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The Job Market and the “Stale” PhD Issue, Once Again

Brian Leiter

We've touched on this issue in the past, but it's worth revisiting in light of this e-mail from a job seeker:

I'm on the job market (not for the first time) and I worry I'll be perceived as "stale".  From what I hear, lots of philosophers think it looks very bad that, after a few years out of a Ph.D. program, there's no tenure-track position on my CV.  I have a few questions that I hope you or your readers might be able to answer:  i. Do people have a sense of how much "staleness" continues to matter even for candidates who are in other ways attractive — some good publications, lots of teaching experience?  ii. If you continue to publish (or publish decent stuff) does that make you any less "stale", or are you still considered obsolete or defective simply in virtue of your defence date?  iii. Is "staleness" less of an issue these days than in the recent past, in light of the terrible job markets and overall economy since 2008?  iv. Do people have any tips about what a "stale" candidate might do to compensate?

The "staleness" issue, as I think about it, is this:  the more years since the PhD that the candidate does not have a tenure-track job, the more likely hiring departments are to draw negative inferences from that fact.  Prior to the economic collapse, my sense was that staleness worries kicked in after 4 or 5 years; I would hope that hiring departments are allowing that strong candidates may take considerably longer these days to find a tenure-track position.  As to the other questions, I'll make just one comment now, and open comments for thoughts for readers; my one comment is that the longer out from the PhD you are, the better it would be if one or more of your letter writers might speak to that and make clear why this does not support any negative inferences about your candidacy.  Signed comments preferred, but job seekers may post anonymously.

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37 responses to “The Job Market and the “Stale” PhD Issue, Once Again”

  1. Mark Silcox

    I do think that this attitude is starting to change. All the search committees I've ever been involved with have viewed candidates in this position as "seasoned" rather than "stale." An old PhD. plus no publications or conferences attendances is much more likely to knock you out of contention, though, regardless of what your recommenders might say in your defense.

    Reply
  2. Tim O'Keefe

    I don't have any special insight on what people in hiring committees do think about "stale" PhDs. But I don't think that a stale PhD should count against somebody, though. (Obviously, that's with all else being equal, and adjusting research expectations with the amount of time since one has received the PhD, as Mark notes above.)

    After all, there is a huge amount of luck in the hiring process. Whether or not the person ranked one ahead of you after on-campus interviews accepts the job offer can make the difference between getting a TT job in one's first year on the market and still trying for something after 4 years of bouncing around the country from visiting gig to visiting gig. Under the circumstances, for search committees to draw negatives inferences from somebody's PhD being "stale" would be foolish–especially when we have access to the candidate's research record, writing sample, and teaching portfolio.

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  3. Fritz Allhoff

    I've got two good friends right now, both of whom are having very different experiences on the job market. One's had a VAP for 5 years, and has about 10 good publications. Other's had a VAP for 2 years, and has about 4 good publications. I.e., their "per year" productivity is about the same. But the "fresher" friend is getting a bunch of interviewers and the "staler" friend isn't. So, sure, anecdotal, though I doubt there are other substantive differences in their dossiers. In other words, I still think hiring committees prioritize (and maybe strongly) "fresh" PhDs, even if–for reasons given elsewhere–they shouldn't necessarily.

    One reason might be that of the "limited trajectory" that more and more publications establishes. The fewer you have, the better you *could* be. If you're hitting solid journals year after year, then you're just showing you're not doing stratospheric work. Many of the young stars hired into top Ph.D. programs don't have publications, and I always wonder if this is why: don't show you're not the best philosopher ever.

    Finally, I've always had an informal metric when evaluating job candidates: take the number of publications and subtract years since degree. It's horribly rough, doesn't take into account quality of journals, disciplinary differences (e.g., history papers take longer), etc., but, as a first pass, +10 is better than -5. Staleness can definitely manifest this way; if you're not publishing at least once a year–i.e., what you'd most likely have to do to get tenure–then you're probably not going to get hired.

    Reply
  4. Ulrich Meyer

    I don't think hiring departments will think poorly of you just because you have been on the job market before. Even before the latest downturn, this happened to many people who did well afterwards. But the longer you have been on the market, the more important it becomes to have research achievements that show that you are in fact a good candidate who was unlucky, rather than just an unattractive candidate whom nobody wants to hire.

    You should also bear in mind that many universities have policies in place that automatically give you a shorter tenure clock if you have taught elsewhere before. This means that hiring committees will also be concerned about having to put you up for review much earlier than a candidate who has just completed her PhD. Again, the more good publications you have, the less you have to worry about this issue.

    Teaching experience counts in your favor, but not as much as you might think. One important exception is teaching experience at a liberal arts college, which will definitely increase your chances at getting interviews with other liberal arts colleges.

    Brian Leiter suggests that you ask your letter writers to address your lack of success in getting a permanent position. I'm not sure this is a good idea. We already know that you aren't fresh out of graduate school from reading your CV. So whats the point of repeating this? At this stage, people would hire you for your achievements, not the mere promise of achievements, and that is what your letters should be about.

