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Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2025-26)

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Reader query: how are you doing on the market?

In the comments section of our last "how can we help you?" post, a reader writes in:

Could we have a thread where people anonymously post the accomplishments that they think should have landed them a job? At the very least, I think this would provide valuable commiseration for those of us on the job market who feel completely helpless about improving our job prospects. At the most, perhaps it could help call attention to the horrible market inefficiency in philosophy, and spur a conversation about how more efficient hiring practices could benefit both junior philosophers *and* academic institutions.

For me, a post would look like this:

5 publications
14 citations
14 classes taught as instructor of record

0 job offers

Having followed this blog for a few years, I know that there are several readers whose accomplishments far outshine my own but who *still* haven’t been able to find permanent employment. I find it particularly upsetting that your readers with 6-10 publications can’t find a job, while a quick browse of PhilJobs reveals that peoiple [sic] with 0 or 1 publication get tenure lines at Ivy League institutions.

I think this is a really good query, but that it might be even better if we had a reporting thread on an even more general question: what is your candidate profile (professional experience, accomplishments, etc.), and how are you doing on this year's market?

I think it might be good to hear from people on this–not only hear from people who think they are faring worse on the market than they think their accomplishments warrant, but also from people who are faring well on the market–for a number of reasons. First, it might provide us all a clearer picture of what the market is actually like, what types of candidates are doing well or not so well, and so on. Second, it might shed more anecdotal light on 'the hypothesis' I recently ventured, and whether certain types of candidates have more trouble on the market than others. Third, it might provide candidates a clearer picture of where they stand, and what they might do in order to do better on the market. 

So, then, what is your "candidate profile" and how have you done on this year's market? Feel free to mention things like your:

  • PhD program's general Leiter-rank (viz. 'Leiterific/top 10', mid-ranked, low-ranked, unranked, etc.)
  • Publication numbers (multiple "top-10 pubs", "no pubs", "only lower-ranked pubs").
  • Teaching experience & evaluations (lots of experience, high student scores, etc.)
  • Year on the market (still ABD, new PhD, 1 year post-PhD, 3 or more years post PhD, etc.)

Candidates should feel free to be as specific or vague as possible. You may of course feel free to report exact numbers of publications, etc., as the above reader did. However, bearing in mind that this is a public venue, if you would like to report your profile in a way that does not make you identifiable, I would suggest being deliberately vague (i.e. instead of reporting your program's exact Leiter rank, maybe give a range; instead of your exact number of pubs, a general picture; etc.). For what it is worth, I think it is unlikely that people will go sleuthing around to figure out who you are (this would, I think, be very difficult). However, I just wanted to make a quick note of it for anyone who might have those concerns.

In any case, I am very curious–as I expect many of you are as well–how candidates are faring, and so I hope a good number of you choose to share in whichever way you feel comfortable.  

Posted in

158 responses to “Reader query: how are you doing on the market?”

  1. Round two

    6 peer-reviewed pubs (3 top-20, 2 top-10, one high-impact non-philosophy)
    10 citations
    6 courses as primary instructor
    Lower Leiter-rank (but well-ranked in sub-discipline)
    New PhD (second time on market)
    0 interviews

    Reply
  2. Endless Apps

    -2 non-peer reviewed, unimportant pubs.
    -0 peer-reviewed pubs.
    -29 courses as instructor of record, evaluations very good but not perfect.
    -Leiter top 15 school (but not well-ranked for my work)
    -Still ABD.
    -110 applications
    -2 first-round interviews, still waiting to hear on both.

    Reply
  3. Anon

    4 peer-reviewed pubs (3 in top- 10)
    7 citations
    7 different courses as primary instructor (21 sections total)
    Relatively Leiterific PhD (solidly Leiterific but dropped some since I left)
    2nd year post PhD
    2 interviews, 0 flyouts

    Reply
  4. TT

    Would folks be interested in outcomes from last year?
    – 1 publication in mid-tier journal
    – Low-ranked Leiter program
    – lots of solo teaching
    – excellent course evals in recent years
    – abundant service to department and profession
    – 3rd year on market
    – PhD in hand
    – 3 first round interviews, 1 offer

    Reply
  5. anon

    1 publication in a specialist journal
    Top 15 school, PhD completed in the past year
    Around ten courses as primary instructor, good evals
    1 tt first-round interview, 1 post-doc first-round interview (both of which were long enough ago that I don’t think they’ll turn into flyouts.)

    Reply
  6. Random job market person

    9 peer-reviewed pubs (roughly equal division of top 10 and top 20, one top 5)
    0 courses as primary instructor (this will change soon, thankfully), reasonable amount of TAing.
    Leiter top 30 school.
    Over 100 applications (lost count a while ago).
    Reasonably trendy AOS.
    A degree of ‘networking’ (only in the last year though).
    2 interviews in about 2.5 years (one postdoc, one tt).
    Guess I fit Marcus’s hypothesis pretty closely (although lack of teaching probably explains a lot too, and maybe word has got out that I am an arsehole…).

    Reply
  7. Tom

    Lots of you will know who I am, but meh.
    – 7 pubs. Two top twenty, two top specialist, two invited, 1 coauthored textbook completed. Two more textbooks under contract.
    – Over 30 courses as primary instructor. Great reviews.
    – Leiter ranked, but barely.
    – 30-40 applications this year.
    – 0 interviews.
    Last year was pretty much the same. The year before was almost the same too, except there was 1 interview that turned into a postdoc.

    Reply
  8. K

    From last year, in case it’s helpful:
    – was ABD
    – 3 peer-reviewed journal articles at the time of application (one co-authored)
    – 2 courses taught with exceptional evaluations
    – non-ranked Ph.D. program
    – 8 first-round interviews, 3 fly-outs, 2 TT offers and one post-doc offer (I declined the post-doc and accepted a TT offer)

    Reply
  9. Job Candidate #56291

    Top 20 Leiter-ranked PhD program.
    AOS in a couple LEMM-ing fields and an AOC too disjunctive to either usefully summarize or lay out in detail without revealing myself (although I kind of don’t care at this point).
    8 peer-reviewed publications (1 at the Noûs level, the rest in the PQ-to-Synthese range), two chapters in anthologies with big names from good publishing houses.
    At least 120 citations (one of my articles has over 80 citations).
    Around 10 sections as primary instructor (undergraduate and graduate), and examiner of PhD and MA theses.
    Sole author of several successful grant applications for postdoc positions, and co-author of several more (half of which I had to decline).
    Lots of conference organization, invited presentations at very good departments, etc.
    PhD awarded five years ago, strong research postdocs since then (the last one was at a Leiterrific department).
    This job cycle: 8 first-round interviews, 0 fly-outs.
    A white male. (I only mention this because I am constantly told, both by members of search committees and by more senior people in the field, that this has at the very least been an obstacle in my case.)

    Reply
  10. Anon Applicant

    1 publication in a very good specialty journal
    10+ professional conference presentations
    5 different classes taught as instructor of record (8 sections), all with excellent evals
    new PhD from program ranked in lower half (although strong in my AOS)
    2nd year on job market (last year, I had 4 TT interviews with 2 flyouts, 0 TT offers, but got a VAP)
    6 TT interviews, 2 flyouts (possibly 1 more), waiting to see about offers
    But looking at our profiles in this quantitative way ignores our qualitative profile, and (in my case, at least) I think is the key to what success I’ve had. I think the quantitative CV elements got me past the first bar, but they weren’t the key to differentiating me from other people with similar profiles. Though I applied widely, my interviews have almost all been at a very specific type of school that takes a certain kind of teaching very seriously but also wants faculty who enjoy research. It also happens this is my ideal sort of job, and I think that shows. In other words, I don’t think it’s all about the numbers or ranking (although ranking is definitely more important at research-heavy schools, where it might be more weighty).

    Reply
  11. Number Three

    -2 publications in very good to excellent specialist journals. Invited to write chapters for a couple of other things.
    -Second job market cycle post-PhD from Top 25 Phil Gourmet department (higher in specialty)
    -12 courses as instructor (evals seem good, but I don’t know what the average scores are across the department and university)
    -2 first round interviews, 1 flyout, no offers yet.
    Only applied for TT positions this year. Last year I applied very widely and had 10+ first round interviews, but I didn’t get any TT flyouts or offers. Ended up taking the best non-TT job I was offered. I had one TT flyout the year before last.
    This is probably my last year. Goodbye, philosophy!

    Reply
  12. Pendaran Roberts

    11 peer reviewed, first author publications and none with advisor or more senior people (6 top 20).
    2 courses as primary instructor; TAed for many more.
    PhD University of Nottingham UK.
    2 interviews over 3 years both for 1 year gigs.
    unemployed.

    Reply
  13. Pendaran Roberts

    Correction: 1 of my papers was with a more senior person at a different university. Not my advisor. Sorry forgot about that one.

    Reply
  14. first timer

    -2 solo peer-reviewed pubs (1 top-10 generalist, 1 specialist)
    -2 co-authored pubs (1 peer-reviewed specialist, 1 for edited volume)
    -No Leiter rank
    -7 sections as primary instructor
    -Still ABD (first time on market)
    -13 applications
    -0 interviews

    Reply
  15. Happily employed overseas TT

    This is from a year ago, I hope it’s helpful.
    – Leiter top-20 PhD, one year out
    – AOS in LEMMING area
    – 4 pubs (3 top-10, 1 top-20)
    – 6 sections as solo instructor, strong but not outstanding evals
    – 2 first-round interviews, 3 additional direct fly-outs (none of the latter in North America), 1 TT offer

    Reply
  16. Happily employed overseas TT

    PS: Also, some citations but not a lot – maybe 15-20 in total?

    Reply
  17. J

    2 peer-reviewed pubs in a top, but a narrow specialist journal
    3 citations
    few times served as a journal referee when requested
    No Ph.D., several applications for funded Ph.D. positions in my country. No offers. Just recently got an offer for funded Ph.D. position from a different country.

    Reply
  18. Joel

    White male
    Leiter mid-rank Ph.D., one year out, in VAP at comparable school
    5 publications in top-10 journals, 1 publication in an edited collection
    ~20 citations
    5 courses taught
    ~100 applications
    7 first-round interviews, 4 fly-outs
    Relevant to The Hypothesis: only 2 of my interviews were for research schools. The rest were all for teaching-oriented schools with high teaching loads. I do get the impression that I’m getting passed over for R1 positions especially based on my Ph.D. granting institution and demographics. But I was able to get interviews with several teaching schools despite a strong research output. I did not hide my research accomplishments in my CV, and I always mention them in my cover letter. But I do try to tailor my cover letters and explain why I’m a good fit to teach at that school, and I think I have a very good teaching portfolio.

    Reply
  19. Chris

    Hi, as a brief aside, I was wondering—how does one calculate or find their number of citations?
    I have seen myself cited once or twice, but is there some sort of program or source that would list this?

    Reply
  20. Daniel

    Chris,
    Look up your papers on google scholar. And/or create a google scholar profile, and make sure your papers are listed on it.

    Reply
  21. Amanda

    I am also curious by all the people listing number of citations. I have a lot of publications, some in top general places and more in top speciality journals, but I have never thought to look at my citations. Do search committees look at this? And if not, why is everyone mentioning it? Genuinely curious.

    Reply
  22. Happily employed overseas TT

    I just mentioned it because Marcus asked for it – I doubt it plays a major role in junior hiring. (Though networking does, of which number of citations can be indicative.) I also started keeping track of it because it can sometimes make a difference in grant applications.

