October "Jobs for Philosophers"

If anyone has an electronic copy of the new JFP (out yesterday), please e-mail it to me as an attachment (I let my APA membership lapse).  Alternatively, post in the comments a link to where it might be on-line somewhere (other than the APA site).  A reader suggested opening a thread for discussion of how the job market looks this fall, which I hereby do.  Post only once, and be patient, it may take awhile for posts to appear.  Substantive postings only, anonymous or otherwise.

UPDATE:  A kind reader has already sent me the JFP (within about five minutes of my posting this!).

ANOTHER:  I've given the October JFP a quick read through, and this looks to be one of the stronger October issues in awhile, with well over 300 job listings (not all tenure-stream jobs--probably more post-doc type positions than, say, ten years ago--but still lots of entry-level posts in the mix).  What do readers think?

Comments

[Eric]

The last number of the JFP is higher than it has been in the past, but I never remember seeing anything like this garbage before:

*33.,*34.,*35.,*36.,*37.,*38.,*39.,*40.,*41.,*42. MARIST COLLEGE, Poughkeepsie, NY. The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Marist College invites applications for adjunct positions teaching Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, or World Views and Values starting in the fall of 2007 or the spring of 2008. Adjuncts usually teach no more than one or two courses per semester. MA in philosophy required, Ph.D. desirable. Teaching experience desirable. Applications considered immediately. Please submit a CV and letter of interest to: Chair, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, Marist College, 3399 North Road, FN 221, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601. (SW07) (175)

that's 10 of the positions in the issue which are nothing more than trolls for slaves. Frankly, I dont think the APA ought to take ads like these

and then there's also more of this sort of thing:

16.,17.,18.,*19.,*20.,*21.,*22.,*23. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, New York, NY. The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University in New York City seeks Post-doctoral Fellows for the academic year 2008-2009. The goal of the Committee is to provide a space for cross-disciplinary, transnational, and otherwise expansive exploration of the world, including processes of globalization, comparisons past and present, and pressing contemporary issues.

I'm sure these are terrific post-docs. But I doubt more than one will go to a philosopher.

In sum, you cannot judge a JFP by the number on the last page. From the point of view of LEMMINGS, as its sometimes called, it looks like a weak issue to me. I'd be curious to see someone (like Brian W.) run the numbers.

[Patrick]

I agree about the inflated numbers. As a rough measure, I count 243 separate ads for a potential 347 positions. Some ads are legitimate multiple postings, but others (i.e. Princeton's posting for positions #111-#125 for 15 Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellowships, available to candidates from 'all disciplines') clearly promise more than they can deliver, if you look at the numbers alone.

[Neil the Ethical Werewolf]

While the back page number is only a little higher than last year's back page number, there's a big jump in the 'additions and web only ads'. We're already up to 476 jobs if you count those. By October 26, the 2006 JFP was at 410. By October 27, the 2005 JFP was at 459. Of course, that includes some inflation of the type that the above commenters have mentioned.

I was taken aback by the aforementioned Marist ad myself. Some of the positions are "starting in the fall of 2007"? I know that some people defend backwards causation, but I've never heard of anyone using it as a teaching method.

[Farhang]

I am not very familiar with other disciplines' organization (MLA, APSA etc.) but I think it's unfortunate that the APA hides the JFP behind its membership section. Granted that student membership is not very expensive ($35), the APA should nevertheless make the JFP available for free. If people have interviews, they have to pay the conference fees anyway, making sure that the APA still gets some money from starving grad students.

I have no major complaint about the APA (though the membership itself does not seem to do much), but it would be nice to have a better professional website and have a more rigorous presence on the web.

[Ancient Philosopher]

Hello,
Strange request here, but can anybody email me a copy (or workable link for a non-subscriber) of the JFP? I am a classicist/ancient philosophy person and would like to be able to take a gander at the "other" APA listings... I am limiting my own search to classics departments, but am curious about the state of play on your side of the fence. Mail to: JobAgora [at] gmail [dot] com
Thank you very much in advance!

