charmingly
put it like this: “People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find
themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not
creativity born of genius; it is creativity as an import–export business.” Thanks for starting this discussion, Bill. (Brothers Bound in Spirit)
Coming from a background in mathematics, I concluded that the Platonism-versus-nominalism fight that dominated professional philosophy of mathematics was a mistake and out of touch with real mathematics. So I wrote a book on Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics, informed by applied mathematics. It would be fair to say the philosophy of mathematics world has not been excited by this contribution.
Let me add the James’s book should have generated more excitement than it has. I recommend it.
Before the internet, before Philpapers.org and Google Scholar, it was extremely difficult to know what other people had written on a topic. One had to go to the library and page through the journals or try to find things in the Philosopher’s Index. Under these conditions one’s obligation to be well-informed could only be defined as keeping track of a few big names and a few hot topics.
And that’s if one had access to a library that had the relevant journals!
It might be worth noting that if Lycan is right about both (a) the desirability of outsider perspectives and (b) the gradation of such perspectives (i.e., that there are outsiders “both in small areas and in the large”), then it looks like we get a straightforward argument for pluralism even among the students with previous philosophical training. The ideal cohort of incoming graduate students wouldn’t just be a cadre of mainstream analytic types + 1 non-philosophically-trained “outsider”, but rather a mix of students whose backgrounds and/or interests include, e.g., non-western philosophies (classical Indian, Buddhism, Confucianism, etc.), non-contemporary western philosophies (Stoicism, Thomism, Kantianism, etc.), and non-analytic contemporary western philosophies (phenomenology, pragmatism, post-structuralism, etc.).
This raises the question (presuming that mainstream analytic training would still stand at the core of most incoming cohorts) of how much pluralism a given department can handle before it becomes destabilizing (if it becomes destabilizing at all). It also raises the question of how much of a responsibility (if any) the faculty have for getting such outsiders “up to speed” on contemporary analytic discussions in the students’ field of interest.
Just reflecting on my own experience back in grad school, I started out as (and probably remained) one of the “little” outsiders in my graduate program, having almost no training in either contemporary analytic or contemporary continental philosophy, and it felt like I had *a lot* of work to do to catch up with my peers. Thankfully, I was blessed that the professors in my department were all incredibly generous with their time and patient with my lack of analytic fluency. Nevertheless, I can totally understand if the thought of having more grad students like me might fill some faculty with dread. The truth is, we outsiders are just a lot more work, and not always of the rewarding kind – even if we do make a positive contribution to the intellectual life of the grad/faculty community.
Where I went to graduate school, many students lacked a background in philosophy (they may have taken a few courses). There was a strong preference for students with math and science background, as the program was known for its strength in philosophy of science. This was not all good. First, some faculty ended up having to teach graduate courses designed to fill gaps in the students’ background. And many hating doing this. Second, the students who lacked background in philosophy really were behind … they did not realize where all these classic problems were coming from. Generally, with the benefit of hindsight, I can say that many of those who lacked sufficient background in philosophy have not had careers in philosophy, at least not those in my cohort. So I do not think that the graduate program did them much of a favour, admitting them in the first place.