PhilJobs is starting to fill up with ads, though not as many ads as one would like to see (at least not yet). But what is striking is the pattern in areas of interest: lots of value theory and history of philosophy (esp. early modern, but also a fair bit of 19th-century), some currently "trendy" areas like philosophy of race and gender, but very little "core analytic" (as the Stanford ad puts it), i.e., very little philosophy of language and mind, metaphyscis & epistemology, the latter being the historical "prestige" trackers in the profession for the last half-century. But as I've remarked before, what is prestigious and central at the top PhD programs may no longer bear much relationship to most of the jobs that exist. That seems increasingly true (we've seen other signs of it).
Far too many PhD programs currently operate on what we might call "the MIT model": little or no history of philosophy or post-Kantian Continental philosophy, certainly no non-Western philosophy, but lots and lots of "core analytic" (sometimes with some philosophy of science thrown in), plus a bit of value theory, though mostly to the extent it is close to the former areas. The MIT model served MIT well when Robert Stalnaker was active and training tons of students, and before Stephen Yablo was, tragically, taken ill (though Yablo is still teaching happily). Perhaps the MIT model can survive as a viable model for graduation education, and might do so if MIT were the only purveyor–but the University of Southern California, despite being a much larger faculty, has adopted the MIT Model with a vengeance, and Rutgers has largely migrated in that direction. Other "MIT model" programs–wholly or heading in that direction–include Michigan, Texas, U Mass/Amherst, Rochester, UC Davis, UC Santa Barbara, among others.
A close, but preferable (at least by my lights) relative, is the "Princeton Model," where the investment is heaviest in "core analytic," but there is also a substantial commitment to history of philosophy and sometimes even post-Kantian Continental. NYU followed the Princeton Model, more successfully than Princeton, which no doubt explains its dominant position in Anglophone philosophy. "Princeton Model" departments include Pittsburgh, Yale, Berkeley, UCLA, Harvard, Brown, and Cornell, among many others.
And then there is what I will call the "Naturalist Model," for which Rutgers was, 25 years ago the exemplar, but no longer. On this view, armchair "analytic" is marginal, since philosophical inquiry should operate in tandem with the empirical sciences, whether biology or psychology or linguistics. History of philosophy often looms large in these departments–at least when they are doing the model right!–since history is a powerful empirical corrective to the "intuitive" nonsense of the present, and so much historical philosophy was deeply interdisciplinary, as it were. Departments in this model include Pitt HPS (which has fabulous job placement, reflecting not only the strength of the program but the appeal of genuinely interdisciplinary young philosophers to colleges I suspect), UC San Diego, Penn, Wash U/St. Louis, and Duke, among others. (UCSD and Penn are notable in this group for their strong commitment to history of philosophy.)
Of course, these are all "ideal types," and one can quibble about the precise groupings. But insofar as these three ideal types explain an awful lot of the most distinguished PhD programs, one can see the trouble on the horizon, at least for the MIT Model (when adopted elsewhere–MIT still maintains strong placement, but it skews to elite institutions, and it benefits from a strong commitment to feminist philosophy, increasingly in demand as an AOC).
I'm curious how others perceive the trends on the job market in terms of what's being advertised and who's being hired. Readers may also comment on my three "ideal types," but let's try not to get bogged down in disputes about particular programs.
UPDATE: Comments now open, sorry about that.
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