The Philosophers' Cocoon

Job-Market Boot Camp, Part 2: Building a Strong, Competitive CV

This is the first substantive post of the Cocoon's Job-Market Boot Camp. As I mentioned in my introduction, the series will discuss all things job-market related, with the aim of helping candidates to better prepare for the academic market. As I also explained, I would like for the series--both my posts and comments--to be as evidence-based as possible. Although, again, sound evidence for how to succeed on the market is hard to come by, my hope that is by tying information and advice to evidence, rather than pure speculation, the series will actually provide readers with good information and advice to go on. So, let's try to hold each other to that. When giving information and advice, don't just give your "impressions." Try to give tangible evidence!

The topic of today's post is simple: how to build a strong CV that will be competitive on the market. My personal experience strongly suggests that when it comes to being competitive, publications--publications in general, not just top-ranked publications--matter more than just about anything else. 

When I was in grad school, many people cautioned me (and others I knew) against publishing articles in low-ranked journals. I was told that this might lead search committees to judge you negatively, and thus, that one should only shoot for publications in top-ranked journals. My personal experience strongly suggests that this advice was mistaken.

Although I've never published in a top-20 journal, and so have no experience with whether they might "help" my candidacy, I have a lot of experience publishing in lower-ranked journals--and here my experience was unequivocal: the more I published (even in low-ranked journals), the more interviews I received. Indeed, the relationship was very striking. When I had few publications, I got few interviews. When I had more publications, I got more interviews. When I had a lot of publications, I got a lot of interviews. Publishing a lot, even if it's only in lower-ranked journals, appeared to help a lot. No, I did not receive R1 interviews. Most of my interviews were at SLACs, and a substantial minority were at R2's (which I define roughly as research universities without philosophy PhD programs). But still, when it came to SLACs and R2's, my experience was that top-ranked publications were not necessary to be competitive, and lower-ranked publications helped considerably.

 

CV-Building Advice #1: All types of publications appear to help. Publish, and publish...everywhere--in top-ranked journals if you can, but also in lower-ranked journals.

So much for publications. What about the rest of the CV? The sad fact is, I think it's very hard to say. Given how important teaching is at many SLACs, I think good teaching evals and a broad teaching resume--with experience teaching a lot of different classes--are both probably helpful. Further, during my interviews at SLACs, search committees and deans seemed to like student-involvement stuff quite a lot. That being said, I had a lot of teaching experience and student involvement for years, and it didn't seem to lead to interviews. What did? Publications. So, I would say:

CV-Building Advice #2: Try to expand your teaching resume and student involvement, and improve your student reviews--but do not sacrifice publishing. Find a way to improve the teaching and student-engagement parts of your portfolio while continuing to publish.

Finally, my experience has been that it is important to secure recommendation letters from respected people outside of your graduate department--particularly the longer you're out on the market. I was not only given this advice by many different people, but also experienced positive results. Every time I got more recommendation letters from respected figures in the discipline, my interview numbers improved. So, I would say:

CV-building Advice #3: It is a good idea to obtain new recommendation letters from respected members of the discipline not from your graduate program.

I will devote a future post to how to go about following this advice. But these, I guess, are my three biggest pieces of CV-building advice. Am I wrong? Have I missed anything important? Fire (and discuss) away!

Job-Market Boot Camp, Part 1: Introduction

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I am going to run a new series here at the Cocoon: a Job-Market Boot Camp of sorts. The basic aim of Boot Camp is to share and discuss information and advice on how to succeed on the academic job market. We will discuss everything from what a good dossier looks like (CVs, research statements), to developing a unified research program, to interviewing, stress management, and lots of other things. The idea for the series came, quite frankly, from my own struggles on the market. It took me a lot of time to "figure things out" and come across good advice that actually seemed to work. My hope is that the series will help others avoid a similar kind of flailing, and provide sound advice based--as far as possible--on evidence. Allow me to explain, then, how I would like to conduct the series.

Discussions of the job-market in philosophy departments and the philosophy blogosphere is rampant with speculation. Everyone, it seems, has an opinion of "what search committees are looking for." The problem, though, is that opinions here often differ dramatically, and often appear to be based on little more than personal impressions. This, in my experience, tends to lead to a lot of unhelpful, contradictory advice. What we should try to do, I think, is base job-market advice on evidence. Of course, such evidence is hard to come by. Given that there are (to my knowledge) no sound empirical studies on what it takes to do well on the philosophy job market, we have to do the best with what we have--and that is personal experiences as job-candidates, search-committee members, PhD program placement directors, etc. What I would like to try to do, then, is conduct the Job Market Boot Camp in the following way. I am going to ask that discussion, as far as possible, be based on evidence. So, for instance, I am going to share quite a lot of my experiences on the market, and trends between what I did and results that I experienced. Similarly, I would like to ask other job-marketeers, search-committee members, placement directors, etc., to share their experiences, in as evidence-based of a way as possible. I would like, in other words, for discussion in the comments-sections of posts to be of the following sort:

• "As a job-candidate, I did X, Y, and Z, and here were the results."
• "As a search-committee member at an R1 institution, this is what I looked for."
• "As a placement-director at a Leiter-unranked program, our students did X, Y, and Z and fared well."

