Leiter has a post up on the issue of the ‘stale PhD', which remains an ongoing debate despite the unusually bad job market of the last years. The rationale seems to be that real ‘stars’ will land TT jobs straight out of graduate school, so if someone has been out of graduate school for some time and still does not have a TT job, search committees will infer that there is something ‘wrong’ with the candidate -- otherwise he or she would have already gotten a TT job. The vicious circularity of the process is patent: the reason why you don’t get a TT job is that you didn’t get a TT job in the first place. It is unfair, but yet one of these heuristics that people use to save time and effort in judging and decision-making processes.
My understanding is that the focus on TT job is predominantly a North-American phenomenon, as opposed to how the job market is organized in Europe (especially continental Europe). As some readers outside Europe may already know, academic research in Europe is heavily subsidized by research grants provided by funding agencies such as the European Research Council as well as national agencies (in the Netherlands, the almighty NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) – a structure that Eric Schliesser has voiced quite a few objections to, but one which I see as having many advantages as well. (And I must admit that these people have been pretty generous with me so far, so I can’t complain…)
This means that there are usually quite a few very attractive post-doc positions available within the bigger projects, and one of the reasons why they are attractive is that they are research-intensive, with little to no teaching or admin load. By contrast, a newly minted PhD straight out of graduate school who lands a TT job typically gets immediately caught in the grinding mill of heavy teaching loads and administrative responsibilities. Add to that the fact that now, in many places, PhD studentships last only 3 years, which means that students come out of graduate school still with rather little research time and experience. So a post-doc position may represent the time they need to continue their maturation as researchers, get some good publications out there, and get ready for ‘real jobs’ later on.
Of course, the trouble with post-doc positions is that they are temporary, and many people go through the exhausting merry-go-round of numerous post-docs at different places. But personally, and especially for those who did their PhDs in little time, I see two or three years of post-doc’ing straight out of graduate school as the ideal path. It allows the person to become a more mature researcher, which will then benefit her later career, both for research and for teaching.
I realize that the attraction of a permanent TT position is considerable, so much so that one may think that it is a no-brainer to choose between a TT offer and a research-intensive post-doc offer. But in many cases, I sincerely think one will be better off taking one’s chances with a temporary post-doc position in an inspiring environment, one that will allow for further research maturation and thriving, than with a teaching-intensive position. (Naturally, I realize that this only applies to the happy few who are presented with such choices!) But the upshot is also that, during a post-doc period, you should do your utter best to beef up your research track record with some solid publications and other accomplishments (a little bit of teaching is also advisable).
Similarly, I want to suggest that search committees be more judicious with the ‘stale PhD heuristics’ during hiring processes, in view of the gain in professional maturity that research post-doc positions may represent. For those who are perhaps less lucky and have a trajectory of other kinds of temporary positions (VAP, adjunct teaching, jobs outside academia), here too committees should keep in mind that those who still manage to produce good work in adverse conditions are likely to be more talented and determined than those who produce the same level of good work in favorable conditions (as per Mark’s recent arguments).
In other words, while Leiter’s post places the discussion mostly at the descriptive level (do search committees in fact discriminate against people with ‘old degrees’?), my post here is intended to be saying something at the prescriptive level, in particular to be presenting some arguments on why a few years out of graduate school in a post-doc position can be a good thing for a job candidate. (Not to mention the sheer unfairness of the stale PhD heuristics!)
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