I ran into S this weekend. He's an old friend from my program. He's been adjuncting in a department that has a graduate program, but not one that's in the 50 ranked on Leiter's list. (In fact, it doesn't even get an honorable mention, or whatever Leiter's also-ran cataegory is.) It's one of these PhD programs where if it disappeared, no one in the profession would notice.
S told me about watching the attitudes of grad students in his department change as they make their way through the program. When they start getting ready to hit the job market, it slowly dawns on them that it's all pretend, make-believe, bullshit, and that they've been had. They realize they will never work in philosophy, and the goal they've been working towards for the past five or six or seven years is a mirage.
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I'm a little puzzled about how they could have been duped so long, and wonder if perhaps they should take some of the responsibility. I say this having experienced, recently, someone from an unranked PhD program in Canada apply, with high hopes, to the University of Toronto and UBC, each of which (esp. Toronto) would be a very fine job to land. S/he seemed to have no clue how difficult it was to get a job, and that s/he had no chance of landing those job. (Not only was this person from a poorly regarded PhD program, s/he had no publications even though s/he defended over three years ago.) Maybe someone was stringing this person along, but s/he must also have been willfully ignorant.
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