Notice that in each case, the information/advice based it on some kind of evidence beyond mere intuition or speculation. This is what I would like to try to aspire to in the series, and I would like to ask everyone who participates--myself and commenters alike--to hold each other to it. It will, of course, be a highly fallible enterprise, and contradictory advice may obviously still emerge. But, for all that, I believe, an evidence-based discussion--linking advice to specific results, trends, etc.--will be more helpful than pure speculation. As such, I would like to invite all job-seekers, search committee members, placement directors, etc., to share evidence they have throughout the series: evidence of how they fared as job-seekers, evidence of how they made decisions (as search committee members), and evidence of how their students fared (as placement directors). Further, I would like to ask commenters to be as specific as possible in the evidence they provide. Did X, Y, and Z seem to result in a lot of interviews? If so, where? At R1's? SLACs? Community colleges? Were you a search committee member at an R1? An R2? SLAC? Etc. You get the picture. The more specific your evidence, the better!

Finally, given that I will be offering advice in my posts throughout the series, I suppose I should answer the obvious question: why should anyone take seriously the advice I have to offer? A reasonable question, to be sure. My first year on the market was 2007. I got my first TT job this year, in 2015. It was a long road, and I by no means have all of the answers. All I can do is share my experiences: things that didn't work, and things that seemed to. I will, at the end of the day, leave it up to readers, and commenters, to decide whether the information and advice I have to offer is accurate and useful--but what I can promise to try to do, throughout, is base my advice on the best evidence I can: on facts and trends that I experienced myself, and on evidence that I have come across from other sources. I hope readers find the posts helpful, and I look forward to discussions of the topics to come.

So, then, up, up, and away! The topic of the next few posts? How to develop and put together a good CV!

The composition of ranked programs

By Michel Antoine-Xhignesse

There's been quite a bit of talk on the internet recently about the role of institutional prestige in philosophy, especially in hiring decisions. The Cocoon has led part of that discussion, with Marcus tallying a whole whack of job market stats (see here and here). And every once in a while someone posting in a job market thread will advise job seekers to have a look at the faculty roster wherever they're applying to see whether people with pedigrees similar to their own have managed to snag jobs there. (Brian Leiter used to keep some information of this kind—see here).

A few weeks ago, I decided to start gathering the information for myself. I started looking at the faculty lists of departments ranked by the PGR as well as departments in Canada, and keeping track of which PhD-granting institutions were represented. It didn't take long before some interesting trends started to show up. Since quite a few people seem interested in this kind of information, I've decided to share my findings with you all. I'm not trying to push any particular conclusions here: you can draw your own. My data is here.

Please note that there are mistakes in this data. Originally, I was just doing this to satisfy my own curiosity, so I wasn't too bothered by it. I guess the mistakes matter a bit more now that I'm making it public, but given the trends involved, I don't think they're likely to be too significant.

The first sheet will show you all the data for the I53 (sorted so that the stronger placers come first), plus 20 other ranked/evaluated departments that I haven't made it to quite yet. The second sheet shows you the same info for Canadian programs. The third sheet tallies up the sums.

Finally, if you turn to the fourth sheet in the Excel document, you'll see that for the I53, I compared their Leiter and placement ranks. The first set of columns shows just that. The second set shows the same information, but sorted by the differential between their ranks, so that the departments that do best are at the top. The last set of columns is just the Gourmet ordering vs. this new ordering, to give you a sense of how things change. It's not a particularly informative way of looking at things, but I was curious, so I did it.

A note on methodology: I tried to count only T/TT faculty; no post-docs, emeriti, VAPs, adjuncts, etc. Doubtless, a few slipped through the cracks. I'm also much less familiar with job titles in the UK, so I'm sure I made more mistakes with respect to those departments. Finally, I have not updated departmental numbers to reflect this year's hires and retirements.

So far, I've counted the PGR International top-53 (I53) and 32 Canadian departments (every PhD- and MA-granting institution in Canada). That's a total of 82 departments, with 1700 faculty members. I do plan to eventually finish counting the rest of the departments ranked by the PGR, as well as all of those recommended by SPEP. That should be about 137 departments total, plus as many American MA programs as I can stomach. That, however, is work for the weeks and months to come. In the meantime, here's what I've got.

I53

In the I53, five departments have 50 or more placements (out of 1212 total, across 129 departments). They are:

• Oxford - 116
• Princeton – 96
• Harvard – 84
• Pittsburgh - 57
• MIT – 55

These five departments account for nearly 34% of all I53 placements. 101 of these 129 departments have fewer than ten I53 placements. Collectively, those 101 departments account for almost 20% of I53 placements. The other 28 account for 77% of them (about 3% are unknown).

Canada

Interestingly, Canada's state is very similar to that of the I53. 122 departments are represented, with a total of 488 faculty. The top five  placers (well, six: there's a tie for fifth) are a little different, though:

• Toronto - 63
• Oxford - 27
• Western Ontario - 27
• Pittsburgh – 21
• Princeton - 15
• Sorbonne - 15

Together, these 6 account for about 34% of placements. Only 7 departments (add Université de Montréal to the above) have 10 or more placements, and these 7 account for 37% of the placements. The other 115 departments make up 60% of placements, with about 3% unknown.

