Do we need to coordinate the job market calendar?

By Jerry Green

For this post I want to switch gears a bit and talk about the job market rather than teaching. As you probably saw, a few weeks ago the APA posted a short Statement on the Job Market Calendar, which reads

The following statement was adopted by the board of officers at its November 2016 meeting. It is effective beginning with the 2016-2017 academic job market season. 

For tenure-track/continuing positions advertised in the second half of the calendar year, we recommend an application deadline of November 1 or later. It is further recommended that positions be advertised at least 30 days prior to the application deadline to ensure that candidates have ample time to apply.

In normal circumstances a prospective employee should have at least two weeks for consideration of a written offer from the hiring institution, and responses to offers of a position whose duties begin in the succeeding fall should not be required before February 1.

When advertising in PhilJobs: Jobs for Philosophers, advertisers will be asked to confirm that the hiring institution will follow the above guidelines. If an advertiser does not do so, the advertisement will include a notice to that effect.

This statement followed a post on the APA blog from John Davenport. John’s post called for an action of this sort from the APA, though in an update to the post he argues that we should go further by setting a single date for all job offers (something like the April 15^th deadline for grad school applications). He also calls for much stricter enforcement:

On the first offense, start with a public letter of censure to the department, naming and shaming, and warning of the consequences of recidivism. On a second offense, ban every member of the department (not including graduate students) from presenting at any of the APA meetings for three years. On a third offense, raise it to seven years, and ban the department from advertising in Philjobs (or perhaps make department members ineligible for APA prizes, officer positions, distinguished lectureships, etc.). Whatever the list of penalties, they must be real enough to solve the problem that is now making us all worse off than we need to be, for lack of cooperation on this point. We need to get very serious about this right now, without any further delay.

Now obviously the job market is a mess in a lot of ways, and in general I’m in favor of more organization and coordination across the discipline. But I was surprised by this particular move, so I wanted to lay out some reasons why I think it’s a bad idea.¹ And fair warning, this post is a long one…

Two caveats before I start: (1) I’m on the job market now, so my judgment may be warped in all sorts of ways. (2) My goal here is not to refute John’s position, but rather just to float some opposing considerations to begin working through the issue. It is a bit disconcerting to me when my gut reaction goes so strongly against someone else’s view, and I think the right approach in such cases is a slow and careful investigation (at least by blogging standards).

OK, so the first problem John sees is that the job market is no longer anchored around the Eastern APA, and consequently application deadlines, and therefore offers and acceptance deadlines, are moving ever earlier. My first deadline was Sept 29^th, so I can definitely sympathize with this worry. But John claims that

“The transition to Skype interviews has done significant harm in eroding the robustness of the one annual meeting at which a lot of colleagues in our field were able to meet face to face; thus we have partly lost one major source of collegiality, to say nothing of meeting a threshold of attendees in which publishers can take sufficient interest.”

I’m surprised at this. I was at the Eastern APA this year, and while it was definitely smaller than the last time I attended (and this despite the date change), it was also much less unpleasant. The pervasive, soul-sucking dread of stressed out interviewees (and worse, of folks who went but didn’t have interviews) was much less palpable than it used to be. So while I can see that the discipline as a whole might conceivably be slightly worse off on this arrangement, the benefit to the most disadvantaged among us seems to outweigh this (as, to be fair, John mentions when he notes that Skype interviews save money for applicants and hiring departments). Yet even if your concern is discipline collegiality, an alternative to changing the job market would be to have fewer total meetings so that participation isn’t diluted. The Society for Classical Studies, for instance, has a single annual meeting, and from the one I attended it seems to work quite well. A single meeting might not be enough for us, but I think two ought to do it.

In any case, John’s “pressing moral problem” isn’t the Eastern as such, but rather than creeping hiring schedule. He laments that people used to not require binding decisions until March or April, whereas now some departments ask for acceptances in December.² John protests:

What an unfair dilemma in which to place the most vulnerable persons in our profession! This sort of strategy deprives job candidate of the only stage in the process when he or she may have a slight advantage, which can also help in negotiating a better salary and benefits: namely, the stage of having multiple offers.

