The Philosophers' Cocoon

Putting together a good academic website?

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, a Grad student writes:

Do people have any thoughts/tips about putting together an academic website? I take it that it's a consensus good thing, but are there platforms/kinds of content/organization tips that people would recommend?

Good question! I discussed websites briefly in this post in our Job Market Boot Camp a few years back, but I'm not sure how good or helpful that advice was. I did my best with my own website just by looking around at other people's as examples--but I've seen websites that are far better than my own.

Anyway, what do you all think? What should a good website look like? Links to ones that you think are particularly good would be helpful, I think--and do feel free to self-nominate by linking to your site, if you think it would be helpful!

Hurricane Ian pause

This is just a quick note that there may not be many (or perhaps even any) new posts on the Cocoon this week due to Hurricane Ian. My spouse and I live in Tampa, and bought our first home only about a month ago. We are in the process of prepping and may have to evacuate. We may also be without power for quite a while, depending on how things go.

Readers should feel free to post comments on existing posts (including our job market discussion and reporting threads), and I'll do my best to moderate and approve them as soon as I can. Having lived in Florida for about a decade now, sometimes things can unexpectedly turn out okay with these things. If (depending on conditions) moderating becomes infeasible, I'll try let you know--but you'll probably be able to infer what's going on from news reports.

To everyone in Florida (or otherwise in the path of the storm), I hope you and yours stay safe. Wish us luck.

Working in 'elite' vs. 'non-elite' programs?

In our September "how can we help you?" thread, eli writes:

I hope this question is in the scope, because I am genuinely curious for practical reasons. Is anyone here a faculty at an elite program who has also worked in non-elite programs? How do those experiences compare? In particular, are you bothered by/developing/acting out some elitism? How do you like this aspect? Does anyone like their non-elite program experience better, assuming all duties are roughly equal? I have never been in a super elite program for study or work, and find it awkward to ask this in real life.

I've never worked in what one might call an 'elite' program, and to be honest, I'm happy for it. I do work that I enjoy, both in research and the classroom, and I'm a heck of a lot less self-conscious than I was in graduate school, when I always felt pressure (much of it self-imposed) to impress those around me. But this is, of course, just my experience and a fairly narrow experience at that. Anyone else have any experience or insights to share?

Beyond the Ivory Tower Workshops

I just returned home yesterday from a wonderful time in Boston for the Beyond the Ivory Tower Workshop. For those of you who may not have heard of them before, the workshops are held several times per year, and participants are guided over the course of several days on how to 'Learn to write short pieces, for wide audiences, about the big questions.'

The Workshop Team was spectacularly helpful and supportive, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Participants ranged from philosophers to psychologists, physicists, and biological anthropologists, and it was cool to learn about their work and share work with them in turn.

Finally, the Workshops are fully funded, so if you have any interest in doing public-facing work, you may apply here!

Getting Closer to a Permanent Position?

In one of my posts from 2021, I considered the question of how long a job candidate should continue pursuing a tenure-track position before moving on and what factors could affect someone’s answer. Recently, someone left a comment on that post that I think warrants a little further discussion:

To what extent does having a VAP each year provide evidence of landing a permanent gig? Maybe that’s not an easily answered question. But I’ve been working on the assumption (I guess “hope” is more accurate) that it counts for something, e.g., it’s another line added to the CV.

This question gets at an important challenge associated with repeated job market runs: how do you assess whether your chances of getting a long-term position are improving or not? Here are a few thoughts on getting a short-term visiting position.

U. Chicago philosophy job

Matthew Boyle (Emerson and Grace Wineland Pugh Professor of Humanities, University of Chicago) wrote in asking us to draw readers' attention to this job listing:

Assistant Professor - Philosophy

Description

AOS: Open, but with particular interest in applicants working in any of the following areas: (1) Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, (2) Kant and Post-Kantian German Philosophy, (3) Philosophy of Race/Racial Justice, or (4) Non-Western Philosophy

AOC: Open

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago invites applications for a position as Assistant Professor to begin July 1, 2023, or as soon as possible thereafter. Minimum teaching load of four courses per year over three quarters, at graduate and undergraduate levels, and usual dissertation, committee, and advising responsibilities.

