Ever since this piece on the hiring process in philosophy was published in Inside Higher Ed, there has been a lot of discussion about the role that pedigree should play in hiring committees decisions about job candidates (see here, here, and here). However, there has been little discussion about publications or, rather, discussions about publications have been about what kinds of publications are most helpful. The underlying assumption seems to be that publications in reputable journals are a good thing on the job market. Many people I know delay going on the market until they get a paper accepted somewhere reputable (I hear that there are some departments that encourage students not to publish, usually departments with a particularly good pedigree or reputation).
Given that it seems to be common wisdom that publications are helpful, two anecdotes I heard in the past week or so scare me a little bit. Both anecdotes are about departments that were searching or are planning a search. Both departments see their department as mainly a teaching department but they do have research requirements (I think 3/3 or 3/2 loads). Also, according to both anecdotes, these departments consider publications in top journals as counting against a candidate!
I can think of a couple reasons a department might see publications as counting against a candidate. One might be that a publication (or publications) in good journals indicate a level of ambition to do philosophical research and so indicate that a candidate will not be happy with the amount of teaching they will be expected to do. Along these lines, schools might be worried that an unhappy candidate is more likely to leave, and if you are worried that the administration is not likely to replace the hire, you might aim to get someone you are confident will stay. Or, the department might take the candidates research ambition as a reason for thinking that candidate won’t be the kind of colleague that will be fun to have around (all work and no play) or that the students will suffer because of it.
Another reason might be that the departments in question think that applicant’s with publications are likely to get “better” offers from more research oriented schools. Given this, the department thinks it better to aim for “more realistic” candidates.
With respect to these reasons, I think the second is a really bad reason to count publications against a candidate. Given the state of the job market, it seems unlikely to me that candidates with a publication are out of the reach of any department. This may be different with respect to candidates from NYU with four publications in J. Phil., but, at least with respect to the general population of applicants with publications, it seems true.
The first set of reasons might be good, if the inference from publications to strong research ambitions were a good one. Of course, we have good reason to think this inference isn’t good. While research ambitions would explain the publications on an applicant’s CV, so does the fact that the common wisdom with respect to publication is that publications help you get jobs!
I’m not sure if the anecdotes I mention generalize (someone get the experimental philosophers on it…ZING!). If discounting publications isn’t widespread, that is all to the good. If it is widespread, someone needs to tell us graduate students what we can do to alleviate the worries of the relevant departments. I, at least, would not count myself unlucky (in fact, quite the opposite) to get a job in a department like those I described. I did my undergrad work in a department with a heavy emphasis on teaching and was extremely pleased that there were extremely qualified philosophers there to guide me.
The fact, if it is a fact, that I have publications does not mean that I’ll neglect my teaching duties, or that I won’t go out to lunch or the pub with my colleagues. It just means that I had something (maybe) interesting to say and thought that putting it out there might improve my chances of landing a job in philosophy. Many of my colleagues, I’m sure, feel exactly the same.
8 Comments
Interesting post, and your final remark seems spot on. I can’t comment on the USA situation, but a decent publication record seems to have become a sine qua non of getting a job in more or less any half-way respectable UK department. Once upon a time, you used to hear anecdotes about third-rate departments turning down first-rate research-promising candidates, preferring to live with more comfortable mediocrity. But those days are long gone (of course, slightly odd things do happen, but that’s human life for you: even philosophy appointment commitments have their foibles!). The RAEs — Research Assessment Exercises — over last twenty years have made a heck of a difference in that kind of way.
Peter,
Thanks for the comment. I hope the US is as you describe the UK. I would understand not getting a job because there was a flood of strong candidates, but I would hate to not get a job because I was passed over because a department thought I wouldn’t care enough about teaching based on (hopefully) a publication record.
I think these are important concerns. I’m a phil grad student who has published, and I’m enthusiastic about working in a department that focuses on teaching. This is because I think teaching is important and I enjoy teaching philosophy. It is hard to see how publications could count as evidence against having feeling that way.
However, it would be interesting to have large-sample empirical data on whether non-publishing PhD grads tend to meet/exceed, once hired, the expectations of teaching focused departments at a higher rate than publishing PhD grads. Maybe non-publishers do outperform the publishers in this respect. But this surely won’t be true in each pair-wise comparison of non-publisher vs. publisher. I hope that teaching focused departments at least keep this in mind, and so investigate each (otherwise promising) publishing applicant’s application, to see whether they are a trend-bucker. More generally I hope decisions of how to weigh publications on an application are done on a case by case basis, taking into account other pieces of the application.
John,
There has been some discussion of graduate student publishing on Leiter’s site in the somewhat recent past:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/a_guide_for_gra.htmlhttp:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/advice_to_philo.html
Also, I’m not sure the second reason you dismiss is necessarily a bad one. For instance, I know of a school who tried to hire one year and got no one because the candidates they liked all took positions at other schools. Given that some types of institutions might lose out in this way, it doesn’t seem unreasonable for them to aim to get candidates they think will accept their offers. One way of doing this is to prefer applicants who look less likely to be pursued by research institutions (i.e. those without publications).
Being at a small liberal arts teaching college at which teaching is overall considered more important for tenure than publications, we certainly would not pass over a candidate just because they published, and I’ve never heard any suggestion of this. I’ve sat on search committees in philosophy and several other disciplines, I’ve also taught to colleagues at other similar schools. It sounds unlikely to me, given the fact that most candidates have some publications.
The absence of publications is, however, not necessarily a reason for a candidate to be passed over. We may not be as impressed by either your pedigree or the long list of publications. Rather, we’ll probably scrutinize your letter and your teaching evaluations, look for the sort of breadth and pluralist background that fits most with our needs. Now not all teaching schools are built the same way. Small departments such as ours have very different needs than larger departments that emphasize undergraduate teaching. But, I can’t imagine us counting publications against a candidate. All things being equal they are always going to count in favor of a candidate, but they’re not the only thing that we look at.
@MattW
Thanks. I’ll re-look at those discussion of publications on L’s blog.
With respect to your comment about the second reason, I think that it is okay to aim for realistic people (for the reason you mention), but doubt that having a publication removes a person from being a realistic candidate. Given the pressure to publish and the applicant-to-job ratio, it seems that an inference to a candidates being an unrealistic candidate should come from elsewhere.
@CA
Thanks for the comment. That is good to hear. As Matt Barker said, it would be great to have a collection of data on this. I wonder, what kind of load your faculty typically have and if there is any correlation between discounting publications and standard teaching load.
John,
Minor point: For some reason an “http” got slapped on to the end of the first website. It should be:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/02/a_guide_for_gra.html
Regarding the second point, I should’ve been a bit more precise. When I talked with an individual in that dept., they said that having publications per se didn’t count against a candidate, and might be looked on favorably. However, if the publication was in a top-flight journal, that might be evidence that the candidate wasn’t “realistic” for them, and so might be passed over. I doubt that a good publication by itself would be break a candidate, but seems reasonable to throw that type of consideration into the mix.
Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post,and very informative,thanks.