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46 comments:
Volume 179, 10/10/08: 267 ads
Volume 175, 10/10/07: 347 ads
Volume 171, 10/10/06: 332 ads
Volume 167, 10/10/05: 363 ads
Volume 163, 10/11/04: 322 ads
Volume 159, 10/10/03: 254 ads
Volume 155, 10/11/02: 274 ads
Volume 151, 10/12/01: 284 ads
Ouch! There are about 50 fewer positions in the US than last year at this time. Thanks, Republicans!
Yeah, it must be Republicans responsible for the increased used of adjuncts and graduate students
It'll probably get worse. Some of those searches will be killed due to the financial crisis.
You're welcome, my fellow prisoners.
17 of these slots are Princeton visiting fellowships *for all disciplines*
Look at #60,
"hybrid delivery modes"?
. . . and it's bad. Unless (as usual) you are in ethics or ancient.
I would love to see an AOS breakdown. There seem to be fewer open slots than normal, but I haven't counted. . . . Take the philosophy of art or aesthetics. There are several matches but there are only two jobs with AOS's in the area for junior faculty! 15 bioethics, at most. I didn't filter for AOS or AOC. There are only 22 unique mentions of the philosophy of mind. . . . .
Uh, even ethics isn't looking too sweet this year.
Sweet. Getting the JFP early is like getting to open your stocking on Christmas Eve.
Well it would be, if your stocking was filled with steaming, chunky, dogshit.
Why is this not a searchable database? Why aren't the structure of the ads standardized? Why can't you print the contents of a search? This is ridiculous.
The largest employer of philosophers in the world I bet (The Cal State System) has ONE school out of 23 Campuses hiring. Holy FUCK!
CNN listed 10 states that cannot pay their bills: CA, NV, FL were all on the list. We are in for a world of hurt people.
The APA site doesn't have it under the JFP listing, so good job however you got it.
I know those of us who visit here can get to scoop with the link, but when I enter through the normal channels on the website, there is still no link for the JFP. I'm interested to see whether the web only additions ease our panic. It's 10:00 EDT. Why haven't they posted?
Based on my quite faulty memory, I'm not actually sure I've seen Cal State schools do that much hiring even in the past three years. I've been paying attention some since I'd like to get a job in that region, but perhaps I'm only remembering that there hasn't been many hires in an area I fit.
Anon 1:00 AM,
Because this is the APA, of course. They're about 10 years behind. Look at their "new" website. It has the usability of websites from the days of yore.
The Cal State System is advertising at least three positions: one at CSU-LA and two or three (I can't tell for sure) at SFSU. Those are both very good programs, so it's not a bad year for CSU hiring. But last year was better.
Worst JFP ever! The only jobs I have any interest in are ones I've already seen and sent letters of recommendation in. By waiting until the last minute, and only having a few official issues, the APA has managed to marginalize themselves within the hiring process in their own discipline. The new jobs all sucked (which means they aren't in my field, mostly, I'll admit). And when you cut out the high-powered research schools, which advertise most years even if they don't have any particular needs, and the generic fellowships and so on, it's even worse. Bad APA, bad APA.
I know the APA says that the JFP will be published today, so it doesn't specify a TIME during that day, it seems reasonable to suppose that it would be BEFORE NOON.
On seeing the wealth of opportunities for employment next year, I promptly threw up.
Literally.
I was wrong it was TWO Cal State Schools. But without looking I can name 4 from last year that hired: Northridge, Sacramento, Fullerton, and Pomona. No Pomona got canceled, but off the top of my head that is double this year.
I'm wondering if this version isn't the full JFP. I wrote APA to ask when it would be posted, and they said by 5.
Does that mean that the pdf version pirated last night is NOT the completed version? We should expect a pdf version posted today that has more jobs? That's strange.
Warning: Do not apply to the Cal State L.A. position unless you are friends with or have some special connection with the department chair. The last two searches were wired. I know this through insider information (i.e. members of the search committees and grad students who were privy to their deliberations). There was much speculation that the chair made a sweetheart deal with the faculty that if he took the hot potato chair position for a few years, in exchange he could hire his friends and make quid pro quo deals to hire people from other departments for favors.
