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 (2026-27)

recent posts

about

An overview of grad school & the job-market in America?

In our May “how can we help you?” thread, a reader asks:

More out of curiosity than any practical use: as a recent UK postdoc, I’d like to be able to better understand all of the (to my eyes) distinctively American discussion of grad school and early career that I see. What is a dissertation committee and why does it require a small army of people? What’s all this R1/Rₙ business? Why does “going on the market” seem to have a meaning beyond just “starting to look for jobs”? Things of that nature. A big ask, but: can anyone offer a potted overview, or recommend one?

I wasn’t aware that PhD students outside of the US might not have dissertation committees–but in any case, in the US a PhD student has to ask a group of faculty (usually 3?) to supervise their dissertation. The committee, which has a Chair, provides feedback, evaluates a “prospectus” before approving the student to move forward with a dissertation topic (which, if memory serves me, usually involves an overview of the proposed dissertation, a draft chapter or two, and “oral defense”); and, of course, serves as the evaluating body for the final dissertation itself (also involving an oral defense).

The designations for different types of institutions (R1, R2, SLAC, etc.) are defined by the Carnegie Classification, which have to do with many things, including how large of a financial endowment the institution has, whether it is undergrad-only, has MA program, PhD programs, etc. A lot of other things go along with these designations. R1 (“research 1”) institutions typically feature lower teaching loads for faculty (2 courses per semester or less), whereas R2s typically have somewhat higher loads (3 per semester) and SLACs may have more (4 per semester). R1 institutions may also typically have a lot more resources for faculty, viz. labs, conference travel, etc.–but not always.

Finally, “going on the market” doesn’t have a single determinate meaning, but I think it typically means something like, “I’m in my final year of graduate school and have to look for jobs full-bore, as I don’t have funding to stay in grad school for another year.”

Does all this sound right to everyone? And, does the OP (or anyone else) have any other questions about grad school or academia in the US?

Posted in ,

22 responses to “An overview of grad school & the job-market in America?”

  1. Anonymous

    Yes, in line with what Marcus says above… Different from most PhD programs in the UK and Europe, PhD students are admitted without a set advisor, and then usually take about 2 years of full-time graduate coursework (about 16 courses). During this period they typically do not also do any teaching or TA-ing for other philosophy courses. After this, they often must pass comprehensive examinations (covering certain topical areas, including usually the history of philosophy); but many PhD programs instead have a ‘qualifying paper’ or two, a sample of research that must be approved. If they pass those, they advance to the prospectus/ dissertation proposal stage (usually around year 3 or 4), which may involve a full dissertation proposal, at which time they will have found a dissertation advisor, plus solicited 2-3 other faculty to be on the committee. Also during those years, their financial support package typically involves TAing or teaching their own undergraduate class (perhaps one per semester, so they still have enough time to work on their dissertation). By the 5th year, if things are going well, they will have shared multiple dissertation chapter drafts with at least their advisor and received feedback. Usually they have completed enough of it (and hopefully also published a journal article or two during this phase, presented at conferences or workshops, etc.) to apply widely for faculty jobs during their 5th or at least their 6th year.

    Compared to most European programs this is very long and involved. European PhD programs (as I understand at least the UK’s versions; I held an Oxbridge position for 3 years) involve being admitted directly to the dissertation phase with an advisor already arranged. So they do not have the coursework phase nor the comprehensive examinations stage, and usually do not have significant opportunity to teach undergraduate courses on your own. (And given all these sunken costs and time devoted to it in the American system, you can imagine how much more important, and stressful it is, to apply for jobs to become a full-time philosophy faculty member, as the stakes can feel very high… especially if one has (or wants) a spouse or family, or has formed strong preferences about where they’d like to live long term after spending all these years doing this (also, sometimes, having done a different MA previous to the PhD). It can also be devastating to prove yourself for this long only to not get one, or to get one but that is subpar by not paying enough to support yourself/family, etc.)

