I Drag Up Ancient History

You might remember a post about rejection letters I shamelessly lifted. ("I regret to inform you that I am unable to accept your refusal to offer me an assistant professor position in your department.") I couldn't figure out where it came from originally, but a commenter at the Chronicle finds it way back in a mathematics newsletter from 1996. Interesting. Is that the source? I have no idea.

Also in the Chronicle's comments section is this awesome response:

In writing and sending such a letter, the applicant confirmed his immaturity and the department probably breathed a sigh of relief that they indeed had rejected him.

Um, in writing and posting such a comment, the commenter confirmed he's a total knob. How's that for maturity?

I've Been Everything You Want to Be, I'm the Cult of Personality

I've talked before about how your advisor's reputation affects the your prospects on the market. No doubt with those considerations in mind, a well-placed departmental source points me to this passage from Leiter's old piece in the Chronicle:

Far too many students attach themselves to professionally marginal faculty members, who may happen to be charismatic or congenial or who seem to loom large in local departmental affairs. No matter how good their subsequent work, these students will be at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to getting a job. What matters isn’t how important and impressive your advisor looks in Austin or Madison or Berkeley or New Haven. What matters is how he is perceived in the profession at large.

When I was new in my department, some of the best senior students got killed on the job market because they fell into the orbit of Evil Columbo. With breadcrumbs and bits of sandwich meat falling out of his mouth, he told them not to bother engaging with recent work on their dissertation topics, because, well, what did anyone younger than him have to say anyway? And he told them search committees wouldn't care about publications, since real philosophers don't need some journal referee to tell them what's good work and what's not.

The man doesn't have a clue, but the force of his personality's stopped some fuck-off smart people from seeing that.

So am I still waiting

Since the first of the month's come and gone, that must mean it's time to e-mail the journal that's been sitting on my paper for nine months now. I suppose I'm well past the point where I could have any hope it would be on my CV by the time my applications go out.

Dear [Lazy Fucking And/Or Appalling Disorganized Journal],

Remember when I sent you my paper and you replied with an e-mail saying this would take four months? Remember? You might not, because it was way more than four months ago. I'm sort of wondering what the fuck happened to my paper? Can you see it lying around the office somewhere? Is it stuck in a drawer? Maybe you should ask the referees if it slipped down behind all the old copies of the New Yorker they keep beside their toilets for reading during snatched moments of quiet repose. Anyway, I'm going to be trying to get a job in, like, six weeks, so any news about the paper sure would be great.

Kisses,

[PGS].

How's that for a first draft?

Taking Care of Business Every Way

I'm late getting back to this, because PJMB HQ had no internet for most of yesterday, but on this question of what happened to the projected surplus of jobs in the humanties, a couple of people in comments mentioned something that scares the fuck out of me.

NS, for one, points to a slowing demand for profs in the humanties. Job Cogburn raises the possibility of something that seems pretty plausible to me. The massive growth of pre-professional BAs has sucked a kids away from a traditional liberal arts-based education. Take a look at the Princeton Review's summary of the top-10 most popoluar majors in US colleges. Only four of the 10--biology, english, communications, and poli sci--are not pre-professional. And even then, in their blurb about why people should consider biology, the Princeton Review people say talk about students being pre-med.

Even worse, although the list doesn't say it ranks majors by popularity, I don't exactly feel all warm inside by the fact that number one is "Business Adminstration and Management." Ugh. I wouldn't be in this business if I didn't really believe in the value of a liberal arts undergrad education, so it really, really hurts to think of b-schools peeling off majors from philosophy and physics and Spanish or whatever.

And besides having all these bright, shiny ideals about undergrad education, I also want a fucking job teaching philosophy. But for that, there's got to be some philosophy students to teach.

Now Renegades Are the People With Their Own Philosophies

The Sally Haslanger article (pdf!) Leiter's linked to is a cold blast of perspective. I'll leave it up to PGOAT say more about women philosophers' experiences in grad school and the job market, since she's the she around these parts, but I want to point to one thing. Haslanger talks a bit about hostility within philosophy to feminism. Wanna see what that looks like up close and personal? Lookee here in this random forum:

Feminist Theory? This is philosophy?

---

I was peeking around the ol' internets this evening, and stumbled across a page listing philosophy jobs (mostly schools hiring for philosophy teacher positions) and more than a few of them were hiring for "Feminist Philosophy" or "Feminist Theory".

Since when is this philosophy and not sociology? Can anyone tell me what "Feminist Theory" is beside what I think it probably obviously is? Can one devote an entire career to the "theory" of feminism? . . . .

ETA: If "Feminist Theory" is considered philosophy, couldn't "Football Theory" be a valid discipline at that point?

To which some other guy responds:

There are 2 or 3 philosophers at my school whose main interest is feminism. I don't know anything about it and don't care to. I avoid those classes like I avoid race theory classes. I don't have a problem with it or anything; I just don't give a damn.

I might check out "football theory" though. :)

Where the fuck does that hostility come from? Both these asshats seem to be undergrads, so they hardly speak for the profession. But they had to get these attitudes somewhere, and I'll bet it wasn't from random goons they talk to in laundromats.*

*Yeah, I know this post doesn't actually have anything to do with the job market, but I've been looking for an excuse to link to those two knobs for a while, and that Haslanger article is too awesome not to mention.

This One's Optimistic

A couple of months ago I ran across a philosophy department claiming:

the Philosophy job market is just now beginning to change from conditions of severe shortage of jobs to ones where, in a few years, there will likely be a shortage of candidates.

