Richard Bett is a professor of philosophy here at Hopkins. The News-Letter spoke with him about his life and what he does both inside and outside the classroom.
News-Letter: What you were interested in as a child?Richard Bett: Well I guess my first intellectual interest, as a five year old, was astronomy. I was really into the planets and things like that, which is not exactly what I ended up doing, but I guess that's sort of the same broad questions about the universe, which is what people in philosophy are concerned with. I was into ancient studies as well as an older kid, and that is something I am still involved in in my research teaching here. I'm from England originally, and dug in one or two sites in Rome and Britain, but I fairly quickly decided I wasn't into the physical remains, but rather the written remains.
N-L: What was your favorite part of college?RB: I wasn't that thrilled about Oxford, to be honest. I mean it was okay, it was very hard work. I made some good friends there. I learned a lot. But I felt Oxford was a bit of an insular town. I knew I wanted to pursue an academic career, which is why, when the time came for graduate school, I thought maybe the United States would be a good place to try, because that would clearly be a big change from Oxford.
N-L: Were there a lot of students from Oxford who went to the US?RB: Not that many. There were a lot the other way around. This was the late '70s when I was there. There were a lot of American students in Oxford. I think there still are. This was the pre-Thatcher days, when the tuition was the same for American and British students. I met a lot of American students there and they gave me lots of advice about where to attempt to go to graduate school here.
N-L: What did you study there?RB: I studied classics and philosophy; it was a joint undergraduate degree.
N-L: How did you get into philosophy, formally speaking?RB: In high school I read a little bit of Plato and things like that as part of my ancient studies. This degree I did as an undergraduate, that was how it was structured: If you did classics you also had to do some philosophy. It's like a very ancient degree, like 200 years ago, that was the only thing you could study there, and gradually some other fields were added. But they still had this relic field.
N-L: Where did you attend graduate school?RB: Went to Berkeley. That was a real eye-opener. It was the change that I wanted. I had the choice of going to Harvard but I judged, correctly, I think, that Berkeley would be more of a contrast to my previous experience. That was in my early 20s, and that's when I moved to the US. It was a whole new world out there.
N-L: Were you looking for change?RB: Oh yeah. Well not necessarily from England, but from Oxford, as an academic setting. As it turned out it was much more of a change than that. I mean, things have become more similar now, but at least in those days it was quite a big contrast. I graduated college in 1980s and then came to the US. From '80-'86 I was a Ph.D student.
N-L: Can you describe the surroundings of Berkeley, what it was like to live there?RB: It was past the period of the '60s, but there were still some kind of throwback people who had clearly never left the '60s. Then, at least, it was quite easy for mentally disturbed people to live in that area because it was a pretty tolerant atmosphere and it was not too cold. I mean there were some people who had clearly been a part of the '60s radical movement and had never quite moved beyond that. But the mainstream atmosphere in the college and the town was quite different from that.
N-L: You finished your PhD. What came after that?RB: I got a job as a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. That was not a big change and not a physically desirable place. I mean, the Dallas, Fort Worth area, it has the amenities of a large urban area, but the overall culture there was a certain anti-intellectual atmosphere, as in many parts of the United States, but it was certainly exaggerated there. In the culture in general, those of us at universities felt like we were sort of a little enclave that was rather different from the overall culture, which was certainly not true at Berkeley and I don't find that to be true so much here, either. I was there for four years, taught a lot. It was a heavy teaching load compared to here. I started a career, and the job was okay, but when the change came to come here, there was no question that this was the better place to be.