    There is also the danger that your letter writers might feel inspired to *explain* you lack of success, which usually ends up hurting the candidate. For example, there might be personal reasons that held you back, such as illness, divorce, etc. If that is the case, make sure your letter writers don't mention any of it, for it would doom your candidacy. As much as we might sympathize with your situation, nobody wants to hire a problem.

    Reply
  5. Kathryn J. Norlock

    With more than half of all humanities instruction in the U.S. now done by contingent or sessional faculty, holding freshness or staleness against PhDs sounds somewhat disconnected from the realities of the labor market.

    I gently disagree with Ulrich Meyer that letter writers ought not 'explain lack of success.' It's only a gentle disagreement because of course he's right that one mustn't be too blathersome, but it impressed my colleagues (I have served on several search committees at a good undergrad institution) to read the direct and clear statement that their employer would give a great deal to retain their job-searching adjunct, that Dr. X is on track to achieve tenure if that were possible, but budgets prevent them, etc.

    It's a bit depressing to read Fritz Allhoff's statement that "if you're not publishing at least once a year…then you're probably not going to get hired." He's probably right, of course, but when I think about the giant classes that sessional faculty are often loaded up with, often with no grading assistance, no TA, and much higher class loads than permanent faculty bear, I don't know how to bear the unfairness. It seems better here at my unionized Canadian employer than it was for adjuncts in the States, but we also just instituted higher teaching loads for sessionals here.

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  6. worried grad student

    I'm struck that the commentators assume that candidates have VAP jobs. But this isn't, of course, always possible. Due to family or financial reasons, would-be-professors might be de facto school teachers, university administrators, or corporate workers. To the extent one takes a job like a corporate one that makes continued research and publishing very difficult, does this spell the end of one's TT chances? How do committees evaluate candidates who have had to (hopefully) temporarily exit academe?

    Reply
  7. Alex H

    One interesting fact about being on the market and moving from one-year position to one-year position is the amount of time, money, and energy it takes away from scholarly activity. For example, moving consumes somewhere around 10 % of one's (very modest) yearly income. Being on the job market makes it very hard to get work done during the Fall. Moving house consumes a month or two of one's Summer — what would ordinarily be prime research time. (Moreover, if you've a visiting position and can have no confidence in being employed come June, it is hard to spend the money it takes to travel to conferences. You might need that money to avoid homelessness and hunger. You will probably need that money to avoid being trapped — unemployed — in some small college town in the middle of nowhere.) Moreover, visiting positions often pay less than TT positions and provide very little (or no) research support. All of this (and more!) makes it both unrealistic and unfair to expect that those philosophers teaching your undergrads for cheap be as productive as TT people.

    Reply
  8. Matt Smith

    One way to determine whether having a "stale" PhD matters in hiring is to look at who is hired each year. If more people just out of grad school are getting hired than people who have been out for a few years, then we need an explanation. Of course, there will be many competing explanations, and those will require looking more carefully at the data.

    Reply
  9. Ulrich Meyer

    I agree with what Kathryn Norlock wrote: a strong letter from your current (non-permanent) employer that explains why they don't keep you in a TT position is certainly very helpful. (In my earlier comment, I was thinking about letters written by faculty at your PhD program.)

    Worried Grad student and Alex H raise another important issue: one of the reasons why candidates begin to look "stale" after a few years is that perennial lack of success on the job market is just very disheartening. This means that they no longer possess the youthful enthusiasm that is the most endearing feature of freshly minted PhDs. If you are in that situation, I would recommend making a conscious effort to look cheerful and happy–no matter how depressed you actually are about your own situation. Never forget that people are hiring a colleague whom they might have to see every day for the next 20 years. Being friendly and socially well-adjusted goes a long way. (I don't have either property myself, but I really appreciate it in others.)

    Reply
  10. Ben C

    Candidates could be hurt by having "stale" letters: i.e. only letters about their dissertation from faculty members at their PhD-granting institution. Reasonable or not, hiring committees might be looking for evidence of post-dissertation research, and up-to-date letters, ideally from faculty at a wider range of institutions, might help.

    Reply
  11. David Marshall Miller

    Some data: Based on the hires reported here, the proportion of tenure-track hires from previous (reported) positions increased last year to 51%, which is the largest percentage in the last six years. Over that time, it has been the case that more "fresh" PhDs have gotten tenure-track jobs.

    See http://phiplaces.wordpress.com/placement-types-by-year/

    (Recall the caveats about this data noted on the site–especially that it's based entirely on what has been reported to the yearly hiring threads on this blog.)

    Reply
  12. ben w

    "He's probably right, of course, but when I think about the giant classes that sessional faculty are often loaded up with, often with no grading assistance, no TA, and much higher class loads than permanent faculty bear, I don't know how to bear the unfairness."

    There's also the fact that publishing, too, is not exactly free of the influence of luck.

