I know, I know, wanting knowledge to serve some practical good like Civilization deserves no response except "wow, just wow" "in the current year" and "I can't even". Please continue to make arguments in favor of your position. And try something better than "advancing human knowledge," as if this were an end in itself requiring no further justification. Nietzsche recognized this as nihilism in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. You're talking about promoting nothing but useless, meaningless, antiquarian knowledge stones bouncing around in the head. Is it any wonder the public has no use for Classics or the humanities with this as the profession's goal? From this point of view, someone like me actually has a lot in common with Eidolon. We just disagree about what we should learn from the Classics to make the world a better place.
Dismissive person here. So would you say monumental vs. critical history represents the distinction between the MCGA folks and Eidolon? And mainstream classicists are antiquarian?
Not the one you asked, but I'd chime in to say that Eidolon and its ilk represent Nietzsche's Critical Historians in the "disadvantage for life" sense. The MCGA are a kind of admixture of the Antiquarians & Monumental "disadvantage" categories. The more reasonable people like 1:00 am are Antiquarian + Monumental in the "advantage/use" category. The responsible and reasonable minority-studies versions (like Benjamin Isaac and other junior scholars who don't need more abuse heaped on them) represent Critical + Antiquarian in the "advantage" category.
It's easy to see how people like 1:13 am conflate (willfully or ignorantly) advantage arguments as disadvantage arguments, and vice versa. They do this vilify the arguments they see as enemy to their own.
One of the things that Sententiae Antiquae got perfectly right: most of the commentorss here are not interested in understanding, clarifying, nuancing, or improving any sort of knowledge; their interests begin and end with the nugatory sledgehammer of their bon mot.
"If you want to be internally consistent and not hypocrites, then by your own lights you have two options: yourselves work on Arabic, papyri, stone fragments and empirically observe the outcomes of your theories, or remove yourself from the field. By either method you will cease to contribute to useless detritus and will improve Classics.
tl;dr: put your money where your mouth is. If you're already doing this without success, then maybe, just maybe you bet on the wrong horse."
12:22 here. 12:37, you silly goose, I'm not going back to grad school just to prove a point to some anonymous person on the internet. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong to say that people should look for less trodden topics instead of studying an author who has been studied so many times before that the Law of Diminishing Returns has kicked in. And every year there are multiple positions in Greek medicine, not to mention philosophy, so if someone does good and original work with the Arabic materials that could certainly lead to a job, and would be quite beneficial to the field.
Also, FYI, it's the papyri that almost always come in fragments, while when stones are fragments they don't preserve enough text to be worth studying in detail. Perhaps I'm not the only one who needs to go back to grad school.
Are you saying stone doesn't come in fragments? Can you define fragment? When is a stone "whole"? Are the majority of inscribed stones "whole" by your definition of "whole"? If not, what's the difference between "un-whole" and "fragment"? Or this philosophy and not classics? Jeez Louise! Quelle aporia!
I'm not going back to grad school just to prove a point
This sounds like a sunk-costs fallacy: "I believe x, but I'm not going to do x because I've done y for too long and x is hard. But still, x." 12:37 was right to call you a hypocrite.
2:23, let me get this straight: one of FV's top three complaints is people going to grad school in classics when the odds against a job are so high, and you are actually critical of someone for not wanting to to grad school in the same field TWICE? I am not sure what one would even call THAT sort of fallacy.
I, for one, am critical of internal inconsistency.
You, 3:17, are basing your claim on: I did x; I claim y is the true value; anyone who does not do y is stupid and deserves their fate as does their field; I myself will not do y because I already did x; I myself deserve compensation for x despite my personal claims about y.
You are internally inconsistent. That precludes being correct, whatever the claims of your interlocutors.
"But the Arabic stuff is apparently mostly philosophy and medicine.(...) So if you want to read bad translations of Galen and people commenting on Galen all day or Aristotle, go for it. Not sure how that would fit into Classics as Classicists understand it."
Are ancient Philosophy and Medicine not Classics? If Classicists aren't interested in and working on Galen and Aristotle, then who is/should be?
The question is whether Classics is or should be (a) an historical, progressive discipline or (b) a loving combing over of quasi-sacred ancient texts (did Dido and Aeneas really get married? What does Virgil really think of Augustus?), or some kind of combination of/compromise between the two. I would argue it could easily be mostly (a) at the grad and research level and (b) at the HS and undergrad level.
People who were willing to pursue a genuine research agenda and also preserve the tradition by teaching would fit into this vision of MCGA. But the 'teaching-research' synergy BS (BS because it's often not possible, not because it's NEVER possible) will have to be soft-pedaled or abandoned, MULTA INTER ALIA.
The problem is that, as Aristotle reminds us, TO MCGA POLLACHWS LEGETAI (Illud MCGA MULTIS DICITUR MODIS). Some people want "lessons of the past for the West' (mission civilisatrice!) some people want Wissenschaft, some people want leftist critical history. But we are all dissatisfied with the status quo (beyond the fact that many of us are unemployable and deplorable).
Did anyone read the Sententiae Antiquae post all the way through? I tried, but I have four classes to prep, an article and conference paper to write, and I foolishly agreed to speak at my state's JCL conference next weekend. My general impression was aporia: FV can be good! But also bad! But sometimes good! But often bad! Am I missing something?
3:43, normally I would not engage a blowhard, but your attempt to use x's and y's to make it seem like you are an expert logician is just too tempting. The following response comes not from a place of anger at being disagreed with or called a hypocrite, but from one of benign amusement at the absurdity of you making such an issue of this, while straying so badly from what the texts you are analyzing actually say.
So, you wrote: I, for one, am critical of internal inconsistency.
You, 3:17, are basing your claim on: I did x; I claim y is the true value; anyone who does not do y is stupid and deserves their fate as does their field; I myself will not do y because I already did x; I myself deserve compensation for x despite my personal claims about y.
You are internally inconsistent. That precludes being correct, whatever the claims of your interlocutors.
Here are my comments from the past 12 hours or so: 1) If you want to be useful then go and learn Arabic and edit+translate Arabic versions of (often lost) works of Greek literature, and work on Arabic papyri. The field needs that more than another Homer dissertation. If you don't have the language chops to tackle Arabic as well -- not saying I do -- then work on literary papyri or else Greek and/or Latin poetry on stone. That's where one can more easily find new things to say.
2) Sure, it's mostly philosophy and medicine. But any time one recovers a lost Greek work, I'd argue, that's more important than yet another study of Pindar. Obviously, it won't appeal to everyone, but how many people in grad school are even made aware that it's an option?
3) 12:22 here. 12:37, you silly goose, I'm not going back to grad school just to prove a point to some anonymous person on the internet. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong to say that people should look for less trodden topics instead of studying an author who has been studied so many times before that the Law of Diminishing Returns has kicked in. And every year there are multiple positions in Greek medicine, not to mention philosophy, so if someone does good and original work with the Arabic materials that could certainly lead to a job, and would be quite beneficial to the field.
At no point do I state or imply that those who do not work on Arabic texts (or literary papyri, or inscribed epigrams) are "stupid" and should leave the field, or do not deserve pay. Since you like logic without understanding it -- to quote Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda when she is challenged about whether apes read philosophy, "Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!" -- I will put this to you in a logical manner with two statements that I believe to be true: "All people who work on Arabic texts preserving lost classical works are doing something useful for Classical Studies. Not all people doing something useful for Classical Studies are working on Arabic texts preserving lost classical works." At no point do I indicate that I believe the first sentence but not the second. I did express my opinion, obviously shared by others, that doing the umpteenth dissertation on Homer or Euripides might not be the best thing to do. I also indicated that while I see the value in working on the Arabic materials, I myself do not have the language skills to learn Arabic and start doing this, but that hardly means that I am wrong to share my thoughts on the matter, and does not make me a hypocrite. But, to set your mind at ease, I will tell you that while I have not worked on Arabic materials, I have made contributions either through work on literary papyri or inscribed epigrams (which you assume I have not done). All in all, you read one heck of a lot into my post that is not there, which hardly is a sign of the orderly, logical mind you pretend to have with your x's and y's.
Ahhhh, speaking of the nugatory hammer of the bon mot, it seems fitting that the SA post was clearly modeling itself, at least structurally, on a bon mot operateur par excellence (as, I suppose, are most polemical textual critics). But, of course, my pointing this out is probably mansplaining, since others no doubt picked up on the connection...
On the Zetzel on Henderson. His stylish imitation of Hendersonia is amusing. Perhaps SA was inspired, but a deeper and more appropriate analogy would have been a post on a comments and wiki site that was in the form of anonymous comments and Wikis....
I read the Sententiae Antiquae post in toto when it was first mentioned here. Essentially, my conclusion was that the author has a complicated relationship with FV, as most of us probably do. I also said that he could have been a bit more concise in saying so, as such an exercise hardly required the lengthy hand-wringing and bloviating.
12:35 here. You got me! After writing a post that was so long I had to whittle it down to fit within blogger.com's character limit I was so desperate to be viewed as having supporters out there that I waited a bit and then posted a one-line message offering to buy myself a drink, figuring that no one would suspect someone who could be so verbose could also be so terse. And to even more effectively throw you all off the scent I cleverly mentioned two types of alcohol I never drink.
If anyone wants to give me something of especially appropriate, then instead of a drink please buy me a literary papyrus off the antiquities market. I promise not to ask about provenance.
12:35 here, taking a quick FV break between having spent the past two hours putting the finishing touches on my latest article (to be sent off to a journal within two weeks) and turning to working on a joint book project with an overseas colleague. But thank you for the concern.
12:35/8:51 — you’re a blowhard; and you’re indicative of the problems in Classics and in the Academy. Go retire with your boomer soulmates. You’ll be doing the world a favor.
12:35 speaks the truth and many of you can't handle it. Classics as a safe space for the umpteenth Euripides or Homer or Ovid dissertation is not sustainable, given trends in HS education (Latin and Greek moribund - good luck hooking smart 13-17 year olds, who will instead study French or Spanish), demographics (fewer WASPs), and culture (dead Greek and Roman men are suspect, and maintaining a quasi-sacred canon that should be pored over by every generation is even more suspect).
If we're not drinking beer or whiskey, a couple of bottles of Etna Rosso for the table: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/dining/wine-school-assignment-etna-rosso.html
I am not sure if 8:25pm was being serious or not (although I fear they were). But since attitudes like that do persist out there, I think it is important to emphasize both to those who have not had to apply for jobs for a long time and to those who have not yet entered the market that there is absolutely no ironclad correlation between productivity and success on the job market these days. Maybe there used to be, but not anymore. Trust me.
8:25 is, I assume, parodying some senior professor (presumably somewhere fancy) who, in the Eidolon editor's Facebook Thread attacking FV, said something like "all of these deplorables should be focusing on writing articles to get real jobs rather than spending their time critiquing Eidolon."
At least Mississippi State did an exemplary job of peppering its ad with indicators that job seekers shouldn't waste their time applying. Should be standard operating procedure for such searches.
