On Lin's "Doing a PhD and Getting a Job in Philosophy"

Hanti Lin's, "Notes on Doing a PhD and Getting a Job in Philosophy", has been going around on social media the past day or so, and is now receiving attention at Daily Nous. I appreciate Lin's desire to help and provide good advice--and I also appreciate Lin's being explicit that his advice should be taken with a grain of salt and weighed against the advice of others. That being said, I believe there are good grounds for skepticism about a lot of his advice. Allow me to explain.

I want to begin by saying that, on the face of it, Lin's advice is good advice for landing an R1 research job. Indeed, I think it is worth noting that Lin is currently Assistant Professor at UC-Davis. In terms of landing jobs like these, Lin's advice generally strikes me as sound. Consider for instance Lin's section entitled, "What do I need on the job market?", which reads:

1. Good papers published in good journals even before you finish your PhD, and consistent productivity after you get your PhD.
2. Good academic reputation. Benchmark: there exist people whom you haven’t met before, but who have known your name and had rough ideas about your work.
3. Good letters of recommendation from good philosophers.

• No more. Everything else I am going to mention in this note is about steps toward getting the above three. And you want to think hard about this question: to get those three, are there alternative steps that will work better to you.

I don't think there is much doubt that these are the primary (if not only) things search committees are looking for at R1 jobs. Committees at R1 departments are looking for awesome researchers, and Lin's tips here speak to that. Similarly, consider Lin's advice for how to behave during on-campus interviews:

• Be able to switch between two modes:

• Defence mode: defend your ideas until you die. People want to know if you are a good researcher.
• Friend mode: be open minded and willing to listen to other people’s opinions. People want to know if you can be a good friend and a good colleague, who might be around for the next 30 years if you get tenured.

• Defence mode during job talk and Q&A.
• Friend mode during lunch and dinner.
• When meeting with faculty members in their offices: well... something between these two modes.
• When meeting with the dean: explain how your work is related to other departments (and, possibly, the dean’s department).

Here too, this advice seems pretty reasonable...for R1 departments. R1 departments want to see how brilliant you are in discussing your research (viz. "defense mode"), and less so, what kind of colleague you will be ("friend mode"). Similarly, deans at R1 schools want to know how you'll contribute to the research standing of the university. Etc.

But R1 jobs are not the only jobs there are--nor are they even the vast majority of jobs. Although I haven't carefully broken down the distribution of jobs advertised on this year's job market, I know from having been on the market that precious few jobs this year were top-flight R1 jobs. The vast majority of jobs I applied to, for instance--and I applied to over 100--were at smaller, teaching-oriented schools. Which raises the question: are search committees at these schools looking for the things Lin lists?

The evidence here, I believe, is pretty clear: the answer is no. First, I have carefully compiled job market numbers the past several years, including the publication records of new hires--and surprise, surprise, here are the lessons I drew from the actual data:

Lesson#1: If you want an R1 job, you must either have at least one top-20 journal publication or have no publications at all but come from a Leiter-awesome department.

Lesson#2: Non-top-20 journal publications DO NOT harm you, either in the case of R1 jobs or teaching jobs.

Lesson#3: If you want a job at a teaching university, you do not need any top-20 journal publications.

Lesson#4: If you want a job at a teaching university, non-top-20 journal publications appear to help you.

Second, these lessons are also supported by my own first-hand and third-hand experience. This year alone, I know of more than a few candidates who scored a high number of interviews, fly-outs, and offers who--contrary to Lin's advice--had no publications in "good journals", but many publications in lower-ranked journals. I have also personally corresponded with committee members at smaller, teaching-centered institutions the past several years who have told me, explicitly, that they are scared off from candidates with R1-type publishing records (i.e. a bunch of publications in top-flight journals). Finally, of course, Lin's advice doesn't so much as mention teaching--and I can tell you for certain that departments and deans at teaching institutions are looking for great teachers and people that will fit into the college's vision of itself as a student-centered institution.

Similarly, consider Lin's advice to go into "defense" mode during job talks. While this may be right for a high-powered talk at an R1 school, I've once again heard from more than a few search committee members at smaller schools that they are primarily looking at seeing how collegially you handle yourself during the talk--i.e. whether you get defensive or combative during the talk. Being defensive/combative may work in R1 departments (where this sort of thing is expected), but at teaching institutions? There are plenty of reasons to think not. Remember, teaching institutions want to know what kind of teacher you will be, whether students will like you, whether you fit the college's vision, etc. 

I also have concerns about Lin's advice on conferences. Lin writes:

    The main job-hunting-related purposes of presenting a paper in a conference are:

• to impress people,
• to earn your reputation,
• to find people to write recommendation letters for you.

Here is one problem I have. Trying to impress people can be self-defeating. Those of us who have been around long enough have seen--and, in some cases, exemplified--this error: the person who is plainly out to impress people comes off as insecure, aggressive, etc. In my experience, the best way to "impress people" is to actually not have these as your explicit aims. Instead, you'll tend to impress people, earn a good reputation, etc., by actually just trying to be a constructive member of the conference--providing helpful feedback, accepting critiques of your work as something to learn from, etc. Further, or so I've found, there's another thing that Lin leaves out--using feedback at conferences to improve your work--that is absolutely crucial for job-market success. Several of my early publications, for instance, might not have ever happened if I hadn't accepted and learned from feedback I received at conferences. So, I would say, no: the aims Lin lists shouldn't be your main aims at conferences. They are good ends--but the means for achieving them are these: work on being a good paper presenter, discussant, during the conference. And yes, be social. If you do all those things for their own sake, chances are you'll come off far better--vis-a-vis Lin's own stated ends--than the person who's clearly out trying to impress people.

Anyway, I could go on--but I suppose you get the picture by now. I may not be right about all this, but I thought it might be worthwhile expressing some areas of disagreement with Lin's advice, and the evidence I think there is for very different conclusions.

Comments

[Justin]

Great advice, Marcus. I agree that trying to impress is just, well, bad advice. Just be yourself! Thinking that one needs to impress puts added pressure to an already pressure-cooked environment.