    Reply
  23. Job Candidate #56291

    Amanda, only speaking for myself:
    Citation numbers were mentioned by the OP, and everyone else in the thread before me listed theirs, so I thought that was the format. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have. I’m virtually certain that U.S. search committees pay zero attention to them.
    That said, I have mentioned citation numbers when filling out U.K./Australian questionnaires for lectureships/grants that ask for evidence of research impact. So at least in that context, they’re good to know.

    Reply
  24. Marcus Arvan

    Here’s why I asked about citation numbers.
    I have noticed a lot of ‘CV vetting’ online, or the comparing job-candidates and hires on the basis of their CVs. For instance, it is often suggested that one candidate is less deserving or meriting a job than other candidates purely on the basis of how many publications they have, and where those publications are.
    While of course there may be many reasons why a given person is hired over another (including pedigree, demographics, etc.), one thing this kind of CV vetting totally glosses over is the impact of a person’s work in the discipline. I’m not sure how often hiring committees look at Google scholar records of citations. But do saavy job-candidates with good citation records note them in their cover letters? And do hiring committees care about impact? Absolutely.
    Compare two hypothetical scenarios:
    SCENARIO 1
    Candidate 1: 10 publications in highly-ranked journals, few citations.
    Candidate 2: 2 publications in highly-ranked journals, dozens of citations and discussion in the literature.
    SCENARIO 2
    Candidate 1: 3 publications in highly-ranked journals, few citations.
    Candidate 2: 14 publications in low-ranked journals, dozens of citations and discussion in the literature.
    Online CV-vetters would presumably count Candidate 1 in both cases as ‘better accomplished’, ‘more deserving’, or ‘meriting’ a job than Candidate 2.
    But is this how search committees think? This is not obvious to me at all.
    First, I’ve heard that tenure-committees at R1’s care a great deal about impact in one’s field–that they make tenure decisions specifically in large on the basis of whether a person has become a Big Name in their field. Indeed, I’ve heard that many tenure denials of people at R1s with good CVs are the result of the person not making much of an impact in their field–and that the awarding of tenure can depend on whether outside reviewers (i.e. other Big Names) recognize them as a Big Name in the field. Wittgenstein was hired by Cambridge not because of his CV but because of his impact on the field, which (obviously) was tremendous.
    Consequently, I would not be at all surprised if R1 search committees were to interview or hire someone like Candidate 2 over Candidate 1 in SCENARIO 1. People sometimes forget that Wittgenstein only had one publication (the Tractatus), and that it was with no-name press (it was rejected by every press Wittgenstein submitted it to until Russell wrote an introduction, and even then all of the top-presses balked at it).
    Similarly, consider SCENARIO 2. While R1’s may prefer Candidate 1 over Candidate 2, it seems clear to me that many teaching-oriented schools would prefer candidate 2. For while teaching schools care primarily about teaching, they also very much like their faculty to make an impact in their field.

    Reply
  25. Nick

    There’s just too much noise and the time frame is way too small for impact to be meaningful for early career scholars. Just think how long it takes for a paper to be published, then for that paper to be cited, then for the citing paper to be published… Throw in some random factors affecting citation numbers positively (coauthored papers in a field with different citation practices; luck; your paper is impactful but so wrong…) or negatively (Google Scholar’s bots sometimes fail to detect a sizeable fraction of your citations or takes a while to do so). When we’re speaking a couple dozen citations, whether you have 5, 10, 15, or 20 really doesn’t mean much. Especially if you’ve completed your PhD recently, the odds citations do not reflect anything meaningful about your work as astronomical.

    Reply
  26. Amanda

    Very interesting ,Marcus. Thanks makes sense. I guess I should look up my citations today. This, I think, is kind of shame, because I had been enjoying being blissfully ignorant of this sort of thing!

    Reply
  27. bc

    -PhD PGR US Top 20, group 2 in specialty
    -8 publications, 5 in last year (1 top 10, 3 more in top 20, 3 in good specialty journals, 1 invited w/ phd supervisor)
    -19 conference talks, 13 invited talks
    -18 courses taught, mostly in specialty
    -2 years postdoc-ing at PGR UK Top 5 university
    -4 years on job market
    -53 applications for TT jobs (only 8 in last two years though), 1 first round interview in yr. 2
    -44 applications for postdocs/teaching, invited for 4 interviews, 1 job

    Reply
  28. Amanda

    An additional something we can learn from this thread is how tough the competition is, and hence how hard it is to stand out. I really do think there has been a huge change insofar as many of these publication records would stand out 10 years ago, maybe even 5. But today that record just makes you one of many. One thing one of my academic advisers said to me (one person, keep in mind) is that sometimes people with a long list of impressive publications just show him that someone has “learned how to work the system.” This again, might point to the difference of someone who has a long list of top publications versus someone who has in some senses a less impressive record but is “known” for this or that. I know I am not the only one who thinks many publications in top places are formulaic and boring. Now this is just me musing on possibilities. As to how a search committee “should” rank these things, that is too much for me to go into there.

    Reply
  29. Pendaran Roberts

    One thing one of my academic advisers said to me (one person, keep in mind) is that sometimes people with a long list of impressive publications just show him that someone has “learned how to work the system.”
    I think this is a dangerous mentality. Every one of my papers was a ton of work. There was no gaming or whatever you want to call it. Just lots of sleepless nights.

    Reply
  30. N/A

    The main thing I’m learning from this thread, and which I find comforting, is that I’m not alone in being more qualified, CV-wise at least, than the average tenure-track hire.
    As far as learning how tough the competition is (as Amanda suggested), I don’t really think that can be inferred from a blog meant for people with early career struggles–especially not from comments in response to a post about poor job prospects despite strong CVs. That kind of inference can only be drawn from a much larger and more representative dataset. And while the only such dataset I’m aware of is five years old, it does not suggest that the competition is tough enough to warrant some of the outcomes I’ve seen posted above.
    “The medians for both tenure-track and postdoctoral hirees were 1 peer-reviewed publication and 0 peer-reviewed publications in a top-15 journal.”
    http://www.newappsblog.com/2013/06/placement-data-and-trends-2011-2013.html

    Reply
  31. RJ

    –PhD PGR World Top 30, UK Top 5
    –13 peer-reviewed publications (2 top 10, 6 top 20, 1 very highly regarded specialist, 1 highly regarded specialist). Also 1 forthcoming edited volume with an ok publisher, and 1 article in an edited volume with the same publisher.
    –77 citations (on google scholar).
    –Success applying for funding.
    –5 courses taught, all in different areas.
    –Don’t know how they compare to others, but I do know (from being told) that my evaluations are impressive in comparison to my colleagues.
    –4 1/2 years post-PhD. Since then I’ve had 2 postdocs (hence the low number of courses taught).
    –113 applications from 3 years on the market (this is my 3rd go).
    –7 skype interviews that didn’t lead to anything (plus 1 turned down), 8 flyouts for permanent positions that didn’t work out (plus 1 turned down), and 4 interviews for postdocs that didn’t lead to anything. Currently in a postdoc position (so I did have 1 success!).
    –This was over 3 years. This year I’ve had 3 skype interviews that didn’t lead to anything and 1 flyout I’m still waiting on (but not hopeful about).
    Not sure what to conclude from this. On the one hand, I get interviews, and I know that at least some of them went well. Also, in some cases even I can see that the candidate who got the job was objectively better qualified. On the other, it does of course get to you when none of the interviews lead to a permanent job! One thing I find interesting is that I don’t seem to get more interviews now than in my 1st year on the market, when my CV was clearly a lot weaker (and I had even less teaching experience than I do now).

    Reply
  32. RJ

    One thing I meant to add: It is fair to say I’ve had far more success in Europe (including the UK) and the rest of the world than in North America. My impression is that it is very hard (though of course not impossible) for someone to break into the North American market, and this goes as much for more teaching-focused schools as for top research schools.

    Reply
  33. A

    In my experience as both a job market candidate last year (who landed a TT job) and search committee member this year, one cannot underestimate the importance of being professional and nice.
    About the last point: personality matters. You will likely not land a job (or second round interview) if you come across as arrogant, too good for the people interviewing you, unprofessional, angsty about the philosophy profession, or inappropriate. This absolutely does and should make a difference to who gets hired. Search committee members have to trust that their future colleagues can work well with others, and they have to trust that their future colleagues are appropriate role models for students. Someone might look amazing on paper and turn out to be unsuitable for a TT position for legitimate reasons related to issues with professional judgment and character.

    Reply
  34. Amanda

    N/A there is newer data than that. And it indeed shows the average publication is 4 or 5. Marcus I am sure you know what I’m talking about right? It was posted on Daily Nous but I don’t remember where. It was actually the difference in the data you cite above N/A and the new data that really surprised me. If someone else doesn’t point to it I will go dig later.
    Pendaran I don’t think my adviser was suggesting that writing papers in good journals was easy. I think he meant somebody might just have gotten down to a T a certain type of formulaic paper that journals tend to like. Now, admittedly, this is a lot of speculating on his part and I argued intensely with him at the time. But if nothing else it does show how the arbitrary whims of search committee members make a difference.

    Reply
  35. Marcus Arvan

    A is right.
    Also, I would suggest that one thing to learn from this thread is not just how tough the competition is (which it clearly it), but how it is a mistake to equate merit, qualifications, and competitiveness for jobs with publication records.
    Here is what TT reported about themselves last year:
    – 1 publication in mid-tier journal
    – Low-ranked Leiter program
    – lots of solo teaching
    – excellent course evals in recent years
    – abundant service to department and profession
    – 3rd year on market
    – PhD in hand
    – 3 first round interviews, 1 offer
    This person was competitive for jobs at teaching schools, and I’ve seen plenty like them. Why were they competitive? Because they realized what teaching schools are actually looking for. Hint: it’s not one’s publication record. It’s teaching, commitment to service and the profession, etc. Those are the things that merit being hired at a teaching school.

    Reply
  36. Pendaran Roberts

    ‘Pendaran I don’t think my adviser was suggesting that writing papers in good journals was easy. I think he meant somebody might just have gotten down to a T a certain type of formulaic paper that journals tend to like.’
    What an odd thing to say. The implication is that what journals like isn’t good or good enough philosophy or isn’t what we should care about. If thats true, then we really should stop having students read journals and write in that style.
    Sometimes the things that get said around here just blow my mind.

    Reply
  37. Pendaran Roberts

    ‘About the last point: personality matters. You will likely not land a job (or second round interview) if you come across as arrogant, too good for the people interviewing you, unprofessional, angsty about the philosophy profession, or inappropriate.’
    If you aren’t upset with the philosophy profession there is something wrong with you. As far as the rest, I doubt many come off as too unprofessional/whatever in interviews. Decisions are made based on way more subtle considerations. Some people may be more introverted, shy, or nervous than others. I suspect most don’t go into interviews insulting the panel or yelling at people. Haha!
    I can imagine that rumors though may influence panels. That’s not interview performance but gossip. And we should differentiate between them. How reliable is gossip? Is that a fair or just way to narrow down candidates?

    Reply
  38. N/A

    Hi Amanda, would you mind digging up that link showing that 4 or 5 pubs is average for TT hiring? I recall a DN thread where people were saying that 4 or 5 pubs was standard for tenure at their institutions, but not a study on TT hiring. Thanks!

