New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

What it takes to succeed in academia

By Catarina Dutilh Novaes

I’ve just been promoted to (junior)* full professor in Groningen, and while I’m still duly enjoying the accompanying feeling of achievement and recognition, it got me thinking about how I got here. It does not take much to conclude that, while I've worked incredibly hard for this, I was also *extremely* lucky. I know countless  people who work just as hard as I do (or more), and who are as good as I am at what they do (or better), and yet do not get similar professional recognition. It takes an incredible amount of luck and, yes, privilege, for things to work out. So let me comment on two kinds of luck that may play a role in one’s professional development. 

The first kind is simply the luck to have been dealt rather generous cards in life. While I am a woman in a male-dominated field, and while I had to overcome hurdles related to coming from the ‘periphery’ of academic action (originally from Brazil, and then developing my career in the Netherlands, which is ok but frankly not Top of the Pops), for the rest I’ve been extremely privileged. My parents were both academics (my mother still is), so in terms of academic support at home I was particularly well served. For a number of reasons, I also never had to worry about economical hardship and financial stability, and thus I could choose the risk of an academic career without having to worry whether one day I’d have no food on my plate. And, last but not least, I am white, not differently abled, cis, and I fit reasonably well within certain stereotypical standards of beauty.

Let me refer to this kind of luck as privilege-luck, and it is still a matter of luck because I might just as well have been born in different circumstances, and things might have been very different. One way in which privilege-luck manifests itself very conspicuously is with the so-called ‘pedigree’ phenomenon; depending on where you go to school (both undergraduate and graduate), your career will develop in very different ways. But we all know very well that the school you end up going to is almost entirely determined by the kind of socio-economical background you can fall back on.

Meritocracies, Rankings, Curricula: A Personal Take On Academic Philosophy

By: Samir Chopra

Some six years ago, shortly after I had been appointed to its faculty, the philosophy department at the CUNY Graduate Center began revising its long-standing curriculum; part of its expressed motivation for doing so was to bring its curriculum into line with those of "leading" and "top-ranked" programs. As part of this process, it invited feedback from its faculty members. As a former graduate of the Graduate Center's Ph.D program, I thought I was well-placed to offer some hopefully useful feedback on its curriculum, and so, I wrote to the faculty mailing list, doing just that. Some of the issues raised in my email are, I think, still relevant to academic philosophy. Not everybody agreed with its contents; some of my cohort didn't, but in any case, perhaps this might provoke some discussion.

Here, reproduced almost verbatim, is that email:

Charlie Huenemann on what we should be doing instead of what we are doing

Provocative essay here by Charlie Huenemann on how academic philosophy broke bad and what might be done to correct it. Most people that make these kinds of criticisms assume that it would be easy to fix the problems so that all of us could get back to doing old-style philosophy like Plato, Kant, and Hegel did. What's most interesting to me about Huenemann's essay is that he explicitly rejects this assumption.

Huenemann first argues that the modern cult of management in academia brought about a situation where there is:

(1) more attention devoted to narrow problem-solving activity rather then efforts to deepen philosophical wonder; (2) increasingly narrow specialization and less general knowledge of the discipline itself and its history; (3) less engagement with anyone outside the professional guild; and (4) development of various cants and shibboleths to patrol membership in the guild.

There is a lot of wisdom here. However, as noted above, whenever I read this kind of whingeing (and I routinely write it in this forum), I'm almost always struck by the whinger's optimism that there could be any alternative, i.e. if we were all just less narrow we'd be able to do the same kind of stuff that Kant or Schopenhauer did. But is this not exactly like telling a music theory professor that he should compose late period Beethoven quartets and stop with all of the articles on Schenker Analysis? It's a transparently silly demand.

Beyond the baby penalty: The lived experience of mothers and a father who are tenured academics

Google the keywords “academic” and “mother” or “motherhood”, and you will find various websites with discussions about the baby penalty in academia for women. Representative for this literature is an influential Slate article by Mary Ann Mason, who writes “For men, having children is a career advantage; for women, it is a career killer. And women who do advance through the faculty ranks do so at a high price. They are far less likely to be married with children.” 

