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When does a job candidate need to finish the PhD for hiring purposes?

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM MAY 9–I HOPE MORE READERS MIGHT COMMENT ON THESE QUESTIONS

Philosopher Peter Vallentyne (Missouri) writes:

How important do hiring departments treat the following:

(1) solid evidence that the dissertation completed by December,

(2) solid evidence that the dissertation will be completed by May 15,

(3) solid evidence that the dissertation will be completed by Aug. 15?

I’ve tended to assume that Aug. 15 was good enough for most departments, but some have suggested that earlier completion is important for many departments. The most useful information would be from people reporting the hiring practices in their own departments, ideally identifying what the highest degree they offer in philosophy (B.A., MA, Ph.D.)

 I suspect the answer may vary depending on how many years the student has been in graduate school:  my impression is that a candidate who has been in grad school for eight or more years ought to be on track to defend by December of the year on the market at the latest.   But comments are open, and must be signed.  I am sure this information will be very useful for both job seekers and their advisors, so I encourage as many readers with hiring experience to report the local norms where they work.

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14 responses to “When does a job candidate need to finish the PhD for hiring purposes?”

  1. George Rainbolt

    At my institution, an individual must have the PhD before classes start or the candidate will not be employed and we risk losing the line. From our perspective, defending before Dec 15 is ideal. A candidate who comes to the on-campus interview without having defended is at a serious disadvantage. Georgia State University. Highest degree offered, MA.

    Reply
  2. Heinrich C. Kuhn

    O.k., this is Germany (LMU Munich, yes we offer PhDs). When we hire for a position requiring a PhD the thesis has to be completed (and, where applicable, defended). If is is not yet published in most cases we'll want to read it in the state it was submitted in.

    Heinrich C. Kuhn

    Reply
  3. doris

    In my estimation, the plausibility of the projection that the candidate will successfully defend a dissertation before taking up the job is crucial, not a particular date like May. v. August. When a new faculty member shows up on campus still working on the degree, ugly complications may ensue, but how slim the margin is shouldn't matter much (depending of course, on administrative regulations at the hiring institution). One thing that tells for not cutting it too close, however, is the difficulty of assembling a committee for the defense during the summer months.

    The "plausibility of the projection," of course, has much to do with the quantity of quality pages; candidates are advised to have them, and letter writers are advised not to exaggerate things.

    Brian's point about longer about times to degree is very well taken; quality pages are the best answer to suspicions that a candidate is a laggard who can't be confidently expected to publish. If you are on the slower side, it is an excellent idea to have the dissertation defended, or at least the defense date set, when one applies; the fact of being done is the best way to muffle cries of "slowpoke" in hiring meetings.

    Given the time of year, a thought for candidates regards timing: unless your job paper is finished (perhaps published), you need to be fully engaged in writing it now, or anyway by June; if you work like most people, you'll need the 3-4 months until early October (when your file must be complete) to generate something sufficiently tight — and "sufficiently" means very, very, tight indeed. If you follow this course, what you have on the dissertation now is likely to be pretty close to what you hit the market with (which may affect your decision to go out this year).

    Good luck.

    Reply
  4. Errol Lord

    Those hiring should keep in mind that at least at some schools one's funding stops as soon as one defends (this is how it is at Princeton). It would be unreasonable to expect people from such places to forgo at least 6 months of pay in order to defend by December 15th of the year they are on the market.

    Reply
  5. Rebecca Kukla

    At Georgetown (PhD-granting), such discussions about specific dates didn't even come up; as doris suggests, we just wanted to see convincing evidence that the person would be done by the time she got here. If someone has been in grad school for 11 years it takes quite a bit of evidence to convince me that no, really, this year she is really going to be done, but it's still not about the dates.

    (Indeed, the ABD person we hired just defended her dissertation last week, so yay for her and for us … but none of us were stressing at all about the issue on this end.)

    Also, I think Errol's point is important – pressuring students to be done and defended by the time they go on the market, or by the APA, is financially insensitive.

    Reply
  6. Michael Kremer

    We do hire people without PhD in hand into tenure-track lines, and let them begin employment prior to their defense. I believe such individuals begin at a lesser rank and do not have a guarantee of continued employment until they are done; once finished their position converts to tenure-track. In such cases it is best if the individual is essentially done on arrival here, with a defense scheduled in the fall.

