There’s been a bit of conversation around the philosophy blogosphere about the state of jobs in the profession. Some of the most recent chatter, linked to by Leiter here and here, is about whether young philosophers today have a sense of “entitlement” in their expectations.
Among the claims made:
To be happy as a professor, you don’t need to teach in buildings that win architectural awards. You don’t need a two-course-a-semester load to publish (I published during my first years in Birmingham, despite teaching nine or 10 courses a year). You don’t need your university to give you a dedicated blog site or IT personnel to support your home computer. You need a tenure-track job, and then you need to work hard at the three things we are expected to do: teach students who want to learn, publish about things you care about, and be a good academic citizen through service to your institution and field. That’s the deal. If it doesn’t sound good enough, then maybe you should try bartending in San Francisco. And when you do, lots of adjuncts will apply for your job.
And, contrasting:
When, as a grad student I and some others were grousing about the poor adjunct pay at a local state college, another household name who overheard the conversation asked us why we even took a job with such poor wages. Why not simply refuse? He couldn’t grasp that we needed to pay the rent and eat, and didn’t have a 6 figure salary like he did. I remember staring at him in stunned silence. If you spend several years around folks with quarter million dollar salaries, minimal teaching duties, palatial offices, and brilliant undergrads, you start to think that your first job, if not that grand, ought to be better than teaching 8 courses a year to unprepared slackers at some underfunded State U. in fly-over country.
Here’s where I’m thinking the tie-in to feminist concerns may be: what are the expectations of female philosophers (and other minorities, blacks, LGBT persons, etc) and what are the expectations of male philosophers? How do they compare and what gets labeled “entitlement”? Other thoughts to explore may be the role of generational perspective in assessing “entitlement” (as a thirty-something teaching Gen Y students, I bemoan the same problem), misconceptions about philosophy as a career, etc.
Further, how much is happiness a function of our ability to thrive despite not having our ideal environment? And how much do social injustices, or even the lack of local culture, matter?
I’d like to encourage feminist conversation both here and at Leiter’s blog, although I’ll leave cross-posting at reader discretion. (Remember that this is a thread about jobs in philosophy and not Brian Leiter’s interpretation of jobs in philosophy.)
Thanks so much for picking up this question, Orlando.
I’ve heard talk about this sense of entitlement before, and I find it puzzling. It’s as though the quality of one’s own work and one’s understanding of what’s happening in the field ought to be independent of one’s surroundings. Perhaps for some it is, but surely not for everyone.
I’m reminded here of Miranda Fricker’s discussion of epistemic injustice and the effects of suffering it; how one is in effect not treated as a full human being. Certainly, one’s credibility in our profession can vary with one’s school’s status, other things being equal.
The last time I checked the Phil Gourmet, my program was listed in the middle or low teens (13 or 15 or something like that). As far as I know, we don’t really have any problems with placement, with most of our recent graduates in postdocs or tenure-track positions. And I don’t think we have anyone who’s stuck adjuncting, just trying to pay the bills. Since I’m aiming for a job that’s primarily about teaching rather than publishing — say, at a small liberal arts college, maybe even back in my home state — I think my prospects are good. (Barring a long economic recession that completely kills academic hiring over the next few years, of course.)
But a lot of my fellow graduate students are a little obsessed with our Gourmet ranking, Jobs for Philosophers, and, especially, our placement record. You see, we mostly send our Ph.D.s to middle-tier programs, especially state universities or small Catholic colleges with no grad students. So starting salaries for our graduates are in the mid-five figures, and starting teaching loads are 3-3 or 4-4 or more. It’s not the glamorous life in the Ivory Tower, comfortably isolated from the world, to which most of my fellow grad students seem to aspire.
I’m not sure, though, whether they see this as a denial of a privilege or a denial of an entitlement.
A couple of people over in Leiter’s thread have touched on this, but I think it’s worth making the point a lot more explicit.
I’m wary of older (invariably male) profs in rural, isolated places bemoaning some of us younger folks’ desire to be in or near major cities. Many of us younger philosophers are trying balance career and relationship needs in ways that an older generation of philosophers never had to. Would I be perfectly happy to move to the far corners of the earth to teach philosophy if my parter were willing to drop everything and move with me? I sure would! But as it happens, my partner’s an academic too. So each of us needs to be looking to land in an area with lots of schools, so as to maximize our chances of ending up together.
So, yeah, I’ve got some pretty serious restrictions on where I’d be content to teach. I’m unwilling to consider taking a job in most of so-called fly-over country. Does that make me entitled? Well, all I want is what that older generation of profs got to have: a life teaching philosophy during the day and eating dinner with the person I love at night.
I know there’s a lot more going on in this discussion than just this issue. But changing expectations about womens’ careers, and the consequent rise of the two-body problem, is at least an important part of it.