As an untenured mother of two children, I find these reports unsettling. When my second child was born, several women who are junior academics approached me to ask me if it was doable, or how I managed to get anything done. They wanted children but were scared that it would kill their careers. How do children impact one’s work? This got me thinking that it would be good to hear the stories of philosophers who did manage to combine a flourishing academic career with parenthood.

To this end, I interviewed seven tenured professors who are parents. Six of them are mothers, but I decided to also include an involved father. I aimed to include some diversity of circumstance. Some of my interviewees have very young children whereas one respondent has grown children, she had them in a time when being a mother and a professor was even less evident than it is now. One of my interviewees is a single mother, who had her child in graduate school. One went to a first-round APA interview when her son was six weeks old, with a sitter in the hotel room. Two of my interviewees have special needs children, a fact that shaped their academic careers in important ways. I aimed also for geographic diversity—my respondents come from the US, the UK, Canada and The Netherlands—since countries and institutional culture differ in the formal and informal support parents receive, such as paid leave and childcare.

Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 1: How and why do they end up there?

This is the first of a three-part series featuring in-depth interviews with philosophers who have left academia. This part (part 1) focuses on their philosophical background, the jobs they have now, and why they left academia. Part 2 examines the realities of having a non-academic job and how it compares to a life in academia. In part 3, finally, the interviewees reflect on the transferable skills of a PhD in philosophy, and offer concrete advice on those who want to consider a job outside of academia. 

Does having a PhD in philosophy mean your work opportunities have narrowed down to the academic job market? This assumption seems widespread, for example, a recent Guardian article declares that programs should accept fewer graduate students as there aren’t enough academic jobs for all those PhDs. Yet academic skills are transferrable: philosophy PhDs are independent thinkers who can synthesize and handle large bodies of complex information, write persuasively as they apply for grants, and they can speak for diverse kinds of audiences. 

How do those skills translate concretely into the non-academic job market? To get a clearer picture of this, I conducted interviews with 7 philosophers who work outside of academia. They are working as consultant, software engineers, ontologist (not the philosophical sense of ontology), television writer, self-employed counselor, and government statistician. Some were already actively considering non-academic employment as graduate students, for others the decision came later—for one informant, after he received tenure. 

These are all success stories. They are not intended to be a balanced representation of the jobs former academics hold. Success stories can provide a counterweight to the steady drizzle of testimonies of academic disappointment, where the inability to land a tenure track position is invariably couched in terms of personal failure, uncertainty, unhappiness and financial precarity. In this first part, I focus on what kinds of jobs the respondents hold, and how they ended up in non-academic jobs in the public and private sector. Why did they leave academia? What steps did they concretely take to get their current position? 

I hope this series of posts will empower philosophy PhDs who find their current situation less than ideal, especially—but no only—those in non-tenure track position, to help them take steps to find a nonacademic career that suits them. And even if one’s academic job is as close to a dreamjob as one can conceivable get, it’s still fascinating to see what a PhD in philosophy can do in the wider world.

Excellence, Schmexcellence Part IV*: an attempt to be clearer about the main problems with assessment.

In comment #9 at this post, Susan makes a kind of canonical case I've heard from lots of assessment people.

First, I should say that I agree with 95% of the intended answers to Susan's rhetorical questions. We should be much clearer about what we want our students to get out of their degrees, and we should put in the hard work of assessing the extent that we are successful.

But "assessment" in contemporary American bureaucracies almost always accomplishes exactly the opposite of the laudable goals that Susan and I share. And there are deep systematic reasons for this. Below, I will first explain three fallacies and then explain why everyone involved in assessment faces enormous pressure to go along with these fallacies. Along the way I hope to make it clear how this results in "assessment" making things demonstrably worse.**

But What about the Children?

It is not very difficult to give undergraduates advice about where they might pursue graduate study without egregiously insulting large numbers of your professional colleagues. 

But then how to explain the ubiquity things like this not unrepresentative post by Spiros?*

In the context of a very nice post about an exceptional department, Professor Leiter claims: "The term 'pluralism'** has, alas, been debased to the point that everyone now knows it is usually a code word for 'crappy philosophy is welcome here'."

That's accurate, but a little too generous! For one thing, it understates the self-congratulation with which the term is deployed, and well as the ways in which it is wielded in order to deceive those most vulnerable in our profession.

