The “job market" doesn't start post-PhD

This is a guest post by John Protevi, Louisiana State University

This post has two sections. In the first, I take a wide view at employment practices in philosophy departments in American higher education. In the second, taking that analysis in hand, I offer some advice to people considering entering graduate school in philosophy.

When philosophers talk about "the job market," they presuppose that the job market in philosophy begins post-PhD, that it’s all about people looking for a TT job. 

I suggest that we change our frame of reference on these matters, and specify that when we talk about "the job market" in this way we are discussing only a small segment of the complete system of employment for philosophy instruction in institutions of higher education. So I'd like to suggest we call the analysis of the complete system "the political economy of philosophy instruction." 

When we change the frame of reference like that, we see the context for the (post-PhD) job market includes post-BA labor of graduate assistants (either as TAs in charge of sections, or in charge of discussion groups, or as graders of essays) as well as part-time and full-time instructors with BA, MA, or PhD, and post-docs with teaching duties. 

To put it in a formula that retains “job market”: the *real* job market for philosophy teachers begins post-BA, so that PhDs are not just competing against other PhDs but also against anyone else who teaches philosophy, holders of the BA and MA included. 

When we talk about the "political economy of philosophy instruction" we can then explicitly talk about several factors that are only implicit in the discussion of the (post-PhD) "job market."

First, we can see the role of university administrators, who are, after all, largely responsible for the shifts in employment patterns in philosophy instruction. 

To an administrator, a section of Logic or Intro to Phil or Intro to Ethics or ... taught by a BA or MA is a section taught, and taught at low cost. This focus on administrators enables us to connect "job market" discourse with the analyses of the "corporate university," the "privatization of the university," and like matters.

Second, we can see the connection to other issues in political economy, such as long-term employment trends toward precarious labor in other industries. We can also see the connection to constantly increasing health care costs in the US system in which employment has been a traditional avenue to health care insurance; precarious labor does not require the long-term commitment to offering health insurance that (current?) TT jobs do. And we also see the connection of the current (post-PhD) job market to "austerity" programs in response to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008.

Many more factors are available for exploration. On Facebook, Allen Miller suggests the following:

Don’t forget the state legislators who often frame the budgetary choices the administrators have to make! And of course the governing boards, generally political appointees, who hire and fire the presidents, who hire and fire the administrators, who make the budgetary decisions framed by the legislators who also appoint the boards. And of course, if we ask who funds the campaigns of the governors and legislators who frame the budgets and appoint the governing boards, then the whole political economy of American higher education starts to come into focus.

SOME ADVICE FOR STUDENTS CONSIDERING GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PHILOSOPHY

With the above considerations in mind, I usually say something like the following when undergraduate students ask me about graduate school in philosophy.

People often talk about “alt-ac” employment in business, government, and NGOs as a “Plan B.” This presupposes that graduate school aims at producing candidates for “the job market” as usually thought, i.e., tenure track higher education.

I think you should consider starting to prepare for alt-ac employment right now, alongside your graduate training.

There are two factors here: your ultimate weighing of goals, and your constructing of your course of study.

Weighing your goals comes in two flavors:

You might want to say that alt-ac comes first; this amounts to inverting the standard formula, so that academic jobs are your Plan B, not your Plan A, which is now alt-ac.

You could of course continue with alt-ac as Plan B, though you prepare for it during your studies.

If you choose alt-ac as Plan A, you’re still not locked out of post-PhD academic job searches (remember, you most likely *already* have a job, that is, a position in the political economy of philosophy instruction). As you look out at (other) jobs post-PhD, if there seem to be some good academic ones you might like, then sure, you should apply for them. But *they* should be your ‘fallback’ option, not your primary aim.

