The JFP

Wednesday is a pretty big day if you're a graduate student or newly minted PhD in the academic discipline of philosophy. On October 10th the JFP - Jobs for Philosophers - list is released by the American Philosophical Association. While I did the MA and have friends who have careers in academia and did my part to recruit law professors for my old employer, I am slowly gathering that the college and university philosophy job market is a whole different beast.

There is a blog out there written by three philosophy grad students called Philosophy Job Market that Michael found a few months back that gives a decent glimpse into the madness. The blog somehow manages to be both obscenely hilarious and deeply troubling from the perspective of our own job search. (I say "our" because this is a family endeavor. And it will likely determine where we'll live for at least the next 5-10 years.) I comfort myself by telling anyone that will listen that the reason these grad students from this decent philosophy program haven't found jobs yet is because they have fundamentally unemployable qualities. Like bad b-o. Or dandruff the size of snowflakes. And you can tell this from their CV alone because the paper smells and dandruff floats out of their application packet. And the good people at Nor'eastern Nebraska figure they have enough philosophy professors with huge dandruff and bad b-o already.

When Michael asked my Dad for his permission to marry me (oh, the patriarchy!), reportedly my Dad's primary question was exactly how many jobs there are in philosophy. Let's say the number was 4,289 jobs every year. That may not seem bad until you consider the 21,425 desperate people applying for those jobs. Good thing we've been married for five years now. No take backs, Dad.