I was on an airplane home yesterday from vacation, and got to listening to some songs on iTunes that I hadn't listened to in a while--songs that took me back to my years on the academic job market. Long story short: I used to go on daily evening walks with my dog to listen to music and try to clear my head from the gauntlet that is the job market. And a gauntlet it is. Almost every year on the market was the same: fill out over a hundred online applications--applications that university human resource departments apparently like to make as time-consuming as possible; face a cruel waiting-game to see if I got any interviews; shell out well over a thousand dollars to attend a couple of interviews at the Eastern APA; prepare and practice like crazy for the Skype interviews; do well in some interviews, totally bomb others; get a fly-out or two, but no job-offers; etc. While I think I'm a fairly well-adjusted person, and finally got a job on my last year on the market, I will say that the near-continual stress had me losing sleep and, at a few points, at an emotional breaking-point. And I know I'm not alone: visits to other job-related blogs show, in stark terms, just how emotionally fraught the job-market is these days. There precious few academic jobs (fewer every year, it seems)
Which brings me, first, to a simple suggestion for search committees: try to remember what it is like to be a job-candidate, and treat candidates like flesh and blood human beings, not just "job candidates." Realize that, just perhaps, that job-candidate who looks awesome on paper but had a bad interview--that candidate whose research is excellent and well-written, and whose students rave about them--maybe just had a bad day. Realize that those 13 candidates you choose to Skype interview--when you have one or two of them in mind at the top of your list who you really want to hire--are people who are going to practice, and stress, for days or weeks for an interview for a job that they stand little chance of getting. Realize that that candidate you interviewed today might have had six other interviews the same week. When you have candidates to campus, be kind--be helpful. Raking them over the coals during their job-talk, or trying not to let on whether you like them, might seem like "just an interviewerly thing to do", as things necessary to "test them"--but are they really? Are they truly necessary to know whether the person is worth hiring?
Which brings me to a few questions: why must the academic job-market continue to be such a gauntlet? Maybe it made sense to have candidates jump through so many hoops a few decades ago, when academic jobs were aplenty and there was little established science on sound selection-methods. But now, given how terrible the market is--with more and more people on the market for years--and given known and emerging science on selection methods, what sound purposes do the various hurdles of the academic job-market serve? Aside from medicine (which is literally a matter of life and death), to the best of my knowledge few job-markets contain as many hurdles for candidates as academia. For many jobs, you drop off a resume or portfolio, interview in person, and you either get hired or you don't. Doesn't someone's publication list and writing sample tell you what you need to know about their research? What's the point of requiring candidates to summarize their research in person--in Skype and on-campus interviews--again and again, in highly contrived and stressful circumstances? (For my part, I've seen some of the most famous philosophers around give terrible talks. Our research capacities, at the end of the day, are displayed in what we publish!). Similarly, what's the point of a one-off teaching demo in an unfamiliar classroom with students a person has never met...when the person has years of students consistently raving about their performance (and they might simply submit a film to you of an actual course meeting they've taught, to convey their actual performance--much as professional football players are evaluated "on film")? What's the point of these hurdles when we know, empirically, from decades of research, that interviews are worse predictors of job-success than objective/algorithmic selection procedures, are more subject to biases on everything ranging from attractiveness, to weight, height, gender, race, speech style, personality traits, vocal tone, are unable to reliably distinguish honesty from deceptiveness in job-candidates, and privilege the appearance of mental "quickness" over actual intelligence and qualifications, than more objective measures of candidate quality?
What's the point indeed? Academia should not utilize cruel, empirically questionable selection methods. They should be based on sound science, and treat candidates less like cattle and more like human beings. Or so say I. What say you?
A related question is how the philosophy job market became such a gauntlet in the first place. I think part of the explanation might be that it is due to their being little agreement on what makes for an ideal philosophy hire. It seems that hiring committees are so varied in what they look for, not only from school to school, but within each committee*, that over time more and more hurdles have accrued to the process to try to get a fuller picture of the candidate and to compensate for the wild biases philosophers exhibit.
As to what the point is, I think that enough philosophers really do not believe all that research, or think that despite it all, they still `know better'. I'm betting that this attitude is more prevalent amongst the older, more conservative, members of the profession, and hence amongst those with more institutional clout. And those members of the profession tend to think of philosophy more like an exclusive club, or a cult, rather than a profession. One has to demonstrate the strength of one's commitment by demonstrating how much shit one is willing to eat for the privilege of joining the club.**
I think the majority of committee members are reasonable people who are trying their best to be fair and objective, but it takes just one obstreperous committee member to distort the process. With enough such people, and parts of the profession do tend to encourage such attitudes, and enough iterations of the process you get the irrational mess we have now.
* As a case in point consider the post by the committee member a while back (http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2015/12/notes-from-search-committee-members-part-1-dr-slac.html). They admit quite frankly that they do not take all the information the department asked candidates to provide into consideration, and that they leave certain assessments to their colleagues (the `wisdom of the herd'), while they look at what they consider essential. In the resulting discussion it turned out that things which this committee member saw as a minus (e.g. expressing the desire to live in some particular location) others view as necessary, or even a plus.
** As an aside to search committee members. If I am treated badly during a search then you can bet that I'll be looking for another job. The normal standards of politeness and decency are not suspended during a search and if you are the kind of person who thinks they are then you're not a colleague worth having, no matter how smart you are.
Posted by: Philosophy Adjunct | 12/30/2015 at 01:48 PM
This is a really interesting idea:
"they might simply submit a film to you of an actual course meeting they've taught, to convey their actual performance."
Overall, I don't think philosophers see other philosophers teach enough. It's like this weird private thing we do with our students. And whenever I have gotten a glimpse at how others teach, I've walked away with at least three good ideas for my own teaching.
So I could see this being a good thing, for both an interview process and as part of a norm of sharing our teaching more.
Posted by: Stacey Goguen | 12/30/2015 at 08:18 PM