The Pre-Doc Publications Arms Race

A recent tweet marveling at the accomplishments of new Philosophy Ph.D. students currently on the market has provoked some strong feelings. The tweet makes the familiar point that the young philosophers seeking jobs today are more likely to have substantial publication records than in the past, to the point where the best are already more established in the field than some professors on hiring committees will ever be. Even those who have published a paper or two as graduate students can fail to stand out in a field with students who have multiple publications in top journals. The responses to the tweet have been varied, but mostly negative. This productivity is taken to be a sign that things are not well in academic philosophy.

An initial thought might be that this critical response is surprising. We might think the trend points to the productive powers of healthy competition—perhaps it’s an instance of what we see in amusing comparisons of what passed for top-notch gymnastics decades ago to what elite athletes are capable of now. Perhaps graduate schools are just filled with students who are, of necessity, much more hard working, ambitious, and capable than in times past.

To resist this conclusion, doubters need to question either the value of all these early “pre-doc” publications, or their utility in identifying graduate students with a lot of career potential, or both. There are certainly grounds for such doubts.

Recent research has shown what many have long suspected—most academic work in the humanities is rarely cited and has minimal impact if it’s read at all. Philosophy is no exception. While there are always nuggets in the slew of very early career publications, the vast expansion of publications and journals is largely not to anyone’s benefit except as they further individual careers or polish department reputations. The level of work is unlikely to be appreciably higher across the board. It’s just that people try earlier and harder to get published, and they have more venues in which to do so.

Nor can much of a case be made that pre-doc publications provide evidence that a job candidate will be a good teacher, or do the kind of research that folds into undergraduate curriculum. This is fine when it comes to jobs at top departments at top research universities, but the focus on publications for their own sake is misplaced with candidates for the kinds of jobs most philosophers get if they get any at all, which are at teaching-heavy institutions.

All of this is well known, and so the palpable frustration is understandable. Arms races, by their very nature, do little to upset patterns of positional advantage. What they do is suck up resources, which in the humanities are largely time and energy, as more and more is invested by individuals to effect marginal comparative gains. The result is a stable and persistent status quo sustained by ever-increasing levels of effort and stress. Whatever average changes are observable across time, we still have candidates desperate to distinguish themselves, and hiring committees looking to make distinctions within a large pool of perfectly capable job seekers. Unless we think philosophy really does work like gymnastics, it’s all a big waste, as arms races tend to be.

So, what to do? It’s tempting to look for some kind of collective action. It would help if the field as a whole could agree to lower its emphasis on publications, or at least early career publications. Or recover an appreciation for slow research that emphasizes scholarly mastery of an area of study over quick interventions on trendy, often political, topics. Or shift the focus when evaluating job candidates to evidence of good teaching. There’s a lot to be said for these suggestions, though as with all collective action problems there are entrenched obstacles, starting with the basic problem it’s always risky to go first. If the reforms don’t catch on, early adopters will miss out on the most desired hires.

Harsher would be a collective commitment to showing the same ruthlessness in admitting people to graduate school as we show in admitting them into secure academic employment. Fewer Ph.D.s relative to job openings would relieve some of the pressure that drives the hyper-competitiveness, allowing graduate students to worry less about publishing and more about becoming better philosophers and teachers. But fewer opportunities for graduate work will just fuel an arms race among undergraduates trying to get into programs with good placement records. However lamentable, it would seem we will be seeing much of the same trends continuing in the future.