    Reply
  39. Marcus Arvan

    Hi Pendaran: There are parts of your last comment that I am sympathetic to, and parts I am not.
    You are absolutely right to bemoan the fact that hiring decisions may be made on the basis of job-irrelevant factors, such as shyness or introversion. There is a wealth of empirical evidence indicating that people hold these traits against candidates, preferring extraverted candidates in interviews, despite the fact that introversion is more positively related to actual job-performance.
    As someone who is profoundly shy and introverted myself, I had these things held against me on the job-market (I was told I came off ‘disengaged’ in a couple of interviews, where it was really just me trying to remain calm and not appear nervous–something else I struggle with in interviews as a shy person).
    Because these are pernicious biases, I always try to go out of my way to draw attention to them, both on the Cocoon and to my own colleagues.
    However, there are other parts of your comment I strongly disagree with. First, whether someone is arrogant, or meanspirited, or whatever, can very much be job-relevant. Indeed, once again there is a great deal of research here–on how toxic employees and (especially) managers can destroy a work environment, bringing down the productivity of others. Second, a person’s personal priorities–as reflected in their behavior (i.e. whether they are actually passionate about teaching, or just trying to fake it)–can also be very job-relevant. I know a teaching school that hired a candidate who claimed to be a passionate teacher, but who then showed up for the job from Day 1 focusing only on research so he could jump ship for a research job.
    Finally, these job-relevant things may not simply come across in interviews or through gossip. Arrogance can very much come across in application materials (cover letters, research statements, teaching statements, etc). So too, obviously, can one’s professional priorities. Finally, these things can also come across in behavior at conferences, online (on blogs), etc. So it is important to be aware of how one comes across in these types of contexts (I say this, in full disclosure, as someone who is by no means perfect in these areas, and who very much learned the hard way–and am still learning–about some of my faults).

    Reply
  40. Round two

    I also find the comments about personality puzzling, especially when it comes to the question of why people aren’t getting interviews. Is there something in particular that people write in their application materials that seems to convey that one is a jerk? If so, what?
    My own guess is that beliefs about whether a candidate “comes off as a jerk” in application materials probably reflects more on the person reading the application than the candidate him/herself.

    Reply
  41. jdkbrown

    “What an odd thing to say. The implication is that what journals like isn’t good or good enough philosophy or isn’t what we should care about. If thats true, then we really should stop having students read journals and write in that style.”
    Well, David Velleman, for one, has argued exactly this. And it’s an undercurrent in a lot of the discussion about pressure to publish early and often overwhelming the journals with unambitious and often formulaic papers. (I tend to think this concern–at least in the very strong form that Velleman pushes it–is overblown, but the sentiment isn’t uncommon.)
    “I doubt many come off as too unprofessional/whatever in interviews.”
    Not many, but a fair few.

    Reply
  42. Nick

    Pendaran, it’s not the first time that you jeer at the thought that being a nice colleague and teacher is a relevant hiring factor (last time I remember was when we discussed the famous NYU guy who can’t find a TT job — people who know the case know there are personality red flags, which you dismissed them as irrelevant. It blows my mind that you still can’t come to terms with the importance of other things than your paper record for decisions that will have a huge impact on whole departments and potentially hundreds of students.
    As for your reply to Amanda, I don’t think she said that what the person had figured out was a fool-proof sufficient condition for publishing. They just appeared to have figured out a way to increase the odds that their good papers will be published.

    Reply
  43. Pendaran Roberts

    Marcus, we don’t disagree about much. We’ve had these discussions before. Perhaps one point we disagree on is how likely people are to come across as unprofessional in job application materials and at interviews. Most serious candidates have had their materials heavily vetted. Even the most outrageous people can fake it for a few hours at interviews. I suspect to whatever degree unprofessional personality characteristics are relevant, rather than just other characteristics like being introverted, is due to gossip and rumors. Is using rumors when hiring just or fair or even epistemically justifiable?
    Another concern I have, which might be a point of disagreement, is what gets classified as unprofessional and why. What one person considers arrogance another considers confidence. So to some degree what might be classified as unprofessional is rather subjective. We have to be careful that we are not simply discriminating based on class or culture, or this is what I believe. For example in Russia people are very direct and in England they are not. So, Russians may come across as rude and ‘unprofessional’ in England. But really this is just cultural. Is it just or fair or even best for the department to discriminate based on culture or class?

    Reply
  44. jdkbrown

    Here’s something that’s missed in this focus on CVs, and especially on publication counts: when it comes to choosing whom to interview–and especially when choosing whom to hire–committees actually read the work and make their own judgments about it.
    Sure it’s published in Phil Studies, but is it actually good? And interesting? [We all can give examples of published work that we think really isn’t very good, or interesting, or…, right?] Sure, they’ve got seven publications, but are all the pubs really pretty much about the same thing? Or do they demonstrate some range? [Seven papers, each on Malbranche’s philosophy sport, but each considering a different sport? Range matters, especially for small departments.] Do they have so many publications because each is the least publishable unit? Are all the pubs straight from the dissertation? [Once this vein of material has run out, will they have something else to run with?]

    Reply
  45. Nick Z

    Last year on the market:
    1 peer-reviewed publication, 1 book review
    Very low-ranked Leiter department
    Dozens of courses taught as lead instructor (several years adjuncting at different kinds of institutions)
    PhD in hand (although applied to about 30 jobs over the previous three years while ABD, so materials were pretty solid)
    43 applications
    9 first round interviews (3 universities, 6 community colleges)
    4 fly outs
    2 offers

    Reply
  46. Marcus Arvan

    Those interested in The Hypothesis I ventured should pay attention to TT and Nick Z. They both got interviews and jobs without many publications, and without any high-ranking ones. Nick got 9 interviews!
    Why? If the Hypothesis is right, it’s because they both had a good job-market strategy given their PhD program’s Leiter-rank.

    Reply
  47. Tom

    I’m also interested in hearing more about how arrogance comes across in job documents. I feel (perhaps wrongly) absolutely certain that I wouldn’t be able to pick up on arrogance in a cover letter. (Full confession: I feel that way at least in pat because I suspect I wouldn’t find anything of value in a cover letter. But that’s a discussion for a different day.)
    What does said arrogance actually look like? What are other bad things that come across in cover letters, and what do these things actually look like? I’m asking because the fact that I was surprised they could come across suggests I’m not in a good position to vet my own materials to see whether that does come across. (Yes: I do ask others to look at them too. But I suspect I’m not alone in not knowing to/how to look for this, so perhaps my readers could also benefit from this information.)

    Reply
  48. Pendaran Roberts

    “Pendaran, it’s not the first time that you jeer at the thought that being a nice colleague and teacher is a relevant hiring factor (last time I remember was when we discussed the famous NYU guy who can’t find a TT job — people who know the case know there are personality red flags, which you dismissed them as irrelevant. It blows my mind that you still can’t come to terms with the importance of other things than your paper record for decisions that will have a huge impact on whole departments and potentially hundreds of students.“
    Read what I’ve actually written and said and respond to that. But don’t straw man my position. Also, I’m not going to gossip about others in this thread. So I’m not going to talk about the NYU guy you mention or address that issue.

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  49. anonymous european

    -white male, English second language
    – +20 peer-reviewed articles (4 of them in top-specialty journals)
    – narrow AOS
    – PhD 2016 from respected school in continental Europe
    – job market year 2018: 10 application, 0 interviews.

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  50. Marcus Arvan

    Tom: Having mentored a number of candidates and read a great many materials, my experience is that coming across poorly in cover letters, etc., is one of the single most common problems candidates have.
    Karen Kelsky makes this point (at the Professor Is In) all the time, and my experience is that she is absolutely right. Far too many candidates try to “talk themselves up” in their materials. While candidates might think they need to talk themselves up (mentioning in their cover letter or research statement, for instance, how they’ve published in All the Best Journals or how they wrote the Best Dissertation Ever), this kind of stuff can look arrogant or insecure (or both). No one needs to be told that Mind is a top-ranked journal. Everyone knows that and can tell by your CV whether you’ve published there. These things may also rub people the wrong way who are not obsessed with journal rankings. Good job-market materials are understated, letting your CV and actual content of your research, teaching pedagogy, syllabi, etc., do the talking.
    For more, see: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2015/05/job-market-boot-camp-part-8-the-cover-letter.html
    http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2015/05/job-market-boot-camp-part-9-the-teaching-statement.html

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  51. jdkbrown

    What Marcus said. I’ve also seen a number of variations on “My work definitively proves that position X is just silly,” where X is fairly nuanced and complex, and has a lot of literature discussing it. I mean, maybe this is true, and all the philosophers who have taken X seriously are fools; but…

    Reply
  52. Nick

    Pendaran, you can review your reactions over there: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2017/04/reader-query-on-staving-off-bitterness.html?cid=6a014e89cbe0fd970d01bb098d19dc970d#comment-6a014e89cbe0fd970d01bb098d19dc970d
    Let me know if you think I mischaracterized your view and attitude. I may have overplayed it, in which case I’m sorry. But you sound really suspicious of taking personality-related factors into account (here and there). Is that not true? Am I really strawmaning?
    As for the NYU person, you’ve been outraged about their case on this very blog, that’s the only reason I bring them up.

    Reply
  53. A

    In my experience, candidates can definitely display a lack of professionalism, arrogance, and other character red flags (or red flags about preparedness for a TT position) in application materials and in interviews. It is not as easy as one might think to “fake it”; maybe some people can pull this off, but doing so requires social awareness – and candidates with character red flags tend to lack social awareness, which is the problem to begin with.
    Yes, you should be angsty about the philosophy job market, but it is unprofessional to display a negative attitude toward the philosophy profession in certain contexts if you want a job in the philosophy profession!

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  54. Pendaran Roberts

    Nick,
    I am very hesitant to place much emphasis on personality in hiring. I think it largely amounts to an excuse to hire your friends or people of the same class or culture as you over the best qualified people. My position is that personality is relevant to a degree. Some people really are nuts and impossible. But I think they are few and far between. Most of the time, in my view, personality differences are not very relevant.
    However, you characterized my position above to be that being nice is irrelevant, suggesting that my position is that whether people are mean is irrelevant. That’s not my position. But some effort has to be made to distinguish between someone who is legitimately mean and someone who is just direct or passionate when arguing. We need to understand that just being someone who might make us uncomfortable sometimes doesn’t mean they are bad or mean or toxic or whatever.
    Jared can speak for himself if he wants.

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  55. Assistant Prof

    “Perhaps one point we disagree on is how likely people are to come across as unprofessional in job application materials and at interviews. Most serious candidates have had their materials heavily vetted. Even the most outrageous people can fake it for a few hours at interviews.”
    In my (limited, anecdotal) experience, this is false. Many applicants come across as graduate students (not as colleagues), many applicants’ materials are not tailored to particular jobs in a way that conveys earnest interest (or, perhaps, are not tailored in a way that suggests a lack of earnest interest), and many applicants’ materials are either blithe or condescending. Obviously, my sample size is limited, etc., etc. But having worked in two other (non-academic) fields, philosophers are significantly less prepared and sophisticated at this, and many philosophers seem to have a hard time grasping the tone their materials convey.
    Hence, the advice from Marcus, from this blog generally, from The Professor Is In are invaluable, imho.

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  56. Anon

    “No one needs to be told that Mind is a top-ranked journal.”
    This is something I’ve thought about a bit. Would it be good to change one’s letters up when applying to interdisciplinary humanities jobs, and to add some detail? Or is this sort of detail always going to come off badly?
    e.g., some schools have programs where there’s a special program for first year students and where post-doctoral fellows from various disciplines participate in the teaching, or where there’s an Honors College with post-doctoral teaching fellows, and sometimes it seems like there are no philosophers on the hiring committee.

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  57. Instructor Gadget

    “No one needs to be told that Mind is a top-ranked journal. Everyone knows that and can tell by your CV whether you’ve published there. These things may also rub people the wrong way who are not obsessed with journal rankings. Good job-market materials are understated, letting your CV and actual content of your research, teaching pedagogy, syllabi, etc., do the talking.”
    Marcus,
    Do you advise not mentioning where your papers are published in the cover letter? So don’t even say something like “In my paper X (published in Mind) I argue….” Or are you only advising not saying “I published in Mind which is awesome!!!”

