I am a Tufts alumnus and proud member of EPIIC’s 2015-2016 colloquium on the Future of Europe. With encouragement from Sherman, IGL staff and my EPIIC classmates, I was supported at every step of my college journey across the social sciences and humanities and from Medford to Oxford and back.
Graduating with a degree in philosophy in 2019, I went on to focus in philosophy at the University of Chicago’s Master of Arts Program in the Humanities. My thesis centered on the moral and political philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr., weaving together longstanding interests in the interface between philosophy, intellectual history, and “the real world”.
I have since worked as a writer in a range of professional contexts. After a stint as a reporter on the financial industry, I worked as a proposal writer for the Foundation and Institutional Advisory practice at AllianceBernstein, a global asset manager. I currently work on proposal writing and business development for the Foundations and Endowments Specialty Practice at Truist Bank.
I look forward to more professional twists and turns as I explore the challenges and opportunities around me. For now, I’m happy to have landed back in my hometown of Houston, where I enjoy reading, fishing, and mild winters.
This exchange was had during his time as a Masters student at the University of Chicago. We begin with his time at Tufts and in EPIIC. We touch upon his chief interests in moral and political philosophy, literature, history, and the humanities generally. We also discuss his aspirations to find a vocation in teaching, practicing journalism, or otherwise engaging in the publishing and editorial world. I expect he will find the means to combine his many interests and pursuits, knowing him to be both a deep thinker and an integrator of ideas. I know he will do great things in any and all domains he engages in.
Reece is among the most thoughtful and intellectually principled people I’ve met. It’s a privilege to have known him as a classmate in EPIIC, and now to have him as a friend.
- Jerome Krumenacker, 2019
EPIIC was one of the first experiences you opted into entering Tufts. What drew you to the course as a freshman? How did it shape the rest of your college experience?
I probably would never have heard of EPIIC if it hadn't been for Caitlin Thompson, who at the time I started at Tufts was an upperclassman instructor in the Experimental College and my orientation leader. She spoke about EPIIC in a way that no one else was talking about their schoolwork. I couldn't quite tell what she was getting at (who can know what they're really getting into before they actually get into EPIIC?) but something about the challenge, the camaraderie, and the clarity of purpose she described cut through the noise of orientation week. I went to Sherman's information session a few days later and somehow decided I would give this thing a shot. It was the first academic and intellectual risk I'd ever really taken, but it felt like the right one to take.
In the short term, EPIIC gave me a taste of social science and its complicated interface with the world. It helped me hone in on themes I found resonant and let me follow up on those interests. In my case, those interests tended in the direction of political theory, which is part of the reason I went on to major in philosophy.
As much as any experience I had in college, EPIIC taught me to seek out difficulty. To seek out difficult ideas and debates, but also to seek out the complex social circumstances they're embedded in. It's easy (for me, anyway) to go through the motions, seeking the path of least resistance and avoiding the intellectual and social-emotional risks of important work. But you just can't do that and succeed in a project like EPIIC. You need to learn to be confident in what you know and honest about everything you don't. You need to trust other people and take seriously the trust they put in you. You need to know how to lead and how to follow. You need a sense of your horizons. I think EPIIC gave me those skills and that sense.
Overall, The experience was breathtaking--breathtakingly challenging, breathtakingly fun, breathtakingly meaningful. I came away from the year with new standards for myself and my work, and friends who continue to hold me to them.
Is there anything particularly unique and meaningful about the friendships you made?
I'm definitely introverted, and often shy to boot, but I love people. More often than I'd like, I have the experience of wanting deeply to connect with and feel comfortable around people I admire and feeling like I fail at it. There are steps I can take to improve myself and manage that feeling, but to some extent I think it'll follow me wherever I go. For whatever reason, though, the friends I made in EPIIC are that rare type who put me totally at ease. Not intellectually at ease (they can think circles around me), but as their friend and fellow traveler. My friends from EPIIC are some of most thoughtful, kind, and humane folks I know.
You studied philosophy at Tufts, and I know you to be sensitive to the tension between the life of the mind and the call to civic engagement. How have you navigated that tension through your time at Tufts? How did EPIIC influence your approach?
Philosophy felt like the right place to sit with various tensions. For one, it's right there at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, disciplines I love and whose boundaries are very porous. Although they're often hybrids, I think philosophers are very much humanists in this respect: they worry about how and whether they can justify their work in a world that demands action. There are purists who dismiss this worry, but more who take it seriously. The professors and classmates I found in philosophy, as in so many other places at Tufts, grappled honestly with the tension of theory and practice. In particular, I'm grateful to have been a student of Lionel McPherson and Erin Kelly, excellent thinkers who shaped the academic interests I'm pursuing in grad school. Maybe most of all, I admire Susan Russinoff, my advisor. She's a fantastic teacher and an advocate anyone would be lucky to have. They are all people who recognized their stake in the world and took responsibility for it. I think I discovered that ethos in EPIIC, and I've tried to stay close by it ever since.