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      This is all helpful. Just a small think worth mentioning: unlike in the US, in the UK you must do a master’s before a PhD, which is 1 or 2 years, and also it’s common to take longer than 3 years for the PhD (and not super uncommon to have funding for 4 years). So a PhD student going on the job market will often have sunk 5 years or so into their postgraduate education, sometimes less, often more. For example, I did a 2 year coursework masters and a 4 year phd (the first year of which incidentally was coursework too, although I think that is not the norm for PhD programmes)

      Reply
  2. Anonymous

    I was educated in Canada, but worked in the USA, as well. I think there is a lot of variability with “dissertation committees”. I had a supervisor and two readers (they read drafts and gave feedback, as well as approved my prospectus). But distinct from that group was the committee that evaluated the thesis. Where I was, your supervisor could not speak during the defense and had NO vote (but could speak in your defense when you left the room for the committee to vote). The examiners included (i) an external, who had veto power (their vote could kill it), (ii) an internal external (someone in another department, at your university), and (iii and iv) two others from your department (but only one could be one of your readers). Another academic chaired the session (in my case, it was my neighbour, a Professor in English literature – their job was merely keeping order and following procedures)
    R1 etc. is as Marcus says. It principally tracks what (and how many) degrees are awarded at a college or university. In America there are many colleges, and some elite, that do not award PhDs, and certainly not in philosophy. So these are not, despite their prestige, R1s. Think Williams College, for example.
    “Going on the market” is a complex phenomena. Keep in mind North America PhD programs go on forever (5 years is not uncommon, nor is 7 years). Many people test the market while they are still PhDs – people outside of the top programs are usually wasting their time, as they are not competitive. After you have defended your thesis then you really are “on the market” – you are aggressively applying for jobs. For those who do not have very many personal restrictions, (for example, I do not want to live on the east coast, in the south, etc.), the market is huge, and it might involve applying for 50+ jobs each year. But the applications are far more generic in North America, though that has changed a bit. So, with 50 applications, going on the market means, among other things, that you are constantly busy, unable to do many things you want to do, and often quite miserable. That is what going on the market means.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      5 years actually is uncommon at this point… uncommonly short! The median has been 7 for a while now but is creeping up year-on-year. Modal is assuredly 6 .

      Reply
  3. Daniel

    My impression is that “going on the market” just means looking for jobs; it doesn’t mean you’re in your last year of grad school. I think many people go on the market as soon as they think they are competitive for jobs, even if they could stay around in grad school for longer.

    Reply
  4. AGT

    Yes, in fact, Europe, for example, is rather different from what is described above. No, PhD students don’t have committees. They have a supervisor, sometimes two, but the second is typically a small, often only formal, role. There is a committee for the viva, but that is in most countries different – and must be different – from those who supervise the student. Categorizing institutions makes little sense, since pretty much all universities are then R1 or R2 (whatever is the difference) in Europe since they will all have MA and PhD programs, and endowment, being state financed, is in most cases irrelevant. Of course, there might be other institutions that are not universities but typically (albeit not uniformly) one does not do a PhD to get a job there. It does seem to me, though, that ‘going on the market’ just means ‘looking for jobs’, except that the market in Europe is rather different from the US. Note also that grad school often does not exist in Europe (these days sometimes funding is given out to grad schools but that is still not the same as what Americans calls grad school) and doctoral students may have no funding either but instead government-run loan schemes or are in fact simply employed as any other member of staff on a temporary contract.

    Reply
  5. Confused Brit

    OP here – thanks for the thorough reply, Marcus; this is very helpful!

    For context on my first question, in the UK, the following is very roughly typical:
    • Just two supervisors for one’s doctoral research; usually a primary who is a (sub)field specialist, and a secondary who needn’t be – and often isn’t – a specialist, who is chiefly there to provide non-field-specific advice on the research.
    • There’s some variation between institutions here on how progression through candidature works, but sounds like it’s roughly equivalent (although perhaps a bit less formal and demanding, given that in most cases we’re admitted at the point where you start working on the thesis).
    •For examination, we send out for an external examiner, who teams up with an internal examiner from the department (who, again, needn’t be in one’s own field).