I53+Canada

If you add together the I53 and Canada, then 35 out of 175 departments (20%) have 10 or more placements. The top ten are as follows:

• Oxford - 143
• Princeton - 111
• Harvard - 91
• Toronto - 89
• Pittsburgh - 78
• MIT - 62
• Berkeley - 52
• Cambridge - 47
• Stanford - 43
• UCLA – 43

So if we add Canada to the I53, Toronto and UCLA find their way onto the map of the top ten departments, and Rutgers and Yale drop out. Together, those ten tippy-top departments account for 45% of all placements. 67 (38%) out of all 175 departments represented have just one placement in those 82 PhD-granting programs; that means that 38% of departments have not quite 4% of all placements.

Two departments (2%) have 100 or more placements, and these two account for nearly 15% of all placements between them. In fact, that 2% has as many placements as the bottom 124 placers together (these placed between 1 and 6 people). Oxford (the top 1%) has as many placements as the bottom 101 departments combined.

Discussion 

The prospects look kind of grim for anyone not coming from the most elite departments where that very roughly seems to correspond to the I10 (NYU and USC aside; USC's showing is dismal compared to the other I10 programs). That does seem to lend some weight to the thought that the discipline's research agenda is heavily influenced by the tippy-top departments, even if only because they seem to staff the bulk of the other research-oriented departments. The one major exception (and surprise) that I can see is Western, which doesn't acquit itself at all badly in the I53 and does fantastically well in Canada.

That's enough blather from me. What do you all think?

Some common prejudices about Indian Philosophy: It is time to give them up

Is Indian Philosophy "caste-ish"? Yes and no, in the sense that each philosophy is also the result of its sociological milieu, but it is not only that. Is Indian Philosophy only focused on "the Self"? Surely not.
Why am I asking these questions? Because ---no matter how sophisticated our discussions of specific topics of philosophy can be--- one still encounters these prejudices in secondary literature…and consequently also in the writings of many colleagues who do not have access to direct sources. They cannot be blamed for that, but I hope that they will be grateful to receive some advice concerning what they believe on the basis of surpassed or unreliable sources. The last example for me was a collection of notes on Academia.edu. Its author starts with the good intention "I’ve had enough of ignorance about Indian philosophy" and overall he sounds engaged and interesting. Unfortunately, however, he has received bad advices and/or chose badly among them. The result is a short summary of the usual suspects, with a strong bias in favour of Advaita Vedānta mistaken to be "Indian Philosophy" sic et simpliciter (bold passages are the author's ones, followed by my comments):

1. "‘See the Self’ is the keynote of all schools of Indian philosophy. And this is the reason why most of the schools are also religious sects" (p. 1). I thought that B.K. Matilal had done enough to defeat this prejudice, but this seems not to be the case. Thus, I am afraid I will not be able to defeat it myself. Let me just note that this is a short summary of what some schools of Vedānta could be said to do but it has little or nothing to do with the vast majority of Indian philosophers. There is no "religious sect" called "Mīmāṃsā" or "Nyāya" or "Vaiśeṣika" and so on. Not to speak of Buddhist schools of philosophy, who tend to be anātmavādin `deniers of the existence of a [permanent] Self'.
2. Self-forgetful service of others is a Christian, not a Hindu idea (p. 1). Well, one might argue that self-forgetful service of others is difficult to attain for human beings. And one is reminded of Hegel's critique of Kant's concept of morality. Moreover, self-forgetful service of others is exactly the Bodhisattva ideal ---which the author himself mentions at p. 9.
3. (Evidently all the life-denying aspects of Indian tradition, as well as the superstitious and degrading religious practices, proceed largely from the caste system, its lack of dynamism, its oppressive structure, its eternal unchangingness. A society that worships Hanuman the monkey and Sabbala the cow, that countenances the burning of wives after their husband’s death, is an inhuman one, in which man is subjugated both by the earth and especially by a caste-structured povert) (pp.1--2). My personal position is not consistent with strict Marxism as for the idea that philosophy were only a superstructure of economic relationships. But in any case, I am strongly suspicious about such summaries highlighting an a-historical laundry list of shameful acts of Indians (not Indian philosophers) without any effort to understand (worshipping Hanuman is not like worshipping a monkey, just like believing in St. Mary does not amount to beliving that virginal births are possible in general).
4. Hegel, Hegel, Hegel (except for the mysticism) (p.3). No, thanks. Again, the author is speaking of Advaita Vedānta and thinks of "Indian Philosophy" as if Advaita Vedānta were its only representative. In fact, Advaita Vedānta, as discussed by Daya Krishna (Three Myths of Indian Philosophy), is virtually absent from the philosophical arena until almost the end of the first Millennium AD. And, one might add, its role in the second Millennium AD has been possibly overemphasised by well-known activists of Advaita Vedānta such as Vivekānanda who looked at Indian Philosophy through these lenses.
5. Hinayana, a religion without a God, emphasizes self-help […]. Mahayana, on the other hand, is less egoistic and negative […]. In this sect Buddha is transformed into God and worshipped as such. […] The Mahayana religion has more missionary zeal than the Hinayana; it is more progressive and dynamic (p. 9). "Hinayana" is already a bad start, since it is a pejorative term (literally meaning 'small vehicle', opposed to Mahāyāna 'big vehicle') applied by Mahāyāna Buddhists to their forerunners. "God" seems to me here a misleading category. If one thinks at the Western and Indian concept of God as creator of the world, dispenser of mercy, etc., then the Buddha is surely not a God, not even in Mahāyāna. And so on.
6. The original teachings of Buddha were not incompatible with the Upanishads—for instance, he emphasized Atman, the Great Self, and encouraged people to act under the light of that Self, to seek union with it—but his early Hinayana disciples (of the Sarvastivada, or Vaibhasika, school) changed that (p. 9). This is a neo-Vedāntic interpretation of Buddhism, which uses a fundamentalistic device ("the origins were good, the successors mixed all up") in order to suggest that the Buddha was in fact a crypto Vedāntin.
7. Idealism is obviously the philosophy of choice for most Indian thinkers (p. 10). This is not so, and surely not "obviously" so. Which schools would one count among the Idealist ones? I can only think of Advaita Vedānta, Yogācāra and perhaps some trends of Pratyabhijñā philosophy. Which schools are closer to Realism, Representationalism, etc.? Mīmāṃsā, Vaiśeṣika, Sāṅkhya, Śaivasiddhānta, Viśiṣṭādvaita Vedānta, Dvaita Vedānta… (all of them are never mentioned in the "Notes"), Yoga, Nyāya, both schools of Jaina philosophy, most schools of Buddhist Philosophy, Cārvākas, and so on.

