One other thing re: CAMWS. Having been on the market several years, I have to say that my sense is that CAMWS is turning/has turned into a one-yr interview setting. In my opinion, this is both good and bad. Good, in that it makes the VAP/lecturer scene more about "ability" (whatever that is) and less about (more-or-less) "arbitrary" regional and personal connections. Bad, in that it piles on $500-1K professional expenses for those very people who are least positioned to afford it.
Again, "Concerned Colleague"is helpful in many ways, but as someone who knows both the SLAC world and RES I schools, I'd say there can be an unrealistic tendency for people at a SLAC, who run a search a couple of times a decade, to want the whole world to think their search is the center of the known universe. When you run a search only once in a while, each one is like the birth of a child. When you've run a lot of searches each new one is like taking your teenager to get braces. Certainly applicants should study a program online, talk to anyone they know who went there ("I was always impressed by the way my friend Snuffy talked about his years at Zenith, and especially the Homer readathons and senior theses"), and craft a letter that draws attention to any way in which the program or location is appealing or right for you, and doesn't give the impression you want to do things you can't do there. But you shouldn't be asking applicants to craft different c.v.'s for different types of job; that's just a waste of time (as opposed to you just turning the page to find what you want). And repeating certain types of material on both the c.v. and the job letter is perfectly fine, because at a program that does a lot of searches or is doing more than one some people in the room might just glance at the c.v. at the last minute to remind themselves what the person is working on.
As for upcoming talks, just list whether they are at a conference, a grad conference, or a school: we can figure out whether it was by invitation or by abstract, and we know which orgs. accept half the abstracts and which all of them
I disagree on not listing talks at graduate conferences. They're not "suspicious;" they're simply a very minor accomplishment. Just be sure to label them correctly. And there's nothing wrong with listing jobtalks where you didn't get the job; being a runnerup is not like having a disease.
Classics - so outdated even a caveman is hip
said...
I used 11pt font, I'm screwed. I knew I should've had my grandfather proof read my cover letters. He surely would have helped more than most of my grad advisors who were too busy pontificating on Mediterranean cruise tours.
As far as tailoring CVs and letters. The easiest thing to do is draw up three or four different templates geared to different types of institutions. You should have a SLAC CV, a R-1 w/PhD program CV, a regional state-school CV, and a VAP CV. Then it is a simple matter of sending the proper CV to wherever you are applying. Same basic rule applies to application letters. Try your best to customize, but that is easier if you already have a SLACish template to work from, which is different from your R-1ish letter, etc. This takes more work at the beginning, but makes your life easier when October and November and December hit.
For those of you looking at next year's market, start getting all of your materials together now and send sample dossiers to friends who have sat on committees at a variety of different places. They often have a better sense of how to tighten things up, and how to make your dossier look more attractive for their particular kind of institution than your graduate school advisors.
When in doubt, less is more. I am always amazed at how un-professional so many CVs appear. Spending a few minutes with a friend who has some experience in the graphic design or architecture world would be well worth the effort. Have academics who are not classicists read your application letter. If you can make a compelling case to a modern historian, or a sociologist, that will help your case with a SC who aren't of your specialty.
And always remember, lady Tyche plays a big role in this process. She can act in ways that are fundamentally unfair and capricious. So, try your absolute best to not take everything personally.
Does anybody know if schools typically interview at CAMWS for temporary positions? Is it worth booking a flight, hotel room, etc. on the off chance that I am going to land an interview? Should I state in my application letters that I will be at CAMWS should you want to interview me?
I will apply to schools who are going to interview at CAMWS (but it's only UGA so far, right?), but I'm not going to go to the conference only to be interviewed.
It is unreasonable for job candidates to be expected to attend two difference professional meetings in order to be interviewed. In fact, I wish that CAMWS would strongly dissuade schools from making its meeting the APA 2.0.
Schools interviewing at CAMWS are perfectly happy to do phone interviews as well. To answer the next obvious question, I don't think going to CAMWS gives you an advantage for the interview. I've gotten jobs that interviewed at CAMWS but for which I interviewed by phone.
Regardless of whether it truly gives you an advantage, it's the sentiment involved. Rather than doing the bare minimum when it comes to propriety, wouldn't it be nice for a change if classics was more on the forefront? And, yes, classics is very behind in this regard. The cutting edge are the disciplines with money - medical, law, sciences, business, etc. They can either fly out a boatload of people or conduct HD video interviews. I'm not talking about this. I know for a fact that some poorer departments in disciplines such as our own refuse to interview at their primary if they can't do it for the great majority; almost all pass on a subsequent conference interviews for VAP searches. And don't talk to me about dumbing down. If phone interviews are good for some, why not all?
Dear obnoxious person demanding to know BY WHOM? a job was accepted on the wiki,
Sheesh, cool it. There is no obligation to post names of successful candidates on the wiki. Past procedure for the wiki was to have candidates post their own names, or after a decent grace period, someone who knew the information first-hand. One of those jobs you marked (Rhodes) has a note that it was accepted *earlier this week*. This is not a decent grace period in which one can expect that information to be posted.
Frankly, if I know who's gotten a job, I'm definitely not posting the information because someone feels entitled to know and scrawls BY WHOM? all over the wiki. Be patient, can't you? No one of us even really needs to know those names, only that the job is now beyond our reach.
I finally got around to clicking that Mr. Hilter link from a couple days ago - brilliant work. Kudos to the aggrieved philosophy applicant who put it together.
Does anyone know if/where APA abstract submission acceptance rates are online? A friend of mine said she had once seen them online, but I can't find them.
They are typically published in the newsletter, so they should be in online versions of the newsletters (which ones is harder to know). I don't know if they are to be found anywhere more easily accessible than that.
As at most annual professional conferences, the papers seem to do little more than provide a testing ground to prove that job candidates can 1) get an abstract approved and 2) talk in complete sentences. (Beyond that there's the occasional good panel or fraction of a panel, but it's a pretty low percentage fruit.) Proving 1 and 2 isn't stupid or pointless, but for most of the audience it really doesn't seem worth the effort of showing up (everyone's having coffee or buying books anyway). On top of that, interviewing committees, who are busy interviewing, can't make it to a lot of talks by candidates for their positions - which kinda undermines the point of the candidates giving talks in the first place. If we wanted to have academically useful conferences (and invited lectures too for that matter) papers should be distributed in advance, like the one or two seminars that always take place. But since everyone is more interested in sticking meaningless talks on their cv I doubt we'll change things.
On a separate note, I'm a philologist and I feel the AIA panels (which aren't that different from APA panels) work a lot better. Is their content just more amenable to the format or is it just a 'grass is greener' thing?
As a classicist, I wish I had known that most university admins consider the legitimacy of classics as a stand alone discipline about as favorably as phrenology.
I wish I would have known that the classes in graduate school I would *take* would have just about zero relevance for my job as a faculty member. On the other hand all of those classes that I managed to avoid *teaching* would have been oh so helpful!
In short, I should have volunteered to teach every semester, done the least possible in my classes, nailed my comps quickly, and then written the shortest, fastest, and most mainstream dissertation I could have gotten away submitting.
I wish I had known the "advantages" of academia are largely an illusion in the 21st century. Yeah, there might technically be less hours in the office, but very few of my friends take their work home with them. I also make half what my friends do with a BA, and they've been making it for almost ten years longer, with stock options in some cases. Academia is just a j-o-b now, one with too much grief and too little pay.
I was told that at Amherst College they were looking for a poetry person...
Ad was for Latin lang. and lit., not poetry specifically. Plus SLACs tend to worry less about specialization since even their seniors don't need a seminar in Plautine metrics. So, apologies for being obtuse, but I'm not really sure what you're getting at except that you may have a beef with your source.
On a related note, there are lots of ads that are actually quite specific and then the committee goes in a completely different direction (e.g., Michigan a couple of years back). It's stuff like that that makes the Santa Clara letter of a few months back so obnoxious. One shouldn't criticize people for applying to absolutely everything if 1) the market is generally awful and 2) committees often behave in seemingly irrational, or at least unpredictable, ways.
In a certain EU country, where 99% of the jobs go to internal candidates, a young lecturer started a blog where people can 'guess' what candidate will likely get the job, so that that sham becomes clear. Wouldn't it be nice to have something similar also here, and so see how many job searches, after thousands of $$$ wasted on interviews and campus visits, end up with the hire of the current VAP in the Dept. that has advertised the job?
It's fortunate/unfortunate (depending on who you are) that this will never happen here.
There's a reason for conducting a search, regardless of there being a fair-haired girl/boy waiting in the wings or not. Universities have hiring regulations to prevent the appearance of corruption and "inside" hires. That means that even if it is 100% sure that they are going to hire the VAP, they still need to run the search.
It doesn't always happen that the VAP or any other "inside" candidate gets the job. There are times when the search brings someone new into the equation whom the search committee, and perhaps the majority of the department, like better.
While it would be nice if job candidates could know for certain cases where the search is a joke and there is no real investigation of other possibilities, so that they could save the time, effort, and money (yes, using Interfolio to send out a writing sample and a whole pile of documents can get costly when it all adds up), this is simply not going to happen. Because if a committee were to reveal that information, the HR department would have a fit, and the Dean might just pull that search altogether, and rethink allowing these people to ever run another search by themselves.
If I might call your attention (assuming you don't already know it) to a interesting blog about the academic market and why it is broken (among other things).
http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/
I just thought I'd draw attention to a different aspect of the problem (I'm not sure that hiring visiting faculty is a problem).
Well, back to adjunct-life (grading papers on a Friday night!),
Anonymous February 25, 2010 12:57 PM said... "As a classicist, I wish I had known that most university admins consider the legitimacy of classics as a stand alone discipline about as favorably as phrenology."
Hoi men, hoi d'ou. The number of admins who think classics as a stand alone discipline is like phrenology is actually pretty small. Unless by "a stand alone discipline" you mean a Classics Department that doesn't care about having connections to English, Religion, Philosophy, Comp. Lit, Anthro, Art, History, Medieval Studies etc. that can help protect it from attack.
"Unless by "a stand alone discipline" you mean a Classics Department that doesn't care about having connections to English, Religion, Philosophy, Comp. Lit, Anthro, Art, History, Medieval Studies etc. that can help protect it from attack."
Is there really any kind? Okay, there are a few that actually have good relations with Art and even Anthro, but they're uncommon. And when a constituency gets squeezed, it becomes a free-for-all and the fringe people get squeezed out before the perceived core (realia folks in classics, usually). In the greater humanities world that you've just listed, guess who's the fringiest of all? Yep, classics. I know it's difficult to see from a worm's eye view, but look broader. Classics is no longer considered a viable division by itself in museums and other places that actually cater to the public. It's only a matter of time. As the West gets more diverse in every sense of the word, classics is somehow defying the odds and becoming more monolithic, and the apple apparently doesn't fall too far from the tree judging by the current generation who's about to be handed the keys just as the music stops.
rightly or wrongly I like to use the number of views for job posts as a rough gauge of likely applicant numbers. Any idea why the Fairfield ad has such few views?
An experienced SC member (and twice-failed internal candidate for a job) here. Internal candidates do not have an edge (barring a situation like a spousal hire). Internal candidates must go through the exact same rigorous selection process that outsiders do. They don't get to skip the job talk, the dinner, the meet with students, the teaching demo. They earn those jobs the same as an outsider would. Yes, it is conceivable that they have an advantage because the department's hired them already, and in fact many departments will grant internals a courtesy preliminary interview or even campus interview on those grounds. BUT the disadvantage for internals is that the department already knows you, perhaps too well. They know your work habits. They hear things from students. They have to clean up the microwave after your popcorn stinks up the department. They see you swearing over a fender-bender in the parking lot. Etc.
Yes, internals do get the job sometimes - I'd hazard it's roughly 50-50 if they do, often because they were hired for a reason and they still fit the bill. But they earn it, just like the rest of you. Stop trying to take away from another's success because you didn't get a job you thought was yours (what I suspect is the motive behind such a post). You act as though internals were just plonked onto third base without having to get there by their own merits. And that is simply not the case.
When I was on the market five years ago, I was stunned by the number of internal candidates who did *not* get jobs that they - ahem, we - were all well positioned for. In those pre-wiki days, my friends and I counted up fully 19 of us that we knew were 'inside' candidates. As I recall, only one of us got the inside job. Myself I was turned down for not one but two jobs, both in my specialty, that my institution was interviewing for. Sort of stings.
So those conspiracy-minded folks who believe that the internal candidates get all the jobs are far mistaken. The last poster has it right - you're a known quantity as an inside candidate...and isn't the grass always greener etc...?