    I wish I had a big picture question to throw out, but instead I’ll pick up on something from Marcus’s reply about “going on the market”: it seems like when grad school ends in the US is a bit fuzzy? As in, there are (strategic or otherwise) decisions to be made by the candidate about when to finish?
    Here you get a specified amount of time in which to write and submit the thesis (usually ~4 years, although most funding runs out well before then). At a certain point you’re out, either because you’ve finished or the university decides you’ve outstayed your welcome.

    Reply
    1. Daniel

      “As in, there are (strategic or otherwise) decisions to be made by the candidate about when to finish?”

      Yes, you don’t want to finish unless you have a job lined up. So most people in America stay in their PhD program until they find a job or they run out of funding. How much funding you can get varies from program to program. A few (maybe basically none) are strict about the 5 year timeline. Most can extend it to 6 or 7. Some places have the resources to keep some/many/most PhD students around even longer, although at that point you often aren’t technically a PhD student but rather an instructor or something, and you’ve either finished your PhD or temporarily paused it with the expectation that if you find a job elsewhere you’ll immediately resume and finish your PhD before that job starts.

      Reply
      1. Confused Brit

        Thanks for this, Daniel; this is pretty wildly different to what I’m used to, and explains some things I’ve found puzzling about the US market.

      2. Anonymous

        To further explain for other Europeans, most Americans cannot have a gap in their employment because of the way health insurance is tied to your employer. Doctoral students often get good health insurance through their university, which is lost as soon as your contract runs out. It’s also extremely difficult to qualify for any type of unemployment benefits in the US. So Americans typically try to arrange to have little to no gap between their employment contracts. In American culture it also can become difficult to find a new job once you have a gap on your CV (remember that extended personal/medical leaves aren’t a thing, neither are vacations). This means many doctoral candidates remain nominally a doctoral student for a year or two after their dissertation is effectively completed while trying to secure a new job.