    Reply
  13. Anonymous

    As a recent PhD graduate the situation is very frustrating. In my part of the world (Australasia) even very good graduates with excellent teaching credentials cannot find even temporary work. The few temporary jobs that are available are casual hires and the pay is basically unliveable. If some enterprising person tries to circumvent this by gaining employment in a non-academic position with the intention of returning to academia later they are punished for simply wanting to avoid a life of poverty. To me, the whole arrangement is savagery.

    Reply
  14. Steven Hales

    I believe that the staleness bias is the flip side of buzz bias. Someone who has been out for a few years and has a handful of publications has by that very fact provided more evidence about their scholarly caliber. In other words, a hiring committee can see that the person is doing solid work but is probably not the new Kripke. A brand-new PhD, on the other hand, with no track record and a fistful of glowing recommendation letters, might very well be the Flying Spaghetti Monster's gift to philosophy. So guess who gets hired. This heuristic is, of course, irrational. Nate Silver talks about this forecasting bias in other contexts in The Signal and the Noise.

    Reply
  15. VOP

    For various reasons having to do with multiple family deaths and caring responsibilities in the last 10 years, I am behind in my publishing trajectory. I will, however, most likely have about 7 pubs in top 20's by next year's job season, a monograph under contract, as well as having a revised an introductory text with a prestigious publisher. I have strong letters from some highly regarded people, at least one of which is external. I am from a 30'ish ranked department (I won't say "top 30" since that's just a pathetic way of saying 30'ish). I have been continuously employed at places of varying prestige as a visiting since 2010. I also spent two years as a post-doc.

    However, I graduated in 2008. Am I stale? I am worried that even if I have good publications, after that long, people will think I am washed up. And that even what I have done will be regarded as insufficient.

    I see that when philosophers speak reflectively about this topic that they are reasonable about this sort of thing and that I should not give up hope. But the data does not bear this out. So, I was wondering whether those currently on search committees might address how they handle this kind of bias in hiring towards freshly minted PhD's, if at all.

    Secondly: would 7 articles in top 20's plus a book under contract and an edited textbook give me a shot at your institution, given my pedigree and letters?

    Thirdly: how much do you think institutions consider their rosters when looking at candidates, i.e., just having a list of people from a bunch of top ten schools? Is this even an issue for departments? For administrations? I ask this because when I see a department that I have applied to full of people from only the top tens, I get a one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others earworm going in my head.

    Inquiring minds want to know from those on search committees.

    If this is too off topic I apologize. I would ask this at the Smoker, but I have a feeling that the info I would get would be rather uninformative — blind leading the blind and cetera.

    Reply
  16. Helen De Cruz

    There is psychological evidence that the staleness bias and buzz bias are indeed biases, rather than good heuristics.
    See in particular the following study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22775472 and the following link for a report on the study: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/10/lena_dunham_book_deal_people_value_potential_over_achievement_in_books_sports.html
    Striking is the following "Even when researchers made subjects choose between someone who might win the award and someone who had actually won four times, subjects preferred the artist who hadn’t actually won anything 57 percent of the time."
    This may explain why even recently, many of the TT hires are straight out of graduate school.

    Reply
  17. Anon Job Seeker

    I wonder also about how search committees feel about those candidates who spend a few years in Full-time NTT positions that have long term contracts? Are those candidates also looked down upon because they may have chosen such a position for various reasons?

    Reply
  18. Ulrich Meyer

    With regard to VOP's and Anon Job Seeker's questions: whether or not you are yourself "washed up," the problem remains that you find yourself in bad company: people who were unsuccessful on the job market because they were not very good in the first place, not because they were unlucky. To distinguish yourself from them, there has to be something in your CV that sets you apart, preferably some good publications, or teaching experience that is relevant to the kind of institution that you are applying to. (It should be in your CV, by the way, because otherwise people might not even bother to look at your cover letter or your letters of recommendation.)

    Similar issues arise for graduates from lower-ranked PhD programs. Top PhD programs get the first pick of students applying to graduate school, lavish a lot of resources on them, and then reliably turn out first-class graduates. (To a large extent, good philosophers are made, not discovered.) There are also some great graduates from less prestigious programs, but there are fewer of them, and they are mixed together with less impressive graduates from the same institutions. Again, you need something in your CV to set you apart from the pack.

    Try to imagine the hiring situation from the other side: you have 300 applicants for one job. How would you pick, say, 12 people to interview at the APA? Surely, you are not going to read everybody's writing sample because that would mean reading more than 6,000 pages! You are not going to read everybody's letters of recommendation very carefully, either, because that would still be more than 2,000 pages and you have plenty of other stuff to do (teaching, grading, committees, your own work, and perhaps even some form of social life). Realistically, you have little choice but to make the first cut on the basis of a rather cursory look at the CVs. Now suppose you come across a candidate got her PhD a couple of years ago, or from a lowly ranked program, and has no evident redeeming virtues (god publications, etc.). As much as you might feel sorry the candidate, also you would put her straight on the "no" pile. Perhaps you would not do this immediately, but certainly after the first 25 files or so. Because there will be plenty of "unproblematic" candidates from top programs to fill your twelve slots, and your task is to hire ONE good person for your department, not to give an exhaustive ranking of all the people who applied.

