The Philosophers' Cocoon

A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.

Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)

Contact: marvan@ut.edu

Blog mission & moderation policy

IMPORTANT NOTE on how to ensure anonymity in commenting
Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2025-26)

recent posts

about

Australian Catholic University’s litany of job ads … after laying a litany of people off?

In our job-market discussion thread, an anonymous reader asks:

What’s up with Australian Catholic University posting so many ads for permanent positions? Didn’t they just lay off a bunch a faculty after having hired them only a few years before? Do they think we have no memory?

These are good questions. I don’t know all of the details about ACU’s layoffs a few years back, but I do know they happened, as I am social media friends with number of philosophers who were there for just a few years who did lose their jobs.

Do any readers have any helpful insights to share?

Posted in

7 responses to “Australian Catholic University’s litany of job ads … after laying a litany of people off?”

  1. Charles Pigden

    As Shakespeare’s Lord Hastings nearly said

    O momentary grace of ACU,
     Which some more hunt for than the grace of God!
     Who builds his hope in air of your good looks
     Lives like a drunken sailor on a mast,
     Ready with every nod to tumble down
     Into the fatal bowels of the deep.

    More seriously, it might be worth applying of one of these jobs if you are a desperate young philosopher with no other options, but even then you should have a back-up plan or an exit strategy. (This might involve saving as much of your salary as you can for the highly likely rainy day) Regard these posts as unstable and temporary stepping stones towards a possible future career, not as rocks on which to build a habitation. Do NOT desert an even half-way decent job with modest prospects for a post a the ACU. Bear in mind that the the VC is still the same person who, violating the promises of his predecessor, destroyed a brilliant department brimming with top talent. A person willing to dispose of some of philosophy’s brightest stars (with the risk of reputational damage) will have no qualms at all about disposing of a junior philosopher should it happen to serve his turn. The law in Australia provides some security against wrongful dismissal from an ongoing position but very little against the abolition of the said position. That is what happened to the Dianoia philosophers.

    Reply
  2. AGT

    Yes, of course they think you don’t have memory. It’s capitalism. You take what you get.

    Reply
  3. Sam Elgin

    I think that people should be extremely hesitant to accept any of these positions. Perhaps they are useful as an absolute last resort (a candidate who has no other options, but a good deal in the pipeline and needs just one more shot on the market). But ACU has demonstrated that they do not keep their promises – and that ‘permanent’ jobs are not actually permanent. These jobs should be viewed as temporary positions – where there will be little (if any) warning before your job vanishes under your feet. Almost any postdoc or research fellowship – to say nothing about a tenure track position at virtually any other university – would be preferable. Expect to hit the market every year after you arrive, and be constantly hoping that your job is still around until you find something else.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    Writing from the UK, it is hard for me to see the difference between the stability offered by these positions and the stability offered by the majority, perhaps the overwhelming majority, of philosophy jobs in the UK. In case you aren’t aware of the ongoing car crash that is UK higher education see here: https://qmucu.org/qmul-transformation/uk-he-shrinking/

    Reply
  5. AGT

    The UK is a somewhat special case, I think. It has a badly construed and badly implemented financial model, which is now crashing (no doubt, the renewed rise of anti-intellectual populism (fascism, if I may) doesn’t help). I do agree that especially humanities jobs are not as safe as they used to be anywhere, but I do think that the UK has its own ‘idiosyncratic’ reasons in addition.

    It is certainly true, though, that given how the market is and the way things are developing (e.g. mentioned anti-intellectual climate certainly concerning the humanities), ACU probably calculates very well that people’s memory is short. It has to be. Unfortunately.

    Reply
  6. Adam Lovett

    I, uh, recently vacated one of the positions being advertised, so I am perhaps unusually well-situated to talk about them. I think in many ways these are great jobs. Materially, they pay well and teaching obligations are not that onerous. The teaching load varies a bit by staff member, but I never taught more than two courses a term (and usually less). I think Melbourne is perhaps the best city in the world from a quality-of-life perspective. It is also a good place to do philosophy. It is a little less philosophically lively than, say, New York or London. But there’s a lot going on at Monash and Uni. of Melbourne, and my colleagues at ACU were great. ACU still has excellent philosophers and the work environment within the School of Philosophy—where these jobs are housed—is good. I found it a congenial place to work.

    The worry about the jobs is obviously instability. Here it’s important to understand some things about the university. The vast majority of the philosophy teaching at ACU is in core courses, often in ethics or something adjacent. These are largely taken by undergraduates doing non-philosophy degrees—education, law, nursing, biomedical science, whatever. My understanding was all undergraduates across the university had to take some core courses like this. This teaching is conducted or organized by staff in the School of Philosophy. ACU could, I think, legally cut jobs in the School of Philosophy in the future. But, practically, to do so, it would probably have to change its course offerings substantially, specifically by cutting philosophy out of the curriculum all undergraduates take. I saw nothing that led me to think this would happen. Indeed many of the internal institutional changes seemed to involve ensconcing philosophy more securely in the core curriculum. So after a while I wasn’t really that worried about being fired at ACU. I was a bit worried about the jobs getting worse, e.g. by teaching loads increasing dramatically, but again I didn’t see much concrete sign of that happening. My worry here was a generalized worry about upper management caprice, and my sense is union bargaining provided some security from such caprice drastically worsening working conditions.

    The Dianoia Institute was in a much more precarious position than I think the School of Philosophy is currently in. It was a pure research institute largely stocked by (very good!) philosophers of language or epistemologists. They didn’t do any teaching and their specialities didn’t fit terribly well with ACU’s teaching needs. It was obviously a great research institute, but it was situated a little peculiarly in a catholic university geared towards vocational education. I think that limits what potential applicants to this job can learn from the closing of Dianoia. I think this closure does show that senior management at ACU feel no moral compunction about firing people and don’t see the reputational cost of doing so as decisive. That’s a downside, and not all universities are like this. But a lot are. A lot of universities in both the US and the UK fire people. It seems to me that jobs in neither system are very well protected from redundancies driven, especially, by financial troubles. And word-on-the-grapevine points to several cases of people being denied tenure at U.S. universities probably for financial reasons; obviously an assistant professor position in the U.S. isn’t a guaranteed permanent job.

    For myself, then, these ACU positions would probably be far preferable to most fixed-term positions elsewhere. I’d take them over pretty much any postdoc. And for me they’d be preferable to tenure-track positions in places I didn’t really want to be in—although that obviously depends massively on the details of the case. Generally, I think probably one’s attitude towards moving to Australia should loom pretty large in deciding whether to apply to or accept one of these jobs (and loom positively, because Australia is awesome). I myself did leave ACU partly due to the stuff with Dianoia, but ultimately I left primarily for personal reasons—my fiancée was tied to Europe for work. So I guess I’m a little less negative about these positions than the other people in this thread.

    Reply
  7. Anonymous

    Just my two cents as someone who lived in Australia and who is not Australian. I was there for 6 years, and it was an incredibly lonely experience. Australians, in general, do not make friends with expats (most tend to stick to well established groups of friends that they have had in the same city since their school years), and the universities are horrible to work for.

    Depends what you value, but for me, this combined with the fact that it is so far from everything made it the worst place to be, and I wish that I had never lived there.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading