Many people seeking an academic job in philosophy have the expectation that almost all of the job opportunities are going to be listed at PhilJobs: Jobs for Philosophers. Yet an exclusive reliance on PhilJobs:JFP may lead one to miss some job listings.
We discussed this in regard to jobs at community colleges last year. However, the issue is not limited just to community college jobs.
An assistant professor of philosophy keeping an eye on the job market shared with me several tenure-track positions at four-year institutions listed at HigherEdJobs but, as of last night, not at PhilJobs:JFP. These included:
- Assistant Professor, University of Maryland Baltimore County, AOS: Ethics
- Assistant Professor, Creighton University, AOS: African or Africana Philosophy, Indian Philosophy, Islamic Philosophy, Latin American Philosophy, or Native American Philosophy
- Assistant Professor, University of Louisville, AOS: Jewish Philosophy
- Professor or Associate Professor, The New School, AOS: Post-Kantian German philosophy, Critical Theory, Pragmatism, or Ancient Philosophy
What explains the discrepancy? In some cases, it may just be a delay. Most of the above jobs were listed at HigherEdJobs last week, and some of them may end up on PhilJobs:JFP soon. For example, this listing for a professorship at the University of Wisconsin, Madison was listed at HigherEdJobs a week ago, but just showed up on PhilJobs:JFP yesterday.
In other cases, though, it may be a matter of budgeting (universities can purchase multiple ads for multiple disciplines at bulk discount rates from HigherEdJobs and similar sites) or the university human resources office being unfamiliar with (or discounting the value of) discipline-specific listing sites.
Comments, especially from those on or recently on the job market who may have suggestions for keeping track of job listings, and from those at institutions that don’t advertise their jobs at PhilJobs:JFP, are welcome.
I suspect that there are various reasons why departments may not post on PhilJobs beyond those mentioned in this post.
And yet:
Female philosopher specialized in Normative Ethics or MetaethicsInstitute of Philosophy / Ph.D in Philosophy Programme, Universidad San Sebastian
https://philjobs.org/job/show/26689
For those looking for jobs in the UK (and in Europe as well), I would reccomend subscribing to the mailing list philos-l
I think most (all?) political theory jobs in America eventually end up in this: https://members.apsanet.org/CAREERS/eJobs/eJobs-PDF
It’s worth remembering that the situation in philosophy (almost all jobs listed in PhilJobs now, or Jobs for Philosophers in previous decades) is quite rare for academic disciplines. My partner is in chemistry, and on past occasions when we were on the job market, he found listings on multiple sites – and also discovered months later that there were additional jobs he would have applied for, but hadn’t been advertised on any of those sites!
It’s very helpful for our discipline that we have this feature, and it’s worth thinking about what we can do to help maintain it.
How likely is it that there is a job that an institution lists on its own HR site but never makes it to one of the major phil job hubs? I’m especially wondering if that might be true of CC jobs.
This is fairly likely especially for the reasons listed in the post and comments above. If institutions are not aware of PhilJobs or as a default do not post outside, then they will not use these sites. For people who have a particular region they would like to work in, one strategy is to make a list of institutions in the region and their HR sites. A lot of the sites in the US use similar platforms which allow applicants to set up notifications so that you do not have to check your list repeatedly.
This was the case with my job. It was pulled by Google’s job search tool, but not listed on any of the major sties. My search was something like “Philosophy jobs near me.”
For people looking for non-professorship positions, studentaffairs.com, higheredjobs.com, jobs.chronicle.com, and careers.insidehighered.com are the main places outside institution HR sites.
I know the post is about academic jobs – but these sites will catch both academic and non-academic positions.
Oftentimes jobs aren’t advertised on PhilJobs because they are slotted for inside hires but HR requires the job to be listed publicly somewhere. A couple of jobs I spent a lot of time applying for turned out to be like this.
I have to wonder if this ever happens even with jobs listed on PhilJobs – There are a couple of cases I’ve seen where a job listing was so absurdly specific about the AOS, AOC, and other qualifications where I really had to wonder if there could be more than one applicant who fit all of them
For UMBC it’s a matter of timing. I wasn’t even aware it was posted on HigherEd Jobs. The university did that before we had a chance to post it on Philjobs. Please share widely!
Also, the link here to the UMBC job takes me to the Creighton job. Is it possible to fix that? Thanks!
Here’s the link
https://www.higheredjobs.com/institution/details.cfm?JobCode=178906778&Title=Assistant%20Professor%20of%20Philosophy%20%20%7C%20%20AOS%3A%20Ethics%20and%20AOC%3A%20PPE
Italian universities often advertise jobs very poorly, as a way of reserving them for insiders. But there is now a website to remedy this. Although it compiles information about jobs in all subjects, you can set it to filter out all save jobs in philosophy. https://academicjobsitaly.com
Euraxess is a somewhat clunky platform, but a useful one: it’s not uncommon to find job ads that never make it to philos-L and/or philjobs, for whatever reason. The search page also comes with some handy filter options – see here (left hand side of the page).