I realize that many of our judgments of concerning philosophical work are somewhere between full-bore cognitive judgments and Kantian judgments of taste rather than judgments of things you happen to find agreeable. I mean, my distaste for a philosophical view or text is not the same as my distaste for bitter vegetables. And that's fine!

Guest post by Zoe Drayson: Happiness-prediction and careers advice

A guest post by Zoe Drayson (Stirling).

------

Can you imagine being happy in a non-academic career? This question is often posed by academics to prospective graduate students, who are encouraged to pursue an academic career only if their answer is ‘no’. This advice came under Nate Kreuter’s scrutiny in a recent Inside Higher Ed column:

Let me start this column by looking at what I think is a horrible but common piece of advice. […] I have often heard of faculty members advising prospective and current graduate students to pursue or continue their graduate studies only if "you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else." The implication, of course, is that you should only pursue an advanced or terminal degree if being a professor is the only way you can see yourself being happy […] [T]his is shockingly bad advice.

While Kreuter worries that this advice fails to acknowledge the possibility of combining academic degrees with non-academic careers, my own concerns are more fundamental and focused specifically on the discipline of philosophy. I’m worried that, by dishing out this advice, we are unintentionally discriminating against precisely those groups of people we are trying hardest to attract and retain.

Getting papers accepted for publication: how?

One of the skills philosophers-to-be must master is how to negotiate the ins and outs of getting their papers published in journals. Of course, the main thing is learning how to write good papers in the first place, but as we all know, writing a good paper is not a sufficient condition for achieving publication. As the years go by and I move steadily from ‘young, up-and-coming philosopher’ to someone with responsibilities for training other people, I’ve found it increasingly important to guide them in the process of finding the right home for their papers. Obviously, learning to do so is a never-ending process, and we ‘old people’ are still prone to making strategic mistakes; but there is a thing or two that we learn through experience regarding how to select the right journal(s) to submit a paper to. In this post, I’ll elaborate on some of the ‘strategies’ I’ve been passing on to the people I supervise; many of them will sound obvious to more experienced members of the profession, but I hope they can be useful to those still learning to navigate the seas of the publishing process.

One well-known heuristic is to follow the order of a certain ‘hierarchy’ of journals, from top to bottom. So you start aiming as high as you can, and then go one step down the ladder if your paper is rejected. Now, while this is generally speaking a sensible approach, there is much to be said against it. For starters, it may take a very long time until the paper is finally accepted somewhere, and if you are a young professional in the job market, this is definitely something to be avoided. Moreover, some of the so-called top journals are known for taking much too long before getting back to authors, and this is a luxury that many cannot afford.

Is it possible to engage in ethical career networking?

Next week, I will be speaking at a career development workshop for female Oxford graduate and masters students. One of the things I want to focus on is the importance of building out a broad, strong, supportive professional network.

Academia is built on trust and personal relationships. Rarely are people invited as speakers at conferences, workshops etc purely on the basis of merit. Merit is an important consideration, but people want additional information (e.g., is she a good speaker, will she turn up?) that they can acquire through their network, either by directly knowing the potential invitee, or by knowing others who know her. People from one’s network can alert one to opportunities, including job opportunities. Without a professional network, one has no letter writers (except the advisor and readers of the dissertation), one is excluded from many aspects of academic life that thrive on trust and personal relationships, such as being a keynote speaker or contributing to an edited volume. Moreover, people from one’s network provide opportunities for mentoring, friendship and mutual support in the very competitive environment that is academia. If one has to move state or country and has to leave friends and family behind, the ability to be able to fall back on a network of professional comrades for support and friendship is very valuable. Therefore, I will advise the students to work on their networks early on, and to nurture them.

But there are problematic aspects to networking. Ned Dobos has argued that career networking is ‘an immoral attempt to gain an illegitimate advantage over others’. He makes clear that he doesn’t target emotional networking - plain old socialising - but specifically career networking, networking in the context of advancing one’s career, especially, but not uniquely, one’s job prospects.

It does not seem clear to me, however, whether we can make a clean separation between career networking and emotional networking, especially in academia, where (for reasons I outlined above) the people in one’s professional network and one’s emotional (friend) network overlap to some extent. Dobos offers several arguments against the legitimacy of career networking. Insofar as the search process is meritocratic, career networking is morally objectionable because it attempts to distort the meritocratic allocation of positions, in a process analogous to bribery, or to ‘earwigging’ attempting to persuade judges outside of the formal process. In both cases, the career networker obtains an unfair advantage. Is it possible to engage in ethical career networking?

