@12:15. I don't think that's entirely true. I am not on a hiring committee, but I think people want you to interpret the word and write about it, and I think that there's a lot of room for you to do that. If that means cultural and racial diversity, fine. If it means classroom accessibility , great. Gender equality? That's wonderful, too. Safe spaces for LGBTQ students and colleagues? Huzzah. Economic and class diversity? That's perfectly OK, especially if you can speak to it well. You are teaching something that has a history, and its history disenfranchised a lot of people,and institutions want to know how you engage that. I certainly don't think you'll be punished for speaking to issues that matter to you and that you think you can work with the institution to improve.
@ 5:25. Depends. Most SCs will send you a note. Sometimes it will just randomly appear in your calendar on the SCS website (rare enough, but it's been known to happen). Good Luck in there!
I meant individualized to the candidate (though I can't promise no one won't want the other).
BTW, I doubt many committee members would worry too much about late letters as such, but there are two important caveats. (1) As noted above, you might still be crushed by HR rules. (2) It's unlikely that anyone will re-read your file, so it is important letters arrive by the time it's actually read (as opposed to the official deadline).
To anyone who submitted an app to UT San Antonio: did your recommenders get a message with a request to submit a rec after you filed the application? Or not?
Overheard last week: Tenure-track faculty member, having difficulty keeping up with research while teaching 2 classes: You are so lucky. You have so much time to write. Unemployed friend: Um, yes.
@8:17. Yes, the San Antonio system (should have) automatically sent your letter writers emails to upload their letters. You should also have gotten a notification when the letters were uploaded.
I had an interview at the SCS with Tulane a few years ago. I am not a member of the SCS (since I pay for the AIA instead), but the Search Committee said they would only schedule interviews through the SCS system, so in essence my interview was ransomed. I paid up, and had the privilege of being interviewed by a very surly group of people.
What a horrible system. If it weren't bad enough that the conference registration is exceedingly expensive for those on limited incomes, to have to pay for a system to schedule an interview (in addition to paying for Interfolio, etc.) adds insult to injury.
Is there anywhere besides academia where one has to shell out so much money in the 1% hope of getting a job?
Yeah these institutions shaking down their poorest and least-powerful members to spend huge amounts of money for a chance to win the prize is real exploitation. The SCS is trying to help, though I don't know how substantial the assistance they offer is. And more universities are interviewing over Skype or Zoom.
1%? More like 0.01%...it's not like we each have an equal shot at each job. Even if we did, positions are getting in excess of 200 applications so it's 0.5% at best.
Once you get to the interview stage, you may have a 1/12 chance. Unless there is someone who is on the inside track for the job, in which case you have somewhere between a "something less than 1/12 but still non-negligible" chance and zero chance.
@ 8:57 I had the same experience a few years ago with a campus that had an inside hire (spouse of existing faculty member, so actually 0% chance of a job), so I paid an extra $50 for the privilege of being strung along. Classical archaeologists/historians really get screwed with our pants on by the Placement Service.
I don't think you need to be an SCS member to use the scheduling platform (and you sure don't need to be in order to get an interview). If you're concerned, you could contact the SCS directly (info@classicalstudies.org) to understand the entire process.
My experience was that paying for the SCS placement service (as a non-member) was the only way to use the scheduling tool; Tulane made it clear to me that no other option would be considered.
Re UTSA Exodus: Both tenured Classicists have left in the past two years. The long term lecturer who taught many of the classes left this year. Another longterm lecturer passed away.
UTSA is an underfunded institution with a toxic administrative culture. (I speak with inside knowledge). As the job ad demonstrates, they expect a lot from this position.
@6:43 AM. It doesn't seem that unreasonable. (?) They've managed to keep the teaching load at 2-2, something that not all underfunded institutions can say. Some larger state schools like this, including some hiring this year, demand the same administrative duties and generalist breadth while requesting that the hire teach a 4-4. But I may be missing something.
Looking at St. Olaf's faculty page, I see only 1 visiting person and all faculty accounted for in their course offerings. A VAP was listed as having taught from '14-17, but is neither on the schedule for this year nor listed on the faculty page as on leave or anything. Make of that what you will!
@12.13 PM Applied for Rome 'morning after' the deadline, received confirmation. Any news/rumors? I've heard this seems a genuine position, unlike some others around there, but I did see a whole bunch of VAPs on their website...
Noticed that someone updated the Wiki to reflect that UTSA had contacted for transcripts, teaching portfolio, and writing sample. Still haven't heard back after emailing the department on Tuesday about why my recommenders received no prompt for submission of recommendations. Anyone have any idea what is going on?
The goal of early interviews (including Albany's surprising jump straight to campus visits) may be to lock in candidates early. But the field is so awash with high quality candidates that this is hardly necessary.
I think we may simply be moving to a world where hiring no longer revolved around the annual meeting. This would be an enormously positive development, as the SCS interviews are an excessive expense for candidates, and frankly ruin the vibe of the whole meeting, turning it into a cauldron of anxiety and despair full of stressed out junior scholars in ill fitting suits. Removing the job aspect from the annual meeting would restore it as a conference where ideas are shared and the field engages in productive social collaboration.
@11:04 I got the request from the HR system overnight, and received an email this morning requesting a skype interview and saying that I would or might already have received the request for additional documents. So it looks like the request for transcripts etc. is part of the next stage. FWIW my references had been requested and received when I'd originally submitted my application.
Can someone elaborate on that comment up above, about Princeton people not knowing their languages? I find it unclear whether that refers to some of the graduate students, or the claim was being made about faculty members. The latter would surprise me more than the former.
So, this is only my second year on the job market (last year I was ABD, so not sure if that *really* counts).
..anyways, is it safe to say that T-T track job listings are essentially done ?? If not, what kind of % remains in peoples’ best estimates? Have we seen 80, 90, 99% of all T-T jobs ??
Yes, TT listings are basically done. A trickle of late-approved hires may come out, but perhaps no more than two or three. I would say we are definitely at 90% of TT jobs. Prove me wrong, America.
I second 3:29's comment. Perhaps some late-in-the-game search will get approved, but we're mostly done. I don't know this for certain, but I think it's common practice for many SCs to meet after the Thanksgiving break, contact candidates in late Nov/ early December, and then interview at the APA.
I'm not at Princeton, but I think it's really unfair to anonymously and generally disparage the abilities of a whole group of graduate students. I've seen these students in action at conferences and they certainly know their languages. I'm surprised that Servius hasn't stepped in here yet.
Also, can we stop asking people to share their "stats"? That kind of request makes this feel like we're a bunch of 17 year olds on College Confidential.
I think it's fine for people to be curious about the research profile that attracted the attention of XYZ institution, but perhaps it's a bit too invasive. Not sure if that's what bothers you, or if it's just the use of "stats."
Ditto on not knocking Princeton. In my experience, language ability doesn't map the institutions we end up at. And I know some excellent linguists who failed to make it to the other side of the desk because, at the end of the day, they have trouble coming up with ideas or troubling communicating them. It sucks that some hiring committees still think an Ivy League degree is a proxy for quality. But beating your chest like Princeton grads are universally incapable of reading Greek or Latin just sounds petty and small.
On stats: look at the people who got jobs last year, then google CVs. Some had years post PhD, with productive records of teaching and publication. Others were ABDs with not even a book review. Indeed, publication-free ABDs got some of the most coveted jobs in the field last year.
In short, the hiring process is arbitrary, and having 0 vs 3 vs 10 articles seems to make little difference in terms of campus interviews or ultimate jobs.
No. It is impossible to discern any sort of pattern between apparent qualifications and successful job candidates. This is because there are many other factors involved, all of which are invisible to us.
Having a publication record, even an impressive one, matters very, very little in this game. Indeed, it can even work against you, as search committees are very concerned with "fit" around Departmental interests and methodologies, the human typography of which is never visible to the candidate and often disputed within the committee. Having too many publications makes it harder for you to fit the image of the perfect candidate that the search committee has developed--it develops your own hard edges. This is why ABDs get jobs without even so much as a BMCR. They having nothing, but nothing can be imagined into everything by a committee itching to hire the golden child.
Now I do not believe that jobs should be handed to whoever has the most publications--it would be silly to base it on numerical "stats." And demanding publications as a precondition of getting a job risks turning grad school into simply a preprofessional slog (oops, too late). But given that publications count for everything for tenure, it is odd that jobs (especially high profile R1 jobs) go to people who have not proven that they can push an article through peer review, while there are adjuncts out there with the publication profiles of Associate Professors.
@10:41 you have a point. but I think it's overstated to say that one can be penalized for being productive. Maybe more accurate simply to say that publications don't necessarily help as much as one might think.
One can most certainly be penalized -- you're not thinking of all those associate and full professors out there with lackluster publication records who do not want to be shown up by a lecturer or assistant professor with more articles in recent years than they've got, let alone more articles in X years than they have produced in 2X (or more) years.
No. What will get you a job is luck. Crappy publications especially won't help. I have a friend with a CUP book, many highly placed publications (CP and similar), four years out from the PhD, does outreach in the schools and underserved communities, very nice person. Left the field because couldn't get an assistant professorship. The Year of No Latin Jobs certainly didn't help this person, but that's basically what it comes down to. You'll get a job if you get lucky, you won't if you're unlucky. Good publications may help with some SCs, may hurt with others. You're no longer a nebulous entity upon which to project fantasies, or you look too flashy. I'm applying to one job in particular this year where the department members are SHOCKINGLY unproductive. And for no particular reason, they're not teaching a particularly burdensome load. I doubt I'll get the interview. Note that my friend is now happy and making more money than any of us, so maybe s/he won out after all.
Indeed there are institutions where tenure where can be had from articles alone, and at such places a well-published candidate is clearly someone who will head for greener pastures at the earliest opportunity. In fact, I have a friend who taught at such a university and was discouraged by her departmental colleagues from writing a book because if she did she would be competitive at other universities. And no doubt there are other ways in which an extensive publication record can work against a candidate; this is the only one I know in any detail.
It seems obvious that having even a hundred "crappy-to-mediocre" articles is not going to help you, at least not unless you are preparing for a research assessment exercise. That this might need to be said is depressing.
Save that search committees are not going to read all your articles to see where they fall on the crappy-mediocre-serviceable-profound scale. As with everything else in the job search, their assessment of your publication record is cursory at best.
certainly there are better articles than others, but this talk of publishing tons of "crappy-to-mediocre" articles" seems an exaggeration that shows little faith in our discipline's peer review process (unless you're talking about truly unknown/pay to publish journals). There may be truly boring articles (to you but not to others) but most editors that I know running classics journals and the referees enlisted to judge them are pretty good at rejecting objectively "crappy" or even "mediocre" submissions
Search committee member here. I'm now deep into my pile of 120 files. There is some truth to the observation that a publication can on occasion 'hurt' a candidate. But it's not as if I have no evidence for the ABDs, since they are giving us writing samples, to which I'm paying a lot of attention. (2:28 is correct that I read don't read everything. But I'm reading a lot, and I'm only one member of the committee.) Also, keep in mind that we have letters of reference from supervisors and committee members, and often a number of letters from the same individual. This allows us to compare what they say about different candidates.