Long story short: Perhaps scholars of Indian Philosophy have really to do something to spread some better-funded knowledge on Indian Philosophy (and perhaps interested scholars should make some efforts in selecting their sources ---the Indian Philosophy Blog lists for instances useful resources).

(cross-posted on my personal blog)

Why the academic job market is not like professional sports

One of the more common analogies one hears about the academic job market is that it is similar to professional sports. In athletics, the best college teams tend to produce the best athletes. Professional teams, in turn, are looking to hire the best athletes they can. Thus, if you want to end up on a professional team, you should try to get onto the best college team you can and become the best player you can be. By a similar token, the thought is, if you want an academic job, you should go to the best program you can, publish in the best journals you can--and if you do these things, you maximize your chances of getting hired into the "major leagues" (i.e. a tenure track job). 

Or maybe not. I've long suspected that this analogy is mistaken, and for these reasons, I collected this data on interviewing and hiring so far this year. Although what we can infer from that data is debatable, the simple fact is that (1) in the hiring data, the vast majority of hires I recorded (40 out of 57, or 70%) had no top-ranked publications, and (2) in the interview data, top-ranked publications did not correlate significantly with interviews, but total publications and low-ranked publications correlated very strongly with interview numbers. How can this be, one commenter, "eugene", asked? Eugene wrote:

These results really are incredible, given that in my experience, everyone really does assume that a publication in a top 5 journal is a golden ticket. (Anyone who has ever seen all the praise on Facebook for those who have managed to secure such publications knows what I'm talking about. Not that I think such praise is a bad thing!).

Anyone have a guess at to what explains this? Do those that land top 5 publications tend to rest too much on such laurels to the neglect of the rest of their dossier?

Although I answered Eugene's query in the comment section there, I'd like to address it again in more detail here--as I believe it makes the same error as the professional sports analogy. Allow me to explain.

I'd like to begin by altering the analogy a bit. In actual professional baseball, there are different "levels" of competition: rookie ball, A-ball, AA-ball, AAA-ball, and the major leagues. The purpose of each level, of course, is to select the best players at the lower-level, and then filter them up to the next level. Thus, the entire system is merit-based: the better one plays baseball, the more likely one is to move up the ladder.

Now, however, suppose that each level had strong incentives to select players that (A) will succeed at their level, but (B) not be so good as to have the desire or means to leave that level once selected. How might this be? Well, suppose that anytime a AA-team gets funding for an extra player,  they will lose that spot (and money for it) if the player they hire leaves for a AAA team. In that case, the AA team has a strong incentive not to select a player who's good enough to play AAA or in the major leagues. That is against the AA-team's interest. And suppose this were true of A-level teams too--that if they select someone who would succeed at the AA-level, they would most likely lose that person to a AA team a couple of years later and lose a position on their team. 

Finally, let us suppose that there are very few major league teams (10, let's say), a bunch more AAA-teams (100, let's say), a bunch more AA-teams (200, let's say), a bunch more A-teams (1,000) etc. For fun's sake, let's call positions on these teams "tenure-track jobs." If you want to maximize your likelihood of getting a job on some team or other, what will maximize your probability of getting one? Answer: it's not having the best skills or resume--the skills or resume of a major-league baseball player. It's actually having the skills of an A-level baseball player. Indeed, in this story as I told it, the most elite players will actually have the hardest time getting on a team--for the only teams who have incentives to select them, major league teams, are a very small minority of all the teams in existence.