Is PhD life hostile to families? (and beyond...)

Jared Oliphint (PhD, Texas A&M) has an interesting substack post up entitled, 'Why a PhD Program Is a Hostile Environment for a Family', which is in a sense less about PhD programs per se than 'PhD life' (broadly construed). A few snippets:

So what makes PhD life so hostile to families?

1. The Big One: Lack of Income

...Any philosophy graduate program worth considering will be funded, which means tuition is all or mostly covered, and you get an annual stipend over the life of your program ranging anywhere from $12k-$25k, in exchange for being a teaching assistant, a research assistant, or teaching your own courses. This will put you below the poverty line even if you are single.  It is extremely challenging to cover basic living expenses if that stipend is your sole source of income, even if you’re single, and it’s impossible to do so if you have a spouse and kids. The math doesn’t add up...

2. The Psychological Toll

…the psychological challenges of grad life are real and constant. You’re doing all this work in social isolation while in the back of your mind you know that there is a good chance you will have little or no employment payoff at the end of it.

I’ll give you an example. While I was looking at job listings in my field over this past year, a realization hit me like a ton of bricks: in the mainstream academic world, the skills I have trained for and honed for years are simply not valued, financially speaking. I was perusing philosophy jobs and noticed that Mississippi State University had an opening to teach in their department. It was one of the temporary positions I mentioned above: only 9 months (an academic year), and it paid $36k. Now, MSU is an R1 institution with a lot of financial resources, and a quick google search reveals that they recently set a fundraising record. Another quick google search reveals that the average public school teacher salary in Mississippi is…$48k. So if I was “lucky” enough to land this position at MSU after years of successfully grinding through a PhD, I would be making as much as the average public school teacher, but without the stability of long-term employment...

3. Isolated Work

The nature of graduate work is also unique... The level of research you need to achieve to be successful... requires a long-term physical space that is isolated and distraction-free, and such a space can be especially difficult to find with a family...

But the constant isolation is bound to have both short-term and long-term effects on your family and social life, in a way I haven’t yet figured out or processed...

The other unique part is the ever-present, relentless time-limit of your work in the program. You feel the constant pressure of completing the dissertation, of course, but sometimes even more important is the unavoidable, intense pressure to get your papers accepted at conferences, and to publish in a good journal before going on the academic job market...That job cycle can be indescribably tough on a family in many ways: financially, socially, psychologically, etc. In many cases those costs can be too high to be worth whatever the gains are.

Oliphint concludes the piece by making it clear that, 'I don’t want this post to read as a list of complaints; if it reads that way I’ve done something wrong.' Rather, as he puts it:

Being in a graduate program is a privilege, and getting accepted happens because of some mysterious proportion of merit and luck. I’m thankfully on the other side of all this, so I no longer have to navigate some of the intense challenges. My primary reasons for writing this post have been to warn those who may be thinking about applying to grad school (particularly in philosophy), and simply to provide a window into the tragically unique trials and challenges that have more to do with daily living than with the academic demands like presenting at conferences, getting published, pleasing an advisory committee, etc., which obviously provide their own unique trials and challenges. I could say quite a bit about the ways a PhD program is unimaginably difficult, academically speaking. I’ll probably say more about that broad topic at some point, but I wanted to focus here on why PhD programs are unavoidably hostile environments for grad students who enter the program with a family, or who start a family at some point during the program. 

I don't have children of my own yet, but I do have a spouse who suffered with me during the end of graduate school and during my seven years on the job-market--and when it comes to my family as such (including my extended family), Oliphint's post very much speaks to my experience. Further, now that I think about it, all three of Oliphint's major sources of hostility to family life seem to me to be hostility to individual and family well-being more broadly, including the well-being of those who don't have families. After all, financial insecurity, isolated work, and the psychological toll of grad school and the job-market all apply to single individuals too, though perhaps not in the same ways. In fact, some of the things Oliphint discusses--such as the isolating nature of grad work--might be even worse in certain ways for single people (who may have few, if any, loved ones to turn to for daily support). So, perhaps the real issue--or rather, more complete picture--is that grad life is profoundly hostile to individual and family flourishing. That seems very bad, but again, not at all inconsistent with my own experiences over the course of my career, both as a (formerly) single person (and son), and now as a husband.

