Hiring Practices at Less "Elite" Universities

Another philosophy graduate student writes: 

I read with interest the comments concerning gappy CV's and found it piqued when discussion turned to less elite universities.  I, as many graduate students, imagine that I will be headed for a school in the bottom 30-50 or below and would appreciate it if you'd be able to open up a post for comments that might cover these two questions:

1. How are hiring practices different from elite universities to more average ones?  i.e. how are things like time to Ph.D., adjuncting experience vs. publication, private sector work experience, involvement in "fringe" philosophical communities (e.g. a publication in a journal of theology, continental philosophy, etc.) weighed differently by these different schools?

2.  Does anyone have any advice on how to find a) non-elite universities that offer elite-university type positions, i.e. reasonable teaching schedules with time for research and b) how to get a job at one of these universities?

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear answers to these questions, and if you could post them somehow I'd (and I'm sure others) would appreciate it greatly.

One initial observation:  it may be useful to distinguish between those schools which grant the PhD (or other graduate degrees), and which are "research universities" or research-oriented (some of these are more "elite" than others, but my guess is they have a lot in common in terms of hiring practices); versus liberal arts colleges (which themselves divide in to the elite and less elite); and then other colleges and universities which may have undergraduate education as their primary mission, but themselves may vary in selectivity of admissions and the degree of emphasis they do or don't place on research.

Commenters should, of course, feel free to reject or modify these distinctions, as they deem relevant.

Comments

[Mark van Roojen]

Hmm. I wondered about the wisdom of being the first person to post in this thread, but as someone who teaches in a department that has not recently cracked Brian's top 50 (though I think we soon should) I suppose I'm qualified. I've also visited as faculty (while already on the faculty here) at top twenty departments, both private and public, so I have some basis for comparison.

As for the first question, I think that hiring goals and methods of evaluation are not that different than those at top departments. The difference comes in the ability to lure the people one considers topnotch. We try to compensate by carefully looking for overlooked talent and by showing candidates that we will be good colleagues.

As I said in another thread, different things play a role at different stages of a search. The first stage is to get files down to a level where one can give them more scrutiny. At this level strong letters from people we know play a crucial role, at least in my own first quick sort. Having a publication on the CV in a good place does too. Having one in a marginal place or a non-philosophical place does not. Presenting at one of the more prominent refereed conferences is a plus. Having a project that sounds interesting plays a role too. Coming from a strong department helps.

Having whittled things down somewhat, the writing sample can play an important role, even if it is not inevitably read all the way through until things are narrowed down further. If a topic piques one's interest it might be looked at closely. Since one is trying to get the number down to a level one can responsibly interview one often uses heuristics to narrow things further. If 3 files are all strong and have letters from the same people I try to figure out how those writers rank them. This can lead to some irrationalities as you might rule out the third person from one school without knowing that they are worse than the first from one you keep in the running.

Those of us going to the convention then prepare thoroughly for the interviews. We often already have views on who the top people are (though we don't always have the same views). Since we are not at a top ranked department we see our job as showing the interviewees that we are good philsophers and would be good colleagues. For myself, I'm not actually using the interviews to decide very much, though sometimes a person can surprise me with their talent.

Flyouts work the same way. We prepare more and try to offer the candidates an engaging visit.

I don't think that this differs much from what happens at a "top" department, except that we see our job as selling ourselves to the candidates. We want them to want to be on the faculty with us.

What actually happens is that certain "hot" candidates often get picked off with offers from clearly more attractive jobs. In a way this puts more pressure on us to read carefully and judge soberly. We have to be able to find quality that others have overlooked or not given sufficient weight. We prefer several good papers at tenure to more less good papers, and thus we care a good bit about our assessment of the potential for quality publications. (That fits with our not caring about marginal publications.)

The one other difference here, I think, is that we probably prefer breadth a bit more than some top departments will. Less well-rated departments tend to be smaller and people therefore have to be able to teach a bit more broadly. And we all want to be able to have philosophically interesting colleagues to talk to.