I don't mean to say that we should rank colleges and universities in the same way--as though small liberal-arts colleges are worse than research universities. What I do mean to suggest is that the proportions and incentives are likely to be similar in the academic job market. There are precious few R1 universities, and very few tenure-track jobs at them. There are a whole lot more R2's, SLACs, community colleges, etc. When the latter, larger group of schools look to hire someone for a tenure-track position, they are looking to (A) have a successful search, not (B) a failed search. But, how are they incentivized to define these things? Answer: a "successful search" hires someone who will succeed (get tenure) and not leave. A "failed search", on the other hand, is someone who either doesn't succeed (doesn't get tenure) or who will leave. This is not mere speculation. These incentives absolutely exist. A search for a tenure-track position costs a great deal of money, and a search that hires someone who leaves is just as much as a "failure"--from a cost standpoint, as well as the department's standpoint--as someone who stays but fails to get tenure.

With this in mind, suppose you are someone at at, say, an SLAC deciding who to hire. Do you have incentive to hire someone with publications in Phil Studies, The Philosophical Review, or Mind? The answer, very simply and honestly, is: no. Although that person would almost certainly get tenure should they stay in the position, they are a very real flight risk--and, if they do flee for greener pastures, your department may lose that tenure-stream line: an absolute disaster for your department. The safer thing to do is to select someone who has shown (A) the ability to publish (since you want them to get tenure, should you hire them), but (B) not the ability publish in journals that might give them the ability and incentive to move to a position at another university.

What does all of this suggest? It suggests to me that the academic job market is not at all like professional sports, and that top-ranked publications are probably not a "golden ticket" to an academic job. They may indeed be a golden ticket for a small minority of jobs, but at many other jobs they may well be the exact opposite: a reason to pass over the candidate for someone less likely to be a flight risk.

Emotion Researcher

Daniel Kelly has drawn my attention to Emotion Researcher, the official newsletter of the International Society for Research on Emotion. Looks like a great site to follow for anyone interested in the emotions, moral psychology, etc.!

Query: Undergrad seminar in contemporary ethics

Suppose you're scheduled to teach an upper-division undergraduate seminar in contemporary ethics and you're looking to put together an awesome reading list. Let's leave it ambiguous whether you want the whole course to focus on ethical theory, or whether you'd like to do some applied ethics. Finally, let's assume you'd really like to do it in an inclusive way, not just assigning "Western"/analytic ethics. Which book(s) would you order? Which articles would you assign? Fire away!

Interview and Hiring Analysis

**UPDATED with time-to-hire on the basis of publication-type (top-5, top-10, etc).

Apologies to readers for such a slow week around here. It's been a very busy week! I do, however, have some news to report. I have (A) analyzed the interviewing data I collected, and have also (B) collected and analyzed data for all of this year's hires to date as reported on philjobs. My main purpose in collecting like this is to test the kind of anecdotal job-market advice one commonly hears, both online and offline. Advice on the job-market is everywhere (viz. "You need to publish in top-ranked journals", "The job market is just a crapshoot", etc.), and yet the advice given is often contradictory and seemingly based on little more than the intuitions of the persons giving it. I want to try to do better. There are some actual empirical facts, after all--facts about what kinds of programs people are from, how many publications they have, how many interviews they've gotten, etc.--and these facts might enable us to develop a better factual understanding of what actually helps and does not help on the market.

Before I present the results of the analyses I have performed, I want to emphasize a few things. First, the samples in each case were relatively small (33 people answered my survey, and 57 hires have been reported on philjobs). Second, the individuals who answered my job-market survey were self-selected and so may not be a representative sample of people on the market. As such, the analyses I present should be taken with a BIG grain-of-salt. In future months (and years), I hope to continue collecting job-market/interviewing data--I'll probably try to do another survey on Qualtrics in a few months--as well as hiring data from philjobs. All that being said, I think the two data sets together provide some independent corroboration of some trends, and would like to report them. So on with the show!

1. Results of The Philosophers' Cocoon Job-Market Survey

33 individuals filled out the Cocoon survey. The survey included the following items:

• Leiter-rank of PhD program
• Years since graduation
• Total jobs applied for
• Total # of interviews
• # of TT interviews
• # of non-TT interviews
• Job offers
• Total # of publications
• # of publications in "top 5 journals"
• # of publications in "top 10 journals"
• # of publications in "top 20 journals"
• # of publications in "non-top-20 journals"
• Years teaching
• Student evaluation average

I then ran 2-tailed Pearson correlations using a standard .05 p-value for significance. My findings are as follows:

1. No significant relationship between Leiter rank and interviews or job offers.
2. A strong positive relationship (r=.501, p=.003) between years on the market and total # of interviews.
3. A strong positive relationship (r=.508, p=.003) between years on the market and total # of TT interviews.
4. No significant relationship between years on the market and actual job-offers.
5. Strong positive relationships between total # of publications and total interviews (r=.549, p=.001), total # of TT interviews (r=.558, p=.001), and job offers (r=.344, p=.05).
6. No significant relationships between top-5, top-10, or top-20 publications with interviews or offers.
   
