Next week, I will be speaking at a career development workshop for female Oxford graduate and masters students. One of the things I want to focus on is the importance of building out a broad, strong, supportive professional network.
Academia is built on trust and personal relationships. Rarely are people invited as speakers at conferences, workshops etc purely on the basis of merit. Merit is an important consideration, but people want additional information (e.g., is she a good speaker, will she turn up?) that they can acquire through their network, either by directly knowing the potential invitee, or by knowing others who know her. People from one’s network can alert one to opportunities, including job opportunities. Without a professional network, one has no letter writers (except the advisor and readers of the dissertation), one is excluded from many aspects of academic life that thrive on trust and personal relationships, such as being a keynote speaker or contributing to an edited volume. Moreover, people from one’s network provide opportunities for mentoring, friendship and mutual support in the very competitive environment that is academia. If one has to move state or country and has to leave friends and family behind, the ability to be able to fall back on a network of professional comrades for support and friendship is very valuable. Therefore, I will advise the students to work on their networks early on, and to nurture them.
But there are problematic aspects to networking. Ned Dobos has argued that career networking is ‘an immoral attempt to gain an illegitimate advantage over others’. He makes clear that he doesn’t target emotional networking – plain old socialising – but specifically career networking, networking in the context of advancing one’s career, especially, but not uniquely, one’s job prospects.
It does not seem clear to me, however, whether we can make a clean separation between career networking and emotional networking, especially in academia, where (for reasons I outlined above) the people in one’s professional network and one’s emotional (friend) network overlap to some extent. Dobos offers several arguments against the legitimacy of career networking. Insofar as the search process is meritocratic, career networking is morally objectionable because it attempts to distort the meritocratic allocation of positions, in a process analogous to bribery, or to ‘earwigging’ attempting to persuade judges outside of the formal process. In both cases, the career networker obtains an unfair advantage. Is it possible to engage in ethical career networking?
When I attended the E-APA for the first time, a few years ago, I was surprised to see placement directors at work, senior philosophers whose job it is to help graduate students and recent PhD holders improve their prospects of landing a position. One of the things I observed these placement directors do is to speak to members of search committees after the interview took place. For instance, I was speaking with philosopher who was member of an SC during the infamous ‘smoker’ (the informal reception with drinks), and was interrupted by such a placement director who urgently wanted to talk to the SC member, because one of their students had blown their interview. The SC member explained patiently that s/he first wanted to finish their conversation with me (which I thought was great), but after this they went off to do a postmortem on the interview. The placement director later apologised to me, saying that s/he had the obligation to do damage control. I was still digesting the fact that PhD holders from eminent institutions, next to all the other advantages such as prestige and glow of their alma mater, also have people advocating for them. As a holder of a PhD degree from Groningen (The Netherlands) I do not have a person who does this on my behalf, and so, I imagine it is the case for most PhD holders. I don’t know what readers on this blog think, but my sense is that this indeed feels like a form of earwigging, disadvantaging some candidates, whilst putting others at an advantage, and distorting the selection process.
Another problem with career networking is that it puts people of different ethnicities, gender, sexual orientation and with disabilities at a disproportionate disadvantage. If – as I hold – we cannot separate career networking neatly from emotional networking, it’s clear that people prefer to hang out with those who are similar to them, which often means, male, white, straight, cis etc.
So given all these problems and the state of our profession as one that relies on personal relationships and trust, how can we make career networking more a process of finding people with whom one can collaborate, to whom one can turn for mentoring, and who can help with reading papers, and less about conferring unfair advantages to some people in the job market? I do not foresee an immediate future where letters of recommendation, invitation based on personal knowledge etc get replaced by an impersonal purely meritocratic process, so I would be curious to hear thoughts from readers about this.
New APPS 
Leave a reply to Jon Cogburn Cancel reply