A very interesting topic. Last year we had one such internal candidate, with two candidates invited in from the outside. One of the outsiders happened to perform far better in terms of the research and teaching presentations, so that we really had no choice in the matter. The internal candidate had the advantage, and for whatever reason did not perform at the same level. We debated for a very long time about what to do, but eventually went with the outside candidate, who simply did a better job of prep and engagement than our insider. It got ugly, of course -- the insider took it quite personally, refused to speak to any of us (even those on the internal candidate's side), and caused a great deal of friction.
Which brings me to a small piece of advice: Insiders, don't burn your bridges. While you may not understand why you did not get the job, there are certainly people there who are or were on your side, and when you go up for that next job your interviewers will be expecting to read something from your immediate past colleagues. While it is certainly understandable to be angry and frustrated, don't let that jeopardize your future, nor break off with colleagues who often do care (very much so) what happens to your career...
I know the query concerned W. Georgia. But to add to the West Virginia comment, I received a rejection letter yesterday informing me that they had filled the position after receiving 100+ applications.
So is it a bad sign if I read that the distinguished Italian scholar Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, the Abe Vigoda of ancient history, has died at age 99 and one of my thoughts is, "I wonder if this opens up a teaching position"?
NB: This blog is for rumors, and the wiki is for facts. Posting a rumor here does not constitute sufficient evidence to update the wiki! Shame on the person who posted to the wiki that the Wooster VAP was definitely filled because the FV rumor mill said it was probably filled!
In the past, posts have been made to the wiki citing FV or rumor mill as sources (just look at last year's wiki). I don't see the problem here. Maybe the wiki poster went too far in saying the job was accepted, but the post on FV was pretty definitive on an offer at least, and citing the source as FV should instantly caution folks about the source. Lots of folks don't read both FV and the wiki, since FV often deteriorates into Battle of the ClArchs and Philologists! Volume 1679! etc. Just so long as no one is bandying names about recklessly or erroneously, and everyone sources their info, the wiki serves its purpose.
The person failed to engage in a close textual reading, and therefore was probably one of those poorly trained archaeologists who do nthing on their digs but drink and hit on 18-year-olds, when they could be studying their languages.
Since we're calling people out, I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who are currently in TT positions but moving into another one elsewhere. Not only is this a zero sum game for the discipline, but it's probably a net loss in the short if not long term. Thanks! While we're at it, all you AARP card-carrying members, go retire already!
Since we're calling people out, I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who are currently in TT positions but moving into another one elsewhere. Not only is this a zero sum game for the discipline, but it's probably a net loss in the short if not long term. Thanks! While we're at it, all you AARP card-carrying members, go retire already!
You are most welcome! I'm thrilled to be leaving that hell-hole. Good luck getting a job there. You'll be miserable too.
Since we're calling people out, I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who are currently in TT positions but moving into another one elsewhere. Not only is this a zero sum game for the discipline, but it's probably a net loss in the short if not long term
I can't ever decide whether this is the lamest complaint on here, or if it's the one about "inside candidates." It's hard, because they're both really lame. But I'd probably vote for "inside candidate." You know, if you forced me to choose. But still, this one is right up there in terms of lameness. Definitely very lame in its own right, is what I'm saying. 9.6, 9.7, somewhere around there.
Whew, at least this time, the senstive TT transfer didn't go into a rant about being mercenary. It would have made a good beer commercial - practice? playoffs? mercenary? I'll show you mercenary, you !@#$ piece of Q@#$!
"Hey guys, Well next year I am going to be applying to [Ivy school] and really want to get in. There is a rumor at my school that students have a great shot at getting into [IS] if they apply to the [liberal arts] program for "classics". I am currently a junior in high school and have taken: Frosh: Latin 1 Grade: A Soph: Latin 2 Honors Grade: B (this is the only B on my transcript I have a 3.78 unweighted) Junior: Latin 3 Honors Grade: A Senior: Latin prose and poetry Grade: A
My question however is should I apply to [IS] as if I were interested in Classics. What I hear is that the [IS] has much lower standards for people applying into the Classics program than all other majors. Also, I was wondering if after I get accepted into the [liberal arts] program if I can switch into [prestigious pre-professional college] without any problems. Thanks guys"
Then comes the best reply.
"Here is a probe that ought to help you decide: What are your preferences in addition to [PPC]? If they are exclusively [pre-professional] programs, you may want to reconsider your application to classics - if you become stuck there you could be screwed."
Great, so we're now apparently the geeks at the circus, a curiosity with little perceived worth except to set up the main show. So much for classics being the de facto honors discipline. This student has taken at least four Latin classes and feels the need to put classics in quotes?
The scary part is that in the current economy, many people who retire will not be replaced. Consequently, it probably is not the right time to be urging people to retire. It will just contribute to the shrinking of the field.
As a means of assurance to those who are not T-T but on the market, I'm a member of a recent T-T search, and I'd say that only about 5% of the whole applicant pool were those people who have T-T positions already. At least in our case, there doesn't seem to be a flood of such people. Rather, about 60% of the candidates were out within 1-2 years and were holding temp/visiting jobs, while the rest were ABDs near completion. Those are rough numbers, but even with the market the way that it is, I don't detect a lot more movement among the "Haves" than usual. But if anyone else on a search wants to chime in, I'd be curious if you are willing to offer similar rough figures...
At my alma mater, 2 of 3 finalists are in TT positions. One is not TT, but in a very good position. I have no idea what the overall applicant pool looked like. At my current institution, all three candidates are in TT positions. Once again, I have no idea what the applicant looked like. Regardleses, these are two TT searches out of how many this year? 50? 60? I would guess that TT applicants are relatively low as you suggest, but it doesn't change the fact that they appear to be quite enticing to search committees.
Interesting. Well, in regard to what I just said above, of the three who were invited to campus in our search, ALL have their degree (although we did interview a few ABDs), and NONE have a permanent position. So that makes us 0-3 for T-T people. While those people who already have T-T positions were very strong candidates, please also remember that they come with their own baggage. While some schools are deliberately looking for more experienced candidates, others are not enticed by these individuals. But again, I'd be curious to hear from others who might discuss their searches (in the abstract, of course).
The economy almost certainly favors candidates with experience, but this is counter-balanced by baggage and "potential," or perceived lack thereof. This is only a guestimate, but this is how the numbers should play out based on past experience and the current economic/political climate.
5-10 jobs will go to superstar ABDs. They have top scholars as advisors and come with academic pedigree - the Princeford candidates that get crucified on here. They will probably have the good fortune of having a diss topic that's particulary hot right now.
Another 5-10 jobs will go to candidates in TT positions. They're either moving up, down, or sideways due to geographic/spousal considerations.
Once you subtract the senior positions (and the small percentage of junior positions that get sniped by seniors), you're probably talking about 30 positions or so. Ten or so will go to internal candidates. This leaves around 20 as truly open to junior scholars with degree in hand but without a TT position. I would guess there are around 200 applicants who aren't just testing the waters. Maybe half could scrounge up something with their current or home institution. So 50+ are totally screwed.
Here are the numbers I just pulled out of the wiki's butt (aka the job market data for hires over the past two seasons):
08-09 07-08
New "pedigree" Phds: 10 21
Inside Hires: 11 9
Phds (i.e. not recent grads): 47 101(12? tt-tt)
New Phds: 26 39
Hopefully I managed the format well enough for this to be legible. Our definitions of "pedigree" Phds might differ slightly, but I limited that population to only those schools on which everyone would agree. I also tried to assume nothing, so if a description wasn't clear, I left that out of the count. I'll leave the conclusions to you all.
All I got out of this exercise was a strong urge to be on the market for the 2007-2008 season, when there were about a million jobs out there.
Just for clarification at what point does a new phud become a regular phud with or without a job (vap, tt, or otherwise)? One, two, three years? Just wondering how long some of us might have to wait for all the stars to line up right.
Perhaps not the sort of answer you're looking for, but in the counts above I included only those hires described as "grad" or listed with only a PhD institution and the current year as their completion date (no subsequent position or institution) in the "New Phd" category. This doesn't distinguish between very recent grads and ABDs. People with "no affiliation" were still lumped into the generic "PhD" category. Even people who took jobs before they were finished probably get bumped out of the "New Phd" category under my system, but I would guess that they also look different to search committees.
to whoever was complaining in the "jeers" section about NYU's interview committee, you should know that they have been searching for various positions for the past few years and weeding though hundreds of files. and in 30 minutes you have to cut to the chase.
Not really related to the job search, but for those who don't know already Sir Kenneth Dover has gone on to his reward (which I hope is full and abundant): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/7400324/Sir-Kenneth-Dover.html
This isn't a kvetch about the job-market per se, but I do think it is a problem worthy of noting, regardless of whether one is hoping to get a job or to keep the job one has.
I ran across this post at Brian Leiter's blog and felt that I could have been the one writing if we substitute "classics" for "philosophy" and name certain Classics journals accordingly.
I'm an untenured faculty member at [a PhD-granting department], and I'm writing because I think something needs to be done about the state of philosophy journals lately. I am powerless to do anything, but maybe if some attention is drawn to the problems (again) on your blog, the situation can be improved.
The problems, as I see them, are these. Junior faculty need to publish in "good" journals. But this is getting harder and harder to do. Currently THREE of the top six (according to the survey you did) philosophy journals are not currently accepting submissions (Nous, PPR, and AJP). The situation with AJP is a one-time only problem (the website says that the editor is ill), but it seems like Nous and PPR only accept submissions for about 6 months out of any given year lately. This has the effect of roughly doubling the number of submissions to the other top journals. These other journals are then swamped with submissions, and their review times slow. (As it is, when you send a paper to the Philosophical Review these days, six months go by before the paper is even sent to someone to read.) The editors of these journals pressure referees to be extra critical, so that they do not also acquire a long backlog of accepted papers. The editors also cut down on the number of referees who read each paper, since they have so many papers to send out. It seems to me that this does not lead to yet higher standards at these journals. Instead it just increases the amount of arbitrariness in the review process, so that it is more likely that even good papers will be rejected. Add to this the fact that the journals that are out of commission are the ones with good editorial practices and faster review times, and the result is that there are relatively few places to send your paper, you must wait a long time to find out whether it will be published, and the chances that it will be accepted are lower. For those under the time pressure of a tenure clock, this is a disaster. It is hard to imagine making the case to my dean that my paper was not published in a "good" journal because so many of those journals were out of commission for most of the last few years---even if that is a large part of the explanation.
What are the possible solutions? We either need more "good" philosophy journals, or we need the good ones to publish more often. The founding of Philosophers' Imprint was a big help here---not only is it a new journal, but because it is online-only it is not confined to publishing only four issues worth of papers each year. But no other general philosophy journal ranked in your survey has shown any signs of giving up the print-journal calendar and following this model. Why not? I'm not sure who is benefitting from the current set-up. In fact, there seems to be an opportunity here for some of the journals: journals ranked near the middle (say, the American Philosophical Quarterly) could re-invent themselves and increase their prestige by going online-only.
It seems like the Philosophers recognize the problem, and are acting to deal with it. Is there any sense that our own senior colleagues are doing something similar?
Young Hellenist, what is the evidence that publishing online ameliorates the claimed problem that journals "take too long" to publish work? The post seems to suggest it's the *refereeing* that takes forever - that's a front-end problem.
What do people think about starts a stats section (speciality, # apps with types of departments, # long lists, # short lists, # campus invites, # offers) on the wiki? I've noticed some other disciplines doing it and it seems helpful for both applicants and the discipline as a whole. Heck, we know the APA is not in a position to do something similar. Any downsides?
I agree that it is a front-end problem, and going online will amelioriate only a portion of this. I also think that going online would enable more journals to flourish, and to publish more regularly. If faculty are expected to publish substantially more (an undisputed fact) then the profession needs to ensure platforms for that publishing. As libraries cancel subscriptions, university presses go into the toilet, those platforms are drying up. This is, as the young philosopher stated, a disaster. A disaster for those of us who are producing but can't find venues, and a disaster for the field. We are all caught in a catch-22, and administrators and senior faculty don't seem to recognize this. Or maybe they do and are working to fix it without broadcasting those efforts.
Interesting issue brought up by Young Hellenistic. Maybe -- call me crazy -- the way to go here is that we should start putting less emphasis on publication in general, and more on teaching and outreach. Who Killed Homer? I'd say the R1 institutions and the idea that quantity matters over quality. But hey, I'm just an instructor at an SLAC that places greater emphasis on teaching over publication, so what do I know? Or as Dennis Miller says, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
Just to add my $.02 to this thread about publishing.