7. Strong positive relationships between total # of non-top-20 publications and total interviews (r=.521, p=.002) and total # of TT interviews (r=.547, p=.001), as well as a nearly significant relationship with job offers (r=.338, p=.059)
   
8. No relationship between teaching reviews and anything.

2. Hiring-Data Analysis

I compiled the following data for all hires in this job-season (jobs that begin in 2015):

• PhD program Leiter rank
• Hire-type (TT, VAP, Lecturer, postdoc)
• Previous position-type
• Years since graduation
• Total publications
• Top-5 publications
• Top-10 publications
• Top-20 publications
• Non-top-20 publications
• Gender

Here is what I found:

1. Top-10 publications correlated significantly with PhD program Leiter rank (r=.274, p=.039).
2. Total publications correlated significantly with top-10 publications (r=.274, p=.039)
3. The mean Leiter rank of all hires was 20-30. (I scored Leiter rank by tens)
4. The mean time-since-graduation of all hires was 2.2 years, with a 2.12 standard-deviation.
5. 35% of hires-to-date are direct from grad school
6. 12% of hires graduated 1 year ago
7. 10.5% of hires graduated 2 years ago
8. 10.5% of hires graduated 3 years ago
9. 14% of hires graduated 4 years ago
10. 7% of hires graduated 5 years ago
11. 10.5% of hires graduated 6 years ago
12. Mean # of total publications for all hires is 5.5
13. Mean # of top-5 publications for all hires is .07
14. Mean # of top-10 publications for all hires is .22
15. Mean # of top-20 publications for all hires is .21
16. Mean # of non-top-20 publications for all hires is 4.9
17. 22.8% of all hires came from Leiter top-5
18. 19.3% of all hires came from Leiter 5-10
19. 12.3% of all hires came from Leiter 10-20
20. 8.8% of all hires came from Leiter 20-30
21. 7% of all hires came from Leiter 30-40
22. 7% of all hires came from Leiter 40-50
23. 22.8% of all hires came from Leiter-unranked programs
24. 64% of hires are men
25. 36% of hires are women

UPDATE: 

(1) Mean time to hire for hires with 1+ top-5 publication: 4.75 years

(2) Mean time to hire for hires with 1+ top-10 publication: 2.6 years

(3) Mean time to hire for hires with 1+ top-20 publication: 2.5 years

(4) Mean time to hire for hires with +1 non-top-20 publications: 2.5 years

(5) Mean time to hire for hires with only non-top-20 publications: 2.37 years

3. Discussion

Here are some thoughts I have when looking at the data and analyses:

1. Leiter-rank: Although the survey I compiled did not show any significant relationship between PhD program Leiter-rank and interviews or hires, the hiring data suggest that there is some relationship--but a complex one. A high proportion of hires 44.2% this year have come from the Leiter top-10. But a significant proportion of hires (22.8%) come from programs that are not Leiter-ranked at all, and another 20% of hires come from programs ranked from 10-30.
2. Publications: Both sets of data seem to strongly support something that I have long suspected (on the basis of personal experience)--namely, that the advice "You must publish in top-ranked journals" to fare well on the market is false. Top 5, top-10, and top-20 publications did not relate significantly to job-market success in either data-set, but total # of publications and total # of non-top-20 publications did. Both data sets thus suggest that in terms of getting a job, the really important thing is not where you publish but how much you publish.
3. Time on the market: Both data-sets suggest that staying on the market longer does not hurt you, and may even help you (at least in terms of interviews). Although 35% of this year's hires are direct from grad school, there does not appear to be a hiring preference across years 1-6 on the market, and my survey (despite its small sample) indicated that people who have been out on the market longer may be getting more interviews  (personal note: this was absolutely the case in my own instance).

I want to emphasize again that these results should be taken with a grain of salt. Only time--and a lot more data--will tell how well they hold up. They are, however, two independent data sets, and the results cohere well with my own personal experience on the market. 

A reminder, and a "job-market boot camp"

I'd like to once again encourage our readers on the job-market this year to fill out the job-market survey I'm conducting, and to spread the word to others on the market who might be interested in filling it out, as well. The more data we get, the better statistical picture we'll have of precisely which things help and do not help job-candidates on the market, and to what extent. In the future, I will probably deploy the survey through other means--Google docs or Qualtrics perhaps--but in the meantime I would like to thank everyone that has taken part.

As soon as I run the data analysis, I will present the results here. What I hope to do then is begin a new Cocoon feature: a Job Market Boot-Camp of sorts offering information and advice, and soliciting advice and discussion from readers, on all things job-market related. My hope is to run a rather long series of posts on everything ranging from dossier materials, to networking, to obtaining new recommendation letters, to interviewing, and beyond. Although I don't pretend to have all the answers, I did spend something like 8 years on the market--struggling mightily for several years before making some changes that led to much better results the past few years--and I would like to share some of the experiences and lessons I think I've learned, and invite readers to do the same. Hopefully we can have some good discussions that present and future job-marketeers will find helpful.

Here is an initial working outline of the series:

• Part 1: Building a better CV
• Part 2: Recommendation letters
• Part 3: Networking and online presence
• Part 4: Should you hire a job-market consultant?
• Part 5: The cover-letter
• Part 6: The research statement
• Part 7: The teaching statement
• Part 8: The teaching dossier
• Part 9: The writing sample
• Part 10: The Skype interview
• Part 11:  The APA interview
• Part 12: The on-campus interview

Are there any topics not listed that you would like to see covered in the series? If so, please do leave a comment letting me know!

