. . .look at me, I'm on the way to the promised land

People who haven't gone through the process of trying to get an academic job don't understand how it works.  So here's my contribution.  In the case of my own discipline, every fall a big publication called Jobs for Philosophers (JFP) is mailed from the American Philosophical Association's (APA's) underground lair to all the academic departments in the land.  There will be something like two to three hundred advertisements for positions, each one delineating Areas of Specialization (AOS) and Areas of Competence (AOC).  To apply for a job you need to be able to publish articles under the requested AOS and be able at least to teach upper level courses in your AOC.  For example, my AOSs are Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Philosophy of Logic, and my AOCs are Formal Logic, Metaphysics, and Cognitive Science.  If you include jobs advertised as AOS open, then you can usually apply for twenty to fifty jobs depending on your areas and what's hot that year.

At my alma mater, we would have to forward the list of jobs to the placement committee, and they would approve a subset of the ones for which we wanted to apply.  They deleted possible jobs if they thought the position was too good for you, and they deleted positions to prevent two graduates from the department from competing for the same jobs.

Once your list is cut down, you send your c.v., writing samples, and evidence of teaching to the relevant departments.  Your institution sends letters of recommendation.

So you've sent out thirty or so applications.  Each of these departments will have received one to three hundred applications for the position.  They then go through a dog eat dog political struggle with one another to narrow their list of applications down to around ten, who will get interviewed.  They  probably won't send out rejection letters to the 90 to 290 applications that won't get interviews.

If you make it through this hoop and get a few interviews, you have to travel to the Eastern Division APA meeting (held right after Christmas) for interviews.  Note that you have to do this on your own dime, at a period of time in your life when you are the poorest you will probably ever be.   When I went the first time the Eastern was held in Washington D.C. where my parents owned an apartment.  Our placement committee told us we could not stay in my parent's apartment because we needed to be available, "just in case they snag an interview at the last minute" for us, something that I was later told hadn't happened in over twenty years.  So in addition to airfare, you have to cover three nights in a convention center hotel in ruinously expensive cities (often New York or D.C. for the Eastern).  I had one interview.

When you get to the APA they have a message board which posts last minute job opportunities.  All the candidates have folders in milk crates in that room with their C.V.s in them.  If you put in for a last minute job, they'll get your c.v. and leave you a note if they want to interview you.  The one time I tried to do this there were over a thousand people using the service, competing for twelve positions, most of which were one year positions.

The interview either takes place in a hotel room or at a table in one of the conference rooms.  Quite often the departmental factions already have candidates they like and don't like.  In my one interview the first time I went to an APA, one faculty member kept asking me overtly hostile questions (e.g. "maybe it's just me and Noam Chomsky, but in our view we need to get the story of acquisition of syntax down first; maybe in three hundred years or so we'll be able to pose the questions you concern yourself with") and then turning his chair around to stare out the window while I answered him.  For all the world I thought he wasn't listening, but when I'd finished he'd scoot his chair around and snarl another question at me.  I kept thinking of the scene in the Blues Brothers where the nun beats the two protagonists until John Belushi scoots his desk too close to the top of the stairs.  After the interview everybody kept saying "Professor Tool" (not his real name) "is such a nice guy."  It makes me vomit how people with PhDs can consider someone unrelentingly abusive towards those who have no power as "a nice guy."   I guess that's just human nature, but I used to think that the study of Philosophy ennobled one enough to not do stuff like that. 

Also note here that you have to be dishonest during the interview.  Good philosophers are sensitive to the muse, and as such honestly don't have any idea what they are going to be writing in five years.  They'll shut up and write what Lady Philosophy brings them, and if they're smart they'll be thankful.  Unfortunately, during an interview everyone has to pretend that this is false, as if any decent philosopher could be in possession of an algorithm for wisdom and thus know what they'll be writing about and concluding for the next several years.  As another word of advice, be very careful about being too buddy-buddy or joking with the interviewers (even if you have a good sense of humor).  Deferential, slightly excited, earnestness is most often the best strategy.

There are two social things called "smokers" that you have to attend if you are on the market.  Each university has their own table (again these are only philosophy departments).  For people with jobs or good job prospects, these can be a good chance to catch up with old friends over a beer while ignoring the massive suffering of the hundreds of job candidates hanging around.  If you've ever walked on a public street in India, then you know what this is like. 

In any case, if you are interviewing with a place, you have to go sit at their table and make small talk with the department.  This sucks for many reasons.  First, chances are that another job candidate will be there talking to people.  Second, there is so much ambient background noise at the smoker that unless you have preternatural hearing, it's very hard to tell what anybody's saying.  For people with hearing loss (and tinitus) like myself, this puts you at an extreme disadvantage.  I just nod and smile in situations like that.  In my experience, philosophy professors are slightly worse than people in the general population at realizing you can't hear anything they are saying. 