John goes on to argue that, due to game theoretic concerns, it is rational for some departments to game the system by locking down a candidate who would turn them down later for a better offer.

So, first, one point of agreement. John at one point calls this behavior “’now-or-never’ offers/demands”, and I agree that requiring a candidate to accept a job without sufficient time to mull it over is not OK. It’s a big deal for everyone, after all, and the candidate should have enough time to thinking through their decision. Likewise, departments that know you have multiple offers and react by demanding an answer from you first would be behaving badly.

But even so I think John’s worry is misplaced, for two reasons. First, he’s concerned about the wrong job-seekers. And second, he does not take into account the benefits of a wider distribution of offers/acceptances.

As the quote about multiple offers above illustrates, John is worried about departments pressuring candidates who might otherwise turn down the school for a better offer. Implied in this worry, I think, is another, that the later departments who would have gotten the candidate lose out as well. But I’m just not moved by this worry. Why? Because the folks John is worried about are among the most privileged people in the profession. The job candidates just got a job offer! Given the nature of the job market, it isn’t certain they’ll get another in the first place. But if they do, they’re in an even better position. Roughly the same concerns apply about the department that loses out: given the surplus of qualified candidates, the person they get instead will almost assuredly be at least as good (and that’s granted that there’s some single metric ‘good’ that all candidates are judged by). So while there’s some small loss that the candidate could have gone to a preferable school, this loss is barely on the radar compared to the many other problems with the job market.³ And if the candidate really doesn’t like the place and think they can do better they’re free to turn down the offer.

This brings us to my second point: I think that it would be a net benefit to spread out the hiring schedule (and I say this as someone who was hit with deadlines before I was really ready to submit). For one thing, early submission deadlines will likely decrease the number of submissions a bit, which will make it slightly easier to look more seriously at more applications (a very small change, I’m sure, but it’s not nothing!). It also allows the candidate to know early on where they’re headed next, info I would love to have right now. It allows the hiring department to plan better for the next year in terms of courses, etc. It decreases the chaos of waiting for one person’s decision to ripple through the system because they have multiple offers. And it removes a candidate from the applicant pool for other jobs, which is especially relevant in the interview and fly-out stages. These benefits seem to outweigh the drawbacks of ‘getting a job but maybe not the one you wanted most’ by quite a bit.

The natural response is that the early offer departments are being unscrupulous in getting candidates that are in some sense better than they deserve. Now of course if the hiring department is being coercive or something, that’s no good. But it’s no good regardless of when the offer happens, so that doesn’t seem to be what makes the difference here. But the idea that departments would lose out to a “better” department in a fair head-to-head contest seems wrong-headed to me. There are quite a few schools out there who would greatly benefit from having a really good young philosopher join their ranks, especially compared to the benefits of that same philosopher going to a “top program” that is already full of big names. The discipline already has enough of an issue with a small number of departments generating a small number of graduates that (i) take a disproportionate share of the job offers and (ii) go directly or indirectly back into those same few departments. Spreading the wealth around, as it were, seems like it would make the discipline better off. And while John worries that it is unfair to the later departments to lose a candidate, it strikes me that (a) they can interview someone else who is in all likelihood just as good, and (b) it’s equally unfair to “weaker” departments to be systematically shut out of getting the best people they can and thereby improving. Not to mention, and I can’t stress this enough, the candidate got a job offer! There’s a big difference between being harmed and being made well off but less so than you could have been.

So try as I might, I just can’t find a way of thinking about John’s worry that makes sense to me. It almost works if you assume something like ‘there’s a clear, objective sense of ‘best’ department and ‘best’ philosophers that justifies them getting the lion’s share of the discipline’s benefits’, but since that seems like a pretty objectionable way of thinking (and it runs counter to some other things John says in his post) I don’t want to foist such an assumption on someone.⁴ But otherwise I’m at a loss.