As for the second question, JFP typically lists the loads and expectations. Working in a PhD granting state university generally comes with a two/two teaching load. Service might be a bit more than at a larger department because fewer people have to do the same tasks. Money may be a bit tighter. But I think that the similarities with top rated state universities are more striking than the differences.

The undergraduates will cover a range of talent at any state school, though the bottoms range is variable. I was surprised to find out that our undergraduates here were stronger than at the other more prominent state university I visited at. In hindsight, state funding of pre-college education should have made me expect that difference.

So I think that JFP will provide all of the information you need to find a research oriented job that is pleasant enough at a non-top-thirty place. What it won't tell you is how good the colleagues are, but by the time the offers are made you will have a decent idea.

I know that was long-winded. I've been a bit disconcerted at the focus on landing a top-thirty job as the holy grail in some of the threads here, not because I don't think that is a good thing to aim at, but at the thought that landing anything less is somehow a bad fate. It isn't necessarily, though of course it depends crucially on the other members of your department.

[Matt]

I was an undergraduate at a university that is _far_ from the elite in anything but football. (Boise State University). I don't know that much about the explicite thought patterns that went into hiring there, but I can say that those who were seriously considered for tenure track jobs while I was there, and the person who was hired after I left, had held various post-docs, visiting positions, and even adjunct positions. I don't think this was at all considered a minus-If anything, I think the department was happy to have people who already had teaching experience, since teaching was one of the main roles in the department. How far this generalizes I have no idea, but it's one more data point to consider. (One philosopher who wasn't hired to a tenure track job at BSU only for reasons of personal conflict with the chair had been at Kent State on a temporary job, had been a text-book salesman, and held a temporary job at BSU for two years. He now has tenure at Washington State. The next person hired had been on a post-doc at Notre Dame for a year and had held a temporary job at Western Washington for one or more years. The most recently hired person had a temporary job at Ohio State, left that and was an adjunct at BSU for at least a year before taking a tenure track job there.)

[Robert Johnson]

I will second all of Mark's points; I am at a similar institution as he is. One thing I want to add to what he says, and I think could be helpful for those who are looking at landing at our type of institution, is this: Bean counting by administrators and hence departments, in general, increases as you go down the reputation scale. I say this because you might think just the opposite, and that would be a very big mistake. Numbers count more on the way down. So you may find yourself in a situation where you are expected to produce more publications for tenure than your friends at institutions of much better reputation. Because of this, search committee may be more likely to look at whether you've published anything or presented at the APA as a graduate student, and whether you look like you will become a regular 'producer' (to borrow a mob metaphor). Partly this is because departments on the higher reputation end can back up tenure cases that are weak in terms of numbers with their own reputation. I don't like this, but there it is. So, well, there's gappy and there's gappy. If you have a gappy cv that looked like it might bode ill for a decent rate of production (e.g., you matriculated in 1994, got an MA in 2003 and are now finishing) explain it in your letter, and ask letter writers to say what they can say about it, if there's something to say. Otherwise, it could lead someone to think you're not a producer, and so the capo di tutti will turn unwanted attention toward her if she hires you.

[Chris Gauker]

Mark van Roojen makes the hiring process all seem very rational. I have served on many hiring committees and it looks just the same way to me, and I might have given the same account of our practices (and I am quite sure that we deserve to be in the top 50 over that place and that place and a number of others--yes, I do). But something bothers me. Why don't more departments come up empty handed? You bring four, maybe five candidates at most to campus and then you're out of money for bringing in candidates. If all departments search for the best and all use roughly the procedure he describes, how do more than 15 people get jobs? Of course, we're not all searching in the same areas, but that can't account for it, can it? (That's why I said 15, not 5.) Or we all go through the same motions, but our criteria don't mean anything. Or some departments foresee that they will not be able to catch certain candidates and avoid them. Or for each of us our main criterion is SIMILARITY TO ME and since there's enough diversity already out there, that gives us all different pools using the same criterion. Can anybody explain this to me?

