Last week, Daily Nous ran a thread on next year's presumably extra-brutal academic job-market. Unfortunately, as Jonathan Kramnick points out here, COVID-19's effects on the academic job market will likely extend beyond next year ("for all practical purposes, the academic job market next year and perhaps the year after will be non-existent"). The fact that the job-market is likely to be especially brutal over the next few years raises many important questions. I want to focus on two:
- What should PhD programs do to cushion the blow on their students?
- What should search committees do to cushion the blog on job candidates?
I want to tentatively float for discussion a particular proposal in answer to both questions. I want to be clear that I am not wedded to the proposal. What I do want to do is get a conversation started, as I think we owe it as a profession to people who will be getting their PhDs during this very difficult time to do what we can to help.
Okay, then, here's the tentative proposal:
- I'm inclined to think that PhD programs should immediately extend grad student funding for at least two years so that students don't have to go out on the market (or, if they do, they will have something to fall back on).
- To help 'fund' (1), I'm inclined to think that PhD programs should consider not admitting new students, or at least admit far fewer new students than normal, for at least a couple of years.
- I think it may make sense for search committees to adopt a policy for several years–to be explicitly stated in their job ads–that candidates who received PhD during 2020 or 2021 will 'receive special consideration' (if only to remind the search committee that any 'gaps' on a person's CV, or their inability to find full-time teaching work, may be due in large part to the extenuating circumstances generated by COVID).
Although I suspect people may have concerns about various elements of the proposal (and I do hope we can discuss them, as well as potential alternatives!), let me explain why I think something like this proposal might be helpful.
I first went on the job market in 2007, getting a nice VAP at a research institution. Then, my first year there, the Great Recession happened. Here is what happened to the academic job market:
Suffice it to say, the subsequent years were dire ones for me and many other job-marketeers. One of the more dispiriting moments I personally had was a Skype interview where a committee member asked, "Why do you think you've been on the market for so long?" The question was not only needlessly embarrassing (I am pretty sure I blushed), but seemed to me needlessly obtuse. Did I really need to explain that the job-market was roughly half of what it used to be? Apparently, yes, I really did to point that out, but should I have had to?
I tell this story for a simple reason: to illustrate something that is well-supported empirically–namely, that recessions can have long-term effects on people's career prospects in part because of how short people's memories are. To well-meaning search committee members, the Great Recession might have seemed years gone by. But, to job-candidates, its effects were still very real (in terms far fewer job ads). The only way to mitigate this kind of 'long-term economic scarring' is to take proactive steps. The most obvious way to do so is to take steps to ensure that those in privileged positions whose daily lives are not (or no longer) affected by the recession–in this case, search committees and faculty in PhD programs–do not forget in their decisionmaking that the economic effects still have enormous effects on those not in such privileged positions (i.e. grad students and job-marketeers).
My suggestion is that the kind of proposal I floated above could do just this. Extending PhD program funding for several would remind faculty in those programs that the effects of COVID-19 on their graduates won't just be for a year or two, but probably for several. Similarly, not admitting many new students would not only enable those funding extensions, but also remind grad program faculty that there is almost certainly going to be a vastly increased 'backlog' of people who need to eventually graduate and get jobs. Finally, search committees adopting an explicit policy in job ads for several years–a policy, again, of giving 'special consideration' to graduates in 2020 and 2021–could remind hiring committees not to hold CV gaps or "underemployment" against candidates. Some readers might respond that giving special consideration to 2020-21 graduates would be unfair to candidates already on the market (who have had to deal with a bad job-market to begin with). However, for my part, I am optimistic that a policy of giving 'special consideration' to COVID-era PhDs wouldn't lead people to discriminate against prior job-candidates, but instead serve primarily to remind search committees that they shouldn't discriminate against COVID-era graduates (since, as many people have noted, CV gaps in particular and underemployment seem to be routinely held against academic job-candidates).
But these are just some thoughts, and again, this is just a tentative proposal. My real aim is to simply get a discussion moving on what programs and other people in positions of power (including search committees) can do to blunt the impact of these very challenging times on the next generation of academic philosophers.
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