    Reply
  19. Charles Pigden

    May I suggest a ‘first cut’ heuristic for search committees that would help to overcome the obviously unfair bias against the supposedly ‘stale’ without discriminating against relatively new-minted PhDs? It is, of course, designed for those departments that value research productivity.

    1) Rank the journals on a scale of 1.0 to (say) 0.4, ranking Mind and Analysis at 1.0 and The NoName Journal of Philosophy at 0.4.
    2) Multiply each candidate’s actual and forthcoming publications by the rank number of their venues. Thus a publication in Mind counts as 1 and a publication in the NoName Journal counts as 0.4.
    3) Sum the (multiplied) publications for each candidate.
    4) For each candidate divide the result by the years out from their PhD (perhaps adjusted for any time out they may have taken to have babies, feed the starving or to save the family business from bankruptcy).
    5) Select the top ten candidates for a more detailed examination.

    So to take myself as an example, when I was appointed to my current (then TT) post in 1988, I had an article in Inquiry, an article in Phil Quarterly, a forthcoming in Phil Quarterly, a forthcoming in the AJP and a forthcoming in the relatively no-name (and now defunct) Critical Philosophy. Let’s assign Phil Quarterly and the AJP a rank number of 0.95, Inquiry 0.7 and Critical Philosophy 0.4. Then I would have a publication number of (1 x 0.95) + (1 x 0.95) +(1 x 0.95) +(1 x 0.7) + (1 x 0.4) = 3.95. I was three years out from my PhD in 1985. Dividing by 3 would have given me a final score of 1.32. That’s not bad for those days though it makes me a lot less productive than the best of today’s candidates.

    The beauty of this procedure is that it is relatively mechanical. In principle it could be performed by a secretary (an important point given the massive number of applications that most search committee’s have to sift through). The only people it discriminates against are those people with NO publications. I think that’s fair enough. When there are so many candidates with substantial track records of publication, I am rather shocked to find that people are getting TT jobs when they have nothing to show for themselves except the prestigious place that they got their PhDs. It seems snobby, unfair and irrational , generating an obvious risk of class (and hence racial) bias. Of course, luck and privilege help to generate the runs on the board, but at least under my system it’s the runs on the board (divided by the time that you have had to make them) that count.

    Reply
  20. Charles Pigden

    Dear VOP,
    I think you should seriously consider applying to non-US departments, particularly in Australasia where considerations of pedigree count for a lot less and where we are a lot less hung up about 'staleness'. (In our last search for a TT position at Otago we had somebody in our top ten who had been batting about in a series of temporary positions for over a decade. He had, however plenty of publications plus good references and good teaching evaluations.) With a potential book and seven actual or forthcoming articles in top 20 journals plus a 2008 PhD, you would stand a very good chance of making it to the long shortlist if we were looking for a junior level TT recruit (which currently we are not). I am not sure that I agree with Ulrich Meyer that good philosophers are made rather than found, but whether they are found or made, somebody with seven publications in decent venues undoubtedly EXISTS as a philosopher and could therefore expect to get serious consideration from an Australasian search committee. Less so somebody with nothing to boast of but their pedigree and the good opinion of their teachers.

    Reply
  21. Anon

    Some of the comments under this post are quite disturbing. I was wondering if some of the more senior readers could opine on how the present job market compares to the market during other low periods (the mid-late 80s, the late 60s, etc.).

    Reply
  22. ben w

    Without meaning to doubt Charles Pigden's good will, this is, I think, somewhat remarkable:

    "With a potential book and seven actual or forthcoming articles in top 20 journals plus a 2008 PhD, you would stand a very good chance of making it to the long shortlist if we were looking for a junior level TT recruit"

    With *seven actual or forthcoming articles and a potential book* (and as far as I can see an article of which it can be said that it's forthcoming in such-and-such place is an actual article), he would only stand a *good chance* of making it to a *long shortlist* for a *junior* position. Let's grant that the devil is in the details (and we know nothing else but these numbers)—at not a few places that would be qualification for tenure.

    Reply
  23. Charles Pigden

    Well, Anon, the comments on this thread are surely no more disturbing than many of the comments made on similar threads earlier this year.

    But if you are interested in the history of the job market there is probably not a uniform story to tell that extends right across the English speaking world. In the UK in the eighties it was probably as tough or tougher to get a permanent job as it is nowadays in the US. But I get the impression that it was a helluva lot easier in America. (I don't know since I did not want to work in a country run by people I believed to be criminally insane, so it was never an option of for me.) In Australasia it wasn't too bad – bad enough to induce panic attacks and a variety of stress-related complaints but not so bad that I, like most of the people I knew doing PhDs at La Trobe or the ANU, didn't manage to get a permanent job in the end.