  6. Anonymous

    Here is the (admittedly odd) lay of the land:
    1) Re: differences in the PhD, it is simplest to say just that it is much more of a production in America than in the UK. This is primarily because most (~80%) of Americans enter their PhD immediately after their undergraduate education, and so the PhD combines all of coursework (you are awarded a pro forma Masters on your way to the PhD, but do not have to do anything like thesis-write in order to receive it), learning to research, and learning to teach. PhD students in America uniformly receive stipends, ranging from $20k (at the penurious) to $75k (at the fanciest of schools), and at most schools (though not the very fanciest) the stipends carry concomitant teaching obligations. Secondarily it is of course a production because of the greater sums of money involved.
    2) Re: Carnegie classifications, the US has gradations of school from R1 to R_n simply because it has so many more schools than the UK. Most countries, in their bourgeois revolutions, took control of the education system from the church and aristocracy. Not so in America; the federal government has almost no control over the university system, and it remains quite decidedly feudal. The government doesn’t have a say in tuition levels, how many universities they are, or what degrees they offer. There are two sorts of go-ahead you need to start a university: one is a pro forma approval from the state (filling out a form, basically), and the second is a sort of drawn-out approval from a club of the *existing* schools in that region. That’s right, our universities accredit themselves! This explains much about their basically feudal character.
    If you would like a heuristic, an R1 is a school that awards more than 70 PhDs per year and spends more than $50 million on research. All the Russell Group and all red-bricks would be R1s by American standards. The plate-glass schools would partition between R1 and R2; I do know that some don’t award quite that many doctorates. R2s are schools that award some PhDs but not very many; they usually do research in a few subject areas, but not the high-spending core-STEM ones. The R3 category is nebulous bordering on meaningless–it is basically a school that does *some* research but doesn’t really award PhDs (well, it actually *does* have a more precise meaning than that, but people aren’t consistent about using it that way). For all intents & purposes you can view it as the ‘everyone else’ partition, because even many community colleges show up in the Carnegie rankings as funding *some* research. Most schools fall in this category (or the one below it, which I’m abstracting away from), because the US has FOUR THOUSAND ACCREDITED COLLEGES/UNIVERSITIES.
    3) Instead of telling you what Going On The Market means, as did Marcus, I’m going to give you a sort of functional geneaology of the phrase instead. Going on the market does, in fact, mean ‘starting to look for jobs’. But it has quite a different tenor than in the UK because *most US PhDs expect, or at least hope, to obtain permanent, full-time positions at research universities as soon as they dissertate*. In fact, ideally, you have such a position lined up *before* you dissertate. Obviously this is not the case anywhere else in the world, where you expect to muck around with a series of postdocs most likely fizzling out into no job at all at some point. And of course this is no longer a realistic hope, even in America. But it shapes how Americans view the practices.
    There are a couple of factors at play in going on the market being more of a decision than just dissertating. The first is that, because American PhD programmes are so long, you can simply stay in them until you are a more attractive candidate and nobody will really notice. Of course you might run out of funding (which in America stretches modally to 5 years, but with many schools offering 6). But nobody will really get peeved at you til ~year 9-10.
    The second is that American schools, unlike British schools, really prize ‘freshness’. About two thirds of the junior tenure-track hires at Gourmet top-20 schools are hired within two years of their defence, and around a third are hired ABD (pre-defence). These ABD hires at the Gourmet top-20 have a modal two publications at time of hire, which obviously would not get you a permanent lecturer position at most countries’ flagship research universities. The accommodations made for youth are extreme, whereas the demerit of having previously worked a contingent job will basically prevent you from *ever* getting a job at the fancy schools. Only 8% of faculty at schools 1-20 on Gourmet have ever worked a temporary/contingent teaching job.
    So, in summary, if you go on the market as a very promising young thing, you may get a tenure-track job at the school of your dreams; hardly any teaching load, supervising PhDs as soon as you’re out of graduate school, making $120k+ a year. But if you go on the market and strike out, and take any temporary job other than a *very* high prestige postdoc like the Bersoff, you’re sort of permanently tainted. You might get a permanent job at a teaching school, eventually, but the odds show you have very little chance of making it to the top schools. Even the senior laterals into the top schools tend to be from very fancy programs and to have had very fancy careers. As you can imagine, this breeds a certain tentativeness and wannabe-strategy to the whole ‘when will I start looking for jobs, when will I schedule my defence’ decision.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Many thanks for this information — the point about freshness is really striking. Can you point me towards more data/analysis/discussions about this observation, either on this blog or elsewhere? I’d be really grateful.

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        Yes, happy to do so. But I can’t figure out how to attach graphs or files, so please bear with this unwieldy tabular data representing the population of junior-level hires at the below schools. (Note that individuals are often in multiple of these buckets; this represents whole career shape).

        Gourmet PhD-granting program: 61% prior postdoc, 46% prior TT, 6% prior VAP, 1% prior adjunct
        Unaffiliated (neither Gourmet nor SPEP) PhD-granting program: 59% prior postdoc, 39% prior TT, 23% prior VAP, 4% prior adjunct
        SPEP PhD-granting program: 42% prior postdoc, 38% prior TT, 23% prior VAP, 6% prior adjunct
        Non-SPEP MA-granting program: 36% prior postdoc, 25% prior TT, 13% prior VAP, 6% prior adjunct
        SPEP MA-granting program: 25% prior postdoc, 28% prior TT, 18% prior VAP, 10% prior adjunct
        BA-granting programs: 32% prior postdoc, 29% prior VAP, 21% prior TT, 9% prior adjunct

    2. Anonymous

      “*most US PhDs expect, or at least hope, to obtain permanent, full-time positions at research universities as soon as they dissertate*. In fact, ideally, you have such a position lined up *before* you dissertate.”
      This is laughably false. No one in the US system is foolish enough to hope or expect to obtain any sort of position, let alone a “permanent, full-time position at a research university”, as soon as they dissertate (which I interpret as meaning: when they start writing their dissertation). This sort of thing sometimes happened way back in the 1960s, when there was huge expansion of faculty hiring and very few PhDs out there… but no one doing a PhD during the past 50 years thinks that way. And (having done all my grad programs in the US and having taught in many places in the US) I’ve never even heard of this supposed “ideally,” having that sort of position lined up *before* you begin your dissertation! I have no idea where that commenter would’ve come up with these expectations, but they are not what PhD students in America of the past two generations have envisioned.

