In my four years on the job-market I had about fifteen APA interviews--about a third of these include some of my most horrid experiences in professional philosophy (some favorites: being asked to respond to a series of quotes from my supervisor's letter of recommendation; the five minute silence after I answered a question about how I would teach medieval philosophy with "I would ask Profs. X and Y in your department for advice on that one;" not to mention far worse stories!) As an interviewer I have also left interviews , where I felt that my clarifying questions torpedoed (unintentionally, really!) some very worthy candidates' job-chances. Professional philosophers are not very good at this kind of thing. So, I am very open to just abolishing APA interviews (recall the discussion on the Leiter report and here at the PhilosophySmoker) [ht John Doris].
But I worry that if job-searches are not scheduled around the shared time-frame set by the Eastern APA that then there may be an unintended, bad side-effect: lower starting salaries. For, in the current situation most tenure track searches occur side-by-side. This generates at least the non-trivial possibility that at least some lucky folk may get multiple offers, which generate the opportunity for (modest) bidding wars. A few thousand dollars bump, say, in the first year can generate a huge difference in total salary at the end of one's career. Once the norm of interviewing at the APA dwindles I bet the tacitly-shared hiring calendar in philosophy will also disappear and a lot of universities will notice that they can hire philosophical talent cheaper than they do now. I realize that even if I am right about this (not guaranteed, of course), this added benefit to the lucky few may not outweigh all the moral, psychological, and financial costs of interviewing at the APA. But with increasing downward pressure on academic salaries it is also in our shared financial interest to try to keep competition for talent alive.
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