Anyway, I'm curious. Did Oliphint's post speak to you, as it did to me? Or, if you had a family in grad school, did you have a very different experience? Finally, to the extent that you may share Oliphint's experiences, what (if anything) do you think grad programs or the profession more broadly could do to do better and be more supportive--both with respect to family life, but also (for reasons noted above) individual well-being too?

Legit journal?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, Malcolm asks:

Does anyone know about the MDPI journal "Philosophies"? I see several recognizable names on the editorial board:

https://mdpi.com/journal/philosophies/editors

I also have heard concerns about the publisher: borderline predatory practices and worries about the peer-review process. It isn't on Beall's list and a quick Google search only yields one Reddit thread warning people to be wary, but without specifics.

I have no idea, but that page does indeed list a number of prominent philosophers on the editorial board. Anyone have any helpful insights?

Philosophy majors: how many credits?

I'm curious: how many credit hours are required for the Philosophy major in your departments? Asking for a friend!

Job market do's and don'ts: campus visits

I'd like to continue our new job-market do's and don'ts series today by asking search committee members to weigh in on what job candidates should or shouldn't do during campus visits / 'flyouts'.

I wrote one post on campus visits for our Job Market Boot Camp series, but I think it would be great to hear from other search committee members. Are there things that you’ve seen candidates do during campus visits that reflected well on them? Alternatively, are there things you've seen candidates do that came across poorly?

Finally, job candidates: feel free to ask search committee members in thread below any questions that you have (and search committees, feel free to answer)!

Using an introduction as writing sample?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

I have a question about writing samples...would it be frowned upon to send an introduction to a dissertation or book project in progress as a writing sample? I work in a pretty technical area, so I think my introduction is clearest and most engaging for a general audience. But, of course, it's only the beginning of an argument, and perhaps search committees want to see a full argument in article form? Apologies if this has been asked before.

This seems to me like a mistake. Your research statement should serve as an accessible and engaging introduction to your work. I think you want your writing sample to show your "chops", as it were. It should be a piece that does hard philosophical work, showing your best as a philosopher! 

But these are just my thoughts. What are yours? 

Listing a presentation presented by a co-author?

In our newest “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

A co-authored paper of mine was recently accepted to a conference. I can no longer make it to the conference, but my co-author has agreed (with the conference's permission) to present the paper on our collective behalf.

My question is about how to represent this on a CV. On the one hand, I am an author of the accepted paper, which is an accomplishment (however small). On the other, it is misleading to simply list it under 'conference presentations', since I am not presenting. Could I get around this by placing an asterisk next to it and adding *presented by co-author? Alternatively, should I simply exclude this from my CV? For me personally, excluding it is no big deal; my CV is robust enough now that this sort of thing would not make or break me. However, I can imagine more junior scholars for whom being able to list an accepted paper at a good conference is valuable, despite having to leave the presentation itself to their co-author.

Maybe I am approaching this all wrong, and this is no different from a case where a single-authored paper is accepted but the author declines to present. Such a thing would not be listed on one's CV (or would it?), so maybe the same holds true for the co-authored case?

Good question. I think it should be listed on the CV, and that noting “*presented by co-author” is probably the way the go. What do you all think?

Making major changes for 'minor revisions'?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a grad student asks:

Suppose after submitting a manuscript for review, I get back comments (perhaps I even get the verdict 'minor revisions'). Am I allowed to make major changes to the manuscript beyond what the reviewers recommend, and should I note this somewhere?

Basically, while waiting for reviewer reports, I've gotten feedback for the paper from a conference and want to make some major changes.

