Where the TT jobs were(n't) in 2021-22

Updated 4/28

Longtime readers may recall that most of the past handful of years, I've done informal data-collection on PhilJobs to see what the year's academic job market has been like (here are the numbers for 2020-21, 2019-20, 2017-18, and 2016-17). Anyway, I was curious what this year's market was like, so I've gone and done another tally. I realize that PhilJobs isn't a complete sample, as a good number of jobs may only be advertised elsewhere, such as at HigherEdJobs. However, collecting and collating this kind of data is really hard work and PhilJobs is the easiest to work with (by far)--so that is the sample I use each year. One quick note before proceeding: although I've done my best to collect the data in this post accurately, this is just an informal report, not a formal study, so if there are any errors, I apologize in advance (though, if there are any, I'm fairly certain they would be very, very minor). Here is my spreadsheet, if anyone would like to triple-check things (you can also take a deeper dive than the numbers below to see how many jobs were advertised this year in particular AOS sub-categories, e.g., mind, metaphysics, philosophy of race, etc.). I'm more than happy to correct any errors and update this post if any are found.

Like last year, I've decided to break things up into two different posts: one on TT jobs (today), and another on non-TT jobs (a few weeks from now). Today's post is based upon a PhilJobs search for 'tenure-track (or similar)' job ad posted between August 1st, 2021 and Friday, April 8th, 2022. A few quick notes on methodology. The methodology I've always used in this series works as follows. When I encounter jobs with two AOS's (e.g. metaphysics, moral philosophy), I counted each job as '.5' jobs in that area (or in the case of 3 AOS, '.33' jobs, etc.). Although I recognize this is a bit odd, it seems to me to make sense, as a job like that could go to someone in any of the listed AOSs, not just one particular AOS. Because I did this with all jobs, the numbers seem to me to accurately weight whether a job is in a particular AOS simpliciter, or whether it was also available to candidates in other AOS. Second, as noted above I only counted "junior-level" jobs (i.e. postdocs, lecturer, and Assistant Professor positions), not Associate or Professor level jobs. Third, I only counted academic jobs (leaving the very few non-academic jobs advertised on PhilJobs to the side). 

Anyway, here are the numbers I compiled for this year, along with a few graphs for comparisons to past years:

Total (junior-level) TT jobs advertised in 2021-22: 201

• 2020-21: 118
• 2019-20: 224
• 2017-18: 228
• 2016-17: 231

TT jobs advertised by AOS:

Open AOS: 36.68 jobs (18.24% of jobs advertised)

2016-17	17%
2017-18	17.8%
2019-20	20.5%
2020-21	24.6%
2021-22	18.2%

'Core areas' (mind, language, metaphysics, epistemology, logic): 24.3 jobs (12.1% of TT jobs advertised)

2016-17	10%
2017-18	13.1%
2019-20	8.3%
2020-21	6.4%
2021-22	12.1%

Philosophy of Science (including cog sci, philosophy of technology, & AI): 14.34 jobs (7.1% of TT job ads)

2016-17	7.8%
2017-18	6.5%
2019-20	10.9%
2020-21	11.7%
2021-22	7.1%

Ethics: 47.18 jobs (23.5% of TT job ads)

2016-17	21.6%
2017-18	22.6%
2019-20	23%
2020-21	26.3%
2021-22	23.5%

Social and Political Philosophy: 24.79 jobs (12.3% of TT job ads)

2016-17	12%
2017-18	11.8%
2019-20	8%
2020-21	10.3%
2021-22	12.3%

History of Philosophy: 19.43 jobs (9.6% of TT job ads)

2016-17	13%
2017-18	11.2%
2019-20	12.3%
2020-21	6.1%
2021-22	9.7%

Philosophy of marginalized identities (race, gender, disability, etc.): 17.08 jobs (8.5% of TT job ads)

2016-17	6.7%
2017-18	4.7%
2019-20	5.2%
2020-21	6.8%
2021-22	8.5%

'Non-Western' Philosophies: 11.74 jobs (5.8% of TT job ads)

2016-17	5.2
2017-18	4.7
2019-20	5.2
2020-21	6.5
2021-22	5.8

Continental philosophy (& phenomenology): 2 jobs

Philosophy of Religion: 1.83 jobs

Here are some graphical comparisons over time:

As you can see, each job season Ethics has far and away advertised the highest number/percentage of TT jobs, followed by Open AOS. If (as in some of my previous report posts) one combines Ethics and Social-Political into a single category ('value theory'), the number of total Value Theory jobs is vastly higher than any other area of TT jobs advertised. Because AOS's lower down on this graph are messy and hard to parse out because of how the graph compresses things, here's the same graph subtracting out Ethics and Open AOS:

As you can see, things are pretty 'noisy' here. It is hard to make out any clear trends, though History of Philosophy TT jobs seem to have declined some over the past two years, whereas TT jobs in Philosophies of Marginalized identities appear to have increased modestly over the past five years. Notably, however, these changes generally pretty small--just a few percentage points here and there.