On either version of the Plan A / Plan B choice, I strongly urge you to develop a ‘content area specialty.’ What I mean by that is that you should try as much as possible to develop your expertise in a content area that could conceivably be of interest to business, government, and NGO employers. There are as many content area specialties as there are live issues in the world: the gender-race-class triad, climate change, food production, immigration and refugees, transportation and urban issues, propaganda and ideology, health care, student loans and debt in general, open access publishing and the commodification of knowledge, and on and on. Those are just things that come into my mind, but there are no doubt many, many more.

Now comes another choice, as you construct your course of study.

On the strongest version of alt-ac as Plan A, you would construct your graduate training as much as possible around your “content area.” For instance, if you are interested in pursuing a philosophy of science program, you might want to target as much of your work as possible on, say, climate change. Your metaphysics course term papers might look at whether or not grounding holds with regard to climate; your epistemology course term papers might look at various questions about modeling; your ethics and political philosophy course term papers might look at various proposals at climate change mitigation, and so on. Mutatis mutandis, you could specialize in health care issues should you be looking at a social and political philosophy program, or in a more granular fashion at differences in health care access and outcomes for different social groups.

A weaker version of arranging your course of study, in which the content area is not necessarily the focus of your course work, is suggested by Rachel Barney on Facebook:

Everybody should indeed have a very concrete Plan B well underway before graduation, but I don't think it needs to be related to their academic specialty. If your heart's in studying Duns Scotus, better to make the most of your chance to study Scotus and learn In-demand Skill X on the side, rather than forcing yourself to do ethics of climate change or whatever you think might be saleable instead. My main advice is simpler: don't go to grad school unless you think you'll enjoy grad school as an end in itself, and regret nothing even if it leads to no subsequent academic jobs at all. (And I point out that that kind of detachment is a lot harder than you might think, after five years or so....)

If you do plan on constructing your course of study around your content area, you should factor in the willingness of programs to allow graduate minors and / or supplemental MA or MS degrees into your decision-making.

The important thing, in my opinion, is that you find a program that allows, or we can hope encourages, you to enter and conduct your course of study, if you so wish, with such a content area specialization.

Whichever version you pursue, whether alt-ac is your Plan A or Plan B, whether you focus your studies on your content area or not, make your strategy as clear as possible to programs as you apply and interview with them, and if they resist your vision of what you want to do, then you might need to take that into account in deciding whether or not you want to attend them.

NOTES

 

The first section here is adapted from a 2012 blog post at New APPS: https://www.newappsblog.com/2012/12/changing-our-frame-of-reference-from-job-market-to-political-economy-of-philosophy-instruction.html\

The second is a response to this Daily Nous post by L A Paul and John Quiggin: http://dailynous.com/2019/03/28/transformative-experience-graduate-study-philosophy-paul-quiggin/.

Interested readers can follow up on the links and comments at each thread.

I recently posted these on Facebook with public settings, so further discussion is available there as well.

Section 1: https://www.facebook.com/john.protevi/posts/10215794024235383

Section 2: https://www.facebook.com/john.protevi/posts/10215786362083834

 

 

Comments

[Sam K.]

This sounds exactly right to me. I think my biggest mistake in grad school was waiting as long as I did to develop concrete hard skills for non-academic employers, and I suspect the same goes for many in my position. Incoming and early grad students really ought to heed this advice.

[Trevor Hedberg]

I think this is definitely something grad students should bear in mind. They should also be aware that it's possible for their Plan B to result in a dead end. In my own case, I was taking some advanced statistics classes on the side toward the end of my graduate career to facilitate a career alternative, but in the second of these courses, I discovered that I absolutely hated doing it and wanted no part of a career focused on that subject area. At that point, I dropped the course and focused on my dissertation for the remainder of grad school.

That being said, I also had a Plan C based on my study of technical communication that I did between getting my B.A. and starting a Ph.D. program, so I wasn't banking on statistics as my sole avenue for non-academic employment.