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  58. Marcus Arvan

    “Some people really are nuts and impossible. But I think they are few and far between.” I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that quite a lot of people will disagree with you here and say truly impossible people are disturbingly common (and moreover, that one problem with impossible people is that they rarely recognize how impossible they are). In any case, having known a number people who have actually had to work with truly impossible people—and having seen how just one such person can utterly destroy an entire workplace—it is should not be surprising if people on the hiring side might take precautions.
    Again, I’m largely in agreement that it can be problematic to discriminate against people on the basis of personality. Still, I think it’s important to be aware of reality, and I suspect the reality here is that many people consider impossible people to be quite common.

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  59. Nick

    Thanks Marcus.

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  60. Pendaran Roberts

    ‘Again, I’m largely in agreement that it can be problematic to discriminate against people on the basis of personality. Still, I think it’s important to be aware of reality, and I suspect the reality here is that many people consider impossible people to be quite common.‘
    I think many people struggle with tolerance and accepting people who are not like them culturally, socially, and politically. They use personality as a way to discriminate against people who are different in favor of hiring friends.

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  61. Marcus Arvan

    Instructor Gadget: Generally speaking, it’s totally fine to mention journal names in a cover letter (I did in mine).
    The one big error, I think, is to talk about how highly they are ranked. Another potential error (again, I think) would be to front-load a letter to a teaching school with a discussion of your research and how you’ve published in Mind, Nous, etc. My worry here is that it might make you look like a person who sees themselves at a research school, pitching you the wrong way as it were.

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  62. Marcus Arvan

    Anon: I’m not sure. Maybe if it’s an interdisciplinary humanities job at an R1. But are there many of those jobs? I definitely wouldn’t go about mentioning journal rankings in a letter applying for an interdisciplinary job at a teaching school. That, to me, would just show a lack of understanding of the culture at teaching schools.

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  63. Amanda

    N/A I know the tenure thread you were talking about and it was not that. It was earlier maybe 8 months ago. However I cannot seem to find it so maybe I was just imagining it? I swear I remember seeing it and being surprised. Does any one else remember the data that showed the recent mean or median of publications was 4 for TT hires? Sorry if this was something I dreamed.

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  64. Sam Duncan

    Re Pendaran’s comment: “But some effort has to be made to distinguish between someone who is legitimately mean and someone who is just direct or passionate when arguing. We need to understand that just being someone who might make us uncomfortable sometimes doesn’t mean they are bad or mean or toxic or whatever.”
    I hate to say this, but I think this is simply false. The issue isn’t just how people will interact with the other faculty members, but also how they will do with students. This is a huge issue as far as teaching schools go, and it’s especially important for teaching schools that serve more diverse or less traditional student bodies. One huge issue that many students face is feeling that they don’t belong in college or in the discipline of philosophy. That it’s not in some sense for people like them. Making students comfortable is a huge deal. Now I’m now saying that we should never challenge them but if you demolish a student’s argument, whatever your intentions might be, they are probably going to disengage with the subject. Look I get it. I used to be incredibly shy and I’m still pretty darn awkward. But the fact is that being a good teacher requires certain personality traits, and to a large extent they’re not the personality traits that academic philosophy encourages. You have to have a soft touch with students; you have to help them develop confidence, feel welcome, and feel valued. Good interviewers at teaching schools screen for people who they think can do that. That’s no more immoral or wrongheaded than are basketball teams hiring lots of tall people.

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  65. Ron Sandler

    4 publications in peer-reviewed journals
    Top-ten Leiter program (currently have PhD)
    6 courses taught as primary instructor
    41 job applications for postdocs/fellowships, 5
    interviews, 1 offer.
    56 applications for TT positions, 2 interviews,
    no offers.

    Reply
  66. Pendaran Roberts

    ‘But the fact is that being a good teacher requires certain personality traits, and to a large extent they’re not the personality traits that academic philosophy encourages. You have to have a soft touch with students; you have to help them develop confidence, feel welcome, and feel valued.’
    One day we’ll come to regret coddling students so much. Treat people like adults, they become adults. Treat them like children, they stay children.
    In the real world, students will be exposed to a whole host of personalities. Sheltering them in college is forsaking our duty to them.
    A university education isn’t what it used to be. How long before people realize the inflated tuition fees are too high for what has basically become day care?

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  67. Marcus Arvan

    Pendaran: I am currently re-reading a Wittgenstein biography. Wittgenstein not only ruined many of his students’ careers, he ruined some of their lives… by using his cult of personality to bully them into career and life-choices that were no good for them. Wittgenstein may have been a genius (I’m not convinced), but he was a terrible mentor…and mentorship is a central job-responsibility of a Professor. Is he an outlier? No. I have known plenty of grad students with supervisors who were utterly derilict in their duties—either by being deliberately cruel, or neglectful, etc. And the consequences of this on students’ choices and careers are real. Good mentors tend to have successful students, bad mentors unsuccessful ones. And again, mentoring students is a central part of the job. It is not coddling students. It is doing one’s job as an educator. And you had better believe that how someone behaves can give one some idea of how they might be as a faculty mentor.

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  68. Pendaran Roberts

    Marcus, I’d prefer to stay away from particular examples. We can debate those forever. My position is that we need to be tolerant of different kinds of people, but that doesn’t mean we have to hire nut cases who are cruel etc.

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  69. Marcus Arvan

    Pendaran: examples are perfectly relevant. They illustrate, in human terms, the real and pervasive costs that hiring the wrong person can have on students and departments. If they happen a lot (and they do), they illustrate why departments have reasons to care about these things.

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  70. Pendaran Roberts

    Marcus, I can’t help but feel you’re not taking the effort to understand my position. My position isn’t that personality is irrelevant or cannot be considered or whatever. My position is that we place too much weight on it. I think we should be more tolerant of different types of people than we are. Now, we can debate where to draw the line but here is an example. On one hand you have someone who is cruel to students, on the other hand you have someone who is direct with students and doesn’t sugar coat criticism. The first person we would be right to avoid. The second we would be wrong to avoid. Russians for example are more direct and to the point. This doesn’t make them bad people or bad educators. Different students respond differently to different people. We also need to expose students to a range of personality types to prepare them for the world. Putting these more pragmatic concerns aside, we have a moral duty to be just and fair to all. Just because we might have to make a little effort to appreciate someone’s personality doesn’t mean they are cruel, mean, or bad educators. That’s myopic and lazy and intolerant.

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  71. Marcus Arvan

    Pendaran: I agree with you on those things. I have made that very clear.

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  72. Pendaran Roberts

    Right. Well in the past I think we concluded we agree on a lot. To be clear when I talk of coddling I am talking of for example not hiring the Russian who is too direct for fear of someone’s feelings getting hurt. I’m not talking about hiring someone who is outright mean and cruel. I think there is an important difference. As a society we need to recognize a range of acceptable personalities, especially ones dominant in entire ethnic groups. And students need to learn to get along with these people. We don’t have to accept mean and cruel people but we do need to accept that there are different ways of being a good person and learn to tolerate these different ways.

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  73. Marcus Arvan

    I’m inclined to agree there is a difference, but think it is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind. There is a fine line between directness and cruelty. We’ve all seen people who think they are “just being direct” but who routinely lapse into cruelty. All personality and character traits exist along spectra—and as Aristotle pointed out, there are many ways to have harmful excesses or deficiencies. We should be tolerant (indeed welcoming) of personality differences. We should not be tolerant of cruelty—and unfortunately what one person thinks is “direct” others may reasonably regard as cruel. I’ve seen many cases of this in academic contexts.

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  74. Pendaran Roberts

    Marcus, I suspect cruelty requires intention. But anyway this is going to move us too far afield. We could debate all night what it takes to be cruel vs direct vs whatever. As long as a difference is recognized we’ve gotten somewhere important.
    Fun discussion! Thanks for it. Looking forward to some more posts regarding how people are doing in the job market.

    Reply
  75. Marcus Arvan

    I don’t think cruelty requires intent, but fair enough! I too hope to hear how more people are doing on the market.

    Reply
  76. Fivefive

    MThough it may be too identifying, I would be curious to hear about AOSs too. I’d wager that certain specialties also make it difficult to achieve a job at certain kinds of institutions. For example, philosophy of language was, by my count, listed as an AOS in only three searches and two were R1s. Philosophy of physics was in a similar position. Few AOS specific postings and most were at R1s. And this situation makes sense to me. R1s presumably have their basic teaching and research needs met in core areas and so have the freedom to hire in niche areas.
    So it looks like if one specializes in an R1 preferred area, you’re going to struggle to compete at non-R1 schools because they won’t advertise in that area or take it too seriously during an open search. Supplemented with Marcus’s hypothesis, it follows that folks specializing in such areas who are from lower ranked schools will suffer the most finding employment.

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  77. UK reader

    Philosophy of language is a niche area now?

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  78. Non-UK reader

    UK Reader,
    Many Philosophy Departments in the US may only have 5 or 6 full time faculty members. You certainly do not need someone who specializes in philosophy of physics, or aesthetics, or … possibly not even language. One person may be hired to cover language, mind, and metaphysics, for example. And if they say they can do early modern, for example, all the better.

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  79. Anon

    4 peer reviewed publications (2 top specialty, 2 good specialty)
    45 citations
    Top-15 program (top speciality)
    12 courses (over 30 sections)
    Good evaluations, some great (but sometimes my school just gave me a table of numbers, without the questions, or even the scale! So some of my materials look extremely unprofessional, but if I don’t include them it looks like I’m hiding something).
    Two times on the market.
    First time:
    3 first round interviews (two TT, one research, one teaching, one teaching VAP)
    2 second round interviews (TT).
    Offered the TT research job (but I would have vastly preferred the teaching one).
    Approx 70 applications.
    Second Time (this year, so far – a couple of places might, I hope, still be going through applications):
    Applied only to TT jobs and fixed-term positions of three years or more, about 30 applications.
    1 first round interview (TT at a teaching school, waiting to hear if I made the second round).

    Reply
  80. Philosophy Adjunct

    “Philosophy of language is a niche area now?”
    I think the point is that language is not a niche area, and so R1 schools already have it well covered, and hence are now looking for more niche specializations.
    The problem Fivefive is getting at, if I understand it correctly, is that if your AOS is in a core area then there are not many, or any, R1 jobs for you. If your AOS is in a niche area there may be more R1 jobs available, but if you are from a Leiterunworthy program on the one hand you exclude yourself from non-R1 jobs by looking too “R1-researchy”, while on the other hand you are from too lower a caste to be acceptable at an R1.

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  81. merely a lecturer

    12 peer reviewed pubs, 1 in top 10 journal, but mostly in good area journals. Plus some book reviews and some public philosophy pubs (no, not blog posts).
    Not a Leiter-ranked school.
    18 type courses, 4-4-2 load last three years. Teaching Awards at University Level, Stellar Course Evals, Teaching Philosophy in Public Schools with undergrads.
    Single-highhandedly increased phil minors from 10 to 30 in 2 years. Created philosophy major.
    4 rounds on the market. 1 skype interview for TT. 3 skype interviews for visiting. 1 on campus for visiting (which was later made permanent non-TT).

