The Philosophers' Cocoon

Moving from academia to a think tank (Guest post by Jason Schukraft)

I’m a senior research manager at a small, academically-unaffiliated think tank called Rethink Priorities. I’m paid to conduct original research, much of it philosophical in nature, that helps charities decide how to allocate their resources. It’s not a career I planned for, but it’s a great job, and my doctorate in philosophy turned out to be pretty good training. The demand for the sort of work I do seems to be increasing, and newly minted philosophy PhDs would be a good fit for many comparable positions. I’m writing about my experience so that others might pursue similar opportunities.

My Alt-Ac Journey

When I was accepted to PhD programs in philosophy in the spring of 2010, I naively believed that becoming a professor was more-or-less a given. Over the next several years, I was exposed to a variety of evidence to the contrary, but through a combination of confirmation bias and wilful ignorance, I convinced myself that the base rate of failure I observed on the academic job market didn’t apply to me. Since nobody in the department was talking much about alternatives to academia, I never really investigated my options, and I certainly did not tailor my research interests to appeal to the non-academic market. (My dissertation is in metaphilosophy.)

In my final year of grad school (2016-2017), I applied to 50 academic jobs and was rejected by all of them. At the time, my wife was pregnant with our second child. I could have applied to even more jobs, but I wasn’t willing to move my family across the country for a one-year VAP or adjunct position with uncertain prospects. (I’m not certain I would have received a VAP or adjunct position even if I had tried.) I was pretty despondent and totally unsure what to do with my life.

I assumed I would end up in a boring, entry-level, nine-to-five office job, probably in the tech industry. (There’s a lot of that around here.) I heard about Rethink Priorities through a newsletter I subscribed to. I didn’t think I was well-qualified for the position, but Rethink Priorities is a remote-only organization and thus offered flexible work hours. As the parent of two young children, that really appealed to me, enough so that I decided to write to one of the founders and inquire more. He encouraged me to apply, and I ended up being a good fit.

Supporting non-academic careers (guest post by Kevin J.S. Zollman)

Kevin J.S. Zollman is an associate professor and director of graduate studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His research is on the application of mathematical models to social behavior, and he is author of the popular book The Game Theorist’s Guide to Parenting. 

When I was a kid growing up in Kansas, someone asked me “what church do you go to?” While (perhaps) not intended, the phrasing of this question communicated volumes to me. The presumption of the question is that I go to a church, not a synagogue, mosque, or temple. What’s more, it presumes that I visit houses of worship regularly. Being raised atheist, it stayed with me: I was so unusual for my time and place that one should assume me away. Many of you reading this post have had similar experiences, especially those of you who are members of groups historically excluded from western philosophy.

We are sensitized to these micro-aggressions against marginalized demographic groups.  But we may miss how we do similar things to those who ultimately leave the academy. Just think for a moment about all the ways philosophical culture talks about getting a PhD. “Placement” means “academic placement”, “a job” is synonymous with “an academic job.” Even that phrase I just used, “leave the academy” implies something like abandonment or at least departure from expectation. Happy, important, and gainful employment outside the academy is treated as abandoning one’s path and is the equivalent to unemployment.

It doesn’t take much effort to realize how cruel this is. In a field where more than half of our students won’t get academic jobs, we are actively creating a culture where most of our students will view themselves as failures. Even those that manage to escape the self-hating trap may still worry that others view them that way.

While I still often make mistakes, I have tried to change the way I talk with students in our graduate program. I always preface relevant sentences with “For those interested in academic employment, …”  I ask students, when I first talk with them about employment, if they want a job in academia. I repeatedly reinforce the question (“are you still planning for a job in academia?”) giving students the opportunity to change their minds.

Job-market catastrophizing? It is not the only way

[EF: I discussed the blogpost "Job-market catastrophizing?: a conversation" with Krishna Del Toso, who continues to write and think as a philosopher but is no longer paid as one. He agreed to share his reflections below:]

Here's my two cents.

I must say that, as I see it, the root of the "catastrophizing" lies in the fact that as far as the academic work is concerned (whether it is philosophy, literature, physics etc.), you aren't totally in control of the effects of your choices, whereas in other domains you are. This condition that characterizes wannabe academics bring about two aspects: 1. you don't need to train the instant reactivity to external stimuli (I'm talking about the kind of reactivity that can make the difference between leading a business brilliantly… or not), 2. you enter a sort of vicious circle in which the "catastrophizing" is nothing but a passive, fruitless, element that nourishes, and is nourished by, the observation that things go as they go because of a sort of inviolable and tacitly admitted norm (kind of Heidegger's "das Man world").