[Amanda]

I think the key is for grad programs to encourage this. I do think it is their job to make sure all students land on their feet. At the least, they should put effort into this. It shouldn't be *all* on the students to do everything in their free time, with no guidance from their program. However, since most grad programs don't help with this, grad students indeed, given the situation, must do this alone for their own well-being.

[Sam Duncan]

It seems to me that if one is in a program with any sort of credible applied ethics specialty then one ought to do applied ethics. Not only is it a lot more marketable in academic philosophy than are a lot other specialties, it sets one up in exactly the way Protevi recommends. (I didn't and in the end it worked out for me. But the fact I won doesn't blind me to the fact I made a horrible bet). But this brings me to an interesting and I think disturbing point: There's an incredible amount of contempt for applied ethics in many corners of philosophy, especially among the Leiterrific or wannabe Leiterrific set. In fact, I've known of cases where universities more or less burnt down very good applied ethics programs to try and rebuild something more "prestigious." Political philosophy is of course more respected but even there there seems to be this weird hierarchy where the more abstract and disconnected is the more respectable it is. (I think with the entirely justified attention that philosophers like Elizabeth Anderson and Lisa Herzog's work has gotten this might be changing, or at least I hope so). Anyway one of the conversations we need to have is about how the values, or I would say prejudices, of academic philosophy hamper both good alt-ac planning and good academic job market planning.

[Biodegradeable]

Sam,
With all due respect, I think the reason that bio-ethics and other applied ethics is held in low regard is because the scholarship is often really poor. It is poor in part because there are people with very little philosophical training "contributing", and their stuff is really ill-informed. But even the philosophers engaged in this are often quite weak. I think you are giving people poor advice to "do applied ethics". Finally, there is a history of bio-ethicists working at hospitals being called in to justify the decisions doctors are making. They are hired guns, often doing dirty work.

[Sam Duncan]

Biodegradeable,
Without some actual proof for your broad generalizations I think it fair to say that this is just an example of the very prejudice I mentioned. Granted I don't know how one proves or disproves such incredibly broad and vague generalizations, which I suppose might be a good reason not to make them. But whatever the general quality of work in bio-ethics there is some excellent work being done in the field these days.
(See for example: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/theory-bioethics/

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1088-4963.1999.00105.x

https://academic.oup.com/jmp/article-abstract/17/6/665/914272?redirectedFrom=PDF

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2265363.pdf?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Or if you a truly excellent pice from someone without philosophy PhD, there's Sherri Fink's "Five Days at Memorial" which is about as good an example of philosophically informed reporting as I've ever seen.
Of course there's some bad work in bio-ethics but there's bad work in epistemology, phil mind, and metaphysics too. And oh boy could I ever point you to some truly bad papers in the sort of "ideal theory" that dominated political philosophy for way too long. As for your dirty work claim. Well no one has to do that sort of work. You may as well tell someone that she shouldn't study chemistry because there's a history of chemists making poison gas or physics because physicists worked on atomic bombs.
I never said that everyone should try to do applied ethics, but if there's someone in your department who does credible work on bioethics or another applied field then you're foolish not to at least seriously consider it.

[Amanda]

There is poor and great scholarship in every area, bioethics included. The whole "bioethics (or other applied ethics) is poor scholarship" shows such prejudice toward a field most people have never looked into. And even assuming on average the scholarship wasn't as good...I still don't get why this would be any reason to look down on people in that field. Obviously a great scholar can work in a "poor scholarship" field. If the scholarship is poor we would want to even encourage more people to do it as to improve the scholarship! Unless one thinks there is something intrinsically wrong with the field, which would only bolster Sam's point about the prejudice.