      And the “ABD hires” stat given is extremely misleading. Yes, many are offered a position and accept the offer to start their job the following autumn, before they’ve defended their dissertation. But nearly always, their defense occurs that Spring around the time they will have been offered a job (and indeed, it is arranged sometimes quickly once they have accepted a job!); and nearly always these new hires are expected to have defended before their start date in the autumn. (Indeed, many universities have strict policies that you cannot begin an Assistant Professor position without the PhD completed and defended; if you were to try to start your accepted job before doing so, their policies might force them to begin as a Lecturer or similar, rather than Assistant Professor.)

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        Apologies, I think we are at terminological odds & ends! By dissertate I mean ‘finish & defend the dissertation, [but not necessarily have the degree conferred]’. In the sentence you object to so adamantly, I meant something like ‘before they’re done dissertating’. You meant presumably ‘start writing the dissertation ab initio’. I should have been clearer.
        I don’t think you succeed in showing anything misleading in the statistic offered. In order to get a job for the fall, with a spring defence, you would need to be applying ABD, before you defend, because the cycle is mostly over by February.

    3. Anonymous

      Am I wrong in thinking that things may be changing RE the premium on freshness? Admittedly, I am new to the job-market and from Canada, not the US, but the most recent data I could find on this when I looked into it was from about 8 years ago and in the last cycle, for example, many/most of people who got the jobs I applied for got hired laterally or after several years without a permanent position. Sure, maybe they had postdocs, but not necessarily the Bersoff (frankly I can only think of two or three other postdocs that would be comparable anyway). And in looking at some other recent hires at PhD granting institutions, I’ve been surprised to see many coming from contract teaching posts (surprised not because I think that says anything meaningful about them, but because the received wisdom is that such positions can be poison for your CV). It’s true that the job market this year has been unusual in many respects. But is it possible that US institutions are starting to put less of a premium on this particular quality in candidates?

      Reply
      1. Anonymous

        I think you’re absolutely right that this is the general trend. But for the time being the tippy top schools seem to be at least largely holding onto old norms, and in the current junior hires there’s still quite strong evidence to me of such bias.

  7. Christopher Hitchcock

    Re: going on the market. Most job applications (especially for tenure-track jobs) follow a similar timeline: Ads are posted September-November; initial interviews in December-January; campus visits January-March. (Pre 2010, this schedule was built around the major conference in late December where first-round interviews took place.) And most job applications require a similar extensive package of documents: CV, recommendation letters, research statement, teaching portfolio, writing sample. Going on the market involves preparing materials in advance, starting at least the summer before. This will involve: asking faculty to write letters for you, preparing a polished writing sample, assembling a teaching portfolio, etc. It is a lot of work, but one can then submit the materials for many job applications at around the same time. Given all this, one will typically make a decision to “go on the market” or not in a given year: one doesn’t just apply to occasional jobs when they come up.

    Reply
  8. Charles Pigden

    Anonymous 1 and AGT are largely correct about the differences between European and Australasian PhDs and the far more elaborate and time-consuming ‘taught’ PhDs characteristic of North America. As one of the Anonymi says ‘it is simplest to say just that it is much more of a production in America than in the UK’. I am going to argue that North American PhD programs are not a very cost-effective way of training philosophy teachers and researchers, (ether for institutions or for the aspiring philosophers themselves) and that they often have serious drawbacks. There is a cheaper way to to achieve similar results namely the dissertation-only PhD which may well be better from a pedagogic point of view. 
    Let me start with three of my posts from the past. 
     
