The Philosophers' Cocoon

Holiday stressors & the job market

In our November "how can we help you?" thread, a reader writes:

Here's one concerning holiday stressors, which is not so much a question as it is a request for the opportunity to vent and/or swap stories of frustration during this time of the year.

I am an early-career person with a large publication output and a series of decent postdoc and VAP-type jobs at good institutions, but no TT job. It turns out that, to my friends and family (nearly all of whom are non-academics), such a career profile makes me indistinguishable from someone who has spent the last many years living in the basement and playing video games.

I've just spent a mentally exhausting few days "back home" among these people for the holidays. It quickly became clear to me that they cannot parse my efforts as successful given that I'm still on the job market.

Some annoyingly ignorant questions I got include, "When do you get to start teaching your own classes?" (I've been teaching my own classes for nine years, five as a PhD student and four as an early-career non-TT prof); "Is the reason you don't have tenure because you don't publish?" (which especially smarts given how aggressive I've been with publishing my research compared to my peers), "How's life as a philosophy major?", and, perhaps most annoyingly, "How's school?" (clearly implying the inability to distinguish between being a professor and being a student). Given the stressors of the job market, etc., dealing with the alienation that follows from friends and family members who cannot see one's hard work and instead read one as a slacker who needs to "work harder" to get that job is especially mentally taxing.

In posting this, I'm not really asking for advice. The rational part of me knows that I should assess myself through the evaluation of my peers (who are experts), not laypeople who do not understand my field; that I cannot expect friends and family to understand my field; that I should remember that I don't even really understand what *they* do for a living; etc. But nevertheless, I would benefit from the opportunity to vent about this, and imagine others might be able to relate.

As someone who spent many years on the job market, I deeply empathize with the OP. Given that they did not ask for advice, I won't attempt to provide any. But, if you are a job marketeer, please do feel free to use this thread to commiserate about these issues--and if you would like to ask for some advice for how to handle these kinds of stressors, please do feel free to ask for some in the thread. As always, the Cocoon is here to help in any way that we can. 

Campus visit tips?

I've noticed on our job market reporting thread that a few hiring committees have already proceeded to invite candidates for campus visits (not many so far, but a few). Given that campus visits will increase in frequency over the coming weeks and months, and some job candidates may be doing campus visits for the very first time, I thought it might be good to run an open thread on campus visit tips.

It would be great to hear tips from past job-candidates, as well as from search committee members. Are there particular "do's and don'ts" for campus visits that you think job candidates should be aware of? Do have any helpful tips for common or unexpected situations that candidates might encounter during a visit?

Presenting papers currently under review?

In our November "how can we help you?" thread, an anonymous postdoc writes:

I've seen a few discussion here about presenting papers before they are under review. And the consensus seems to be that this is fine (as I think it should be).

However, I'm not sure you've touched on presenting papers that are currently under review.

Specifically, I am giving a talk next week on a paper that is already under review, and at a venue where I expect some of the most obvious reviewers for the paper will be attending (although it is not a particularly niche paper, so the probability the reviewers are actually there is reasonably low).

The following reasons make me think this should not be a problem: 1. I'm pretty sure I've seen people do this before. 2. If the reviewers are in the audience and haven't started reading the paper yet then this is really just an instance of pre-review presentation.

But the final reason goes rather the other way: 3. If the reviewers have started reading the paper and my presentation changes their views of the paper (either positively or negatively) then they might need to excuse themselves (or feel that they should) from review—and that would be annoying for everyone (me, the reviewers, the editors) due to the wasted time and effort all around.

So, have I made a mistake? And assuming that I will present the paper anyway (it would be difficult to change now), is it better to flag that the paper is already under review or not to mention it?

My sense is that it is fine to present papers that are under review at journals. I suppose it could "pollute the reviewer pool", as it were, particularly if the paper is on a niche topic where there aren't many reviewers for the journal to choose from. But this is a problem even before a paper is under review, as presenting at conferences or colloquia can disclose your identity to potential reviewers too. I also don't think it's a good idea to flag it to the presentation organizers or participants. But, I'm not sure. I have to confess that I've never thought about the OP's questions before myself!

What do you all think?

Taking breaks from writing & research?

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

Does anyone have advice for what an early scholar might do while taking a break from writing? I'm in a post-doc and feel a bit(lot) burnt out on writing, having done it at a blistering pace for so, so many years. I'm starting some time "off" from this particular aspect of my career and hoping to spend more time reading, exploring philosophy, and perhaps other things.

Has anyone taken a similar sort of break from writing? How was it? Do people have tips as to how to stay engaged with philosophy even if not through new research projects?