So what do the rest of you think? Am I missing something here? I’m especially interested to hear from folks who’ve served on search committees, since I don’t know what things look like from that vantage.

---------------------------------------------------

[1] This isn’t to say I disagree throughout. John’s call for philosophy courses to respond to people’s interests and to engage with the broader public is spot on, for example.

[2] John cites two anecdotes for this claim, one for a grad in his department and one from his alma mater. I quick look at the job wiki throws some doubt on the prevalence of this pattern: ANU’s offer was posted on Dec 9, but the rest weren’t posted until January. Though both anecdotes and wikis can be unreliable, I think we should grant John’s observation.

 [3] This observation is compounded once we take into account folks who are applying for strategic reasons, like angling for promotions or spousal hires. I don’t see anything wrong with these moves per se, but they’re pretty low on the priority list, seems to me.

[4] As I proofread this post I see myself continually slipping into talk of ‘good departments’, ‘top candidates’ etc in a way that I don’t like. Problems about ranking departments are well known. Worse, talk of a philosopher’s ‘talent’ buys into a bad picture of our psychology (I have in mind a sort of Dweckiean ‘Fixed’ vs. ‘Growth Mindset’ picture). But that’s a post for another day.

Comments

[SMJ]

The shifting in the calendars has created inconvenience for philosophers on the job market. Earlier deadlines (sometimes months earlier than in the past) and later deadlines have expanded the job season quite a bit. Now, that's not really a moral problem, although we might prefer to have a smaller part of our year devoted to job-seeking.

Similarly, having interviews and job offers uncoordinated is an inconvenience. I know for a fact that some departments are trying to "game the system" by getting their searches done earlier, when there's less competition, so to speak. I know this because (a) my department does it, and (b) I've been told by people in other departments that they do it too. Perhaps the gaming there is counterbalanced by the possibility that someone will accept an offer at a less desirable school (where desirability can be a matter of location, prestige, teaching load, salary, etc.), and then renege if a better offer comes along. That's a risk for the less desirable departments (potentially a failed search), but obviously a risk some of them are willing to take. Given that they are themselves trying to game the system and lock-in a candidate, it seems only fair that job candidates should game it to their own advantage when they can.

The inconveniences of the current system and the lack of a coordinated calendar burden job applicants, but not, especially, hiring departments. Is it unfair to adopt such a system (or to fail to adopt a better possible system) when all the burdens fall on the least advantaged parties? Yeah, probably. But I rather suspect that the current system (being quite new) was not consciously adopted, and that draconian punishments are not called for to remedy it. The APA's nudging on this might be sufficient.

[shane wilkins]

I don't follow the worry about Davenport's critique being about "the wrong job candidates". If the practice is brutal to some job candidates, that's bad enough for it to be something for us to worry about, surely, even if the number of the brutalized is smallish. (I say this as one of the "right" job seekers to worry about). It's not like being trying to be fairer to this one smallish segment of job candidates is going to lead to greater unfairness for the other job seekers, right? The number of jobs available will stay the same, so it's not like forcing an end to premature "do or die" offers is going to keep some other candidates from eventually getting a position. Or am I missing something?

[Jerry Green]

Thanks for your comment, SMH. I agree with you that nudges>draconian punishments. I'm curious what you think about the inconvenience of the extended market. As I mentioned, this is my first year out, so I don't have anything to compare it to. I was caught off-guard by my earliest deadlines for sure, but I think a little advance warning to next year's applicants can address that problem. And at least right now I'm grateful that jobs continue to be posted. And I can say that I think the small revisions I've made on my materials over the last few months have improved them.

The drawback, of course, is that once you're on the market it never really stops until you accept an offer. This is both psychologically unpleasant and potentially distracting (e.g. if, like me, you're trying to finish your dissertation at the same time).

I'm inclined to think the pros outweigh the cons here. But like I said I'm only working with one year's experience. So I'd be interested to see what you (or others) think.