On Being a PhD Supervisor (or Spinoza and Seneca on Equanimity)

Childhood is abundant in fruits, but infancy is sweeter [Fructuosior est adulescentia liberorum, sed infantia dulcior].--Seneca, Letter 9.

I am very bad at being powerless when I really want to help another that I care for who is self-undermining. I find it vexing, and because of the intensity of the passion, I am perfectly capable of making a situation worse--thus, not helping the person in need and frustrating my aims. Recognizing the pattern and even the fact that I re-enact childhood experience, has helped to some degree. But nobody that knows me will call me "unflappable" in such circumstances. (By contrast, I have remained unperturbed when I have been amidst gunfire and scary aircraft failures.) This particular incapacity has a work-place consequence: it makes me a less than ideal PhD supervisor for people that are self-undermining and it influences how we can do philosophy together.

In her best-selling and philosophically subtle book on Spinoza, Door Spinoza's Lens [full disclosure: I wrote a brief "afterword" to it, but that is obviously not why it is selling!] the Flemish scholar-public intellectual, Tinneke Beeckman, emphasizes the significance of equanimity. When one first encounters it in the Ethics, it seems to council resignation: "we should await and endure fortune's face with equanimity" [utramque fortunae faciem aequo animo exspectare et ferre]. E2p49S It is easy to mistake this for passivity in the face of harms done by others to us (as E4Appendix, ch. 14 suggests).* But in chapter 32 of the appendix to Ethics 4,   Spinoza makes clear that equanimity is consequent to being conscious of having done one's duty [si conscii simus nos functos nostro officio fuisse]. Given that Spinoza uses here the Ciceronian "officio," he means this in terms of meeting the obligations of one's public station or social role. Spinoza's version of equanimity is a public virtue, one that emphasizes a notion of duty that we can capture by way of 'public spiritedness.' As we know from Hutcheson this entails all of us can be heroes in modern times.

Excellence, Schmexcellence Part III*: When the Better is the Enemy of the Good

Yesterday I had one of those thank God for tenure moments.

At a meeting of the"Assessment Officers" of over 100 LSU programs as well as most of the relevant deans, I blurted out, "Well, that's perfectly silly," after a dean announced that she would send back for substantial rewriting annual report that did not interpret the assessment "data sets" to entail problems that would be rectified in the "action plan."**[Please read notes ** and **** below to get some idea of just how much make-work this is.]

Then, when the hundred plus group of otherwise intelligent people looked at me, I didn't do a very good job articulating why this kind of thing was stupid during the cultural revolution in China and just as stupid today. I just said that if a unit is doing well there's no reason to find problems and that you can't expect units to get better to infinity.

This precipitated another long speech by the poor man in charge of LSU's compliance with SAAC's accreditation mandates involving assessment.*** This speech reiterated how there's always room for improvement and how this process should be helpful.**** I wanted to explain to him that he had John Calvin's doctrine on the depravity of man dreadfully wrong, but didn't say anything. Besides, everyone present needed guidance on the constantly changing computer interface that makes us enter data in all sorts of new ways and also at six months intervals recursively assess how well we are assessing.

This is what I should have said.

On trusting placement data

Michael Kremer has expressed justified concern that prospective graduate students might use the data compiled by Andy Carson to guide their choice in graduate programs. Even if the data were perfect, one should be cautious in using them; the data are backward-looking and reflect circumstances that might well have changed significantly by the time one shows up at the school of one's choice. Even when Andy Carson removes all the current (serious) problems with his data, placement data absent attrition rates are of limited use.  Moreover, given the incentives involved we should not expect to get fully reliable data easily.  Ideally, once Carson has worked out the obvious snafus with his data people can use his data and measures and compare them with old and more recent Gourmet reports and figure out ways to use them in light of each other given their individual needs.

But for now, nobody should let these data play a decisive role in their decision-making.

I'm changing my advice to graduate students: TT jobs should be your Plan B

Speaking of placement, I can't get behind the paywall to this Chronicle article entitled "Scholarly Groups Chip Away at Taboo of Nonacademic Careers." (This part should be read in a Troy McClure voice: "and I don't condone people sending me the PDF, because that would evade a key part of their business model.")