    Just to explain, I am originally a Brit, I have a first degree from Cambridge, did my PhD at La Trobe (Melbourne Australia) and worked for a year as a research assistant at the ANU in Canberra. I had to leave Australia on completion of my PhD in 1985. Though a UK citizen, the situation in Britain plus my aversion to US employment meant that I pretty well HAD to return to Australasia if I wanted to get a job at all. (I still harbor a grudge against the Thatcher government. They forced me to leave my native land in order to follow my dream.) I remember very clearly the enormous sense of relief I felt after three years to-ing and fro-ing (including a long period of unemployment) when I at last got that fateful phone call offering me what you would call a TT position in 1988. I had a future in philosophy after all! The big gamble of my adult life had finally paid off.

    Casual hand-to-mouth employment reminds me of the quote from Bladerunner:

    'Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave'.

    It's really only worth putting yourself through this hell if you love philosophy more than anything else, indeed if you love it so much that, for you, being a professional philosopher is not just Plan A or Plan B, but Plan C, Plan D, Plan E. and Plan F. When you read some of the posts on threads such as this, or the even more paranoid effusions over at Philosophy Smoker, they often seem to stink of fear and anxiety. But the thing that people are anxious about, the thing that they are afraid of is that they will lose what they love most of all – the license to work as a philosopher. To put the point in Buddhist terms it is DESIRE that binds us to the wheel of suffering, until either the suffering becomes too much and we lose the desire, or the desire is fulfilled and we cease to suffer. The economic situation means that fulfillment is becoming less common, as permanent posts are in short supply. There’s probably not much that we can do about that. But those of us with some power in the profession can at least do our bit to minimize the suffering and to make sure that the chances of fulfillment are not unfairly weighted in favor of the already privileged.

    Reply
  24. Charles Pigden

    In reply to Ben W, I can only say that in our last round for an entry-level TT post, VOP's level of publication would have got him or her onto the long shortlist (the top ten) but it would not have been enough to automatically get him or her the job. That's how stiff the competition was. We were turning away people with BOOKS. And remember that's for a post in NEW ZEALAND at the ends of the earth.

    Thus what Ben W very reasonably regards as a qualification for tenure would in today's climate only make you a PLAUSIBLE candidate for a TENURE TRACK job. (Though perhaps I should add that what we call 'confirmation' is nowhere near such a big deal as the tenure process appears to be in the US. Once you've got the job unless you stuff up spectacularly, your worries are over. )

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  25. Dan Dennis

    An additional reason why the hiring bias referred to (by Steve Hales and Helen de Cruz etc) above is irrational is that in the unlikely event the new hire turns out to be the ‘Flying Spaghetti Monster's gift to philosophy’ then if the hiring department is not a top one, he/she will probably be lured away to a top department. The reliably good candidate who is immensely grateful for being hired is more likely to stay (and incidentally must love philosophy and be committed to doing further good work, to have kept at it despite setbacks, job insecurity etc).

    Reply
  26. Christian Coseru

    To pick up on Steven Hales' point about the staleness bias being the flip side of the buzz bias, the issue is really that perceptions about what makes a job candidate desirable to hiring committees have not changed (at least not much) following the downturn in the job market after 2008. There is an embarrassingly large pool of candidates who, 3-4 years away from their degree, have a pretty strong track record (half a dozen articles or more in top journals, often on top of a book or an edited volume). Yet, rather than being judged on their excellent track record they are being weighted against freshly minted PhDs with nothing but glowing letters.

    Of course, given the sheer volume of applications (300+ in most cases) selection committees have to wade through to select 10-12 candidates for interview, sample writings seldom get a look at. One would assume that 2-3 papers in top journals should weigh as much as a glowing letter about the candidate's dissertation project. But that's seldom the case because letters of recommendation are read and publications are not. And one is more readily (though perhaps irrationally) seduced by a great potential to deliver than by actual results.

    Why a candidate in her/his mid to late 20s with no publications would be preferable to someone in her/his early 30s with a solid track record (assuming they both come from, say, top 20 programs) makes very little sense. After all, hiring in a TT line an up an coming junior philosopher with proven (as opposed to merely potential) promise makes much more sense.

    Reply
  27. Charles Pigden

    It seems to me, Christian, that letters of recommendation should not count AT ALL when it comes to the first cut. Given the enormous incentives to overpraise candidates (the desire to improve your department’s placement record, the desire not to disadvantage your students given that nearly everyone else is overpraising theirs, the desire to help somebody who you happen to like and the desire to do your bit for somebody who has taken the trouble to butter you up) the chances that letters of recommendation will produce ‘false positives’ are absolutely overwhelming. They are, in consequence, utterly unreliable as measures of philosophical merit. {They are useful in my opinion only if you know and trust the letter-writer and if that person’s encomiums are backed by hard evidence.] With publications, you do at least know that somebody who did not know the candidate from a bar of soap and who consequently had no reason to wish them well personally, thought that their stuff was worth pushing into print.

