Academic Job Market

Written by Fionn Dempsey on August 27, 2008 – 2:31 pm

I was recently asked about the academic job market for philosophers in Ireland, and it struck me that I don’t really know a lot about this stuff myself, so I was wondering if it would be a good idea to start a discussion about it here. It will be prudent at the outset to presage my general ignorance of the academic job market abroad, too, and to invite some discussion of academic job-seeking in general as a context-setting exercise.

So… what is the state of the academic job market? Is it rather rough in these parts, comparatively, and what is the control sample for judgments of relative roughness? Is there a marked unevenness of positions in different philosophical fields? What institutions are notable, and for what reasons? Are there structural/institutional differences between academic work here and abroad?

And what is the context for this discussion: Is there a different ethos/conception of academic philosophy in Ireland, as opposed to, say, the States, or Britain, and in what does it consist?

All comments welcome, from members and non-members alike!

12 Responses »

1. Flynn on August 27th, 2008 at 3:58 pm:

   Rather than taking up space elsewhere, maybe people who had been through the process before might also have some advice for people seeking phd programs?

2. Chris Mole on August 27th, 2008 at 9:14 pm:

   Oh, my dear grad students – The job market is well worth worrying about, and there is lots of worrying to do.

   I speak from only partial experience, but here are the things you ought to know. Some of them will seem obvious, but are worth remembering. At UCD we have hitherto been doing a bad job of informing our students about all this:

   1. The time to start thinking about the job market is the beginning of your final year of Phd studies.
   2. Most job applications contain:
      • (1) A C.V.
      • (2) A Covering Letter.
      • (3) Some References – The number can vary, but it is unusual for there to be more than you can count on one hand. These are confidential from you, but you should still take an interest in them.
      • (4) A Dissertation Summary – A couple of pages in length, going through the thing chapter by chapter, and explaining its cleverness (which is not the same thing as stating the arguments). You can say ‘In Chapter Two I prove that …’ without reprising the proof here. Note, however, that every claim you make here is a plum question for an interviewer to throw at you.
      • (5) A Writing Sample – This might be a dissertation chapter, or perhaps a short paper that you’ve written along the way. Length constraints might be different for different jobs, so you may need to tailor this for some applications.
      • (6) A Statement of ‘Teaching Philosophy’ – This is usually only requested by American Liberal Arts Colleges, but it’s not an unusual requirement and you need to have it ready, because they might ask for it in short order. A page or two will suffice, but it’s tough to write if you’ve no teaching experience. The difficulty is to avoid banality. When attending job interviews it is a good idea to have, in your hand and in triplicate, a complete worked out twelve week syllabus for every course that you claim to be able to teach. You should also be able to answer specific questions about these. For the topics that you claim as areas of expertise you’ll need undergraduate and graduate syllabi. It’s also recommended to have different syllabi for beginning and for advanced undergrads.
      • (7) A Statement of Work Done During your Graduate Study – Not a lot to this one: just names of courses, names of the lecturers, and a sentence or two explaining what the course covered if the title doesn’t make it explicit. This information should be arranged chronologically.
   3. Of the things listed above the CV and writing sample are the things you should worry about most. The importance of the covering letter is a matter of some contention. There are some jobs for which it’s important too. It’s the one thing that needs to be redone for every job you apply for. The rest of the stuff you can photocopy a million times and stuff the envelopes ahead of time.
   4. The writing sample should simply be the single most high quality and most exciting thing you have ever written.
   5. The C.V. should cover
      • Your Name
      • Your Contact Details – including home number, mobile number, and all the rest. Potential interviewers will call you at home, in the evening, when you’re drunk.

        I once had an offer of a job interview that was nearly lost when a powercut caused my answerphone to dump its memory (thanks to my flatmate at the time for remembering sufficient details for the identity of the school to be deduced). Give them a fax number too (Helen’s). If they’re in a different time zone they might offer the job at any hour of the day or night.

      • A statement of your ‘Areas of Competence’ and ‘Areas of Specialization’. A topic counts as an AoS if you could teach a graduate seminar on it and write a paper on it. It counts as an AoC if you could teach it to undergrads.

        Resist the temptation to double count: Nobody will be impressed by a list along the lines of: ‘Metaethics, Ethics, Normativity, Value Theory, Utilitarianism, Practical Reasoning’. It is, however, OK, to list a hedged topic if your expertise is limited. Listing ‘Descartes to Hume’ is fine if your Kant is shaky. It might also get you out of a dodgy interview question.