Young Hellenistic mentioned the interest of the field. Very, very true. Administrative expectations of publishing are getting higher and higher. This makes is more difficult for classicists on two counts: 1) It takes longer for us to produce good scholarship because of the very nature of that scholarship. 2) This scholarship takes longer to review and does not have the wide range of publication options available to other humanists.
These two problems (and others) lead to issues of hiring and tenure (especially acute to those classicists teaching in, e.g., history departments). Denial of tenure is a disaster not only to the individual denied tenure, but to the field since all too often that FTE is taken away from classics and given to a sexier field. This makes the job-market all the worse for the rest of us, and shrinks the profession overall.
The APA simply MUST direct its resources to expanding avenues for junior-level research, and educating non-classicists about the challenges of scholarship in the field. Deans and Provosts are using every tool available to cut lines and re-shape the academic landscape -- classics is a constant target. Tenure-denial is a ready-made knife for them and we classicists should try to blunt it in recognition of scholarly fairness and in the interests of the field as a whole.
This seems to me a little like putting the cart before the horse. Are the increasing demands for publication really a cause for the dearth of t-t jobs? If deans are taking t-t positions away from classics, how often are they converting them to t-t positions in other fields? If anything, they are replacing them with non t-t positions. This is why whereas 30 years ago, 60% of faculty were t-t, but now only 30% are. The academic landscape is being redrawn, but this has less to do with our internal demands for publication, and more to do with an administrative emphasis on flexibility.
This seems to me a little like putting the cart before the horse. Are the increasing demands for publication really a cause for the dearth of t-t jobs? If deans are taking t-t positions away from classics, how often are they converting them to t-t positions in other fields? If anything, they are replacing them with non t-t positions. This is why whereas 30 years ago, 60% of faculty were t-t, but now only 30% are. The academic landscape is being redrawn, but this has less to do with our internal demands for publication, and more to do with an administrative emphasis on flexibility.
Not true at my university. A tenure denial in classics last year meant a loss of the line to our department with no temporary hire to replace it. In the meantime departments like Economics and Politics gained lines. It is impossible to trace particular FTEs since the money is fungible, but Deans are most assuredly converting former classics lines to other fields. They would never admit to this, but it is the case.
Same experience here, but our person left for another job. Political Science received three new lines the following year without even asking when we ask every year for one to no avail. When I discussed our situation with a colleague in Poli Sci, it was so foreign to him that it didn't register. He viewed it with a curiosity that bordered on the macabre and didn't realize how offensive he was being.
We're foolish if we don't see that we're getting screwed big time by administrations.
This has nothing to do with any of this, but might be of interest to some: what appears to be a fascinating new study of oxygen levels in Icelandic clam shells represents further evidence for a Roman warm period. (Some of you work in areas for which this is significant; most of us don't.) Here's the info: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100308/full/news.2010.110.html?s=news_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Frss%2Fnews_s7+%28NatureNews+-+Earth+and+Environment%29&utm_content=Netvibes
The study's also extremely important because it represents new evidence that the global warming alarmists who denied there even was a Medieval Warming Period were dead wrong about that. But that's a tale for another day...
The study's also extremely important because it represents new evidence that the global warming alarmists who denied there even was a Medieval Warming Period were dead wrong about that.
Well, sure, but it snowed a lot in DC this year, which proves that really we are experiencing global cooling. So, no worries!
Re Anonymous 12:48: I think this discussion is getting perilously close to a violation of TOS - we are discussing the career path of a particular person who is easily identified.
Anybody know what the situation is with the Northern Illinois ancient history job? I never received a rejection letter, although the wiki says they went out last week. I've also heard through the grapevine that the job was offered to somebody, who then turned it down. Anybody else out there more in the loop than I am, and is willing to share?
Honest question here from an archaeologist on the verge of graduation. Is someone in my situation pretty much screwed? I don't have a dig where I can take 40 students and I don't imagine getting one anytime soon. Half the permanent jobs seem to be taken by an internal candidatse who's been toiling there for a number of years. Is the main path to a permanent job paved with years of VAPing as a second-class in a classics or art history department? I would appreciate comments from older archaeologists who have somehow made it through this morass. Thanks.
Honest answer (I hope) from a recently tenured Classical Archaeologist. Took me awhile to find a job, and when I did, it was in a history department. I kept all avenues open, and went with my strengths. In my case, I'm a field archaeologist with a lesser interest in art historical issues, so it was a good fit. The dig part didn't really end up mattering much, although I am part of an active field project and I have taken students with me into the field. There are jobs I did NOT get because they wanted someone who did vases or sculpture, and could care less about my work abroad. All of which is to say, as you probably suspect and often read on this site, it is a crap shoot with no guarantees, in which luck often plays a significant role. Sorry, but that is my take.
My advice would then be to (a) look beyond the environment of a Classics Dept., either to History or Art History, if those areas apply, and work on a strong case why you can help that discipline; (b) get out and meet as many people from different schools and regions as you can, give papers, go to conferences (get your name out there); and (c) get your foot in the door somewhere, for yes indeed, the VAP route is the one that pretty much all of us are taking and, moreover, it is the one that committees more or less expect now (that being my impression)...
It's definitely a rough time to be looking for a job in archaeology (and Classics and academia in general), but I don't think not having a dig means you're screwed. Most junior scholars don't have their own digs, and, despite the fact that many schools may be attracted by a dig, most of them don't have or won't commit the resources (money, leave time) needed to support one. Also, when you do get a job (think positive...), you'll want to focus on publishing, not excavating, until you get tenure.
Considering that television likes to focus its gaze on the stupid and the pretty, I highly doubt that idea would get very far with the programming executives.
We could be the academic equivalent of "The Biggest Loser." Instead of wringing the pounds off of its participants, ours will be surrounded by lawyers, doctors, nurses, and other gainfully employable professionals who berate us until we admit stupidity for pursuing an academic job in the humanities. How's that?
Hey, why not feature a Classicist on Discovery's "Dirty Jobs" with Mike Rowe? They can bring him in to spend a day in a Classics Dept...All sorts of hilarity will ensue...
"For everyone counting on a robust slate of VAPs to be announced in April .... think again."
I've been here a few years. This is a fairly strong temporary market - five jobs in April? (Read the Cincinnati ad - they have up to 3.) There are also a number of jobs for classicists, or that classicists are viable candidates for, on the FV boards, that have not been announced through the APA.
There will never be a slew of jobs in Classics. That's the nature of the field.
As a newbie to the classics job market, can someone tell me whether this year's market is right in line with the economy or if it's indicative of a larger shift/decline in the way universities do business with the humanities and classics? In other words, will the classics job market pick right back up after the economy rebounds or are we screwed?
The immediate results of the economic downturn have been the contraction of the job market. But, as we see economic improvement you should not expect to see any correlating improvement for you academic job prospects. Administrators are using this crisis to the full, slashing and eliminating programs by fiat, recognizing that everybody is too stunned and fearful to react. Short answer: we're screwed.
As witness I call forward this letter, which my chair distributed just a few minutes ago:
Dear Friends,
As some of you may know, the department of Classics at Trinity College in Hartford, Ct. (my alma mater) faces elimination. I learned of this development a couple of weeks ago, but the College’s administration has been planning (informally but in detail) the move for some time. A short article appeared in a recent issue of the Trinity student newspaper.
The plan, to the extent that it is known, professes to strengthen Classics at Trinity by dissolving the department and replacing it with an interdisciplinary Classical Studies program that will draw on faculty from Religion, History, Philosophy, Modern Languages, and other departments. Trinity enjoys outstanding faculty specializing in the ancient world in those disciplines, and it may be that a program relying on them will strengthen Classics at the College. But that is not a view that I, or I suspect many other Classicists, share. Leaving aside that the teaching of Greco-Roman civilization will be spread across many departments without a centralized, institutional base, what will be lost is serious study of classical languages and literature, the teaching of which will fall in part to adjuncts. Indeed, Trinity’s faculty, numbering now more than 200, presently lacks a tenured or tenure-track member with a PhD in Classics; the present chair and last permanent member of the Classics department is a Classical Archaeologist by training; other Classics department faculty have PhDs in Classics but hold only temporary, non-tenurable appointments. Ironically, this ostensible move to strengthen Classics comes in the wake of external review conducted by well-known Classicists from Wellesley, Vassar, and Yale; they called for strengthening the department by restoring to it the two tenured/tenure-track lines that it had held for nearly fifty years but that have been filled by temporary appointments for the last several. One could argue that the College’s refusal to fill these lines in the first place, a decision that precedes the present financial crisis struck and can only cause instability, is the very reason that Classics at Trinity now needs strengthening.
Trinity’s Classics department is probably not well known; it has always been low profile, committed (like many of its small college counterparts) principally to teaching. Its faculty has included distinguished Classicists, such as Frank Cole Babbitt, translator of Plutarch’s Moralia for the Loeb Classicsal Library, and James A. Notopoulos, best known alongside Parry and Lord for his work on Homer and oral poetics. More recent faculty have published monographs on everything from Nepos to Corinthian pottery to Proclus. But the department’s chief focus was never research; it always has been to produce majors who can put their Classics degrees to good use in a variety of fields, and it has graduated a long line of students who have gone on to successful careers in law, business, medicine, and other professions--precisely what an undergraduate degree in Classics at a small liberal arts college ought to do. Trinity's Classics department has turned out some distinguished Classicists who include Louis Feldman of Yeshiva, Bruce Frier at Michigan, and Ken Harl at Tulane. The late Willie Coulson, Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for many years, was an alumnus. Still other alumni have taught or still teach at institutions ranging from Kenyon to Dartmouth to Emory, and not only in departments of Classics but also in departments of Religion and Philosophy -- these latter testimony to the breadth and versatility of a Trinity Classics degree; still other Trinity Classics majors are now in graduate programs at Oxford, Princeton, and other universities. And Trinity's Classics majors now department has turned out many who now teach in public and private high schools throughout New England and the U.S. It is difficult to understand, with this record of alumni achievement, what was so broken about the department that the Trinity administration believes that it can only be fixed by dismantling it.
The disappearance of Trinity's Classics department has broader ramifications. Of concern is what loss of a Classics department at an institution like Trinity portends for the long-term future of Classics in the United States. As a liberal arts college with some claim to national pre-eminence, and one that once boasted three permanent positions in its Classics department (to say nothing of specialists in ancient history and ancient philosophy housed in other units), Trinity is precisely the type of institution where Classics should, indeed must, survive to ensure the continuing strength of our discipline. If Trinity, with an undergraduate price tag of $50,000+ and a substantial endowment, will not support a Classics department with specialists in Greek and Latin literature, civilization, and culture, how can we expect other institutions, ones with fewer financial resources, to do so? And then where will PhD-granting Classics departments place their students? I don't want to be melodramatic or alarmist, but we cannot not rely solely on the existence of Classics departments at large universities alone to maintain the health of Classics; its survival also depends on other Classics departments, small and large, at colleges and universities throughout the U.S.
All of us appreciate the financial pressures that Trinity, and indeed all institutions of higher education, now face. Budget cuts have forced my employer, Florida State University, not only to consolidate and eliminate departments but even to lay off and let go tenured and tenure-earning faculty, as recent reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education have highlighted. All of us appreciate too that presidents, provosts, and deans are faced nowadays with exceedingly difficult choices, ones that affect not just the survival of departments but even entire institutions. But it bears repeating that financial pressures are not the sole or even the main reason given for the desire to dissolve Trinity’s Classics department. The plans to eliminate the department appear to spring from a view that misunderstands what Classics is today, or that sees little value for the teaching of language, literature, and culture in undergraduate education.
There are other issues involved, but I don't want to impose any more on your time. The American Philological Association has been notified, and its advisory service is lending its support. Alumni have started to write and express their concerns to college officials. I suspect that Martha Risser, the department chair at Trinity, would welcome messages of support as well (Martha.Risser@trincoll.edu). For my part, I am trying to gather information and have set up a Facebook page, Keep Classics at Trinity to foster support, promote communication, and signal concern at what is in the works. I realize that this is not your fight, and I apologize for contacting out of the blue so many of you with whom I have not often been in touch, in some cases for years. But I would appreciate it if you would consider joining this group, leaving a message, and perhaps spreading the word to others (I myself have not contacted the Classics email list but have preferred to write to friends and colleagues). And if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, I would welcome to hear from you.