    I) The first is a response to a question about what to teach in a proseminar: [It was originally posted on Daily Nous in 2015 at which point I was thirty years out from completing my Australian PhD.]
    Here’s a fact which some of you will find almost unbelievable but which suggests a big cultural divide in the profession. Until I began to read this thread I literally *did not know* what a proseminar was. (I gather from the contributions that it’s the seminar class you take in your first year of graduate school which is designed to ensure a general level of philosophical literacy, and that it is therefore non-optional.) And this despite the fact that I am a well-published philosopher in his late fifties . The reason is, of course, that, as is common in the UK and Australasia, having completed my (three-year) BA, I did a research-only PhD. with *no taught component*. Whatever general literacy I may have as a philosopher, over-and-above what I learned as an undergraduate, I either taught myself through general reading or acquired by picking other people’s brains. This suggests something interesting about the OP’s query (What texts to set in the proseminar?). It is not just that for a non-North American teacher the question would not arise. In so far as there is a corresponding question, it would be not even be addressed to the same audience. It would not be ‘What texts should we set in our proseminars?’ It would be ‘What books or articles should we read (or make sure that we have read) outside our specific research areas in order to be reasonably well-rounded philosophers?’. The first question is from a teacher asking other teachers (and perhaps former learners) for advice on to run somebody else’s education. The second is from a learner asking other learners and ex-learners for advice on how to run their own. I’ve got suggestions to make and recollections I could post about the second question. As for the first it is alien to my experience.

    II) The second post is a response to discussion about intellectual strategies for getting to grips with some lesser known philosopher of the past. The OP was worried that if the dead philosopher was indeed little known, mentors would be in short supply: 
    Forgive me for sounding harsh X, but I can’t help thinking that your feeling that you can’t embark on the study of some lesser known philosopher without ‘guidance’ is due that unadventurous and unduly deferential attitude that is sometimes induced by the North American system of taught PhDs. Let’s start with an obvious point. In many cases the kind of guidance that you think necessary simply won’t be available. If the person or the topic that you are interested in is really under-investigated, then there may not be anyone anywhere who is qualified to be a guide. Conversely, if you are afraid to tackle an historical topic without the right kind of guidance you will be condemned to topics or philosophers who have already been worked over, which means that it will tougher to say anything original. If you are boldly going where no contemporary scholar has gone before, it follows automatically that qualified guides will be unavailable. If qualified guidance is available then you won’t be boldly going where no contemporary scholar has gone before.
You write: ‘If the advice is “well if you need help you shouldn’t be in the field”, then we might as well abolish grad schools as such and turn clever students with philosophy BAs loose on their own for 5-7 years’. What you forget is that is pretty much what is currently DONE in the UK and Australasia where the norm is a dissertation-only PhD which you begin after only three or four years of formal instruction [and which only goes on for three to five years]. And it is not at all clear that those free-ranging UK or Australasian PhDs end up as worse scholars than their North American counterparts. So abolishing those graduate schools might not be as catastrophic as you seem to think. I was one of those clever BAs, let loose on my own with nothing more in the way of formal teaching than a fortnightly or monthly session with my supervisor, and I managed to get by largely without the guidance the you think is so important. Yours is not the only post that I have read over the last five or six years (and I am not trying to get at you but to make general point) which makes me wonder whether the North American system of ‘taught’ PhDs sometimes has the effect of infantilizing students and retarding their development as independent thinkers.

    III) The third is a post about whether and when students (both graduate and undergraduate) should address their teachers by their personal names rather than their titles:
    It is common in New Zealand and Australia for undergraduates (and not just graduate students) to address the lecturers and professors by their first names and I have never had a problem with it. But I would like to protest against the absurd suggestion that teachers who routinely allow their students to address them by their first names do so because they are so secure of their place in a hierarchical society that they can afford a certain faux informality.Here’s Professor Y:


    ‘Arguably social hierarchies are more entrenched in the UK than in the US, so perhaps [UK habits of informality] should be understood as a kind of noblesse oblige of a group of people very secure in their higher social status’.