This is a great query, and I'm curious to hear how readers respond. I myself go through peaks when I feel inspired to do write and do research and troughs where I feel worn out and uninspired (often when, like the OP, I've worked at a blistering pace for a while). And I've found it to be helpful to listen to what my body and mind are telling me, as it were. In fact, I'm taking one of these breaks right now, as I've been working really hard the past several months and feel like I need some time to recoup.

When I'm feeling worn out, I'll take a break and focus on other things for a while--either other aspects of work (e.g. trying to teach a particular course really well), and/or hobbies (such as writing and recording music, listening to podcasts, or reading historical nonfiction). Oddly, I've found that many of these hobbies can be great (and unexpected) sources of inspiration for new philosophical projects--so, it's sort of like "doing research without doing research." To be clear, I don't pursue hobbies looking to mine them for philosophical ideas. I often just find that new ideas occur to me out of the blue when doing other things for pleasure.

Light blogging this week

This is just a quick note that there may be comparatively few posts on the Cocoon this week, as I will be traveling to visit family for the holiday.

If readers have any topics you'd be interested in seeing discussed here this week, please feel free to post them at our November "how can we help you?" thread. I can get discussion threads up quickly and am happy to moderate them while I am away!

How to choose readers for paper drafts?

In our October "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asked:

What goes into selecting a potential reviewer for your article? Is it normal for junior scholars to select, for example, their thesis advisor or another person at their graduate institution? Should it specifically be someone who works on this exact topic, or someone who you know in the general area of philosophy?

I've never presented this exact argument, so I don't feel that I would have met someone at a conference who clearly responded well to this particular work. Although, I did attend a conference on this topic and met some folks there. What's the best strategy?

It wasn't clear to me whether this reader means "suggesting reviewers" when submitting to journals (which some journals request or even require from authors), or whether they simply mean "readers of paper drafts." I'm assuming the latter, as it would surely be inappropriate (a clear conflict of interest) to suggest a thesis advisor or someone else one is close to as a journal reviewer.

So, I'm assuming this person means to ask: what goes into selecting readers for paper drafts? Should a junior scholar ask mentors in their graduate program (even if, say, they already received their PhD)? Should they seek out other specialists? If so, how? Any helpful tips?

Are new hires expected to do graduate mentoring?

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

I have seen several job adverts recently for Assistant Professor roles that seem to request graduate mentoring. Are new Assistant Professors actually expected to mentor graduates from day one, or is this listed as something that will be expected in the future? Or am I misunderstanding and they do not mean PhD dissertation supervision but something else by graduate mentoring in the US? It seems like a lot to ask recent PhDs to mentor graduates.

My experience, from what I have seen and heard second-hand, is that new hires in graduate programs are absolutely expected to do graduate mentoring from day 1. Are recent PhDs well-prepared to this? My sense is: probably not--which, personally, is why I think it may be better for people to be not to be hired into these kinds of TT jobs right out of graduate school. Postdocs and/or a VAP or two can greatly help one find one's footing, as it were, and for my part I recall feeling profoundly unprepared for a tenure-track job when I got my first VAP (in retrospect, I'm profoundly thankful that I did not get a TT job right out of the gate; I think I probably would have failed in one!).

But anyway, maybe I'm wrong about the expectations here. Any readers care to weigh in?

Can paid work count as 'service'?

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

Can I include paid work under 'service' on my CV? I'm doing some copy-editing for a journal. Or is service supposed to be volunteer?

Fair questions, and I'm not sure what the answers are. I suppose you could always list it in your CV under "service", but maybe it should be noted parenthetically as "(remunerated)"? What do you all think?

Race equality work in Philosophy @Sheffield (Guest post by Tareeq O. Jalloh)

By Tareeq O. Jalloh (PhD Student, University of Sheffield)

There is an astounding lack of demographic diversity in philosophy, especially academic philosophy. BAME–Black, Asian and minority ethnic–students make up 8.6% of philosophy postgraduate students in the UK (Pozniak, 2020). In the US, 2.5% of philosophy PhD recipients and 4% of philosophy faculty are black (Schwitzgebel, 2021). Many other disciplines encounter the same lack of diversity. This is especially true for disciplines in the arts and humanities. For instance, whereas BAME students make up 22.3% of UK postgraduates, they only make up 11.5% of humanities postgraduates and 9.2% of arts postgraduates in the UK (Pozniak, 2020).

This lack of diversity in turn tends to centre dominant perspectives in academic disciplines. History, for instance, often centres a very narrow and constrained view of British history where black history is relegated to the margins (Arday, Brachu, & Boliver, 2022). Further, topics in race and ethnicity often seem to be marginalised and taught as add-on or specialist modules as opposed to being a fundamentally integrated part of the curricula (Arday, Brachu, & Boliver, 2022). BAME students engage with curricula that don’t reflect their socialisation, history or lived experience.

