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Can you use your writing sample for philosophy jobs as your job talk?

Brian Leiter

For a long time (in the 1990s and into the early 2000s) that was standard practice, but more and more I hear from job seekers who have been told that their writing sample can’t be their job talk. What do readers think? If you do not post with a full name, please indicate whether you are a faculty member in a PhD program, a graduate student, a job seeker, etc. Also indicate the country in which you are a faculty member or graduate student (maybe norms are different in different countries?). Have things really changed that much over the last 25 years? Is it considered “bad form” to use the writing sample as the job talk? (I’m talking about writing samples that have not been published, of course.)

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6 responses to “Can you use your writing sample for philosophy jobs as your job talk?”

  1. JDF

    It’s a very bad idea, and I was told so when I was on the market for the first time a decade ago. I don’t think it would be disqualifying, but I think it is not very far off disqualifying in many cases.

    The people on the committee want to see something else because they want confirmation that you have more than one piece which is professional-level and ready to go. (It is fine if your writing sample is already published–indeed, if it is recent, I think that is advisable–but obviously the job talk cannot be already published.) And almost all of your competition will have two distinct pieces, which will make you seem behind in comparison.

    I was a graduate student at Harvard, and I’m faculty at Oxford.

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  2. Ian Cruise

    Yes, I also received the advice not to present your writing sample as your job talk (regardless of publication status), and the reason given was the same one that JDF gives above. If you present your writing sample as your job talk, you look like a one-trick pony. The hiring committee ends up wondering if you actually have a research agenda with any momentum. If you only have one thing ready to put in front of the committee now, do you have enough in the works that you’ll be able to get tenure?

    I do not know if hiring committees in fact think this way, but the advice seems sufficiently prevalent at this point that I’m sure that many do.

    I got my PhD in the US and got a TT job in the US last cycle after a postdoc and a couple years as a VAP.

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    1. Brian Leiter

      Very interesting. For decades, schools were happy for the writing sample to also be the job talk, and had none of these worries. Why not? Because they don’t make sense. If the candidate has a dissertation, if the letters are informative about the candidate’s work, then there is no reason to think the candidate is a “one trick pony.” For candidates with publications it seems particularly bizarre to think using the writing sample as the job talk raises any doubts about the candidate’s breadth or research agenda.

      Curious to hear from faculty on the hiring side of things whether they share these views. It could be that what may have become “common wisdom” passed on to job seekers is not, in fact, a worry shared by faculty doing the hiring.

      I look forward to more comments on this!

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      1. Faculty in a small, non-top PhD program

        I think the “one trick pony” language is maybe just a poor framing of a more substantive point about heuristic evidence about a future colleague. Speaking from the hiring side, I trust that any candidate making it to the stage of job talk is capable of a certain amount of *depth* concerning their research agenda. But what I would like a better sense of is whether the candidate has the capability to engage in *breadth* concerning their research agenda. I take this to be informative about what their presence would be like as a future colleague in the intellectual life of the department. (Are they likely to be freely moving about a landscape of research, or will their research always come across as a narrow charted path reflecting their interest of the day, which morphs project to project over time within their research area?) In other words, it isn’t doubt that their research agenda has breadth, but about how they engage temporally with that breadth, as the latter is what is relevant to day-to-day intellectual life.

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      2. Ian Cruise

        Just to be clear, I was giving voice to the tenor of the advice I’ve received, not endorsing it. I don’t know how hiring committees actually think about this, and I completely agree that there is other evidence available about the promise of the candidate’s research agenda.

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  3. Joshua Alexander

    For what it is worth, our department (one-time SLAC; now regional university) has for years replaced the public job talk model with a smaller discussion model where the faculty come prepared to discuss the candidate’s writing sample. The candidate gets 10-15 minutes at the start to rehearse the main argumentative moves of the writing sample, and perhaps even more importantly, to situate it in a broad research program, and then we jump straight to the Q&A, which is always the fun part, anyway. We find that this helps us get to know the candidates better, and better simulates department life. Using this model, we are happy to focus on just one sample of written work, but are, of course, interested to learn what else candidates are thinking about.

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