Inessentials

The November issue of Jobs for Philosophers has just come out. (In case you’ve forgotten, I discussed this last year.) Things are worse this year than I expected. The economy has hurt universities more quickly than I had initially thought it would, so fewer jobs are being offered, and some have already been pulled that were initially listed. Fortunately, I’m not on the market this year (you go “on the market” the fall before you would take a job), but the prognosticators are saying it won’t be better next year (in part because of people waiting to apply for a year because the market is so poor).

What’s the verdict? Well, as always, I need to narrow down the list of 188 listings (not all of which will be filled) to those that apply to me (in terms of tenure rank and specialization). There are basically two categories of tenure-track, “assistant professor” jobs that I can apply for: those that want someone with my specialization, and those that want someone in any number of fields, including mine. Here’s what I would be facing this year.

• Jobs for a Specialty in Early Modern Philosophy: 7 (1 in Massachusetts, 1 in Tennessee, 2 in Ohio, 1 in Iowa, 1 in Illinois, 1 in Canada)
• Jobs Open to a Number of Specialties: 17 (3 in New York, 1 in Maine, 1 in Virginia, 2 in New Jersey, 1 in Maryland, 1 in North Carolina, 1 in Indiana, 3 in Texas, 1 in California, 2 in Turkey, 1 in Hong Kong)

Add in a couple of post-docs and one-year positions (most of which will be listed this spring), and that’s all there is. Last year, there were 11 openings in my area (as of October, 2007). That means a 36% drop, which might not be as bad as the overall drop in the number of job listings, but that’s hardly good news. For these 7 jobs, I’m probably up against a couple dozen other candidates. For the 17 open-specialty jobs, there will be 100-400 applicants to each.

That’s why, when people ask me where I want to live, I say “wherever there’s a job.” For instance, in the last two years there has been no tenure-track job west of Kansas for my specialization. That’s also why people bounce around for a few years, filling one-year positions until they settle somewhere that they are reasonably happy with some small amount of job security. And it’s why some people leave academia entirely.