Earlier this month Adam and I both picked up copies of Jason Brennan’s new book, Good Work If You Can Get It: How To Succeed In Academia. This is one of the most candid, unromantic accounts of the job of a professor, how hard it is to get such a job, and what you can do to get such a job if you want one. (The book advertises itself as “candid, pull-no-punches”: “The hard truth is that half [of PhD students] will quit or fail to get their degree, and most graduates will never find a full-time academic job.”)
You can get more flavor from Bryan Caplan’s review:
Brennan calmly and crisply cuts through piles of misconceptions, lame rationalizations, and mountains of Social Desirability Bias to tell would-be professors the cold, hard truth about their would-be occupation.
Good Work could just as easily be called Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Becoming a Professor… But Were Afraid to Ask.. He describes the main types of academic jobs, including the multitudinous low-status positions that excellent students rarely encounter first hand… but often end up occupying after grad school. He teaches backwards induction: figure out where you want to end up, then line your ducks up in reverse order to reach your goal. He urges would-be professors to start publishing ASAP:
As a graduate student, you are training for the Olympics. You are trying to win a faculty job. You will be competing against three hundred to one thousand people who are the best in the world at what you study. Your least qualified competitors will be impressive people with decent credentials. Your best qualified competitors spend all five (or more) years of graduate school teaching innovative classes, publishing papers in top peer-reviewed journals, networking with people around the world, and amassing a resume on par with or better than the resume of most currently employed assistant professors. They spend their entire grad school career training to get the job you want. If you want a job, you must not only be better than they are, but look better on paper.
Don’t like it? Then maybe academia’s not for you:
Or from this interview with Brennan, including a list of tips like: “Prioritize Writing. Spend less time teaching. Have multiple projects at all times at all different stages. When you have a hammer, find multiple nails. Look for holes in the literature. Write first, read second.” Or “most service work is not worth doing, period, by anyone.”
Anyway, although I have some disagreements with Brennan’s account of academia, I found it a really helpful starting point for anybody thinking about it as a career path. But I also found myself wondering how this advice applies to the legal academy, which has some very important differences from the arts-and-sciences jobs that Brennan writes about:
Our graduate school program is shorter, focused on being a lawyer rather than a professor, and much more expensive.
There are a lot fewer law schools than there are colleges, and very few law schools where professors are not expected to do active research and publishing.
Our publishing system is centered on student-edited law reviews.
And more.
We briefly wondered if we should try to dash off a book of our own, How To Succeed in Legal Academia, but it seemed like the audience for that book would be pretty small. (But, hey, if you are a publisher and disagree, email us!)
So instead, in the next few posts, Adam and I will provide our takes on Brennan’s advice, as applied to the legal academy.