Right now, I'm looking to get my pile to a more manageable size, and eventually down to maybe ten for the APA interviews. Will there be some ABDs there? Almost certainly. Will one or more them make it to campus? Probably. Will one of them be the appointee? Possibly. If I didn't think so, they wouldn't be invited to the APA interview.
@8:18. 6:29 here. So far, I've been mostly looking at intellectual strengths and research potential, so I've not started on the question of teaching. But right now the committee's task is getting c. 120 down to (say) 60, and then down to 30. Once we're there, I'm guessing that strong teaching that's relevant to what we need will help nudge people up towards or into an interview at the APA and those without that will be nudged downwards. Signs that someone is mediocre/bad in the classroom, or worst of all negligent, would probably be fatal.
@8:33. 6:29 again. As the original poster pointed out, your publications tend to define you. Say, we are looking for a historian. Included within the applicant pool will be some candidates who sit astride history/literature and others who are more history/archaeology. Some do it all. But the one who does it all might have two archaeological articles out. A committee, especially in early culling, might include or exclude him/her because we've categorized them as x while we need y.
Or to choose a different potential problem. A good article in a good venue can only do you good. But not all articles are good, or are good in every way. An article with problematic prose or eccentric organization doesn't help.
Or, again, a candidate might have multiple publications, but if they are all (e.g.) in what are essentially edited conference volumes, then the question of research quality needs to be addressed, especially if the volumes are edited by (say) a supervisor or friend. Don't forget that peer-reviewed articles in the better journals are the gold standard. (Nothing wrong with a mix, too: being in conference volumes implies that you are academically social.)
Expecting all this might seem unfair, but we're looking to appoint the best applicant—understanding, of course, 'best' has a lot of moving parts in it—and we only have one job.
@9:46. 6:29 again. I don't want to say too much. But we're a small enough department that we need a candidate who can participate outside of their niche and in the full life of the department, but in a university that is big enough and research-intensive enough that the tenure expectations can be substantial.
@11:47. 6:29 here again. A couple weeks, maybe? In our case, I'm hoping to send a single email with an acknowledgment along with a rough timeline. But just between us, right now I have only the most general idea of what that timeline is. And the logistics of sending those emails is rather daunting to me.
(Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised—though perhaps a bit disappointed—that the first you hear is either an invite to an APA interview or news that there isn't such an invite.)
I am not on an SC (and may never be), but I can say based on my (ongoing) experience on the job market that the time between deadline and interview notification varies considerably. In the fall it is not unreasonable to hear about SCS/AIA interviews as late as Christmas Eve (I have). For deadlines in January and February about 6-8 weeks is fairly common; for deadlines in March or later 4 weeks is closer to the norm. This doesn't necessarily apply for postdocs, since their volume of applications can be greater (depending on what sort of postdoc it is), but on the whole the later the application deadline, the shorter the time to notification. At present I would say there's no reason to give up hope on any job until Boxing Day has come and gone.
On publications that hurt: I have served on several searches in Classics and in other departments (at both a large R1 aspirant and a SLAC type). For young candidates reception and pop culture publications can hurt in many institutions. If you have opportunities to publish good work, do so. If you are choosing between prepping a new article for AJP, TAPA, etc. or for writing about Game of Thrones etc (and you don't already have a TT job), write the 'serious' piece.
@ 2:03. I am curious to know if reception in literature and reception in other media are treated in the same way. Your comment leads me to believe that an article on Montaigne is looked in the same way as an article on Star Trek. I would think that, especially in the SLAC context, something that deals with literature or history relevant to other fields might even be looked on favourably. Do you think that's misguided?
I am curious: do search committees stick to the one writing sample, or if interested in candidates do they use their C.V.'s to track down other publications (or use Academia.edu, etc.) in order to get a fuller picture?
I realize that I'm asking this as someone who has never had to go through 120 applications.
6:29 back again. I would agree with what 2:03 said, and at least from my perspective @3:21, serious reception is better, but still a potential stumbling block. @5:17. Yes, articles, too. And I've downloaded a few PhD theses recently. But that's been because of curiosity. I'm not going to do that for many.
There was a moment when reception was a hip thing, and even a moment in the late 1990s when departments were even adding TT lines for people who did nothing but reception. That moment has passed. I do agree with the comments above that reception, especially in pop culture, is a poison pill. No one wants to read about classical references in Battlestar Galactica, because these are intended to be rather obvious.
A note from the Servii re Princeton: the ground rules here are that people don't attack individuals, especially junior scholars. That leaves a lot of room for other statements that we might not all think are judicious, and which you are all presumably capable of taking for what they're worth.
I love reading about classical references in BSG, for the very reason that they are not obvious to me, even if they were intended to be. In fact, I find that the occasional reception work I do in areas that haven't received as much attention are much more obvious cases of reception, since these later texts are often explicitly naming their classical sources, whereas classical references in pop-culture tend to be much more nebulous and require a lot more unpacking and interpretation.
Then again, I do agree with you that I would not, at present, solely work in classical receptions (with an s), with the caveat that we are all always-already doing classical reception (without an s), given the ever-widening remove from the ancient world we imagine ourselves to be investigating.
I know of one TT professor at a good school who's writing a book about the Aeneid and BSG, so we can all look forward to that. For me, reception(s) is more of a teaching tool, but I think some (not all) of the people who devote more time to it are certainly doing "serious" work.
I think the point about BSG was not about whether such scholarship is worthwhile (BSG reboot was a good show, and it can be a way of exciting students), but rather the risks and rewards in this job market of junior scholars engaging in pop culture reception. Note that in the comment above, the person writing the Aeneid/BSG book is TT (tenured or no?). This at least gives them some security, more than a junior scholar has.
Basically, the question was to what extent should junior scholars expose themselves through publication? I suspect the answer varies. Some SCs might have a bias that makes them view people who do pop-culture reception as lightweights--fairly or not. Some SCs might love the idea of a scholar engaging in popular outreach. As always, the job market is brutally capricious.
Sending solidarity to those who will face endless job market queries from well-meaning relatives this week. A gem from my family's celebration last year: "I think you should just go over to Stanford, make an appointment with the department chair, and tell him about your teaching." (Stanford had no opening.)
@7:17 here. That’s no mean feat. I look thoroughly awkward in mine, especially when sitting in an interview chair with no table-barrier between me and the interviewers. What do I do with my legs? My hands? My fidget spinner? How much do I recline in this very cozy nigh-loveseat? Why is this night different from all other nights?
I wouldn’t think that the T-T season is done. As an Ancient Historian, let me share that so far as the History job sites go, there are consistently 6-7 new T-T postings a day. Granted, there hasn’t been one for an Ancient historian in over a month. But, if any of you want to be a prof of East Asian or African-American History (two HUUUGE fields right now), there are plenty of jobs. :/
History jobs may continue to roll out (I don't know, that's not my field) but Classics TT postings are pretty much done. If you look at the wiki from last year, you'll see that most of the TT jobs were scheduling interviews by the end of November or beginning of December, meaning that the postings had already gone up by early November at the latest. A few more will certainly trickle out, but not many.
Yes, the only new TT jobs coming out now are usually due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g. the death of William Mullen (R.I.P.) has opened up a TT line at Bard; one wonders if Columbia will advertise a Roman history TT soon, too...maybe too late) or sometimes late approvals from the university administration.
@12.37 Yup, me too. It only took them one week from the deadline to pick who they wanted to interview? They must have raced through those application materials or had a solid idea of who they wanted.
Is there any particular reason why (seemingly) 8-9/10 of sitting faculty have their PhDs from only Harvard and Chicago? Harvard hasn’t had any strong faculty there since the mid-90s and Chicago never struck me as *that* wowing of a Dept. ...Am I missing something? ...sigh, not that it matters, but what are us plebeians from Stanford, Berkeley, UNC, and Columbia to do?
I wonder if it is not nepotism but a reflection of how little time is invested in the hiring process. Course exemptions were not granted to any of the faculty I know who worked on search committees at the institution where I got my PhD. So it is service on top of service. And in a tight market, that means paying less close attention to applications, at least in the first round. So institution becomes a proxy for quality.
The real pity, for all of us plebs, is that there is no bottom rung of the latter. You can't write your way out of a job at Eastern Missouri Technical College and into a job at Penn or whatever because there is no job at EMTC. Members of other fields can rise and fall. We don't have that many opportunities. So there is no chance for a sixth-round pick to climb his or her way to the top.
But that is the US post recession. A few winners, a mass of losers. At least we can #resist.
I've been on search committees. I guarantee that my service and teaching loads are higher than those at Bard and that my research production is close to theirs. Get outside of the 1% and you'll see that life at Bard is extraordinarily privileged.
People on SCs will make time to review applications or not depending on the biases they bring to the table. Hiring takes only a portion of one's time for a single semester -- the onerous part of reading applications anyway -- but its consequences are for decades. So anyone being ethical or even just being self-interested with a long view rather than with merely myopically selfish will spend the time necessary to review applications thoroughly.
I choose to assume that the search committees at Bard have not been maliciously negligent, which using institution as a proxy for quality would be. Therefore I must conclude that they are maliciously nepotistic. Either way, malice is the common denominator.
Think of it this way: we see at specific universities certain systems perpetuating themselves in which merit is claimed to be determined by obviously false proxies. These proxies, however, closely correlate to wealth and privilege (and the racism, sexism, and other -isms attendant upon that privilege). What are we to make of the self-proclaimed high-powered intellectuals and bastions of social justice & equity that hold positions at these universities yet still willingly and willfully perpetuate systems of classist inequality (all the more verbally ironic, if not dramatically ironic, since it's classicism among classicists)?
I know what I make of them. Damned by their own testimony.
Note that last time Bard ran a search, the job ad was comically broad, yet with the entire field to choose from, they ended up hiring someone's spouse.
Bard: sure they are a privileged bunch, no disputing that; malice is a strong word though. I think a whole lot of institutions are malicious without intending to be so. But there can't be any possibility of a spousal hire at Bard this time, so why bring it up?
That ABD interviewee for Clemson, what institution are they ABD at? Harvard? Chicago? ...Many SCs *will* nab an ABD (or two), but it’s more than not just to make themselves feel like “hey, look how fair we are, we *did* interview ABD candidates.”
...yes, I know, ABDs do sometimes get T-T jobs, but... it’s usually only ABDs from ultra privileged universities.
Aside from the horrible prejudices of SCs, they often hire people who DO NOT fit their original ad.
For example. 2 years ago, SUNY-Binghamton had an ad for an ancient historian; they hired an ABD Princeton student with a blank CV who does Medieval.... Last year, St. Mary’s College of Maryland had an ad for a Greek/Roman Historian; they hired an Iron Age Philistine archaeologist... also, last year College of William & Mary had a 2-yr VAP spot for a *Roman Historian*; they took on a Greek philologist focusing on Pindar!!
We can all complain about A) the lack of jobs, B) how many VAP jobs are predatory, and how C) SCs have deep biases toward certain institutions, but another major problem is that SCs often “go off script” and take someone who isn’t even what they said they were looking for.
Oh 2017... Spring, started the year with Ivy League campus visit, lost to VAP. Summer, shortlisted in Europe, lost to a spouse. Fall, second book deal in the bag, optimism renewed. And then? I don’t get shortlisted at my own alma mater for tt job in my own field. Winter is certainly here.