There are multiple benefits to improving the demographic and conceptual diversity of disciplines. For instance, improving demographic diversity will lead to students interacting with a variety of different people, and interacting with diverse peers leads to gains in cognitive abilities such as critical thinking (Pascarella & Loes, 2012). We might think improving critical thinking skills would be good for all university students, but this especially rings true for students in disciplines like philosophy, where critical thinking is an integral part of philosophising well. Another reason demographic diversity is necessary is that it exposes people to members of a commonly stereotyped social group who don't fit stereotypes–countersterotypical exemplars. The exposure to counterstereotypical exemplars helps reduce implicit bias (Holroyd & Saul, 2018).

Fewer jobs at SLACs?

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

Anyone (or Marcus?) affiliated with SLACs care to weigh-in as to the dearth of job postings at such places this year? It's a real bummer for those from the SLAC system who would ideally love to teach & work at that kind of institution. Or maybe my perception is off? But it seems like there haven't been many postings at SLACs.

I hadn't noticed this, so I'm curious whether other job seekers share the OP's sense. If it is a real phenomenon, it could just be a statistical blip--but I suspect one thing that could be going on is this: there have for a few years now been warnings about an enrollment cliff in higher education, where college enrollments are expected to decline by 15+% beginning in 2025.

The impact is in turn expected to have different effects regionally (see below):

Moreover, there have already been some significant declines in enrollment, particularly since COVID. And unfortunately, my understanding is that these trends are the most likely to impact small colleges and universities the most. I work at a SLAC (or rather, we've grown into a mid-sized liberal arts university) in a desirable location, and we've been growing every year. But I have friends that work at ones in other places that are already really struggling financially, and in fact sadly I know of at least one person in recent years who accepted a tenure-track job at a SLAC only to be let go a year or two into the job due to downsizing. 

Anyway, this might be going on with the SLAC job market. I think it would be great to hear from people who actually work at SLACs whether they think there's anything to this explanation, or whether something else is up.

Five years on the academic job market (Jeremy Davis)

Jeremy Davis (Georgia) has a nice piece over on Substack detailing his five years on the academic job market in philosophy. It's a very insightful read, and worth checking out by anyone currently on the market or due to head out on it in the future. A few excerpts:

[I]t is not my aim in this post to wax poetic about this journey, what I’ve learned about myself and my profession, and so on. My goal here is rather to illuminate some of the more specific elements of my job search that, in my experience, remain relatively opaque to those who haven’t already experienced it—particularly, graduate students who are planning to enter the profession. In my case, while I knew that finding a job in academia would be hard, I didn’t have a clear enough sense of just how hard it would be—and what, specifically, my own trajectory might look like.

....

I had one first-round interview for a VAP in ethics, which yielded a fly-out, which yielded an offer. This was for a 3-year position at West Point, which I accepted—though I only ended up staying for two years (which, of course, is normal and expected for these types of jobs).

I should note here, in case you’re reading this and don’t know me personally: I don’t have military experience; I’ve never even so much as held a gun. West Point hires civilian instructors regularly. (I find some people mistake my working at West Point as an indication that I’ve served, but I want to be clear that I haven’t.)

...

I asked (as one does) during my fly-out at West Point whether there were any concerns about my candidacy. I was told that there was some concern about my comparative lack of teaching experience. (Remember: I had taught two courses on my own, and had a wealth of TA experience at that point.) It obviously didn’t prevent me from getting the job, but in a different candidate pool, it could have been a significant barrier.

(How) do jobs prioritize domestic candidates?

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

Can someone working at a Canadian institution, and preferably someone who has been part of hiring committees, speak to the typical 'Canadians will be given priority' line in most job ads at Canadian universities. It would be helpful to know how this is actually put in practice when it comes to selecting candidates. What I am most curious about is whether it is already effective at the interview stage, or whether it is more of a tiebreaker.

This would be very helpful for more than one of us, I assume.

Good question. A couple of readers submitted helpful responses. One writes:

I am on the job market now (non-Canadian but have a Canadian degree). The priority has been real for me. I have watched two recent searches at two different Canadian universities. The total 7 candidates who were invited to Campus were all Canadians. (You can tell by looking at the places where they got their bachelor's degrees.) It's only two incidents, but I believe many Canadian institutions just go for Canadian candidates (anyway, there are plenty of good candidates!)