At the time I asked, "where the fuck does anyone get the idea there's ever going to be a shortage of candidates?" Well, maybe this is part of the answer. This piece in the Chronicle points to a 1989 report by William G. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa. The Chronicle's original article about the report opened with this lede:

The arts and sciences face severe faculty shortages in the future, especially in the humanities and social sciences, a new study has found.

"Severe faculty shortages"? Wow. And that's under a headline that says, "Big Faculty Shortages Seen in Humanities and Social Sciences." Apparently Bowen and Sosa's big idea was that lots of faculty were due to retire in the late '90s, leaving buckets of jobs for everybody. I guess it didn't work out that way.

Was this a common thing to think in the late '80s? It's hard for me to understand where that kind of optimism could come from.

I Have a Plan, We're Gonna Make it Happen

Last night I started talking about the disconnect between well-meaning non-academics' advice and the realities of the job market. But maybe I was too quick to dismiss the advice. Maybe we should give it a shot. What do we have to lose, right?

So in the spirit of taking very seriously the thoughts of non-academics on the job market, I offer these real-life suggestions about how to get a job.

First, just to get warmed up, you have to fully exploit your mother-in-law's connections:

Recently we moved across the country. Before we left, my MIL told me that a guy in her office had a brother who was in the admissions office at a university in our new state and that she had talked him into asking her brother to hire me. She means well, but despite my frequent explanations still has no idea how the academic job market works and was offended that I wasn't more excited about her "inside contact."

This plan is sure to work. Your mother-in-law's co-worker's brother--got that?--works in the admission's office. And that guy's got juice with the philosophy department.

Okay, so maybe that doesn't work out. No problem, you've got options. Have you tried a headhunter?

A friend suggested to me that I hire a professional headhunter. I explained that headhunters know the corporate market; they don't understand the academic market. He insisted that a headhunter could let me know about all the jobs available that I'm not aware of. I told him I pretty much know about all of the jobs available in the US in my field, that I am linked to several job posting sites and get email notifications about jobs, and the problem is not finding jobs to apply for, but getting the job after I apply. He was not convinced.

The real genius of this plan is, after you've applied to all the jobs in the JFP, the Chronicle, and the all the listservs you're on, you can pay a guy to tell you about all the jobs in the JFP, the Chronicle, and all the listservs you're on. He can also probably offer professional advice about how to jazz up your "resume" with things like your professional goals and personal interests.

But if the headhunter doesn't do it, you're going to have pull yourself up by your bootstraps:

No, I can't just decide I really really want a job at, say, Princeton, and get a job as an administrative assistant in X department and "work my way up."

Why the hell not? You can be just like Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, except you do epistemology. Once the chair of the department at Princeton sees how awesomely you answer phones and make photocopies, he'd be insane not to give you a research budget. After all, this is America.

My mind's made up. I'm totally trying these out.

But I Can't Answer You Anymore

One thing I wasn't ready for last year was how totally confused non-academics can be about the job market. One night I was out with some people who work with the Future Dr. Mrs. Dr. PGS's sister, and I ended up talking a lot with this guy who'd been a philosophy major in college. He seemed to like me, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he got that I should swing by his old department and "drop off a resume." He really liked this idea, and he got pretty animated about it.

That kind of confusion can be funny or it can piss me off, depending on my head space. But something more subtle made me grind my teeth more than any yuppie dumb-ass telling me he'd "put in a good word" for me with his old professors. All kinds of people--friends, family, random people--asked me what my top choices for jobs were. Sometimes they wouldn't use exactly those words--"What are you hoping for?" "If you got to choose, where would you go?"--but that's what they were asking. You can tell that's what they're asking because when you answer by saying you're hoping for any job and, no, you don't get to choose, they don't think you've answered their question. They think you're being evasive and obtuse and weird. Or worse, they think you're just being a dick.

But what they don't get is, I wasn't being evasive or obtuse or weird. What's the point of having preferences when getting even a single job is a long shot? I don't want to consider the inevitable counterfactual, "Yeah, but if you got to choose. . .?" What's thinking about that going to get me? An extra crowbar of disappointment laid into my ribs when I get rejected? That's exactly what I'm trying to avoid. But how do you explain that to someone when they're just trying to make small-talk?

Rocking the Passive Voice XVII

Guess what turned up in my inbox on Friday? A PFO! I guess the department that sent it wanted to get their rejection e-mails out of the way before, you know, the Labor Day weekend. That's like, what? 10 months between the application deadline and the rejection?

But I bet I know why it took so long. Someone obviously put a lot of thought into it:

Thank you for your interest in the following position:

Position Title: Assistant Professor
Posting Number: [blah, blah, blah]
Department: Philosophy

Your application has been reviewed and based on our current pool of applicants, you will not be considered for an interview at this time.

We appreciate your interest in this position and we wish you well in locating the opportunity you desire. We invite you to log on to http://blah.blah.edu to apply for other job opportunities at [C]SU for which you feel you qualify.

[Crappy] State University

Not having a salutation of any kind is pretty awesome, but what makes this PFO super-awesome is the way it's just signed with the school's name instead of a real person's. Now that's class.

Update: In comments, himself puts a positive spin on how late this PFO was: "[w]hen universities send you rejections before they've interviewed applicants, that's when they're really telling you to get fucked." Fair point.

How hard is it to write a letter?

After reading PGS talk about his rejection letters, I’m reminded of how few of them I received. And that’s not because I got job offers instead of letters.

Now, I did a very selective search last year. I only applied for eight jobs. But, I received one (one!) rejection letter, and that was from the only school that gave me an interview. (I must have made a good impression to deserve a letter.)

Maybe hiring committees have been reading PGS’s rejection letter posts and decided that my feelings would be hurt less by being ignored than by receiving a letter written in the passive voice. Or maybe I should add another item to the list of things that are dehumanizing about the philosophy job market.