    University of Chicago, highest degree awarded here is PhD

    Reply
  7. Mark van Roojen

    FWIW, I suspect some of the pressure comes from Dean's offices and not departments. In our (PhD granting) department we have not required actually being finished before the start date and we have not passed up people we liked for this reason. (20 years ago I was hired without a finished dissertation, but my pay was docked 5%. They don't dock pay here anymore.) So far we've been allowed to hire those we think are the best candidates, whether finished or almost finished by their starting dates. But it would not be all that hard to imagine someone higher up in the administration coming to take a dim view of candidates who don't have degrees in hand and forcing a department like ours to have to worry about that sort of thing. Not that I expect them to do that in our case. My point is just that this issue won't always be in a department's sole control.

    Reply
  8. Kathryn J Norlock

    At my public SLAC in the U.S. (St. Mary's College of Maryland), in the decade I was there, we were always allowed to decide as a search committee what deadlines and requirements we would place on completion of the PhD, and as had been the case with my own hire, we were satisfied with (3) evidence that the degree would be completed by the start of employment (so, Aug.15). Presumably, the candidate's advisor or a committee member is in a position to affirm this in a letter of recommendation. (I still vividly recall moving to Maryland, but flying back to Wisconsin the week before I started teaching in order to defend the dissertation!) I imagine other undergraduate SLACs proceed similarly.

    Reply
  9. Peter Vallentyne

    Like several of the other Ph.D.-awarding departments above, we, at U. Missouri, would not, I think, require the defense to precede, or shortly follow, the on-campus interview (although we would want reasonable evidence that the dissertation would be completed by Aug. 15). We would go with the most promising candidate (although we have no official policy on this).

    Most of the jobs, however, are not from Ph.D.-awarding departments. I would be interested in hearing from a few more undergraduate-only hiring departments.

    Reply
  10. Grad student

    I seem to recall an article in the NYT several years ago about a M.A. granting university in the Southeast that hired an ABD from Harvard who had been in Harvard's Philosophy Ph.D. program for 18 years. Is that possible? Most state universities cut off candidates at 10 years. Maybe time to degree is irrelevant to departments if the potential hire stands to have such exceptional pedigree.

    BL COMMENT: Absent evidence, I'm inclined to suspect this story is apocryphal.

    Reply
  11. Grad student 2

    BL: Grad student was remembering this article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/magazine/21jolley-t.html?pagewanted=all. Ctrl+F "Harvard".

    BL COMMENT: Thanks for this (and to those who e-mailed). This is pretty anomalous, to put it mildly!

    Reply
  12. Dale Miller

    We (Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA) want very strongly to avoid hiring someone who won't have defended before they get here. My understanding is that they couldn't take up the position in that case; at the very least they would have do so as a lecturer rather than an assistant professor, which diminishes salary and job security. I don't think that we would feel safe with someone who was planning to defend in August, just prior to the start of the school year; all it takes then is someone's getting sick to postpone the defense past the cutoff point for the the candidate to have the degree in hand at the start of the term. Spring would be acceptable, although if we have two candidates who are otherwise pretty equal and one has the degree in hand, that will be a consideration and might well tip the balance. Given that there is such a large pool of unemployed or underemployed philosophers with Ph.D.s right now, we have discussed requiring Ph.D. in hand at time of application but not done so (that I recall, anyway).

    Reply
  13. George Rainbolt

    Yes, in our case (Georgia State University) the pressure comes from the upper administration. They are concerned about the percentage of faculty who hold the terminal degree. They have seen many cases of defenses that were predicted but did not occur. They prefer candidates who have completed all degree requirements when they come for on-campus interviews. To be successful in getting resources, we have to keep their preferences in mind.

    However, I don't want to make it sound like I disagree with the administrators. Before they started putting this pressure on departments, many units across the university had new hires who would spend their first year or two working on their dissertation. That wasn't good for their tenure prospects and it wasn't good for students. Overall, I think that their practice is best for the University and its students.

    On the other hand, we do not have the policy that funded stops at defense. Here, funding stops at graduation. The policy of stopping funding at defense seems to have poor incentive effects. I.e., the incentive to postpone the defense to as late as possible and thus increase the risk of unforeseen events (such as the director's sudden illness) causing problems. It also seems financially unkind to graduate students. They need to eat between defense and their first job. Here students can (and do) defend in December and still get a stipend through the following August.

    Reply
  14. Aeon Skoble

    If an ABD makes it to the final-3 stage, we will specifically speak to the dissertation advisor to get a sense of how realistic it is that the candidate will be graduation-ready by the end of August. Once we had to start someone at the lower Instructor rank (and salary) because s/he was not done by then, but then the person was awarded the PhD in Dec and was Ass't Prof effective that January. In every other case, the person did in fact finish the PhD prior to 9/1.

    Reply

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