In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
I suppose I have a meta question. On the one hand, the Cocoon is an inclusive and supportive space. On the other hand, much of what goes on here is job market advice. However, the job market is inherently competitive, and so it seems to me that virtually none of the advice can truly scale: if everyone does x, then doing x doesn't give you the edge anymore. So the advice is only good if only some (not all) job marketeers follow it — but then is this forum really meant to be inclusive of and supportive of *all* job marketeers? Isn't that something of a pragmatic contradiction?
I am putting the question in a rather, well, tendentious manner. But I mean to only be pressing the point in its most serious form, like we do in philosophy. And let me emphasize that I do not doubt the goodwill or intentions of Marcus and everybody else (including myself!) who contributes to discussions here. I suppose what I am really after is hearing how other people think about the advice they're offering in this environment.
Fair questions. To me, the Cocoon's job-market advice is for leveling the playing field and helping people compete on the market more on their merits than the "luck of the draw" they do or do not have as far as mentorship. Let me explain what I mean though a couple of anecdotes.
First anecdote: A number of years ago at a summer conference, I met a PhD student who was about to go on the market. During our conversation at dinner, it became clear that he had virtually no job-market mentoring in his program. He had no clue what to include in a teaching portfolio, or really even in a research statement. He hadn't even begun preparing materials, and the job market season was just about a month away. Maybe some of it was his fault for not being more proactive, but for all that, it was clear that his PhD program and dissertation supervisor basically provided no guidance–which seemed sad and unfair to me. This was in stark contrast to my PhD program, which a few years into my time there created a professionalization seminar (for credit, I believe) precisely to provide that that kind of mentorship.
Second anecdote: Also a number of years ago, I met someone from a well-ranked PhD program on a plane trip to an APA conference. They described their program as incredibly dysfunctional, saying that they virtually never placed any of their students in jobs. They were profoundly depressed, as they'd been in their program for the better part of a decade and felt despondent over their lack of career prospects.
The academic job market is already unfair–and to me, this stuff profoundly exacerbates it. Of course, there's no way to eliminate all unfairness in the academy, or in life, but to me the Cocoon is a place to help even things out: to help people prepare well for the market so that it's their actual accomplishments, skills, and qualifications–how good they are as a philosopher, teacher, colleague, etc.–that play a larger role in determining their success.
That, at any rate, is the intent–and I hope the Cocoon succeeds more in this regard than not. But what do readers think?
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