I've Been Everything You Want to Be, I'm the Cult of Personality

I've talked before about how your advisor's reputation affects the your prospects on the market. No doubt with those considerations in mind, a well-placed departmental source points me to this passage from Leiter's old piece in the Chronicle:

Far too many students attach themselves to professionally marginal faculty members, who may happen to be charismatic or congenial or who seem to loom large in local departmental affairs. No matter how good their subsequent work, these students will be at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to getting a job. What matters isn’t how important and impressive your advisor looks in Austin or Madison or Berkeley or New Haven. What matters is how he is perceived in the profession at large.

When I was new in my department, some of the best senior students got killed on the job market because they fell into the orbit of Evil Columbo. With breadcrumbs and bits of sandwich meat falling out of his mouth, he told them not to bother engaging with recent work on their dissertation topics, because, well, what did anyone younger than him have to say anyway? And he told them search committees wouldn't care about publications, since real philosophers don't need some journal referee to tell them what's good work and what's not.

The man doesn't have a clue, but the force of his personality's stopped some fuck-off smart people from seeing that.