      • Awards and Honours – This can be construed fairly broadly, but it will do you no favours if you look desperate.
      • A List of Publications – If this list is empty then it isn’t the end of the world. It’s also OK to include papers that have been submitted, but not yet accepted – just make sure you list them as such (and, be ready to provide them at a moment’s notice in the event that interviewers ask for them). In my opinion you’re ill advised to publish second rate work in second rate journals just for the sake of adding a line to your C.V.
      • A List of Papers Presented at Conferences. Unlike the list of publications, my inclination is to say that this list really ought not to be empty. All serious graduate students are doing work that’s good enough to be presented at conferences, and all ought to care enough about the state of the discipline to being attending conferences and giving presentations.
      • A list of courses on which you have experience teaching.
      • A list of other things you’ve done that could be construed as ’service to the discipline’ or that in some way show you to be a dedicated and philosophical kind of guy. As before, the appearance of desperation is to be avoided.
   6. In order to learn about job vacancies you need to subscribe to ‘Jobs for Philosophers’ – Go to the website of the American Philosophical Association in order to do so. You should also subscribe to emails from Philos-L, and from jobs.ac.uk
   7. Most american schools use two rounds of interviews when making appointments. The first round takes place at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Conference (which takes place between Christmas and New Year). Interviews in this round are not more than half an hour in length. The second round involves being flown out to the campus of the university in question. At this stage you will be expected to give a talk, and possibly to address a group of undergraduates. You will also be expected to eat at least one dinner with your potential future colleges, and to be debonair throughout.
   8. What you must never, ever do is take anything personally. You will get a lot of rejections. The whole thing is very up and down, even if it’s going well. Even the best people have a horrible time on the job market. The fact that you are having a horrible time is no reason to pretend to be anything that you’re not. Nor is it a reason to feel bad. There were more than a hundred and seventy applicants when UCD last advertised a permanent job. Rejections are to be expected.
3. Fionn Dempsey on August 28th, 2008 at 11:08 am:

   That’s really quite fantastic help, Chris. Thank you so much for taking the time to write it.

   You’re right – this sort of information doesn’t tend to offer itself within the department – there is the sense that one just knows it, but which is sort of disconcerting when you don’t feel as if you do. I’m always hopeless at discovery by epistemological osmosis. It really helps to have an idea of what is expected.

   I wonder whether this material shouldn’t be incorporated into the “Research and Methodology” type seminar strand, if it hasn’t already?

   You mentioned that the jobs for the last academic post in UCD were highly contested. How does that degree of contest compare with other departments in the country, I wonder, and with universities abroad? And do you know if, in Ireland, that level of application is discipline-specific (I mean sub-disciplines of philosophy here; or species, like European/Anglo-American, etc), or if there is a stable mean across different fields?

4. Emma Nic Eodhasa on August 28th, 2008 at 11:37 am:

   Way to kill the dream, Chris.

5. Fionn Dempsey on August 28th, 2008 at 1:45 pm:

   The cake shop dream?

6. Emma Nic Eodhasa on August 28th, 2008 at 2:02 pm:

   Granted, I actually dream of cake shops, and only cake shops, but I was imagining a counterfactual situation in which reaching the heady heights of academia was desirable, and more importantly, prima facie conceivable.
   No more.

7. Chris Mole on August 29th, 2008 at 7:04 am:

   There are, as you would expect, opinionated, lengthy and often well-informed discussions of various aspects of the job market experience, to be found on Leiter’s Blog.

8. Simone on September 3rd, 2008 at 11:23 am:

   Thanks a mil, Chris!

9. Simone on January 12th, 2009 at 11:13 am:

   There is an interesting discussion about some of these issues over ‘Certain Doubts’. You can find it here http://fleetwood.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=899#comments

   s.

10. Admin on January 12th, 2009 at 11:44 pm:

    http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2009/01/pedigree-and-hiring-decisions.html

11. Andrew J on January 14th, 2009 at 4:56 pm:

    Thanks for the link Simone. Very sobering reading. I disagree with the strategy they advocate of holding out to publish in a top class journal. The name of the journal counts to people who aren’t going to read the piece, but after they’ve read it, the quality of the work speaks for itself regardless of where it appears. If you aim for the journals with the best reputation, the most likely outcome given their very low acceptance rates, is that you wait for ages before getting rejected with limited or no comments.

12. Simone on January 15th, 2009 at 10:04 am:

    I completely agree Andrew, but I guess it all boils down to what hiring committees usually do. I mean, do they read the candidate’s papers (all of them, from the very first round, not just the papers of the shortlisted candidates), or do they just look at the journal’s titles? The comments on ‘Certain Doubts’ seem to lean toward this latter option as an underlying assumption of the whole discussion. Personally, I have no clue of how the hiring process works. But if it is true (at least partially) that the reputation of the journal counts more than the actual quality of the papers in the overall evaluation of the candidates, then I guess there are ‘pragmatic’ reasons for recommending graduate students only publish in well-known journals.

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