hiring

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Campus Visit Horror Stories II

In 2015 I asked readers to share bad experiences they had while visiting campuses during their job searches. I would bet, alas, that the past four years did not go by without such incidents. (more…)

Dougherty from Cambridge to UNC

Tom Dougherty, currently lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, is moving to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC), where he will be a tenured associate professor of philosophy. (more…)

Trends in Philosophy Hiring by Area of Specialization

Aero Data Lab, “a collaboration of scientists, ethicists, and policy-makers interested in improving the quality of the clinical research enterprise,” has published an analysis of trends in the academic philosophy job market over the past six years. (more…)

Untangling the Strings: The Limits of Acceptable Donor Influence in Academia (guest post by Chris Surprenant)

“Our donors are supporting our projects, not the other way around.”

The following is a guest post * by Chris Surprenant, associate professor of philosophy at the University of New Orleans, on the role that those who fund academic programs may have in determining program goals, methods, materials, and staff. (more…)

Who Are Philosophers Less Willing To Hire?

George Yancey, a professor of sociology at the University of North Texas who works on anti-Christian attitudes in the United States, has researched bias in academia, and recently shared some information he had collected regarding philosophers’ hiring preferences. (more…)

Hiring and Firing for the Sake of Rankings

To what lengths do departments and universities go to improve their rankings? In one case, a school is being accused of firing a number of its philosophy lecturers and using the funds to give contracts to professors elsewhere so they can have honorary appointments at the school to improve its research profile. (more…)

Graduate Student Input on Hiring

What input do graduate students have in hiring decisions in your department? (more…)

New Study on Gender and Program-Prestige in Tenure-Track Hiring of Philosophers

Market outcomes starting in 2014 and going back 10 years offer no evidence women are at a disadvantage in tenure-track competitions.

That’s the primary finding of a study by Sean Allen-Hermanson, associate professor of philosophy at Florida International University. The study, “Leaky Pipeline Myths: In Search of Gender Effects on the Job Market and Early Career P..

Should We Stop Interviewing Job Candidates?

Recent research suggests that job interviews not only provide potential employers with irrelevant information, but actually “undercut… the impact of other, more valuable information about interviewees,” according to Jason Dana (Yale), in a recent column in The New York Times. How, if at all, should the hiring of philosophers be affected by these findings? (more…)..

Hiring Departments: Don’t Do This

A philosophy department hiring this year publicly announced who it hired (a) before it had received a signed contract from the candidate and (b) without first asking the candidate. Hiring departments, don’t do this. (more…)

Hiring Departments Ask Candidates To Anonymize Materials

At least a couple of philosophy departments that are hiring this year have instituted measures to shield the identity of applicants from those reviewing some of their application materials. (more…)

Gender & The Philosophy Job Market

“The odds of women obtaining a permanent academic placement within two years is 65% greater than men when all else is held constant,” according to an analysis discussed by Carolyn Dicey Jennings, Patrice Cobb, and David Vinson (UC Merced) at the Blog of the APA.

Jennings and Vinson do not argue for any particular explanation of this finding, but note three possibil..

Fricker from Sheffield to CUNY

Miranda Fricker, currently professor of philosophy at University of Sheffield, will be taking up a full-time senior position at CUNY Graduate Center this September. Professor Fricker works in social epistemology, ethics, and feminist philosophy. She will maintain an affiliation at Sheffield, where she is co-investigator on a European funded research project into epi..

Steup to Leave Purdue to Become Chair of Colorado (updated)

Matthias Steup, currently professor of philosophy and head of the Philosophy Department at Purdue University, will become chair of the University of Colorado Philosophy Department starting in fall of 2016. Steup works in epistemology and metaphysics. A press release about the appointment is here.

UPDATE: David Boonin, currently interim chair at Colorado, writes:
..

Cognitive Biases and Limitations of Search Committees

A philosopher whose last name starts with a letter towards the end of the alphabet writes in:

I wonder how often members of search committees work through alphabetized stacks of dossiers? I recently had a few conversations with people who have been on search committees, and both mentioned working through an alphabetized stack.

I work in phil cog. sci. and psy..

Sexism in Academic Hiring — A Myth? (updated)

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences produced findings that appear to show that hiring practices in certain fields are not biased against women. Here is the paper’s “significance” summary:

The underrepresentation of women in academic science is typically attributed, both in scientific literature and in the media, to sexist ..

Philosophy’s Disunity as Cover for Its Problems

The nature of philosophy is to blame for philosophy’s woman problem, says Zachary Ernst, who left his position as tenured associate professor of philosophy at University of Missouri to work in the private sector, and who occasionally writes about academia and philosophy at his blog, Inklings. But it isn’t what you think. Ernst isn’t blaming philosophy’s combativenes..

Quantifying the Influence of Prestige

A new study by an interdisciplinary team of researchers focuses on “who hires whose graduates as faculty” in order to “present and analyze comprehensive placement data on nearly 19,000 regular faculty in three disparate disciplines. Across disciplines, we find that faculty hiring follows a common and steeply hierarchical structure that reflects profound social inequ..

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..

APA Protests UIUC Treatment of Salaita

The American Philosophical Association (APA) Board of Officers have written a letter in which they “protest the action of the Chancellor and Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in withdrawing the offer of a tenured position to Professor Steven Salaita.” The Board condemns the actions of these officials based on considerations of free ..

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..

Upcoming Faculty Moves

Berit Brogaard (University of Missouri-St. Louis; philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of psychology) will be moving to University of Miami as full professor, starting in Fall 2014.

Douglas Lavin (Harvard; ethics, practical reasoning, action) will become a permanent lecturer in philosophy at University College London, starting Fall 2014.

Sigrún S..

An Article and a Petition to the APA about Negotiations

Inside Higher Ed has some further commentary on W’s negotiation debacle (or maybe it is better characterized as “Nazareth’s negotiation debacle”). Also, Chad Kautzer (CU-Denver) has posted a petition asking the APA to “publicly condemn the actions of the hiring committee of Nazareth College’s Philosophy Department” and “amend the APA Handbook on Placement Practices…