[anonymous]

Well, I'd be down with backwards causation in this case if it implied that I could open my bank account and discover direct deposited checks starting in early September... of course an adjunct job of one or two courses is not likely to yield much. Why would they advertise for 10 positions, each involving teaching only one or two courses? Why not fewer positions, more courses, more pay? Are they required to provide health insurance for anyone who teaches more than two courses? I smell something fishy.

[anonymous]

Regarding the Marist advertisement, if you only focused on the advertisment for adjuncts you would get the impression that Marist is staffed by adjuncts. As a matter of fact, in a school of 4000 students, there are five tenured or TT faculty, one teaching associate (who is a permanent lecturer who teaches introductory courses and has no research or service requirments but gets health insurance and is payed substantially more than an adjunct). Moreover, if you looked right below that advertisement you would notice that Marist is hiring another TT faculty member.

So why the army of adjuncts? At Marist all students are required to take an introductory philosophy course, an ethics course, and to meet a further requirement they may take a third course in philosophy. So students take a lot of philosophy courses at Marist. Philosophy courses are capped at 25. The permanent faculty teach both introductory courses and upper-division courses. But they cannot cover all of the introductory courses. The faculty would rather have more competent teaching associates and TT faculty. Persons occupying such posts are more qualified than many adjuncts, are payed better, get benefits, have voting privileges, etc. Many of the adjuncts are graduate students who are A.B.D. and persons who received terminal M.A. degrees. This is not all that different from what you find at many large state institutions. Is this good? It is not ideal. Both the students and the faculty benefit from having permanent faculty teach their courses.

The only difference between Marist and many other institutions is that it is putting out an APA advertisement for adjunct posts (and I believe it is not the first school to ever advertise adjunct posts in JFP--other schools regularly post adjunct jobs in the Chronicle, Higheredjobs.com, etc.). I can assure you that the preference of the faculty and even many administrators is to have more teaching associate and TT lines. Whether or not the APA should take advertisements for adjuncts is an interesting question. But if it does not, then where are schools supposed to advertise adjunct posts? Once upon a time (e.g., when I was a graduate student) I was looking for adjunct posts at schools to get more teaching experience and to make more money. I would have welcomed advertisements for adjunct posts in JFP. I agree, however, that a string of adjunct lectureships are no substitute for a TT post. But it is not obvious that the APA should ban advertisements for adjunct posts.

In any case, at least Marist is doing more than many other schools by starting to open up permanent non-TT posts (which are an improvement over adjunct positions). I know other schools are opening similar posts. It is hoped that more will open in the future. But the hands of the philosophers are tied, or at least restricted. Progress takes time and work.

[anon75]

While not uninterested in the Marist situation, I would appreciate some more general discussion of this JFP. Does anyone else have the impression that it's an unusually good year for "core" areas (met, ep, lang, and even mind)? And perhaps not an especially good year for ethics?

[anon38]

I had that same thought. It doesn't seem like a especially good JFP for Ethics. Although the new 'web only' ads provide some compensation.

On a related note, can someone explain what schools with a 'social and political' AOS tend to look for? I suspect a lot of Ethics candidates may turn to them this year (and there are quite a few).

[Kenny Easwaran]

Another odd thing that I noticed is that many of the jobs in the supplement seem to be repeats of the same jobs in the main issue - is that normally the case?

[ABD Epistemologist]

Is there an unusually large number of "AOS: Open" junior searches at moderately to very desirable institutions? (I.e.: at NYU, Cornell, Syracuse, UConn, UMaine, UMass, Haverford, Princeton, Rutgers, Virginia Commonwealth, Wash & Lee, Emory, UNC, Miami, Ohio State, Michigan, Notre Dame, Illinois State, Macalaster, Northwestern, SMU, New Mexico, Texas, Scripps, Berkeley, USC). I don't know how things have been in the past.