    Another point about pedigree in response to Ulrich Meyer. Suppose we concede that good philosophers are made not found. Then the advantage of going to a good school is that you get the chance to be made into a particularly good philosopher. If you’ve taken that chance that should show up, for instance, in your publications. But to select people on pedigree alone (which more or less automatically includes good letters of recommendation) is to reward people for having had the CHANCE to become an especially good philosopher whether or not they have actually managed to BECOME one (whereas a publications based system would tend to reward you for what you have become not for what you had the chance to be). If pedigree counts AS WELL AS publications, that seems unfair too, as the candidate from a good school gets rewarded twice over, once for having had an especially good CHANCE to become a good philosopher and once for actually BECOMING one, whereas the candidate from a less illustrious school with the same rate of publications gets effectively penalized for being just as good a philosopher despite having had an INFERIOR chance to become one. If anything, it is the second rather than the first that is likely to be the more talented.

    I must say this whole thread is (despite my earlier remarks) deeply disconcerting. I had thought that the chief point of the Gourmet Report was to tell people which were the best places to study given a) the quality of the philosophers that they could expect to be taught by and b) by the particular research strengths of each department. As such it is a fine thing and I have been very anxious to make my own department as Leiterrific as possible, both to attract good students and as an index of our collective achievements. But if people are being rewarded simply for the rank of the institution at which they got their PhDs (which means that others are effectively being penalized for NOT going to those places), then the whole institution of ranking becomes a lot more dubious.

    But there is a solution. Search committees should simply ignore considerations of pedigree (at least in the first cut) and make their assessments on the (prestige-weighted) number of publications divided by the time that the candidate has had to produce them. Institutional snobbery and irrational buzz-factors drop out as irrelevant. Having at least one publication is an extra hurdle for a young philosopher to jump, but not to make that hurdle an official requirement effectively penalizes those who have already jumped it.

    ‘What about teaching evaluations?’ you may ask. Well, in my experience nearly everyone has good-to-stellar teaching evaluations so they are simply not a differentiating factor. You can worry about teaching ability when you have selected your top ten.

    Reply
  28. Brian Leiter

    I would like to emphasize Charles Pigden's parenthetical about letters of recommendation: it seems to me that some letters are very helpful, and that anyone who has been through hiring for a few cycles tends to know who from major programs can be trusted, and who can't. Indeed, I'm always struck when I talk to philosophers elsewhere about this, their impression about whose letters are helpful and whose are not trustworthy are largely the same.

    Charles's attitude about pedigree also seems to me extreme. If pedigree is a decent if defeasible proxy for training, as it is, then it seems to be mad to ignore it. There is a reason that, e.g., almost everyone from NYU these days does very well on the job market, and it's not mindless pedigree worship, it's because these students worked with really good philosophers.

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  29. Neil Levy

    Mark Lance argues that pedigree should count AGAINST a candidate when deciding between two even;y matched candidates over at NewApps.

    http://www.newappsblog.com/2012/12/more-substantive-advice-to-admissions-committees.html

    BL COMMENT: I doubt one ever has a case where the candidates "are evenly matched" except for considerations of pedigree!

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  30. Mark

    I am not sure whether pedigree is a decent proxy for training. (I guess it depends on how good a proxy it would have to be to be decent.) I think it is very likely a decent if defeasible proxy for quality of PhDs coming out of those programs. But one major reason for that is surely that the students going into those programs are of such high quality.

    The idea that being a superstar of the profession makes one likely to be a better trainer of graduate students than a good and productive member of the profession would be seems initially dubious, and I doubt that we have empirical evidence that this conjecture is true.

    BL COMMENT: I don't want to overstate the relevance of pedigree to training. But it is the case that, ceteris paribus, there are more philosophical smarts at higher ranked departments (either overall or in particular specialties) and that this matters for the kind of feedback students will get and thus the kind of work they will do. That being said, I agree that pedigree quite significant for prospective students to know about, given the sociological factors at work in job placement success.

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  31. Anonymous

    I am 36, getting my second B.A. and will be heading to a graduate philosophy program after next year. My previous B.A. is from way back in 1998. Between then and now I worked as terrorism analyst in and for the military where I obtained significant experience in training, teaching, planning, organizing, research, and working under deadlines. Let's say I enter a philosophy PhD program in 2014 and complete it in 2021. Then, I'll be a "fresh" PhD, 45 years old, with lots of pre-academia work experience. Let's assume that in 2021 when I am looking for a professorship, I will already have several good journal publications, good letters of recommendation, and degree from a top 20 philosophy program.

    How would a hiring committee view the fact that they are looking at a 45-year-old fresh PhD? (I know you cannot predict the future, just assume conditions are the same as now) Are my age and previous work experience advantageous or not?

    BL COMMENT: Just to be clear, this is different than the 'stale' PhD issue, which has to do with time elapsed from receipt of the PhD without finding a tenure-track job. This is more likely an issue of age discrimination; others are welcome to comment on that.

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  32. Annonymous

    I'm all for an objective measure of publication strength, but why isn't anyone talking about quality/strength/influence of philosophical project? How many citations has a candidate's work generated? How prominent are the responses to the candidate's work? It seems to me that these questions are central in determining whether potential has been realized or not. It's also useful in thinking about how 'high-pedigree' candidates eventually do in their career.

