How Important Are Credentials?

This morning I met a group of friends for coffee. One asked me how I’ll be spending my summer, and I told them about some of the research I plan to do: studying leafcutter ants in Costa Rica, learning more about bioinformatics, and hopefully some classes and practical learning about freshwater bivalve ecology.

One of the guys at the table is new to our group. He knows I’m a philosophy professor, but he was surprised to hear me talking about studying biology this summer.

How Many Degrees Do I Need?

“You must have more degrees than I know about,” he said to me.

And that’s a reasonable guess. Why would anyone study ants and clams and mussels if they weren’t a biologist, after all?

“No,” I replied. “I just do a lot that I’m not qualified for.”

I meant it in jest, but not completely. I’ve made my career by learning through doing.

Learning By Doing

In high school, I worked in construction, in our local hardware store, and as a stone mason. I didn’t intend to become a home builder, but I enjoyed learning to work with my hands.

When it was time to go to college, I started off thinking that I’d study math, science, and computers. (I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I liked learning about those things.)

Somehow along the way I wound up majoring in Spanish, studying Greek, Latin, Russian, French, and German, and minoring in education and comparative poetry. This meant that when I graduated, I was prepared to a high school Spanish teacher, but my student teaching in the local high school made it clear to me that while I love learning languages, I didn’t really want to teach them full time.

For the next few years after college, I worked as a campus minister. I didn’t have a seminary degree, but I had studied a lot of religion and theology in college and on my own, and I got lots of on-the-job training.

While I was doing that work, an opportunity came up to bring my college students to Poland, where we taught English and volunteered with Habitat for Humanity for a few summers after the Soviet Union fell apart. My training in teaching languages turned out to be very helpful there. So did all my experience in construction and masonry!

During the regular school year, I found that what really interested me about campus ministry was spending time with college students who were asking the Big Questions about life. This led me to read more theology and especially philosophy of religion.

Towards the end of my time as a campus minister, some students who had heard me speaking on campus invited me to debate some philosophy professors. I accepted the invitation and found that while I hadn’t studied philosophy in college, all the reading I’d done made the debate into an enjoyable experience.

I’m sure the professors found me to be underwhelming, but I left that debate feeling like I’d found my people and my calling. Soon after, I was off to graduate school in philosophy.

In grad school a series of new opportunities presented themselves. To pay the bills, I started working as a fly-fishing guide and as a substitute high school teacher. One of the students I met in that high school asked me if I’d teach him Greek, so I started tutoring him. Soon others asked me to teach them languages, and math, and science, so I took those jobs as well.

Unqualified

As I said, I’ve made my career by learning the next thing by doing the next thing. Of course my degrees helped me to get my job as a professor — there are some jobs where the degree is essential (in medicine, for instance) and others where it is highly conventional (being a professor, for example.) But most of the really interesting moves I’ve made in my career have been when I’ve put together a few of the experiences I’ve had and used them to learn more — and to do more.

Consider what I just said about my work in Poland, for instance. I had some experience in construction and training in teaching languages, so I put them together and taught English while volunteering to build homes.

Or consider my work as a language and math tutor. Once again, I took a little experience and put it to work. Rather than going back to school for a new credential, I taught what I knew, which spurred me on to learn more so I could teach better.

That work teaching abroad when I was a campus minister made it easy for me to start teaching abroad as a professor. Since I knew Spanish, I was able to help other professors teach courses abroad in Central America. And along the way, I learned some of their fields (Economics and Ecology) so I could help them teach.

Even my experience as a fly-fishing guide has been helpful in my career. If you’re going to help people catch fish, you have to understand the fish and the place they live. In a way, by guiding I had become an amateur river ecologist. Later, when I started teaching environmental philosophy, I drew on that knowledge, and began to specialize in the relationships between fish and forests. Eventually, I got good enough that I was able to write a book about trout, and to found an interdisciplinary environmental studies program.

Lifelong Learning

One of the catchphrases of higher education these days is “lifelong learning.” By it we usually mean that when our students graduate, they should be prepared to continue to teach themselves. That’s the ideal, anyway.

In reality, lots of people will tell us that being self-taught isn’t enough, and we’re told that if we’re going to do something worthwhile, we need to get credentialed.

This is true, but only to a degree. Some fields do require the credentials. But my hope is that your lack of credentials won’t hold you back from learning more, and applying what you learn. Obviously there are limits, especially in fields where the consequences of practicing that field badly can do great harm. Even so, I would guess there are things that you know that will benefit others if you practice them, and where there is little downside to trying.

Ants and Mollusks

For me, this summer, that means studying ants and mollusks. I see no downside to learning more about these small lives, and I see a lot of upside for them and for us if I, a teacher, learn more about the ways our lives are connected to theirs.

And I am much more interested in that learning than I am in getting more credentials.

How about you? What will you learn next, and how will you put it to use to help others?

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