Steven M. Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where he served for nearly a decade as provost and vice president for academic affairs, then as acting president. He spoke with Heidi Schmidt about his new book, Navigating Academic Life: How the System Works.
What is Navigating Academic Life about?
This collection of recent essays reveals how a professorial career involves not only pursuit of a scholarly discipline but also such unwelcome features as the tribulations of graduate school, the trials of teaching, and the tensions that develop from membership in a department.
What topics do you discuss in the work?
Among the topics discussed are preparing graduate students to teach, how teachers succeed, testing and grading, evaluating teaching, faculty appointments, affirmative action, interviewing candidates, tenure and academic freedom, and gratitude to colleagues.
What writing tips do you have?
As I discuss in Polishing Your Prose: How to Turn First Drafts into Finished Work, a book I wrote with my brother, Victor L. Cahn, a playwright and professor emeritus of English at Skidmore College, a major fault to avoid in writing is verbosity. Fewer words elucidate meaning. Also avoid jargon, redundancy, and useless modifiers, and make sure that every pronoun has a clear antecedent.
How has your teaching influenced your work?
My teaching has led to my editing anthologies intended to provide students with a balanced selection of accessible historical and contemporary readings. These works include The World of Philosophy, now in its second edition, including not only standard analytic materials and Western historical texts but also writings reflecting Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Arabic, African, South American, Chicano, and Native American sources; Political Philosophy: The Essential Texts, soon to appear in its fourth edition; Exploring Ethics, now in its fifth edition; and Exploring Philosophy, now in its seventh edition. One of my oldest anthologies, first published in 1977, is Classics of Western Philosophy, now in its eighth edition.
What’s next for you?
My next project is to complete the third volume of a trilogy of my shorter writings. First came The Road Traveled and Other Essays (2019), whose final article is a detailed account of my career as a faculty member, foundation executive, and university administrator. That book was followed by A Philosopher’s Journey: Essays from Six Decades (2020), which includes favorite essays from the 1960s to the present. The final volume, Philosophical Debates, will appear this year and includes not only my own work but also material to which I am responding.
Steven M. Cahn
Steven M Cahn is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the City University of New York Graduate Center. Among the recent books he has authored are Teaching Philosophy: A Guide (Routledge, 2018); Inside Academia: Professors, Politics, and Policies (Rutgers, 2019); Navigating Academic Life: How the System Works (Routledge, 2021); Professors as Teachers (Wipf and Stock, 2022), and, most recently, From Student to Scholar: A Candid Guide to Becoming a Professor, Second Edition (Wipf and Stock, 2024).
