The Philosophers' Cocoon

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In my last major post, I gave the details on how a major depressive episode radically disrupted my academic year and ongoing job search, but I never specified how that search ended. The job search itself wasn’t the core topic of the post, and it wasn’t over when I first drafted the post. But I did survive the gauntlet, and enough time has passed that I think I can finally catalog everything that transpired.

In this post, I’m going to chronicle some of the noteworthy events  that took place during my 8-month academic job search in 2018-2019 while I was completing the final year of my postdoc at the University of South Florida. As will become obvious, there are some aspects of this story that are extremely idiosyncratic and unlikely to be a part of anyone else’s job search. Still, I think there are some meaningful takeaways from the tale, and since it does actually end in success, it’s a reminder that perseverance does sometimes pay off – a message that is all too often overshadowed by the grim realities of the current job market.

Once the lengthy recap of the job search is complete, I’ll highlight some general lessons that can be gleaned from the journey.

Success stories - what you love about academic philosophy and why you decided to stay put

The exploitation of academics in precarious positions, particularly adjuncts but also graduate students, has given rise to a remarkable literary non-fiction subgenre: the quit lit.

Quit lit are heartfelt pieces where academics vent their frustration. I find these pieces very useful. They help us critically evaluate some of the assumptions academics make, such as that a PhD is required to be a good philosopher (this piece by Rachel Williams argues it isn't). This piece by Eugene Sun Park, on why he quit his PhD programme, challenges the homogeneity in academic philosophy and lack of viewpoints outside of the western canon. And this classic piece by Rebecca Schuman  (not a philosopher but a German scholar) advises against graduate school.

I'm on board with all of that but sometimes it is also useful to share stories of success, particularly by people who didn't go to prestigious schools, who struggled and who succeeded. Who in spite of the odds stacked so heavily against them still thought academia is worth it and derive joy from being an academic philosopher. I believe those stories have their place too (hence our long job market journeys feature a while back), and I'd be interested to hear readers' stories about (either in comments or send to us). Such stories can help people in difficult situations see that it does sometimes pay off to stay--although of course, there is a risk in doing so--and for busy people who feel a bit overwhelmed by it all why they are academics in the first place.

So with that in mind I want to hear stories about: 

• you staying in academia, and ending up not regretting it
• accomplishments you got in spite of difficulties (including e.g., health issues, poverty)
• what you enjoy about academic philosophy

You  can comment anonymously but we need a real email address (which we won't reveal).

Long job-market journeys: Tom Cochrane

The following is a guest-post in our long job-market journeys series by Tom Cochrane (Flinders University):

I've been invited to share the story of my 10 year odyssey from phd to permanent job. It started out pretty well. I completed my Phd at Nottingham University in 2007, six months ahead of deadline. Before my graduation ceremony, I managed to get a postdoc on 'aesthetic emotions' at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences in Geneva. I think this was the luckiest thing that happened in my career- I completed a phd in music and emotions right at the time that a job in this area came up. At this point I had some teaching experience, the valuable endorsement of my PhD supervisor Greg Currie, and no publications.

Over the next 16 months, I converted 3 of my phd chapters into decent journal publications- and looking back, that was relatively painless as well. Then things started to slow down. My main task in Geneva was to research the sublime. To sit at your desk 9am monday morning and contemplate exploding volcanos and the vastness of interstellar distances is a rather odd way to make a living. I produced work quickly enough, but it is by no means a hot topic that journals are clamouring to publish. Meanwhile, I was trying to publish a paper on emotions. This was initially the first chapter of my phd, and I kept revising it, and sending it out, and getting rejected, and revising it again. The months and months I spent working on those papers were just not getting rewarded with publication. Combine that with the excruiating wait times between journal decisions and this adds up to a serious detrimental impact upon one's career. My article on the sublime was finally accepted in 2012 after 10 submissions. The ever-revised paper on emotions was only accepted in 2017 after 22 submissions! I think that's a record (if anyone can beat that, let me know).

 

Italian philosophy PhD on the challenges of international careers

I'd like to draw Philosophers' Cocoon readers' attention to this compelling personal story by Elisa Caldarola, an Italian philosopher who has relocated several times in pursuit of her dream to become a professional analytic philosopher working in aesthetics: https://www.che-fare.com/philosophy-women-english-as-a-second-language-and-international-careers/. 

She tackles several issues that are familiar to European (non-UK) philosophy PhDs: the lack of good training in analytic philosophy in one's home country, the challenges of writing articles in English if it is not one's first language, the feeling of not belonging anywhere if it turns out your home country's academic job market is dysfunctional, non-existent or deeply corrupt, the loss of focus on one's original passion for philosophy to one's employability. As she writes: 

Will I get a job as a philosopher? I don’t know. This is the big question that is bothering me right now. Where did all the other questions go? Some are still here and I’ve come to realize they’ll be with me forever if I keep doing this job, although they now look less scary, domesticated, partially answered in the affirmative: can I master English well enough to work at the international level? Can I consider myself an analytic philosopher? The question about pictures has allowed me to learn much, and to learn that I wanted to know more about art than about pictures, in the end. So it’s not really a pressing question anymore. What of the question about the meaning-conferring power of art? I think I know a lot about that now. Perhaps I even have something to say. It feels good.

