Community Colleges and PhilJobs
A commenter on the job market post last month asked whether it included data from community colleges, noting, “it seems like PhilJobs doesn’t even list community college jobs.”
I asked about this, and PhilJobs has no policy in place preventing community colleges from advertising.
Amy Ferrer, executive director of the American Philosophical Association (APA), on the basis of conversations with members of the APA’s Committee on Philosophy in Two-Year Colleges, reports that the small number of community college positions advertised at PhilJobs is probably owed to lack of funding for extensive advertising.
Those looking for positions at community colleges may have better luck searching the job listings at Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education, or at general job listing sites such as Indeed or LinkedIn.
Comments welcome, especially from those at community colleges.
Related: An APA Webinar on philosophy at community colleges.
Many CC’s only have one or two philosophers. When jobs get posted they are typically by HR or deans, who do not know about PhilJobs.
This goes for some SLACs as well. I work at a SLAC where I am the only philosopher. They didn’t advertise on philjobs back when I was hired in 2018, but did advertise on higheredjobs and (I think) in the Chronicle. I learned about the job in one of those two places.
In a second to Josh’s point, lots of jobs for philosophers are never put on Philjobs. Higheredjobs and the chronicle needs to be checked in on. Also, it is worth searching for jobs under the general ‘humanities’ heading on both websites, where philosophy jobs are often also listed (or jobs that could be filled by philosophers).
You’re absolutely right, and increasingly professional and applied ethics courses which were once the province of ethicists are now being administered by specialists in the professions; to their detriment, I would argue.
The problem is often the policies and budgets at the HR level, and that community colleges are only in the last decade often recognizing the value of true national job searches in academic positions. I know at Austin Community College, we are starting to get processes in place to support targeted listings like this, which we will hopefully have in place starting this year as I anticipate a number of full time listings in PHIL in the coming years.
I don’t know if this is actually a barrier or not, but there’s a $150 fee (for advertising one opening, plus 20% of the base price for each additional opening) attached to posting a job on PhilJobs, and CCs might not have any easy way of paying for that, since they aren’t set up to pay for that, since they aren’t already in the habit of posting on PhilJobs, etc. That is, it’s not like a philosopher could ask HR “hey could you just copy and paste this job ad to PhilJobs?” It’s more work than that because HR has to figure out billing etc.
They probably have processes in place for paying for job listings, because most listing sites charge for them. But if a search is not specialized in philosophy, then it needs to be advertised at one of the more general sites, like the Chronicle of Higher Education, and once they’ve paid for one ad, they may not have a budget to pay for getting that same ad into multiple specialized venues like PhilJobs too.
Philosophy really is fairly unusual in having such a centralized site for all listings. Over the past several years, when my partner and I were looking to move out of Texas, I found it striking that I could just refresh PhilJobs once every few weeks and see everything, while he had to scour various journals, department websites, blogs that were collating jobs listed in other places, and the like, to find all the relevant advertised positions in Chemistry.
Good grief I had no idea those ads cost money to post.
At our CC, we had to fill out extra paperwork with a justification for listing our positions on PhilJobs.
HR typically lists all jobs for the college in HigherEd and the Chronicle.
I agree that if there isn’t a philosophy department directing the search (which is often the case when a CC only has one philosopher; we’re a little unusual in that there are 6 of us), it is unlikely an HR department would know about PhilJobs.
If one is interested in CC’s they should definitely not rely on PhilJobs.
Folks looking for positions in California Community Colleges would do well to look at the California Community College Registry.
Not every community college in the state advertises there, but most do, making it a very useful tool for one of the larger CC markets in the country.
While we on the committee haven’t taken this specific issue up explicitly in the past (to my knowledge), the question of finding and getting community college teaching jobs is one of our main concerns. Two year colleges are an often overlooked opportunity for philosophers who really want to focus on teaching, and on reaching out to non traditional students.
I suspect it’s two things. First, the people responsible for posting don’t know about Phil jobs. Second, a lot of places have policies about how they post jobs and what they can spend. The price for a philjobs posting might seem negligible. But I’ve worked at a California CC for many years now and I’ve learned that almost everything has a specific procedure and there is virtually no wiggle room. This is due to (1) the shared governance model where many policies are decided by committees so exceptions can’t be made unilaterally and (2) even if it’s possible to make an exception there is a significant amount of status-quo bias where one has to fight for the change and it often doesn’t feel worth the effort.
I’m glad more people are considering this career path. It has so many benefits that people don’t realize. It’s true there that research is not part of the job (though one can do it in their “free” time) and the teaching load is significant and includes a repetitive set of intro level classes. But I love teaching and I’ve found it to be incredibly rewarding. And for all of higher Ed’s talk of “equity,” serving mostly 1st gen college students in often low income areas is an excellent way to help. Also, for self-interested reasons, some CCs pay better than their nearby state universities.
Another place to look is on the various websites of the colleges or at a centralized location — for example California has a centralized registry — California Community College jobs https://www.cccregistry.org/jobs/index.aspx
Other states may have similar registries.
For us, the problem has a few pieces. The expenditure is sometimes hard to get through approval chains, there are often layers and layers of administration (academic and HR) between us and the ad itself, and HR’s job ad practices often don’t make for a good match with how the average philjobs ad looks. What we end up with are ads which post too late and tend to look rather unusual. We often don’t get much out of the experience either, since so many of the applications we draw are re-tasked applications better suited to research jobs and our strangely formatted ads fail to communicate to applicants what they need to do.