It's sad to hear this, but it is not very surprising. I pull two quotes of interest from the Trinity newspaper article:
"The Dean is trying to think, with senior faculty here, of ways to extend our offerings rather than to have to justify tiny-enrolled courses for a very few." (James F. Jones, Jr. President of Trinity College)
"Some have expressed concern about enrollments,' said Risser, "While it is true that some of our classes (e.g. Advanced Greek) are consistently small, others (e.g. Mythology, Ancient Warfare, Ancient Athletics) are large. Our average enrollments are equivalent to those of other departments."
Note which classes consistently have large enrollments and which have small ones.
I am not trying to start a philologists v. others debate again. There's little point holding a fiddle contest while Rome is burning.
But it really is as simple as this: not enough students are interested in pursuing the languages to the advanced level. And you don't need tenured professors to teach first or even second year Latin and Greek.
I agree with many points from the previous posts. As a mid-career classicist at a SLAC in upper New England, the events at Trinity are a gut punch to classics. At our modest SLAC, we've always taken solace in the fact that our "peer institutions" have classics. If the leading SLACs start downsizing classics, it's only a matter of time before administrators at other SLACs are emboldened to do the same. Our mandate will have vanished. If it is indeed a numbers game, I fear we're on an irreversible path towards extinction.
Holy smokes, has anyone checked out the courses taught by the chair at Trinity?! Hats off to her as she's definitely doing her part to hold down the fort. I don't think I've ever seen such a vast array of courses: Bronze Age and archaeological theory to Catullus and Jerusalem?!
We should, but the way our incentive structure works, you get no credit for doing so. All that matters is research research research. It is complete bullshit. Teaching, the stuff students are paying us for, and the stuff that excites a few to join the field, is accorded zero respect. We are fools.
Honestly, what do you guys expect? Yes, I'm a bit of an outsider as a faculty member in anthropology, but my research is focused in the Mediterranean. Have you taken a step back and seen the situation from an outsider's point of view? Yes, some of this is just a general assault on the humanities, but some of it is inherent to your discipline, which you have much more control over.
The thing that strikes me about classics is how white, white, white it is (and I say this as an Irish-American). I'm not just talking about the color of people's skin, but the entire culture/bubble you're in - the topics of discussion both at colloquia and in the hallway, the multicultural relevance of classes, etc. Classics already has a reputation as an elitist, white discipline. I see very little effort by classics as a whole to dispel this notion. As the country heads toward a demographic with caucasians no longer forming the majority, how can a discipline be so lily white and unwelcoming to a huge chunk of the population in the 21st century?
My own department has recognized its shortcomings, which are nowhere near as dire, and have taken drastic action over the past decade. We've gone from zero ALANA faculty to four (around twenty total). As the departmental culture changed with our new faculty, so has the makeup of our students. We have gone from three ALANA grad students to twenty-one (~60 grad students in any given year). We don't keep tabs on our undergrads, but the change here seems comparable. I once gave a talk co-sponsored by a UC classics department and was surprised by how different my audience was in comparison to the general student body you saw roaming the campus. How can a campus with so many Latinos and Asians have no one from these groups involved in their classics community? Absolutely mindboggling.
Anonymous 12:34, you're suggesting departments' risk of closing depends on the skin color of their faculty and grad students? Hmn... there's a name for that... What is it... On the tip of my tongue... Where decisions about people are made solely on the basis of their race...
Not incidentally, it's a little weird to focus on the physical appearance of the faculty rather than on the much more important question of whether a dept. is appropriately serving its college/university. And last I checked, a dept.'s performance was not dependent upon its physical appearance.
As an anthropologist you think that if we had small language classes consisting of more diversity we would be okay? You don't think it's the size that's the problem in the first place? Do you really think it's possible for us to make advanced study of Greek a hundred strong class if 'we' were less 'white'? You're now marshaling a race argument to attack the teaching of an intellectual discipline? I'm really not sure what to say in response.
Now, now, let's not get testy. The anthropologist has a point, although I think it's a little far-fetched. ALANA faculty country-wide average only about 15-17%. So it's a little disingenuous to state that it's a classics' problem, or that it's the reason why classics depts are being cut.
I guess what he/she is getting at, is that we need more diverse views, and to interest students and (perhaps more importantly) administrators in what we're doing. I think that has little or nothing to do with the color of our skin, and everything to do with the content of our curricula. I would agree with that.
Re: Anon 12:34 and the "lily white" nature of our field
I disagree that we are not addressing the problem. In order to get more ALANA profs, we need to attract more ALANA people to the field in UG and Grad. That is where we are focusing most of our energy, because there simply aren't enough ALANA people on the market right now to start stacking the deck.
At the recent annual meetings, I attended a seminar on attracting women and minorities to the field, where I met some pretty phenomenal women and minorities holding tenured professorships at various universities and learned some strategies for recruiting and retaining women and minorities. Then I came home and began to implement my new found knowledge. The seminar wasn't packed to the brim, but I certainly wasn't the only one in the audience.
You may think our subject matter has only white appeal, but I don't: the Classics is a study of some cultures that greatly influenced our own, and therefore has relevance to anyone who currently participates in our culture. It is also a study of people who have experienced many of the same things we witness in our lives, like nation-building, racism, and multi-culturalism. Studying these historical issues allows us to reflect on how we approach our own world. (And by the way, to the anti-philology commenter: knowledge of Greek and Latin is essential to studying these cultures.)
Yes, we still have a ways to go, but I take offense at the suggestion that we aren't trying.
I don't totally agree with the anthropologist's post, but s/he did say:
I'm not just talking about the color of people's skin, but the entire culture/bubble you're in - the topics of discussion both at colloquia and in the hallway, the multicultural relevance of classes, etc.
And to continue to play the devil's advocate, it's been proven that the easiest and most effective way to change the culture of an organization is from the top down. Off the top of my head, I know of an African-American Roman Archaeologist who has not been able to get a job for almost ten years. Yes, she does something a bit different, but this is a nice example of how narrowly defined our search parameters take. Shouldn't we at least pause and reflect on the parameters we use to determine that she's "less qualified?" I know of one African-American male grad student at a top program who dropped out due to a number of issues, but the departmental culture was definitely near the top. I know of one Asian-American Ph.D. who should have gotten a job years ago. Once again, the person does something a bit different. Whether we admit it or not, there's a certain cachet in our discipline to representing a certain cultural norm which can very well be construed as "lily white."
For whoever mentioned it, our situation is not just a numbers game. It is not an objective formula where a department's enrollment drops 10% so your support drops 10%. Provosts and deans are making subjective decisions keeping the entire college/university in mind. Programs are downsized and shut down, not just to save money, but so those resources can be freed up for programs considered a higher priority.
What does this mean? It's a competition, folks, and we're getting our asses handed to us by History, Biology, etc. If you don't continually have a watchdog in your program with the mentality of a pitbull, you WILL get downsized. It's not enough to have brilliant, absent-minded faculty whose reseach "speaks for itself." If you combine this with the dreadful economy and the recent siege against the humanities, it goes a long way to explain the predicament we're all in.
Heaven help us if we have to count on having pitbulls in our departments. That's paranoia, not a strategy. What is needed is a discipline-wide outreach attempt, not to high school, but to administrators, to try to show them that their view of classics as an outdated discipline is outdated. For Pete's sake, the Trinity president thinks all we do is drill verb forms and wax about Virgil! No wonder he wants to cut the program!
I know you meant this as a parody, but since some people within Classics think that 1) this is the vast majority of what we do and 2) verb forms and Vergil are over-rated, we can hardly present a unified front to any administrator. Creative differences are good, but if we can't stand up for something that's important without caving in the face of some social scientific paradigm (does anyone out there remember that we have something to do with the humanities?), then we're basically buying into the hierarchization of human knowledge that ends with technocratic education plus the History channel.
(Yes, I work at a liberal arts college, if that wasn't obvious. And if my department engaged in the kind of self-consumption that goes on on FV we would have been disbanded long ago.)
Has anybody out there ever gone through Carney-Sandoe in order to find a teaching gig at a prep school?
I submitted my info a while ago and have gotten no love. Is it because I have a Ph.D.? How do you convince the private high schools that you are serious? I've struck out on the market four years now and I am tired of moving from temp to temp -- I would much prefer a steady job teaching decent high school kids Latin, and Greek if possible, than this crap.
I used Carney Sandoe 20 years ago, when I finished my undergrad studies, and they were very good, very professional. Helped me get a job at a nice prep school for two years, before I went on to grad school. How they are today, though, I couldn't really say. I did use them again 10 years ago, when I went on the market, and sent in materials to them in the same situation that you are in. I received several notices of jobs, but just then I also received a VAP position, so I wrote them to cancel my candidacy.
That said, I did very much enjoy teaching at a private school, and while I eventually elected to go the college teaching route, I often think back about whether I should have continued down that line. The faculty was very supportive, the students were great, and it was a very rewarding experience. I even got to teach Greek (as well as Latin and ancient history). I can think of at least three well established profs who have left their academic jobs to teach in a private school. So don't despair -- it might be the best move you have ever made, depending on your preferences...
Two of my grad school mates found good positions through C/S. I used it myself for a few years to keep an eye out for anything to tempt me away from a PhD. The last year I used them was the 2008-09 season and I received far fewer notifications than in previous years. The ACL looks thinner this year as well and an ABD friend looking for a HS post is coming up as empty as those looking for Uni work so...tough all over?
Just OOC: how many folks applied for the Classics-related but non-college teaching jobs listed on FV? (the library jobs, the editing job, the middle and secondary school jobs)
This reader feels that the FV community should produce an independently authored report of job placements over the last 3 academic years and submit this report to APA/AIA. If the FV coordinators would organize this, then candidates could opt to identify themselves by name or else be tabulated anonymously. The statistic always absent from the APA's often late in coming job placement report is the tabulation of job seekers in Classics/Archaeology/Ancient History who ply the market but are not successful in netting either a T-T or visiting post (vel sim). If FV readers and users can produce an independently authored report, it would be both interesting and perhaps instructive. For what it's worth, BOTH APA and AIA could greatly increase their respective levels of service to their professional constituencies.
937 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 801 – 937 of 937One other thing re: CAMWS. Having been on the market several years, I have to say that my sense is that CAMWS is turning/has turned into a one-yr interview setting. In my opinion, this is both good and bad. Good, in that it makes the VAP/lecturer scene more about "ability" (whatever that is) and less about (more-or-less) "arbitrary" regional and personal connections. Bad, in that it piles on $500-1K professional expenses for those very people who are least positioned to afford it.
Again, "Concerned Colleague"is helpful in many ways, but as someone who knows both the SLAC world and RES I schools, I'd say there can be an unrealistic tendency for people at a SLAC, who run a search a couple of times a decade, to want the whole world to think their search is the center of the known universe. When you run a search only once in a while, each one is like the birth of a child. When you've run a lot of searches each new one is like taking your teenager to get braces. Certainly applicants should study a program online, talk to anyone they know who went there ("I was always impressed by the way my friend Snuffy talked about his years at Zenith, and especially the Homer readathons and senior theses"), and craft a letter that draws attention to any way in which the program or location is appealing or right for you, and doesn't give the impression you want to do things you can't do there. But you shouldn't be asking applicants to craft different c.v.'s for different types of job; that's just a waste of time (as opposed to you just turning the page to find what you want). And repeating certain types of material on both the c.v. and the job letter is perfectly fine, because at a program that does a lot of searches or is doing more than one some people in the room might just glance at the c.v. at the last minute to remind themselves what the person is working on.
As for upcoming talks, just list whether they are at a conference, a grad conference, or a school: we can figure out whether it was by invitation or by abstract, and we know which orgs. accept half the abstracts and which all of them
I disagree on not listing talks at graduate conferences. They're not "suspicious;" they're simply a very minor accomplishment. Just be sure to label them correctly. And there's nothing wrong with listing jobtalks where you didn't get the job; being a runnerup is not like having a disease.
Sheesh, is Hobart running a search again? Good think I didn't apply because I'm fresh out of silver monogrammed cover letters and passenger pigeons.
I used 11pt font, I'm screwed. I knew I should've had my grandfather proof read my cover letters. He surely would have helped more than most of my grad advisors who were too busy pontificating on Mediterranean cruise tours.
CC is giving good advice here.
As far as tailoring CVs and letters. The easiest thing to do is draw up three or four different templates geared to different types of institutions. You should have a SLAC CV, a R-1 w/PhD program CV, a regional state-school CV, and a VAP CV. Then it is a simple matter of sending the proper CV to wherever you are applying. Same basic rule applies to application letters. Try your best to customize, but that is easier if you already have a SLACish template to work from, which is different from your R-1ish letter, etc. This takes more work at the beginning, but makes your life easier when October and November and December hit.