[Michael Cholbi]

The best advice I ever received was to really do your homework about the institutions that interview you. I think this is especially important for the overwhelming majority of positions that are available, namely, those at state universities and non-elite private colleges. At those places, how well you'd fit into the department's plans and vision matter a lot. Some things to know (and to be able to discuss):

- how many faculty there are in the department
- how many students are at the institution
- how their curriculum is organized
- what recent initiatives they've undertaken (new degree programs, etc.)
- what courses you'd teach within their department
- the research specializations of the faculty

Not only does displaying such knowledge flatter those doing the hiring, but it indicates that you're making an informed choice about applying there in the first place (i.e., you're not just applying because it's any old job with your AOS). It also keeps you from saying embarassing things, like how you like small class sizes when interviewing at a huge public university, or how you'd like to teach a course in X, when not only do they already have a course in X, but it's taught by a senior faculty member who'd likely teach it for the next two decades. At the interview stage, you and the interviewing institution are not quite on the same footing, but knowing some basics about the department and college makes it more like you're interviewing them as well, and shows that it matters to you what kind of place you end up.

[Mark van Roojen]

Chris wrote:
"If all departments search for the best and all use roughly the procedure he [that's me, MvR]describes, how do more than 15 people get jobs?"

I don't know, but I expect it is that we do not all have the same judgements about who is best or at least who is second or third best. I know that in my department we do not always agree even about who to interview at the convention, beyond perhaps all agreeing that we should interview 3 or so of the same individuals when we are looking to narrow it down to 10. That means that there is disagreement, even vehement disagreement about the last seven or so slots.

If there is that kind of disagreement within departments, there will likely be similar disagreement across departments. And, we all know that differences in decision procedures can lead to different decisions even when people have the same preferences. So my guess is that differences in deliberative/decision making practices will lead to divergence of choices between groups of philosophers.

Finally, even when two departments have area needs, the particulars within the area may be different given the way people might fit into a department.

I also know that in my department we have in fact continued searches into the next year (and even the next) when we were searching in an area where we thought we were running out of viable candidates. I suspect that it happens elsewhere as well, though it takes enlightened deans to allow this to happen.

Terry Irwin once related a story to a group of people at a dinner after a talk he gave. He said that the philosophers at Harvard once tried to see if they were good judges of the future prospects of their graduate students. They found they were not all that good at it. My take on the upshot was that we know that even very reasonable people can make judgements about philosophical talent that diverges from future performance and that that means that they will also likely diverge from one another.

And I guess finally, I'm constantly impressed with how good philosophers really are at what they do. If a lot of the candidates are very good indeed, it may well be that we are all right when we judge a certain (but different) bunch to be up to the job we want filled.

[Robert Johnson]

Chris may also be thinking of open searches, which very few, and still fewer of the 'less elite', 'The best' in that pool might be very hard to land. But if you're doing a search in mind, for instance, you can easily end up being one of a couple of desirable spots for the pool of candidates you look at. Under those conditions, it is quite easy to end up hiring one of 'the best'.
Mark is right, too, about the number of good candidates there are. My impression is that when for almost all of our recent hires, the top five or ten look very similar indeed, and at that point one starts to make judgments of 'fit' rather than 'who is better'.

[Robert Johnson]

I see that I completely misunderstood Chris' question. How many philosophers is it reasonable to think meet or exceed prevailing criteria (and can survive the weeding procedures) for hiring? If it is unreasonable to suppose that there are anywhere near as many as entry jobs, and most entry jobs are filled, then probably many entry jobs are filled with people not meeting the criteria.
The answer might just be issues of fit in the initial weeding out of dossiers process. Even cutting the dossiers down to 20 or can include things that have nothing to do with talent and ability. "Not really in the AOS" is one that constantly is used in our searches (again, because we aren't allowed to engage in the most desirable form of hiring, the 'open search').
One more (lamentable I'm afraid) thing about productivity: Going down the prestige scale, 'big idea' people with ambitious new projects that don't engage with on-going debates look too risky to get through the tenure process. The underlaborers who look to move forward a debate in the journals by increments are safer. Sad for our profession, I think, but at least some of those people are picked up at the higher end institutions.