This is such an amazing quote: " there are people with very little philosophical training "contributing", and their stuff is really ill-informed. But even the philosophers engaged in this are often quite weak." First, it shows someone who assumes that because someone doesn't have "philosophical" training, therefore they are ill-informed. And not only ill-informed, but apparently they can't even be thought of as contributing, hence the need to use scare quotes. What?! As if people in other areas cannot produce good work! There is such thing as interdisciplinary work, and in some respects non-philosophers will not be as good at certain things philosophers do, but they will be better at others. And then just to claim that people who work in an area are "weak." Stuff like this really makes me want to quit philosophy. The elitism is just nauseating. And I'm sure the person who wrote it thinks they are entirely justified because they have "informed research" and their own scholarly abilities are not "weak."

[Amanda]

Also, Sam basically said what needed to be said about the hired guns comment...but what an odd thing to say. There are also bioethicists doing great work in hospitals, fighting against corruption, implementing policies that improve how patients are treated, fighting for healthcare access, etc. The fact that some are doing bad things...what does that have to do with anything? Lots of philosophers do bad things, lots do good things, and lots do meaningless things that have no impact on life outside a secluded area of the ivory towers.

As for what people should study, I just think applied ethics is one area to consider. Philosophy of science is another area with good prospects. The key is to seriously consider what strengths your department has, what the job market looks like (for most people metaphysics is a very risky choice) and what your dissertation might do for you if you do not go into professional philosophy.

[Sam Duncan]

Amanda,
Thanks for that. I'd wanted to add some of the same thoughts after my initial post but hadn't. But I can't resist adding that Biodegradeable's comment is a complete non sequitur. As you say there are two different claims here: 1. Whether work in applied ethics is inherently inferior to other more "prestigious" (that is LEMM) work. 2. Whether the actual work done in applied ethics is as a whole worse scholarship than that in other areas of philosophy. 2 has no obvious bearing on 1. One may as well argue from the obviously true fact that the average photograph is quite bad to the claim that photography is an inherently inferior art form. But the fact that the average cell phone snapshot uploaded to Instagram is bad has no bearing on whether Walker Evans or Paul Strand's work is bad or even of less value than say painting or drawing. Even if the average paper in bio-ethics is especially bad that doesn't mean that say John Arras and David Velleman's work isn't excellent.
Anyway, the prejudice I have in mind is 1 and it leads both graduate students and graduate degree programs to make poor decisions. I'm especially concerned with the latter. If the average department had a choice to hire either a star bio-ethicist or a mediocre LEMMing it's pretty obvious which would be better for their students' employment prospects both in academia and in alt-ac careers-- the bioethicist-- and equally obvious which would be more likely to move their Leiter rankings, the LEMMing.
And a final, perhaps cynical, thought as far as graduate students go: Let's suppose that 1 is true. It also seems to me pretty true that studying bioethics or another applied ethics field sets one up better in the academic job search and the alt-ac job search than does studying most LEMM topics. Is it so obvious the doing "better" research is worth the much higher chance that one ends up stuck as an adjunct or has to start their job search from scratch? It's easy for the tenured prof at an R1 with his forever job and 70K or more a year salary to say yes. But is it really so clear for the grad student facing the life of adjuncthood or starting over at 35?

[Sam Duncan]

Sorry I meant 2 in that last bit! I suppose I shouldn't go posting right after going through the mind-numbing process of filling out my tax returns.

[Michel]

Off-topic, but for the record: I don't think it's at all obviously true that the average photograph is quite bad (even leaving aside more mathematical worries about average = bad). It's also not obvious that snapshots and fine art photography are the same thing, even though they share a vehicular medium, and so the comparison to Walker Evans and Strand may well be misapplied.

It's also worth noting, however, that photography struggled mightily to be accepted as a fine art in the first place, and that even though it's now accepted, it still tends to be looked on as a lesser art form (painting, sculpture, and instrumental pure music still dominate the Western canon). So it's maybe not the best comparison class--doubly so, because philosophical aesthetics is a pretty marginalized subfield, and tends to be looked down on itself (recall Leiter's recent AOS prestige poll, where IIRC aesthetics/philosophy of art came second-to-last, and feminist theory came last).

(Apologies for veering so far off-topic.)