    Reply
  82. Amanda

    Okay so as mentioned in an earlier comment, I’ve never given any thought to citations. But Marcus made a case for why they matter, which I at least found somewhat compelling. Anyway I decided to take a look at some young philosophers and their citations by checking google scholar, especially those with very impressive publications. I was pretty surprised to find some people with the most “on paper impressive” publications had very few citations. I am talking like 2 citations when their paper was published in the likes of ppr and journal of philosophy.
    One thing (among others) that this really made me think about is what are we doing, as philosophers? I (unlike Marcus) am not one who argues we should work hard to cite more or as much as other disciplines. I actually think the opposite. However I do think citations are some reflection on how much a paper is read. So if papers in the very top journals are getting less than 3 citations (granted these papers I saw were published in 2012-2016) I could only think that means few people are reading it. But if few people are reading papers published in the very best journals, well, that says something quite odd at the least.

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  83. Sometimes cited

    Amanda,
    citations are highly skewed. Few papers get lots, and many papers get few … and some none.
    But papers do get read and cited, even papers outside the highest rank of journals. I have a paper in International Studies in Philosophy of Science (2015), and it has been cited 10 times; I have another in Synthese (2013), cited 19 times.

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  84. Amanda

    Sometimes cited that is sort of my point. It is interesting some papers in lower ranked journals get cited far more than papers in top 5 journals.

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  85. Really?

    The first of the tenure-track appointments is up on PhilJobs.
    No peer-reviewed philosophy publications, no publications in top journals in any field, appointed at program ranked in the top 15 of the PGR.

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  86. Anonymous

    No peer-reviewed philosophy publications, no publications in top journals in any field, appointed at program ranked in the top 15 of the PGR.
    Yes, we’ve all seen this before, many times. If somehow the public could be informed of how these universities are run, that would be the end to them.

    Reply
  87. A

    I do not have much special insight into this, but I think that candidates from top programs without impressive publications and/or teaching who do well on the market have letter writers with strong connections at the institutions which hire them. If this happens, it is entirely unfair and infuriating. I did not look at the candidate who was hired and don’t want to make claims about any particular hire. But as a general point, I think the unfairness of prestige bias runs deep.

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  88. Really?

    I agree with A 100%.
    I published four articles during a 2-year postdoc at a no-name institution without a philosophy department. My prospects would undoubtedly have been better if I’d published 0 articles during a 2-year postdoc at Harvard or Princeton.
    This seems to me precisely backwards, since it’s probably easier to publish when you have a superstar-stocked philosophy department to support you, rather than a humanities department with just 2 or 3 unknown philosophers.

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  89. RealityCheck

    Anonymous and others,
    Keep in mind that 8 of the top 15 are private schools. What the public thinks matters little. They are hardly going to be concerned with who and how the philosophy department hires. The public will be more concerned with whether their own kid might get in to such a place (long shot) or whether they will be able to buy a College T-shirt when they visit the campus.

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  90. ABD

    It’s worth noting that some top programs don’t care as much about publications from junior scholars (esp. when ABD) as the quality of the work they’re currently doing. They place much more emphasis on the job talk and research proposal than what you’ve already managed to publish while still in graduate school. (Source: I have been told this in informal settings by several people on hiring committees at such a place.) I don’t deny prestige bias, but I do deny that it’s doing all the work some of you think it’s doing.
    Also, FWIW, the TT hire on PhilJobs you’re referencing is from last year’s hiring season, not this year’s.

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  91. Brittle Spirits

    There are other places for job market whinging decaying into attacks on actual people who got jobs. I thought this blog had a different mission or something.

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  92. Marcus Arvan

    I am with Brittle Spirits on this. It’s fair to raise general concerns about hiring practices—but I think singling out individuals pushes the boundaries of the blog’s mission.

    Reply
  93. Amanda

    I agree we should not mention individual people. And I hope it is not done again. However, what is done is done. Given that, I think it is worth mentioning that this hire under discussion (funny others didn’t mention it) is…gasp…a white male.

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  94. Anonymous

    Amanda,
    I don’t think anyone has claimed that a preference for the female gender is the only injustice in the job market. There is also prestige bias and cronyism. Certainly a lot of white males get employed based on these two injustices. However, that’s perfectly compatible with there being a gender bias.
    Also, just to note, it’s perfectly compatible with there being a gender bias that there was no injustice in your case.

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  95. Brittle Spirits

    Amanda I’m a supporter of equality in hiring practices. But piling on in this local case is weak sauce. I say this as someone who does not know the person in question, or anything about the job in question. Let it go or take it to whatever metablog currently exists to stoke our baser reactions.

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  96. A Non-Mouse

    Mightn’t it be that many of those who are appointed at R1s despite having no peer-reviewed pubs have a groundbreaking research project that is being vetted? Mightn’t they be better candidates for those jobs than many (perhaps most) who have multiple pubs in top journals but no groundbreaking research project? It seems to me that the answer is obviously “yes.” For this reason alone, I hesitate to make accusations of cronyism, prestige bias, gender bias, or other biases. This, of course, is not to deny that some such accusations may be warranted.

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  97. Amanda

    Let me say for the 900th time I believe there is gender bias in hiring. I have seen departments hire women, in large part because they are women. I have never denied this.

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  98. Chris

    Let me add to what ‘A Non-Mouse” says. I am also talking about the general issue here – I know nothing about this particular case. Further, I don’t want to deny gender bias or cronyism, or luck, etc. play large roles on the job market in philosophy.
    BUT: people applying for jobs should know this: MANY faculty who are at R1s think that much published work is mediocre. They are looking for someone with a groundbreaking research project. You can publish a bunch of say, mostly secondary or critical work, even in great journals. That won’t impress such faculty. Or you can even publish, primary, original work – but work that many faculty might think is part of a degenerating research program. That won’t impress such faculty, either.
    Are faculty who search for promising, ground-breaking proposals subject to bias, etc. Of course. But it is also just possible – just maybe, that some of the time they’re in a good position to make judgments about quality and originality, and that they are more concerned with these things than number of publications. In fact, it is arguable that faculty at more prestigious institutions are more likely to do this – they’re more trusted by their admins, often (for better or worse). Larger R1s are also more likely to have people who are already specialists in the hiring area and don’t have to simply rely on the fact that “well, it’s published in superstar journal X – it must be good”.
    What “Really?” says about it being easier to publish when you have a superstar department to support you is undoubtedly true. But also – arguably – it just might be easier to come up with a promising, ground breaking research proposal (regardless of whether you’ve yet published in it), when you’re at such schools.

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  99. Pendaran Roberts

    I find the proposal presented by Chris et al to be rather implausible. The best indicator (certainly not perfect but still the best) of groundbreaking research is a strong publishing record. If top people want to deny this, then they should stop participating in the publishing process, or they should create new journals just for them. The blind review of ideas is the best we have at the moment to determine good research, not hiring committees. All that’s going on, in addition to the obvious, is individual preferences for certain agendas over others.

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  100. A Non-Mouse

    Pendaran Roberts says that the best indicator of groundbreaking research is a strong publication record. That seems plainly false, and it is easy to understand why if you consider that most papers published in top journals are not accurately described as groundbreaking research. Groundbreaking research is to be understood as research that breaks ground, and ground is broken mainly when important problems are understood in new, innovative, and promising ways, or when those problems are approached in new, innovative, and promising ways.
    Anyway, the proposal was about groundbreaking research projects. Groundbreaking research projects are harder to come by because they involve multiple interrelated components that promise to break ground.

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  101. Nick

    whatever else you think of Wittgenstein he did grounbreaking work but would hardly pass for qualified by Pendaran’s standards

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  102. Pendaran Roberts

    “That seems plainly false, and it is easy to understand why if you consider that most papers published in top journals are not accurately described as groundbreaking research. Groundbreaking research is to be understood as research that breaks ground, and ground is broken mainly when important problems are understood in new, innovative, and promising ways, or when those problems are approached in new, innovative, and promising ways.”
    And where should I go to read this groundbreaking research?

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  103. A Non-Mouse

    Apparently, we are to believe that Pendaran can’t think of a single book or article that counts as presenting groundbreaking research as described. You’re joking, right?

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  104. A Fat Mouse

    A non-mouse,
    I am as perplexed as Pendaran. Where is all this ground breaking research? Please list just seven papers published in the last five years that are ground breaking by people who have only had their Ph.D.s for less than three years. I am at a different stage in my career. I will tell you, the peers of mine that have had very successful careers did not do any ground breaking research in the early part of their careers. Much of their research is quiet fine, but hardly distinguished. And most of them have earned the position they have in the field.

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  105. Marcus Arvan

    Wittgenstein didn’t get hired until well after he published the Tractatus and it made a huge impact in the discipline. Similarly, Einstein had to actually publish the special theory of relativity and make an impact before anyone would give him a job.
    I have seen far, far too many hires at R1’s fail to get tenure to believe committees are reliable at selecting for groundbreaking research. In fact, I’ve known some personally: candidates hired with few or no publications…who then went on to publish very little and get denied tenure. Groundbreaking ideas aren’t enough. To be successful, a person must have the ability to publish them. And what’s the best evidence of that? Demonstrable evidence publishing.
    As I have pointed out at this blog before, my spouse is a PHD researcher in a top-5 program in Industrial Organizational Psychology. One of the most robust findings in her field—confirmed hundreds of times over five decades across different job markets—is that (A) hiring committees always think they have a talent “divining rod”, but (B) they don’t: far and away, the best predictor of future success is one’s past record of actual accomplishment.
    There was even a study on this in academia just a year or two ago, where an algorithm crunching #’s of publications at time of hire better predicted tenure than the decisions of hiring committees.
    There was a book and movie based on this research a few years ago called “Moneyball.” Watch it. In professional baseball, for decades scouts selected prospects based on their “talent.” They routinely labeled people “can’t miss” prospects on the basis of their “groundbreaking abilities.” Alas, despite being sure they could spot talent, all too often the players they selected went on to fail. Then someone said, “Hmm..I wonder what would happen if we actually selected players on the basis of their objective accomplishments: walks, hits, runs scored.” Turns out, just as the decades of above research indicate, this person was right. At the time, the scouts protested vehemently, saying algorithms couldn’t do better than the decades of expertise they had developed as scouts. The problem is, the algorithms showed them wrong. Now every MLB team uses the moneyball method.
    This is not just one case. These kinds of results have been replicated across a wide variety of industries. It is hubris for academics to think we are the sole exception–that we and we alone are the reliable ones at selecting for expertise. Wonder why so many candidates at R1’s are denied tenure? The science suggests the answer is because, all too often, people are hired on the basis of a method akin to reading tea leaves.

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  106. Amanda

    I can buy the idea that many philosophers at top places believe what non-mouse says. This was the idea I expressed before when talking to my professor in grad school. Whether or not you agree with it, a point is being made that some of these professors do think they hire by quality when hiring someone without many publications but with what others judge important work in the pipe line.
    As for what I personally think, I do think A LOT of work published in top journals is boring and not ground-breaking. So that gives me some sympathies to the idea. But here is where I lose all sympathy. If it were true that philosophers at top departments really just wanted the best work, they would at least occasionally hire someone from a non-top department that had this potential. I can buy that people from top places are more likely to have ground breaking work. But I cannot buy that this is true 99.5% of the time. And that is the rate at which those without great publications are hired from top departments. If it was 80 or even 90 percent from top departments then maybe it is fair. But 99.5% suggests prestige bias beyond any plausible rate which reflects quality.

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  107. A sociological perspective

    Adding to Marcus’ thoughts …
    sociologists of science have noted that the best predictor that a scientist or scholar will publish a SECOND paper after publishing one paper is that she has published one. And the best predictor that one will publish a third paper is that one has published two papers.

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  108. Marcus Arvan

    I would also add that there is an internal tension in the perspective being espoused.
    The view is something like this:
    (1) The top journals are full of mediocre stuff that isn’t very groundbreaking.
    (2) Top departments routinely seek to hire people doing groundbreaking work.
    Here’s the tension: if departments are reliable at hiring people doing groundbreaking work, why are the journals so full of work that isn’t groundbreaking?