So, I guess my takeaways are these:

• This season's TT job was vastly better than last year's COVID-impacted season, but still not quite up to the level of TT job ads pre-COVID.
• Ethics and Open AOS continue to dominate other AOS's in terms of TT jobs advertised.
  • Update/note: a full 67.5% of TT jobs in Ethics were in applied ethics fields this year (47.18 jobs in Ethics, 31.86 of which were applied areas).
• It's hard to make out clear trends regarding other AOS's, all of which seem to fluctuate markedly over time--though History of Philosophy appears to have declined somewhat over time whereas Marginalized Identity jobs appear to have modestly increased the past few years.
• I also noticed (merely anecdotally) that philosophies of marginalized identities and non-Western philosophies appears to occur relatively often this year in AOS categories (though I was not able to do comparisons to past years, as I have not in general compiled AOC numbers):
  
  • # of TT jobs w/philosophies of marginalized identities AOC's: 22 jobs (10.9%)
  • # of TT jobs w/non-Western philosophy AOC's: 12 jobs (6%)

Update (4/28/2022): 2 Aesthetics jobs were advertised this year and accidentally omitted from the spreadsheet. I missed them both because one of them (Uppsala) was listed as "Associate Lecturer" (which I didn't identify as tenure track) and the other (Amsterdam) was listed as "tenured or permanent" (rather than tenure-track).

Comments

[TTethicist]

Do you include all AI/tech/data jobs in phil sci or are some of them under ethics? My impression was there was a lot of them but maybe that was just an impression.

[Marcus Arvan]

@TTethicist: jobs specifically in AI/tech/data *ethics* were categorized under Ethics rather than phil sci.

[postdoc]

Thanks for this, Marcus.

[Frederick]

@Marcus Arvan Just wondering, why are there 2 Medieval columns in the spreadsheet?

[Marcus Arvan]

@Frederick: Thanks for catching that. It's just an accident, and I'm surprised I didn't see it myself. With so many columns in the spreadsheet, I just never noticed I gave the same title to two columns side-by-side. Fortunately, it looks like I didn't double-count any jobs across the two columns, so feel free to just add the two columns together.

[Michel]

Both Uppsala and Amsterdam advertised jobs with a single AOS in aesthetics (although Amsterdam also wanted a decolonial/continental background), which I didn't see in the spreadsheet.

[Cassandra!]

Thanks so much for all this work, Marcus. Would it be possible to include a category for Aesthetics & the Philosophy of Art?

As per your posts on previous years (which show that there has been practically zero jobs in Aes/Art), it seems important to evidence and report the crisis in Aes/Art (and it is a crisis). If this isn't evidenced and reported, then there'll be less pressure on the APA, BPA and other philosophy associations, as well as the learned societies for Aes/Art (such as the American Society of Aesthetics, British Society of Aesthetics, European Society of Aesthetics, etc.) to try to tackle the fact that one of the main (and oldest) subdisciplines of philosophy will likely die out if something isn't done about this.

There is already a tendency towards aesthetics-erasure -- such as seeing job ads that say "Value Theory, broadly construed (i.e. ethics, social and political philosophy)" and senior aes/phils of art needing to openly advise junior aes/phils of art to hide the fact that they are "card-carrying" aes/phils of art on the job market. So it'd be super helpful if the Cocoon could help cast light on the problem by including Aes/Art.

This wouldn't just help job candidates with an AoS in Aes/Art, but could also help institutions in deciding where to hire. Due to the dearth of jobs in Aes/Art, there are a glut of really excellent early-career Aes/Art. So, why look for an ethicist or epistemology, and end up with a good one (or at least an unproven entity), when you could have an outstanding (and proven) aesthetician or philosopher of art?

[Marcus Arvan]

@Michel: thanks for catching that. I’ll take a look on PhilJobs and update the spreadsheet.

@cassandra!: excellent points - I may run a post discussing the crisis (and similar crises in a few other areas) soon!

[Curtis Franks]

It is plausible that recent trends in specialization in topics like philosophy of race and philosophy of gender and recent emphasis on hiring specialists on these topics is driven in part by concerns about the social status of marginalized persons. It seems to me like a misrepresentation of these academic specialties, though, to categorize them as "philosophies of marginalized identities."

One could be interested in what sort of thing (or things) gender is, how and why it has come to be what it is, what its precursors were, what it might become under the influence of certain institutional changes, or what things might be like without it, or whatever, without having any specific agenda with respect to gender categories on the margins or with respect to persons with marginalized associations with prevailing gender categorizations.

[Emma]

Thank you for compiling this data. I'd be curious to know the % of jobs at various types of institutions (e.g., R1, R2, SLAC, regional, CC, etc.)