Philosophy Job Market

Solutions to the Jobs Problem Revisited

Last year, Daily Nous reported that Eleanor Dickey, professor of classics at University of Reading, had been collecting various possible responses to problems associated with the high ratio of PhD holders to academic jobs. The full report is here, and the helpful summary, which groups the more popular responses by type, is here.

Professor Dickey (et al) report th..

Campus Visit Horror Stories

It’s that time of the year when the interview season for tenure-track jobs is drawing to a close, most of the campus visits are done, and offers are being made (don’t forget to post hires at Appointments in Philosophy), so there should be a fresh crop of amusing or awful or cringe-worthy stories for candidates to share about their experiences visiting campuses, alon..

Hanti Lin’s “Doing a PhD and Getting a Job in Philosophy”

Check out “Hanti’s Notes on Doing a PhD and Getting a Job in Philosophy” by Hanti Lin, assistant professor of philosophy at UC Davis. It has a lot of good advice. Of particular value is the “When to do what?” section. Also, I appreciate the “Health maintenance” section, the issues under which do not get discussed as frequently as they should. Throughout the guide, L..

Posting About New Hires

I’ve received a couple of inquiries as to whether I’ll be hosting a thread for people to post hires, and the answer is no. Instead, please post your hiring news at the Appointments in Philosophy page at PhilJobs.

Students Object to Job Candidate for Offensive Views

Graduate students in a philosophy department somewhere in the English-speaking world did some online sleuthing about a job candidate for a position in their department, and learned that the candidate seems to hold views they find offensive. In particular, they found reports (including alleged quotes) that the candidate had expressed in online fora the view that homo..

Lessons for Philosophy from Economists on English?

“Over the last 35 years, less than half of graduated Ph.D. students have gotten tenure-track academic jobs upon graduation. The result is a large pool of residual job seekers, which places even more pressure on the job market for existing students.”…

“The data are pretty straightforward,” the paper says. “While students in top-10 programs might have a reasonabl..

Video Interview Do’s & Don’ts

Many departments are turning towards the use of Skype and other forms of video-conferencing for first-round interviews, and such interviews are sometimes among the first times candidates and search committee members have used such technology. Noting this, Professor Mitzi Lee, placement director at the University of Colorado, writes in with a request to discuss some ..

Job Market Mentoring for Women Philosophers

A group of women philosophers — Amanda Greene (University of Chicago), Corinne Gartner (Wellesley College), Sarah-Jane Leslie (Princeton University), Tamar Schapiro (Stanford University), Kristin Primus (New York University), Jennifer Frey (University of South Carolina), Daniela Dover (UCLA), and Sara Bernstein (Duke University) — have created Market Boost, “a n..

Are Terminal MA’s Part of the Solution?

My proposal, if I had a magic wand to make it happen, would be to not to make PhD admissions out of college. Turn a lot of PhD programs that aren’t serving their graduates well into MA programs, and have PhD programs accept students from the MA programs. Then the PhD programs would be evaluating applicants who’d spent a couple of years doing graduate-level work. The..

Philosophy Jobs at Community Colleges (updated)

I’ve been asked to solicit information from readers about how to get a permanent job teaching philosophy at a community college.
Some questions:
(a) Where are community college jobs typically advertised?
(b) What makes a job candidate look good, on paper, to community colleges?
(c) How is the job search process different at community colleges?
(d) What misc..

Professors in Poverty

A few weeks ago Salon published “Professors on Food Stamps: The Shocking True Story of Academia in 2014.” The article shares the plight of adjunct instructors, a lot of whom teach many courses at multiple institutions for minimal compensation.

“The most shocking thing is that many of us don’t even earn the federal minimum wage,” said Miranda Merklein, an adjunct ..

Better To Not Create Lectureships?

An assistant professor who wishes to remain anonymous (“given the possibility that my department might proceed to hire a lecturer, I do not by any means want that individual to feel anything other than completely welcome in our department”) writes in with the following query:

“Say an institution is contemplating creating a new non-tenure-track lectureship positio..

How Much Should Graduate Students Publish?

A current graduate student writes in with this sense of what is expected nowadays:

I’m under the general impression that I need to get as many publications in top journals as I can before I go on the job market. Considering how slow this process can be, and the fact that you can’t concurrently submit the same paper to more than one journal, it follows that I need t..