The point concerns the value of negative papers, right? I say (truly, I think) that they can be extremely valuable. Obviously I’m not saying that graduate students will probably have a very good one available. Just as obviously, it is improbable that they will have a very good positive paper available. My point is not to rule out presenting a negative paper a priori.

Indeed, it would be impressive if a job candidate could pull off something like that. However, it is unlikely that said candidate will. If you want a job, stick to positive papers (and check your desire to destroy at the door—that’s grad school behavior).

As a side note, I would like to suggest that a distinction be made between “critical” and “negative.”

positive paper = a paper that states what is the case and provides a solution

critical paper = a paper that meticulously assesses claims and counter-claims

negative paper = a paper that states what is not the case, pointing out problems without offering solutions.

While all papers should/must be “critical” not all have to be “negative.” Hope this helps.

Similarly for minimalistic outside letters — better to decline to write than to write “I barely know this student and haven’t read her work” in job letter.

Based both on this past year’s search and my own recent time on the market, I would advise getting “outside” letters from within your department (by which I mean letters from people who are not on your dissertation committee and/or do not work in your general area). For example, it can look very good if big name Professor Z found you to be an excellent student, scholar, and generally good person even if your work has nothing to do with Professor Z’s work.

BTW, people interested in more on this particular topic can see it being thrashed out in the comments section of Brian Leiter’s blog last Fall,

http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2004/11/advice_to_philo.html

I think it would be interesting to do some systematic controlled studies about job market success. I’m rather skeptical of principles for job market success that aren’t based on such research. The reason is because smart people with equal experience going on the market or being on committees give contradictory advice. ‘Cover letters don’t matter at all’, ‘The cover letter is the most important part of the application’, ‘A few publications is a prerequisite for making your application stand out’, ‘Publications don’t matter’, etc.

Another way to put this is that anecdotal evidence seems to not be enough to justify any principle about what is important for a job seeker, but anecdotal evidence seems to be all any of us have.

I don’t mean to be saying that there’s no consensus about what would be ideal – lots of publications, good letters from a variety of institutions, teaching experience, etc. – but no claim of the form “The most important n things for job seekers are x1 … xn” is justified for me, because all the testimonial evidence I have on claims of this sort is conflicting.

Bill Hart says at the beginning of his book defending dualism that a friend defended an unorthodox view in print, and that subsequently three separate replies appeared, each claiming to present a definitive refutation. Hart’s friend, he reports, suspected that his original idea had been a good one when he noted that all three of the replies were inconsistent with the others.