[Chuck]

Thanks especially to Mark for the info (coming from a mediocre grad student from a ranked school). Often I have thought about the topic and the questions this grad student has offered (most often at the grocery store, hovering over expensive meat). In no way should people working at unranked schools be considered mediocre philosophers (if they are mediocre, that fact will present itself otherwise, not solely by their place of employment). But the fact remains, many young philosophers will be left along the wayside when they go on the market. Sometimes (perhaps rightly) because they are mediocre. Constantly many are left feeling that they ought to focus more on their teaching skills so they might eventually secure a job at a community college or otherwise less-research-oriented institution (e.g., adjucting for 3 years or so). There is an anger growing by those that are not "in". By many rights, that makes for a good foundation for undergraduate teaching (often more historically oriented, I guess--and this is a good thing). There are many young people that have aspirations to "build" small departments. So, it seems that the advice for graduate students is to immediately specialize and establish yourself (for any job). Young generalists tend to lack rigour. Somehow that doesn't seem right--especially for the needs of small departments.

[Chris Gauker]

Here's what I'm saying. If everyone says that they are going for the very best, then something has to be wrong. Suppose for simplicity that all jobs are open with respect to field and that all departments have to hire one of their five finalists. If there really is such a thing as "going for the best" and all departments do it, then, under these simplifying assumptions, exactly five departments will make hires. The fact that not all jobs are open means that the number will be higher, but whatever that makes it, more people than that get jobs; so there's something wrong. The conclusion I draw is that there really is no such thing as "going for the best" and the people who say that that's their method ought to reflect a little harder on what they actually do.

[Mark van Roojen]

Chuck wrote,

"So, it seems that the advice for graduate students is to immediately specialize and establish yourself (for any job). Young generalists tend to lack rigour."

This is not what I meant to convey, and before I say what I think about it I want to add a caveat. All of us have a relatively narrow range of experience that we draw on. What I'm mostly talking about is how it works in my department. Robert seems to agree that his similar department is similar in its practices with some differences regarding the need for numbers to satisfy their higher ups. Our expeciences might not be a good sample, though I think we are similarly good judges of what happens in our own departments and why.

Anyway, I think that most good philosophers still have general knowledge, though I also think that dissertations primarily show off specialized knowledge and what one can do in a narrower area. I noted above that in my department, because we were small we put some value on breadth. This is both because having good colleagues capaable of understanding one another's stuff makes for better research from all of us, because it makes life more pleasant, and because we can serve student needs better. In my department we regularly attend each other's seminars. My field is ethics, but I'm going to a seminar on causation by one of our new members. So are other colleagues. That is actually part of why I say that so much about what it is like to teach at a less elite place depends on the other people there.

I can relate a story relative to the issue of specialization. We were doing a search in an area and had a very good writing sample from a smart and likable candidate. But we were worried about whether the person could go beyond the particular historical figure they were working on. We asked for more work, even in raw form. Their advisor apparently told them not to send us anything more because it was not done. We kept looking and sound up with someone else -- now a valued colleage and clearly one of the best philosophers I know. I have since learned that the first person we were considering had more to send, but did not send it on the advisor's advice. This is a case where seeming possibly too narrow hurt the person. I can't really blame us in this case since we were rather honest about our concerns and why we wanted the additional work. The other moral here is not to be too clever with requests from potential employers. Sometimes they are just what they are presented to be.

My advice is not to immediately specialize, though you do want to show deep competence in your writing sample.

As for Chris's observation about the impossibility of going after who (you think) is best of the applicants you have, it may be that we have different ideas of what it takes for a process to be rational.

