In the discussion at the phil smoker on the philjobs appointments page a lot of interesting issues are raised, including:
- whether one should put one's adjuncting jobs on it,
- how post docs seemed to only be available to people from the most prestigious schools,
- the extent to which one can infer affirmative action from the page,
- the extent to which one can infer chances of a tenure track job right out of graduate school from the page,
- the extent to which deans are or are not driven by the desire to make hires from more prestigious schools,
- how many post docs might already have accepted job offers which are now deferred and not on the page,
- the ethical obligations of everybody involved in a department with persistantly low placement numbers.
One thing that didn't get any discussion is the fact that there's a search field on the appointments page. It's on the the right hand side with the word "Go" after it. You can search by area and tell how many people out of the (at present) 206 people who reported their hiring to the site got jobs with given AOSs or AOCs, e.g.
- ethics =60
- science = 49
- metaphysics = 33
- mind = 31
- epistemology = 28
- language = 22
- modern = 15
- ancient = 11
- continental = 10
- logic = 7
It's a little bit limited, because when you put more terms in the field you get Boolean "or." Also, there's no way to limit the search to whether the term occurs in the AOS or AOC . An awful lot of the 33 people in metaphysics have it in AOC [Update: See David Chalmers' comment below; I messed this up, as they don't show AOC. I misremembered some of the people I know who got jobs as having metaphysics AOCs when in fact they have AOSs.].
The Boolean "or" does give you some information though. Since each name only occurs once, if the search for a Boolean or gives you less than the sum, you know that people are doing both of those fields, e.g.
- metaphysics science =71
Since metaphysics = 33 and science = 49, if nobody were doing both, then the field would return 82. So this tells us that 11 people are doing both. And from this we can see that the much heralded (by me) "return to metaphysics" in continental philosophy did not at least this year have any impact on hiring in English language departments.
- continental metaphysics = 43
Since continental = 10 and metaphysics = 33, this means that nobody that reported their hire to the jobs site listed both on their CV!
I suspect that graduate and undergraduate students are going to start doing these kinds of searches when trying to figure out what to focus on, which classes to take, what to dissertate on, and how to present their cvs. Is this rational? Is it a good thing?
One big problem is that you can't infer much from the numbers unless (1) you also know how many people were on the market in those fields in a given year., and (2) the level of reporting is high. If nobody went on the market with both "continental" and "metaphysics" on their cvs, then we really don't know anything about how doing so might effect your chances for a job. Likewise, if only 20 people went on in ancient, while 90 went on in metaphysics, then (all else equal) you have a better chance at going up in ancient, even though the number is less. Also (as with the case of trying to determine affirmative action), one would need to collate these numbers over multiple years for them to be really helpful. Finally, if too many people game the system, then it undermines the system being gamed. Let's say that everybody goes into philosophy of science because that's where most of the good jobs are. Then when they are all on the market in five or so years the ratio of job seekers to jobs in the philosophy of science become worse than all of the other jobs.
I'm interested in what people think about these issues. In general one should follow the muse and ignore everything else, but of course that can be dangerous pre-tenure. But if too many people game things too much it not only becomes self-defeating but also I think bad for philosophy.
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