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  33. Charles Pigden

    In reply to Brian, two points:
    1) I recently wrote an article (it will be coming out next year) arguing inter alia that a sensus divinitatis is an unreliable belief forming mechanism since our propensity to devotion often leads to a belief in false gods or false religions, a fact which is acknowledged even by those who think that some religion is true, since they will typically think that other people’s religions are false. In other words our propensity to devotion often leads to false positives and is therefore unreliable. But if this is a good argument against relying on our propensity to devotion as a belief-forming mechanism, it is an equally good argument against the belief-forming mechanism of relying on letters of recommendation. If a lawyer on behalf of some candidate were to say to me ‘I put it to you Sir, that the candidate’s referee, the distinguished Professor X, states that the candidate is the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s gift to Philosophy’, I would reply with the immortal words of that great epistemologist, Mandy Rice-Davies, ‘Well, he would {say that} wouldn’t he.’ If someone is highly likely to claim that P whether or not P is true, the fact that they assert that P provides no evidence of its truth. Letters of reference are only worth anything if you have reason to believe a) that the letter-writer WOULDN'T say that somebody was good unless they genuinely thought that they were, and b) that their judgment about who is good and bad (and who is better and who best) is reliable. And this means either knowing them personally or knowing them by reputation to be unusually truthful and self-critical. (For example they should not be too prone to form an unduly high opinion of people who have a high opinion of them. I ‘m impressed with letters of reference which explain how the candidate refuted the referee on some point or other. THOSE letters I DO take seriously. Ditto letters which are simply copies of an EXTERNAL examiners report on somebody’s PhD dissertation. ) But even here there are problems. For there may be conversational implicatures that you are missing out on because you are unfamiliar with the relevant conventions. (I remember reading a blog a few months ago which discussed the fine distinctions between ‘strongly’ ‘warmly’, ‘heartily’ and ‘unreservedly’ recommending somebody for a post. It became clear a) that some people set great store by these subtle distinctions, but b) that different people interpret them differently. I simply haven’t a clue which of these adverbs to use in this connection and am terrified of writing a letter that sends the wrong signal. )

    There’s a lesson in this for job-seekers though it is a lesson many of them won’t be able to profit from. If you want your letter of reference to be of any use don’t just pick a celeb or even a celeb that knows your work – pick a celeb that the search committees at your target institutions can be expected to know and trust. But of course, most candidates won’t be in a position to whether their potential referees are widely known and trusted, still less whether thy are known and trusted at the target institutions.

    So we have a rather paradoxical result. Letters of reference are necessary but except in special circumstances (which you are generally not in a position to know about), they are not actually of much use, at least if search committees are more or less rational.

    BL COMMENT: This seems to me to mostly ignore that a persuasive and useful letter of recommendation contains a lot more than just an assertion!

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  34. Charles Pigden

    2) Brian thinks that I am a bit extreme in suggesting that pedigree should not be a consideration for fair-minded search committees. His argument is that ‘pedigree is a decent if defeasible proxy for training’ and that other things being equal it better to have a philosopher you have reason to believe to be well-trained rather than one of whose training you are effectively ignorant. If training were all you had to go on this might be a good argument. But in the current climate it is not. Nowadays there are plenty of philosophers who have given evidence of the use that they have made of their training, whether good or bad. It is surely irrational to prefer someone you only believe to be well-trained over somebody who has demonstrated that they have profited from whatever training they may have received. And if it irrational to prefer pedigree to achievement it is unfair to prefer achievement-plus-pedigree to achievement alone. For that is to reward the candidate who has done well given good chances over somebody who has done equally well given worse ones. If Sophie F with a PhD from Boondock U is as well-published (given her time out from completion) as Yolanda Y with a PhD form NYU, then it seems most unfair to prefer Yolanda to Sophie, simply because Yolanda had a better start in life. If anything it ought to be the other way around.

    Brian says that ‘there is a reason that, e.g., almost everyone from NYU these days does very well on the job market, and it's not mindless pedigree worship, it's because these students worked with really good philosophers’. Perhaps so. But let’s reward them for what they have made of their opportunities and not simply for having had such wonderful opportunities in the first place. And that’s precisely what my publication-based heuristic would be likely to do. If they have benefited from working with those ‘really good’ philosophers, this will tend to show up in their record of publications, and NYU alumni will continue to prosper. But they won’t be prospering for no better reason than that they had a chance in life than their rivals.

    Finally I have got a PS for VOP and perhaps for some others. Over at Philosophy Smoker that are quite a lot of posts indicating that publications can actually be a minus at some colleges and universities in the US. That seems flat-out weird to me, but it does afford another argument for considering emigration. New Zealand, Australia and the UK all have systems in place that INCENTIVIZE research (the PBRF, the ERA and REF respectively). A substantial slab of government funding (and almost all the universities are government funded) is due to a department’s research standing. This means that a department would have to be suicidally stupid NOT to take research productivity into account when hiring new recruits. (I suspect that the same is true for many institutions in Continental Europe where English is one of the media of instruction but I am ready to be corrected on this point.) So if you want to be judged on you research record rather than extraneous factors such as pedigree or whatever weirdness it is that motivates the anti-research search committees in the US, perhaps you should be looking for an overseas job.

