Monday, August 1, 2011

Rebel Angels, Take Two

Apparently the answer to the question "How many comments can a blogger post handle before it gets wonky?" is 1400.

Let's see if opening up a second comment thread solves this problem, because Blogger/Google has not responded to complaints from this blog (and from others).

Happy Commenting!

431 comments:

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Anonymous said...

Want to be able to get a job anywhere and still be paid way more than a humanities professor? And be helping people, in practice?

Plumbing

Seriously. Good. Job.

Anonymous said...

Re: the 2 U Arizona VAP positions in Classics, at least one of these has not been filled. A new job description has been posted on the UA HR site:

https://www.uacareertrack.com/applicants/jsp/shared/frameset/Frameset.jsp?time=1339180092531

Review of applications will begin very soon. If you applied for one of the earlier VAP positions and were not offered an interview, you are eligible for this new posting.

Anonymous said...

Anyone completely desperate who's giving up and isn't seeing anything in high school teaching - consider Library Science

Brilliant. You might as well tell them to go to j-school so they can get jobs as newspaper reporters. I mean, if you're looking for a boom industry with a real future, why not tell them to become zeppelin pilots or telegraph operators or buggy drivers?

Anonymous said...

Edit to the UA announcement: the correct link for applying to the new VAP job is the following:

www.uacareertrack.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=205121

Anonymous said...

The names of over 500 of the 532 (!) candidates who signed up with the Placement Service are as of now available for anyone to see:

http://placement.apaclassics.org/FinalUsers?order=value&sort=asc

I wonder if this "outs" any TT or tenured faculty who were testing the waters on the sly?

Anonymous said...

Wow! It just outed me. This seems pretty unethical. Thanks a lot, APA.

Anonymous said...

Actually it may not be clear whether a senior or tenure-track person is on the list because they are looking for a job or because their dept. is hiring, or because they want to get all the info to advise students. The last option sounds extravagant, but there are people with "reseach" $ to throw around.

Anonymous said...

I find it highly amusing that right now, Google reports the APA site as one that "may harm your computer."

Anonymous said...

The Placement Service appears to have made the list of names private once more. That was a really brief look behind the curtain.

Anonymous said...

"a really brief look behind the curtain"??? Five days is brief? Who wrote that?

Anonymous said...

I looked on the evening of the 28th and couldn't find or access this list. So 5 days may not be quite accurate.

Anonymous said...

I saw the list on 2.28, and was surprised to see the name of a TT friend of mine. I forwarded the link to my unhappy friend (this was not news that he had shared with his department), but the link was dead by the time he tried to look on the morning of 2.29.

Anonymous said...

…by "2.28" and "2.29", I meant to write 6.28 and 6.29.

Anonymous said...

I stand corrected. My cynicism got the better of me that time.

Temporary Like Achilles said...

Yeah, I wish people on this blog would just chill the f*** out about the revelation of the names of all the job seekers by the Placement Service. They're probably just following the best practices of Michigan, Boston College, Edinburgh and, in past years, Baylor, who have all revealed the names of applicants to other applicants. Isn't this kind of openness just the sort of strategic dynamism that academia so sorely needs right now (cf. UVa Board of Visitors)? Your criticism is so 2010.

Who else is ready for another ride on this Merry-go-round, starting in 11 days?

Anonymous said...

They just asked me to complete a survey detailing my experiences in the market this year. That would be fine, if they didn't want my ID number. I don't so much care if the committee members see who I am along with my responses, but I really really really don't want the placement service staff to associate my comments with my personal information! What to do...

Anonymous said...

Choose a number at random?

Anonymous said...

That would be fine, if they didn't want my ID number. I don't so much care if the committee members see who I am along with my responses, but I really really really don't want the placement service staff to associate my comments with my personal information! What to do...

Why are you so suspicious? I am sure that your identity will be kept in strictest confidence, except on those occasions on which it is published openly on the Internet, along with your medical records, your credit card and bank information, and unflattering pictures of your least favorite parts of your body.

Anonymous said...

If you had entered your ID number and completed that questionnaire, you would have realized that you did not need to fear. There is absolutely no chance to give feedback on the most of the mediocre services offered by the Placement Service. It is just a serious of questioned designed (I presume) to fill out a report showing what a good job they do making sure that no one is harassed during interviews and proving also that people get jobs through the placement service (and therefore it's incredibly valuable and shouldn't be changed).