And another writes:

I can speak to this. I am a Canadian, and I have worked in the USA and Europe. The Canadian law is interpreted the same way the equivalent US law is. The US schools are less explicit about advertising it ... but it is more or less the same. The very competitive schools have ways of working around things, such that they can hire who they want without difficulty (they also have legal departments to take care of this). The smaller schools - or ones outside the more competitive rank - tend to not have resources to hire foreigners. There is paperwork involved - costly paperwork. When I was hired by a state college, they needed to apply for a labor certificate saying I was the most qualified candidate, and there was not a qualified American. I know at least one of my competitors - and they were no match for me. But smaller schools do not want to do this, and then have you leave after a year or so. I did not leave so quickly! They got more than their money's worth from me.

It would be great to hear from other readers who are in the know, both in Canada (as this is what the OP asked about), but also in other countries (such as, but not limited to, the US). To what extent do/must hiring departments prioritize domestic over foreign job candidates? 

Unusual Interview Questions

By Trevor Hedberg

Later this week, I will be helping with a workshop designed to help ABD grad students prepare for job interviews. There are some questions that are asked in almost every job interview, but almost all the ones I've done have also featured at least one rather unusual or idiosyncratic question. Here are a few such questions that struck me as odd when I was asked them:

• What does "social justice" mean to you?
• Wouldn't you agree that the way you described [a specific study mentioned in my writing sample] was inaccurate? (I reread the study after the interview and discovered that, as I suspected, I had not described it inaccurately, but I didn't feel comfortable saying that so straightforwardly in the interview.)
• When I teach [subject in the job ad], I teach it through [modality A], [modality B], and [modality C]. What different modalities do you use to teach that subject? (Given how the faculty member described them, the "modalities" were sort of like different disciplinary perspectives, but the course under discussion was common philosophy course.)

These are relatively mild compared to some of the stories I've been told, however. I was hoping that some of you might have particularly rare or unusual interview questions that you are willing to share so that I could give workshop attendees some examples. If you have an example of an unusual interview question that you were once asked, please post it as a comment.

Addressing peer-review bottlenecks in job apps?

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

I am a postdoc on the job market and I only have minor publications on my CV. I currently have three publications under review; one of this paper has been reviewed for a year at a highly-regarded journal in my main AOS and another is stuck in a third R&R round since May. The difficulty for finding reviewers may be explained by the fact that I use an unusual empirically-informed methodology in philosophy.

Would it be a good idea to address the impact of the reviewing bottleneck on my research in my job documents? And if so, how? Instead of directly addressing this situation in my cover letter, a way to hint at this situation could be to add on my CV and/or research statement the dates since my papers have been under review or through R&R. Or, would it be better to have my letter writers addressing this situation in their letters?

These are good questions, but although I could be wrong, I unfortunately suspect that addressing these issues in job-market materials (either in a cover letter or letters of recommendation) is unlikely to help very much. From a hiring perspective, search committees have incentives to hire people who publish enough--and publish quickly enough--to get tenure. They also typically have hundreds of candidates, many of whom have robust publishing records, and who they may favor for that reason alone.

Fortunately, I think, all is not lost. Search committees, at least in my experience, also care a great deal about the nature and quality of a person's work and will sometimes hire someone with few publications because their research is particularly unique and exciting. My department hired someone like that a few years back--someone whose research was so different than everyone else in our pile that we just had to interview her, and she knocked our socks off and we ended up hiring her.

Postdocs requiring projects beyond the dissertation?

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

This question might be too specific, especially given the UK focus, but I think there is no harm in asking.

I am looking to apply for a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship and one of the criteria is that "the project put forward should therefore not be a reworking or mere extension of the candidate’s doctoral research project". I was wondering if anyone had a sense of how distinct a project has to be in these sorts of circumstances?

For instance, suppose my doctoral thesis was on distributive justice, would another project on distributive justice but in a different domain be considered an extension of the project?

Or suppose my thesis was fairly theoretical, but I now want to explore similar questions in applied/practical philosophy, but informed by my previous work. Would this be considered sufficiently different?

More broadly, do people have a sense about the merits of this kind of project versus one on a very different subject but still in ones broad research specialism?

These are fair questions, and not too specific at all! I'm not all that well-placed to answer the questions, as I've never applied to let alone hired for postdoc positions like this. However, I suspect that "[exploring] similar questions in applied/practical philosophy, but informed by my previous work" would almost certainly run afoul of the requirement, as it sounds like a clear extension of one's dissertation project. I'm less sure about whether "another project on distributive justice but in a different domain [would] be considered an extension of the project", and suspect that the answer is probably something like, "Well, it depends on how similar that project is, albeit in a different domain." 

But again, I'm not at all sure about any of this. It would be great to hear some answers from people who are more in-the-know!