Near the end of my time at Tufts I had the chance to join the Ethics Bowl team, one of the nerdier things I did as an undergraduate (and that's saying something). I joined up at the prompting of some good friends and with the encouragement of Professor Russinoff, our coach and sponsor. As a practical ethics contest, it falls naturally at the intersection of philosophy and the world, of thinking and acting. This was a place I wanted to be.
I didn't realize at the time that Ethics Bowl would lead me farther beyond the ivory tower than I had imagined. In my last semester, my teammates and I traveled to MCI Concord, a prison, to work with incarcerated students on ethical reasoning and help facilitate a version of our competition. It was intense, humbling, and amazing to start a conversation with the students at Concord about justice and punishment and the ways we have of thinking through our responsibilities to each other. I can't imagine a higher purpose for philosophy, for academia, or for life than to struggle with these issues.
You have a deep interest in a broad range of eclectic topics, including, for example, international justice, theory of mind, and nuclear security. What core principles and convictions tie together how you think about these themes?
I wish I had a good answer! The honest through-line is probably that I have too much time on my hands. Like a lot of topics I'm interested in, they are all conditions in the lives we live and the society we share. They’re all given, in the sense that they came before us, but not in the sense that they're unchanging. I think if we pay attention, we can notice the circumstances under which they do change, and consider what that means for us.
I've been thinking especially about how notions of identity condition us to think about ourselves and the problems we face. Racial, ethnic, gender, and national identities are all critical background conditions which, as we're seeing now, sometimes break into the foreground in our personal and political lives. They are incredibly consequential, and yet they change constantly, and faster than we recognize. I'm interested in how and whether philosophical analysis can pinpoint what we mean when we talk about these identities, how we use these identities in practice, and how we ought to think about, talk about, and use them.
What drew you to the Masters in the Humanities at the University of Chicago? Will you gravitate to a particular discipline, or choose a multidisciplinary focus?
I'll probably focus somewhere between political philosophy and literature. If that doesn't sound like a focus, well, I can't argue with that. Unlike a lot of other, more specialized master's programs, the MAPH allows you to work across and even beyond the traditional humanities disciplines over the course of the degree. I think a tragedy of the disciplines, or at least of grad school, is that you have to sacrifice so much interesting, worthwhile stuff in order to gain "expertise" in something. I really appreciate that I can make my own way here and stave off some of the pressure to specialize for a little while.
What are the virtues of generalizing? How does resisting specialization allow you to grow in ways you might otherwise not?
Hopefully I'll learn more and more about the virtues of generalizing as I go! As far as growth is concerned, I think being a generalist forces you to first articulate and then address problems and projects, making the case for their importance in terms that aren't domain-specific. Needless to say, we can't do without specialists. But I think specialists sometimes fall into a blinkered worldview that sets the agenda for them. Often that's what we want--it's an efficient way for super-competent people to prioritize and throw themselves at prescribed challenges. On the other hand, there's always going to be an important place for people who, because they don't have the scaffolding of a particular professional community or a narrow skill set, have to set think hard about setting the agenda in light of the connections they see between things.
What’s next for you? What are your aspirations?
I'm using this year to hone my academic and non-academic writing skills, which I'd love to put to use somehow.
From there, whether I go the PhD route or not, I plan to give myself at least a year out in the real world, and I'd like to fill it with something worthwhile.
By "real world," I mean the world that exists outside the incentive structure of the research university system. I think it's hard to overstate how much that incentive system distorts values, relationships, and self-image (in good and bad ways), and it's always worth reminding myself of that fact as I consider the costs and benefits of a career in or outside academia.
Journalism really interests me, for example. Teaching, too. Ultimately I don't want to be too precious about what comes next. I want to be grateful for now, and for all the opportunities I'm unbelievably lucky to have moving forward.
What draws you to writing and journalism? The joy of the act? An impact you aspire to have?
Both! My own writing certainly hasn't made an impact in the world, but it has definitely impacted me. There will never be anything else like writing as a tool for learning. And when it's done really well, it's one of the best forms for sharing what you've learned. I hope that someday I'll have learned something well enough to help someone else understand it. I would be in a position to do for others what great writers do for me every day.
Whose writing and philosophy do you admire?
These days I'm interested in Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and especially Martin Luther King, Jr. Each of them formulated compelling responses to unimaginable injustice. In King's case, he's only fairly recently been taken up by scholars as a full-fledged philosopher instead of rather than just a great orator. This is long overdue--his thinking about justice, ethics, and nonviolence are subtle, powerful, and highly relevant today.