Thom Brooks, who recently completed the PhD in philosophy at Sheffield and is now on the Politics faculty at Newcastle (and who is also editor of the Journal of Moral Philosophy), has more pertinent observations on our issue du jour:
"In the UK things work much differently. In general, if a student already has a MA or MPhil degree, they can be accepted straight into a PhD programme. Now if you are *not* accepted into a PhD programme immediately (as you may not have some kind of postgraduate research training), students are generally accepted into a 1 + 3 year PhD programme. Here students take classes for one year and, if they receive sufficiently high marks, are then formally admitted into the PhD programme in full.
"Someone who is accepted into a PhD programme in the UK --whether it be immediately after receiving MA/MPhil or after a probationary year-- need not take any classes or comps. This is very different from the US (where I also was a graduate student). And it makes a big difference. I would much prefer taking a course in epistemology rather than international relations. If I had to take a few years of classes, then I would be pulled towards philosophy rather than politics.
"However, as I stated above, no classes need be taken when one is admitted into a PhD programme. This means that students immediately begin to work on their PhD thesis, as ABD equivalent: a huge plus in my eyes.
"Given that one does not have to take courses, one's supervisor becomes all important. I would advise all students thinking about graduate studies in Britain (or Ireland) to give highest priority to finding the right supervisor. If he or she is not a Straussian, postmodern, etc., then all these worries attributed to US political science graduate programmes disappear. (Unless one wants to study such things and, in such cases, one can do so 100% of the time with his or her supervisor.)
"Personally, I opted to go to a philosophy department. Why did I do so? Given that a student can be acepted immediately as an 'ABD' equivalent, one's supervisor is all important. And it makes all the difference in the world. For me, I wanted to work on Hegel and a particular person (Bob Stern) and this led me to apply to a philosophy dept rather than a politics dept. If Stern had been in politics, I would have applied to a politics dept. (And, in fact, I am now lecturing in a politics department.)
"If I were in the US, I would not have been so carefree about which department I went to. After all, one must worry not only about how one gets along with a supervisor and what he or she thinks of one's work, but also the kinds of classes that are offered (and esp. which classes are mandatory). In the UK this choice is made simple: go to the place that has the supervisor you want. Whether or not other graduate students are studying epistemology or international relations is almost immaterial.
"It is worth putting forward my slight bias: my best guess is that graduate students in political science probably have much greater job prospects than graduate students in philosophy in the UK (and probably in Ireland). I would imagine it would be true generally and almost certainly in academia, as the Thatcher years (and beyond) have led to more and more philosophy departments closing their doors. Swansea is reported to be perhaps the next dept to close. Meanwhile, Swansea's politics dept stays off the chopping block...."
UPDATE: Chris Bertram (Bristol, Philosophy) disagrees with some of this:
"Let me just enter a note of mild dissent with Thom Brooks's comments. Thom writes that political science graduates have better job prospects than philosophy ones. That might be true (I'm not sure). But it doesn't seem directly pertinent to the issue, which had to do with people studying political philosophy/theory (so a subset of philosophers or a subset of political "scientists"). I don't have any data to back this up, but my strong impression is that there is much less resistance among politics department to hiring people with a background in philosophy than there is among philosophy departments to hiring someone with no background in the subject.....Lots of people do PhDs in political philosophy in philosophy departments and end up teaching in departments of politics. So I'd say that the smarter choice jobwise is to study in a philosophy department."
I should add that the same seems to be true in the U.S., though less often at the junior level. But there are lots of PhDs in philosophy who have or have had a primary appointment in a Political Science Department (Charles Larmore, Philip Pettit, Stephen Holmes, Seyla Benhabiba all come to mind), but I can't think of any PhDs in political science with a primary appointment in philosophy in the US.
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