I think a rational process aimed at this need not always gets it right. I'm also not sure that there is a non-department-relative ordering of who is better than whom. I tend to think that we are highly fallible about philosophical talent, but that it makes sense to aim at those who you think are best.

I also think that the simplifying assumptions are not usually met so that even if under those assumptions the result is that fewer people than actually are would be hired, in the real world it won't work out that way. The assumption that a department is only able to go after their top five is often wrong, if only because some people get picked off before the fly-out stage so that perhaps your fly outs are numbers 2, 4,5 and 7 (say). And not all candidates apply to all schools, so that my top five and your top five may differ, even if we would make the same judgements of the same candidates. So my claim is not that we all actually get the very best candidates, or that only the very best get hired; it is that it makes sense to aim at those you think are best by your lights.

Robert is also right to point out that the initial paring down stage may lead to different pools of people who get more serious evaluation even with the same bunch of applicants, and that this is the least reliable stage of evaluation.

I'll stop now for fear of looking like one of those combatitive philosophers who can't admit being wrong. I probably am one, but I'd like to maintain the public illusion of greater modesty.

[Robert Johnson]

I think I might agree with Chris that we actually don't go for 'the best'. But in my view, that is because a rank ordering of candidates from best to worst is not the right way of ranking, at least when one gets down to the last 10, 15 or even 20 candidates. They typically all look great to me at that stage, and I often find myself saying 'I'd like to have any of these'. Indeed several of us in my department said in a recent search that we'd love to take the top 12 applicants and start a new department with just them. What made the difference was not who was best.
At bottom, most who are hiring are looking for bright colleagues who are really excited about what they're doing, whatever that is, and who will enliven the intellectual life of the department. So whatever you do in grad school, you better be doing it because it really gets you out of bed in the morning. Then you just have to sell who you really are, philosophically speaking, or at least make it really clear in your dossier who you really are. There's just a lot of luck involved in finding a department that has a 'you-sized' gap in it. It's like looking for a mate, not a date or someone to dance with. Maybe there's a secret formula or a to-do list, but I'd be skeptical of its being much help in the end.

[Matt Davidson]

I think it behooves the philosophical community to take APA interviews more seriously. If a department is allowed to turn it into an informational session, or the candidate is allowed to give her canned speech, a valuable opportunity is lost to test the philosophical acumen of the candidate. I remember and am grateful for those few APA interviews I had where I was grilled. I felt like they took me seriously enough to read my writing sample and to probe to see what sort of philosopher I was. On the other side of the table, we always try to do this. It involves a lot of work, but we constantly get comments (many times from people who got better offers) that they really appreciated the interview because of the fact that we did philosophy during it. So, my advice to philosophers going on the job market--steer the interview toward doing serious philosophy to extent that you can. Never settle for a "tour" of the campus.

I also must say that the hiring process can be really baffling (more-so than the grad admissions process). I know of people who didn't make a shortlist because the department was hiring in x, and the person was competent in x and y, and others in the department happened not to like the guy who did y or didn't mind the guy who did y, but didn't need more y, and thus the candidate suffered. There are all sorts of scenarios like this that play out behind the scenes, and the candidate never will know about them.

On the generalist issue: Being a generalist, so long as you're as good as other candidates in the AOS advertised should be an advantage. But, it can not be, especially in better departments. If someone doesn't look carefully at your dossier, they may not realize that you really can claim other AOSs other than the advertised one (or that you can claim the advertised one, given the other AOSs). It may be that smaller departments are more-carefully reviewing dossiers to try to catch people that might be overlooked elsewhere (because of pedigree, often). Better departments often have a choice that is overdetermined--they can afford not to look as closely because they're bound to get someone good. This is just speculation, of course, and isn't to suggest that really good departments generally don't vet their candidates as well as do smaller departments.