Good question! Strictly speaking, you're "allowed" to do anything you want. Revise-and-resubmit verdicts are technically rejections where you are simply invited to resubmit the manuscript for another round of review. The more salient question is what the wise thing to do here is, and I think that probably depends a lot on your situation and what you value. Let me explain.

Choosing and developing AOCs?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I have a question about developing AOCs. Specifically, I am curious how people go about deciding what AOCs to develop, what the best practices there might be. Obviously it would be nice to have competence in areas of interest to me personally, but also, I want to think strategically in terms of the job market.

One piece of advice was that the AOS and AOC should paint a coherent picture -- so my AOS and my AOC(s) are clearly related in content. E.g., specializing in ancient, project is on an ancient figure's view of mind, AOC in contemporary mind. Something like that. But if this is good advice, I'm wondering if one risks seeming overly specialized.

Another piece of advice was to think about what areas hiring committees might like to offer undergrad courses in. I'm less clear how this one works (maybe choosing an often underrepresented area like race/gender, nonwestern areas, etc.? or a 'core' subfield, or a history one, assuming these are needs every department might have?). But if this is good advice, I'm wondering how to actually figure out what areas those might be.

Finally, I was curious whether AOC-related advice differs in terms of research-focused and teaching-focused job searches. (For what it's worth, I personally will be focusing my job search at SLACs, but I'm curious about advice more generally.)

These are great questions. I do suspect that things may be different here for research-focused versus teaching-focused institutions. My sense is that at SLACs, at least, there are often particular undergrad courses that the department either needs or wants to offer. Given that these courses may differ substantially across universities (as a result of different major or gen-ed requirements, etc.), it can I think be hard to predict. But I would offer two rules of thumb: (1) more diversity in terms of being able to teach standard philosophy undergrad courses is better than less (e.g. being able to teach some history of philosophy courses may indeed be helpful, particularly for getting a job in smaller departments without specialists in history of philosophy), and (2) many departments at SLACs are concerned with attracting students to the major, so being able to teach 'popular' types of courses (e.g. courses in ethics, justice, etc.) may be advantageous.

But these are just some off-the-cuff thoughts, and I'd love to hear what search committee members or department members in different kinds of institutions think. What approach to choosing or developing AOCs do you think would best serve job candidates for getting a job in your department?

7 Years Later Excerpt #5: The Costs of Relocation

For those waiting for me to continue this series, I thank you for your patience. Now that I have completed my 2000-mile move from Ohio to Arizona and gotten somewhat settled into my new job, I will be continuing this series of snippets from my in-progress guide to graduate school in philosophy. Since the job hunting season is right around the corner, I'm going to focus my next few posts on the job market and related topics. This post focuses on the costs of relocation – something that graduate students and other early career philosophers should take into account with respect to the jobs they pursue and how long they stay on the market. I include this in the guide because this is one of the costs of the job market that I could not properly evaluate when I was going on the market for the first time.

---

One of the costs of pursuing academic employment is that you will often have to relocate in pursuit of long-term employment. Looking back, I believe this is one of the hardest costs to explain and quantify to graduate students. In this post, I’m going to explain some of the challenges associated with relocation and reflect a little on them.