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  109. Pendaran Roberts

    “The view is something like this:
    (1) The top journals are full of mediocre stuff that isn’t very groundbreaking.
    (2) Top departments routinely seek to hire people doing groundbreaking work.
    Here’s the tension: if departments are reliable at hiring people doing groundbreaking work, why are the journals so full of work that isn’t groundbreaking?”
    That’s a good point. There are other tensions too. Here’s one. If top journals are so full of mediocre work, why don’t these top departments who are presumably so reliable at hiring groundbreaking researchers simply start new journals where decisions are made entirely in-house? Or, in other words, if peer review is worse at determining good research than in-house committees at top R1 schools, why don’t we replace peer-review with in-house committees from R1 schools? My only worry is that someone will in fact want to bite this bullet. haha!

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  110. A sociological perspective

    Pendaran,
    Apparently, The Journal of Philosophy was, for a long time, run in house by the Columbia University Philosophy Department. And my understanding is that Philosophical Review was more or less run out of Cornell.

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  111. A Non-Mouse

    I have to get back to work. So, unfortunately, I can’t get to all the comments directed at mine. I’ll be brief.
    All the complaints I’ve seen recently, about hiring for groundbreaking work seem to involve confusions.
    1. Not groundbreaking work is not the same as mediocre, as some have suggested.
    2. Some seem to think that groundbreaking work is ubiquitous, or should be. It’s not, and this is because it is not at all easy to do (I’d bet).
    3. Nobody (as far as I know) has suggested that R1s reliably hire people doing groundbreaking work (despite their attempts).
    4. If there has not been much groundbreaking work published recently, and if nobody doing groundbreaking work has been hired at R1s, it is because it is not ubiquitous.

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  112. A Dud

    Non-Mouse
    By “not ubiquitous” you mean as rare as hens’ teeth. In that case, it is absurd for departments, even the best, to use it as a criterion for hiring. Why not just hire some dud, like the rest of us, who have a number of well placed publications.

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  113. Marcus Arvan

    A Non-Mouse: I didn’t mean to suggest that groundbreaking work is ubiquitous. I did mean to suggest that one evidently common way of trying to predict groundbreaking work–judging candidates by their writing samples and/or letters of recommendation rather than by their publication record–is inductively likely to be a terrible method, given a wealth of science on the subject.
    Here’s one case-study from a different academic field (I don’t think it’s consistent with this blog’s mission to single out philosophers who might be reading the blog):
    A couple of years ago, an R1 department had two finalists. One was from a #1 program with no publications. The other was from a lower-ranked program with lots of highly-ranked publications. The department chose the former candidate on the basis of his writing sample, letters, pedigree, and job-talk (which was supposedly “mind-blowing”)–even though the latter candidate had, in every objective sense, a far better CV. The committee judged the latter candidate’s publications as “just okay”, even though they appeared in top journals.
    Fast-forward several years. First dude has still published nothing. The second candidate (the one not hired) has gone on to continue publishing in top-ranked journals, and is now an emerging leader in her field. Is this just a one-off error? No. The department in question has done the same thing in their last four hires, none of whom got tenure. In each case, they convinced themselves the person they hired was a genius…and what they ended up getting was exactly what the person’s CV suggested to begin with: someone with no demonstrable ability to publish their supposedly “groundbreaking” ideas. In retrospect, many in the department in question think they made a mistake. And yet they chose the person anyway. Why? Because their writing sample was “groundbreaking”, their grad advisor from a top program said they were brilliant, and they gave an impressive sounding job-talk. What they didn’t do–and still haven’t done–is actually publish anything.
    Word is there is a number of departments in philosophy who haven’t tenured their last X-number of junior hires. Could this possibly be because hiring committees are going about things the wrong way? The problem with trying to judge whether someone is the “next Rawls” (or whomever) on the basis of unpublished work is that there are so many possible confounds. Perhaps you just think their writing sample is groundbreaking because in the back of your mind you know they come from Harvard. Or perhaps that one paper really is brilliant but it’s the only groundbreaking idea they’ll ever have (perhaps because they’ve been working face-to-face with Parfit the last five years). Or perhaps you think it’s groundbreaking but people in their field think the opposite. I don’t mean to say that these biases are always at work–but the problem is that they may be at work, and this is why (or so I-O psychology systematically demonstrates) objective measures are better predictors.
    The thing about publishing is that one has to convince anonymous reviewers, editors, and readers that one has a groundbreaking idea–not just five search committee members who know what program you’re from and who your advisor is.

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  114. flux

    I think talk of a prestige “bias” may be misleading, especially in a discussion about predicting future success (publishing, tenure, etc).
    The word ‘bias’ in this context suggests a kind of irrational heuristic: one may think that being from a prestigious department is a good predictor of future publications, but, the critics say, this is a mere bias; a better predictor of future success is publication record (regardless of prestige of pedigree).
    But I think this misses the point: those who hire for prestige don’t do that because (they think) prestige predicts something else (in this case, publications). They hire for prestige because they want the prestige. They just want it to say on their department website that their faculty came from Harvard and studied under Kant himself. I don’t think they care about whether the research will or won’t be groundbreaking, and I don’t think they care about predicting who will eventually have the most publications. They just want luggage that says ‘Gucci’ on it, and a shirt that says ‘Armani’ on it.
    Is one more likely to have an objectively better or more successful vacation with Gucci luggage? The question is misguided. Some people just want to be seen with a fashionable bag, simply because of the status it connotes. So, sure, other bags might carry more stuff, and might objectively be “better” bags. But Gucci is Gucci, and those top departments wouldn’t be caught dead in anything else…

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  115. Amanda

    We are confusing two points here:
    (1) Whether search committee members think they are hiring by quality when they hire people from top departments with unproven records.
    (2) Whether the above practice mentioned in (1) is either justified or effective.
    As far as I can tell non-mouse was not suggesting (2) but only (1). And I think there is a good case for (1). I also think it is possible for a search committee member to think lots of work in top journals is boring and yet still hire on the basis of a great record. Why? Because not all work in top journals is boring. Some is great. And the job market is so over flooded with talent that one can ignore a lot of candidates with impressive but boring records while still hiring someone they believe is exciting but also has a great publishing record. It is a buyer’s market. Given that, I find it hard to justify hiring someone without a proven record.

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  116. Amanda

    flux I think you are right. At least, a lot of the time I think that is what it is about. But this isn’t all of the time. And even when it is about the label, I think a lot of professors lie to themselves and try to convince themselves they are hiring for “real” reasons related to merit. (I think the way we use bias has changed from the original meaning of the word.)

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  117. Trust the Process

    I agree with Marcus and others that hiring methods at the tippy-top are akin to reading tea leaves, and also that there is often a delusion that the tippy-top are the best at doing this (just gossip with someone on a tippy-top search committee). I’d only add that while some in this sphere do want to hire the best qualified, others really don’t – they want to swing for the fences, hoping for the next Wittgenstein. And if they miss, well, they expected that, and there’s no pressure to tenure the hire. Look at the tenure rates at places like Columbia or Yale et al – often getting hired there is basically getting a six-year VAP, and those hired often have some sense of this.
    There is also the thing that since our profession is status obsessed (even when we pretend we aren’t) getting that top gig often really transforms the person, creating reinforcing cycles of prestige. Often someone who is mediocre will get touted as doing the ground-breaking research, when someone at a less prestigious place is doing similar and better and much less recognized work. (I’ve seen this from both sides of the thing.) (But, in my pessimistic view, there is nothing to be done about this, because philosophers inside and outside of the tippy-top are not good at recognizing quality (unless the signal is long-lasting or crazy-strong or both): hell, the above claims are based on my assessments, which may be way off, although I rate them highly.)

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  118. A Non-Mouse

    Marcus: I appreciate the “case study.” But I am far from impressed by it. This is why. I agree, it might be that when departments hire for potential for groundbreaking (GB) work, they are likely not to end up with someone who publishes much. I agree, it might be that when this occurs, they passed on someone who would’ve published a lot of great work. Perhaps it happens even more than we think, and even more than the evidence shows. But this does not show that those departments should not hire for potential for GB work.
    You and others have been offering support for the claim that departments should not hire for potential GB work. It’s not clear that any of the criticisms work. Your latest criticism would clearly work if we had a clear idea of their reason(s) for hiring for potential GB work, and the reason were simply that they want someone who publishes a lot of great work. I take it, their reason(s) is not simply this.
    In fact, publishing a lot of great (but not GB) work might be a good predictor of producing less than GB work. In fact, statistically, we should expect precisely this. After all, GB work is very rare, and most people publishing great (but not GB) work have not published GB work. So, assuming that R1s really do want someone who promises to produce GB work, how do they get what they want?
    Statistically, given the above, maybe the candidate most likely to do GB work is not the candidate who has published lots of great (but not GB) work. Perhaps it is the candidate whose first project promises to be groundbreaking, but who has published nothing. After all, nothing tells us this person will not publish GB work, and something tells us that this person has potential to publish GB work. Whereas, with respect to the other person, statistically, they are likely not to produce GB work.
    Again, I’m not suggesting that this is what should be going on. This is simply a speculative suggestion for what best explains the facts.

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  119. A Non-Mouse

    Amanda: yes, I was not suggesting (2). Thanks for the charitable reading! And I agree it may be hard to justify hiring someone without a proven record. But as I suggest in my last comment, there is a case to be made.

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  120. Anonymous

    I’ve talked to faculty at several top departments about this issue. Many of them feel that they are in a better epistemic position to judge the quality of someone’s research program than a random, unidentified journal reviewer. They’re reading the work themselves; why should they be swayed just because a better paper hasn’t appeared in a journal and a worse one has? Furthermore, as has been said several times already, what makes for one good journal article is something entirely different than what makes for an impressive research program or general body of work (even if it’s just a potential body of work at the moment it’s being vetted). And finally, many of these candidates are being hired out of graduate school, giving them less time to publish. Even if you argue, “well, what about all the candidates at lower-ranked schools who published 10 articles by their 5th year of graduate school”, if what’s most relevant is developing an original body of work, focusing on publishing and other miscellaneous CV-fillers (tons of conferences, teaching, and other things that often seem “lacking” in who’s being hired) might arguably detract from that goal, insofar as they might be distractions for some from the task of thinking uninterruptedly about one’s dissertation and developing one’s ideas.

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  121. Marcus Arvan

    A Non-Mouse: fair enough. I guess I am just unconvinced. Historically speaking, the next Wittgenstein (or Einstein or whomever) hasn’t emerged from departments playing the Next-Genius Slot-Machine. They’ve emerged from actually publishing the Tractatus, special theory of relativity, etc. In other words, I believe truly groundbreaking work isn’t discovered by gambling on job candidates who haven’t published anything. Far more often than not, it’s discovered by the groundbreaking work making itself known by the person who published it.

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  122. A Non-Mouse

    I understand why you say this, Marcus. And I don’t blame you.

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  123. Reply

    One thing anonymous gets right is that some people on the market do not realize that after you have published a few things, you should switch your strategy and try to publish in higher ranked journals. So polish your stuff, and produce better work. In my field, there are a few excessive publishers, and their papers are often quite unfinished or under developed. They could benefit from publishing less, and slower.