Publishing as process

Academics everywhere seem to have a hate-love relationship with publishing. Each discipline seems to have its own standards and norms, ranging from the "publish or perish" model that emphasizes quantity (prevalent across much of the natural and biomedical sciences) to the heavy emphasis on allegedly "top" journals in philosophy. And academics are often struggling hard to square discipline-specific expectations with institutional demands (variously enforced by Annual Reviews, University Tenure and Promotion Committees, or nation-wide programmes such as Britain's RAE/REF which have caused many academics a sleepless night or two...). Typically, however, we think of publishing in terms of its output -- individual publications, whether they be articles, monographs, edited volumes, special issues etc. An increasingly competitive grant culture encourages such thinking and has coined the rather awful expression 'research deliverable' to refer equally to publications, patents, prototypes etc.

What's missing from the narrow emphasis on publications as 'output', however, is the day-to-day experience of publishing: how to get one's work published (or, as the case may be, how not to get published), how to revise accepted papers for final publication, how to handle proofs (and deadlines), etc. In philosophy, given the often enormous time delays between first submitting a paper and finally seeing it in print (whether in the journal one first submitted to or, more likely, another one) -- and given further that almost all the work is outsourced to authors -- the mechanics of the publishing process can add up to a lot of work and can take up quite a bit of time.

Having published a monograph last year (with a second one in the works right now...), and having been involved in a number of special issues (several of which with an interdisciplinary bent), I've recently started thinking a fair amount about the *process* of publishing -- not just about 'getting published' (as in getting papers accepted), but also about how to handle the mechanics of the publication process in a satisfactory and responsible way. So, over the next few weeks, I hope to contribute a series of posts dealing with some of the perhaps less 'glamorous' aspects of academic writing and publishing.

In order to get a better sense of what people are interested in, are there any aspects that readers would be especially keen to hear about?

Boss moves on the job market?

Just about every year around this time there are blog posts on campus-visit "horror stories" (see e.g. here, here, and here). Such stories are often illuminating and disturbing. But, since they are so common, I got to thinking about what other kinds of more positive stories that might be fun to share. In particular, I was thinking it might be fun to hear reports of "boss moves"--things that a candidate has done, intentionally or unintentionally, either during an interview or an on-campus visit, that were really, really impressive, including impressively cool, impressively kind, impressively amusing, whatever.

What might an example of a boss move be? Giving a killer job talk "without a parachute" (i.e. no notes)? I don't know. You tell me! I haven't been at enough departments who hosted candidates to witness any boss moves. But, for all that, I'm pretty sure they exist. Have you witnessed any? If so, please share away! (Note: when it comes to instances of impressively amusing behavior, let's stick to non-embarrassing cases. This is a safe and supportive blog, after all. No need to embarrass people!).

Is philosophy in the doldrums?

I came across Harry Frankfurt's claim that philosophy is "in the doldrums" today (see here, here, and here), and am curious what others think. Is philosophy in the doldrums? How should we even go about answering this question? We might, for instance, ask the question individually about different sub-disciplines--as in:

• Is metaphysics in the doldrums?
• Is philosophy of language?
• Philosophy of science?
• Moral philosophy?
• Political philosophy?
• Aesthetics?
• Feminist philosophy?
• Etc.

But still, how are we to go about answering these questions? We might then draw up a list of desiderata for determining whether philosophy is in the doldrums. But, which desiderata? Here are some possible ones:

1. Has the field made clear, sustained, widely-recognized progress on important problems over the past few decades, or are recent debates largely seen now (in retrospect) as pseudo-problems or passing fads?
2. Have there been clear, bold steps forward in the area recently--surprising, creative, new theories and arguments--or have debates in the area largely mined old ground, focusing on longstanding theories, figures, or arguments?
   
3. Have the methodologies that have dominated the (sub-)discipline withstood the test of time, or are people increasingly calling into question those methodologies (and whatever "progress" they have supposedly generated)?
   

I've explored some of these issues before (see here, here, here, and here), but I don't want to belabor my same old arguments. Instead--since Frankfurt's claims seem to have touched a nerve--I'm curious to see whatever everyone else thinks. Is philosophy in the doldrums? Are particular areas of it? Why/why not? 

Getting scientific on the academic job market

Advice on how to succeed on the academic job market is not hard to come by. Just about everyone seems to have an opinion. Senior faculty and placement directors have opinions. People on search committees have opinions. People on philosophy blogs have opinions. Etc. Yet, as is typically the case, these opinions often diverge sharply. One person says it is an absolute necessity to publish in top-20 journals, another person denies it. One person says publishing in lower-tier journals hurts you, another person denies it. And of course many people just say it's all one big crap-shoot--like buying a lottery ticket. Get lucky, you get a job. Unlucky, you don't.

I'd like to try to do better than this. I would like to collect and analyze data from candidates on the market each year so that we can actually get a clearer, fact-based picture of which sorts of things benefit/harm people on the market. In the past, I have collected some data on new hires, and the data suggested some surprising things: namely, that (A) lower-tier publications do not appear to harm candidates, but indeed, help them, and (B) top-tier publications appear entirely unnecessary for landing a teaching job.