    *This is a sheer mistake*. Rest assured, that if you want an academic culture characterized by hierarchy and deference, it is NOT the UK, Europe generally or Australasia – it is the USA. How do I know this, never having been there? Because my graduate students who HAVE visited the US , have come back SHOCKED by the atmosphere of formality and subservience that prevails in many departments, and in particular the way that graduate students were *actually nervous of meeting some of their professors in the corridor*. Please understand that the abject contortions caricatured at the outset of this thread [in a cartoon involving an agonising flowchart about how to address one’s professors] are utterly alien to my experience as an undergraduate at Cambridge, as a graduate student at La Trobe in Australia and as a teacher in New Zealand for the last thirty years. It may be that in a highly deferential culture, an ostentatious preference for being on first-name terms betokens a covert enjoyment of privilege, but strange as it may seem there are many cultures a lot less deferential than that of North America.
    ——————————
    Coming back to the present, there is a lot of talk on the blogs suggesting that young philosophers nowadays are pressured, incentivised or encouraged to write tight little articles in their tightly constrained areas of specialisation, addressing sub-problems of sub-problems rather than producing bold, innovative or wide-ranging work. (It’s like Kuhnian normal since but without the science or like Lakatos’s account of a degenerating philosophical research programme.) In so far as this phenomenon is real, the causes are no doubt complex .  However, a contributing factor might be the unduly timid, deferential and subservient cast of mind encouraged by SOME of the leading graduate schools, Students come to think of themselves as the intellectual equivalents T S Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock:

    No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

    Am an attendant lord, one that will do

    To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

    Except that instead of swelling progresses or starting scenes, they are resigned to making minor contributions to continuing scenes which have gone on too long and have ceased to be of any interest. 

    Then there are the nervous questions that you get on the Philosopher’s Cocoon (and here I am saying something a bit harsh both about Marcus and about some of the contributors to this blog).The questions asked often suggest a certain lack of gumption and self-reliance. And it’s not just the CONTENT of the questions––there is often something rather adolescent about the TONE of *both* the questions *and* the answers. There’s this underlying idea that everyone is looking at you (or the worry that they are not) and a compulsive concern with relative status –– a tone that is perfectly normal in teenagers but unbecoming in men and women in their mid-to-late twenties. 

    Now don’t get me wrong.  This process of infantilizing students and retarding their development as independent thinkers, if it happens at all, is something that only happens SOMETIMES, and obviously, it is far from universal.  I am sure the there is a chorus of readers ready to respond with fervent praise of their professors in taught courses (their help with respect to dissertations being beside the point) with copious anecdotes about how inspiring and intellectually liberating they were. ‘X’s graduate course on Y was one of the most stimulating experiences of my entire life, not least because she encouraged us to take a critical attitude!’ So I am not denying that the taught PhD can be useful or even valuable. But I do insist a) that the taught PhD has serious drawbacks and b) that taught courses are not  necessary to produce competent, well-rounded and wide-raging philosophers.  

    But there is an obvious objection. Isn’t there a risk that that the dissertation-only PhD will produce narrow obsessive scholars who go down their own private rabbit holes never to return? Isn’t there a risk that they will end up knowing a lot about the topics of their own dissertations but next to nothing about anything else? Well, the answer is that this is indeed a risk, but that in my experience, IT HARDLY EVER HAPPENS. Dissertation-only PhDs are at least as well rounded and wide ranging as their taught PhD counterparts. My own department [as of last year] has eight teaching-and-research staff. Five of us have Anglo-Australasian dissertation-only doctorates (one being an American) and of three of us have American-style taught PhDs (one being a Scot). ‘Intellectual narrowness’ is not a charge that can be levelled against the department. (The Biblical Scholar has a book on Galileo, and teaches Merleau-Ponty and the philosophy of indigineity; one meta-ethicist has papers on conspiracy theories, literature, metaphyisics and the philosophy of mathematics; another  – world-famous – metaethicist is also world famous as a philosopher of language, and moonlights reviewing books on history and politics for Left-wing magazines; the Philosopher of Time has a book on general metaphysics and the philosophy language with a substantial section on metaethics; the Spinoza specialist teaches the Philosophy of Science; the logician teaches existentialism; and the leading expert on Kant’s politics teaches and publishes on the ethics and politics of Climate Change.) But the taught PhDs are not MORE wide-ranging than the thesis-only PhDs – indeed, if anything, it is (slightly) the other way about. I would say the same about all the numerous philosophers I have known over the years. The taught PhDs simply don’t stand out as markedly *more* wide-ranging , more versatile or more philosophically well-informed than their dissertation-only confreres. The chief supposed advantage of the partially taught PhD – extra breadth – is conspicuous by its absence. 
     