You should always expect that one’s alma mater will deliberately NOT hire you. It’s really, really bad form when an institution hires their grads as they walk off the podium, so to speak. ....rule of thumb: at least 10 years removed from graduation to be “fair game” again; especially if you’re speaking of the PhD alma mater.
12:44PM: my first taste of the capriciousness of the job market was when I was still a graduate student. One of the candidates brought on campus to my graduate institution ended up with no offers at all and teaching high school. Happily, as it turns out. But it was a shock to me that it is entirely possible to be of the caliber to make the top three list at one of the best universities in the country and walk away without a single offer.
The world has changed. We all should be mindful to not eliminate half of the possible T-T college jobs: community college.
At a CC, tenure is simply time (ca. 6 yes of good teaching). The pay is essentially the same. Also, holding a PhD from a top school will most definitely get you many interviews, jobs offers, and prestige among your peers when hired.
It's tough coming close to getting positions. However, if a VAP is doing a great job it's fantastic that the work they have been doing is rewarded. Likewise, a spousal hire, if the candidate is genuinely appointable, is no bad thing and probably makes for a happier work environment for all (although, not always). In a way, it's a shame that institution's can't hire these people and not have to put others through the application and interview process (especially submitting tediously elaborate dossiers). As it stands, it defeats the purpose of having a competition in the first place. In the private sector appointments like those are completely normal and, to my mind, there is nothing wrong with that.
@2:31 I agree, and having been the inside candidate during a job search I know the frustration of the others who were interviewed for a job they simply would not get. I wish that SCs were able to be more straightforward about it. So others would not waste their time or their hopes.
OMG. How are there still people going to grad school who don't understand that (a) most people starting a PhD will not get a T-T job and (b) getting said T-T job has way more to do with luck and persistence than native talent?
Happy Thanksgiving to all. I'm thankful didn't receive any rejection emails today and that the jobs I applied to have still not called for interviews (as far as I know and the wiki tells).
I, too, wonder why people continue to attend graduate school. I assume most graduate students still hope to become faculty members, but maybe someone from a graduate program can correct me on that. For those who entered prior to the crash, or even just afterward when everyone thought the dip was a temporary blip, going to graduate school or finishing what you started might appear to make sense. But why enter today? And why do people still encourage foolish undergraduates to do this?
In my experience at an excellent if not quite elite SLAC, it's exceedingly difficult to talk reason into today's privileged boomer kids. If you speak of the wonders of classics but then dare to rain on their own aspirations, they will find sympathetic boomer ears in admin positions that will then get you in trouble (especially pre-tenure). So you smile, perpetuate the bullshit their parents have been selling them their entire lives, and watch in wonder as millennials on here are so shocked why the special snowflakes flock in droves to grad school.
Also, new graduate students often have no idea how bad the market is. Their programs have just spent a lot of time and money touting their placement rates and telling their prospective students just how great they are (that is, both the programs and the students). This, I think, contributes to a sense that the older students in the program are simply jaded or fearmongers, or that their fear derives from their own inadequacy. New students, on the other hand, all know how great they are, and therefore have no cause for concern because their greatness will undoubtedly be recognized by search committees. Certainly this was my experience as a student.
I think you’re quite right on the viability of Community College jobs. But, there some intereing problems that also come with it. As someone who has applied for a some of the T-T historian jobs seeking someone who focuses on Ancient, let me share my experiences.
So... I have my PhD from an upper top-10 program; I have publications and many competitive grants; I have a solid background of teaching experience and even achieved a few teaching awards. When a Community College (CC) looks through their applicant pool, which is no doubt filled with people whose top degree is the MA or whose PhD is from a tier 2 or tier 3 school.. YES, having a PhD from a top-10 will make them excited and will often get you an interview. But, when this moment comes, there are some very serious issues that arise among the CC SC. ...first, a fear that taking on someone whose degree and (even if mild) publication record will make them all look bad in comparison. Second, that if they hire Mr./Ms. Top-10 they’ll come in to their Dept and see themselves as superior and therefore may attempt to dictate how things will be going forward or that may be especially difficult with sitting faculty in any/all admin maters. And of course, third, that you will show up, get some teaching experience and then move on to bigger and brighter things.
As such, their questions are very different than those posed by a larger university. ...I’ve had T-T interviews at both, so let me enlighten the board as to what questions a CC SC will ask you. It’s also worth note that these questions are asked 50 different times 50 different ways:
1.). Why are applying to a CC job? 2.). How will you amend your lectures to work for the needs of our students? 3.). What will you do when you have a student that’s failing? 4.). Why do you prefer a ‘teaching’ role over a ‘research’ role? 5.). What has been the most challenging experience you’ve had as a teacher and how did you overcome it?
...and add to these, questions about your long-term goals (which is how they gauge if you’re a job-hopper or if you’re there for the long haul.
...in short, it’s often harder for a PhD from a top school to get a job at a CC than a 4-yr College, since it’s very difficult to assuage the reasonable fears of a CC SC as to your commitment to them. Also, it’s a 5-5 teaching load (really 3-3, but you offer one course multiple times/days), so be sure you’re ok with that kind of teaching.
BUT... there are amazing rewards to a CC job. The most significant is that you can have a life. There isn’t constant pressure to publish, and it’s something you can do at your own pace when you want. Tenure, you’re right, is based on x number of years of successful teaching. Also, the salaries are comparable (in some cases better) than 4-yr schools.
At end of the day you have to honestly ask yourself what you want out of life and make a choice about if you want to remain in the horribly cut-throat world of bouncing VAPs in the dreams of maybe landing a TT job at a University some day (I think most TT hires today have been a VAP at at least 2-3 reputable colleges beforehand, at the least).
Many of us from top PhD programs have an extreme problem with delusions of grandeur and that we can be some monumental figure in our field and be at some amazing institution somewhere.
@ 10:29 AM. So so true. Also, let's not forget that at 22, the thought of hopping from job to job, from town to town, doesn't seem so terrible. At 27 and up, however... nope. Even if I didn't currently have a stable partner, I personally wouldn't want to do that for more than two years. Still don't understand why people over the age of 25 enter grad school in this market.
@11:04 pm: I suspect you're correct, but since the SCS refuses to collect meaningful data on completion and placement, we have no way to know. The picture might be slightly better than your comment, or a whole lot worse. Not long ago I asked someone in SCS management about gathering stats by college or university, and I was told that that might "embarrass" a number of schools so they didn't want to list the data. Wow.
Or, you can look at departmental presentations such as Columbia's (not the only one which does this, just the most recent I've seen): they list a "selection" of their PhD grads who have jobs. Well, great. But how many got their degrees and *didn't* get jobs? *That* is the interesting number. North Carolina does a better job: they list everybody (as far as I can tell), and the career they have now, which unsurprisingly shows diversity of employment.
This is what the placement wiki is for, people, keep it updated. The SCS will never make such stats public. Pretty much all PhD-granting universities would be against it.
12:54, true enough. But I haven't figured out a way to use the Wiki easily across years, without tedious work. Is there a simple way to pull out everyone from Chicago, for example, or everyone from Stanford?
How do people find out about community college jobs? You don't typically see them listed through the APA Placement Service (or whatever they're calling it now).
Most CCs don’t have anything to offer Classics people. History? Sure, but I’m sure that very, very few CCs offer Latin and/or Greek. If they offer atacheology courses they’re always very broad and more than not a Classics PhD would be far from ideal.
1) From a statistical point of view, the Placement Tracker is effectively worthless. There are so many gaps in it that it is nigh impossible to gauge any meaningful statistics. The thought is great, the layout is horrid, but the gaps are what render it little more than a(nother) depressing thing to look at.
2) In my experience, applying to CCs got me nowhere as a Classicist. The courses they offer are very, very broad - think Intro to Humanities, or Art History survey, or History of the Western World. It's hard to find a place for a niche Classics PhD in there.
The the issue with the uber-specialization that's hardwired into Classics along with the glut of PhDs. Even our third-tier PhD programs are staffed with faculty holding elite PhDs and train students to the same formula rather than thinking differently (like training broadly for CCs). We're an outdated discipline in every sense with no signs of adaptation. Welcome to the road to extinction, kiddos.
I disagree. My first job was at a CC while I was still ABD. I taught a modern language, but also "Critical Thinking" (basically teaching the students how to make a coherent argument based on close reading of non-fiction sources) and an intro to Humanities class. I think that my Classics background was an excellent training for such classes. Granted there would be no Greek or Latin to teach, but it was still a very fulfilling position.
If you seriously think that, you’re either VERY poorly trained (and generally incurious) or you haven’t spent much time with humanities PhDs from other disciplines. Or both. A halfway decent Classicist is worlds more interdisciplinary than the rest of humanities phds, including that mongrel “discipline” that calls itself Comp Lit.
@12:54, old-timer here. The APA did actually keep such stats, and published them, in the 1980s and 1990s; they appeared in specific issues of the APA newsletter. The APA also published another useful feature: announcements of dissertations as they got underway, and when they were finished. Information that was provided included the name of the dissertator, the dissertation's title, and the doctoral advisor. This was useful and interesting information. A given department had someone tasked to report such information to the association. This is not an unreasonable thing to report, and to publish.
@10:37, I agree, I think my Classics background is excellent training for teaching such broad classes. Convincing a CC search committee of that, on the other hand, seems to be where I have fallen short. Any advice?
Old-timer, why and when did that stop? It seems like that would be a responsible, fair service for the SCS to offer. Departments or advisers with strong records could use it to recruit with.
SCS does publish quite a bit of data about placement: https://classicalstudies.org/professional-matters/professional-matters-data-collection
And SCS still posts the in-progress dissertations, though not all departments are as good at sharing that data: https://classicalstudies.org/professional-matters/professional-matters-data-collection
10:35: the data appear to be generally current to 2008, for the most part, and also to be done by CSWMG rather than the SCS itself. Do you have any information that the SCS is now in swing to do its own gathering and reporting, and to current terms/years? That would be really helpful. Also, I'm not understanding why the SCS would list this under Professional Matters when that group did not do the actual work, but maybe I'm missing something. I don't know the organization's charter by heart.
@10:01, well, some time ago. I will guess in the early 2000s. I used to read the dissertation topics pretty carefully, to see if there would be any overlap, but then my duties changed and I got out of the habit. I don't think I've received a newsletter in more than a decade, at a guess, though recently some newsletters have been arriving in email, which is a positive development.
I'm so tired of seeing people disparage other disciplines and specialties on this forum. I get that you're bitter, but can you just keep those opinions to yourself? It does absolutely no good for anyone and contributes to the perception that Classicists are elitist snobs.
Elitist snobs who are one trick-ponies in the grand scheme but think we're interdisciplinary and can kick ass in the CC world despite reality, thank you very much.