As an ABD it's good, I guess, to have so many jobs to apply for -- but it's extra-depressing to think that you'll be competing with *everybody else on the market*, and not just those in your specialty, for these positions.

[Eric]

Sorry this is drifting a bit off topic, but I wanted to respond to the anonymous person from Marist:

The reason I do not think the APA ought to take these sorts of ads is as follows: The proliferation of these sorts of adjunct positions is bad for our profession. It decreases the number of genuine, living-wage-generating, benefit-carrying jobs for philosophers. Think of the APA as our union, and think of these ads as ads for scabs. Why should our organization facilitate this?

Furthermore, the JFP is a national, if not international, publication. The implication of advertising in JFP is that the job you are offering is suitable for attracting people from around the country. But am I meant to believe that the pay for these positions will adequately compensate me for moving to Poughkeepsie, New York from Kenosha, Wisconsin, or Sopchoppy, Florida?

Finally, I know that there are other schools who do this, and perhaps Marist is drawing undue individual scrutiny here, but my goodness, what were they thinking when drew attention to themselves and their hiring practices with an ad that occupied ten numbered slots?

[Fritz]

Thanks to Brian for starting this thread! I agree that the 350 is somewhat misleading, though we'd have to control for similar multiplicity of listings over past years in order to know what it meant: we can't just substract from the 350 this year, not in other years, and then say that this year looks dodgy.

My first reaction was regarding the AOSs: in the past couple of years, applied ethics and philosophy of science has had a *huge* percentage of the listings (50%+?) and that's clearly down this year. The last two years, especially, I think were tricky in this regard. It's great that, as departments other than philosophy require ethics courses (e.g., pre-med, pre-law, engineering, business, etc.), we get more tenure lines, but I worry about the discipline going that way. I think there were fewer than 10 M&E (non-open) tenure-line hires last year (in Oct. JFP) and that just isn't good. This year, though, there are clearly more core hires, and that's good. There are more open lines--as someone else already pointed out--and these will quite probably go to core areas as well.

Anyway, I would just suggest that, in assessing the health of the profession, we think not just about the numbers, but also what the numbers are *in*; it seems to me that we might construe health along these more qualitative lines as well, and I would suggest that this year is an improvement over the last couple in that regard. (Btw, I *do* applied ethics and philosophy of science, so this isn't about hating those fields; it's about thinking that there are balances that are important for the profession and that we should have some control over our own destinies rather than desiderata being foisted upon us from without.)

Cheers,
Fritz

[Fritz Warfield]

This year's October JFP looks normal compared with recent years. But the real test is how the October and November issues look together. In some recent years, the November issue has had few new postings while in others the November issue has added a good number of new positions to the mix. We start to get a preview of this from the 'web only' ads but I'll reserve overall judgement until the November issue is in print.

[not the same "Fritz" as posted above]

[Jeremy Pierce]

I'm also curious about the extension of "social and political philosophy" but from a completely different direction. Someone working on the metaphysics of race is doing metaphysics but might not be viewed as working in the core of metaphysics by many who want more traditional metaphysical work. But it isn't political philosophy by most measures. Is it social philosophy to the extent required for a job listing social and political philosophy as an AOS?

[chris]

Would someone be so kind as to forward the list to me as well? My email is:
drcmg@yahoo.com

While it is my yearly exercise in futility, I would like to check it out nonetheless, but have too let my membership lapse.
Thanks

[Lou]

I, too, would like to ask if someone would be so kind as to forward the electronic copy of the JFP to me. I truly believed I was up-to-date with my membership but, having just tried to log on to the APA site and been refused, there would seem to be a clash between my conviction and the APA's records. Perhaps my memory is awry or the form got lost in the post ..., but, as it's already the end of October and I'm late as it is, I would really appreciate receiving a copy from someone, while trying to work out with the APA what's happening with my membership.

My email address is: lou.bu@free.fr
All my sincerest thanks in advance,