Of course, I was myself in this very vicious circle when I was hoping (mind the word: hoping!!) for a position at the university, long ago, and I was wearing myself out of "I've never done enough", not to speak of the struggle for publications (a struggle often driven by the aim of adding an extra title in my cv: mere form, devoid of real substance… should research be like this? Definitely not!) and of the almost depressing waiting-time in the maybe-you’ll-be-the-next "parking lot" for researchers after a position. I was waiting for others to decide for me, and that, back then, looked quite obvious, normal.

Fortunately all this no longer wears me out, fortunately we live in a fast-changing world… and fortunately the Aristotelian saying, often remembered but rarely put into practice, according to which "being (and so philosophy too) can be said in many ways" remains always valid.

Now I'm bringing my knowledge of philosophy into non-strictly-philosophical fields, such as early-stage business (I'm currently working on a book on this subject) and personal growth (a colleague recently asked me to make together Youtube video conversations on this matter). The time to actualize the aforementioned Aristotelian message is ripe: consider that Google inaugurated the CPO position, Chief Philosophy Officer, not because it's cool but because they need philosophers. I also continue as an independent scholar with my research in the spare time, avoiding all boring stuff and focusing only on arguments that really tantalize me (of course now I write less articles than before, but they're published on the same international journals). But the most important aspect is that now I know (I mean, crystal clear awareness!) that if I work well, I pick up all the fruits of my actions because I damn deserve that, if I don't, the bad effects are entirely on me… because I damn deserve that. Such a huge relief!

Changing the 'academia or bust' mindset

In my recent post, "Alt-ac: how our profession can do better?", I suggested that grad programs and professional organizations (such as the APA) should do more to foster alt-ac opportunities for their students. At the moment, our profession leads all too many its early-career members into an awful situation. As anyone who has gone to grad school or sent off undergrads to grad school knows, many people enter grad school with a false sense of their chances (youthful optimism is surely a very real thing). They then spend anywhere from 5-10+ years doing little else than academic philosophy, often while racking up student debt. Then, after 5-10+ years, only around only around 35% of those who finish the PhD end up getting permanent academic jobs. And the rest? As Ben Sheredos' paper on professional failure illustrates--and countless discussions both online and offline attest--those who don't end up with permanent academic jobs can end up feeling like abject failures utterly ill-equipped to make a living in the non-academic world. Insofar as this is our profession--and insofar as grad programs often seem to entice students to enroll with optimistic pictures of career success--I believe we should make changing this situation our responsibility. But how?

In my last post, I suggested there are a few simple things that grad programs and professional organizations might do:

1. Grad programs (placement directors, dissertation supervisors) could cultivate contact-lists of students of theirs who have entered non-academic industries, staying in touch with them personally for the purposes of helping students network for alt-ac opportunities.
2. Professional institutions (such as the APA) could also publish a "who's who" directory of philosophers in industry, as well as organize alt-ac networking events at major conferences (much like other disciplines do, where industry representatives have informational tables for potential job-candidates).

Readers who commented seemed to like these ideas. However, although I think simple steps like these might dramatically improve things, one major difficulty is getting them to happen.

Alt-ac: how our profession can do better?

In recent years, my primary focus on the Cocoon has been to help early-career people navigate the profession, particularly the job-market. To this end, Helen and I did things like the Job-Market Boot Camp and Job-Market Mentoring Program. Although I plan to keep doing these kinds of things--as a number of readers have said they find these kinds of things helpful--from time to time some readers in comments sections have been critical of these endeavors, saying that they don't do anything to deal with the deeper problems grad students and job-candidates face: specifically, features of the profession that put grad students and job-candidates in such awful positions to begin with. If, as appears to be case, only something like 35% of job-candidates can get permanent academic jobs at all, what does job-market advice really accomplish in the end...besides helping out this candidate or that candidate, while still leaving 65% of job-candidates without jobs? Ben Sheredos' paper on the phenomenology of professional failure really drove this point home to me: that for all too many candidates, all of the well-meant advice and encouragement in the world (viz. "You can do it...if only you improve your dossier materials and interviewing skills!") may not only ring hollow, but may even be harmful in a hard-to-quantify way (by perhaps fostering false hope, followed by many hours harder and harder work to become a better candidate, only to again be met with failure in the end). In this way, Ben's paper made me begin to reevaluate what in the world I am trying to do here at the Cocoon.