Warning: do not listen to anonymous commentators who say things like "don't apply to such and such job" I have it on insider information that they're trying to cut down on the competition. Cal State LA is hiring in Chinese Philosophy. You think they have an insider candidate? Somehow I doubt it. Also, it sure is easy to insult people (the way you're slandering Mark Balaguer) anonymously, isn't it?
More generally, given the cost of and effort in one more application, of course it is worth it to apply if you do Chinese Phil.
So I finally got a glimpse of the web ads added to the new JFP. It reaches to 500. That's #268-507. We can't access the post-October JFP web only adds from last year to make a comparison. I guess they're rolled into the November issue.
I am sorry, WTF with the no ads except for shitty positions hiring in weird specialties and then 200 more web ads? What? Someone smarter than I needs to lay it out for me.
What does "Web Only" mean? My Ph.D. is about ten years old, so I'm not smart enough to figure it out anymore. I would have thought that "web only" refers to ads that ONLY appear on the web, but virtually every posting in the "web only" section was in the printed JFP, as well.
So I'm assuming they are being imprecise. It's not web only, but rather, web-plus-print ads. Whatevs. Have learned to expect less from the APA.
But it's not just that the JFP 179 was reproduced on the web-only, with a few more added because jobs appear in the issue but not on the web only. And as some have noticed, some of the web-only do not appear on the JFP--I think. Anyway, the APA is so fucking confusing (I won't say incompetent yet, but I'm getting close).
Warning: Do not apply to any position. I have the inside track on all of them.
Regarding web-only, they are not being imprecise. They fucked up. Jobs that appear in print should not appear in web-only. It is supppossed to be for ads that missed the deadline. Those ads then appear in November issue. That is how it has been the last 3 years I have been on the market.
I think somebody at the APA made a big mistake in the last week and that is why it took so long to get it up today and why the jobs in the print edition are listed randomly
Anon 12:11
Saying that "There was much speculation..." hardly constitutes slander. Moreover, if you check who was hired in those last two searches at CSULA, one person was a graduate student at CUNY at the same time as the chair. Wouldn't you want to do the same: hire your buddy from grad school once you became chair of the department? Still, that near universal weakness does not make it fair to the rest of us poor souls without jobs. Cronyism in this tight job market should be exposed wherever it occurs.
[Things suck this year] unless (as usual) you are in ethics or ancient.
I haven't looked at this year's JFP--hurray, I'm not on the market!--so I'll take your word that ethics and ancient are relatively decent. But I don't buy that this is usually the case. Sure, there are tons of ethics jobs every year, but there are also tons of people who do ethics. And ancient is a small enough area (a lot bigger than medieval, phl of religion, etc., but still relatively small) that it bounces around a lot from year to year. Why think that it's consistently a good area for getting a TT job?
What we'd really need, if there were some way of getting it, is information on the ratio of the number of jobs listing an AOS in F, over the number of people on the job market listing an AOS in F, for each AOS.
I think somebody at the APA made a big mistake in the last week and that is why it took so long to get it up today and why the jobs in the print edition are listed randomly
It's hard to believe that the same organization that mailed out rejection letters for the Eastern APA to everyone who submitted papers for the Pacific while also mailing out acceptance letters to the Eastern on the same day would make these sorts of mistakes.
MAPFM: I have no real opinion about ethics - it's true there are lots of people and lots of jobs but I am not sure how that balances out.
But I am very sure that there is less competition for Ancient jobs and my impression is that this is well-known. I have been on hiring committees in Ancient at three different schools. Each time there were long, explicit conversations about how hard it is to hire in ancient and how few candidates there were for the number of jobs, along with strategizing for how to manage to get someone. Each time (three completely different departments, remember, and never particularly spearheaded by me) we decided to run a disjunctive search because we had no confidence we'd manage to get an actual decent ancient person, though that was our preference. And in only one of those searches did we manage to get someone in ancient. The number of applications in that area was MUCH smaller than for any other AOS's for which we searched, and the best candidates always got picked off by top schools before we could get them.
And then mailed out apologies to lots of other people who hadn't submitted to either.
"Why think that [History of Ancient is] consistently a good area for getting a TT job?"