The headline seems off though, because for at least ten years now I haven't had any such "taboo" (and I don't think I'm exceptional here); my standard advice has been for grad students to prepare themselves for multiple job markets, academia being only one of them, so that if you don't get a TT offer, you are already prepared for non-academic fields. (To be precise, getting a TT offer only means moving from one sector to another in the political economy of philosophy instruction; TAs are *already* in the "job market.") 

In fact, however, even that doesn't seem responsible, so starting this year I tell them that it's *academia* that should be their Plan B, that is, if you get a TT offer, sure that's great, give it some thought, but your primary plan should be the BGN sectors (business, government, non-profits). I also add in academic administration, too, because, hey, that's the growth market, right? No matter what I think of administrative bloat, I think I have an ethical obligation to counsel grad students as to all their career options.

An interview with the author behind the placement data post

Yesterday, I linked to a blog post that claims to offer detailed data and analysis on "approximately 3,200 placement records since the year 2000."  While (as subsequent commentary on my post revealed) there are obvious problems with the material outside North America and more subtle ones with the ones inside, the proposed approach can give an important perspective on recent hiring. The author is calling for the right sort of assistance: "if you believe my data is mistaken, please send me the appropriate and complete data for your school, so that I can update the data." Once the data have been improved one might be able to do some interesting comparison with past Philosophical Gourmet reports.

Because I was utterly unfamiliar with the author, Andrew Carson, I also expressed concern about his/her identity in my post. A friendly reader pointed to a linkedin page, and I contacted the person via email. Carson agreed to do a brief interview, which I have reprinted (and slightly edited) below. Obviously, this does not settle any concerns about the author and his methods, I now believe we are dealing with a good faith effort to help improve the profession. Obviously, how Carson deals with the new data that people sent him will be most illuminating. Here's the interview:

Yes, I am a real person.  I received my MA in philosophy from Northern Illinois University in 2012.  I have since left academia and am working in Data Science (hence my interest in the intersection of philosophy and data)...

I did the post because I like philosophy and I like data, and I figured I could bring the two together.  I know lots of friends recently in grad school and they are all concerned about getting a job after they graduate.  I’ve also had friends get stuck in adjunct positions.  I wanted to let others thinking about graduate school know what they were up against and to go into it with eyes wide open, especially since I hadn’t seen anything like this before.  I hope to just get this info out there and get people less focused on the Leiter rankings (I know people were obsessed with those in applications).

 

If you want a tt/permanent job in philosophy

[UPDATE: I have been unable to find any information on Andrew Carson, so I wonder if this is a real person or a pseudonym. I also hope that at one point the data will be released to interested parties, so we can check for accuracy; for all I know this is a hoax.--ES]

The numbers say....go to Yale, UMass, Amherst, or Northwestern! Andrew Carson (the person who crunched the numbers), explans the method here.

I haven't had a chance to look at his approach, so I will just report his bottom line:

If you are applying to graduate schools in philosophy and are trying to decide which schools you want to apply to or attend, and if you are concerned about your placement prospects after graduation, you need to consider (1) how a school ranks in your chosen specialty and (2) how well that school places students overall.  You cannot just rely on overall faculty rankings, for these bear no relationship to how well a school places, although many will find these rankings important for other reasons.  What does appear to matter as far as placement is concerned is the school's ranking in your area of specialty.  If it ranks well, then you have a much higher chance of getting a tenure track or permanent position in academic philosophy.  And some schools just appear to have better placement rankings than others.  For example, both Northwestern University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst are not ranked above a 3 in any category (except Continental philosophy and Social and Political Philosophy, respectively), but they have some of the best placement records.

Why is that?  I wish I knew. That is a question worthy of further exploration...[Emphasis in original--ES.]

On 'postdoctoral tutors.'

I received my PhD from Columbia in June of 1950 but my education scarcely stopped there... I did not really know much about how to do any serious research and writing, since my graduate education did not involve the personal supervision of research of the kind so familiar to graduate students today. I was neither forced nor encouraged to produce early in my graduate career a publishable paper nor to because acquainted with the "how-to-do-it" aspects of research. I was, however, full of energy and brimming over with ideas. I thrashed around for a few months but fortunately I soon became acquainted with J. C. C. McKinsey, a logician who had recently joined the Department of Philosophy at Stanford. McKinsey served as my postdoctoral tutor.---Patrick Suppes.