    Another objection is based on the dubious saw (widely bruited about) that philosophers are made not born. In so far as this is true (not very far in my opinion) it does not imply – and had better not imply – the demonstrable falsehood that philosophers can’t be made without the aid of an American-style taught PhD.  

    So what am I suggesting? I am actually of the view that it would be a good idea if many of the North American programs were simply shut down and that the entry level requirement for becoming a philosophy teacher should not be a taught, but a dissertation-only PhD (as it already is for overseas candidates).  But this isn’t going to happen any time soon. So instead I am going to make two suggestions, one to North American graduates thinking of a career in philosophy and one to non-Americans contemplating study either in the United States or Canada.

    1) To North Americans. Depending of course on finances, scholarships etc, you should really consider a dissertation-only PhD overseas as opposed to a taught PhD at home. This would take only three to five years [rather than five to eight]. A dissertation-only PhD is much less of a sunk cost than seven years in a taught program, which means that as a dissertation-only doctor you will probably be less prone to the sunk cost fallacy. You will do your PhD because you love philosophy and want to get stuck in to some topic that they find really interesting. No doubt you will hope that your PhD will lead to a philosophical career, but if that hope does not materialise in the form of a permanent job, you can turn to some other trade or profession whilst still in your mid-to-late twenties with a nice shiny doctorate to add to your CVs and the memory of a good time doing something that you loved plus a stimulating dollop of overseas experience.  You won’t feel compelled to traipse through a succession of adjunct professorships until your mid thirties because they can’t bear to admit that all those years of effort went waste.

    2) To Non-Americans. For much the same reasons, you will probably be better off staying at home and doing a dissertation-only PhD (or doing a dissertation-only PhD in another country). The stay-at-home option means that you won’t have to work your way through an immigration system that (under Trump) is openly hostile to foreigners or to put up with an increasingly authoritarian society. (Though of course neither of these objections applies to a taught PhD from a *Canadian* department.) And you probably won’t be the loser from *not* having done all those taught courses but having taught yourself whatever you needed to know.

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      Excellent response

      Reply
    2. Daniel

      Hi Charles. Although I agree with much of this in broad strokes, I think there are two important caveats to add:

      1) Someone could write a post of equal length making more or less the opposite points and I would also agree in broad strokes. That is to say, I only agree with many of your points because you qualify them (“sometimes” X is Y, etc.) and if you didn’t, I’d disagree quite a bit. Here and elsewhere when you make similar points I sometimes get the feeling you’re generalizing from an induction base that, whether or not it is small, fails to include a lot of US stuff that would lead you to draw opposite conclusions. Since my own experience and the experience of many people I know seems very different from what you describe as characteristic of many US programs/people/etc. I think someone whose frame of reference about the US was closer to mine than yours would write a very different post, and they’d be right to!

      2) I find people with UK PhDs are often rather deficient with respect to preparation for teaching compared to people with American PhDs, so much so that it can hurt them on the job market with respect to jobs that want you to be able to teach. So I don’t think it would necessarily be a good idea for the USA to swap to a UK style PhD system, if it means everyone ends up much less prepared to teach. Philosophy is about more than just research, after all.

      Reply
  9. Anonymous

    In case OP is interested in teaching loads by school type, just wanted to add that it is definitely not the case that all SLACs teach a 4-4. I see 3-3 at least as often as 4-4, and they can also go down to 2-3 or even 2-2 at the elite SLACs.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

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

Continue reading