I have spent the past academic year applying for lecturer and reader positions in UK philosophy departments. Six years ago, when I applied for seven jobs worldwide, I quickly landed one at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Since then, the length of my CV has roughly tripled and now features 15 articles - most of them in high-ranking journals in the field - and two forthcoming books with prestigious academic publishers....Almost all my research has been produced in the eight years following my PhD: an output well above the average for someone applying for philosophy lectureships, and comparable to that of readers or professors with 15 years of experience....With this CV, I have applied for 16 jobs at top 20 UK universities. I have not been shortlisted for a single interview....
Academics also tend to rely on hunches and gossip about who’s hot and who’s not. Hence they end up making decisions that, to an outsider, seem totally counterintuitive and self-defeating, and that breach any principle of meritocracy or fair competition. This, to me, is irresponsible and will ultimately destroy the credibility of the academy.--István Aranyosi, Times Higher Education. [HT Sandrine Berges]
It is rare that somebody publishes his grievances about the academic job-market in such a prominent place, so this is a good opportunity to open up discussion. My own view (derived from Adam Smith and experience) is that academic hiring has a lot in common with a lottery--with lots of deserving winners, but with plenty more equally deserving non-winners. I do have some reservations about Aranyosi's argument.
First, Aranyosi may have been mislead about the nature of the academic job-market by landing so quickly in his academic career such a terrific job at a fantastic university with fairly limited effort. A few privileged exceptions apart, many of us have to apply far more widely to land any position.
Second, Aranyosi seems to think that the main and only criteria in hiring decisions is the number and purported quality of publications. But, of course, people are primarily hiring a colleague that they are often condemned to be with for the rest of their lives. So, personal and cultural fit plays a non-trivial role. (Of course, this can introduce all kinds of harmful biases.) In general, departments are also hiring a philosophy teacher--student enrollments play a non-trivial role in departmental survival. So, research output need not be a trumping consideration.
Third, Aranyosi assumes that length of CV is a key metric of research performance. But, luckily, in many (but by no means all) places people also read writing samples. This may influence their evaluation of the CV. Getting papers published in good journals is a non-trivial professional achievement, but it is also something of a technique. Few us believe that most published philosophy papers are really interesting or significant. I have not read Aranyosi's work, so I can't judge his quality; but until he has read the papers by the folk that displaced him, his (hardly impartial) judgment in the matter is skewed.
None of my comments offer decisive evidence that philosophy is a meritocrocy, of course.
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