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  124. Pendaran Roberts

    “Is one more likely to have an objectively better or more successful vacation with Gucci luggage? The question is misguided. Some people just want to be seen with a fashionable bag, simply because of the status it connotes. So, sure, other bags might carry more stuff, and might objectively be “better” bags. But Gucci is Gucci, and those top departments wouldn’t be caught dead in anything else…”
    Yup, I agree. This is prestige bias. It’s preferring a bag with Gucci written on it to a better bag with a less prestigious name written on it.
    “I’ve talked to faculty at several top departments about this issue. Many of them feel that they are in a better epistemic position to judge the quality of someone’s research program than a random, unidentified journal reviewer.”
    Sure they think that. But is there any evidence of this? Also, if they really do believe this, then why do they require publications in blind, peer reviewed journals? If they think they’re better at identifying good research than the blind peer review system, why don’t they start new journals reviewed in-house by them? Then they can make the requirement for tenure publishing with them.
    “In fact, publishing a lot of great (but not GB) work might be a good predictor of producing less than GB work. In fact, statistically, we should expect precisely this. After all, GB work is very rare, and most people publishing great (but not GB) work have not published GB work.”
    But this assumes that the hiring committee can read someone’s publications and determine that none of them are GB. I very much doubt the committee can determine this. Many times throughout history GB work has been widely ridiculed until eventually becoming accepted after years and years. Most likely, actual GB work would be read by the committee and at least some members would say, ‘this is nonsense, x showed back in xxxx that it was false’ or something like that. Real GB work is contentious and offensive; it rocks the boat, and it makes people uncomfortable.
    “In France, Einstein was largely ignored until he visited in 1910. In the U.S., a few understood it, but, in general, relativity was ridiculed as “totally impractical and absurd.” In Britain, his theories met with resistance, because relativity was seen as a direct challenge to the widely accepted theory of ether.”
    https://daily.jstor.org/why-no-one-believed-einstein/

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  125. Marcus Arvan

    Pendaran:
    “He is a confusionist. The Einstein theory is a fallacy. The theory that the ‘ether’ does not exist, and that gravity is not a force but a property of space, can only be described as a crazy vagary, a disgrace to our age.”
    – Thomas Jefferson Jackson (University of Chicago, Astronomy)
    “[Relativity] is repugnant to commonsense.”
    – Sir Oliver Lodge (Physics, Birmingham University)
    “The supposed astronomical proofs of [Einstein]’s theory, as cited and claimed by Einstein, don’t exist.”
    – Charles Lane Poor (Columbia University, Astronomy)
    “Perhaps Einstein has made the greatest achievement in human thought, but no one has yet succeeded in stating in clear language what the theory of Einstein really is.”
    – Joseph Thomson (Cambridge University, 1906 Nobel Prize Winner in Physics)
    “London-born physicist, Oliver Heaviside, another Nobel Prize winner…was one of the few who seemed to understand relativity–and he denounced it as drivel.”
    -Einstein: A Life (Bryan 1996: p. 101)
    “Dr. Arthur Lynch lumped him with history’s fakes…Lynch produced an impressive list of European scientists who…turned thumbs down on Einstein’s theory: Henry Poincare, mathematician Gaston Darboux, Pail Painleve, Le Roux, Curbastro Ricci, Tullio Levi-Civita, and Emile Picard…For the most part Einstein stood above the battle, declining to cross swords with either critics or crackpots. Nevertheless, he was disappointed that his early mentor, Ernst Mach, did not support him. He also hoped in vain for approval by Albert Michaelson. Still, he was confident he was right.”
    – Einstein: A Life (Thomas Bryan 1996: p. 104)
    Oh, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason?
    “The Critique of Pure Reason has exerted an enduring influence on western philosophy.[79] However, the Critique received little attention when it was first published. There were no reviews in 1781. According to Frederick C. Beiser, who compares the initial lack of response to the book to the way in which Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1738) fell “still born from the press”, Kant knew that “he could not expect to hear from anyone qualified to appraise” it, and initially heard only complaints about its “unintelligibility and obscurity.” Johann Friedrich Schultz wrote that the public saw the Critique as “a sealed book” consisting in nothing but “hieroglyphics”. However, in 1782, the first review of the Critique appeared in the Zugaben zu den Göttinger gelehrte Anzeigen. The review, which denied that there is any distinction between Kant’s idealism and that of Berkeley, was published anonymously, and became notorious…The review was denounced by Kant, but defended by Kant’s empiricist critics…
    Kant believed that this anonymous review of the Critique was biased and that it deliberately misunderstood his views. He devoted an appendix of the Prolegomena to refuting the review, accusing its author of failing to understand or even address the main issue addressed in the Critique, the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments, and insisting on the distinction between transcendental idealism and the idealism of Berkeley…Following the controversy…there were no more reviews in 1782 except for a brief notice. The work received greater attention only in 1784.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique_of_Pure_Reason#Reception )
    Ha.

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  126. Pendaran Roberts

    Thanks Marcus. I couldn’t be bothered to do that much research but it is as I expected. GB work is seldom recognized at first and many are hostile towards it. So, why do these committees think they have the magic scope for detecting it?
    (I actually think Einstein’s relativity is incoherent nonsense. Haha! It makes no sense to talk of time being relative. So, nice to see many thought so too back in the day. It’s really too bad in my opinion that it caught on. If I was on a committee inspecting Einstein’s writing sample i’d certainly fail to recognize that he would end up famous.)

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  127. Marcus Arvan

    “I actually think Einstein’s relativity is incoherent nonsense. Haha! It makes no sense to talk of time being relative.”
    Lol. You do know it’s been experimentally verified, right?

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  128. A Non-Mouse

    Pendaran and Marcus: I agree that real GB work very often is regarded as nonsense at first. So maybe we should expect that recently published work is not real GB work. In that case, the person who has no publications, but has a project that promises to be GB, is more likely to produce GB work.
    Here is an objection: committees are not in a good position to determine real GB work because they would believe the work to be nonsense if it is real GB. Or as Pendaran has already put it: at least some of the members would say “this is nonsense.”
    Here is the reply: this is not clearly correct. Often departments are partisan. They favor P rather than not P. So, if the project being evaluated for its GB-promise is for P, then they will be amiable. On the other hand, if the work is for not P, they won’t. But someone whose work is for P is likely not applying for a job at a department that favors not P. Especially if the work is real GB work since their advisor would know that it is going to be regarded as garbage by such a department.

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  129. Pendaran Roberts

    ‘You do know it’s been experimentally verified, right?‘
    This is a totally different debate that would take this thread way off topic. Haha! I mentioned it to show that even I don’t think I can spot what will be famous. But of course no I don’t think it’s been verified. I don’t think it’s even verifiable.

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  130. Pendaran Roberts

    But to continue my point, Marcus’ reaction to my comment about relativity is the exact kid of reaction most GB work that challenges current orthodoxy is going to get. Many will just laugh at you. So, I don’t see how hiring committees think they are capable of selected based on this, and honestly I don’t think they want GB research anyway. That’s way too contentious and rocks the boat way too much.

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  131. Marcus Arvan

    Pendaran: touché! 😉

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  132. Pendaran Roberts

    Thanks Marcus!
    Wanted to say that I think you have a fantastic website here! I have fun posting and debating with you and others.

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  133. Trust the Process

    As someone who published a load, and in very good places, citations through the roof, and who also had lots of other markers of quality on the CV back on the market, and who came from a non-fancy place, and who struggled on the job market for years and years, and (due to friendships and gossip-connections with many people) who had inside info about how searches went down at various fancy places, and who watched top departments systematically bungle hires and overlook people I rated so much higher than whoever was hot at the moment, I’ve long wondered what exactly was/is going on.
    The simplest and cleanest explanation is two-step. First step, explanation of the fact that you have almost zero chance of moving up significantly (to a top R1 or a top SLAC) if you are non-fancy: people at the top want someone inculcated into their bubble-system of social and professional norms, and they do not trust people from outside the bubble (this also explains the snobbery expressed towards successful faculty at non-fancy schools being mentioned at the ‘philosophy is flat’ discussion going on at daily nous). There is a real bubble, and it comes along with assumptions and expectations and a whole system of invites and workshops and students-of-X and friends-of-Y and the way you talk and with whom you talk and how you assess quality and knowing-what-it’s-like to be so fancy and being-on-the-inside of the ego-gossip-competition culture and lots of other things. Fancy places are uncomfortable with non-fancy people, and this invisible barrier is incredibly strong. So the non-fancy usually get cut early, and sometimes late, but very rarely make it all the way through. When they do there is always (of course) a very atypical (i.e., not quality-related) reason they were able to do so, and this reason weighed very heavily on the deciders.
    Second step, explanation of what happens when the fancy assess the fancy: they aren’t great at it, though they believe they are (witness all the terrible justifications constantly given for loving prestige so much, and also witness how gossip-opinion always coalesces around a couple ‘rising stars’ every year – remember Leiter’s old posts making this explicit?! – which would be hilarious if it weren’t so pathetic… okay it’s both), and the situation is not too different from other bubbles (speculation about the Oscars, scouts ranking the NBA draft classes). But it is bad for those involved at this stage as well – folks at school #1 worry about whether they are student #1 or #5, folks at school #6 worry that they are not top-5, and so on and so on. The non-fancy complain, but the fancy are just as worried, the vast majority are underemployed if employed, and then have to live with the same kind of non-fancy thing where they feel like the fancy look down on them because they didn’t get a fancy-enough job.
    Philosophy is actually great, and full of really great people, and many/most fancy-place folks are great, but the culture at the top has flaws.

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  134. Pendaran Roberts

    “…and many/most fancy-place folks are great, but the culture at the top has flaws.”
    I wonder if this makes sense. If the culture is so seriously flawed can the people who make up that culture be so great?

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  135. Trust the Process

    Would you extend this judgment to, e.g., people living in the US, or in Britain, Pendaran? (Maybe your view of how a culture is constituted attributes an implausibly massive role to individual agency.)

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  136. Pendaran Roberts

    Yes, actually I would.
    Maybe my view is implausible, maybe it isn’t. I just wondered out loud whether what you said made sense. I’m not convinced it does.
    I don’t have time for a long post right now though.

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  137. Trust the Process

    haha okay

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  138. Taco Tuesday

    I’ll just say this. I don’t have a profile that lends itself to meaningful comparisons (won’t say more to preserve anonymity), which is all the more reason to take my non-story with a grain of salt. I finally managed to get ONE offer. For a great job at a SLAC. I could probably give you a story of what worked, but it’d be deceptive. I can’t honestly give you a story of why among 9 interviews this year I was lucky to get a flyout (or unlucky to get only one, being told I was on the fence for a couple others). I could tell you why I think I was a good match and what I did well, but it wouldn’t tell you what I did better than others or what I think I didn’t do well. It wouldn’t tell you what imperceptible, uncontrollable factors made me stand out at this particular match but not others. Because I’m not a script, and some days I do well, some days I don’t. Because applications and schools are not a script either.
    It only takes one, and that’s what it took for me. But for the most part I consider myself lucky. Desert is overrated and a fraught concept. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be blessed with your accomplishments or pissed about your failures. But you shouldn’t think it has too much to do with desert.
    I’ll also say this. Ever since I got the offer I’ve been feeling terrible. For years I thought it’d be a blast. And now I wish I had a good story to tell myself. But I don’t believe it. And in some way that’s liberating, even though I feel terrible. Getting a job is fantastic news. But I wish I believed it was the predictable outcome of my work. It’s fantastic news, but failing a lot doesn’t exactly make you confident in your deserving a job, even when you do get a job. And that’s terrible even though it’s fantastic. It’s a very messy process. In many ways it’s like sausage.

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  139. Trust the Process

    Taco Tuesday that makes a lot of sense and I had a similar thing with my one offer and my feelings afterward.

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  140. Not Deserving

    Taco Tueday and Trust the Process:
    Don’t feel terrible! If desert is a fraught concept surely so too is its contrary; outcomes like yours (and mine) are if (for that sort of reason) not deserved, then not undeserved either!