[Jerry Green]

Hi Shane. Thanks for your input. If I follow you, I think you're responding to a slightly different worry than the one I mean to raise. The concern I have is not a quasi-utilitarian 'X people have problem A, Y people have problem B, and X>Y, so don't worry about B'. Rather, I'm thinking in terms of distributive justice, where the folks who are most harmed by early offers are people who are very well off comparatively, and so don't warrant additional concern for their benefit.

An analogy, I suppose, would be something like raising property taxes for second or third homes to pay for road maintenance. Sure, some people would be harmed by this change. What matters is that these people are well-off enough to afford multiple homes. So (1) they don't really need any extra help to begin with, and (2) whatever small harm they experience is (dramatically?) outweighed by the benefits that accrue to everyone else, including themselves less directly.

You do raise a good question though about whether treating multiple offer candidates (MOCs) fairly they way Davenport wants would harm other candidates. An MOC might prevent the next person in line from getting an interview down the road, but that probably doesn't count as a harm. And conversely, taking an early offer you might not otherwise take might prevent the job going to the 2nd place candidate, so this would even out.

I'd like to think that we can simultaneously (i) allow for early offers (and late offers too, which come to think of it I didn't address in the post) and (ii) make offers in a fair, non-coercive way. I grant that there are definitely bad ways of making early offers. I guess the question is whether there are good ways too.

[Trevor]

We have been told by admin here at UNC Charlotte that TT positions we've advertised and interviewed for could disappear with the new calendar year and budget. This could be another reason why some state schools have been trying to make offers in December (one that is less nefarious).

[With Trevor]

There are all sorts of considerations like the one Trevor raises that figure in the unusual dynamics of the job market, unusual from the candidates' point of view. Many schools have to act fast, and cannot afford a candidate to accept their job, and then move on to another before they even begin employment at the institution. Many of us who work at such place work hard to get tenure track lines. But this can take years of work. Many of us with tenure would gladly hire many of the unemployed or under-employed.

[Karl]

It strikes me that while some departments are being strategic about hiring dates, it is often administrative whims and concerns that go into scheduling sometimes. Punishing a department for this strikes me as a bit unfair.
Also, I am not quite getting the first problem. If a candidate accepts an offer, signs a contract, whatever- what is to stop her from accepting another and abandoning the first? It is bad form, no doubt, and it can potentially be awkward, but the contract does not legally bind you with any penalties for default. If a school makes an early offer and one accepts it, they are always taking the risk that the person may leave, for any reason at all. What am I missing?

[shane wilkins]

JG, I'm not quite following the analogy. I don't really see how a MOC getting multiple offers is doing anything that looks like a harm to any other candidates, at all. But further, I don't see why you think setting firm deadlines (Davenport's proposal) is going to do any good for non-MOC candidates. Maybe i'm just obtuse here, but I'm not tracking the house analogy.

[Jerry Green]

Hi again Shane. It definitely looks like we're not on the same page, but I'm not sure why either. I think I agree with both your points: (1) the MOC doesn't harm other candidates in getting multiple offers (Davenport says the MOC is harmed by early offers, I say not, or if so barely) & (2) firm deadlines wouldn't help non-MOC candidates, since they only get one offer, and so timing doesn't make a huge difference either way (except maybe peace of mind).

If I had to guess, I think I must have summarized something from Davenport's post that made it sound like I agree with him when I don't or vice versa. Looking back at your first comment as well, I think we might be focusing on slightly different places vis-a-vis folks with 0-1 offers. But I'm not sure: I always have a hard time telling what the words I've written suggest independent of what I had (often subconsciously) had in mind when I wrote them, so I may be assuming something that isn't coming out explicitly or something.

[Helen De Cruz]

From a European, especially UK perspective, there is no fixed job market calendar. Positions are advertised all year round. This does mean there is less bargaining power for junior candidates, especially since you only have a very short timeframe for negotiating (accepting) your offer, and there is relatively little room for negotiation. What this has resulted in though, is that academics are more mobile. It is normal for people to say after 5, 10, years they would like to explore other options and apply to other positions, same as in the non-academic market. This gives a bit more bargaining power as well. So the job market is more fluid, including moves by senior people.

