Recent discussions here and elsewhere have gotten me thinking about what more we could do–as individuals and as a profession–to help our most vulnerable colleagues: grad students and adjuncts in particular. As we all know, the academic job market in philosophy is horrific, and will presumably continue to be for the foreseeable future. A good proportion of graduate students never finish their PhDs, and of those who do finish, only around 50% seem to find full-time, permanent academic jobs–and many of those who don't end up working in low-paying adjunct positions. This means that a large proportion of our colleagues–people who spend 7-10 years (or more) working hard in PhD programs–ultimately find themselves in very difficult circumstances. And, or so online philosophy blogs indicate, many of them are profoundly angry, feeling left behind and unsupported by a discipline–and academy–that they have done their best to try become contributing members of.
Some people have suggested that our early-career colleagues in these situations only have themselves to blame–but this seems to me a needless case of blaming the victim. The relevant question is what we can do to help our colleagues who find themselves in such difficult situations. So then, what can we do? What should we do? Because changing the structure of the academic job market is, in my view, a Mission Impossible–at least in the short-term–the best option (an option that I think should probably be pursued in addition to trying to improve the situation in academia) seems to me to better support philosophers in finding good, well-paying lines of work outside of academia. Allow me to explain.
My wife is a PhD student in another field: Industrial-Organizational Psychology. There is, as far as I can tell, little anger or disappointment among graduate students or early-career academics in her discipline. Their discipline doesn't have blogs suffused with anger or disappointment, and in just about every case her fellow grad students seem happy and optimistic. Why? The answer, it seems to me, is clear: just about all of them get good jobs, either in academic or without. About 50% of PhD graduates in her field go into academia–but those who don't get good jobs in industry. Now, obviously, the skills graduate students learn in her field are "more obviously marketable" than skills learned in a philosophy PhD program. But their grad programs and professional organizations put a great deal of resources and effort into helping their students enter the non-academic workforce. Their grad programs typically encourage their students to work in industry (in paid internships, usually 20+ hours a week) while working on their MA and PhD, and their professional organization, the American Psychological Organization, solicits and advertises industry jobs. Contrast this to our discipline. In our discipline, grad students are typically discouraged from working outside of academia in grad school, and our discipline's job board solicits and advertises primarily (indeed, almost entirely) academic jobs. When it comes to industry/non-academic jobs, our APA only has a webpage (last updated in 2002!) giving our colleagues advice on how to obtain non-academic jobs–and the only other resource I'm aware of is Justin Weinberg's Non-Academic Hires page at Daily Nous.
I want to suggest that we can, and should, do better. First, graduate programs in philosophy should stop requiring their students to "only focus on the program", and help them build their non-academic resumes while in their programs (how? I don't know: by securing internships with academic publishers, journals, etc.). If people in my wife's field can work 20+ hours a week in industry and finish their PhDs, so can people in our field (and I see what they do. Their stuff is not easy either!). Second, the APA should dedicate more resources to foster networking and internships in industry. The APA has enough resources to throw three conferences a year, print and publish conference proceedings, start a new blog (with several paid editors), and so on. While these are perhaps not bad things to spend resources on (though I'm not sure in some cases), ensuring that our colleagues can find jobs should be a priority, especially when they are colleagues of ours who have spent 7-10+ years as low-paid graduate students. The way I see it, there is no reason why a LinkedIn group of philosophers in industry should be the best resource our colleagues have for obtaining non-academic work. Our professional organization should–as the American Psychological Association does–provide much more ample resources for finding non-academic work. For although philosophy may not be as "immediately marketable" as, say, I-O Psychology, if we helped philosophers get non-academic work in grad school and network in non-academic industry from the start, surely our colleagues would be better off.
Or so say I. What say you?
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