As a student of empirical methods, I soon learned about problems of interview bias and how tricky in-person interviews are. The research suggests that interviewers’ conclusions are based on unconscious first impressions, and that they’re not generally predictive of actual abilities. Furthermore, interviewers tend not to favor you unless you “look the part,” which in the case of academic philosophy, means being young, male, white, and “quick-witted.”

The issue of wit cuts deep into the problems of academic philosophy. There is a cult of genius in this field. Philosophy departments are constantly looking for the next Wittgenstein, the next young rising star. These rising stars are usually quick on their feet in Q&A sessions and always very dominant in seminar discussions. The quiet, introverted scholars who prefer to think deeply and slowly before answering are unconsciously judged to be less gifted in “philosophical skill” — as if philosophy could really be boiled down to an issue of innate talent as opposed to grit, determination, and rigorous scholarship. Giving your job talk, but don’t seem “witty” in the Q&A session? Good luck getting the job. Not good at schmoozing over drinks after the job talk? Good luck getting the job.

The elders have all the power, and they do not want to retire.

And as I learned more about the perils of the job market, I came to understand how rampant the “publish or perish” problem really is. As a PhD student, you must not only publish many papers by the time you graduate to stand out against hundreds of similarly qualified applicants, but you must publish in top journals and compete against tenured professors, PhDs, and postdocs. These top journals usually have acceptance rates in the low single digits. It’s brutal. To be a philosopher, you must get used to rejection and constant criticism.

It’s not uncommon to work on a paper for a year, send it to a journal, wait anxiously for another year, and then receive a succinct rejection that patently misunderstands your thesis — a disconnect likely based on the biases of the reviewer. It’s not a fair system. And do you really think the process is “blind”? Hardly. It’s easy to tell who’s who based on their references, footnotes, writing style, topic, etc. Tenured professors get into editorial circle-jerks with their buddies who run the journals that publish their papers. The elders have all the power, and they do not want to retire.

Fresh on the job market? Good luck competing against the postdoc with five times the publications as you — who also has yet to find a job. There is a backlog of highly, highly qualified candidates and there are very few job openings every year. Not from a top 10 graduate program? Your chances of success are slim unless you want to slog it out in the adjuncting/postdoc world for years, waiting for a job to open up in the middle of nowhere.

According to a recent analysis, roughly three-quarters of teaching positions in higher education are not on the tenure track. This leaves the typical philosophy student working for six years to get a PhD, only to become an adjunct carrying a brutal course load, making maybe $30,000 a year, with no job security or benefits, no union, disposable, all while constantly hoping to get a job. You’re hopping from one shitty job to the next, moving to bumfuck nowhere, and happy you even have a source of income — all because you’re “doing what you love.”

You don’t know what academic philosophy is really like until it’s too late.

Except you’re not. Because by this time, you have no work-life balance and you’re sick of your research topic, which is essentially your dissertation stretched into 30 tedious papers over the next decade. The only way to advance your career is to become an expert on an incredibly narrow topic that nobody else has bothered to care about because its significance is so exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things.

Forget about writing papers on meaty topics you’re really interested in. Philosophy journals only want mind-numb, nitty-gritty logic chopping. The dense prose and needless logical formulas make it impossible to read without wanting to bash your head against the table.