The confusion here is that while Classics is an interdisciplinary field -- language, literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, and art are all parts of it and part of most undergraduate major curricula -- very few individual classicists are genuinely interdisciplinary in their training or approaches to scholarship. The field as a whole is not remotely narrow, though it may look that way from the perspective of some graduate programs that focus on traditional 'philology' and ghettoize everybody else. But younger scholars especially tend to be narrowly focused even within one of the major branches of classics. If you're one of those, though, there's a plus side, because genuinely interdisciplinary young scholars too often get rejected on the grounds that they're not really classicists; just ask all the classics PhDs who work heavily in history, philosophy, or linguistics (no, the commonsensical notion that such people would be more employable due to their competence in multiple disciplines is not borne out by the evidence; instead they're usually just seen as outsiders by people in both disciplines). A candidate who could genuinely teach in all the areas of classics would be a great hire for a community college, since she could teach history, literature, archaeology, art, philosophy, and whatever precious few language courses the CC's offer (a few offer Latin). But there aren't many fresh PhDs who are any more competent to teach in all those areas than your average undergraduate classics major is. Unlike the average undergraduate classics major, however, if you have a PhD and have done some teaching then you know how to teach and, more importantly, you know how to teach yourself stuff. So you're a decent candidate for a CC job if you're willing to learn some new things.
Yes, the field as advertised is not remotely narrow but we can't escapes the fact that we focus 90% of our energies and resources on the "Upper East Side" and ghettoize everything else as you correctly pointed out.
Admins aren't stupid. We can say we cover everything from prehistory to Constantinople and text to material culture, but when reality shows we privilege only a sliver of this available data, it's a roadmap to irrelevance and oblivion. We can't have it both ways - call ourselves the study of Greek and Latin so we get combined with language departments, or truly train and teach the full breadth of classical studies as we advertise. I see no change, however, on the horizon in the way we train and hire our practitioners.
I sure would love to know whether these doom and gloomers around here, including those currently lamenting how our narrowness assures our demise, actually know what they are talking about, or are just a bunch of grad students parroting what they have heard from others. Because I have taught at places where Classics is thriving, and even growing, and no one gets worked up over how we are a bunch of elitists who only appeal to rich, white Manhattanites.
Gaslighting: "the field is doing great, silly little woman! Don't you start with your whining, now." There may be places where classics is thriving, but that is very much the exception. Have you seen the job data over the last decade??
There are some fantastic, generous senior scholars, but for every one of them, there's a gas lighter who got his job with his advisor's phone call and tenure without a book let alone the two some institutions are expecting now on top of a crap load more service. That is if one is *lucky* enough to even land a full-time job with tenure expectations in this day when many a classicist has retired after lighting a dumpster fire in his department. Yeah, we knew it would be a tough slog, but it doesn't help to have smega-brained douchenozzles (cf. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/listen-up-bitches-its-lysistrata-time), aka walking Title IXs, lording over the field.
SCS insider here (not official SCS staff), wishing to respond to earlier posts (November 25th and 26th) regarding data on the profession, particularly information about placement, dissertations, etc. Through its various committees, the SCS attempts to gather information about a variety of matters of interest to members and others, and the communications team does its best to present that information in a timely manner. But a lot of that depends on the information received from members and institutions, as SCS staff reported in this piece on how the SCS collects data: https://classicalstudies.org/about/scs-newsletter-october-2017-other-scs-data.
To respond to some of the issues raised above, here are some other links that might help:
--A list of the completed and in-progress dissertations from 2010-2016: https://classicalstudies.org/education/list-progress-and-completed-dissertations-classics
--A rundown of last year's Placement Data with direct downloads to the raw data itself as well as the office write-up: https://classicalstudies.org/about/scs-newsletter-july-2017-placement-report-2016-2017
Also, check out the Eidolon article that SCS staff did with Jason Pedicone on the complexities of tracking non-TT scholars after they graduate, with some general numbers on how many Ph.D.s get TT jobs: https://eidolon.pub/ne-plus-ultra-classics-beyond-the-tenure-track-1504c555f20b
Thank you for your post. I, too, have been wondering why there is no longer an official list of who got which job, as there used to be. And here is a simple solution to the problem of departments not sharing information: any program that posts job announcements through the Placement Service MUST say who (if anyone) got the job, or else it will not be allowed to use the Placement Service the next time. An e-mail reminder or two in spring/summer will undoubtedly be necessary, but this should make it quite possible for the old placement list to be resurrected.
If so, I'd love to know the rationale for changing their long-standing policy of publishing such information in the newsletter. And, since roughly half of the jobs out there seem to be at public institutions the hiring info for those, at least, is the exact opposite of not-to-be-made-public.
If only the Randolph-Macon (I sure hope you did include the hyphen in your letter!) deadline had not yet passed I would apply and engage in similar dittography, because that's what Augustus would do.
I totally sent Hamilton the unedited version of my cover letter. Whoops. I'm ABD so they're going to chuck me into the No pile without writing it i think (since they want a creature I've never heard of: an advanced assistant professor).
@5:17. Can you speak generally what the problem is? If it's just a question of a bad time (e.g., 1st thing on 1st morning), as a search committee member, I can probably assure you that it's not that big of a deal. If you're on our list and are presenting, one of us will be there.
Agreed with @5:17am, both about the SCS and AIA, especially if they are open sessions. Utterly pointless; small audiences. No one gave me any real feedback, good or bad. And I had presented the papers elsewhere beforehand in smaller venues and received very constructive and positive feedback. I find smaller conferences (preferably with pre-circulated papers) way more useful. But it seems that you need an AIA/SCS paper on your CV at least once...
somehow -- perhaps it's a perverse way of taking the rejection -- it feels not so terrible to let the job market decide my fate. if I don't get any offers perhaps it's an encouragement to find a satisfying career path elsewhere?
I complain to friends that I haven't received any response to applications that I submitted 6 weeks ago, but then I get two rejections in one morning and have to go put on a good face for my students despite how depressing that is. I'm with you, 11:12 and 11:23.
11:12, 11:23, 11:49: I'm with you too. Really sorry to hear about the rejections. But given that you currently have a position, you have value, you are talented! Don't give up. I'm determined to see application rejections as a sign that I wasn't the right fit the SC was looking for. We have to remember that not being selected for interview is not a sure sign that we aren't qualified or capable.
I'm 5:17am, the one who wrote about the pointlessness of presenting at the AIA/SCS. I worry that if I mention the specific aspects of my irritation and the wrong person reads it, I'll be in trouble.
Unfortunate times are unfortunate times; that's just a fact, and no one can really complain. (Even though I have given an AIA/SCS paper where no one from the SC showed up - my annoyance was limited in its duration and intensity.) However, what gets my goat is that there are demands and constraints not announced in advance.
Add to that: some shockingly terrible papers get fawned over at the AIA/SCS. Sometimes it looks like Ivies defending Ivies, friends defending friends' students. It's a very strange environment and not one I'm used to seeing unremarked upon at a very large conference. Then again, my experience is limited and perception is subjective.
W&M , however, deserve a serious jeer, as last year they advertised for a “Roman Historian” for a VAP slot, and ended up hiring a Greek philologist whose entire CV revolves around Pindar. ???
by the way, for rejection emails sent directly from the department chair, is it expected/wise to respond with a short "thank you for considering my application" message?
No. They don’t care and they’d 9/10 not want to be bothered. You can’t blame them, imagine being a Dept Chair and (on top of all the junk mail you have to filter through) receiving an additional 100+ “thanks” emails from rejected applicants.
@10:03,
I agree. The AIA/SCS really ought to (somehow) penalize Depts that put an ad out for ‘x’ it hire ‘z’. It’s just plain wrong. BTW, it seems as if the good folks at W&M were sooo googly-eyed over the Pindar-specialist they hired to teach Roman History (which is on so many levels so very wrong) that they then, this year, have a T-T line out for, you guessed it, a Greek philologist. ...they already know who they’re hiring. ...Shame on W&M
4,546 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 4546 Newer› Newest»@12:15. I don't think that's entirely true. I am not on a hiring committee, but I think people want you to interpret the word and write about it, and I think that there's a lot of room for you to do that. If that means cultural and racial diversity, fine. If it means classroom accessibility , great. Gender equality? That's wonderful, too. Safe spaces for LGBTQ students and colleagues? Huzzah. Economic and class diversity? That's perfectly OK, especially if you can speak to it well. You are teaching something that has a history, and its history disenfranchised a lot of people,and institutions want to know how you engage that. I certainly don't think you'll be punished for speaking to issues that matter to you and that you think you can work with the institution to improve.
First timer here: how are we notified if we have SCS interviews?
@ 5:25. Depends. Most SCs will send you a note. Sometimes it will just randomly appear in your calendar on the SCS website (rare enough, but it's been known to happen). Good Luck in there!
So, dumb question... is it essential to pay the money for an SCS account or will schools just email you?
10:33
I meant individualized to the candidate (though I can't promise no one won't want the other).
BTW, I doubt many committee members would worry too much about late letters as such, but there are two important caveats. (1) As noted above, you might still be crushed by HR rules. (2) It's unlikely that anyone will re-read your file, so it is important letters arrive by the time it's actually read (as opposed to the official deadline).
To anyone who submitted an app to UT San Antonio: did your recommenders get a message with a request to submit a rec after you filed the application? Or not?
Overheard last week:
Tenure-track faculty member, having difficulty keeping up with research while teaching 2 classes: You are so lucky. You have so much time to write.
Unemployed friend: Um, yes.
@8:17. Yes, the San Antonio system (should have) automatically sent your letter writers emails to upload their letters. You should also have gotten a notification when the letters were uploaded.
@8:17 I also received notification from San Antonio that my recommendations had been submitted.
@3:14 Oh dear that is worrisome since i submitted the application before the deadline and got a confirmation. hmmm.
What was meant by the post for U-Oregon that said “rejection letter 11/14”
... is Oregon already (within a few days of contacting for Skypes) letting all those know that they are out of the running?
...or is that comment from someone who interviewed already via Skype and was passed on?
Both possibilities seem very odd and premature. Any insight ??
I think the Oregon rejection went to everyone not selected for 1st round interviews. A "you're out of the running" notification....
@7:42 (Nov 13):
I had an interview at the SCS with Tulane a few years ago. I am not a member of the SCS (since I pay for the AIA instead), but the Search Committee said they would only schedule interviews through the SCS system, so in essence my interview was ransomed. I paid up, and had the privilege of being interviewed by a very surly group of people.
@8:57
What a horrible system. If it weren't bad enough that the conference registration is exceedingly expensive for those on limited incomes, to have to pay for a system to schedule an interview (in addition to paying for Interfolio, etc.) adds insult to injury.
Is there anywhere besides academia where one has to shell out so much money in the 1% hope of getting a job?
Yeah these institutions shaking down their poorest and least-powerful members to spend huge amounts of money for a chance to win the prize is real exploitation. The SCS is trying to help, though I don't know how substantial the assistance they offer is. And more universities are interviewing over Skype or Zoom.
1%? More like 0.01%...it's not like we each have an equal shot at each job. Even if we did, positions are getting in excess of 200 applications so it's 0.5% at best.
Once you get to the interview stage, you may have a 1/12 chance. Unless there is someone who is on the inside track for the job, in which case you have somewhere between a "something less than 1/12 but still non-negligible" chance and zero chance.
@ 8:57 I had the same experience a few years ago with a campus that had an inside hire (spouse of existing faculty member, so actually 0% chance of a job), so I paid an extra $50 for the privilege of being strung along. Classical archaeologists/historians really get screwed with our pants on by the Placement Service.
Enough with the diversity statements. Please tell me why you on the SCs are not contactingus for interviews.
1/12 assuming some unforeseen development doesn't F it up. Been there, done that as well...
Contactingus? Sounds like Title IX waiting to happen...
Since another bunch of deadlines has passed, what other rumors are there about inside candidates?
So, if I never paid SCS I will not get contacted for an interview for that reason alone?
I haven't paid either . . .
I don't think you need to be an SCS member to use the scheduling platform (and you sure don't need to be in order to get an interview). If you're concerned, you could contact the SCS directly (info@classicalstudies.org) to understand the entire process.
Wait, maybe use scs-placement@classicalstudies.org for placement service-related questions.
@Masked Classicist (2:45). Hamilton College and St. Olaf have had their current VAPs since 2014, so, make of that what you will.
@Masked Classicist (2:45): due to the recent exodus, there are no classicists on the UTSA SC.
My experience was that paying for the SCS placement service (as a non-member) was the only way to use the scheduling tool; Tulane made it clear to me that no other option would be considered.
@8:04 PM. Exodus? what was the reason for this exodus?
Re UTSA Exodus: Both tenured Classicists have left in the past two years. The long term lecturer who taught many of the classes left this year. Another longterm lecturer passed away.
UTSA is an underfunded institution with a toxic administrative culture. (I speak with inside knowledge). As the job ad demonstrates, they expect a lot from this position.
@6:43 AM. It doesn't seem that unreasonable. (?) They've managed to keep the teaching load at 2-2, something that not all underfunded institutions can say. Some larger state schools like this, including some hiring this year, demand the same administrative duties and generalist breadth while requesting that the hire teach a 4-4. But I may be missing something.
@ 6:23 PM:
If St. Olaf is an inside hire, why has it taken them 6 weeks to reject the rest of us?? Or is the wiki woefully behind in its updates?
I doubt St. Olaf is an inside hire. The insider's expertise coincides with another tenured faculty member's.
Also, @6:23: I think you are mistaken about St. Olaf. Their VAP was hired this past spring.
How many people applied to the American University of Rome?
@11:26. They have two.
Looking at St. Olaf's faculty page, I see only 1 visiting person and all faculty accounted for in their course offerings. A VAP was listed as having taught from '14-17, but is neither on the schedule for this year nor listed on the faculty page as on leave or anything. Make of that what you will!
One VAP from St. Olaf left the field.
@12.13 PM Applied for Rome 'morning after' the deadline, received confirmation. Any news/rumors? I've heard this seems a genuine position, unlike some others around there, but I did see a whole bunch of VAPs on their website...
Why are Penn and Brown running searches so early?
Noticed that someone updated the Wiki to reflect that UTSA had contacted for transcripts, teaching portfolio, and writing sample. Still haven't heard back after emailing the department on Tuesday about why my recommenders received no prompt for submission of recommendations. Anyone have any idea what is going on?
to 9:04:
trying to get searches done before the meetings. Possibly to lock in hires, but have heard that Penn had someone in mind.
The goal of early interviews (including Albany's surprising jump straight to campus visits) may be to lock in candidates early. But the field is so awash with high quality candidates that this is hardly necessary.
I think we may simply be moving to a world where hiring no longer revolved around the annual meeting. This would be an enormously positive development, as the SCS interviews are an excessive expense for candidates, and frankly ruin the vibe of the whole meeting, turning it into a cauldron of anxiety and despair full of stressed out junior scholars in ill fitting suits. Removing the job aspect from the annual meeting would restore it as a conference where ideas are shared and the field engages in productive social collaboration.
@11:04 I got the request from the HR system overnight, and received an email this morning requesting a skype interview and saying that I would or might already have received the request for additional documents. So it looks like the request for transcripts etc. is part of the next stage. FWIW my references had been requested and received when I'd originally submitted my application.
@11:04. Congratulations! Do you mind sharing some basic stats? Monograph published or not / Latinist / Hellenist etc?
Still no word on W&M, Luther, Williams or Haverford?
The due date was a while back. UTSA was quick turnaround.
Can someone elaborate on that comment up above, about Princeton people not knowing their languages? I find it unclear whether that refers to some of the graduate students, or the claim was being made about faculty members. The latter would surprise me more than the former.
I don't know for sure, but the word 'round the NE is that the grad students don't know their languages.
So, this is only my second year on the job market (last year I was ABD, so not sure if that *really* counts).
..anyways, is it safe to say that T-T track job listings are essentially done ?? If not, what kind of % remains in peoples’ best estimates? Have we seen 80, 90, 99% of all T-T jobs ??
Yes, TT listings are basically done. A trickle of late-approved hires may come out, but perhaps no more than two or three. I would say we are definitely at 90% of TT jobs. Prove me wrong, America.
I second 3:29's comment. Perhaps some late-in-the-game search will get approved, but we're mostly done. I don't know this for certain, but I think it's common practice for many SCs to meet after the Thanksgiving break, contact candidates in late Nov/ early December, and then interview at the APA.
I'm not at Princeton, but I think it's really unfair to anonymously and generally disparage the abilities of a whole group of graduate students. I've seen these students in action at conferences and they certainly know their languages. I'm surprised that Servius hasn't stepped in here yet.
Also, can we stop asking people to share their "stats"? That kind of request makes this feel like we're a bunch of 17 year olds on College Confidential.
I think it's fine for people to be curious about the research profile that attracted the attention of XYZ institution, but perhaps it's a bit too invasive. Not sure if that's what bothers you, or if it's just the use of "stats."
Ditto on not knocking Princeton. In my experience, language ability doesn't map the institutions we end up at. And I know some excellent linguists who failed to make it to the other side of the desk because, at the end of the day, they have trouble coming up with ideas or troubling communicating them. It sucks that some hiring committees still think an Ivy League degree is a proxy for quality. But beating your chest like Princeton grads are universally incapable of reading Greek or Latin just sounds petty and small.
On stats: look at the people who got jobs last year, then google CVs. Some had years post PhD, with productive records of teaching and publication. Others were ABDs with not even a book review. Indeed, publication-free ABDs got some of the most coveted jobs in the field last year.
In short, the hiring process is arbitrary, and having 0 vs 3 vs 10 articles seems to make little difference in terms of campus interviews or ultimate jobs.
@6:55. It depends on the articles, no?
No. It is impossible to discern any sort of pattern between apparent qualifications and successful job candidates. This is because there are many other factors involved, all of which are invisible to us.
@8:32 sadly true
Having a publication record, even an impressive one, matters very, very little in this game. Indeed, it can even work against you, as search committees are very concerned with "fit" around Departmental interests and methodologies, the human typography of which is never visible to the candidate and often disputed within the committee. Having too many publications makes it harder for you to fit the image of the perfect candidate that the search committee has developed--it develops your own hard edges. This is why ABDs get jobs without even so much as a BMCR. They having nothing, but nothing can be imagined into everything by a committee itching to hire the golden child.
Now I do not believe that jobs should be handed to whoever has the most publications--it would be silly to base it on numerical "stats." And demanding publications as a precondition of getting a job risks turning grad school into simply a preprofessional slog (oops, too late). But given that publications count for everything for tenure, it is odd that jobs (especially high profile R1 jobs) go to people who have not proven that they can push an article through peer review, while there are adjuncts out there with the publication profiles of Associate Professors.
@10:41 you have a point. but I think it's overstated to say that one can be penalized for being productive. Maybe more accurate simply to say that publications don't necessarily help as much as one might think.
One can most certainly be penalized -- you're not thinking of all those associate and full professors out there with lackluster publication records who do not want to be shown up by a lecturer or assistant professor with more articles in recent years than they've got, let alone more articles in X years than they have produced in 2X (or more) years.
Is every publication good? or decent? or even adequate? Like, is it worth me pumping out 5 crappy-to-mediocre articles, and then i'll get a job?
No. What will get you a job is luck. Crappy publications especially won't help. I have a friend with a CUP book, many highly placed publications (CP and similar), four years out from the PhD, does outreach in the schools and underserved communities, very nice person. Left the field because couldn't get an assistant professorship. The Year of No Latin Jobs certainly didn't help this person, but that's basically what it comes down to. You'll get a job if you get lucky, you won't if you're unlucky. Good publications may help with some SCs, may hurt with others. You're no longer a nebulous entity upon which to project fantasies, or you look too flashy. I'm applying to one job in particular this year where the department members are SHOCKINGLY unproductive. And for no particular reason, they're not teaching a particularly burdensome load. I doubt I'll get the interview.
Note that my friend is now happy and making more money than any of us, so maybe s/he won out after all.
Indeed there are institutions where tenure where can be had from articles alone, and at such places a well-published candidate is clearly someone who will head for greener pastures at the earliest opportunity. In fact, I have a friend who taught at such a university and was discouraged by her departmental colleagues from writing a book because if she did she would be competitive at other universities. And no doubt there are other ways in which an extensive publication record can work against a candidate; this is the only one I know in any detail.
It seems obvious that having even a hundred "crappy-to-mediocre" articles is not going to help you, at least not unless you are preparing for a research assessment exercise. That this might need to be said is depressing.
Save that search committees are not going to read all your articles to see where they fall on the crappy-mediocre-serviceable-profound scale. As with everything else in the job search, their assessment of your publication record is cursory at best.
certainly there are better articles than others, but this talk of publishing tons of "crappy-to-mediocre" articles" seems an exaggeration that shows little faith in our discipline's peer review process (unless you're talking about truly unknown/pay to publish journals). There may be truly boring articles (to you but not to others) but most editors that I know running classics journals and the referees enlisted to judge them are pretty good at rejecting objectively "crappy" or even "mediocre" submissions
Search committee member here. I'm now deep into my pile of 120 files. There is some truth to the observation that a publication can on occasion 'hurt' a candidate. But it's not as if I have no evidence for the ABDs, since they are giving us writing samples, to which I'm paying a lot of attention. (2:28 is correct that I read don't read everything. But I'm reading a lot, and I'm only one member of the committee.) Also, keep in mind that we have letters of reference from supervisors and committee members, and often a number of letters from the same individual. This allows us to compare what they say about different candidates.
Right now, I'm looking to get my pile to a more manageable size, and eventually down to maybe ten for the APA interviews. Will there be some ABDs there? Almost certainly. Will one or more them make it to campus? Probably. Will one of them be the appointee? Possibly. If I didn't think so, they wouldn't be invited to the APA interview.
@ 6:29
How much do you value teaching experience when looking at the applications?
@6:29, can you give any (v. general) additional information about when publications hurt candidates?
@8:18. 6:29 here. So far, I've been mostly looking at intellectual strengths and research potential, so I've not started on the question of teaching. But right now the committee's task is getting c. 120 down to (say) 60, and then down to 30. Once we're there, I'm guessing that strong teaching that's relevant to what we need will help nudge people up towards or into an interview at the APA and those without that will be nudged downwards. Signs that someone is mediocre/bad in the classroom, or worst of all negligent, would probably be fatal.
@ 6:29
Would you mind saying what sort of school you are at?
@8:33. 6:29 again. As the original poster pointed out, your publications tend to define you. Say, we are looking for a historian. Included within the applicant pool will be some candidates who sit astride history/literature and others who are more history/archaeology. Some do it all. But the one who does it all might have two archaeological articles out. A committee, especially in early culling, might include or exclude him/her because we've categorized them as x while we need y.
Or to choose a different potential problem. A good article in a good venue can only do you good. But not all articles are good, or are good in every way. An article with problematic prose or eccentric organization doesn't help.
Or, again, a candidate might have multiple publications, but if they are all (e.g.) in what are essentially edited conference volumes, then the question of research quality needs to be addressed, especially if the volumes are edited by (say) a supervisor or friend. Don't forget that peer-reviewed articles in the better journals are the gold standard. (Nothing wrong with a mix, too: being in conference volumes implies that you are academically social.)
Expecting all this might seem unfair, but we're looking to appoint the best applicant—understanding, of course, 'best' has a lot of moving parts in it—and we only have one job.
@9:46. 6:29 again. I don't want to say too much. But we're a small enough department that we need a candidate who can participate outside of their niche and in the full life of the department, but in a university that is big enough and research-intensive enough that the tenure expectations can be substantial.
@6:29. Thank you very much for sharing this.
@6:29, thank you.
One other question to search committee people.
How long from application due date to applicant notification?
I concur with the above. How long should one hold out hope against hope?
@11:47. 6:29 here again. A couple weeks, maybe? In our case, I'm hoping to send a single email with an acknowledgment along with a rough timeline. But just between us, right now I have only the most general idea of what that timeline is. And the logistics of sending those emails is rather daunting to me.
(Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised—though perhaps a bit disappointed—that the first you hear is either an invite to an APA interview or news that there isn't such an invite.)
I am not on an SC (and may never be), but I can say based on my (ongoing) experience on the job market that the time between deadline and interview notification varies considerably. In the fall it is not unreasonable to hear about SCS/AIA interviews as late as Christmas Eve (I have). For deadlines in January and February about 6-8 weeks is fairly common; for deadlines in March or later 4 weeks is closer to the norm. This doesn't necessarily apply for postdocs, since their volume of applications can be greater (depending on what sort of postdoc it is), but on the whole the later the application deadline, the shorter the time to notification. At present I would say there's no reason to give up hope on any job until Boxing Day has come and gone.
On publications that hurt: I have served on several searches in Classics and in other departments (at both a large R1 aspirant and a SLAC type). For young candidates reception and pop culture publications can hurt in many institutions. If you have opportunities to publish good work, do so. If you are choosing between prepping a new article for AJP, TAPA, etc. or for writing about Game of Thrones etc (and you don't already have a TT job), write the 'serious' piece.
@2:30pm, thanks--I really needed to hear that.
@ 2:03. I am curious to know if reception in literature and reception in other media are treated in the same way. Your comment leads me to believe that an article on Montaigne is looked in the same way as an article on Star Trek. I would think that, especially in the SLAC context, something that deals with literature or history relevant to other fields might even be looked on favourably. Do you think that's misguided?
@12:36 Can you tell us the kind of line of work your friend is in now?
I am curious: do search committees stick to the one writing sample, or if interested in candidates do they use their C.V.'s to track down other publications (or use Academia.edu, etc.) in order to get a fuller picture?
I realize that I'm asking this as someone who has never had to go through 120 applications.
6:29 back again. I would agree with what 2:03 said, and at least from my perspective @3:21, serious reception is better, but still a potential stumbling block. @5:17. Yes, articles, too. And I've downloaded a few PhD theses recently. But that's been because of curiosity. I'm not going to do that for many.
There was a moment when reception was a hip thing, and even a moment in the late 1990s when departments were even adding TT lines for people who did nothing but reception. That moment has passed. I do agree with the comments above that reception, especially in pop culture, is a poison pill. No one wants to read about classical references in Battlestar Galactica, because these are intended to be rather obvious.
A note from the Servii re Princeton: the ground rules here are that people don't attack individuals, especially junior scholars. That leaves a lot of room for other statements that we might not all think are judicious, and which you are all presumably capable of taking for what they're worth.
Enough with that, we are hear for the rumors about the jobs we won't be getting interviews for!
@11:54 pm
I love reading about classical references in BSG, for the very reason that they are not obvious to me, even if they were intended to be. In fact, I find that the occasional reception work I do in areas that haven't received as much attention are much more obvious cases of reception, since these later texts are often explicitly naming their classical sources, whereas classical references in pop-culture tend to be much more nebulous and require a lot more unpacking and interpretation.
Then again, I do agree with you that I would not, at present, solely work in classical receptions (with an s), with the caveat that we are all always-already doing classical reception (without an s), given the ever-widening remove from the ancient world we imagine ourselves to be investigating.
I know of one TT professor at a good school who's writing a book about the Aeneid and BSG, so we can all look forward to that. For me, reception(s) is more of a teaching tool, but I think some (not all) of the people who devote more time to it are certainly doing "serious" work.
Man, this is really not a good year.
I think the point about BSG was not about whether such scholarship is worthwhile (BSG reboot was a good show, and it can be a way of exciting students), but rather the risks and rewards in this job market of junior scholars engaging in pop culture reception. Note that in the comment above, the person writing the Aeneid/BSG book is TT (tenured or no?). This at least gives them some security, more than a junior scholar has.
Basically, the question was to what extent should junior scholars expose themselves through publication? I suspect the answer varies. Some SCs might have a bias that makes them view people who do pop-culture reception as lightweights--fairly or not. Some SCs might love the idea of a scholar engaging in popular outreach. As always, the job market is brutally capricious.
Sending solidarity to those who will face endless job market queries from well-meaning relatives this week. A gem from my family's celebration last year: "I think you should just go over to Stanford, make an appointment with the department chair, and tell him about your teaching." (Stanford had no opening.)
Surely the chair will see how special you are, just like your grandma does!
If only it were that simple . . .
"Don't they see how handsome you are in your suit? And did you tell them how you won the tzedakah contest at Hebrew school for six straight years?"
@ 7:17 That might be the best thing on my CV, how I wear a suit.
@7:17 here. That’s no mean feat. I look thoroughly awkward in mine, especially when sitting in an interview chair with no table-barrier between me and the interviewers. What do I do with my legs? My hands? My fidget spinner? How much do I recline in this very cozy nigh-loveseat? Why is this night different from all other nights?
Even better: when you're perched awkwardly on the edge of a bed in a non-suite hotel 'interview' room... A win for professionalism!
"I'm sorry, is that a fog machine? And is that... yep... that's La Bouche on your... boom box?"
Really thought we'd see some movement on the wiki today. Guess everyone's going to be reading my apps as a desperate ploy to avoid their relatives.
I wouldn’t think that the T-T season is done. As an Ancient Historian, let me share that so far as the History job sites go, there are consistently 6-7 new T-T postings a day. Granted, there hasn’t been one for an Ancient historian in over a month. But, if any of you want to be a prof of East Asian or African-American History (two HUUUGE fields right now), there are plenty of jobs. :/
History jobs may continue to roll out (I don't know, that's not my field) but Classics TT postings are pretty much done. If you look at the wiki from last year, you'll see that most of the TT jobs were scheduling interviews by the end of November or beginning of December, meaning that the postings had already gone up by early November at the latest. A few more will certainly trickle out, but not many.
Yes, the only new TT jobs coming out now are usually due to unforeseen circumstances (e.g. the death of William Mullen (R.I.P.) has opened up a TT line at Bard; one wonders if Columbia will advertise a Roman history TT soon, too...maybe too late) or sometimes late approvals from the university administration.
Looks like Clemson passed me by for an interview. Ugh.
@12.37 Yup, me too. It only took them one week from the deadline to pick who they wanted to interview? They must have raced through those application materials or had a solid idea of who they wanted.
Is there any particular reason why (seemingly) 8-9/10 of sitting faculty have their PhDs from only Harvard and Chicago? Harvard hasn’t had any strong faculty there since the mid-90s and Chicago never struck me as *that* wowing of a Dept. ...Am I missing something? ...sigh, not that it matters, but what are us plebeians from Stanford, Berkeley, UNC, and Columbia to do?
@9:13
Check out the PhDs at Bard. Harvard, Chicago, Princeton.
How do you spell hiring? n-e-p-o-t-i-s-m
I wonder if it is not nepotism but a reflection of how little time is invested in the hiring process. Course exemptions were not granted to any of the faculty I know who worked on search committees at the institution where I got my PhD. So it is service on top of service. And in a tight market, that means paying less close attention to applications, at least in the first round. So institution becomes a proxy for quality.
The real pity, for all of us plebs, is that there is no bottom rung of the latter. You can't write your way out of a job at Eastern Missouri Technical College and into a job at Penn or whatever because there is no job at EMTC. Members of other fields can rise and fall. We don't have that many opportunities. So there is no chance for a sixth-round pick to climb his or her way to the top.
But that is the US post recession. A few winners, a mass of losers. At least we can #resist.
Given that they were so quick, I wonder if they just instantly discarded all ABD's or something.
@9:45
That's a cop out.
I've been on search committees. I guarantee that my service and teaching loads are higher than those at Bard and that my research production is close to theirs. Get outside of the 1% and you'll see that life at Bard is extraordinarily privileged.
People on SCs will make time to review applications or not depending on the biases they bring to the table. Hiring takes only a portion of one's time for a single semester -- the onerous part of reading applications anyway -- but its consequences are for decades. So anyone being ethical or even just being self-interested with a long view rather than with merely myopically selfish will spend the time necessary to review applications thoroughly.
I choose to assume that the search committees at Bard have not been maliciously negligent, which using institution as a proxy for quality would be. Therefore I must conclude that they are maliciously nepotistic. Either way, malice is the common denominator.
Think of it this way: we see at specific universities certain systems perpetuating themselves in which merit is claimed to be determined by obviously false proxies. These proxies, however, closely correlate to wealth and privilege (and the racism, sexism, and other -isms attendant upon that privilege). What are we to make of the self-proclaimed high-powered intellectuals and bastions of social justice & equity that hold positions at these universities yet still willingly and willfully perpetuate systems of classist inequality (all the more verbally ironic, if not dramatically ironic, since it's classicism among classicists)?
I know what I make of them. Damned by their own testimony.
Note that last time Bard ran a search, the job ad was comically broad, yet with the entire field to choose from, they ended up hiring someone's spouse.
Clemson: I know one ABD who got an interview.
Bard: sure they are a privileged bunch, no disputing that; malice is a strong word though. I think a whole lot of institutions are malicious without intending to be so. But there can't be any possibility of a spousal hire at Bard this time, so why bring it up?
@8:44
That ABD interviewee for Clemson, what institution are they ABD at? Harvard? Chicago? ...Many SCs *will* nab an ABD (or two), but it’s more than not just to make themselves feel like “hey, look how fair we are, we *did* interview ABD candidates.”
...yes, I know, ABDs do sometimes get T-T jobs, but... it’s usually only ABDs from ultra privileged universities.
Aside from the horrible prejudices of SCs, they often hire people who DO NOT fit their original ad.