[JR]

From the perspective of someone who has been on the job market for each of the last four years (though only in a very minor way this year as I am in the first year of a multi-year postdoc): Another downside to the shift to an almost year-round application season is the inconvenience in terms of time commitment. The sheer amount of time it takes to apply for lots of different jobs while also teaching makes "job application season" essentially worthless for doing good research. If one did not receive one's PhD from a "top" department and thus actually needs both publications and teaching experience in order to be competitive for jobs, an extension of the job application season is in effect a shortening of the researching/ writing/ beefing-up-my-CV season. This year, from the relative security of a multi-year position, was the first in which I have been able to get any serious research done alongside teaching in the fall semester because I was not constantly applying for jobs (as I was in the past years while in one-year positions).

Assuming I'm not the only one for whom this is the case, a different sort of solution to at least some of these worries would be a much greater degree of standardization of application materials across institutions. Part of the reason it takes so much time to apply for jobs is that every hiring committee has its own idiosyncratic, slightly different requirements for materials to be submitted (shorter or longer research statements and writing samples, idiosyncratic instructions for things like combined statements of research and teaching, with specific reference to a department's course offerings, etc.). Reformatting application materials to meet these seemingly arbitrary differences in requirements and clicking through endless online Human Resources application forms that simply duplicate the information included on the CV is the "busy work" that takes much of a job applicant's time and energy. If there were a something like a discipline-wide standard dossier uploaded to a central database, updated regularly, and used to apply to the relevant jobs with a single click--perhaps with the option to include tailored cover letter, but perhaps not even that--I would be happy to be "on the job market" year round, since the time commitment would be minimal.

Surely a system along these lines is something the APA could help to put in place. And such a system might even make possible a way of "anonymizing" some parts of such standardized dossiers so as to control for various forms of bias (gender, race, institution prestige, etc.).

I suppose one obvious objection to such a system is that making applying so easy could result in candidates applying for any job even close to their area of expertise, but this is basically already the case given the awful state of the market.

[Jerry Green]

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, JR. Regarding the extended schedule, do you feel like its more time consuming to spread it out vs. doing it all at once? Since I only have a single year of experience, I can't compare, but I can see arguments on either side of either basically doing nothing but applying for 3 months vs. applying regularly along with other things for 6 months. I can easily imagine how someone would spend all their time on applications given the chance, but at least in my case I feel like I'm spending much less time on recent applications after a fixed cost getting things ready in the Fall.

On your other suggestions: Preach! Totally agree.

[Confused]

I am a bit confused about the difference it makes whether the job market is spread over 10 months of the year (or 12) or over 2 months in the fall, as it used to be. If you are applying to roughly the same number of jobs (let's just say, about 60 a year), then you can apply to about 6 a month, which is not fun, or 30 in two months as a teaching term is just starting, which is complete hell. I have been through the latter regime, and it was very stressful. So I am not yet convinced that spread over the year, things are worse. I would think they are better.

[Jerry Green]

I'm with you, Confused. Like I said, I've only been out once, but I'm very glad to have been able to spread out the job market work, for a number of reasons. And normally I like to go all-out on one thing at a time. For both psychological and practical reasons, I'm in favor of some time to breathe between submissions.

[Daniel Brunson]

An additional consideration is the amount of time it takes to prepare for an interview. I'm not sure if it is better or worse to have interviews spread out over the year instead of concentrated at the Eastern, with on-campus interviews typically in February/March. However, I can see the difficulty in getting an early interview in, say, November, and with luck an on campus in December, when other applications are coming due.

[Confused]

Daniel,
When the market was condensed, and virtually all first round interviews were at the Eastern, there were a lot of problems. Imagine you have a death in the family during the APA, before you have left for the conference. Or imagine if you (if you are a woman) or your wife are pregnant, and give birth during the APA. Or imagine you just get a very bad flu. There goes the job market for you for the whole year.

[Daniel Brunson]

Confused,

Oh, I know - that's why I said that I'm not sure what's better.