Check it out!

 

Long journeys part 7: Matt Drabek

I work in assessment design and content development for ACT, Inc., an educational and workforce assessment company. ACT is primarily known for its college readiness assessment (i.e., the ACT), which is the largest college readiness assessment in the United States. My work primarily concerns the assessment of critical thinking, graduate admissions (i.e., the GMAT test for business schools, for which ACT provides test content), and the assessment of workforce and career skills. Previously I worked full time as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at The University of Iowa, and I still occasionally teach philosophy courses there. It’s at Iowa where I received my philosophy PhD in 2012. I also maintain an active research program, attend philosophy and interdisciplinary conferences, and recently published a book, Classify and Label: The Unintended Marginalization of Social Groups.

My job market story begins 2011 and tentatively ends in 2014. Over the course of these four years on the market, I gradually transitioned from a fully committed academic to a more or less fully committed non-academic professional. I’ll say a bit about how that happened and the sort of transformation this involved.

In 2011 I was still a graduate student and went on the market with the well-known and ill-advised “spray and pray” strategy: I applied for over 150 positions, including all “AOS: open” ads. I landed 2 interviews, both for one year gigs far away from my Iowa City home. I came close to landing one of these positions, but in the end I struck out. This took an incredible personal toll, and I’m still not thrilled about giving the details. The short version is that the period of heavy stress that this caused led me to lose over one fourth of my body weight in about 2 months. During the worst period, I lost weight at a rate of one pound per day.

Long journeys part 6: Martin Lenz

(This is the sixth installment of our series of philosophers who have been on the job market for a long time - submissions - anonymous or named, are still welcome - send your story to helenldecruz @ gmail.com). 

Since 2012, I have been an associate professor at the University of Groningen (NL).

After receiving my PhD it took me eleven years to get a permanent position. The reason why I think it might be interesting to share my story is that I had most of my education and job market experience in Germany, which is special in that most academics ‘encouraged’ to do a Habilitation after receiving their PhD.

The main part of the Habilitation consists in writing a second book, preferably in a somewhat different area of specialisation, and might take five or up to ten years. Until very recently, there has been no such thing as a proper tenure track model in the German speaking countries. This means that it was and still is quite the norm to live on fixed term positions as a postdoc (if one is lucky enough to get one of those) until being “habilitiert”. But having one of the various kinds of postdoc positions or obtaining the Habilitation is not a guarantee for anything and might just result in unemployment. In the German speaking countries, then, the real run on permanent positions begins after the Habilitation, for many people at an age between 35 and 40, when there is uncomfortably little room to go for realistic alternatives outside academia.

Long journeys part 5: Rebecca Bamford

(This is the fifth installment of our series of philosophers who have been on the job market for a long time - submissions - anonymous or named, are still welcome). 

I am currently Assistant Professor of Philosophy (tenure-track) in the Department of Philosophy & Political Science at Quinnipiac University. I received my PhD in 2004 from Durham University, in the UK. I had a one-year visiting position at the University of Bradford in 2003-04, after which I held an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Rhodes University in South Africa (2004-06), and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University (2006-07), which brought my husband (who is not an academic) and I to the US. 

I went on the US job market in 2006, immediately after arriving at Emory, and with no idea what I was doing. Some Emory faculty kindly read over my materials and patiently explained some of the basic expectations surrounding the US academic job market. I got three offers, all for non-tenure-track, multiple year positions. In retrospect this was a huge stroke of luck: I had no teaching evaluations from US institutions available, my transcript (which uses the UK grading scale) looks to US eyes as though I failed everything (so much so that I ended up putting an explanation of the grading scale on the front of it), and had published/in press something like four articles, which looking back, was nowhere near enough. I accepted an offer from Hunter College, CUNY, to become what they call a “Substitute” Assistant Professor for a year, with the possibility of renewal for a second year.

I tried the job market again in 2007-08 (somewhat reluctantly, because I was enjoying my time at Hunter) and - knowing I had a four-semester limit on my CUNY contract - for a third time in 2008-09. The latter was, as we all know, a disastrous job market year because of the financial crisis. At pretty much the last minute, just as I was resigning myself to unemployment, I was recruited to a tenure-track job in a new interdisciplinary health sciences program at the University of Minnesota Rochester. I was grateful to get the position and learned a lot from my students and colleagues, but I decided to go on the job market again after three years in order to find a position where I could teach and do research focusing on philosophy. I was lucky enough to secure my current tenure-track job in the 2011-12 job market season.

In total, I moved institution five times between 2003 and 2012 - across three different continents - before finding a tenure-track position in philosophy. 