Perhaps my post was a little precipitous, having not really done research on the exact proportions of jobs in the Hist. of Ancient to past years, etc. It occurred to me through the cursory flip through the ads that there were a lot of ancient and ethics jobs this year (followed by me telling myself "Oooh. Not me again!").
But I think the case can be made that core areas of history (Ancient, Modern--and to a lesser extent--19th Century and Medieval) are often in demand, because most departments need at least one person able to teach the upper-level history surveys. Add to that TPG's remark (which I believe to be true) that there aren't a heck of a lot of people out there in Ancient--I think this is a good year for anyone writing on Plato.
I, myself, have a rather "undefined" area of history in which I work (History of Analytic). That means there are only a handful of jobs "in area," forcing me to apply to LEMMing jobs for which I'm "not analytic enough," or history jobs for which I am "not historical enough." So frankly, it always seems like a good year for everyone but me ;)
One reason the labor supply for Ancient doesn't expand to meet the demand might be that the 'entry costs' are higher than in other areas of philosophy. To be good at it not only do you have to master the original texts and secondary literature, but you have to spend years learning Greek. Obviously this won't stop a budding philosopher who dreams of spending her life on Aristotle, but it probably thwarts a bunch who have one foot in Ancient and the other in, say, philosophy of mind.
Similarly for Early Modern, I guess, though maybe to a lesser degree.
I agree with Prof. J.
Also, accordingly, not that many good departments have enough Ancient scholars to stock a reasonable committee. Students who come to grad school wanting to do Ancient are often encouraged to go in a different direction where they will have more faculty support.
For those willing and able to make it through the 'entry costs', I think Ancient is probably your safest route to a decent job in philosophy. Every department, no matter how small or ideologically inclined, agrees that they need that area covered (unlike feminist philosophy, medieval, continental, etc.) but few departments put out genuinely qualified candidates. Plus, hell, Ancient philosophy is really fucking cool (though not my area).
Thanks for all of the replies regarding Ancient as an AOS. Maybe it is a good area if you want to get a job (and are willing to put up with the entry costs).
My sense is that *many* Ph.D. programs have just one 'ancient person,' with a decent number having two. And yeah, most places need somebody to teach history of ancient. But if it's a small place, an AOC in ancient would do. You don't need to be an ancient specialist to teach a one-semester survey class.
tpg,
Perhaps your lack of success in hiring ancient specialists reflects, in part, your standards, and not just the candidate pool. Did you reject people who were too philological, or people whose dissertations and publications were in different areas, but who knew the field quite well? I don't know -- this is a challenge to you, not a rejection of your experience. I found your comments enlightening and helpful, as a former ancient specialist who turned to something very different.
Anon 5:00: Of course there is SOME sense in which our failure to hire in ancient reflected our standards and not the pool ... this would have to be true as long as we got at least one applicant who was willing to take the job. But that's not really what you were asking.
It is true that we (all three 'we's) rejected overly philological candidates, as you put it. We felt that they would not have enough connections with other faculty or enough to offer the grad students in our midsized department(s). However we definitely did not reject people who worked on other things but were well-versed in the field. We did require that they knew their Greek (amazingly some did not). Significantly, in each of the three departments, which had really different philosophical orientations and personalities involved, it seemed to me that the desiderata were about the same. Also, unusually, in all three departments we were quite open to people doing ancient from an analytic or a continental perspective ... to the extent those terms make sense at all, which is some but not much.
One reason I don't think it's just a matter of us having some funny standards is the sheer number of applications. The ads just said 'ancient' but we'd get only 30 or so applications (one of the searches was senior so it was way fewer) instead of the 300 or so that we'd get for the other ads.
If tpg is right and it's hard to hire in ethics, then what are we to make of the St. Lawrence ad? They want someone who does ancient, ethics, and Africana philosophy. I'd say more than half the ancient people have at least an AOC in ethics, but how many can also teach Africana competently? I'd bet one or two people who are on the market this year, in the whole country. Great way to have a failed search. Or am I wrong?
Anon Oct. 10 3:13 wrote
"Moreover, if you check who was hired in those last two searches at CSULA, one person was a graduate student at CUNY at the same time as the chair." He also has published in J Phil, etc. So even if he's friends with the Chair, isn't it also possible he was the best qualified for the job?
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