1. Relocation costs money. It’s expensive to move across the country (or potentially to a different country) whether you are physically moving your possessions from your current residence or selling/donating your possessions and buying new things. If you’re moving to a new apartment, there will also be security deposits and the first month’s rent to pay. Not only is this expensive, but you are also likely to have a gap in your pay. I officially graduated from the University of Tennessee in May 2017. I started my first post-graduate position in early August that summer, but because of the way pay cycles worked and the lag in getting all my information into the HR system, I did not receive my first paycheck for that position until the second week of September. That translates to over 3 months without any income. Depending on the distance you are moving, whether your new position comes with a moving allowance, and how long you have to sustain yourself with no income, you may well need more than $10,000 on hand to complete your move. During my 3 relocations (Tennessee to Florida, Florida to Ohio, Ohio to Arizona), the lowest amount of money I needed to cover costs without taking on debt was between $5000 and $6000.
2. Relocation requires a lot of paperwork. In the United States, moving states means changing vehicle registration and insurance agents. You’ve also got to update your address on all your financial and postal accounts and get a new driver’s license. You’ll have to start a new utilities account, get your home cable and/or internet installed, and make sure all the relevant utility accounts at your previous address were properly closed. There will also be a ton of things to complete as part of being a new hire. None of these items is all that daunting by itself, but the sheer quantity of it all can feel overwhelming.
3. Relocation is physically demanding. One component of moving is the actual process of putting new items inside your home, transporting books to your new office space, assembling the new furniture you purchased, organizing clothes and other household items in your personal space, and so on. This is not all that exhausting in most instances, but doing these sorts of things for several hours a day for a whole week will leave most people rather drained.
4. Relocation breaks routine. Everything you did in your previous place of residence has to be re-learned. Your drive to work is different, your grocery shopping is different, the campus layout is different, and your daily plans are different. Depending on where you moved, the weather and culture may also be very different. One of the things that allows us to focus our cognitive energy on our research and teaching is the fact that so much of what we do is practically automated – we have done it the same way so often that we do not have to think about it. Moving forces you to re-establish all those habits, and that makes the first several weeks after a move rather mentally taxing.
5. Relocation disrupts social networks. In some ways, it is easier now to maintain long-distance relationships than it has ever been. Nevertheless, moving somewhere else often puts a strain on relationships that were established with people in your former place of residence. Additionally, in your new location, it is highly unlikely that you will have enough established connections to replace the friends or family that you are leaving behind. (This is not true if you are moving to somewhere you previously lived, but philosophers rarely have much choice in where they get their first job – you’re very unlikely to be in this situation.) The result is that you have to rebuild your social support network, which can take a long time.
6. Relocation undercuts motivation. Because so many appointments in academic philosophy are short, temporary contracts (namely, 1–3 years), those who relocate often face the prospect of relocating again in short order. This makes it difficult to fully invest in your current community or university. What’s the point of becoming good friends with a bunch of people just to leave them behind in a year or two? What’s the point of doing a bunch of volunteer work for your department when you have no prospects for another contract? Some may be able to push these questions aside and stay motivated, but they are hard to dismiss.
7. Relocation alters one’s temporal perspective. One effect of repeatedly going on the job market and relocating is that your timeline becomes incredibly short-term. During my first appointment as a postdoc, my mentality at the outset was something like this: “What can I do in the next year to make myself a stronger candidate on the job market?” Since you’ve got to be job market ready by September (October 1st at the latest), you’ve only got about 1 year to improve your credentials if your job starts in August, and it's a 2-year position. But this kind of outlook narrows your focus to short-term goals – things that can be accomplished in a year or less. That makes it difficult to entertain bigger, grander projects, and it also places considerable pressure on you to produce during the shortened timetable you have. This problem is even more acute if your position is for only a single year: by the time you complete the moving process, you will already be contemplating your next move!
8. Relocation is demoralizing. Most people start settling down and carving out a stable life for themselves in their early 30s – some even earlier. If you’re an academic philosopher, the odds are that you will not be one of these people. You will watch your friends establish themselves where they live and solidify their jobs while you continue to travel across the country in hopes of permanent employment.
9. Relocation strains families. I am not married and have no children, but for those who have a spouse and/or children, frequent relocation multiplies some of the costs on this list. In some respects, it does make the move more bearable since you have people with you who are sharing that experience. But it also means that there will be much more to do to complete the moving process. Academic couples may also encounter the all-too-common scenario where they hold jobs at different institutions.

When I made my move from Kansas to Tennessee to start graduate school, I was excited to move and start something new. In some ways, I felt the same way after starting my first postdoc – I was ready to be done with graduate school and wanted to start new projects, teach new classes, and so on. But after a while, this enthusiasm fades. My recent relocation to Arizona marks my 4th state of residence in the last 6th years. That sounds extreme, but many in the profession have much more nomadic career trajectories than mine. If you’re considering a career in philosophy, it’s worth asking yourself how many times you’re willing to move while you’re on the market. How often are you willing to bear the costs of relocation?