This year, however, and in future years, I would like to collect data from people currently on the market. In particular, I would like to ask people to report all of the following data in the comments section to this post:

• PhD program Leiter rank:
• Graduation status: (ABD, graduated 1 year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, etc.)
• Current position: (Graduate student, Adjunct, Post-Doc, VAP, etc.)
• Total # of jobs applied for:
• Total # of interviews:
• Total # of TT interviews:
• Total # of non-TT interviews:
• Total # of job offers:
• Total # of publications:
• Total # of top-5 publications: (general rankings here, moral philosophy rankings here, etc.)
• Total # of top-10 publications:
• Total # of top-20 publications:
• Total # of non-top-20 publications:
• # of years experience solo-teaching:
• Student evaluation average: 

Anything I left out? Anyway, please spread the word so that we can get a good data-set. I'll then crunch the numbers and see if there are any trends!

Elisa Freschi (Austrian Academy of Sciences) on what one should have read in Indian Philosophy

Our own Elisa Freschi has a new post, "Absence and error in Indian Philosophy: What you should have read", up at the Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy.

I'd also like to remind everyone: if there's an author, article, book, etc., that you think has not received adequate citation or credit in the philosophical literature, please do submit a post. Anonymous posts are welcome, but must conform to the Campaign's Mission!

Jessica Wilson (Toronto) at the Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices

I have posted a short essay, "On the the pedigree of the 'subset view' of realization", by Jessica Wilson (Professor, University of Toronto) at the Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy. Check it out, as well as the first post I wrote on the "Lewis-Stalnaker-(Sprigge?) theory" of counterfactuals.

I'd also like to encourage anyone and everyone to contribute new posts to the Campaign. Are there authors/papers you think haven't received due credit in the literature? Let everyone know!

A Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy?

In light of recent discussions raising questions about citation and credit-giving practices in academic philosophy, I have tentatively launched a new blog, "The Campaign for Better Citation and Credit-Giving Practices in Philosophy", to serve as a forum to share and address systematic problems in these areas.

As the blog's Mission Statement makes clear, the blog will NOT function as a forum to post any accusations against particular authors, articles, etc (such things will not be permitted). Instead, the blog is a place where individuals can submit posts arguing that particular works/authors have be under-cited/under-recognized in a given body of literature as a whole. In other words, the blog aims to merely serve as a forum to rectify cases of systematic omission--a forum for people to argue that specific works that (1) contributed substantially to some debate in philosophy, have (2) for some reason or another, not received due citation or credit in that literature as a whole. 

I believe that this is a worthy endeavor worth attempting, and have begun the new blog as a tentative attempt to do it in a positive (rather than accusatory) way. Philosophers who have not received due credit for their contributions should receive such credit, and I hope the new blog can provide a positive forum for helping to accomplish that.

Philosophers and their religious practices, part 1: Homilies for a hoping agnostic

[cross-posted at Prosblogion] This is the first installment of a series of interviews I am conducting with academic philosophers about their religious practices. Curiously, there’s relatively little attention for religious practices, with most work in philosophy of religion strongly focusing on beliefs (this is changing thanks to excellent work by Terence Cuneo, Howard Wettstein, Sarah Coakley and others, but this work is still decidedly in the minority). 

In this series of interviews, I ask philosophers who are religious practitioners—they go to church or temple, pray, utter blessings, engage in stoic meditation, read the Torah, serve in the capacity of priest—about their religious practices and the influence on their philosophical work. I have interviewed (and am in the course of interviewing) agnostics, theists and atheists, hopefuls and skeptics. The contributors are in various stages of their career, tenured and untenured. Interviews were conducted through e-mail and responses are not edited, except for some occasional shortenings (indicated by ellipses)

The first interview is with Marcus Arvan, who is an assistant professor at the University of Tampa. Arvan self-identifies as a hoping Agnostic and attends Catholic mass weekly. 

Recent work by Cocooners (February 2015)

The following works were either published or uploaded to philpapers by Cocoon contributors during the month of February:

Nicholas Joll (2015). Defending Adorno’s Practical Philosophy. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (1):126-140.

David Killoren (forthcoming). Robust Moral Realism: An Excellent Religion. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion:1-15.

Clayton Littlejohn (forthcoming). Knowledge and Awareness. Analysis.

Clayton Littlejohn (forthcoming). A Plea for Epistemic Excuses. In Fabian Dorsch Julien Dutant (ed.), The New Evil Demon Problem. Oxford University Press.

Clayton Littlejohn (forthcoming). Potency and Permissibility. In Ben Bramble Bob Fischer (ed.), Stirring the Pot. Oxford University Press.

Moti Mizrahi (forthcoming). An Argument for External World Skepticism From the Appearance/Reality Distinction. International Journal for the Study of Skepticism.

Martin Shuster (forthcoming). "Nothing to Know" in Advance. Idealistic Studies.Martin Shuster (forthcoming). Espen Dahl and Stanley Cavell: Religion, and Continental Philosophy. International Journal for Philosophy of Religion:1-4.

Meg Wallace (2015). Article 18: Redundant and Unnecessary? Australian Humanist, The 116:9.

Anything I missed? Let me know and I'll update the list!