Long journeys part 4: Anonymous UK PhD

This fourth post on philosophers who were/are on the job market for a long time has an anonymous contribution. For more background on the aims of this series, and how to tell your story, see here. 

My first job rejection was on Christmas Eve 2009. I spent the whole night having nightmares about never getting a job, and the whole of Christmas day having arguments with my family, because I hadn't had any sleep.

I finished my PhD in September 2010 from a good UK institution, with a good publication. I had missed the job market for the 2010/11 academic year, but I had a couple of interviews within the next 12 months for the following year. I have learned since that I came second in one of those. As much as my institution was good for me philosophically, I didn't know how the job market game was played. My department offered lots of advice, but, at the time, I didn't feel confident enough to ask for help - I didn't want to impose on people's time.

I spent 2010/11 working two jobs, and applying for every job that was advertised. My applications were mostly rushed, my writing sample was not in the best shape (after several revisions it has since been published). Clumsy errors led to no more shortlists. Philosophically, my ideas were interesting, but I didn't understand what needed to happen to make my papers what journals were looking for.

Long journeys part 3: Dr. M (anonymous contribution)

This third post on philosophers who were on the job market for a long time has an anonymous contribution. For more background on the aims of this series, and how to tell your story, see here.

I got my Ph.D in 2003, from a decent place, with a new wife who was working part-time at a bakery and my first baby under a year old. I did full job searches in '03 and '04 which eventually yielded one-year positions in wildly different parts of the US from where I'd ever lived before. I was hired on my 134^th and 112^th applications these cycles. I applied all over the US, and a few non-US jobs. I applied to anything I was vaguely plausible for. I went to the APA and found it immensely stressful. My whole life plan was literally on the line. I remember thinking that the defense had been far less stressful than my APA interviews. I had several interviews each year but managed to bobble them and got hired at places that hadn't interviewed at the APA.

In '05 I did another national job search and went to the APA, and wound up getting a tenure track job based on my 99^th application that cycle, from an APA interview that I didn't mess up, and it was in a state I'd lived in before. None of the 3 times I was hired were for my specialties. The town we moved to had a bad reputation among academics and had problems retaining academics. But we were tired of moving our family across the country every year or so, and living in crappy apartments. For the first time ever, our family income was above the national median, whereas before we'd just edged over the poverty line some years and not others. We put down roots in the community. We bought a house. We became involved with a congregation and with local organization in ways we never had during one-years.

But the dean that hired me retired, and the new one wanted to eliminate our department and had never wanted my position created in the first place. I struggled with publication. I spent too much time teaching which I liked and was good at, and not enough on publication and committee work. The politics was brutal. I didn't play it right either. Oh and by this time I was clinically depressed too, although I'm not sure I realized it yet.

Long journeys part 2: Mark Silcox

In this second post on philosophers who were on the job market for a long time, Mark Silcox (professor of philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma) tells his job market story. For more background on the aims of this series, and how to tell your story, see here. 

I applied for my first permanent job teaching philosophy in 1997. I had barely started my dissertation, never presented at a conference, and never published anything. But in spite of the fact that the senior faculty at my top-twenty school were given to deploring the lamentable decline in ability amongst grad students, they also seemed to take it for granted that all of us who at least survived the first few years of the program could be expected to land a gig in some research school within a year or two of becoming ABD.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen, and I spent most of ’98 and ’99 in my parents’ basement, battering out vast early drafts of obscure chapters on Quine, Davidson, and McDowell and e-mailing them across one international border to a committee that seemed strangely disinclined to read them.

Long journeys part 1: Mark Alfano

At the Cocoon, we are introducing a new series: personal accounts of philosophers who have been on the job market for a long time.  We don't have a firm timeline for what "long" means, but a rough timeline is 3 or more years post-PhD. The idea is to collect testimonials - by people who are either anonymous or not - about what it is like to be an academic job seeker for a long period of time. We would welcome people who eventually found a permanent or TT job, but we are also happy with people who eventually found a non-academic job, or people who are still looking. The aim of this series is to give some sense about how non-linear a career path can be, and to shed light on how personal circumstances and looking for a job in a dismal market mutually influence each other.  

If you are interested in telling your story, you can do so by e-mailing me at helenldecruz at gmail dot com. 

Here is Mark Alfano's (TU Delft)  job market story.

I finished my BA in philosophy at Princeton in 2005; during my senior year, I applied to about ten PhD programs. I got into none of them. I spent a gap year sitting in on seminars, working on my writing sample, and getting up-to-speed with more recent philosophical work. My second year seeking a PhD position, I applied to about a dozen programs and got into two. I ended up going to CUNY, where I was near the bottom of the barrel for funding. My first year there, I received $8000 and no health insurance. To live in NYC. I worked a couple of part-time jobs that I'd started during my gap year to help support myself. My partner, who was also doing a PhD, had better funding. We scraped by.