    BL COMMENT: No one is suggesting hiring based only on letters. And every dossier comes with evidence, namely, a writing sample!

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  35. Christian Coseru

    Letters are an important (and perhaps indispensable) metric, especially when evaluating candidates with no publications (in the world of academe, and I imagine in other domains as well, that’s how most people get their first job). In effect, coupled with institutional pedigree, letters are often the deciding factor in whether a candidate makes it through the first cut. And, as is well known, high pedigree candidates without publications get ranked higher than low pedigree ones with publications. When it comes to evenly matched candidates (say, folks coming out of the same program, working in overlapping areas, and having some of the same people writing for them) other factors kick in, like how interesting one's project is relative to what's perceived to be an important topic of discussion in one's subdiscipline.

    Anonymous is right to ask whether more objective measures like publication strenght should be used in weighing candidates (no matter their pedigree). Of course they should, but in practice those measures, typically reserved for internal evaluation of faculty already on the tenure clock, are harder to apply when hiring: unless it's there in the package, no hiring committee member has the time (and disposition) to check how many citations a candidate's work has generated. And anyway that's seldom a consideration for junior hires.

    What must be disconcerting about this thread (and similar ones in the recent past) for job candidates is just how little one's publication record counts in the end. There is still this perception (no doubt lingering on from the good old days when folks coming out of schools like Harvard, Princeton and Berkeley practically walked into TT jobs simply on the prestige of their advisers and the strength of their letters) that publications is something one worries about after landing that much coveted prize: the TT job. And it's the high pedigree candidate that is more often than not the winner in this contest (for all the obvious reasons).

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  36. Charles Pigden

    Returning the charge. You are on the admissions committee for an Oxbridge college. You have two candidates for one place (and remember folks, getting in to Oxbridge a very big deal in the UK, a real life-changer). The two candidates have equal scores on the entrance exam, but one is from Eton and the other from a state school. (This is some time ago. The Oxbridge entrance exam has now been abolished.) You choose the Etonian on the grounds that he has had a better training and is therefore more likely to shine in his finals thus maintaining the college’s illustrious status at the top of the academic rankings. Obviously unfair, yes? An obvious perpetuation of privilege, right? And obviously silly too since the state school candidate has done equally well with a worse education and is therefore likely to be the smarter of the two.
    Now in the current climate, when it comes to permanent hires we have ample and easily accessible evidence of philosophical talent in terms of papers published, multiplied by the prestige of the venues, divided by the time out from the PhD. That’s the equivalent of the entrance exam. Suppose we have two candidates one educated at NYU and the other at Boondock U who both get the same scores on their publications. We pick Sophie from the NYU rather Yolanda from Boondock U on the grounds that Sophie has had a better training and is therefore more likely to shine as a researcher thus maintaining the our department’s Leiterrific status at the top of the academic rankings.
    Obviously unfair, yes? An obvious perpetuation of privilege, right? And obviously silly too since the Boondock U candidate has done equally well with a worse education and is therefore likely to be the smarter of the two.
    Let’s go back to the Oxbridge example. Again we have one place. This time we have two candidates, an Etonian who hasn’t taken the entrance exam AT ALL but has got a REALLY good write-up from his housemaster and the state school candidate who has taken the entrance exam and done very well. But we choose the Etonian a) because he had a better training than the state school candidate and b) because his housemaster (whose pay and status is partly dependent on how many of his students he can get into Oxbridge) recommends him very highly. If it came out that admission decisions had been made on this kind of basis there would have been a public outcry and rightly so. But it seems that when it comes to TT hires, analogous decisions are being made right right now across America. People with the right pedigree but no publications are being hired over people with good publications but a less distinguished pedigree. This seems to me a disgrace: obviously unfair and not only unfair but deeply irrational if the object of the exercise is to hire competent and productive scholars.
    I suggest a two-track solution. 1) Pedigree should not be a consideration at any state of the selection process. Period. 2) The first cut should be made on the basis of publications times the prestige of the venues divided by time out for the completion of the candidate’s PhD. Though far from perfect this would be a lot less unjust and a lot less irrational than what currently seems to be going on.

    More on letters of recommendation for a later post.

    BL COMMENT: I'm afraid this thread is now being hijacked by a different set of issues, so this is the final round on this topic. I don't imagine anyone doubts that if two candidates are really evenly matched, choosing based on pedigree makes no sense, but of course that's almost never the situation in the real world. And the Eton case is obviously disanalogous on two fronts: namely, the "training" at issue and the discriminatory access to Eton in the first place, which makes treating that pedigree as a 'plus' more problematic.

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  37. Berit Brogaard

    Anon Job Seeker (# 17): In my experience, working a few years in a full-time NTT position makes you look better than you would if you had moved from job to job or had only taught as an adjunct. Employing a person in a continuing NTT position still requires a commitment (and a risk) on the part of the hiring department. Of course, publications and "fresh" letters of recommendation are still key to employment in a TT position.

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