I had a really enlightening conversation with a friend yesterday that had some interesting parallels to a conversation I had with another friend several weeks ago. Both friends are philosophers, both work at different universities, both work at 'teaching schools' (i.e. small liberal-arts colleges), and both have served on search committees.
One interesting parallel between my two friends concerns their graduate programs. One of them received their PhD from an Leiter 'unranked' school, the other from a fairly well-ranked (but not 'Leiterific') school. The friend from the unranked school noted that their unranked program has a far higher TT job-placement rate than many Leiter-ranked schools (as reported in Jennings et al's 2015 placement report). This friend speculated that this is because their grad program doesn't try to compete for research jobs. Their PhD program didn't obsess over things like journal rankings (they said this is something that wasn't even talked about). Instead, while their program cares about research, they focus primarily on preparing their graduates for teaching jobs–getting their grad students a lot of solo-teaching opportunities, developing their pegagogy, and so on. Further, this friend remarked to me that this really stood out to them as a search committee member. The person noted that many applicants present as a 'terrible fit' for a job a teaching school like theirs (I'll return to some reasons why below).
That's my first friend. My second friend (the one from the Leiter-ranked PhD program) told me several weeks ago that about a decade ago, their program changed placement directors due to problems placing job-candidates. This person told me that the new placement director changed their program's emphasis. The new placement director's maxim is evidently something like this, "We don't shoot for those jobs [R1 jobs]. We know we can't compete against Harvard, Princeton, and NYU for them. So, we prepare our graduates for jobs they can actually expect to get: jobs at teaching schools" Evidently, this program–like my first friend's program–now focuses on getting its grad students a lot of teaching experience. It also, apparently–just like my first friend's program–now has a TT placement rate well above 50% (far above the average for grad programs reported by Jennings et al.).
What does this suggest? To be fair, it's just two anecdotes. Still, as anecdotes, they seem to me to both support the hypothesis I ventured a while ago (about why a certain profile of job-candidate is having trouble getting jobs), as well as also support the strategies I suggested programs and job-candidates adopt for grappling with that issue. This especially seems true to me given some of the other things my friend said to me about their experience on a search committee. Although I've invited this person to write some guest-posts on these things (and hope they will!), here are some of the things they said to me (I paraphrase):
- "The reason I think my grad program does so well is that our graduates aren't playing the same game as everyone else. All of the Leiter-ranked programs' candidates are fighting for the same types jobs. You've got 90 out of 100 candidates coming across as researchers more than as teachers. That means the pool for candidates for research jobs is enormous. There are very few research jobs, and almost all of the candidates are fighting for them. Because many of them focus so much on research and neglect teaching, the pool of candidates who are actually good candidates for teaching jobs is far smaller. So, programs and candidates who really pitch themselves for teaching jobs actually have a better chance at getting TT jobs [note: once again, this person's unranked grad program has a spectacular placement rate]."
- "It's clear to me from being on a search committee that worst thing to be is a candidate coming out of a lower Leiter-ranked school. Those schools have the same research-heavy ethos as the Leiterific programs, but their graduates are always going to struggle to beat out Leiterific candidates for research jobs and are poorly prepared for teaching jobs."
- "Many candidates only or primarily have experience as TA's or maybe one or two solo-taught courses, which is totally insufficient for getting a job at an institution like mine."
- "Many candidates go wrong by writing in their cover letters about how they've published in high-ranking journals like Nous, etc. That shows they don't understand the kind of culture here."
- "Too many candidates lead off their cover letters with a paragraph on their research. This also shows they are a bad fit for a school like mine."
- "Too many cover letters come across as boiler-plate, stock letters with only a few sentences changed to make it apply to my school. It matters a great deal how much a person shows they know about our school and how they would fit here."
- "Originality matters a lot, both in research and teaching. We need people can do a lot of different things. The kinds of candidates who do well on the teaching market are those who are outside of the norm–doing things differently than most of the other candidates out there."
Tellingly, this person said these things independently of my Secrets of Search Committees series on fit and originality, etc. (which they hadn't read). I hope to have them on as a guest-author soon, as I think it would be good for readers to hear some of these things in more detail from someone other than me. Still, in the meantime, I thought I would share the gist of their thoughts, as I was astonished at how similar their thoughts and experiences are to the ones I have discussed across several different job-market series.
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