For example. 2 years ago, SUNY-Binghamton had an ad for an ancient historian; they hired an ABD Princeton student with a blank CV who does Medieval.... Last year, St. Mary’s College of Maryland had an ad for a Greek/Roman Historian; they hired an Iron Age Philistine archaeologist... also, last year College of William & Mary had a 2-yr VAP spot for a *Roman Historian*; they took on a Greek philologist focusing on Pindar!!
We can all complain about A) the lack of jobs, B) how many VAP jobs are predatory, and how C) SCs have deep biases toward certain institutions, but another major problem is that SCs often “go off script” and take someone who isn’t even what they said they were looking for.
Oh 2017... Spring, started the year with Ivy League campus visit, lost to VAP. Summer, shortlisted in Europe, lost to a spouse. Fall, second book deal in the bag, optimism renewed. And then? I don’t get shortlisted at my own alma mater for tt job in my own field. Winter is certainly here.
@12:44,
You should always expect that one’s alma mater will deliberately NOT hire you. It’s really, really bad form when an institution hires their grads as they walk off the podium, so to speak. ....rule of thumb: at least 10 years removed from graduation to be “fair game” again; especially if you’re speaking of the PhD alma mater.
Yes, winter is here. I feel like a turkey waiting for slaughter when checking the Wiki.
12:44PM: my first taste of the capriciousness of the job market was when I was still a graduate student. One of the candidates brought on campus to my graduate institution ended up with no offers at all and teaching high school. Happily, as it turns out. But it was a shock to me that it is entirely possible to be of the caliber to make the top three list at one of the best universities in the country and walk away without a single offer.
The world has changed. We all should be mindful to not eliminate half of the possible T-T college jobs: community college.
At a CC, tenure is simply time (ca. 6 yes of good teaching). The pay is essentially the same. Also, holding a PhD from a top school will most definitely get you many interviews, jobs offers, and prestige among your peers when hired.
It's tough coming close to getting positions. However, if a VAP is doing a great job it's fantastic that the work they have been doing is rewarded. Likewise, a spousal hire, if the candidate is genuinely appointable, is no bad thing and probably makes for a happier work environment for all (although, not always). In a way, it's a shame that institution's can't hire these people and not have to put others through the application and interview process (especially submitting tediously elaborate dossiers). As it stands, it defeats the purpose of having a competition in the first place. In the private sector appointments like those are completely normal and, to my mind, there is nothing wrong with that.
@2:31
I agree, and having been the inside candidate during a job search I know the frustration of the others who were interviewed for a job they simply would not get. I wish that SCs were able to be more straightforward about it. So others would not waste their time or their hopes.
OMG. How are there still people going to grad school who don't understand that (a) most people starting a PhD will not get a T-T job and (b) getting said T-T job has way more to do with luck and persistence than native talent?
@3:52,
It’s not that people don’t understand that there’s a clear bottleneck, but instead what’s going here is venting and commiserating.
As such, one could pose the question: “how can there still be people who are surprised at peoples’ comments on the Internet?”
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
I'm thankful didn't receive any rejection emails today and that the jobs I applied to have still not called for interviews (as far as I know and the wiki tells).
"most people starting a PhD will not get a T-T job"
I assume you mean "only about a fifth of people completing a PhD from one of the top programs".
4:09, sure. I was reacting chiefly to 1:51 pm.
9:59, hear hear!
I, too, wonder why people continue to attend graduate school. I assume most graduate students still hope to become faculty members, but maybe someone from a graduate program can correct me on that. For those who entered prior to the crash, or even just afterward when everyone thought the dip was a temporary blip, going to graduate school or finishing what you started might appear to make sense. But why enter today? And why do people still encourage foolish undergraduates to do this?
In my experience at an excellent if not quite elite SLAC, it's exceedingly difficult to talk reason into today's privileged boomer kids. If you speak of the wonders of classics but then dare to rain on their own aspirations, they will find sympathetic boomer ears in admin positions that will then get you in trouble (especially pre-tenure). So you smile, perpetuate the bullshit their parents have been selling them their entire lives, and watch in wonder as millennials on here are so shocked why the special snowflakes flock in droves to grad school.
Also, new graduate students often have no idea how bad the market is. Their programs have just spent a lot of time and money touting their placement rates and telling their prospective students just how great they are (that is, both the programs and the students). This, I think, contributes to a sense that the older students in the program are simply jaded or fearmongers, or that their fear derives from their own inadequacy. New students, on the other hand, all know how great they are, and therefore have no cause for concern because their greatness will undoubtedly be recognized by search committees. Certainly this was my experience as a student.
@ 2:03,
I think you’re quite right on the viability of Community College jobs. But, there some intereing problems that also come with it. As someone who has applied for a some of the T-T historian jobs seeking someone who focuses on Ancient, let me share my experiences.
So... I have my PhD from an upper top-10 program; I have publications and many competitive grants; I have a solid background of teaching experience and even achieved a few teaching awards. When a Community College (CC) looks through their applicant pool, which is no doubt filled with people whose top degree is the MA or whose PhD is from a tier 2 or tier 3 school.. YES, having a PhD from a top-10 will make them excited and will often get you an interview. But, when this moment comes, there are some very serious issues that arise among the CC SC. ...first, a fear that taking on someone whose degree and (even if mild) publication record will make them all look bad in comparison. Second, that if they hire Mr./Ms. Top-10 they’ll come in to their Dept and see themselves as superior and therefore may attempt to dictate how things will be going forward or that may be especially difficult with sitting faculty in any/all admin maters. And of course, third, that you will show up, get some teaching experience and then move on to bigger and brighter things.
As such, their questions are very different than those posed by a larger university. ...I’ve had T-T interviews at both, so let me enlighten the board as to what questions a CC SC will ask you. It’s also worth note that these questions are asked 50 different times 50 different ways:
1.). Why are applying to a CC job?
2.). How will you amend your lectures to work for the needs of our students?
3.). What will you do when you have a student that’s failing?
4.). Why do you prefer a ‘teaching’ role over a ‘research’ role?
5.). What has been the most challenging experience you’ve had as a teacher and how did you overcome it?
...and add to these, questions about your long-term goals (which is how they gauge if you’re a job-hopper or if you’re there for the long haul.
...in short, it’s often harder for a PhD from a top school to get a job at a CC than a 4-yr College, since it’s very difficult to assuage the reasonable fears of a CC SC as to your commitment to them. Also, it’s a 5-5 teaching load (really 3-3, but you offer one course multiple times/days), so be sure you’re ok with that kind of teaching.
BUT... there are amazing rewards to a CC job. The most significant is that you can have a life. There isn’t constant pressure to publish, and it’s something you can do at your own pace when you want. Tenure, you’re right, is based on x number of years of successful teaching. Also, the salaries are comparable (in some cases better) than 4-yr schools.
At end of the day you have to honestly ask yourself what you want out of life and make a choice about if you want to remain in the horribly cut-throat world of bouncing VAPs in the dreams of maybe landing a TT job at a University some day (I think most TT hires today have been a VAP at at least 2-3 reputable colleges beforehand, at the least).
Many of us from top PhD programs have an extreme problem with delusions of grandeur and that we can be some monumental figure in our field and be at some amazing institution somewhere.
@ 10:29 AM. So so true. Also, let's not forget that at 22, the thought of hopping from job to job, from town to town, doesn't seem so terrible. At 27 and up, however... nope. Even if I didn't currently have a stable partner, I personally wouldn't want to do that for more than two years. Still don't understand why people over the age of 25 enter grad school in this market.
11:48 sounds like you are not committed to the field (as the senior people who who never left the top 20 say) :)
@11:04 pm: I suspect you're correct, but since the SCS refuses to collect meaningful data on completion and placement, we have no way to know. The picture might be slightly better than your comment, or a whole lot worse. Not long ago I asked someone in SCS management about gathering stats by college or university, and I was told that that might "embarrass" a number of schools so they didn't want to list the data. Wow.
Or, you can look at departmental presentations such as Columbia's (not the only one which does this, just the most recent I've seen): they list a "selection" of their PhD grads who have jobs. Well, great. But how many got their degrees and *didn't* get jobs? *That* is the interesting number. North Carolina does a better job: they list everybody (as far as I can tell), and the career they have now, which unsurprisingly shows diversity of employment.
This is what the placement wiki is for, people, keep it updated. The SCS will never make such stats public. Pretty much all PhD-granting universities would be against it.
12:54, true enough. But I haven't figured out a way to use the Wiki easily across years, without tedious work. Is there a simple way to pull out everyone from Chicago, for example, or everyone from Stanford?
Voila, I offer you the Placement Tracker. Update it: http://classics.wikidot.com/placement-tracker
How do people find out about community college jobs? You don't typically see them listed through the APA Placement Service (or whatever they're calling it now).
@4:59,
Higheredjobs.com is a big resource. It lists all the standard university jobs but also seems to be the only database that CCs use.
For “Classics” people, go to subfolder: Faculty>Liberal Arts>Humanities for most applicable jobs.
Most CCs don’t have anything to offer Classics people. History? Sure, but I’m sure that very, very few CCs offer Latin and/or Greek. If they offer atacheology courses they’re always very broad and more than not a Classics PhD would be far from ideal.
Just my 2 cents.
Two small thoughts:
1) From a statistical point of view, the Placement Tracker is effectively worthless. There are so many gaps in it that it is nigh impossible to gauge any meaningful statistics. The thought is great, the layout is horrid, but the gaps are what render it little more than a(nother) depressing thing to look at.
2) In my experience, applying to CCs got me nowhere as a Classicist. The courses they offer are very, very broad - think Intro to Humanities, or Art History survey, or History of the Western World. It's hard to find a place for a niche Classics PhD in there.
The the issue with the uber-specialization that's hardwired into Classics along with the glut of PhDs. Even our third-tier PhD programs are staffed with faculty holding elite PhDs and train students to the same formula rather than thinking differently (like training broadly for CCs). We're an outdated discipline in every sense with no signs of adaptation. Welcome to the road to extinction, kiddos.
@6:46,
I couldn’t agree more.
@6:46
I disagree. My first job was at a CC while I was still ABD. I taught a modern language, but also "Critical Thinking" (basically teaching the students how to make a coherent argument based on close reading of non-fiction sources) and an intro to Humanities class. I think that my Classics background was an excellent training for such classes.
Granted there would be no Greek or Latin to teach, but it was still a very fulfilling position.
And as Classicists we have to promote the inter-disciplinary nature that is embedded in the discipline.
Interdisciplinary? You mean the Homerist teaching Cicero once in a while? We're narrow as fuck. Party like it's 1899, y'all.
@10:48
If you seriously think that, you’re either VERY poorly trained (and generally incurious) or you haven’t spent much time with humanities PhDs from other disciplines. Or both. A halfway decent Classicist is worlds more interdisciplinary than the rest of humanities phds, including that mongrel “discipline” that calls itself Comp Lit.
Touché, Pussy Cat!
If there is anything we can agree on, it should be that Comp Lit sucks.
@12:54, old-timer here. The APA did actually keep such stats, and published them, in the 1980s and 1990s; they appeared in specific issues of the APA newsletter. The APA also published another useful feature: announcements of dissertations as they got underway, and when they were finished. Information that was provided included the name of the dissertator, the dissertation's title, and the doctoral advisor. This was useful and interesting information. A given department had someone tasked to report such information to the association. This is not an unreasonable thing to report, and to publish.