Future SC Chair seeking advice (from March 5) here. I just wanted to thank all those who gave suggestions/advice. Some of this I already knew, some I probably would have guessed, and some I would never have thought of (especially the importance of more than 3 letters and the pitfalls of online submissions that I should look out for). Again, many thanks and best of luck to all of you who are on the market.
Please do not ask for more than three letters. There is never a good reason to do this. With very, very few exceptions candidates would be better served by figuring what three people will write the strongest possible letters and then having frank conversations in order to make sure that collectively these referees are covering all of the key bases. More letters makes more work with no measurable payoff for the field and in fact increases the likelihood of one lukewarm letter undoing the unstinted praise of the others. In fact the field would profit from limiting the number of letters to at most two, with no exceptions.
@3:01, this really depends on the stage of your career. For people who are ABD or in their first job, 3 is probably the max you can really wrangle. After a year or two out, hopefully you'll have a variety of people who can speak to different aspects of your professional profile. I'm a couple years out and I have 4 solid recommenders: my Ph.D. supervisor, a member of my diss committee who apparently writes a mean letter of rec, a research collaborator, and my current chair. If you ask me for three, I have to cut out my committee member, which is one of my strongest letters (from what I've heard). It's not the end of the world, but I'd like to have the extra backup if I can!
@4:30 (et al.). Another recent SC here. We asked for three letters and many candidates just had all their letter writers send them anyway. So for some, we had three; for others, four; for at few, five. My advice is just have them all sent. What's a committee going to do? Trash your application? Choose letters randomly?
Yes, you SHOULD read no more than three, if people break the rules. I dutifully stick to three letters, even though I have five available, and I could make a better case for myself if all five were read. So the fact that some SC's will accept more letters than requested, while others might not, forces people like me to decide whether to follow the rules or to essentially cheat. If we follow the rules and others don't, we're screwed; if we don't, and a place enforces the maximum rule, we're screwed.
A candidate should not have to engage in frickin' Game Theory to figure out how many letters to send. And cheaters shouldn't be rewarded.
Agreed, if an SC wants three letters, they should stop at three. If people have additional recommenders, there is nothing from stopping these from informally lobbying later in the search.
This goes under "mean what you say and say what you mean."
I'm someone who has been out a while and I NEED more than three in order not to create weird-looking gaps (How'd you like to choose between "oh, so nobody at your current institution will write for you, huh?" and "oh, so nobody has a word to say about your teaching, huh?"?). But I NEVER send more than are requested. Allowing people to bend the rules in order to get more points on the board is not fair.
8:06 SC member here again. It's a tough thing to police, especially given the common use of portfolio services for letters.
In retrospect, we should have worded our ad more flexibly. There were cases like 12:11 where three letters meant that there were holes in the career that we had to either ignore or try out best to fill in. Ideally, I think, there would be two letters about the thesis and research (say, supervisor and a committee member) and one from each place that a candidate has taught. Given that so many candidates now have had two or three or more gigs after completion, something useful will go missing.
12:11 again, thanks for your thoughtfulness, 8:06! But note that portfolio services have nothing to do with it -- those dossiers are individually tailored and assembled just like in the days of yore, so if there is more material in it than the job ad allowed, that is because the candidate made a choice to send it, not because Interfolio somehow made them do it. Thanks again for checking in here!!
It's been quiet here for nearly a day! Anyone have their lunch eaten by someone from Cincinnati, Eidolon, or The Left since then? Maybe by some Post-Modernists or Judith Butler? I'm surprised no one has taken on the task of punching down by slagging off the Sportula yet.
When SCs can't even match the number of recommendations they want to the number listed in their job ad, how can we expect them to match a description of what candidate they want to the description listed in their job ad?
That pollyanna comment about how "portfolio services" work = QED.
Well, I have had my lunch eaten as a result, in part, of a long-standing leftist policy, but I can't explain where or how. So it's not the only reason my lunch was eaten or rather stolen, but it's one factor.
If the recipient of the Hamilton job wanted their identity known, they would have made it known. Until then, we'll just have to wait until Hamilton announces the result.
You keep using that word. I do think it means what you think it means.
Seriously though, get a grip. There is no such thing as leftism in the American university system, at least not at the policy/administrative level. What you're referring to is most likely run-of-the-mill, bog standard centrist neoliberal policy, which is not leftist by any stretch.
@2:03am - you want people to out themselves on here? Until the tone on here changes and successful candidates aren't going to be ripped to shreds (like the last few people to post their names on the wiki), I think they're entirely justified in not divulging their names.
By my count there are 14 names on the wiki. Regarding one of these, someone commented something like "X school wins the insider candidate prize" for hiring their VAP, but that's the worst anyone's faced this year, so far as I've followed. That's hardly anyone whose name becomes public getting "ripped to shreds"
As an old-timer, I will remind everyone how things work around here. When someone officially accepts an offer he/she should NOT be outed for a certain period of time (think of it as a grace period), enabling both the new hire to share the good news with friends, thesis advisors, etc. and the department to inform those who did not get the position. After a period of time that traditionally has been three weeks anyone who knows the person's name should feel free to post it on the wiki: after all, it is not meant to be a secret forever, but just long enough for the involved parties to inform those they wish or need to inform.
That is how we've been handling this for years. Regarding Hamilton specifically, since someone asked about that, the wiki suggests that no one who knows who got the job should post it for another two weeks or so.
And then, of course, this being FV, the rest of us can say the most horrendous things about him/her.
I'm in the last stages of writing my dissertation, due to file at the end of the semester (May). I just finished the last of my main chapters, and it's, well, kind of measly compared to my others, mostly due to a combination of the stress to finish, a lack of access to my regular university's holdings, and a general lack of motivation. It's still good for what it is, it's just not as robust as the other chapters (I knew it would be the shortest of all, but it's about 2/3 the length of the next shortest. The project as a whole feels kind of disjointed -- I wrote each chapter as an individual thing, and haven't made any real effort to make anything "flow" from one chapter to the next.
What are your general thoughts about the end stages of the dissertation-writing process? Is it OK for the final product to be a little . . . personally disappointing? I know what I'll need to do for the manuscript, when I get to that point, is it OK not to do any of that now? I know the best dissertation is a finished dissertation, I just don't know what, exactly, to expect the finished product to look like.
I had kind of the opposite experience, in that my final chapter wound up being way WAY longer than it should have been, had to be split into two chapters, and was generally huge and unwieldy and a mess. I think very few of us really like the dissertation by the time we are done, especially when there’s a big push to the finish line at the end. Fortunately, no one except your committee will read it, and possibly not even all of them (at least not all the way through). Finish, defend, and congratulate yourself. No dissertation is better than a done dissertation.
@8:39 here. What I just finished isn't the conclusion, just the final body chapter. I still have the conclusion left, and it'll be either more or less substantial, depending on time, I guess?
Goodness, my conclusion was written the morning I shipped it off to the committee. Just be done with it already. The best dissertation is a done dissertation.
I would suggest making sure that you are proud of one chapter so that you can use it as a writing sample (unless you have a published article you'd rather use). Other than that, get it done to the standard that you think will pass.
Finish NOW. You dissertation is not your life's work. It is a permission slip to BEGIN your life's work, assuming any of us will have the opportunity to do the scholarship we want to do.
Why is no one stating the most important thing here, which is that what matters is whether the committee can be expected to approve the dissertation if one chapter seems not up to snuff and they don't work together well? I am hoping that the answer to that has already been determined, and that's why only the secondary issue of personal feelings about the project is being raised, but it would be malpractice for none of us to bring this up.
Well I did say "get it done to the standard that you think will pass" (8:46) so that aspect hasn't gone completely unmentioned.
Someone who is in the last stages (submitting in May) has been working with an advisor all along and presumably has some idea of what their committee will be looking for. The original question wasn't about passing the defense, it was explicitly about one's personal feelings towards the project.
OP here. 12:14pm is right, I've been working with my advisors and know what they're looking for, they have seen drafts of most chapters already, and so on. I'm at/above the standard to pass, I'm not worried about that, it's more about how I am or should be *feeling* about it, about what it could be vs. what it is, what I know it needs to be really great and currently lacks, and so on. There's a lot of posturing when I talk to people about it in person, I thought maybe an anonymous forum would elicit some honest responses, and also responses from people who aren't in my same program, and also responses from people at different stages of their careers.
This is 8:46/12:14 again. To expand a little beyond "just finish it": I felt very similarly towards the end of my writing process (the chapters felt disjointed, the last one wasn't as good as the first few, etc). For maybe a year after finishing, I wondered whether I should have stayed for another semester or year and crafted it into a solid manuscript that would be a lot closer to publication. (That's partly because the demands of a VAP made me wonder how anyone ever gets anything published while teaching full time, let alone a book.)
Now that I'm two years out, I have enough distance from the project to recognize that I don't want to turn it into a book anyway, and another semester or year working on the dissertation would have just set me back from the next stages of my career. I've given talks based on aspects of that project and may get an article or two out of it, but my primary research interests have already moved on. So my advice if that if you're feeling meh about it, just get it done and look forward to the next thing. I don't think I know a single person who absolutely loved their finished product.
It's interesting to see that, so far (and we have very incomplete data), the Ivies are not doing so well this year in the TT market... 3 positions and all from UPenn. Actually, some schools thought to be "subpar" (by the "prestige" metric) or outside of/on the cusp of the top 10 have managed to place a few people this year. Sure, there are still plenty of names to go up on the board, but Wisconsin, Duke, Iowa and Cincinnati have all probably bested 50 or more Ivy/Ivy+ candidates in 6 searches.
"There are at least three Princeton graduates who got TT positions this year. They're just not up on Wiki. I suspect it's the same with other schools."
Of course it's the same with other schools, if we're talking about *all* other schools. There are still a lot of jobs left to be updated and/or finalised. But if we're just talking about the Ivies, the numbers somebody crunched for us several pages ago from the wiki of the past several years suggested that Princeton and Penn have recently been placing people better than the other Ivies, somewhere almost on par with Cincinnati (gasp). From that, and the fact that our Ivy-insider network hasn't made it obvious just how much better the Ivies are doing this year than everyone else, I'd suggest that it's probably not the same with other schools. Didn't somebody say the Ivies take a lot fewer grad students anyway, so we shouldn't expect the placement numbers we see from lowly state schools like UNC and Cincinnati and so on? We all like our high quality in very small doses, after all.
@1:04, actually 11:16 is quite correct. I know from an insider in the department that their first choice accepted another offer. I know who that person was, and his/her name is on the blog as accepted at another TT position. I think it’s you who are misinformed.
^^ also, the named (retired) scholars were named to emphasize their greatness, which is now left a huge chasm at their institutions. Nothing, not a single thing, of a negative nature was said of them.
Ummm... maybe it was taken down because calling the many historians that are currently at those institutions "nobody of importance" was wrong and a pretty aggressive slight?
Does a sitting VAP stand a better/worse chance for a TT job at the same institution?
I've heard mixed comments. Some say that they almost always get a 'courtesy' interview, but that it's extremely rare for them to get the TT job when it's advertised. Others have said that since the VAP has made inroads, they're often a very serious consideration.
I've only heard that they stand a worse chance. It's for that reason that last year I did NOT apply to two VAPs, since I knew that they will advert for TT in the 18/19 academic year, and I didn't want to eliminate my odds before the application even began. For what it's worth, this was the advice from 3 faculty members at my top-10 R1.
@7:23: My experience as an “old-timer” is that it is usually a tougher road for sitting VAP’s. My guess is that familiarity and extra information work against them: their weaknesses are known as well as their strengths, and it is more difficult for them to position themselves as filling X,Y, Z niches for various committee members (often with conflicting hopes for the position), while other candidates can appear as figures of infinite promise and potential. It’s unfortunate, and I’ve seen many excellent “inside” candidates passed over for less-qualified outsiders.
Servius: our policy is to consider whether individuals are easily identifiable, not whether names are used. Anonymously trashing scholars' careers while identifying them by institution, field, and last initial -- especially if there happens to be only one person with one of these last initials at said institution -- is not what FV is about.
Here's a new low for academic professionalism: I was asked to apply for a job by the chair of the search committee, with all of the usual compliments on my career thus far. I was not selected for even a first-round interview. Wow.
@10:06, yep, been there as well; learned the hard way that they *may* be interested because of your/my career to date, but what they *really* want is to be able to say that the pool was large, or diverse, or included scholars of X quality, or maybe even that there's a well known inside candidate and they want bodies in the candidate pool. So, when I am asked to apply for things (not that that happens every afternoon), I'll likely respond, but with a huge dose of skepticism that it actually means anything.
The answer to the VAP question depends on the school, but I think some generalizations can be made. I know of many people whose positions were essentially converted from VAP to TT (some of whom had a national search as part of the conversion process), even though they were told initially that no conversion would occur, no TT lines are going to be available, etc. Those individuals were in smallish classics departments that weren't at top institutions, and they seem to have made themselves pretty indispensable and the departments knew they could trust the fit. The VAP also seems to have a privileged position in searches at top-10 institutions if they, too, come from a top-10. Where the VAPs have a hard time is if they are at a department that is ranked 10-20 or is a prestigious SLAC, in which case the department wonders if they can "do better" with someone shiny and new.
Does anyone here know of a source to get doctoral regalia at a better price than the school? The cost for doctoral gown, hood, and cap comes to $1,285 at my institution. ...lame, especially since the way the market is, I might never have the chance to wear it as tenured faculty somewhere.
@ 1:27 -- can't you rent it for the day? Then, if you do get a job/need it for a graduation at your new institution, you can buy it when you have the means? At least that's my plan. (Renting the doctoral regalia is under $200 at my school).
Re: "I was asked to apply for a job by the chair of the search committee, with all of the usual compliments on my career thus far. I was not selected for even a first-round interview."
This has happened to me more than once. What usually happens in this case is the SC wants the best range of candidates and then when they get the full applicant pool the people available change the nature of the search. The SC chair may well really like you and respect you, but once it becomes clear that the SC as a whole is interested in other people or that the search is breaking another way, it is, perversely, better for you to be left off the interview roster. In a way, it is a mercy.
I've seen many VAPs get a TT job at the same institution. If, when hiring the VAP, the department knows they are going to search for TT in a year or two, the search committee may assess all VAP candidates with long-term fit in mind. If the VAP search happens early enough in the season, then you get a strong and vibrant pool. If the VAP ends up thriving at the institution, then he/she is an even better looking candidate when the TT search comes around. Sure, some institutions are susceptible to the "new and shiny" argument, but some are not. Sometimes "new and shiny" has a lot of potential, but is still a gamble, while the known quantity may already have proven that he/she can meet your publication standards, teach your curriculum well, teach your students effectively, and contribute to the institution in a meaningful way.
Institutions are legally and ethically obligated to run a full search for the TT, which makes complete sense for issues of equity: not everyone can uproot and relocate for a 1 year job, so the applicant pool for a TT job will look different than the applicant pool for a VAP job. The TT search is a genuine search, but if the VAP has done very well at the institution, then the VAP's application, interview, and campus visit are going to be extremely strong.
I am not trying to say that the VAP is a shoe-in, or that "outside" candidates have no shot, BUT if you see an attractive VAP position and you think they'll be hiring TT in a year or two, absolutely GO FOR IT. Grad students are by nature coming out of big research schools, and their professors/mentors/advisors have a warped view of the market as a whole. Maybe Ivies and R1s are more likely to take the shiny new candidate over the current visitor, but for a lot of SLACs and R2s, a *successful* visitor is a strong candidate for the TT.
I will now apologize to everyone for reopening the "inside candidate" mudslinging gripe-fest wars.
*If* it's true, then shame on Toronto for apparently giving their postdoc to a Toronto ABD (according to the wiki). Why oh why?! I've heard their Medieval Latin search was also entirely internal.
@ 12:05 I don't have a problem if Toronto went for an internal candidate for the Medieval position (and I applied unsuccessfully for the Mississauga postdoc). There are very few institutions that can compete with them in that field, and I imagine they know what they're doing.
Wow, I'm surprised at how many of you feel an inside hire is justified simply because the hiring department is also perceived to have the best graduate program. And maybe it is the "best" by most metrics. That's no reason, however, to throw out the principles of a fair search. There are several medieval Latin programs around the US and UK which produce graduates of the same calibre or better, e.g. Harvard, York (UK), Notre Dame. Finally, why do we want to continue to see departments hiring their own: it only creates staleness; akin to academic inbreeding. Even Harvard has seemingly realized that it can't continue to hire its own (last two hires finally came from outside: Berkeley) and retain some semblance of intellectual diversity.
"Finally, why do we want to continue to see departments hiring their own: it only creates staleness; akin to academic inbreeding. Even Harvard has seemingly realized that it can't continue to hire its own (last two hires finally came from outside: Berkeley) and retain some semblance of intellectual diversity."
Ah yes, Berkeley, where two former HSOF junior fellows went on to get jobs and become senior scholars...
yes it's completely normal to resign a short-term position for something TT, whatever your previous commitments there for the following year -- if they're reasonable human beings they will be very happy for your accomplishment and new-found security -- after all, that's why departments create these positions (that and for the cheap labor, obvis, but *ideally*!!)
Re: "I was asked to apply for a job by the chair of the search committee, with all of the usual compliments on my career thus far. I was not selected for even a first-round interview."
The fact that you were not selected for an interview does not mean in any way that the original request for you to submit an application was insincere. Every member of a search committee, including the chair, must consider the input and opinions of the entire group. The person who made the original suggestion may have tried to make a strong case for your candidacy, but may have encountered resistance from other members of the deciding group.
Old tenured guy here, not from Toronto. Regarding Toronto's Medievalist position, I have no inside information. I did, however, hear the name of one of their shortlist, who as it happens has a Toronto PhD. And he, at least, is really impressive: a well-reviewed monograph with CUP, prestigious postdocs, and (if I remember a different rumor correctly) had to decline an offer from an Ivy for family reasons a few years back. Now, all that I heard is that he was one of the shortlist. If he is the appointee, trust me when I say that no one should be surprised that he was at the top of the list. And if he's not the appointee, whomever they appointed had to seem even better, which would be amazingly good.
Yes, please put the Holy Cross one back up! It's "red" but there is no update next to it. But I'm assuming it's a Chicago person, from the above comment?
Presumably the Holy Cross update was deleted because either the successful candidate did not wish to be identified, or because the information was wrong (which is a regular occurrence).
Btw, an easy way to see who is now hired where is to go to the said College/University course schedule page for Fall 2018 (most are now up or will be very soon), and see the names of who’s teaching the courses. Look for the name that’s not listed in the faculty list on their Dept homepage, and viola.
Re Holy Cross: generally speaking Wiki updates stay up longer when the name of the person who supposedly accepted a job is realistic and it's not, say, someone who's been on the tenure-track at the institution for so long that they recently got tenure. No points for even trying on this one!
"Does a sitting VAP stand a better/worse chance for a TT job at the same institution?"
Someone with fast fingers and some time on their hands could go through the last several Wikis and see when someone hired at Happy Valley U is listed as being UofX/HVU, i.e. a Phd from UofX and a visiting job at HVU
It’s more likely that the hired person saw that they were ‘outed’ and removed it ASAP. Given how venomous FV has been towards those hired, it’s nit much of a surprise that those of weaker constitution want to remain anonymous as long as they can.
Do you mean they received their PhD from Brown (and are VAP-ing elsewhere) or they are ABD at Brown?
If the Holy Cross hire is an ABD at Brown, there are only 1-2 people that it potentially could be and I’d be highly doubtful that any of them would get the gig, since the few who are right at the end of ABD time there have very light CVs. ...though, I do understand that Ivy often overrules anything else. (I mean no insult to anyone at Brown and do not mean to imply that any of the ABDs are not promising scholars).
Given how competitive things are and that many of us are many years out, I don’t feel even slightly bad saying that I don’t think any ABD should be offered or seriously considered for a TT job.
If it were 2002 and there were almost more jobs than applicants, sure. In this market, however, it’s complete bullshit for any SC to think that the best and most qualified person for an Asst Professorship is an ABD. No way. Not with the number of folks still on the market and pushing so hard to get more publications and teaching experience so as to be more competitive only to lose to an ABD who TA’d for 4 classes and gave one presentation at CAMWS.
I think this is why some people were upset about the cushy VAP at Georgetown going to an ABD. We’ve gotten to a point where it’s almost normal that ABDs get nothing, and have to wait until degree is in hand to be a viable candidate, and pick up an adjunct gig in their hometown or teach a lone course at their PhD institution to get their feet wet.
(a) Taught their own classes (even self-designed ones), sometimes more than one per semester. (b) Have more than a CAMWS paper, and 1 or 2 major articles.
Looking at some of the Brown VAPs I know of who'd fit this position, if either of them are the HC candidate of choice, then they are no more qualified than several ABDs I know of. Not all VAPs are "worthier" or better than all ABDs. Sometimes there's a reason why you might be stuck in an endless chain of VAPs/adjuncting, because quite frankly, you may have a PhD, but that doesn't mean you deserve, are the best fit, or are even the most qualified for a certain TT job.
And Georgetown is a VAP, not a TT, so getting upset about that is just sour grapes.
I personally am not too upset about the Georgetown hire, but was only referencing it to highlight a broader point: that many here (on year 2,3,4+) were angry about this job from, literally, the first moment that the Wiki reported an interview request, and that the anger stemmed from (IMO) an ever-growing sense of paranoia, anger, and resentment that the drying-out of the Classics job market has produced.
All that I'd comment on the Georgetown hire is that I can *understand* a lot of the arguments by folks with full CVs and who have demonstrated years of capability and were passed over for one who is an ABD. ...While I had no stake in that job, I can empathize in that it surely is frustrating to see the folks that get the jobs you put in for if you personally feel that you are a better fit and/or that whoever was hired is not as qualified as 3/4 of applicants. Now, I have no idea who the ABD was that got the Georgetown job, but when I referred to it as a "cushy VAP" that is because being a sitting VAP at such a great school really puts one in a phenomenal position for next year's TT jobs. AND, that plays in to my broader point that the job market has gotten so bad that even very good VAPs are capable of inspiring extreme hatred and vitriol amongst those more-seasoned of us here on FV.
...Surely some ABDs are capable and would be great fits at some jobs for some depts, but with 200+ applicants (with at least 50 from top-10s with overflowing CVs) it seems striking that any ABD would be considered in a market that sees so many folks sticking around for years more than has ever been typical.
...I don't think that anything could ever fix the horrible job market for Classics. It has little to do, IMO, with folks hanging on to their jobs. Imagine if, for instance, a massive earthquake swallowed up the hotel in San Diego next year.. That would not create 100s and 100s of TT jobs (as one presenting there, I hate to even say this in jest), but if that were to happen, most school would just see it as an opportunity to shut down Classics for good. :/
Some of the TT positions will go / have gone to ABDs. We just don't have their names yet. I only hope that those people don't read FV, because ... well, no one really deserves that level of vitriol.
@11:39pm Not even trying to be funny, but get a degree from a top ten school. Otherwise, you will face serious challenges in this market. Publish. Widely. Make connections. Hopefully your advisors don't give up on you when you don't get a TT initially. They have to push for VAPs as much as they push for TT. Most of them just figure you will get something and stop pushing during VAP season.
I would think that columbus is the best of the three.I was in Cleveland last year and it actually is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY (their art museum however was spectacular)
"Anonymous Anonymous said... Is it common not to have a job for the next academic year at this point in time or am I the last loser standing?
March 17, 2018 at 3:32 PM"
It's rough but I know two smart people with good experience and publications who had nothing, not even the chance of staying where they were, in April and got very good VAP positions in May or June.
@ 3:32. Take it from another loser: after four years on the market without ever getting even a first round TT interview or a VAP offer, you get used to it.
So I think the big question this year (and the next) is if (and when) the secondary market will collapse.
Since 2008, it did seem that most people who wanted one were able to get some sort of temporary job (VAP/adjunct/postdoc). This means people were rarely forced to leave the field for want of a job (although many quit in despair).
But if the secondary market collapses, exit from the field may take place simply because there are not enough short-term positions to go around. There is still a five-six year backlog of PhDs looking for TT jobs, plus a new batch of PhDs every year. At some point, the secondary market will fail.
This may be hastened by the otherwise humane policy of many departments to convert adjunct ships into permanent lecturers. The result is fewer VAPs, and therefore fewer places to maintain a holding pattern.
And you are not a loser if you do not have a job lined up at this point, or even by June. Lets not use such terminology, even in jest. You have been failed by a inextricably broken system.
Based on their Facebook feed and rumors I heard, Brandeis had their last campus visit this week. I imagine that if an offer has not been made one will be made shortly.
With regard to the 5-6 year backlog of PhDs, I've been looking for concrete information on the number of new Classics/Ancient History etc. PhDs produced in the last 15-20 years as well as information on the total annual number of new PhD track grad students admitted into all North American programs. I can't seem to locate comprehensive info. SCS has some data on PhDs conferred, but much of it is wrong (for example, I'm not listed, nor are three of the other five people in my cohort, nor are several friends from other institutions). Although I *feel*, entirely based on anecdotal evidence, that the number of new PhDs and number of accepted grad students has been dropping since the economic collapse, I would really like firm data. Any help is appreciated.
4:27, I know that the total number of graduate and professional students went up considerably during the recession, but I'm not sure about Classics and allied fields specifically. Anecdotally, a few "top" programs cut back admissions for a few years, and a few programs have been shuttered, but also new programs have opened over the past ten years. I would guess the number of entering students isn't that different 2008-2018 than 1998-2008, and, if anything is probably higher (at least now); but, again, anecdotally / parametrically, more people are leaving during grad school or in the year or two afterward. I would also be interested in reliable figures on this. The Legion project, I think, illustrates how tough it is to get departments to cough up figures, although a few months ago someone on here claimed that SCS used to (?) maintain(s?) comprehensive data at least on the market side of things.
I’m at a top-10 (public non-ivy) and when I came into the program they said at graduate orientation in 2012 that they had received ~400 applications and accepted 12.
Obviously, of those 400, many were dreamers, but those numbers are scary.
...also, they used to make offers to ~25, expecting about a dozen to accept. Ever since the economic collapse around 2008, they only make offers to those that they could afford to fund.
So this doesn't get to the question of where to find statistics on the number of PhD students pre-2008/ post-2008, but it does confirm what we already know--that the market has gotten FAR more competitive since 2008. Number of job candidates has risen (presumably due to backlog) as the number of jobs has dropped.
4:27 here. Thanks for the responses. I hadn't heard of the Legion project, but looking over their study it seems that they're folks I should get in contact with (despite the difficulties they describe which the poster above noted as well.)
@5:07, indeed the APA did collect and publish such data. When we still had quarterly print newsletters, twice a year dissertations underway were listed, and those completed, with advisor and dissertator named, title of diss., and name of person reporting for that school. This information was useful in many different ways.
This information no longer appeared publicly roughly when the SCS stopped distributing the newsletter (in any format). I have heard they have "some data" "behind the scenes." Next best method has been to prowl the pages of the likely schools, a fair number of which list evidently all their completed people (see North Carolina). But not all schools do, some list it in ways I regard as deceitful (i.e., listing only those w/ jobs), and I think nobody lists people just when they have advanced to candidacy.
Is there any news on the poetry job at Stanford? It was listed as "offered and accepted" on the wiki, but someone edited that out and turned it back orange.
You'd better believe that every department has comprehensive data on every student that has ever begun a PhD. Students cost money for any decent department since they generally offer full funding, so there is information on who finished the PhD, how long it took, who quit, and when. If departments don't collect information on placement beyond students who complete the PhD and remain in the field, advisors most certainly know. If a department wanted to put all this information together, they could easily do it (somebody mentioned Chapel Hill above). That every department does not offer this information freely indicates that a) they're too lazy to put it all together and make it available b) they're not lazy but purposefully keeping this information a secret to create an unrealistic picture of their department. In either case they deserve to be censured by the SCS/AIA...but this seems unlikely if the organizations themselves have date that they are not making public.
I believe that when one of these projects tried to get their hands on attrition data from departments, "privacy" suddenly became a huge concern. The "privacy" of students who had gotten TT jobs is apparently not an issue, since their identities are often listen on department websites, but even sharing the numbers of people who had started and finished grad programs was too sensitive to be shared.
4,546 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 2201 – 2400 of 4546 Newer› Newest»Man, late night really brings out the "Great Again" agenda folks...
I know, I know, wanting knowledge to serve some practical good like Civilization deserves no response except "wow, just wow" "in the current year" and "I can't even". Please continue to make arguments in favor of your position. And try something better than "advancing human knowledge," as if this were an end in itself requiring no further justification. Nietzsche recognized this as nihilism in On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life. You're talking about promoting nothing but useless, meaningless, antiquarian knowledge stones bouncing around in the head. Is it any wonder the public has no use for Classics or the humanities with this as the profession's goal? From this point of view, someone like me actually has a lot in common with Eidolon. We just disagree about what we should learn from the Classics to make the world a better place.
Dismissive person here. So would you say monumental vs. critical history represents the distinction between the MCGA folks and Eidolon? And mainstream classicists are antiquarian?
@1:18
Not the one you asked, but I'd chime in to say that Eidolon and its ilk represent Nietzsche's Critical Historians in the "disadvantage for life" sense. The MCGA are a kind of admixture of the Antiquarians & Monumental "disadvantage" categories. The more reasonable people like 1:00 am are Antiquarian + Monumental in the "advantage/use" category. The responsible and reasonable minority-studies versions (like Benjamin Isaac and other junior scholars who don't need more abuse heaped on them) represent Critical + Antiquarian in the "advantage" category.
It's easy to see how people like 1:13 am conflate (willfully or ignorantly) advantage arguments as disadvantage arguments, and vice versa. They do this vilify the arguments they see as enemy to their own.
One of the things that Sententiae Antiquae got perfectly right: most of the commentorss here are not interested in understanding, clarifying, nuancing, or improving any sort of knowledge; their interests begin and end with the nugatory sledgehammer of their bon mot.
"If you want to be internally consistent and not hypocrites, then by your own lights you have two options: yourselves work on Arabic, papyri, stone fragments and empirically observe the outcomes of your theories, or remove yourself from the field. By either method you will cease to contribute to useless detritus and will improve Classics.
tl;dr: put your money where your mouth is. If you're already doing this without success, then maybe, just maybe you bet on the wrong horse."
12:22 here. 12:37, you silly goose, I'm not going back to grad school just to prove a point to some anonymous person on the internet. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong to say that people should look for less trodden topics instead of studying an author who has been studied so many times before that the Law of Diminishing Returns has kicked in. And every year there are multiple positions in Greek medicine, not to mention philosophy, so if someone does good and original work with the Arabic materials that could certainly lead to a job, and would be quite beneficial to the field.
Also, FYI, it's the papyri that almost always come in fragments, while when stones are fragments they don't preserve enough text to be worth studying in detail. Perhaps I'm not the only one who needs to go back to grad school.
You win the contest for most pedantic pot calling the kettle black--no, off-black--no, iron-dark--no, #000000!
Problem, meet problem!
@1:39
Are you saying stone doesn't come in fragments? Can you define fragment? When is a stone "whole"? Are the majority of inscribed stones "whole" by your definition of "whole"? If not, what's the difference between "un-whole" and "fragment"? Or this philosophy and not classics? Jeez Louise! Quelle aporia!
Silly geese!
I'm not going back to grad school just to prove a point
This sounds like a sunk-costs fallacy: "I believe x, but I'm not going to do x because I've done y for too long and x is hard. But still, x." 12:37 was right to call you a hypocrite.
2:23, let me get this straight: one of FV's top three complaints is people going to grad school in classics when the odds against a job are so high, and you are actually critical of someone for not wanting to to grad school in the same field TWICE? I am not sure what one would even call THAT sort of fallacy.
I, for one, am critical of internal inconsistency.
You, 3:17, are basing your claim on: I did x; I claim y is the true value; anyone who does not do y is stupid and deserves their fate as does their field; I myself will not do y because I already did x; I myself deserve compensation for x despite my personal claims about y.
You are internally inconsistent. That precludes being correct, whatever the claims of your interlocutors.
LOL at the Mississippi State TT ad. Inside candidate much?
"But the Arabic stuff is apparently mostly philosophy and medicine.(...) So if you want to read bad translations of Galen and people commenting on Galen all day or Aristotle, go for it. Not sure how that would fit into Classics as Classicists understand it."
Are ancient Philosophy and Medicine not Classics? If Classicists aren't interested in and working on Galen and Aristotle, then who is/should be?
How can we read something as banal as Galen when there are new readings of Euripides to be discovered?
You see this kind of thing in other fields - e.g. Dante-fetishization in Eyetalian Studies, Chaucerism in Middle English. So we are not alone.
The question is whether Classics is or should be (a) an historical, progressive discipline or (b) a loving combing over of quasi-sacred ancient texts (did Dido and Aeneas really get married? What does Virgil really think of Augustus?), or some kind of combination of/compromise between the two. I would argue it could easily be mostly (a) at the grad and research level and (b) at the HS and undergrad level.
People who were willing to pursue a genuine research agenda and also preserve the tradition by teaching would fit into this vision of MCGA. But the 'teaching-research' synergy BS (BS because it's often not possible, not because it's NEVER possible) will have to be soft-pedaled or abandoned, MULTA INTER ALIA.
dixi et animam levavi
What does MCGA stand for?
Make Classics Great Again, a play on Trump's Make America Great Again.
The problem is that, as Aristotle reminds us, TO MCGA POLLACHWS LEGETAI (Illud MCGA MULTIS DICITUR MODIS). Some people want "lessons of the past for the West' (mission civilisatrice!) some people want Wissenschaft, some people want leftist critical history. But we are all dissatisfied with the status quo (beyond the fact that many of us are unemployable and deplorable).
Did anyone read the Sententiae Antiquae post all the way through? I tried, but I have four classes to prep, an article and conference paper to write, and I foolishly agreed to speak at my state's JCL conference next weekend. My general impression was aporia: FV can be good! But also bad! But sometimes good! But often bad! Am I missing something?
3:43, normally I would not engage a blowhard, but your attempt to use x's and y's to make it seem like you are an expert logician is just too tempting. The following response comes not from a place of anger at being disagreed with or called a hypocrite, but from one of benign amusement at the absurdity of you making such an issue of this, while straying so badly from what the texts you are analyzing actually say.
So, you wrote:
I, for one, am critical of internal inconsistency.
You, 3:17, are basing your claim on: I did x; I claim y is the true value; anyone who does not do y is stupid and deserves their fate as does their field; I myself will not do y because I already did x; I myself deserve compensation for x despite my personal claims about y.
You are internally inconsistent. That precludes being correct, whatever the claims of your interlocutors.
Here are my comments from the past 12 hours or so:
1) If you want to be useful then go and learn Arabic and edit+translate Arabic versions of (often lost) works of Greek literature, and work on Arabic papyri. The field needs that more than another Homer dissertation. If you don't have the language chops to tackle Arabic as well -- not saying I do -- then work on literary papyri or else Greek and/or Latin poetry on stone. That's where one can more easily find new things to say.
2) Sure, it's mostly philosophy and medicine. But any time one recovers a lost Greek work, I'd argue, that's more important than yet another study of Pindar. Obviously, it won't appeal to everyone, but how many people in grad school are even made aware that it's an option?
3) 12:22 here. 12:37, you silly goose, I'm not going back to grad school just to prove a point to some anonymous person on the internet. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong to say that people should look for less trodden topics instead of studying an author who has been studied so many times before that the Law of Diminishing Returns has kicked in. And every year there are multiple positions in Greek medicine, not to mention philosophy, so if someone does good and original work with the Arabic materials that could certainly lead to a job, and would be quite beneficial to the field.
At no point do I state or imply that those who do not work on Arabic texts (or literary papyri, or inscribed epigrams) are "stupid" and should leave the field, or do not deserve pay. Since you like logic without understanding it -- to quote Jamie Lee Curtis in A Fish Called Wanda when she is challenged about whether apes read philosophy, "Yes they do, Otto, they just don't understand it!" -- I will put this to you in a logical manner with two statements that I believe to be true: "All people who work on Arabic texts preserving lost classical works are doing something useful for Classical Studies. Not all people doing something useful for Classical Studies are working on Arabic texts preserving lost classical works." At no point do I indicate that I believe the first sentence but not the second. I did express my opinion, obviously shared by others, that doing the umpteenth dissertation on Homer or Euripides might not be the best thing to do. I also indicated that while I see the value in working on the Arabic materials, I myself do not have the language skills to learn Arabic and start doing this, but that hardly means that I am wrong to share my thoughts on the matter, and does not make me a hypocrite. But, to set your mind at ease, I will tell you that while I have not worked on Arabic materials, I have made contributions either through work on literary papyri or inscribed epigrams (which you assume I have not done). All in all, you read one heck of a lot into my post that is not there, which hardly is a sign of the orderly, logical mind you pretend to have with your x's and y's.
Anyway, enough of this.
This is an important, indeed necessary, read for everybody here now, and everybody who was once here:
https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/03/04/famae-volent-a-personal-history/
Eloquent, direct, and heartfelt.
Just read it.
And then wait a bit to comment.
March 7, 2018 at 11:44 PM
Ahhhh, speaking of the nugatory hammer of the bon mot, it seems fitting that the SA post was clearly modeling itself, at least structurally, on a bon mot operateur par excellence (as, I suppose, are most polemical textual critics). But, of course, my pointing this out is probably mansplaining, since others no doubt picked up on the connection...
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1998/1998-11-32.html
On the Zetzel on Henderson. His stylish imitation of Hendersonia is amusing. Perhaps SA was inspired, but a deeper and more appropriate analogy would have been a post on a comments and wiki site that was in the form of anonymous comments and Wikis....
@12:35
tl;dr
Bravo, 12:35! I hereby buy you a (virtual) microbrew or fancy bourbon/Scotch of your choice.
I read the Sententiae Antiquae post in toto when it was first mentioned here. Essentially, my conclusion was that the author has a complicated relationship with FV, as most of us probably do. I also said that he could have been a bit more concise in saying so, as such an exercise hardly required the lengthy hand-wringing and bloviating.
Is it multiple personality disorder when you buy yourself virtual alcohol under different personas, or just alcoholism?
@ 7:20
Lol. It's just "childish, churlish, and pedantic sentiments parading as wit or wisdom."
12:35 here. You got me! After writing a post that was so long I had to whittle it down to fit within blogger.com's character limit I was so desperate to be viewed as having supporters out there that I waited a bit and then posted a one-line message offering to buy myself a drink, figuring that no one would suspect someone who could be so verbose could also be so terse. And to even more effectively throw you all off the scent I cleverly mentioned two types of alcohol I never drink.
If anyone wants to give me something of especially appropriate, then instead of a drink please buy me a literary papyrus off the antiquities market. I promise not to ask about provenance.
Is that you, Dirk?
Silly geese!
Drink buyer here. I am NOT 12:35. Give me a break. He put a lot of time into that thing, and it was thoughtful and on the mark.
Now let's get back to the important business of discussing who got what VAP by what hook and what crook.
I got none of them because Cincinnati.
12:35/drink-protestor would be a lot happier if s/he put all that time and effort into writing articles that got him/her a real job....
12:35 here, taking a quick FV break between having spent the past two hours putting the finishing touches on my latest article (to be sent off to a journal within two weeks) and turning to working on a joint book project with an overseas colleague. But thank you for the concern.
12:35: That's a lot of words to say that you engage in the intentionalist fallacy.
@8:51
IKR?! I'm a full prof at an Ivy pulling $150K per annum, and I'm just taking an FV break after a trip back from the cottage at which I winter.
@8:21- did Cincinnati eat your lunch?
Cincinnati sinned since it had at he's foie gras!
A stretch, I do confess, a palpable stretch!
12:35/8:51 — you’re a blowhard; and you’re indicative of the problems in Classics and in the Academy. Go retire with your boomer soulmates. You’ll be doing the world a favor.
12:35 speaks the truth and many of you can't handle it. Classics as a safe space for the umpteenth Euripides or Homer or Ovid dissertation is not sustainable, given trends in HS education (Latin and Greek moribund - good luck hooking smart 13-17 year olds, who will instead study French or Spanish), demographics (fewer WASPs), and culture (dead Greek and Roman men are suspect, and maintaining a quasi-sacred canon that should be pored over by every generation is even more suspect).
If we're not drinking beer or whiskey, a couple of bottles of Etna Rosso for the table:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/03/dining/wine-school-assignment-etna-rosso.html
I am not sure if 8:25pm was being serious or not (although I fear they were). But since attitudes like that do persist out there, I think it is important to emphasize both to those who have not had to apply for jobs for a long time and to those who have not yet entered the market that there is absolutely no ironclad correlation between productivity and success on the job market these days. Maybe there used to be, but not anymore. Trust me.
8:25 is, I assume, parodying some senior professor (presumably somewhere fancy) who, in the Eidolon editor's Facebook Thread attacking FV, said something like "all of these deplorables should be focusing on writing articles to get real jobs rather than spending their time critiquing Eidolon."
I haven't seen the thread and only know about its existence from a FV post above (if it hasn't been deleted), so relata refero..
At least Mississippi State did an exemplary job of peppering its ad with indicators that job seekers shouldn't waste their time applying. Should be standard operating procedure for such searches.
Future SC Chair seeking advice (from March 5) here. I just wanted to thank all those who gave suggestions/advice. Some of this I already knew, some I probably would have guessed, and some I would never have thought of (especially the importance of more than 3 letters and the pitfalls of online submissions that I should look out for). Again, many thanks and best of luck to all of you who are on the market.
Thanks for asking! We all appreciate a thoughtful SC chair.
Please do not ask for more than three letters. There is never a good reason to do this. With very, very few exceptions candidates would be better served by figuring what three people will write the strongest possible letters and then having frank conversations in order to make sure that collectively these referees are covering all of the key bases. More letters makes more work with no measurable payoff for the field and in fact increases the likelihood of one lukewarm letter undoing the unstinted praise of the others. In fact the field would profit from limiting the number of letters to at most two, with no exceptions.
*figuring out and *unstinting
@3:01, this really depends on the stage of your career. For people who are ABD or in their first job, 3 is probably the max you can really wrangle. After a year or two out, hopefully you'll have a variety of people who can speak to different aspects of your professional profile. I'm a couple years out and I have 4 solid recommenders: my Ph.D. supervisor, a member of my diss committee who apparently writes a mean letter of rec, a research collaborator, and my current chair. If you ask me for three, I have to cut out my committee member, which is one of my strongest letters (from what I've heard). It's not the end of the world, but I'd like to have the extra backup if I can!
for anyone wondering about the FSU Roman archaeology job: the offer was made in late February, but it's hung up in negotiations.
@4:30 (et al.). Another recent SC here. We asked for three letters and many candidates just had all their letter writers send them anyway. So for some, we had three; for others, four; for at few, five. My advice is just have them all sent. What's a committee going to do? Trash your application? Choose letters randomly?
Yes, you SHOULD read no more than three, if people break the rules. I dutifully stick to three letters, even though I have five available, and I could make a better case for myself if all five were read. So the fact that some SC's will accept more letters than requested, while others might not, forces people like me to decide whether to follow the rules or to essentially cheat. If we follow the rules and others don't, we're screwed; if we don't, and a place enforces the maximum rule, we're screwed.
A candidate should not have to engage in frickin' Game Theory to figure out how many letters to send. And cheaters shouldn't be rewarded.
Agreed, if an SC wants three letters, they should stop at three. If people have additional recommenders, there is nothing from stopping these from informally lobbying later in the search.
This goes under "mean what you say and say what you mean."
I'm someone who has been out a while and I NEED more than three in order not to create weird-looking gaps (How'd you like to choose between "oh, so nobody at your current institution will write for you, huh?" and "oh, so nobody has a word to say about your teaching, huh?"?). But I NEVER send more than are requested. Allowing people to bend the rules in order to get more points on the board is not fair.
8:06 SC member here again. It's a tough thing to police, especially given the common use of portfolio services for letters.
In retrospect, we should have worded our ad more flexibly. There were cases like 12:11 where three letters meant that there were holes in the career that we had to either ignore or try out best to fill in. Ideally, I think, there would be two letters about the thesis and research (say, supervisor and a committee member) and one from each place that a candidate has taught. Given that so many candidates now have had two or three or more gigs after completion, something useful will go missing.
any news on the Connecticut VAP ?
12:11 again, thanks for your thoughtfulness, 8:06! But note that portfolio services have nothing to do with it -- those dossiers are individually tailored and assembled just like in the days of yore, so if there is more material in it than the job ad allowed, that is because the candidate made a choice to send it, not because Interfolio somehow made them do it. Thanks again for checking in here!!
It's been quiet here for nearly a day! Anyone have their lunch eaten by someone from Cincinnati, Eidolon, or The Left since then? Maybe by some Post-Modernists or Judith Butler? I'm surprised no one has taken on the task of punching down by slagging off the Sportula yet.
When SCs can't even match the number of recommendations they want to the number listed in their job ad,
how can we expect them to match a description of what candidate they want to the description listed in their job ad?
That pollyanna comment about how "portfolio services" work = QED.
Who got the offer at Hamilton?
When Classics sends its people, they're not sending their best....
Well, I have had my lunch eaten as a result, in part, of a long-standing leftist policy, but I can't explain where or how. So it's not the only reason my lunch was eaten or rather stolen, but it's one factor.
If the recipient of the Hamilton job wanted their identity known, they would have made it known. Until then, we'll just have to wait until Hamilton announces the result.
6:01pm: "long-standing leftist policy"
You keep using that word. I do think it means what you think it means.
Seriously though, get a grip. There is no such thing as leftism in the American university system, at least not at the policy/administrative level. What you're referring to is most likely run-of-the-mill, bog standard centrist neoliberal policy, which is not leftist by any stretch.
To describe it as 'policy' seems to me optimistic.
@6:49pm
So, this is not a forum for rumors then? Official word only? Superpluscool.
@2:03am - you want people to out themselves on here? Until the tone on here changes and successful candidates aren't going to be ripped to shreds (like the last few people to post their names on the wiki), I think they're entirely justified in not divulging their names.
By my count there are 14 names on the wiki. Regarding one of these, someone commented something like "X school wins the insider candidate prize" for hiring their VAP, but that's the worst anyone's faced this year, so far as I've followed. That's hardly anyone whose name becomes public getting "ripped to shreds"
As an old-timer, I will remind everyone how things work around here. When someone officially accepts an offer he/she should NOT be outed for a certain period of time (think of it as a grace period), enabling both the new hire to share the good news with friends, thesis advisors, etc. and the department to inform those who did not get the position. After a period of time that traditionally has been three weeks anyone who knows the person's name should feel free to post it on the wiki: after all, it is not meant to be a secret forever, but just long enough for the involved parties to inform those they wish or need to inform.
That is how we've been handling this for years. Regarding Hamilton specifically, since someone asked about that, the wiki suggests that no one who knows who got the job should post it for another two weeks or so.
And then, of course, this being FV, the rest of us can say the most horrendous things about him/her.
I'm in the last stages of writing my dissertation, due to file at the end of the semester (May). I just finished the last of my main chapters, and it's, well, kind of measly compared to my others, mostly due to a combination of the stress to finish, a lack of access to my regular university's holdings, and a general lack of motivation. It's still good for what it is, it's just not as robust as the other chapters (I knew it would be the shortest of all, but it's about 2/3 the length of the next shortest. The project as a whole feels kind of disjointed -- I wrote each chapter as an individual thing, and haven't made any real effort to make anything "flow" from one chapter to the next.
What are your general thoughts about the end stages of the dissertation-writing process? Is it OK for the final product to be a little . . . personally disappointing? I know what I'll need to do for the manuscript, when I get to that point, is it OK not to do any of that now? I know the best dissertation is a finished dissertation, I just don't know what, exactly, to expect the finished product to look like.
FINISH. Just aim for bad.
You know what they call someone who writes a mediocre dissertation? Doctor.
I had kind of the opposite experience, in that my final chapter wound up being way WAY longer than it should have been, had to be split into two chapters, and was generally huge and unwieldy and a mess. I think very few of us really like the dissertation by the time we are done, especially when there’s a big push to the finish line at the end. Fortunately, no one except your committee will read it, and possibly not even all of them (at least not all the way through). Finish, defend, and congratulate yourself. No dissertation is better than a done dissertation.
A dissertation is a draft of a book manuscript. It is not a final, polished work of scholarship. Finish the draft.
@8:39 here. What I just finished isn't the conclusion, just the final body chapter. I still have the conclusion left, and it'll be either more or less substantial, depending on time, I guess?
Goodness, my conclusion was written the morning I shipped it off to the committee. Just be done with it already. The best dissertation is a done dissertation.
I would suggest making sure that you are proud of one chapter so that you can use it as a writing sample (unless you have a published article you'd rather use). Other than that, get it done to the standard that you think will pass.
Finish NOW. You dissertation is not your life's work. It is a permission slip to BEGIN your life's work, assuming any of us will have the opportunity to do the scholarship we want to do.
Why is no one stating the most important thing here, which is that what matters is whether the committee can be expected to approve the dissertation if one chapter seems not up to snuff and they don't work together well? I am hoping that the answer to that has already been determined, and that's why only the secondary issue of personal feelings about the project is being raised, but it would be malpractice for none of us to bring this up.
Why use FV for advice on your doctoral thesis? Ask your supervisor, for heaven’s sake.
Well I did say "get it done to the standard that you think will pass" (8:46) so that aspect hasn't gone completely unmentioned.
Someone who is in the last stages (submitting in May) has been working with an advisor all along and presumably has some idea of what their committee will be looking for. The original question wasn't about passing the defense, it was explicitly about one's personal feelings towards the project.
OP here. 12:14pm is right, I've been working with my advisors and know what they're looking for, they have seen drafts of most chapters already, and so on. I'm at/above the standard to pass, I'm not worried about that, it's more about how I am or should be *feeling* about it, about what it could be vs. what it is, what I know it needs to be really great and currently lacks, and so on. There's a lot of posturing when I talk to people about it in person, I thought maybe an anonymous forum would elicit some honest responses, and also responses from people who aren't in my same program, and also responses from people at different stages of their careers.
This is 8:46/12:14 again. To expand a little beyond "just finish it": I felt very similarly towards the end of my writing process (the chapters felt disjointed, the last one wasn't as good as the first few, etc). For maybe a year after finishing, I wondered whether I should have stayed for another semester or year and crafted it into a solid manuscript that would be a lot closer to publication. (That's partly because the demands of a VAP made me wonder how anyone ever gets anything published while teaching full time, let alone a book.)
Now that I'm two years out, I have enough distance from the project to recognize that I don't want to turn it into a book anyway, and another semester or year working on the dissertation would have just set me back from the next stages of my career. I've given talks based on aspects of that project and may get an article or two out of it, but my primary research interests have already moved on. So my advice if that if you're feeling meh about it, just get it done and look forward to the next thing. I don't think I know a single person who absolutely loved their finished product.
Super classy rejection, Clemson. Love how you blamed your own "protracted process" on the candidate, who accepted the job weeks ago.
It's interesting to see that, so far (and we have very incomplete data), the Ivies are not doing so well this year in the TT market... 3 positions and all from UPenn. Actually, some schools thought to be "subpar" (by the "prestige" metric) or outside of/on the cusp of the top 10 have managed to place a few people this year. Sure, there are still plenty of names to go up on the board, but Wisconsin, Duke, Iowa and Cincinnati have all probably bested 50 or more Ivy/Ivy+ candidates in 6 searches.
I blame the alt-Left!
The alt-Left is eating our lunch!
I heard that the Clemson job was originally offered to someone else, who accepted another offer, so maybe that had something to do with the delay?
@11:16, you heard wrong. Not what happened.
Anyone have an update on the UMass Amherst position?
@9:27: As Eidolon and the Megaphone of the mainstream media show, it's actually the ctrl-Left.
^?
E.D. at Harvard; J.M. at Columbia
stop with the generalizations
There are at least three Princeton graduates who got TT positions this year. They're just not up on Wiki. I suspect it's the same with other schools.
"There are at least three Princeton graduates who got TT positions this year. They're just not up on Wiki. I suspect it's the same with other schools."
Of course it's the same with other schools, if we're talking about *all* other schools. There are still a lot of jobs left to be updated and/or finalised. But if we're just talking about the Ivies, the numbers somebody crunched for us several pages ago from the wiki of the past several years suggested that Princeton and Penn have recently been placing people better than the other Ivies, somewhere almost on par with Cincinnati (gasp). From that, and the fact that our Ivy-insider network hasn't made it obvious just how much better the Ivies are doing this year than everyone else, I'd suggest that it's probably not the same with other schools. Didn't somebody say the Ivies take a lot fewer grad students anyway, so we shouldn't expect the placement numbers we see from lowly state schools like UNC and Cincinnati and so on? We all like our high quality in very small doses, after all.
Now, which of you ate my lunch?
@1:04, actually 11:16 is quite correct. I know from an insider in the department that their first choice accepted another offer. I know who that person was, and his/her name is on the blog as accepted at another TT position. I think it’s you who are misinformed.
@3:!4. Not me. I didn't get the job.
Friend of a friend told me favorable winds are coming up from the Big Easy soon for those still searching.
^^ also, the named (retired) scholars were named to emphasize their greatness, which is now left a huge chasm at their institutions. Nothing, not a single thing, of a negative nature was said of them.
Re: UMass, I only know about an email that they're running behind and that they haven't made a decision yet, but that was over a week ago, I think.
Does anyone know if PostDocs have an 'interview stage' or do they just offer admittance, like most grad schools tend to do ?
Some postdocs have interviews -- at least one at SDSU, for example, is doing video conferencing interviews.
2:03/5:47/5:50
Ummm... maybe it was taken down because calling the many historians that are currently at those institutions "nobody of importance" was wrong and a pretty aggressive slight?
Someone spoke unfavorably about a tenured prof at an Ivy? Oh, boo-fucking-hoo.
Does a sitting VAP stand a better/worse chance for a TT job at the same institution?
I've heard mixed comments. Some say that they almost always get a 'courtesy' interview, but that it's extremely rare for them to get the TT job when it's advertised. Others have said that since the VAP has made inroads, they're often a very serious consideration.
...Thoughts ??
@ 7:23,
I've only heard that they stand a worse chance. It's for that reason that last year I did NOT apply to two VAPs, since I knew that they will advert for TT in the 18/19 academic year, and I didn't want to eliminate my odds before the application even began. For what it's worth, this was the advice from 3 faculty members at my top-10 R1.
There's no rhyme or reason to this. Depends on the dept and the VAP. It would be nice if there were rules, or even trends, but there really aren't.
Anyone rumours on the Stanford (poetry) job? I've heard conflicting whispers of an offer being made, but nothing firm.
@7:23: My experience as an “old-timer” is that it is usually a tougher road for sitting VAP’s. My guess is that familiarity and
extra information work against them: their weaknesses are known as well as their strengths, and it is more difficult for them to position themselves as filling X,Y, Z niches for various committee members (often with conflicting hopes for the position), while other candidates can appear as figures of infinite promise and potential. It’s unfortunate, and I’ve seen many excellent “inside” candidates passed over for less-qualified outsiders.
Servius: our policy is to consider whether individuals are easily identifiable, not whether names are used. Anonymously trashing scholars' careers while identifying them by institution, field, and last initial -- especially if there happens to be only one person with one of these last initials at said institution -- is not what FV is about.
Stanford's offer has been made, but not yet accepted from what I hear.
Here's a new low for academic professionalism:
I was asked to apply for a job by the chair of the search committee, with all of the usual compliments on my career thus far.
I was not selected for even a first-round interview.
Wow.
^maybe your application wasn't very good?
@10:06, yep, been there as well; learned the hard way that they *may* be interested because of your/my career to date, but what they *really* want is to be able to say that the pool was large, or diverse, or included scholars of X quality, or maybe even that there's a well known inside candidate and they want bodies in the candidate pool. So, when I am asked to apply for things (not that that happens every afternoon), I'll likely respond, but with a huge dose of skepticism that it actually means anything.
Mediocrity is eating our lunch!
aurea mediocritas
The answer to the VAP question depends on the school, but I think some generalizations can be made. I know of many people whose positions were essentially converted from VAP to TT (some of whom had a national search as part of the conversion process), even though they were told initially that no conversion would occur, no TT lines are going to be available, etc. Those individuals were in smallish classics departments that weren't at top institutions, and they seem to have made themselves pretty indispensable and the departments knew they could trust the fit. The VAP also seems to have a privileged position in searches at top-10 institutions if they, too, come from a top-10. Where the VAPs have a hard time is if they are at a department that is ranked 10-20 or is a prestigious SLAC, in which case the department wonders if they can "do better" with someone shiny and new.
The alt-Left and the Maoists and the Antifa are the real threats!
Does anyone here know of a source to get doctoral regalia at a better price than the school? The cost for doctoral gown, hood, and cap comes to $1,285 at my institution. ...lame, especially since the way the market is, I might never have the chance to wear it as tenured faculty somewhere.
I bought the hood/cap and rented the gown.
@ 1:27 -- can't you rent it for the day? Then, if you do get a job/need it for a graduation at your new institution, you can buy it when you have the means? At least that's my plan. (Renting the doctoral regalia is under $200 at my school).
Not all schools rent out doctoral regalia.
Just buy an undergrad gown and glue some velvet patches on it. That's basically what the low-cost doctoral robe option is anyway.
Re: "I was asked to apply for a job by the chair of the search committee, with all of the usual compliments on my career thus far.
I was not selected for even a first-round interview."
This has happened to me more than once. What usually happens in this case is the SC wants the best range of candidates and then when they get the full applicant pool the people available change the nature of the search. The SC chair may well really like you and respect you, but once it becomes clear that the SC as a whole is interested in other people or that the search is breaking another way, it is, perversely, better for you to be left off the interview roster. In a way, it is a mercy.
I've seen many VAPs get a TT job at the same institution. If, when hiring the VAP, the department knows they are going to search for TT in a year or two, the search committee may assess all VAP candidates with long-term fit in mind. If the VAP search happens early enough in the season, then you get a strong and vibrant pool. If the VAP ends up thriving at the institution, then he/she is an even better looking candidate when the TT search comes around. Sure, some institutions are susceptible to the "new and shiny" argument, but some are not. Sometimes "new and shiny" has a lot of potential, but is still a gamble, while the known quantity may already have proven that he/she can meet your publication standards, teach your curriculum well, teach your students effectively, and contribute to the institution in a meaningful way.
Institutions are legally and ethically obligated to run a full search for the TT, which makes complete sense for issues of equity: not everyone can uproot and relocate for a 1 year job, so the applicant pool for a TT job will look different than the applicant pool for a VAP job. The TT search is a genuine search, but if the VAP has done very well at the institution, then the VAP's application, interview, and campus visit are going to be extremely strong.
I am not trying to say that the VAP is a shoe-in, or that "outside" candidates have no shot, BUT if you see an attractive VAP position and you think they'll be hiring TT in a year or two, absolutely GO FOR IT. Grad students are by nature coming out of big research schools, and their professors/mentors/advisors have a warped view of the market as a whole. Maybe Ivies and R1s are more likely to take the shiny new candidate over the current visitor, but for a lot of SLACs and R2s, a *successful* visitor is a strong candidate for the TT.
I will now apologize to everyone for reopening the "inside candidate" mudslinging gripe-fest wars.
*If* it's true, then shame on Toronto for apparently giving their postdoc to a Toronto ABD (according to the wiki). Why oh why?! I've heard their Medieval Latin search was also entirely internal.
Anyone have updates on Colgate or AUR? I haven't heard back from either after interviews.
@ 12:05 I don't have a problem if Toronto went for an internal candidate for the Medieval position (and I applied unsuccessfully for the Mississauga postdoc). There are very few institutions that can compete with them in that field, and I imagine they know what they're doing.
Lets face it, post docs and short term positions are pretty much fair game for inside hires.
Where does the Wiki say anything about Toronto offering its Post-Doc to a Toronto ABD? I know for a fact that this is not the case.
It was there an hour ago or so... Seems to have been edited out.
^i think it was deleted - it was obvious that the comment was added facetiously
I saw the Toronto hiring a Toronto ABD here, on FV. There was significant talk about it if I recall.
Toronto's medieval search was not "internal". the successful candidate has been out of Toronto for several years, and has a superb publication record.
the mark of a great program is that it hires its own graduates!
when you admit the best and then give them the best training, it would be irresponsible to do otherwise.
Wow, I'm surprised at how many of you feel an inside hire is justified simply because the hiring department is also perceived to have the best graduate program. And maybe it is the "best" by most metrics. That's no reason, however, to throw out the principles of a fair search. There are several medieval Latin programs around the US and UK which produce graduates of the same calibre or better, e.g. Harvard, York (UK), Notre Dame. Finally, why do we want to continue to see departments hiring their own: it only creates staleness; akin to academic inbreeding. Even Harvard has seemingly realized that it can't continue to hire its own (last two hires finally came from outside: Berkeley) and retain some semblance of intellectual diversity.
I think the above comments (4:01, 4:02) were being sarcastic?
LOL yes this was meant as a self-evidently absurd parody of the inbred-dept mentality.
that it was not read as such just proves how messed up this field is.
"Finally, why do we want to continue to see departments hiring their own: it only creates staleness; akin to academic inbreeding. Even Harvard has seemingly realized that it can't continue to hire its own (last two hires finally came from outside: Berkeley) and retain some semblance of intellectual diversity."
Ah yes, Berkeley, where two former HSOF junior fellows went on to get jobs and become senior scholars...
when harvard hires anyone who was not b.a.-m.a.-ph.d.-SOF all in boylston, it is to be congratulated for its open-mindedness.
OP here -- it was in response to 12:37, not your sarcastic/parodic comments.
How can Connecticut College still be crickets ??
Has anyone heard any rumors on their VAP search ?
yes it's completely normal to resign a short-term position for something TT, whatever your previous commitments there for the following year -- if they're reasonable human beings they will be very happy for your accomplishment and new-found security -- after all, that's why departments create these positions (that and for the cheap labor, obvis, but *ideally*!!)
Re: "I was asked to apply for a job by the chair of the search committee, with all of the usual compliments on my career thus far.
I was not selected for even a first-round interview."
The fact that you were not selected for an interview does not mean in any way that the original request for you to submit an application was insincere. Every member of a search committee, including the chair, must consider the input and opinions of the entire group. The person who made the original suggestion may have tried to make a strong case for your candidacy, but may have encountered resistance from other members of the deciding group.
Old tenured guy here, not from Toronto. Regarding Toronto's Medievalist position, I have no inside information. I did, however, hear the name of one of their shortlist, who as it happens has a Toronto PhD. And he, at least, is really impressive: a well-reviewed monograph with CUP, prestigious postdocs, and (if I remember a different rumor correctly) had to decline an offer from an Ivy for family reasons a few years back. Now, all that I heard is that he was one of the shortlist. If he is the appointee, trust me when I say that no one should be surprised that he was at the top of the list. And if he's not the appointee, whomever they appointed had to seem even better, which would be amazingly good.
A lot of updated info on the Wiki. Names of who received the Gettysburg, Reed, Holy Cross, etc.. jobs are now up.
..looks like it's been a big year for Chicago PhDs (big surprise)
I don't see the Holy Cross update. Did someone delete it?
Yes, please put the Holy Cross one back up! It's "red" but there is no update next to it. But I'm assuming it's a Chicago person, from the above comment?
Is it common not to have a job for the next academic year at this point in time or am I the last loser standing?
Presumably the Holy Cross update was deleted because either the successful candidate did not wish to be identified, or because the information was wrong (which is a regular occurrence).
I saw the Holy Cross post, but I don’t recall their name. It was a guy, and I *think* is was Chicago.
Btw, an easy way to see who is now hired where is to go to the said College/University course schedule page for Fall 2018 (most are now up or will be very soon), and see the names of who’s teaching the courses. Look for the name that’s not listed in the faculty list on their Dept homepage, and viola.
Re Holy Cross: generally speaking Wiki updates stay up longer when the name of the person who supposedly accepted a job is realistic and it's not, say, someone who's been on the tenure-track at the institution for so long that they recently got tenure. No points for even trying on this one!
"Does a sitting VAP stand a better/worse chance for a TT job at the same institution?"
Someone with fast fingers and some time on their hands could go through the last several Wikis and see when someone hired at Happy Valley U is listed as being UofX/HVU, i.e. a Phd from UofX and a visiting job at HVU
@4:58,
It’s more likely that the hired person saw that they were ‘outed’ and removed it ASAP. Given how venomous FV has been towards those hired, it’s nit much of a surprise that those of weaker constitution want to remain anonymous as long as they can.
The Holy Cross hire is from Brown.
Anyone hear anything about Case Western?
^ yes i hear cleveland sucks
Best to apply only to Boston and NYC schools so you don't have to lower your cultural standards.
Man, here I thought Cleveland *rocked*.
@7:07,
Do you mean they received their PhD from Brown (and are VAP-ing elsewhere) or they are ABD at Brown?
If the Holy Cross hire is an ABD at Brown, there are only 1-2 people that it potentially could be and I’d be highly doubtful that any of them would get the gig, since the few who are right at the end of ABD time there have very light CVs. ...though, I do understand that Ivy often overrules anything else. (I mean no insult to anyone at Brown and do not mean to imply that any of the ABDs are not promising scholars).
@8:30... have you visited before?
@8:33, the Holy Cross hire received their PhD from Brown and currently has a VAP position elsewhere.
Holy Cross explicitly did not advance any ABDs to the final round of interviews.
Given how competitive things are and that many of us are many years out, I don’t feel even slightly bad saying that I don’t think any ABD should be offered or seriously considered for a TT job.
If it were 2002 and there were almost more jobs than applicants, sure. In this market, however, it’s complete bullshit for any SC to think that the best and most qualified person for an Asst Professorship is an ABD. No way. Not with the number of folks still on the market and pushing so hard to get more publications and teaching experience so as to be more competitive only to lose to an ABD who TA’d for 4 classes and gave one presentation at CAMWS.
I think this is why some people were upset about the cushy VAP at Georgetown going to an ABD. We’ve gotten to a point where it’s almost normal that ABDs get nothing, and have to wait until degree is in hand to be a viable candidate, and pick up an adjunct gig in their hometown or teach a lone course at their PhD institution to get their feet wet.
@9:34pm: some ABDs I know...
(a) Taught their own classes (even self-designed ones), sometimes more than one per semester.
(b) Have more than a CAMWS paper, and 1 or 2 major articles.
Looking at some of the Brown VAPs I know of who'd fit this position, if either of them are the HC candidate of choice, then they are no more qualified than several ABDs I know of. Not all VAPs are "worthier" or better than all ABDs. Sometimes there's a reason why you might be stuck in an endless chain of VAPs/adjuncting, because quite frankly, you may have a PhD, but that doesn't mean you deserve, are the best fit, or are even the most qualified for a certain TT job.
And Georgetown is a VAP, not a TT, so getting upset about that is just sour grapes.
@8:42pm Yes, and it kind of wants to rock, but it kind of still doesn't.
Opinions on Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati? Which is the best? Which worst?
Now that we're on the topic of what scraps are left for us: what's happening with Brandeis?
@11:05pm Cincinnati is actually pretty cool! Better weather, too!
@10:07,
[9:34 here]
I personally am not too upset about the Georgetown hire, but was only referencing it to highlight a broader point: that many here (on year 2,3,4+) were angry about this job from, literally, the first moment that the Wiki reported an interview request, and that the anger stemmed from (IMO) an ever-growing sense of paranoia, anger, and resentment that the drying-out of the Classics job market has produced.
All that I'd comment on the Georgetown hire is that I can *understand* a lot of the arguments by folks with full CVs and who have demonstrated years of capability and were passed over for one who is an ABD. ...While I had no stake in that job, I can empathize in that it surely is frustrating to see the folks that get the jobs you put in for if you personally feel that you are a better fit and/or that whoever was hired is not as qualified as 3/4 of applicants. Now, I have no idea who the ABD was that got the Georgetown job, but when I referred to it as a "cushy VAP" that is because being a sitting VAP at such a great school really puts one in a phenomenal position for next year's TT jobs. AND, that plays in to my broader point that the job market has gotten so bad that even very good VAPs are capable of inspiring extreme hatred and vitriol amongst those more-seasoned of us here on FV.
...Surely some ABDs are capable and would be great fits at some jobs for some depts, but with 200+ applicants (with at least 50 from top-10s with overflowing CVs) it seems striking that any ABD would be considered in a market that sees so many folks sticking around for years more than has ever been typical.
...I don't think that anything could ever fix the horrible job market for Classics. It has little to do, IMO, with folks hanging on to their jobs. Imagine if, for instance, a massive earthquake swallowed up the hotel in San Diego next year.. That would not create 100s and 100s of TT jobs (as one presenting there, I hate to even say this in jest), but if that were to happen, most school would just see it as an opportunity to shut down Classics for good. :/
Some of the TT positions will go / have gone to ABDs. We just don't have their names yet. I only hope that those people don't read FV, because ... well, no one really deserves that level of vitriol.
Tricks to getting a decent VAP?
@11:39pm Not even trying to be funny, but get a degree from a top ten school. Otherwise, you will face serious challenges in this market. Publish. Widely. Make connections. Hopefully your advisors don't give up on you when you don't get a TT initially. They have to push for VAPs as much as they push for TT. Most of them just figure you will get something and stop pushing during VAP season.
I would think that columbus is the best of the three.I was in Cleveland last year and it actually is like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysmLA5TqbIY
(their art museum however was spectacular)
"Anonymous Anonymous said...
Is it common not to have a job for the next academic year at this point in time or am I the last loser standing?
March 17, 2018 at 3:32 PM"
It's rough but I know two smart people with good experience and publications who had nothing, not even the chance of staying where they were, in April and got very good VAP positions in May or June.
@ 3:32. Take it from another loser: after four years on the market without ever getting even a first round TT interview or a VAP offer, you get used to it.
So I think the big question this year (and the next) is if (and when) the secondary market will collapse.
Since 2008, it did seem that most people who wanted one were able to get some sort of temporary job (VAP/adjunct/postdoc). This means people were rarely forced to leave the field for want of a job (although many quit in despair).
But if the secondary market collapses, exit from the field may take place simply because there are not enough short-term positions to go around. There is still a five-six year backlog of PhDs looking for TT jobs, plus a new batch of PhDs every year. At some point, the secondary market will fail.
This may be hastened by the otherwise humane policy of many departments to convert adjunct ships into permanent lecturers. The result is fewer VAPs, and therefore fewer places to maintain a holding pattern.
And you are not a loser if you do not have a job lined up at this point, or even by June. Lets not use such terminology, even in jest. You have been failed by a inextricably broken system.
Based on their Facebook feed and rumors I heard, Brandeis had their last campus visit this week. I imagine that if an offer has not been made one will be made shortly.
With regard to the 5-6 year backlog of PhDs, I've been looking for concrete information on the number of new Classics/Ancient History etc. PhDs produced in the last 15-20 years as well as information on the total annual number of new PhD track grad students admitted into all North American programs. I can't seem to locate comprehensive info. SCS has some data on PhDs conferred, but much of it is wrong (for example, I'm not listed, nor are three of the other five people in my cohort, nor are several friends from other institutions). Although I *feel*, entirely based on anecdotal evidence, that the number of new PhDs and number of accepted grad students has been dropping since the economic collapse, I would really like firm data. Any help is appreciated.
Isn't Paideia working on this kind of thing? Legion project?
Well, if they figure out all the people who left, you can surely figure add that to the number of people who stayed.
4:27, I know that the total number of graduate and professional students went up considerably during the recession, but I'm not sure about Classics and allied fields specifically. Anecdotally, a few "top" programs cut back admissions for a few years, and a few programs have been shuttered, but also new programs have opened over the past ten years. I would guess the number of entering students isn't that different 2008-2018 than 1998-2008, and, if anything is probably higher (at least now); but, again, anecdotally / parametrically, more people are leaving during grad school or in the year or two afterward. I would also be interested in reliable figures on this. The Legion project, I think, illustrates how tough it is to get departments to cough up figures, although a few months ago someone on here claimed that SCS used to (?) maintain(s?) comprehensive data at least on the market side of things.
I’m at a top-10 (public non-ivy) and when I came into the program they said at graduate orientation in 2012 that they had received ~400 applications and accepted 12.
Obviously, of those 400, many were dreamers, but those numbers are scary.
...also, they used to make offers to ~25, expecting about a dozen to accept. Ever since the economic collapse around 2008, they only make offers to those that they could afford to fund.
^^^let me add that this was a History Department, so those 400 are for historians of all fields.
So this doesn't get to the question of where to find statistics on the number of PhD students pre-2008/ post-2008, but it does confirm what we already know--that the market has gotten FAR more competitive since 2008. Number of job candidates has risen (presumably due to backlog) as the number of jobs has dropped.
https://classicalstudies.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/PlacementStats2013-15.pdf
4:27 here. Thanks for the responses. I hadn't heard of the Legion project, but looking over their study it seems that they're folks I should get in contact with (despite the difficulties they describe which the poster above noted as well.)
@5:07, indeed the APA did collect and publish such data. When we still had quarterly print newsletters, twice a year dissertations underway were listed, and those completed, with advisor and dissertator named, title of diss., and name of person reporting for that school. This information was useful in many different ways.
This information no longer appeared publicly roughly when the SCS stopped distributing the newsletter (in any format). I have heard they have "some data" "behind the scenes." Next best method has been to prowl the pages of the likely schools, a fair number of which list evidently all their completed people (see North Carolina). But not all schools do, some list it in ways I regard as deceitful (i.e., listing only those w/ jobs), and I think nobody lists people just when they have advanced to candidacy.
Is there any news on the poetry job at Stanford? It was listed as "offered and accepted" on the wiki, but someone edited that out and turned it back orange.
What happened to the Stanford Latin entry? Did anyone else notice it went from red back to orange?
You'd better believe that every department has comprehensive data on every student that has ever begun a PhD. Students cost money for any decent department since they generally offer full funding, so there is information on who finished the PhD, how long it took, who quit, and when. If departments don't collect information on placement beyond students who complete the PhD and remain in the field, advisors most certainly know. If a department wanted to put all this information together, they could easily do it (somebody mentioned Chapel Hill above). That every department does not offer this information freely indicates that a) they're too lazy to put it all together and make it available b) they're not lazy but purposefully keeping this information a secret to create an unrealistic picture of their department. In either case they deserve to be censured by the SCS/AIA...but this seems unlikely if the organizations themselves have date that they are not making public.
...or c) if the university caught wind of how many PhDs didn't get a job/left the field, they'd massively cut funding to the department.
(c) seems unlikely, as long as the grad students keep providing super-cheap labor.
^^agree.
Admin doesn’t give a shit if PhDs gets jobs. They only care that undergrads are filling classes.
I believe that when one of these projects tried to get their hands on attrition data from departments, "privacy" suddenly became a huge concern. The "privacy" of students who had gotten TT jobs is apparently not an issue, since their identities are often listen on department websites, but even sharing the numbers of people who had started and finished grad programs was too sensitive to be shared.
Well who would have thought that someone would turn down Stanford for another offer? (What a position to be in!).
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