During the heydey of the post World War II great academic job market, these smokers were quite different.  For one thing, people actually smoked.  For another thing, the Baby Boomers actually smoked pot at the smoker.  Unless you are a Generation X job candidate who has been stuck at a table with a drunk Baby Boomer during one of these things, and he (it's always a he!) is telling you how great it was "back in the day" when everybody had over ten interviews and there was a "dance circle" of pot smokers in the middle of the room. . . unless you've had this experience added to the penury and hopelessness of the average job candidate, you maybe don't even know the meaning of the word "rage." [To give you a basis of comparison, I found such experiences vastly more rage inducing than the time four drunk Ohio farm kids on a public street called me a "long haired faggot" and then used me as a punching bag.  This may just be because I could understand most of what the farm kids were saying, unlike with the atrocious A.P.A.-smoker-room acoustics added to the slurred speech of Doctor Peace Bear and his equally drunk and self-satisfied Boomer colleague Professor Hippypants.]

I speculate that this is one of the main reasons Generation X academics are often so unrelentingly hostile (when talking with one another) about Baby Boomer academics.  Note, I don't endorse this.  But any fellow Gen Xer not suffering from the kind of Stockholm Syndrome induced by relentlessly acting like a "promising young man," (i.e. a Boomer's idea of a young person instead of an actual young person) knows what I'm talking about.  Baby Boomer academics had a much easier time getting jobs and tenure.  Somehow on their watch we not only got Reagan, the two Bushes, and abandonment of cool plans to colonize space, but also a university system where now less than half the positions are tenure or tenure-track.  And Gen Xers should be forgiven for concluding that they don't care.  You go to a faculty senate meeting and all the talk is about: (1) diversity (any comment by me on how this actually works in most universities would take us too far afield), (2) fighting the administration's efforts to make it easier to sack dead-wood Baby Boomers with tenure, or (3) instituting some awful management school thing like "strategic planning" that only results in academics (usually the junior ones) writing useless reports to justify some Baby Boomer vice provost's six figure salary. 

Out of the ten or so interviews, departments will invite around three candidates for an "on campus" interview.  If you are in the seven or so who get axed, they will probably send you an e-mail telling you as much after they've done all the on campuses and made the hire.  If you are one of the three then you fly out (on their dime) to the school and meet and greet the Dean and your department's faculty, and give a paper.  The chances for a screw-up here are epic.  Given that most academic departments are divided into warring factions, people who are really good at modulating their glad handing and small talking to different audiences have a real advantage.  I know one person who can modulate the promising young man thing enough to actually charm both Baby Boomer god squaders and Baby Boomer drunks.  I stand in awe of his mad skills.  Unfortunately, the ability to thus modulate in no ways translates into good teaching and research, but there you go.

After having read this, I hope that well meaning Parents and Friends of prospective academics will understand that 99.9999% of academics have no control over where they live.  The job market is so bad that you just go wherever you can get something.  I also hope that they will understand that you can't just call up a chair of some department and ask for work.  You can only apply for positions in your AOS and AOC and you have to do it through the JFP (or the Chronicle of Higher Education's service, which has many more one year and community college positions).

When I finally landed an instructorship from the Central APA (a scaled down version of the Eastern that takes place later in Spring Semester) and got settled into my new position, job search related stuff, moving expenses, and getting through the summer without employment had left me ten thousand dollars in credit card debt.  I was making twenty-six thousand dollars a year, a year in which I was teaching 4 classes a semester (the normal tenure-track load is two), for a total of over two hundred and fifty students a semester.  Since it was an instructorship I had no job security and had to have my contract redone each year.  To understand how hellish the academic job market is today, just note that I was very lucky to get the job, and still feel very thankful to the people who hired me (albeit, see above note about Stockholm Syndrome).

The brothers Young and Bon Scott (R.I.P.) penned a song about the whole experience that you can view here.  It was popular in France.

Comments

[corey]

Excellent post. Just one quibble: the normal teaching load at a research institution is two. At the small liberal-arts college where I teach, we have three terms (2 long twelve-week terms and a six-week term), and the normal teaching load is 3/3/2. Slightly better than a 4/4, but (alas!) I'm so broke from being on the job market that I've volunteered to teach an extra course this term in addition to teaching a Business Ethics course at the local community college last spring. Of course, the trade-off is that the research expectations are less stringent than they would be at a research/graduate institution.

Lest anyone think I'm being ungrateful, I'm still very thankful to have a tenure-track job, and there are much worse ones than mine.

[palejewel]

Since it was an instructorship I had no job security and had to have my contract redone each year. To understand how hellish the academic job market is today, just note that I was very lucky to get the job.

This says it all, doesn't it? Only in our profession would we be glad to be paid a pittance to work too hard with no security and no choice where we end up. The things we do for the love of academia! I must admit I find the whole idea of job searching terrifying (I am currently doing my PhD), because it seems to have so little to do with merit. All my life thus far, if I wanted to achieve something, generally I could, based on my skills and effort. But I know that won't necessarily be enough to get me anywhere in academia. Still, I shall not lose heart before I've even started.

Give me six months into my job search and then we'll talk about heart... ;)

[Drew]

I think I'm going to law school.

[Jon Cogburn]

Drew,

For what it's worth, you can do both- either getting the Ph.D first, and then going to law school, or getting them concurrently (on Brian Leiter's page he's got a list of schools that allow both). You can also get a master's degree in philosophy as a way to see if you want to keep doing it. The master's degree should help your chance at getting in a great law school. Admittedly, this means being poor more years than you otherwise would.

All this being said, if you can rock out at law even half as much as you rock out at writing, you deserve to end up on the supreme court.

[Iron Man]

...That's...horrible.

[Drew]

Thank you for the writing compliment; amongst my unrealistic career goals (next to rock star and pro football player) is sucessful novelist.

Working on both concurrently actually sounds very appealing. There are definitely areas of philosophy - freedom&determinism, philosophy of mind, and Kierkegaard (though he'd certainly disapprove of his most important work being considered philosophical) - which I can't imagine ever really abandoning. But I honestly don't think being a teacher is for me.

Very informative post and undoubtedly much appreciated by many others.

[ABD...looking for that Ph.D.--Have you seen her (calm down)?]

That was an excellent post. Am i about to write something? No! Why not? Well, i have to prepare lectures for the two different universities i'm paid a "pittance". Oh yeah, that student lost his syllabus, she couldn't find the book in the bookstore, he had to go to a wedding so he doesn't have the notes, she uses inappropriate language in class--what to do, what to do? Did i say the wrong thing? I hope he doesn't tell the Dean that i said "hell" in class. Oh, the dissertation, what about conferences, ... What? I need to start publishing as a grad student or i'm doomed! Really? Let's see, between teaching, conferences, the dissertation, keeping my committee happy-(hey, i'm still alive guys (literally)...not working on my dissertation but teaching--"oh, so you don't have a chapter for me?"--hmmm, i'll have to talk to the faculty committee about this. Lovely.

[delagar]

Argh!!! You give me flashbacks! Here I have landed, doing 4/4 on a revolving contract (3 year contract, no tenure, renews every year) at what we used to call a "cow college," back when I was an arrogant young grad student, and am I glad to have the job? Oh shit yes am I ever.

[the nameless lurker]

a very affecting post!

a late-90s grad school ex and I had a plan to edit a collection entitled

Second Sons and Dowryless Daughters

We are proposing a special session for the 1999 MLA on literary representations and enactments of generational conflict. From "Puss-in-Boots" to _Generation X_, literature has registered moments of systemic crisis where a younger generation finds avenues of social
advancement blocked. How does cultural production respond to this kind of demographic crisis and the scarcity of resources that accompanies it?

--this was EIGHT YEARS AGO. Nothing has changed.....

[Thomas H. Benton]

Thank you! Thank you! Every prospective graduate student in the humanities should read this NOW.

[Fishbone McGonigle]

Only in our profession would we be glad to be paid a pittance to work too hard with no security and no choice where we end up. The things we do for the love of academia! I must admit I find the whole idea of job searching terrifying (I am currently doing my PhD), because it seems to have so little to do with merit.

I am a month away from my defense, and this is a perfect description of why I recently decided that the academic job market can go take a flying piss (note: I'm not in Philosophy, but it's not so great in my field either). I am a resourceful guy - I've had to be to get to this point in my studies - and I'm sure I will figure out something rewarding and enjoyable to do with my degree.

[Fishbone McGonigle]

Also, your art selections accompanying this post are very well-chosen.

[Aurolyn]

Sounds like philosophy is just a disfunctional discipline. Why the hell is the student's dept. vetting what jobs he/she gets to apply for? Why prohibit two students competing for the same job? Shouldn't all that be up to the dept. that's HIRING??
In my field (Anthropology), I've learned that there's not much point going to the equivalent of "smokers". The brief, degrading interviews at the annual meetings are used for weeding people out; good candidates who skip them remain in the pool.

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