For those of you looking at next year's market, start getting all of your materials together now and send sample dossiers to friends who have sat on committees at a variety of different places. They often have a better sense of how to tighten things up, and how to make your dossier look more attractive for their particular kind of institution than your graduate school advisors.
When in doubt, less is more. I am always amazed at how un-professional so many CVs appear. Spending a few minutes with a friend who has some experience in the graphic design or architecture world would be well worth the effort. Have academics who are not classicists read your application letter. If you can make a compelling case to a modern historian, or a sociologist, that will help your case with a SC who aren't of your specialty.
And always remember, lady Tyche plays a big role in this process. She can act in ways that are fundamentally unfair and capricious. So, try your absolute best to not take everything personally.
Cheers,
TBFTGOGGI
Does anybody know if schools typically interview at CAMWS for temporary positions? Is it worth booking a flight, hotel room, etc. on the off chance that I am going to land an interview? Should I state in my application letters that I will be at CAMWS should you want to interview me?
Hitler finds out that he didn't get accepted to graduate school.
I will apply to schools who are going to interview at CAMWS (but it's only UGA so far, right?), but I'm not going to go to the conference only to be interviewed.
It is unreasonable for job candidates to be expected to attend two difference professional meetings in order to be interviewed. In fact, I wish that CAMWS would strongly dissuade schools from making its meeting the APA 2.0.
I applied to a SLAC department that searched for a VAP last year. I was able to interview by phone instead of at CAMWS.
Schools interviewing at CAMWS are perfectly happy to do phone interviews as well. To answer the next obvious question, I don't think going to CAMWS gives you an advantage for the interview. I've gotten jobs that interviewed at CAMWS but for which I interviewed by phone.
Regardless of whether it truly gives you an advantage, it's the sentiment involved. Rather than doing the bare minimum when it comes to propriety, wouldn't it be nice for a change if classics was more on the forefront? And, yes, classics is very behind in this regard. The cutting edge are the disciplines with money - medical, law, sciences, business, etc. They can either fly out a boatload of people or conduct HD video interviews. I'm not talking about this. I know for a fact that some poorer departments in disciplines such as our own refuse to interview at their primary if they can't do it for the great majority; almost all pass on a subsequent conference interviews for VAP searches. And don't talk to me about dumbing down. If phone interviews are good for some, why not all?
If you wanted a progressive atmosphere, you definitely chose the wrong discipline (or at least the wrong day to stop drinking).
Dear obnoxious person demanding to know BY WHOM? a job was accepted on the wiki,
Sheesh, cool it. There is no obligation to post names of successful candidates on the wiki. Past procedure for the wiki was to have candidates post their own names, or after a decent grace period, someone who knew the information first-hand. One of those jobs you marked (Rhodes) has a note that it was accepted *earlier this week*. This is not a decent grace period in which one can expect that information to be posted.
Frankly, if I know who's gotten a job, I'm definitely not posting the information because someone feels entitled to know and scrawls BY WHOM? all over the wiki. Be patient, can't you? No one of us even really needs to know those names, only that the job is now beyond our reach.
I finally got around to clicking that Mr. Hilter link from a couple days ago - brilliant work. Kudos to the aggrieved philosophy applicant who put it together.
Does anyone know if/where APA abstract submission acceptance rates are online? A friend of mine said she had once seen them online, but I can't find them.
They are typically published in the newsletter, so they should be in online versions of the newsletters (which ones is harder to know). I don't know if they are to be found anywhere more easily accessible than that.
IIRC, the overall abstract acceptance rate is usually around 50%, but I assume that varies across disciplines, special panels, etc.
The latest data is newly available at:
http://apaclassics.org/Newsletter/2009newsletter/Oct-Dec.html#VPProg
The acceptance rate has been declining in recent years.
The acceptance rate has been declining in recent years.
Yet the quality of the papers has been getting worse...
Re: APA conference papers.
As at most annual professional conferences, the papers seem to do little more than provide a testing ground to prove that job candidates can 1) get an abstract approved and 2) talk in complete sentences. (Beyond that there's the occasional good panel or fraction of a panel, but it's a pretty low percentage fruit.) Proving 1 and 2 isn't stupid or pointless, but for most of the audience it really doesn't seem worth the effort of showing up (everyone's having coffee or buying books anyway). On top of that, interviewing committees, who are busy interviewing, can't make it to a lot of talks by candidates for their positions - which kinda undermines the point of the candidates giving talks in the first place. If we wanted to have academically useful conferences (and invited lectures too for that matter) papers should be distributed in advance, like the one or two seminars that always take place. But since everyone is more interested in sticking meaningless talks on their cv I doubt we'll change things.
On a separate note, I'm a philologist and I feel the AIA panels (which aren't that different from APA panels) work a lot better. Is their content just more amenable to the format or is it just a 'grass is greener' thing?
Interesting thread at the Chronicle:
Things you wish you had known
As a classicist, I wish I had known that most university admins consider the legitimacy of classics as a stand alone discipline about as favorably as phrenology.
Ouch, that hurts but it's depressingly true.
I wish I would have known that the classes in graduate school I would *take* would have just about zero relevance for my job as a faculty member. On the other hand all of those classes that I managed to avoid *teaching* would have been oh so helpful!
In short, I should have volunteered to teach every semester, done the least possible in my classes, nailed my comps quickly, and then written the shortest, fastest, and most mainstream dissertation I could have gotten away submitting.
I wish I had known the "advantages" of academia are largely an illusion in the 21st century. Yeah, there might technically be less hours in the office, but very few of my friends take their work home with them. I also make half what my friends do with a BA, and they've been making it for almost ten years longer, with stock options in some cases. Academia is just a j-o-b now, one with too much grief and too little pay.
I was told that at Amherst College they were looking for a poetry person...
I was told that at Amherst College they were looking for a poetry person...
Ad was for Latin lang. and lit., not poetry specifically. Plus SLACs tend to worry less about specialization since even their seniors don't need a seminar in Plautine metrics. So, apologies for being obtuse, but I'm not really sure what you're getting at except that you may have a beef with your source.
On a related note, there are lots of ads that are actually quite specific and then the committee goes in a completely different direction (e.g., Michigan a couple of years back). It's stuff like that that makes the Santa Clara letter of a few months back so obnoxious. One shouldn't criticize people for applying to absolutely everything if 1) the market is generally awful and 2) committees often behave in seemingly irrational, or at least unpredictable, ways.
The wiki says that the U. Richmond job is "closed." Does this mean an offer was extended (and accepted) or that the search was canceled/failed?
The U. Richmond was offered and accepted (at least verbally- the signed contract might still be making its way through the mail).
In anticipation of the slew of posts that is sure to follow: Yes! I'm sure of this! 100% sure! This job is closed! They have a new TT hire! Really!
In a certain EU country, where 99% of the jobs go to internal candidates, a young lecturer started a blog where people can 'guess' what candidate will likely get the job, so that that sham becomes clear. Wouldn't it be nice to have something similar also here, and so see how many job searches, after thousands of $$$ wasted on interviews and campus visits, end up with the hire of the current VAP in the Dept. that has advertised the job?
It's fortunate/unfortunate (depending on who you are) that this will never happen here.
There's a reason for conducting a search, regardless of there being a fair-haired girl/boy waiting in the wings or not. Universities have hiring regulations to prevent the appearance of corruption and "inside" hires. That means that even if it is 100% sure that they are going to hire the VAP, they still need to run the search.
It doesn't always happen that the VAP or any other "inside" candidate gets the job. There are times when the search brings someone new into the equation whom the search committee, and perhaps the majority of the department, like better.
While it would be nice if job candidates could know for certain cases where the search is a joke and there is no real investigation of other possibilities, so that they could save the time, effort, and money (yes, using Interfolio to send out a writing sample and a whole pile of documents can get costly when it all adds up), this is simply not going to happen. Because if a committee were to reveal that information, the HR department would have a fit, and the Dean might just pull that search altogether, and rethink allowing these people to ever run another search by themselves.
If I might call your attention (assuming you don't already know it) to a interesting blog about the academic market and why it is broken (among other things).
http://howtheuniversityworks.com/wordpress/
I just thought I'd draw attention to a different aspect of the problem (I'm not sure that hiring visiting faculty is a problem).
Well, back to adjunct-life (grading papers on a Friday night!),
tinkerty-tonk,
poldy
Anonymous February 25, 2010 12:57 PM said...
"As a classicist, I wish I had known that most university admins consider the legitimacy of classics as a stand alone discipline about as favorably as phrenology."
Hoi men, hoi d'ou. The number of admins who think classics as a stand alone discipline is like phrenology is actually pretty small. Unless by "a stand alone discipline" you mean a Classics Department that doesn't care about having connections to English, Religion, Philosophy, Comp. Lit, Anthro, Art, History, Medieval Studies etc. that can help protect it from attack.
"Unless by "a stand alone discipline" you mean a Classics Department that doesn't care about having connections to English, Religion, Philosophy, Comp. Lit, Anthro, Art, History, Medieval Studies etc. that can help protect it from attack."
Is there really any kind? Okay, there are a few that actually have good relations with Art and even Anthro, but they're uncommon. And when a constituency gets squeezed, it becomes a free-for-all and the fringe people get squeezed out before the perceived core (realia folks in classics, usually). In the greater humanities world that you've just listed, guess who's the fringiest of all? Yep, classics. I know it's difficult to see from a worm's eye view, but look broader. Classics is no longer considered a viable division by itself in museums and other places that actually cater to the public. It's only a matter of time. As the West gets more diverse in every sense of the word, classics is somehow defying the odds and becoming more monolithic, and the apple apparently doesn't fall too far from the tree judging by the current generation who's about to be handed the keys just as the music stops.
rightly or wrongly I like to use the number of views for job posts as a rough gauge of likely applicant numbers. Any idea why the Fairfield ad has such few views?
An experienced SC member (and twice-failed internal candidate for a job) here. Internal candidates do not have an edge (barring a situation like a spousal hire). Internal candidates must go through the exact same rigorous selection process that outsiders do. They don't get to skip the job talk, the dinner, the meet with students, the teaching demo. They earn those jobs the same as an outsider would. Yes, it is conceivable that they have an advantage because the department's hired them already, and in fact many departments will grant internals a courtesy preliminary interview or even campus interview on those grounds. BUT the disadvantage for internals is that the department already knows you, perhaps too well. They know your work habits. They hear things from students. They have to clean up the microwave after your popcorn stinks up the department. They see you swearing over a fender-bender in the parking lot. Etc.
Yes, internals do get the job sometimes - I'd hazard it's roughly 50-50 if they do, often because they were hired for a reason and they still fit the bill. But they earn it, just like the rest of you. Stop trying to take away from another's success because you didn't get a job you thought was yours (what I suspect is the motive behind such a post). You act as though internals were just plonked onto third base without having to get there by their own merits. And that is simply not the case.
More on internal candidates:
When I was on the market five years ago, I was stunned by the number of internal candidates who did *not* get jobs that they - ahem, we - were all well positioned for. In those pre-wiki days, my friends and I counted up fully 19 of us that we knew were 'inside' candidates. As I recall, only one of us got the inside job. Myself I was turned down for not one but two jobs, both in my specialty, that my institution was interviewing for. Sort of stings.
So those conspiracy-minded folks who believe that the internal candidates get all the jobs are far mistaken. The last poster has it right - you're a known quantity as an inside candidate...and isn't the grass always greener etc...?
Re: Internal Candidates
A very interesting topic. Last year we had one such internal candidate, with two candidates invited in from the outside. One of the outsiders happened to perform far better in terms of the research and teaching presentations, so that we really had no choice in the matter. The internal candidate had the advantage, and for whatever reason did not perform at the same level. We debated for a very long time about what to do, but eventually went with the outside candidate, who simply did a better job of prep and engagement than our insider. It got ugly, of course -- the insider took it quite personally, refused to speak to any of us (even those on the internal candidate's side), and caused a great deal of friction.
Which brings me to a small piece of advice: Insiders, don't burn your bridges. While you may not understand why you did not get the job, there are certainly people there who are or were on your side, and when you go up for that next job your interviewers will be expecting to read something from your immediate past colleagues. While it is certainly understandable to be angry and frustrated, don't let that jeopardize your future, nor break off with colleagues who often do care (very much so) what happens to your career...
Anyone know if West Georgia has made an offer yet?