On a side note, did anyone else who applied to the spring UCLA job get a recent email from the chair? I think that the one I got was a form letter, but it's hard to tell.

Anonymous said...

I meant "series of questions."

mendicus said...

So who's ready for another year of even more rejections? Hooray!

Anonymous said...

@9:52 - definitely a form letter, considering that in the paragraph talking about my dissertation, they express their pleasure at seeing that I had worked with a scholar whom I have never met, and who works in a completely different subfield. Well played, UCLA!

Anonymous said...

My UCLA rejection letter was actually personalized to me, which I appreciated. But I have received letters clearly personalized for somebody else from other schools, and it is indeed frustrating.

Anonymous said...

UCLA seems to have added personalized comments to at least some of the form e-mails they sent out, and of course deserves credit for this, even if once or twice they copied and pasted incorrectly. They actually treated job candidates as people and colleagues. Heck, if I didn't think the "cheers" and "jeers" section of the wiki is so pointless I might even have given them a "cheer."

Anonymous said...

Agreed. Given the number of applications jobs are getting, the attempt to personalize rejections is an enormous commitment of time. No one is making people do it either, so it's a sign that they truly care about the candidates as people, enough to sit around trying to think of something nice to say to 200 different people instead of working on an article or book. If there are occasional errors, that's to be expected.

Anonymous said...

July 16, 2012 12:54 PM Agreed. Given the number of applications jobs are getting, the attempt to personalize rejections is an enormous commitment of time. No one is making people do it either, so it's a sign that they truly care about the candidates as people, enough to sit around trying to think of something nice to say to 200 different people instead of working on an article or book. If there are occasional errors, that's to be expected.


So, given that we're gracious enough to accept the occasional error on the part of a search committee that has gone out of its way to personalize our rejections, is there any chance we'd also be extended the same courtesy if we should make the occasional glaring error in our own application letters? Because my sense is that this is exactly the sort of error that would have our applications thrown into the burn pile. We may not be applying for 200+ positions, but we are spending WAY MORE time writing each of the dozens of letters that we send out for consideration. Or is it too much to expect a pragmatic kind of humanity on both sides of the process?

Anonymous said...

Yes, granted, it's nice that they made an effort to individualize their rejections. Personally, however, I much prefer the short-but-thoughtful form email from, say, Wyoming a couple of months back. Encouragement to apply for a job at UCLA in the future comes off as a wee bit disingenuous when a seemingly personalized message has facts wrong.

That said, at least they let us know that we didn't get the job, which - as I'm sure we've all discovered - is not a guarantee.

Anonymous said...

Senior person here, who was once rejected for another senior job with a letter addressed to a different first name. "No, you're definitely not famous enough for us."

Anonymous said...

Permit me to be the first to complain about this latest announcement from the APA/Placement Service about their efforts to ener the 21st century...

Adam Blistein just sent out an e-mail directing us to an announcement regarding (further) changes to the P.S., and there is a major change which is just silly. I guess they heard the complaints that with the internet there was no reason why we couldn't get announcement's e-mailed to us once they're posted, but instead of doing that, apparently we'll just get an e-mail with the name of the school advertising, forcing us to log on to read the full add. Don't these people realize that even for the most general generalist at least 50% of the postings are irrelevant to most of us? (In my case I'd say 70% are.) It seems as if this is a misguided attempt to protect the information from reaching those who haven't registered -- I can't think of why else they would do it this way -- but that's just plain dumb, since if a registered person was going to forward an e-mail to an unregistered one then he/she can also copy&paste.

Might I suggest that if the APA is finally getting the Placement Service to try to do things the right way it not permit this half-measure to stand, and get the Placement Service to e-mail all registered candidates THE WHOLE DARNED POSTING? If not, I would welcome a response from Adam Blistein or someone on the Placement Committee to explain why not.

P.S., I am being very polite here. This post could easily have included some well deserved expletives. And yes, I'm using the initials 'P.S.' in two different ways there, that's how clever I am.

Anonymous said...

I sent the PS an email stating that I thought the new email format was silly, and Adam Blistein sent me a very polite response saying he was glad for the feedback and asking for suggestions.

If a lot of us agree that the new format is silly, they might just actually change it, if we tell them. It's worth a try.

Anonymous said...

And so it begins…
http://chronicle.com/jobs/0000737754-01

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