@10:37, I agree, I think my Classics background is excellent training for teaching such broad classes. Convincing a CC search committee of that, on the other hand, seems to be where I have fallen short. Any advice?
Old-timer, why and when did that stop? It seems like that would be a responsible, fair service for the SCS to offer. Departments or advisers with strong records could use it to recruit with.
SCS does publish quite a bit of data about placement: https://classicalstudies.org/professional-matters/professional-matters-data-collection
And SCS still posts the in-progress dissertations, though not all departments are as good at sharing that data: https://classicalstudies.org/professional-matters/professional-matters-data-collection
10:35: the data appear to be generally current to 2008, for the most part, and also to be done by CSWMG rather than the SCS itself. Do you have any information that the SCS is now in swing to do its own gathering and reporting, and to current terms/years? That would be really helpful. Also, I'm not understanding why the SCS would list this under Professional Matters when that group did not do the actual work, but maybe I'm missing something. I don't know the organization's charter by heart.
@10:01, well, some time ago. I will guess in the early 2000s. I used to read the dissertation topics pretty carefully, to see if there would be any overlap, but then my duties changed and I got out of the habit. I don't think I've received a newsletter in more than a decade, at a guess, though recently some newsletters have been arriving in email, which is a positive development.
Regarding the Comp Lit comments:
I'm so tired of seeing people disparage other disciplines and specialties on this forum. I get that you're bitter, but can you just keep those opinions to yourself? It does absolutely no good for anyone and contributes to the perception that Classicists are elitist snobs.
Elitist snobs who are one trick-ponies in the grand scheme but think we're interdisciplinary and can kick ass in the CC world despite reality, thank you very much.
The confusion here is that while Classics is an interdisciplinary field -- language, literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, and art are all parts of it and part of most undergraduate major curricula -- very few individual classicists are genuinely interdisciplinary in their training or approaches to scholarship. The field as a whole is not remotely narrow, though it may look that way from the perspective of some graduate programs that focus on traditional 'philology' and ghettoize everybody else. But younger scholars especially tend to be narrowly focused even within one of the major branches of classics. If you're one of those, though, there's a plus side, because genuinely interdisciplinary young scholars too often get rejected on the grounds that they're not really classicists; just ask all the classics PhDs who work heavily in history, philosophy, or linguistics (no, the commonsensical notion that such people would be more employable due to their competence in multiple disciplines is not borne out by the evidence; instead they're usually just seen as outsiders by people in both disciplines). A candidate who could genuinely teach in all the areas of classics would be a great hire for a community college, since she could teach history, literature, archaeology, art, philosophy, and whatever precious few language courses the CC's offer (a few offer Latin). But there aren't many fresh PhDs who are any more competent to teach in all those areas than your average undergraduate classics major is. Unlike the average undergraduate classics major, however, if you have a PhD and have done some teaching then you know how to teach and, more importantly, you know how to teach yourself stuff. So you're a decent candidate for a CC job if you're willing to learn some new things.
Yes, the field as advertised is not remotely narrow but we can't escapes the fact that we focus 90% of our energies and resources on the "Upper East Side" and ghettoize everything else as you correctly pointed out.
Admins aren't stupid. We can say we cover everything from prehistory to Constantinople and text to material culture, but when reality shows we privilege only a sliver of this available data, it's a roadmap to irrelevance and oblivion. We can't have it both ways - call ourselves the study of Greek and Latin so we get combined with language departments, or truly train and teach the full breadth of classical studies as we advertise. I see no change, however, on the horizon in the way we train and hire our practitioners.
I sure would love to know whether these doom and gloomers around here, including those currently lamenting how our narrowness assures our demise, actually know what they are talking about, or are just a bunch of grad students parroting what they have heard from others. Because I have taught at places where Classics is thriving, and even growing, and no one gets worked up over how we are a bunch of elitists who only appeal to rich, white Manhattanites.
Now comes the expected gaslighting...splendid. Let them eat cake!
Make classics great again!
gaslighting? how so?
Classicists might be elitist snobs, but everyone shits on Comp. Lit.
Yes please step off of comp. lit. It is the modern version of Classics when done well, and when not it is theoretical onanism.
Gaslighting: "the field is doing great, silly little woman! Don't you start with your whining, now." There may be places where classics is thriving, but that is very much the exception. Have you seen the job data over the last decade??
There are some fantastic, generous senior scholars, but for every one of them, there's a gas lighter who got his job with his advisor's phone call and tenure without a book let alone the two some institutions are expecting now on top of a crap load more service. That is if one is *lucky* enough to even land a full-time job with tenure expectations in this day when many a classicist has retired after lighting a dumpster fire in his department. Yeah, we knew it would be a tough slog, but it doesn't help to have smega-brained douchenozzles (cf. https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/listen-up-bitches-its-lysistrata-time), aka walking Title IXs, lording over the field.
SCS insider here (not official SCS staff), wishing to respond to earlier posts (November 25th and 26th) regarding data on the profession, particularly information about placement, dissertations, etc. Through its various committees, the SCS attempts to gather information about a variety of matters of interest to members and others, and the communications team does its best to present that information in a timely manner. But a lot of that depends on the information received from members and institutions, as SCS staff reported in this piece on how the SCS collects data: https://classicalstudies.org/about/scs-newsletter-october-2017-other-scs-data.
To respond to some of the issues raised above, here are some other links that might help:
--A list of the completed and in-progress dissertations from 2010-2016: https://classicalstudies.org/education/list-progress-and-completed-dissertations-classics
--A rundown of last year's Placement Data with direct downloads to the raw data itself as well as the office write-up: https://classicalstudies.org/about/scs-newsletter-july-2017-placement-report-2016-2017
Also, check out the Eidolon article that SCS staff did with Jason Pedicone on the complexities of tracking non-TT scholars after they graduate, with some general numbers on how many Ph.D.s get TT jobs: https://eidolon.pub/ne-plus-ultra-classics-beyond-the-tenure-track-1504c555f20b
Thank you for your post. I, too, have been wondering why there is no longer an official list of who got which job, as there used to be. And here is a simple solution to the problem of departments not sharing information: any program that posts job announcements through the Placement Service MUST say who (if anyone) got the job, or else it will not be allowed to use the Placement Service the next time. An e-mail reminder or two in spring/summer will undoubtedly be necessary, but this should make it quite possible for the old placement list to be resurrected.
2:33: Yes! That's an excellent idea, and a perfectly reasonable request.
I believe the SCS does in fact collect such information, they just don't make it public.
If so, I'd love to know the rationale for changing their long-standing policy of publishing such information in the newsletter. And, since roughly half of the jobs out there seem to be at public institutions the hiring info for those, at least, is the exact opposite of not-to-be-made-public.
Oh gods, I just noticed a superfluous "the" in my cover letter to Randolph Macon. Don't let it sink me!
I accidentally applied to Randolf Bacon University. Perhaps they will look the other way.
May they see your dittography as a subtle pastiche of Byzantine manuscribal phenomena and offer you the job on the spot.
If only the Randolph-Macon (I sure hope you did include the hyphen in your letter!) deadline had not yet passed I would apply and engage in similar dittography, because that's what Augustus would do.
(Well, I see I'm not the only one showing off by using the word "dittography.")
(Oh, it's not clear which of us wrote that post. It's by me, Anonymous 5:49b, not 5:49a.)
5:49a here. Stay out of my head, 5:49b. I won't be incepted.
I totally sent Hamilton the unedited version of my cover letter. Whoops. I'm ABD so they're going to chuck me into the No pile without writing it i think (since they want a creature I've never heard of: an advanced assistant professor).
I'd like to complain about my SCS session, but don't want to jeopardise my anonymity.
The entire production of presenting at this conference is pointless.
@5:17. Can you speak generally what the problem is? If it's just a question of a bad time (e.g., 1st thing on 1st morning), as a search committee member, I can probably assure you that it's not that big of a deal. If you're on our list and are presenting, one of us will be there.
Agreed with @5:17am, both about the SCS and AIA, especially if they are open sessions. Utterly pointless; small audiences. No one gave me any real feedback, good or bad. And I had presented the papers elsewhere beforehand in smaller venues and received very constructive and positive feedback. I find smaller conferences (preferably with pre-circulated papers) way more useful. But it seems that you need an AIA/SCS paper on your CV at least once...
just got a rejection notice from williams.
somehow -- perhaps it's a perverse way of taking the rejection -- it feels not so terrible to let the job market decide my fate. if I don't get any offers perhaps it's an encouragement to find a satisfying career path elsewhere?
@11:12 I feel you.
I complain to friends that I haven't received any response to applications that I submitted 6 weeks ago, but then I get two rejections in one morning and have to go put on a good face for my students despite how depressing that is. I'm with you, 11:12 and 11:23.
11:12, 11:23, 11:49: I'm with you too. Really sorry to hear about the rejections. But given that you currently have a position, you have value, you are talented! Don't give up. I'm determined to see application rejections as a sign that I wasn't the right fit the SC was looking for. We have to remember that not being selected for interview is not a sure sign that we aren't qualified or capable.
@1:17: thank you for the kind words! :)
It's hard not to dwell on the rejections but then I say to myself, well, it ain't no use to sit and wonder why, babe.
I'm 5:17am, the one who wrote about the pointlessness of presenting at the AIA/SCS. I worry that if I mention the specific aspects of my irritation and the wrong person reads it, I'll be in trouble.
Unfortunate times are unfortunate times; that's just a fact, and no one can really complain. (Even though I have given an AIA/SCS paper where no one from the SC showed up - my annoyance was limited in its duration and intensity.) However, what gets my goat is that there are demands and constraints not announced in advance.
Add to that: some shockingly terrible papers get fawned over at the AIA/SCS. Sometimes it looks like Ivies defending Ivies, friends defending friends' students. It's a very strange environment and not one I'm used to seeing unremarked upon at a very large conference. Then again, my experience is limited and perception is subjective.
What demands and constraints are not announced in advance?
"constraints" makes it sound like one of two things:
- something to do with a change in time allotment
- no projector
i would say that that was a rather nice and polite rejection email from william and mary
W&M are nice people, I've interacted with them before in the job-search context.
W&M , however, deserve a serious jeer, as last year they advertised for a “Roman Historian” for a VAP slot, and ended up hiring a Greek philologist whose entire CV revolves around Pindar. ???
by the way, for rejection emails sent directly from the department chair, is it expected/wise to respond with a short "thank you for considering my application" message?
W&M hired two VAPs last year -- one in Roman History and one in Greek Literature, so that jeer is entirely unfounded.
@10:11,
No. They don’t care and they’d 9/10 not want to be bothered. You can’t blame them, imagine being a Dept Chair and (on top of all the junk mail you have to filter through) receiving an additional 100+ “thanks” emails from rejected applicants.
@10:03,
I agree. The AIA/SCS really ought to (somehow) penalize Depts that put an ad out for ‘x’ it hire ‘z’. It’s just plain wrong. BTW, it seems as if the good folks at W&M were sooo googly-eyed over the Pindar-specialist they hired to teach Roman History (which is on so many levels so very wrong) that they then, this year, have a T-T line out for, you guessed it, a Greek philologist. ...they already know who they’re hiring. ...Shame on W&M
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