Re: WVU position. According to the wiki the job has been offered and accepted (as of 2-25).
Re: the WEST GEORGIA position. Um. And I clearly misread your question and answered with completely unrelated information. A thousand apologies!
I know the query concerned W. Georgia. But to add to the West Virginia comment, I received a rejection letter yesterday informing me that they had filled the position after receiving 100+ applications.
Well, since we are here, has anybody heard anything from Dartmouth or College of Wooster (VAP Generalist)?
So is it a bad sign if I read that the distinguished Italian scholar Giovanni Pugliese Carratelli, the Abe Vigoda of ancient history, has died at age 99 and one of my thoughts is, "I wonder if this opens up a teaching position"?
http://www.ilmattino.it/articolo.php?id=91116&sez=NAPOLI
Wooster has been offered and (I am pretty sure) accepted.
NB: This blog is for rumors, and the wiki is for facts. Posting a rumor here does not constitute sufficient evidence to update the wiki! Shame on the person who posted to the wiki that the Wooster VAP was definitely filled because the FV rumor mill said it was probably filled!
Well, since we are here, has anybody heard anything from Dartmouth
Shortlist being drawn up, I hear.
In the past, posts have been made to the wiki citing FV or rumor mill as sources (just look at last year's wiki). I don't see the problem here. Maybe the wiki poster went too far in saying the job was accepted, but the post on FV was pretty definitive on an offer at least, and citing the source as FV should instantly caution folks about the source. Lots of folks don't read both FV and the wiki, since FV often deteriorates into Battle of the ClArchs and Philologists! Volume 1679! etc. Just so long as no one is bandying names about recklessly or erroneously, and everyone sources their info, the wiki serves its purpose.
The person failed to engage in a close textual reading, and therefore was probably one of those poorly trained archaeologists who do nthing on their digs but drink and hit on 18-year-olds, when they could be studying their languages.
Since we're calling people out, I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who are currently in TT positions but moving into another one elsewhere. Not only is this a zero sum game for the discipline, but it's probably a net loss in the short if not long term. Thanks! While we're at it, all you AARP card-carrying members, go retire already!
Since we're calling people out, I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who are currently in TT positions but moving into another one elsewhere. Not only is this a zero sum game for the discipline, but it's probably a net loss in the short if not long term. Thanks! While we're at it, all you AARP card-carrying members, go retire already!
You are most welcome! I'm thrilled to be leaving that hell-hole. Good luck getting a job there. You'll be miserable too.
Since we're calling people out, I would like to extend my thanks to all the people who are currently in TT positions but moving into another one elsewhere. Not only is this a zero sum game for the discipline, but it's probably a net loss in the short if not long term
I can't ever decide whether this is the lamest complaint on here, or if it's the one about "inside candidates." It's hard, because they're both really lame. But I'd probably vote for "inside candidate." You know, if you forced me to choose. But still, this one is right up there in terms of lameness. Definitely very lame in its own right, is what I'm saying. 9.6, 9.7, somewhere around there.
Whew, at least this time, the senstive TT transfer didn't go into a rant about being mercenary. It would have made a good beer commercial - practice? playoffs? mercenary? I'll show you mercenary, you !@#$ piece of Q@#$!
Just spotted on College Confidential by my son...
"Hey guys,
Well next year I am going to be applying to [Ivy school] and really want to get in. There is a rumor at my school that students have a great shot at getting into [IS] if they apply to the [liberal arts] program for "classics". I am currently a junior in high school and have taken:
Frosh: Latin 1 Grade: A
Soph: Latin 2 Honors Grade: B (this is the only B on my transcript I have a 3.78 unweighted)
Junior: Latin 3 Honors Grade: A
Senior: Latin prose and poetry Grade: A
My question however is should I apply to [IS] as if I were interested in Classics. What I hear is that the [IS] has much lower standards for people applying into the Classics program than all other majors. Also, I was wondering if after I get accepted into the [liberal arts] program if I can switch into [prestigious pre-professional college] without any problems.
Thanks guys"
Then comes the best reply.
"Here is a probe that ought to help you decide:
What are your preferences in addition to [PPC]? If they are exclusively [pre-professional] programs, you may want to reconsider your application to classics - if you become stuck there you could be screwed."
Great, so we're now apparently the geeks at the circus, a curiosity with little perceived worth except to set up the main show. So much for classics being the de facto honors discipline. This student has taken at least four Latin classes and feels the need to put classics in quotes?
Come to think of it, when I tell people I teach classics, they do look at me like I bite off the heads of chickens.
The scary part is that in the current economy, many people who retire will not be replaced. Consequently, it probably is not the right time to be urging people to retire. It will just contribute to the shrinking of the field.
As a means of assurance to those who are not T-T but on the market, I'm a member of a recent T-T search, and I'd say that only about 5% of the whole applicant pool were those people who have T-T positions already. At least in our case, there doesn't seem to be a flood of such people. Rather, about 60% of the candidates were out within 1-2 years and were holding temp/visiting jobs, while the rest were ABDs near completion. Those are rough numbers, but even with the market the way that it is, I don't detect a lot more movement among the "Haves" than usual. But if anyone else on a search wants to chime in, I'd be curious if you are willing to offer similar rough figures...
At my alma mater, 2 of 3 finalists are in TT positions. One is not TT, but in a very good position. I have no idea what the overall applicant pool looked like. At my current institution, all three candidates are in TT positions. Once again, I have no idea what the applicant looked like. Regardleses, these are two TT searches out of how many this year? 50? 60? I would guess that TT applicants are relatively low as you suggest, but it doesn't change the fact that they appear to be quite enticing to search committees.
Interesting. Well, in regard to what I just said above, of the three who were invited to campus in our search, ALL have their degree (although we did interview a few ABDs), and NONE have a permanent position. So that makes us 0-3 for T-T people. While those people who already have T-T positions were very strong candidates, please also remember that they come with their own baggage. While some schools are deliberately looking for more experienced candidates, others are not enticed by these individuals. But again, I'd be curious to hear from others who might discuss their searches (in the abstract, of course).
The economy almost certainly favors candidates with experience, but this is counter-balanced by baggage and "potential," or perceived lack thereof. This is only a guestimate, but this is how the numbers should play out based on past experience and the current economic/political climate.
5-10 jobs will go to superstar ABDs. They have top scholars as advisors and come with academic pedigree - the Princeford candidates that get crucified on here. They will probably have the good fortune of having a diss topic that's particulary hot right now.
Another 5-10 jobs will go to candidates in TT positions. They're either moving up, down, or sideways due to geographic/spousal considerations.
Once you subtract the senior positions (and the small percentage of junior positions that get sniped by seniors), you're probably talking about 30 positions or so. Ten or so will go to internal candidates. This leaves around 20 as truly open to junior scholars with degree in hand but without a TT position. I would guess there are around 200 applicants who aren't just testing the waters. Maybe half could scrounge up something with their current or home institution. So 50+ are totally screwed.
Do you pull numbers out of your ass like that when you do research? That's probably not helping your jobsearch.
Here are the numbers I just pulled out of the wiki's butt (aka the job market data for hires over the past two seasons):
08-09 07-08
New "pedigree" Phds:
10 21
Inside Hires:
11 9
Phds (i.e. not recent grads):
47 101(12? tt-tt)
New Phds:
26 39
Hopefully I managed the format well enough for this to be legible. Our definitions of "pedigree" Phds might differ slightly, but I limited that population to only those schools on which everyone would agree. I also tried to assume nothing, so if a description wasn't clear, I left that out of the count. I'll leave the conclusions to you all.
All I got out of this exercise was a strong urge to be on the market for the 2007-2008 season, when there were about a million jobs out there.
Just for clarification at what point does a new phud become a regular phud with or without a job (vap, tt, or otherwise)? One, two, three years? Just wondering how long some of us might have to wait for all the stars to line up right.
Perhaps not the sort of answer you're looking for, but in the counts above I included only those hires described as "grad" or listed with only a PhD institution and the current year as their completion date (no subsequent position or institution) in the "New Phd" category. This doesn't distinguish between very recent grads and ABDs. People with "no affiliation" were still lumped into the generic "PhD" category. Even people who took jobs before they were finished probably get bumped out of the "New Phd" category under my system, but I would guess that they also look different to search committees.
to whoever was complaining in the "jeers" section about NYU's interview committee, you should know that they have been searching for various positions for the past few years and weeding though hundreds of files. and in 30 minutes you have to cut to the chase.
Not really related to the job search, but for those who don't know already Sir Kenneth Dover has gone on to his reward (which I hope is full and abundant): http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/7400324/Sir-Kenneth-Dover.html
Should we really feel bad for NYU when they have the opportunity to hire (even as many other departments lose positions)?
Despite their 'rudeness' (as reported in 'Jeers') they still receive record numbers of applications and have the benefit of a buyer's market.
This isn't a kvetch about the job-market per se, but I do think it is a problem worthy of noting, regardless of whether one is hoping to get a job or to keep the job one has.
I ran across this post at Brian Leiter's blog and felt that I could have been the one writing if we substitute "classics" for "philosophy" and name certain Classics journals accordingly.
I'm an untenured faculty member at [a PhD-granting department], and I'm writing because I think something needs to be done about the state of philosophy journals lately. I am powerless to do anything, but maybe if some attention is drawn to the problems (again) on your blog, the situation can be improved.
The problems, as I see them, are these. Junior faculty need to publish in "good" journals. But this is getting harder and harder to do. Currently THREE of the top six (according to the survey you did) philosophy journals are not currently accepting submissions (Nous, PPR, and AJP). The situation with AJP is a one-time only problem (the website says that the editor is ill), but it seems like Nous and PPR only accept submissions for about 6 months out of any given year lately. This has the effect of roughly doubling the number of submissions to the other top journals. These other journals are then swamped with submissions, and their review times slow. (As it is, when you send a paper to the Philosophical Review these days, six months go by before the paper is even sent to someone to read.) The editors of these journals pressure referees to be extra critical, so that they do not also acquire a long backlog of accepted papers. The editors also cut down on the number of referees who read each paper, since they have so many papers to send out. It seems to me that this does not lead to yet higher standards at these journals. Instead it just increases the amount of arbitrariness in the review process, so that it is more likely that even good papers will be rejected. Add to this the fact that the journals that are out of commission are the ones with good editorial practices and faster review times, and the result is that there are relatively few places to send your paper, you must wait a long time to find out whether it will be published, and the chances that it will be accepted are lower. For those under the time pressure of a tenure clock, this is a disaster. It is hard to imagine making the case to my dean that my paper was not published in a "good" journal because so many of those journals were out of commission for most of the last few years---even if that is a large part of the explanation.
What are the possible solutions? We either need more "good" philosophy journals, or we need the good ones to publish more often. The founding of Philosophers' Imprint was a big help here---not only is it a new journal, but because it is online-only it is not confined to publishing only four issues worth of papers each year. But no other general philosophy journal ranked in your survey has shown any signs of giving up the print-journal calendar and following this model. Why not? I'm not sure who is benefitting from the current set-up. In fact, there seems to be an opportunity here for some of the journals: journals ranked near the middle (say, the American Philosophical Quarterly) could re-invent themselves and increase their prestige by going online-only.
It seems like the Philosophers recognize the problem, and are acting to deal with it. Is there any sense that our own senior colleagues are doing something similar?
Young Hellenist, what is the evidence that publishing online ameliorates the claimed problem that journals "take too long" to publish work? The post seems to suggest it's the *refereeing* that takes forever - that's a front-end problem.
What do people think about starts a stats section (speciality, # apps with types of departments, # long lists, # short lists, # campus invites, # offers) on the wiki? I've noticed some other disciplines doing it and it seems helpful for both applicants and the discipline as a whole. Heck, we know the APA is not in a position to do something similar. Any downsides?
That should say "starting" and not "starts." Sue me, it's 7am and I'm jobless.
I agree that it is a front-end problem, and going online will amelioriate only a portion of this. I also think that going online would enable more journals to flourish, and to publish more regularly. If faculty are expected to publish substantially more (an undisputed fact) then the profession needs to ensure platforms for that publishing. As libraries cancel subscriptions, university presses go into the toilet, those platforms are drying up. This is, as the young philosopher stated, a disaster. A disaster for those of us who are producing but can't find venues, and a disaster for the field. We are all caught in a catch-22, and administrators and senior faculty don't seem to recognize this. Or maybe they do and are working to fix it without broadcasting those efforts.