N-L: How did you come to Hopkins?RB: I published a few papers in my field, and was starting to get noticed by one or two people. As luck would have it there was an opening here in this department for a person specializing in Ancient Greek philosophy. The person who was retiring knew somebody at Princeton who had just edited a paper of mine, this guy was sort of a mover and shaker in the world of Ancient Greek philosophy, and as I understand he recommended me. The process took a while because they were looking for senior people, and I was pretty junior at that point. The senior person they were looking at, he eventually decided to not come here. And at that point the dean said, "Well I'm not interested in a senior appointment anymore, you can have a junior appointment or nothing," and so that's how they came to me. And so I've been here since 1991.N-L: Since you came here, what have you been doing?RB: Well I teach a whole range of things in Ancient Greek and to some extent Roman philosophy. I do an introduction to ancient Greek philosophy every year. I do, right now, an upper-level class on the later period of Greek philosophy. I do graduate seminars sometimes, I do freshmen seminars sometimes. In this department we teach the whole range of students, from freshmen to Ph.D students. With us, it's a different kind of tradition. I enjoy teaching intro classes to people who have never taken a philosophy class.Right now I publish things, I've done several books, some of which are translations of ancient Greek texts. I'm editing a volume of essays.
N-L: What is it like to edit a volume?RB: It takes some arm twisting to get some people to contribute. They'll agree to contribute, you give them a while to do it, a year to write the paper, and they'll agree up front, "Yeah sure, I can do that." But when the deadline actually comes, then you get very few of them actually submitted. I've got almost half of them now. I haven't edited a volume before, but everyone always tells me that's what it's like. You have to do some harassing.I'm sure you've heard the phrase "Publish or perish." All of us are expected to do scholarship, and if you're invited to do a paper, usually, unless you're really busy, then you'll probably say yes.
N-L: What is teaching at Hopkins like?RB: Teaching at Hopkins is great in that the students are really driven. They are usually very smart; there are very few basic writing problems, compared to the school I first started at. Texas-Arlington, that was a very different kind of thing. There were people who really did have trouble with stringing sentences together, and there's not much of that here. At least at the undergraduate level here, the things that students are driven towards are not always the things that I am interested in teaching. They're driven, but they're driven to get into medical school, which has only an indirect relationship to the kind of thing that I teach.There are going to be versions of that kind of issue everywhere. You wouldn't want huge numbers of people to go into some subject like philosophy. I think that's very good. One thing that's very good about the American higher education system. In Britain, you go to university just to study one subject, whereas here you don't specialize until much later. Some of the most valuable work we do in humanities is teaching classes to people who are not going to be specialists in that field but who will pick up some interesting ideas that will hopefully in some ways, form their life. We have a number of majors, and some of them, many in fact, are second majors with pre-med. Because having a second major in philosophy will show medical schools you are a well-rounded human being.
N-L: How is Hopkins's philosophy department?RB: It's pretty good. I mean, we're small, as all Hopkins departments are. This guy does this report every year that ranks philosophy departments. We don't score as high on it as we might think we should, in part because that ranking system very heavily favors larger departments.
N-L: Is the department going to expand anymore?RB: Well right now we're a little shorthanded because we had two junior people leave, but we're planning to replace them. When I first came here it was nine people, but at its full strength it's 12. That's quite an expansion percentage-wise, but I don't think it's going to get much bigger than that. By some counts that makes us the second-biggest humanities department at Hopkins.
N-L: What are you planning to do in the future?RB: More of the same, certainly. I also have a job with the American Philosophical Association. I do some organization for them, and I'm planning on continuing doing that for a bit. I'm not sure if I'd call this a plan, but I expect sooner or later they'll want me to be chair of the department, which is a different kind of job. Unlike a lot of academics, I actually don't mind administration; I actually quite like it, so long as it doesn't overwhelm all the teaching and scholarship. It's a rotating kind of position, so everyone has to do it at some point. I am probably less unwilling to do it than some other people. I may do another translation. In ancient Greek you have to go very slowly and painstakingly. So basically more of the same.The life of an academic is a very good life, if you can make it in a good place like this with a secure position. There are also a lot of schools that are not as good as this. There are a lot of adjunct hires these days, that is, people who don't have the kind of security that the tenure track does. There are a lot of people, particularly younger people in the profession who don't have it as good, at least not for a while. And that's something that all of us, who are concerned for the future of the academic world, worry about. And not just for ourselves; it's not good for the students either, to have people who are running from campus to campus teaching a course here, a course there. In this position, it's a great life, but there are dangers down the road for the academic field.
