**UPDATED–see below
In the comments section under my recent post on the pleasures and perils of working in a large department, one of our readers, Eugene, asked the following question:
What is the typical philosopher's salary like?
I ask that you start a post on this topic because I've heard a number of conflicting things about what to expect with respect to the salary of philosophers in different kinds of departments and at different stages of their careers.
Because this blog is intended to be a helpful place for early-career philosophers, and my experience has been that grad students tend to know very little about this type of stuff (I hardly knew what kind of salary to expect myself when I was first hired!), I thought it would be good to have a post dedicated to the issue. It is an issue that grad students and other early-career philosophers could use more information about.
Here, then, is what I would like to do. I would like to ask people to report in the comments section, in as evenhanded of a way as possible, what they know about salaries at different levels (i.e. adjunct positions, post-docs, VAPs, and TT positions) in different places (i.e. different states, different nations, etc.). Please do not speculate. Only report things you know.
Finally, because as Eugene rightly points out, the subject of money is always a bit of a sensitive one, I would like to ask that everyone address the issue in as safe and supportive of a way as possible (in line with this blog's mission). This is not a place to have a salary "pissing contest", etc. If you are at all worried that you may come off as bragging, feel free to comment anonymously. The point of this thread is not to know "who makes what." It is merely to give our readers factual knowledge of what philosophers' salaries are like.
With that said, I will not report my own salary here non-anonymously. I *will* report my salary experiences below, anonymously, after other people have posted. What I do feel comfortable saying is this. My experience in two VAP positions is that their salaries do not depart substantially from TT jobs.
UPDATE: One thing that I forgot to mention is that I've heard that institutions can differ dramatically in terms of how often they give raises, and what those raises are like. I've heard, in particular, of some state schools not giving faculty any raises at all for several years. Other institutions, however, give faculty raises (often based on judgments of teaching, research, and service merit) every single year. Thus, two jobs with a similar starting salary can end up with quite different salaries down the road. As a first gloss, my impression is that you can expect raises far less often at state schools (due to recent budget cuts) than at private ones. Because this is a very important detail, I would like to encourage people who post in the comments section to also share what the situation is with raises at their institutions.
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