It is (sound) conventional wisdom that one's fellow students can be as (or more) important as one's supervisors in one's education. But reading Suppes' autobiography reminded me of a bit of wisdom that my supervisor, Dan Garber, handed down to me during a 'reality-check moment' as I was contemplating a crucial career decision: if one is lucky (and wise) one's most important intellectual and professional mentors may be encountered on the job early in one's career. Much has changed since Suppes went to Stanford (and even since I obtained my first position), but Garber's point still stands. In the discipline this wisdom is obliquely recognized when people say that 'such-and-such department has a great track record hiring young people'. (I heard this a lot about Syracuse before and after I went there, but I am not impartial in this matter.) The truth would be better expressed as 'such-and-such department does a stellar job tutoring and developing recent hires.'

It's a structure, not a crisis

Comments on this thread, which began as a discussion of accusations of tokenism against women graduate students, veered off into discussions of (the perception) of effects of AA on "the job market."

A couple of comments caught my eye. One (#34) was that "Your fellow graduate students are not your competition, they are your colleagues.... Unlike your faculty advisers, your fellow students will know what it's like to be a graduate student at this school at this time, facing this job market. And they will (or should!) also be an important part of your professional network as you do enter into the job market." Another (#37) was that "people born in the 80's already have a (fairly understandable) generational grudge against the baby boomers."

I want to make two points here, about when the post-PhD TT "job market" changed, and who competes against whom.

On optimal trouser rolling strategies

One of the saddest and scariest things about human beings is how we can work so damned hard for year after year and then derive so little satisfaction when things actually come to fruition. I don't know how ubiquitous this is, but it is somewhat pronounced both in academia and the music world, two fields that typically require a nauseating amount of effort for years on end just to make a bare living.

Consider music. There's an overwhelmingly affecting point in the recent Ramones documentary where the original bassist and songwriter (who later died of a heroin overdose) is reflecting on his bulimia and massive intake of anti-anxiety medication; he says something to the effect of "All my dreams came true. Why can't I be happy?" This isn't just rock music either. There is a small literature suggesting that successful orchestra musicians (with a job market very similar to academia) have pretty low job satisfaction when compared to other fields.

In academia I've noticed in particular two kinds of virulently unhappy successful people. The first is the person who just got tenure and all of the sudden faces an overwhelming existential crises, analogous to when deep sea divers come up too fast and their bodies can't handle the depressurization. That is, at every point prior to tenure, from gradeschool through being an Assistant Professor, there is ususally a ton of outside pressure to do specific tasks to get to the next point. And some people who thrive when being told what to do find it horrifying to be any other way. 

This is a weird thing, because the pressure of going through tenure review is itself so harsh. I know plenty of people who actually went on prescription happy pills for the first time in their life during tenure review, only to get off them after the tenure was resolved and move on unscathed. But two people I cherish did just fine during the tenure review only to completely fall apart afterwards. One was institutionalized and is no longer an academic and the other is dead. 

Networked individualism (and what it means for professional philosophy as work)

Jeremy Gilbert (see also Monday's post) writes on the relation of social media networks and individualism; below the fold some reflections on his essay for the philosophy profession.

On the one hand we have  a social logic which tends towards the promotion of egalitarian collective creativity. On the other, we have an ideology which demands that we remain commited to the liberal individualist obsession with our private, interior lives and our separability from all other beings. It insists that the outputs of all such creativity - and even the condition of possibility for those outputs - manifest themselves only as forms of private property: from the ‘transferrable skill sets’ which we ‘sell’ in the labour market [*] to the carefully-defined pieces of intellectual property that are the substance of the ‘knowledge economy’.... [**]  

Teaching advice from Teacher of the Year

Becko Copenhaver has won teacher of the year at Lewis & Clark College. [HT Dan Kaufman.]  In an interview she comments:

"I realized I was a lousy teacher because I hadn’t approached teaching the same way I approach everything else. I hadn’t approached it as something I could learn from others and get better at... Nick Smith taught me to be confident but open, and to use my personality in the classroom rather than sublimate."--B. Copenhaver [The whole interview is worth reading.]