[Michael Cholbi]

On the generalist/specialist point: I suspect that with teaching, being competent to teach too many things isn't possible. Well, maybe it's possible.
But most departments, especially the smaller and non-elite ones, welcome pedagogical flexibility. But research-wise, publishing is a specialist's game, so I think it's crucial to present hiring departments with an in-progress research agenda that's reasonably narrow but can also be "projected" for 5-10 years. By this I mean you should be able to say not only what will come after your dissertation, but the 2-3 papers after that.

[Robert Johnson]

Michael's advice seems good. Still, the central question for me is whether the candidate is a good philosopher (whatever she's working on). Whether someone will be productive is very very hard to predict, though Michael's sort of question is what many will take as evidence. I myself think that many need time for their ideas ripen. Also, perhaps many will disagree, but in my view a good philosophical mind and training should make one able to teach pretty much in any area to undergraduates. The person should mostly teach in her area of research to grad students. Perhaps the reason the profession asks for 'teaching competencies' and AOCs is that they need to justify their hiring to administration in that form. But I myself don't think it reflects anything very important. The narrow AOS focus just shows that the candidate has some area in which he or she has been able to think deeply and say something interesting on a topic.

[Jon Rowe]

Here is a post of mine where I discuss how to secure a full-time tenure track position at a community college, or at least, how I got mine.

http://jonrowe.blogspot.com/2005/05/career-announcement-after-6-years-of.html

It's interesting, I was at a dinner tonight at the College of New Jersey and talking to a fellow international business professor. He noted how in many schools they pay differently depending on what department/discipline one teaches. My college doesn't. It's all the same for rank and years experience regardless of which department one teaches in.

In many colleges, the going rate for a Ph.D in business is far greater than a humanities Ph.D; so the latter tend to get paid somewhat less. (My fellow prof. who teaches at the TCNJ says it's $110,000, which is more than any professor makes at my college).

This explains why there are tons of Ph.Ds among my college's English, History, and Art teachers, but none in our Business Division. We do, however, have a number of Ed.Ds and JDs like myself.

[Mia Wood]

I'm wondering if anyone can speak to a two-pronged issue in the jobs category that (I believe) doesn't get much attention: community college hiring and job prospects for low-level worker bees (ABDs and Ph.D.s from low- or non-ranked Ph.D. programs, or M.A.s from terminal M.A. programs).

Most discussion about jobs for philosophers focuses on the end of the elite end of the spectrum. By this I mean job prospects for those excellent candidates from competitive institutions. Many job seekers, however, are like me: ABD for the Ph.D. from a virtually unrecognized department and wanting a job at a community college.

My personal sitaution is this: for a variety of reasons, I was not qualified to get into a competitive program, and for some of the same reasons, I have not yet finished a dissertation. I have, however, taught a lot and this is what interests me most. I'm not a towering intellect, but I am good at teaching core courses. In short, I'm rather well-suited suited for today's standard classroom.

The problem seems to be that there are few full time openings at community colleges and a glut of qualified and overly qualified applicants. As a result, many of us do the "adjunct thing," teaching at several schools. Needless to say, this situation is not good for both the adjuncts and the students. The schools don't seem to care; they're headed toward or have achieved the sort of corporate structure that emphasizes getting the most out of employees and offering little more than subsistence in return - if that. Am I off track in my general assessment? If I am not mistaken, for example, Pierce College (one of the Los Angeles Community College schools where I work) has not hired a full time philosophy prof. since the 1960s!!!!

I wonder if anyone would direct me to studies on the subject of jobs in philosophy at the lower tiers, specifically community colleges. I've started my research, but any direction would be helpful. There must be a place for people like me, people committed to teaching. Though I think the bright lights of the discipline should make for the best teachers, that's not always the case. Besides, they're effectively spoken for by top schools that offer light teaching loads and time for research.

As more and more American community colleges fulfill the roles of "grade 13" and financially viable transfer preparation institutions, it seems to me that the jobs should become more plentiful. Not only that, there should be a need for worker bees such as myself. I fear, however, that this may not be true.

Any advice or insight anyone could offer would be appreciated. Thanks!