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  141. Chris

    Well, I see I managed to convince virtually no one that there is even a chance that people trying to select for positive, ground breaking projects might select someone with fewer publications over someone with many. At least, virtually no chance that they’ll do it well.
    Look: I agree there’s lots of bias. And like Marcus I can find anecdotes to support my claim – there are people who came out with no publications but fancy pedigree who are now doing great as far as publishing. But of course there’s the reverse. As others have noted, many programs are happy to “swing for the fences” and deny tenure if the research program doesn’t pan out.
    Maybe there problem here is that the term “ground breaking” is too unclear. Let me try again.
    One kind of ground breaking is simply having a positive account that addresses some question, rather than criticizing other people’s positive accounts.
    You can publish – even in top journals – papers that are largely negative or critical. Many philosophers whole careers are full of such papers. Nothing wrong with that.
    But: many programs are looking for a positive project – they’re not necessarily looking for the next Einstein or Wittgenstein (though maybe some are!). They just want someone who is developing a positive theory of X rather than simply criticizing other’s theories of X.
    That is part of what I had in mind by “ground breaking”. You CAN find such papers – even by junior scholars – in the journals. But many (most?) papers – even in top journals – are not of this sort.
    Of course, much of the time, promising young scholars DO publish their positive proposals – sometimes even before finishing the PhD. And fancy schools do hire such people. But of course sometimes it takes a year or two after the PhD (in the old days, it usually did) to publish their positive theories.
    There’s more to say, too – many philosophers are convinced large parts of the field are not promising research programs. Imagine that you’re an atheist and most of the work on say, ethics, approaches the issues from a theological point of view (or imagine the reverse if you’re a theist). Should you hire the person who you think is working in a flawed research program, just because they have more publications?
    Feel free to substitute your own examples.
    of course, you might protest – most philosophers at elite institutions aren’t in an epistemic position to know that so many of these other research programs are degenerating, or rest on flawed foundations. Perhaps so. But at least you can see why people might think this.
    Some philosophers do think you should hire the person with the most publications, regardless of whether you think their views are on the right track. But I think its actually good that we have a mix of such people who hire (or a mix of hiring departments) – some think you just go for the person with the longest c.v., while other think you go for the person who you think is on a promising line – even if that person isn’t the one with the longest c.v.)
    At any rate, I think the point about a positive – rather than merely negative – research proposal is independent of whether you think people should be able to hire those who they think are on the right track. (See David Lewis’ paper on hiring for a discussion of whether one should instead try to hire those who disagree).

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  142. Amanda

    The problem I have with your argument Chris, is that the market is so flooded with talent that ANY criteria a search committee prefers, ground breaking positive research or whatever, there is enough options of ppl with publications to hire someone with SOME established record. No reason to do otherwise with the optiobs

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  143. Trust the Process

    I have some sympathy with Amanda’s point here. But I doubt anyone thinks longest CV=most deserving of any particular job. Chris, I don’t disagree that it’s possible to favor someone with less/no publications because their research project looks so great. Whether that’s reasonable in any case is, in my experience, always based on specifics. I’m usually mystified by search committee decisions at elite places, and even by the gossip-consensus about who’s cool in any given year. But sometimes, sure, I think: that person looks/is amazing, and I’d sure hire them, in spite of far less pubs than many others.
    In a sense, I don’t know what we’re talking about here. I guess some are trying to shift profession norms in certain ways. But each search is its own thing. I doubt the shifting-norm efforts will be effective, or will come near the intended aim, whatever it is.

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  144. Anonymous

    Is it that surprising that an audience of disgruntled job market candidates won’t easily be convinced that the job search decisions of top departments might be justified? I’m not sure that the fact that this thesis isn’t playing well in this context is good evidence in favor of discounting it.

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  145. Amanda

    Anonymous that is an ad hominem and not relevant. Whether or not the arguments are good ones have nothing to do with how “disgruntled” people are or are not. And you, of course, could say something similar about those who have been successful (it is no surprise those who have jobs at r1s are convinced….)
    Another issue: I never said anything about the longest CV. I do think it makes sense to hire someone with less publications over someone with more, if the few published papers show particular promise for the future. What does not make sense is hiring someone with NO or maybe 1 publication, given the deep job market and sheer number of candidates who have proven something.

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  146. Chris

    I also have some sympathy with your point, Amanda. I do think, however, that “No reason to do otherwise” is a bit too strong. I think it should happen less often in this market, and i think it does. I don’t expect we’ll come to agree about this in this forum.

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  147. A Non-Mouse

    Amanda: you seem to be suggesting that hiring someone without publications is not (or cannot be) justified in the current market. But you haven’t offered a principled route toward that conclusion. What you suggest is that it can be justified for a candidate with few (say, 2 or 3) pubs to be hired over a candidate with more pubs if those pubs show particular promise. But it’s not clear why pubs are more valuable than unpublished manuscripts. So, you might as well agree (with me) that hiring someone with 1 or fewer pubs over a candidate with many pubs is sometimes justified.
    You might say: at least someone with 2 or more pubs has (as you put it above) “SOME established record,” while someone with less has no such record. But this is not clearly true, unless you mean “established record of publishing.” But if you do, then you are simply presupposing that pubs are more valuable than unpublished manuscripts.
    If the presupposition seemed true, there would be no problem. But it doesn’t seem true. An unpublished manuscript might be better than any candidate’s published paper. And a set of such manuscripts might be better than any set of papers published by a candidate. If so, then this person’s manuscripts might be more valuable than any candidate’s pubs. Thus, the presupposition seems false.
    You might say: yes, but the person with pubs has shown that blind reviewers value their work, while the person with unpublished manuscripts has not. And, you might continue, this makes the former more valuable. But this certainly is not true, since even mediocre work that has undergone blind review is sometimes accepted by top journals. So we should not be confident that the value added by blind review is great. This leaves it open whether the unpublished manuscripts might be of such a greater value than another candidates pubs that hiring the candidate with 1 or fewer pubs over the candidate with many pubs is justified.

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  148. Philosophy 101

    A Non-Mouse, regarding the last paragraph of your comment:
    Since you are not willing to identify specific examples non-anonymously and put your credibility on the line, as far as I am concerned the amount of evidence you have provided for you factual premise is nil. Until you provide some evidence of your own expertise, for all I know you have no clue at all about what counts as ‘mediocre work’ and what doesn’t.
    But even if your factual premise is true, it is clearly fallacious to infer that anonymously reviewed articles shouldn’t count more than unpublished manuscripts for the purposes of hiring and promotion. It’s also true that a few people who have taught courses turn out to be extremely bad at it. But obviously, it doesn’t follow that hiring and promotion committees shouldn’t count actually teaching a course more than merely designing a syllabus for a course you may or may not actually put through the gauntlet.
    (Or to put the point more simply: even if some smokers don’t get cancer, it still matters a ton that the medical profession has concluded that smoking causes cancer.)

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  149. A Non-Mouse

    Philosophy 101: About your first point, for the purposes of the point I’m making, it doesn’t matter at all whether I know anything about what counts as mediocre work. All that matters is that what I say is true. And it is true.
    About the point about fallacious inference, I completely agree. Fortunately, I did not make any such fallacious inference. What I say is that blind review doesn’t make pubs more valuable, and I then go on to support what I say with the observation that mediocre papers have undergone blind review and been published. I did not infer that pubs shouldn’t count as more than unpublished manuscripts. There is a significant difference between what I said and what you took me to say.

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  150. Philosophy 101

    A Non-Mouse,
    I had charitably interpreted you as making a contribution relevant to the present discussion — namely, about whether a committee ought to count published vs. unpublished work as more valuable for the purposes of hiring or promotion — rather than uncharitably interpreting you as meandering into some off-topic discussion about whether one is somehow ‘really/intrinsically’ more valuable (whatever that would mean).
    I stand corrected.

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  151. Amanda

    The reason why I think publications are more valuable, is that any single philosopher judging a person’s work, or a single search committee, is likely to be plagued by all sorts of biases. Peer review shows that at least some other people agree the work is valuable. This protects against letting nothing other than one’s own biased (or potentially biased) opinions count for the entire hiring decision.

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  152. A Non-Mouse

    Philosophy 101: If you understood the relevant part of my comment to be off-topic, then you weren’t reading carefully, or you don’t understand what it is to respond to objections before they arise. I guess is that it is the former.
    Amanda: Your reason is certainly understandable. However, reviewers have biases too. I suspect that this is why work that is less than stellar sometimes gets published at top journals.

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  153. Random job market person.

    One point about the value of publications: it doesn’t just show that some random referee somewhere thought the paper was worth publishing. It shows that the paper was considered worth publishing by one or more experts in the area who were selected by an experienced editor, that the paper was able to withstand the gauntlet of R&R objections, and that the author and referees were able to make a strong enough case to an editor (somebody who reads countless similar referee reports) that the paper is more worthy of being published than 95% (or whatever) of the other papers submitted to the journal. Is this process fallible? Yes, crap papers do get published, and many great papers go a long time without being published. But it is still pretty good evidence of quality.

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  154. Philosophy 101

    A Non-Mouse: Yes, you are completely correct that I didn’t read you carefully enough. I charitably interpreted you as objecting to a position that people were actually defending in this thread. Instead, I should have read you as propping up and then knocking down a straw man. My bad!

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  155. Amanda

    I agree that bad papers get published and reviewers have their biases. However, the more people that approve of a paper, the greater the chance that it is not just biases but real quality. Hence if ONLY a search committee approves of a paper, that is less evidence that the paper is truly of great quality than if a search committee AND reviewers approve of the paper. So if a committee has a choice between two candidates they like, say, one with publications and one without, there is greater evidence that the former is a better candidate. Given these two choices, it makes sense to choose the candidate with more evidence that they do quality work. The process is still fallible. However it seems one should makes choices that give one the best odds of success.

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  156. A Non-Mouse

    Amanda: The point about more evidence is a good one, as long as it’s qualified. As the number of people who judge a paper as being of a high quality increases, the number of pieces of evidence that a paper is of a high quality increases. So, the evidence of quality is always greater (in one sense) when there are more judgments of quality.
    But, as others have mentioned previously, the people on committees at top places likely believe that their judgments of quality are to be given greater weight than those of most reviewers (et. al.) working for most journals. (And this belief is likely justified.) For these reasons, the evidence of quality is not always greater (in another sense) when there are more judgments of quality.
    The question is now this: are committees ever justified in believing that the evidence of quality of unpublished manuscripts is greater than the evidence of quality of pubs? Surely they sometimes are. Now consider two candidates, A and B. A has 1 or fewer pubs, but has manuscripts that the committee judges to be of a very high quality. B has many pubs, and the committee judges B’s writing sample to be of a lower quality. Can the committee be justified in hiring A over B? It seems to me that the answer is obviously “yes.” Apparently, then, hiring a candidate with high quality manuscripts (but no pubs) over a candidate with many pubs is sometimes justified. My guess is that this may happen more frequently than many suppose.

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  157. Amanda

    A Non-Mouse, your point would be true if it was ever the case that a search committee just had the two candidates you mention. But I doubt this. Hundreds of people apply to any decent research job. So I find it hard to believe there is ever a case where the best two options come down to the situation you mention. And yes, I suspect that given the job market we have, it is hard to imagine a case where a search committee does not have a candidate that they BOTH deem as qualified and has at least a few publications.

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  158. A Non-Mouse

    Amanda: I don’t find it hard to believe that that the two best options might be as I’ve described. I’m not sure why you do. I suspect that it’s because you have a bias toward valuing pubs. But I of course can’t be sure, nor wish to accuse you of being biased. I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree.

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