Placement Data and Trends, 2011-2013

By clicking the link posted below you can download an Excel spreadsheet with placement data from the last two years, 2011-2012 and 2012-2013, together with a “how-to” guide for future years of data gathering and analysis. The data is sourced from ProPhilosophy, the link for which you can find here. 

Here are some of the findings:

Career Development Advice from the Young to the Young (and the rest of us)

Undoubtedly, there are still blessed people that come out of graduate school and find a job on the strength of letters of recommendation and a forthcoming paper in The Philosophical Review.  Maybe some perfectionists can still attain tenure in a decent place by publishing a beautifully crafted piece every other year (I doubt it). So, for the rest of the young people looking to be hired in places where some research is taken seriously, here's an important bit of unsolicited advice:

"[I]t's critical to have multiple pieces under review at a time, and to be constantly writing while pieces are under review (so that as pieces become accepted, you have more to send out). I also think there's a skill to develop here, because it requires working on more than one project at a time."--Rachel McKinnon (offered in response to this post.)

Hiring Statistics

Many readers of this blog are probably aware that I ran some basic hiring statistics last year, both at The Philosophy Smoker and ProPhilosophy. I first ran those analyses out of personal curiosity, but soon found that others considered them needful. I thus aim to run them each year, so long as placement directors are willing to supply the required information. I will cross-post the results here and at ProPhilosophy. 

A Plea: ProPhilosophy has sent out emails to a number of departments, so far hearing back from just 19 of them. (You can find the collected responses here.) Last year ProPhilosophy heard back from 64 departments. I hope that many more placement directors/DGSs/department chairs will find time to respond to ProPhilosophy with the available information (by sending an email to [email protected]).

Why?

A common fallacy in deciding on graduate schools.

Decision time for undergrads choosing a grad school is fast approaching, and I want to comment on a fallacy that I hear commonly repeated both by candidate students and by professors.  

asshole academia?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice discussion of UC Irvine philosopher Aaron James' recent Asholes: A Theory.

James argues that what is characteristic of assholes is that they systematically "act out of a deep-rooted sense of entitlement, a habitual and persistent belief that they deserve special treatment." He develops a typology of different kinds of assholes, and also theorizes about the rise of "asshole capitalism," which is where:

The ‘stale PhD' issue and post-doc positions

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…)

Should Graduate Students Contribute to Edited Volumes?

In Catarina Dutilh Novaes's recent post, "How to ensure gender balance in edited volumes?" one anonymous commenter suggests:

One thing that I think editors can do is to be willing to invite junior women (and even promising graduate students) to write articles for volumes that are otherwise mostly big-name senior people. This does double (triple?) duty: it helps put less pressure on established people... while helping to ensure gender balance in these volumes, and it helps women who are at an earlier career stage with things like tenure and getting jobs (and simply becoming "known" in the philosophical community). I've seen more and more volumes with a few articles in them by junior people/grad students; the least we could do is ensure that THOSE articles are written by women.

This seems right and good to me, at least as far as the volumes themselves go and as far as the profession goes.  But my question is whether submitting papers to volumes is actually good for the graduate students (or early academics) themselves.  I am not so sure that it is.

A Few Puzzles for a Rainy Sunday

Five old puzzles to brush up on your logic skills before the GREs:

(1)
Yesterday I ran into my colleagues Eric Wiland and John Brunero, who were trying to sneak out to watch the baseball game. I asked Eric:
"Is any of you a truth-teller?"
Eric said something that sufficed for me to know the answer to my question. Are Eric and John liars or truth-tellers?

A small bit of advice for grad students

Recently I was asked to suggest graduate students for a focused conference on a particular issue in philosophy.  I decided to poke around the web pages of some departments known for work on that topic. This turned out to be largely useless.  Many students had web pages - not all did, which brings up prior advice - but almost none had any specifics.  Now I know that one doesn't always know specifically what one's specialization will be while in grad school.  But still, if you know enough to say that you are working on, say, metaphysics, you know this because you have written papers at least for courses. So you can mention topics.  My advice is that you do so - mention every topic that you know enough about that you would like to be invited to a small focused conference on that topic.  Where you will meet folks working in the area, get noticed, share work, all that good stuff. Talk with your faculty about what would be good things to include, but do so.  I doubt that my search was all that unusual a phenomenon, but you have little to lose by including some areas.