Anti-Climacus

ON WHETHER I HAVE ANY HOPE IN EVER GETTING A JOB: (All of the following said by someone not within two years of worrying about the job market. Caveat lector.)

Chris points to this Jacob Levy post on this report from APSA about the preponderance (or lack) of jobs offered in political theory with respect to those offered in both the other 'traditional' subfields and those that have emerged as of late. Says Chris:

"My sense from four years on the market is that new hiring, particularly outside the research universities, is trending in a very pragmatic direction, with more emphasis on applied and borderline vocational subfields such as policy and public administration (and, to a lesser extent, quantitative political analysis as applied to those fields) and rather less on the theoretical study of politics, normative or otherwise."

I have three thoughts about this:

1. Most people who get into programs in political theory have some awareness of the lack of jobs out there, even if they have no particular idea how bad it may be any particular year. Levy's 20 Questions at Crescat Sententia came out as I was applying to grad programs, and I took what he said to heart: the odds are not good that I'll place in a tenure-track job my first time out on the market. It is likely that I'll have to take some combination of post-docs and one-year positions before I have enough of a publishing history to be taken seriously. On the margins, there are things you can do to make yourself more attractive to schools (and the locally capricious nature of hiring adds a fair amount of noise to the signal), but in large part I think there's some dues-paying involved.

2. My sense from following political theory rumor mill and some of the end-of-year wrap-ups on who got hired, the market's not entirely terrible. If nothing else, I have the story Michael Gillespie told about how many political theory jobs there were when he first went on the market, and it makes 62 look more than decent. Duke, as far as political theory programs go, is up there--maybe not quite high enough to get your foot in the door just on that alone--and has placed fairly well so far this year, given the number of PhDs who are out.

3. My own research agenda runs not just to political theory, but also into international relations, public law (international, in particular), and political philosophy. It runs that way largely because of the phenomena I'm interested in, but it's not entirely lost on me that it could function as a comparative advantage, depending on the sort of jobs I might apply for. Fortunately, that's still a few years away for me.