The philosophy job market is bullshit

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About the Author

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.

Disclaimer: The screenshots below are drawn from real postings, rejection letters, and applicant data. Nothing here is hypothetical.

Let us dispense with the euphemisms. The philosophy job market isn’t a market. It is instead a guild protected by the requirement for credentials, and is oversupplied and structurally insulated—at the moment, anyway—from meaningful feedback. In that sense, it is a system that masquerades as meritocratic while rewarding conformity, identity signaling, and knowing the right people.

Before getting too far into the weeds, I must clarify that I write this post as someone who—luckily for me—won the philosophy job market. A few years ago, fortunately, I got a full-time teaching position—teaching-track, similar to tenure-track—at Arizona State University. And I love my job! I am proud of my students and my research, and I genuinely believe ASU is one of the rare universities doing important work in public-facing philosophy.

However, unfortunately none of that changes the fact that the hiring process in higher education—and especially in fields like philosophy—is deeply flawed and broken, even for someone like me with an excellent record of research and teaching. Even with a stellar academic resume—stellar!—like myself, the path was arbitrary, demoralizing, and inefficient to an astonishing degree, even for people who expect it to be a total and complete disaster. Looking for a job in academic philosophy—especially during a global pandemic—was like looking for work at the height of unemployment during the Great Depression. No exaggeration required here.

This post is an attempt to describe that system from the inside, and to demonstrate how it actually operates even for someone like me who publishes lots of great research, extensive teaching experience across several colleges and states,