Interesting issue brought up by Young Hellenistic. Maybe -- call me crazy -- the way to go here is that we should start putting less emphasis on publication in general, and more on teaching and outreach. Who Killed Homer? I'd say the R1 institutions and the idea that quantity matters over quality. But hey, I'm just an instructor at an SLAC that places greater emphasis on teaching over publication, so what do I know? Or as Dennis Miller says, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong...
Just to add my $.02 to this thread about publishing.
Young Hellenistic mentioned the interest of the field. Very, very true. Administrative expectations of publishing are getting higher and higher. This makes is more difficult for classicists on two counts: 1) It takes longer for us to produce good scholarship because of the very nature of that scholarship. 2) This scholarship takes longer to review and does not have the wide range of publication options available to other humanists.
These two problems (and others) lead to issues of hiring and tenure (especially acute to those classicists teaching in, e.g., history departments). Denial of tenure is a disaster not only to the individual denied tenure, but to the field since all too often that FTE is taken away from classics and given to a sexier field. This makes the job-market all the worse for the rest of us, and shrinks the profession overall.
The APA simply MUST direct its resources to expanding avenues for junior-level research, and educating non-classicists about the challenges of scholarship in the field. Deans and Provosts are using every tool available to cut lines and re-shape the academic landscape -- classics is a constant target. Tenure-denial is a ready-made knife for them and we classicists should try to blunt it in recognition of scholarly fairness and in the interests of the field as a whole.
This seems to me a little like putting the cart before the horse. Are the increasing demands for publication really a cause for the dearth of t-t jobs? If deans are taking t-t positions away from classics, how often are they converting them to t-t positions in other fields? If anything, they are replacing them with non t-t positions. This is why whereas 30 years ago, 60% of faculty were t-t, but now only 30% are. The academic landscape is being redrawn, but this has less to do with our internal demands for publication, and more to do with an administrative emphasis on flexibility.
This seems to me a little like putting the cart before the horse. Are the increasing demands for publication really a cause for the dearth of t-t jobs? If deans are taking t-t positions away from classics, how often are they converting them to t-t positions in other fields? If anything, they are replacing them with non t-t positions. This is why whereas 30 years ago, 60% of faculty were t-t, but now only 30% are. The academic landscape is being redrawn, but this has less to do with our internal demands for publication, and more to do with an administrative emphasis on flexibility.
Not true at my university. A tenure denial in classics last year meant a loss of the line to our department with no temporary hire to replace it. In the meantime departments like Economics and Politics gained lines. It is impossible to trace particular FTEs since the money is fungible, but Deans are most assuredly converting former classics lines to other fields. They would never admit to this, but it is the case.
Same experience here, but our person left for another job. Political Science received three new lines the following year without even asking when we ask every year for one to no avail. When I discussed our situation with a colleague in Poli Sci, it was so foreign to him that it didn't register. He viewed it with a curiosity that bordered on the macabre and didn't realize how offensive he was being.
We're foolish if we don't see that we're getting screwed big time by administrations.
This has nothing to do with any of this, but might be of interest to some: what appears to be a fascinating new study of oxygen levels in Icelandic clam shells represents further evidence for a Roman warm period. (Some of you work in areas for which this is significant; most of us don't.) Here's the info: http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100308/full/news.2010.110.html?s=news_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+news%2Frss%2Fnews_s7+%28NatureNews+-+Earth+and+Environment%29&utm_content=Netvibes
The study's also extremely important because it represents new evidence that the global warming alarmists who denied there even was a Medieval Warming Period were dead wrong about that. But that's a tale for another day...
Sheesh, what are you, some grubby prehistoric archaeologist? Crawl back under your rock, caveman.
The study's also extremely important because it represents new evidence that the global warming alarmists who denied there even was a Medieval Warming Period were dead wrong about that.
Well, sure, but it snowed a lot in DC this year, which proves that really we are experiencing global cooling. So, no worries!
I heart this place.
Well, at least we know what's bouncing around the heads of our colleagues but goes unsaid.
Re Anonymous 12:48: I think this discussion is getting perilously close to a violation of TOS - we are discussing the career path of a particular person who is easily identified.
Servius, can we have a ruling?
Agreed. Comments deleted.
Comments were not malicious but discussing another person's career, etc. in such a way should be avoided at all costs.
Please excuse my tardiness in addressing this. I am just now getting back from our spring break and my colleagues in moderation are still away.
Anybody know what the situation is with the Northern Illinois ancient history job? I never received a rejection letter, although the wiki says they went out last week. I've also heard through the grapevine that the job was offered to somebody, who then turned it down. Anybody else out there more in the loop than I am, and is willing to share?
Hellenists are SOL for the short-term job market.
does anyone know the status of the ancient art/arch search at Wellesley College?
Re: March 16, 2010 2:13 PM
I received a letter this week from Northern Illinois indicating that the search had been completed. No real details included.
Honest question here from an archaeologist on the verge of graduation. Is someone in my situation pretty much screwed? I don't have a dig where I can take 40 students and I don't imagine getting one anytime soon. Half the permanent jobs seem to be taken by an internal candidatse who's been toiling there for a number of years. Is the main path to a permanent job paved with years of VAPing as a second-class in a classics or art history department? I would appreciate comments from older archaeologists who have somehow made it through this morass. Thanks.
Honest answer (I hope) from a recently tenured Classical Archaeologist. Took me awhile to find a job, and when I did, it was in a history department. I kept all avenues open, and went with my strengths. In my case, I'm a field archaeologist with a lesser interest in art historical issues, so it was a good fit. The dig part didn't really end up mattering much, although I am part of an active field project and I have taken students with me into the field. There are jobs I did NOT get because they wanted someone who did vases or sculpture, and could care less about my work abroad. All of which is to say, as you probably suspect and often read on this site, it is a crap shoot with no guarantees, in which luck often plays a significant role. Sorry, but that is my take.
My advice would then be to (a) look beyond the environment of a Classics Dept., either to History or Art History, if those areas apply, and work on a strong case why you can help that discipline; (b) get out and meet as many people from different schools and regions as you can, give papers, go to conferences (get your name out there); and (c) get your foot in the door somewhere, for yes indeed, the VAP route is the one that pretty much all of us are taking and, moreover, it is the one that committees more or less expect now (that being my impression)...
It's definitely a rough time to be looking for a job in archaeology (and Classics and academia in general), but I don't think not having a dig means you're screwed. Most junior scholars don't have their own digs, and, despite the fact that many schools may be attracted by a dig, most of them don't have or won't commit the resources (money, leave time) needed to support one. Also, when you do get a job (think positive...), you'll want to focus on publishing, not excavating, until you get tenure.
It's high time someone created an academic job market reality show.
Considering that television likes to focus its gaze on the stupid and the pretty, I highly doubt that idea would get very far with the programming executives.
We could be the academic equivalent of "The Biggest Loser." Instead of wringing the pounds off of its participants, ours will be surrounded by lawyers, doctors, nurses, and other gainfully employable professionals who berate us until we admit stupidity for pursuing an academic job in the humanities. How's that?
Hey, why not feature a Classicist on Discovery's "Dirty Jobs" with Mike Rowe? They can bring him in to spend a day in a Classics Dept...All sorts of hilarity will ensue...
For everyone counting on a robust slate of VAPs to be announced in April .... think again.
"For everyone counting on a robust slate of VAPs to be announced in April .... think again."
I've been here a few years. This is a fairly strong temporary market - five jobs in April? (Read the Cincinnati ad - they have up to 3.) There are also a number of jobs for classicists, or that classicists are viable candidates for, on the FV boards, that have not been announced through the APA.
There will never be a slew of jobs in Classics. That's the nature of the field.
As a newbie to the classics job market, can someone tell me whether this year's market is right in line with the economy or if it's indicative of a larger shift/decline in the way universities do business with the humanities and classics? In other words, will the classics job market pick right back up after the economy rebounds or are we screwed?
The immediate results of the economic downturn have been the contraction of the job market. But, as we see economic improvement you should not expect to see any correlating improvement for you academic job prospects. Administrators are using this crisis to the full, slashing and eliminating programs by fiat, recognizing that everybody is too stunned and fearful to react. Short answer: we're screwed.
As witness I call forward this letter, which my chair distributed just a few minutes ago:
Dear Friends,
As some of you may know, the department of Classics at Trinity College in Hartford, Ct. (my alma mater) faces elimination. I learned of this development a couple of weeks ago, but the College’s administration has been planning (informally but in detail) the move for some time. A short article appeared in a recent issue of the Trinity student newspaper.
The plan, to the extent that it is known, professes to strengthen Classics at Trinity by dissolving the department and replacing it with an interdisciplinary Classical Studies program that will draw on faculty from Religion, History, Philosophy, Modern Languages, and other departments. Trinity enjoys outstanding faculty specializing in the ancient world in those disciplines, and it may be that a program relying on them will strengthen Classics at the College. But that is not a view that I, or I suspect many other Classicists, share. Leaving aside that the teaching of Greco-Roman civilization will be spread across many departments without a centralized, institutional base, what will be lost is serious study of classical languages and literature, the teaching of which will fall in part to adjuncts. Indeed, Trinity’s faculty, numbering now more than 200, presently lacks a tenured or tenure-track member with a PhD in Classics; the present chair and last permanent member of the Classics department is a Classical Archaeologist by training; other Classics department faculty have PhDs in Classics but hold only temporary, non-tenurable appointments. Ironically, this ostensible move to strengthen Classics comes in the wake of external review conducted by well-known Classicists from Wellesley, Vassar, and Yale; they called for strengthening the department by restoring to it the two tenured/tenure-track lines that it had held for nearly fifty years but that have been filled by temporary appointments for the last several. One could argue that the College’s refusal to fill these lines in the first place, a decision that precedes the present financial crisis struck and can only cause instability, is the very reason that Classics at Trinity now needs strengthening.
Trinity’s Classics department is probably not well known; it has always been low profile, committed (like many of its small college counterparts) principally to teaching. Its faculty has included distinguished Classicists, such as Frank Cole Babbitt, translator of Plutarch’s Moralia for the Loeb Classicsal Library, and James A. Notopoulos, best known alongside Parry and Lord for his work on Homer and oral poetics. More recent faculty have published monographs on everything from Nepos to Corinthian pottery to Proclus. But the department’s chief focus was never research; it always has been to produce majors who can put their Classics degrees to good use in a variety of fields, and it has graduated a long line of students who have gone on to successful careers in law, business, medicine, and other professions--precisely what an undergraduate degree in Classics at a small liberal arts college ought to do. Trinity's Classics department has turned out some distinguished Classicists who include Louis Feldman of Yeshiva, Bruce Frier at Michigan, and Ken Harl at Tulane. The late Willie Coulson, Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for many years, was an alumnus. Still other alumni have taught or still teach at institutions ranging from Kenyon to Dartmouth to Emory, and not only in departments of Classics but also in departments of Religion and Philosophy -- these latter testimony to the breadth and versatility of a Trinity Classics degree; still other Trinity Classics majors are now in graduate programs at Oxford, Princeton, and other universities. And Trinity's Classics majors now department has turned out many who now teach in public and private high schools throughout New England and the U.S. It is difficult to understand, with this record of alumni achievement, what was so broken about the department that the Trinity administration believes that it can only be fixed by dismantling it.
The disappearance of Trinity's Classics department has broader ramifications. Of concern is what loss of a Classics department at an institution like Trinity portends for the long-term future of Classics in the United States. As a liberal arts college with some claim to national pre-eminence, and one that once boasted three permanent positions in its Classics department (to say nothing of specialists in ancient history and ancient philosophy housed in other units), Trinity is precisely the type of institution where Classics should, indeed must, survive to ensure the continuing strength of our discipline. If Trinity, with an undergraduate price tag of $50,000+ and a substantial endowment, will not support a Classics department with specialists in Greek and Latin literature, civilization, and culture, how can we expect other institutions, ones with fewer financial resources, to do so? And then where will PhD-granting Classics departments place their students? I don't want to be melodramatic or alarmist, but we cannot not rely solely on the existence of Classics departments at large universities alone to maintain the health of Classics; its survival also depends on other Classics departments, small and large, at colleges and universities throughout the U.S.
All of us appreciate the financial pressures that Trinity, and indeed all institutions of higher education, now face. Budget cuts have forced my employer, Florida State University, not only to consolidate and eliminate departments but even to lay off and let go tenured and tenure-earning faculty, as recent reports in the Chronicle of Higher Education have highlighted. All of us appreciate too that presidents, provosts, and deans are faced nowadays with exceedingly difficult choices, ones that affect not just the survival of departments but even entire institutions. But it bears repeating that financial pressures are not the sole or even the main reason given for the desire to dissolve Trinity’s Classics department. The plans to eliminate the department appear to spring from a view that misunderstands what Classics is today, or that sees little value for the teaching of language, literature, and culture in undergraduate education.
There are other issues involved, but I don't want to impose any more on your time. The American Philological Association has been notified, and its advisory service is lending its support. Alumni have started to write and express their concerns to college officials. I suspect that Martha Risser, the department chair at Trinity, would welcome messages of support as well (Martha.Risser@trincoll.edu). For my part, I am trying to gather information and have set up a Facebook page, Keep Classics at Trinity to foster support, promote communication, and signal concern at what is in the works. I realize that this is not your fight, and I apologize for contacting out of the blue so many of you with whom I have not often been in touch, in some cases for years. But I would appreciate it if you would consider joining this group, leaving a message, and perhaps spreading the word to others (I myself have not contacted the Classics email list but have preferred to write to friends and colleagues). And if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, I would welcome to hear from you.
Sincerely,
Jim Sickinger (Trinity '86)
It's sad to hear this, but it is not very surprising. I pull two quotes of interest from the Trinity newspaper article:
"The Dean is trying to think, with senior faculty here, of ways to extend our offerings rather than to have to justify tiny-enrolled courses for a very few." (James F. Jones, Jr. President of Trinity College)
"Some have expressed concern about enrollments,' said Risser, "While it is true that some of our classes (e.g. Advanced Greek) are consistently small, others (e.g. Mythology, Ancient Warfare, Ancient Athletics) are large. Our average enrollments are equivalent to those of other departments."
Note which classes consistently have large enrollments and which have small ones.
I am not trying to start a philologists v. others debate again. There's little point holding a fiddle contest while Rome is burning.
But it really is as simple as this: not enough students are interested in pursuing the languages to the advanced level. And you don't need tenured professors to teach first or even second year Latin and Greek.
I agree with many points from the previous posts. As a mid-career classicist at a SLAC in upper New England, the events at Trinity are a gut punch to classics. At our modest SLAC, we've always taken solace in the fact that our "peer institutions" have classics. If the leading SLACs start downsizing classics, it's only a matter of time before administrators at other SLACs are emboldened to do the same. Our mandate will have vanished. If it is indeed a numbers game, I fear we're on an irreversible path towards extinction.
Holy smokes, has anyone checked out the courses taught by the chair at Trinity?! Hats off to her as she's definitely doing her part to hold down the fort. I don't think I've ever seen such a vast array of courses: Bronze Age and archaeological theory to Catullus and Jerusalem?!
Yes, she's a true gem. (Said at the risk of incurring Servius' Delete key, for discussing a specific person.)
It truly is a shame as we should be celebrating and nurturing good teachers who teach such a wide breadth of classes in classics.
We should, but the way our incentive structure works, you get no credit for doing so. All that matters is research research research. It is complete bullshit. Teaching, the stuff students are paying us for, and the stuff that excites a few to join the field, is accorded zero respect. We are fools.
Honestly, what do you guys expect? Yes, I'm a bit of an outsider as a faculty member in anthropology, but my research is focused in the Mediterranean. Have you taken a step back and seen the situation from an outsider's point of view? Yes, some of this is just a general assault on the humanities, but some of it is inherent to your discipline, which you have much more control over.
The thing that strikes me about classics is how white, white, white it is (and I say this as an Irish-American). I'm not just talking about the color of people's skin, but the entire culture/bubble you're in - the topics of discussion both at colloquia and in the hallway, the multicultural relevance of classes, etc. Classics already has a reputation as an elitist, white discipline. I see very little effort by classics as a whole to dispel this notion. As the country heads toward a demographic with caucasians no longer forming the majority, how can a discipline be so lily white and unwelcoming to a huge chunk of the population in the 21st century?
My own department has recognized its shortcomings, which are nowhere near as dire, and have taken drastic action over the past decade. We've gone from zero ALANA faculty to four (around twenty total). As the departmental culture changed with our new faculty, so has the makeup of our students. We have gone from three ALANA grad students to twenty-one (~60 grad students in any given year). We don't keep tabs on our undergrads, but the change here seems comparable. I once gave a talk co-sponsored by a UC classics department and was surprised by how different my audience was in comparison to the general student body you saw roaming the campus. How can a campus with so many Latinos and Asians have no one from these groups involved in their classics community? Absolutely mindboggling.
Anonymous 12:34, you're suggesting departments' risk of closing depends on the skin color of their faculty and grad students? Hmn... there's a name for that... What is it... On the tip of my tongue... Where decisions about people are made solely on the basis of their race...
Not incidentally, it's a little weird to focus on the physical appearance of the faculty rather than on the much more important question of whether a dept. is appropriately serving its college/university. And last I checked, a dept.'s performance was not dependent upon its physical appearance.
As an anthropologist you think that if we had small language classes consisting of more diversity we would be okay? You don't think it's the size that's the problem in the first place? Do you really think it's possible for us to make advanced study of Greek a hundred strong class if 'we' were less 'white'? You're now marshaling a race argument to attack the teaching of an intellectual discipline? I'm really not sure what to say in response.
Now, now, let's not get testy. The anthropologist has a point, although I think it's a little far-fetched. ALANA faculty country-wide average only about 15-17%. So it's a little disingenuous to state that it's a classics' problem, or that it's the reason why classics depts are being cut.
I guess what he/she is getting at, is that we need more diverse views, and to interest students and (perhaps more importantly) administrators in what we're doing. I think that has little or nothing to do with the color of our skin, and everything to do with the content of our curricula. I would agree with that.
Re: Anon 12:34 and the "lily white" nature of our field
I disagree that we are not addressing the problem. In order to get more ALANA profs, we need to attract more ALANA people to the field in UG and Grad. That is where we are focusing most of our energy, because there simply aren't enough ALANA people on the market right now to start stacking the deck.
At the recent annual meetings, I attended a seminar on attracting women and minorities to the field, where I met some pretty phenomenal women and minorities holding tenured professorships at various universities and learned some strategies for recruiting and retaining women and minorities. Then I came home and began to implement my new found knowledge. The seminar wasn't packed to the brim, but I certainly wasn't the only one in the audience.
You may think our subject matter has only white appeal, but I don't: the Classics is a study of some cultures that greatly influenced our own, and therefore has relevance to anyone who currently participates in our culture. It is also a study of people who have experienced many of the same things we witness in our lives, like nation-building, racism, and multi-culturalism. Studying these historical issues allows us to reflect on how we approach our own world. (And by the way, to the anti-philology commenter: knowledge of Greek and Latin is essential to studying these cultures.)
Yes, we still have a ways to go, but I take offense at the suggestion that we aren't trying.
I don't totally agree with the anthropologist's post, but s/he did say:
I'm not just talking about the color of people's skin, but the entire culture/bubble you're in - the topics of discussion both at colloquia and in the hallway, the multicultural relevance of classes, etc.
And to continue to play the devil's advocate, it's been proven that the easiest and most effective way to change the culture of an organization is from the top down. Off the top of my head, I know of an African-American Roman Archaeologist who has not been able to get a job for almost ten years. Yes, she does something a bit different, but this is a nice example of how narrowly defined our search parameters take. Shouldn't we at least pause and reflect on the parameters we use to determine that she's "less qualified?" I know of one African-American male grad student at a top program who dropped out due to a number of issues, but the departmental culture was definitely near the top. I know of one Asian-American Ph.D. who should have gotten a job years ago. Once again, the person does something a bit different. Whether we admit it or not, there's a certain cachet in our discipline to representing a certain cultural norm which can very well be construed as "lily white."
For whoever mentioned it, our situation is not just a numbers game. It is not an objective formula where a department's enrollment drops 10% so your support drops 10%. Provosts and deans are making subjective decisions keeping the entire college/university in mind. Programs are downsized and shut down, not just to save money, but so those resources can be freed up for programs considered a higher priority.
What does this mean? It's a competition, folks, and we're getting our asses handed to us by History, Biology, etc. If you don't continually have a watchdog in your program with the mentality of a pitbull, you WILL get downsized. It's not enough to have brilliant, absent-minded faculty whose reseach "speaks for itself." If you combine this with the dreadful economy and the recent siege against the humanities, it goes a long way to explain the predicament we're all in.
Heaven help us if we have to count on having pitbulls in our departments. That's paranoia, not a strategy. What is needed is a discipline-wide outreach attempt, not to high school, but to administrators, to try to show them that their view of classics as an outdated discipline is outdated. For Pete's sake, the Trinity president thinks all we do is drill verb forms and wax about Virgil! No wonder he wants to cut the program!
drill verb forms and wax about Virgil
I know you meant this as a parody, but since some people within Classics think that 1) this is the vast majority of what we do and 2) verb forms and Vergil are over-rated, we can hardly present a unified front to any administrator. Creative differences are good, but if we can't stand up for something that's important without caving in the face of some social scientific paradigm (does anyone out there remember that we have something to do with the humanities?), then we're basically buying into the hierarchization of human knowledge that ends with technocratic education plus the History channel.
(Yes, I work at a liberal arts college, if that wasn't obvious. And if my department engaged in the kind of self-consumption that goes on on FV we would have been disbanded long ago.)
Then I came home and began to implement my new found knowledge.
Care to elaborate?
A neat article which a friend just sent to me, perhaps of relevance to some of our discussions lately...
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/04/02/the_classics_rock
Has anybody out there ever gone through Carney-Sandoe in order to find a teaching gig at a prep school?
I submitted my info a while ago and have gotten no love. Is it because I have a Ph.D.? How do you convince the private high schools that you are serious? I've struck out on the market four years now and I am tired of moving from temp to temp -- I would much prefer a steady job teaching decent high school kids Latin, and Greek if possible, than this crap.
Any ideas?
I used Carney Sandoe 20 years ago, when I finished my undergrad studies, and they were very good, very professional. Helped me get a job at a nice prep school for two years, before I went on to grad school. How they are today, though, I couldn't really say. I did use them again 10 years ago, when I went on the market, and sent in materials to them in the same situation that you are in. I received several notices of jobs, but just then I also received a VAP position, so I wrote them to cancel my candidacy.
That said, I did very much enjoy teaching at a private school, and while I eventually elected to go the college teaching route, I often think back about whether I should have continued down that line. The faculty was very supportive, the students were great, and it was a very rewarding experience. I even got to teach Greek (as well as Latin and ancient history). I can think of at least three well established profs who have left their academic jobs to teach in a private school. So don't despair -- it might be the best move you have ever made, depending on your preferences...
Two of my grad school mates found good positions through C/S. I used it myself for a few years to keep an eye out for anything to tempt me away from a PhD. The last year I used them was the 2008-09 season and I received far fewer notifications than in previous years. The ACL looks thinner this year as well and an ABD friend looking for a HS post is coming up as empty as those looking for Uni work so...tough all over?
Just OOC: how many folks applied for the Classics-related but non-college teaching jobs listed on FV? (the library jobs, the editing job, the middle and secondary school jobs)
This reader feels that the FV community should produce an independently authored report of job placements over the last 3 academic years and submit this report to APA/AIA. If the FV coordinators would organize this, then candidates could opt to identify themselves by name or else be tabulated anonymously. The statistic always absent from the APA's often late in coming job placement report is the tabulation of job seekers in Classics/Archaeology/Ancient History who ply the market but are not successful in netting either a T-T or visiting post (vel sim). If FV readers and users can produce an independently authored report, it would be both interesting and perhaps instructive. For what it's worth, BOTH APA and AIA could greatly increase their respective levels of service to their professional constituencies.
Does anyone know what's happening with the McMaster post-doc?
Pretty sure that the McMaster's PostDoc has been awarded (reliable connection to lucky candidate).
Anyone have any info on the Yale search? Their original projected timetable would have them making an offer soon...
who knows what is going on with the various archaeology searches at Brown?
This is an easy one. If you or your advisors aren't chummy with the Joukowsky Janus, you're pretty much screwed.
Brown-Classics VAP position offered & accepted. Brown-Joukowski VAP position likely offered, or on its way. (Famae non fabulae)
so who did the Joukowsky people hire in the end?
Anyone know the status of the Case Western 1 year Latin gig?
It's June 22nd—has anyone heard back from the APA re: individual abstracts for the San Antonio meeting?
I think Classics really needs something like this:
Survey of Philosophy Journals
Anybody else with me on this?
Is there hope for us after all?
http://chronicle.com/article/An-Academic-Rip-Van-Winkle/123707/
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