Anonymous 8:30, You're not as clever as you think, raising that Israel question as if you don't have a specific goal. Next time you want to agitate politically I suggest that you take a more direct approach and have the guts to use your name.
Personally, if the APA ever passed such a rule I would resign. Perhaps a small loss, but there are some who would be displeased to see that.
Um, I asked about Boycotting Israel and had absolutely no political agenda. Partly, I was mocking the sturm und drang about the American Studies Association doing so and the prediction that the MLA would. Oh, and really I was just fucking around.
I did not expect such anger. Maybe that's why I am such a shitty Classicist.
Why do people complain that they have been notified for an interview through the placement service? Isn't an interview a good thing? Shouldn't you feel thankful to get one?
I have exactly one APA interview, which I received last week. I'm going to spend ~$1800 for a 30 minute conversation, which may lead to a non-TT job. This article, and the comments on the German blog, resonate!
Video conferencing technology has made the conference interview obsolete. Let's ditch them already, and save everyone a ton of money, time, and energy.
Seriously, who thought that scheduling a conference in Chicago in January was a good idea? Thank you, APA Planners, for making travel plans even more stressful than they have to be.
Calm down, young one. It's after New Year's because it used to be between XMas and NY but people bitched that was inconvenient. If it were a week later than it is now, many schools (maybe not yours) are already in classes. It meets in Chicago because there are facilities and personnel there to do all the work... Either all that, or I fed the troll?
I don't find the timing problematic, but I agree with Anon about the location. I freely admit that I know nothing about the logistics of planning these things, but were I among the PTB, I think that places not prone to snowstorms would be high on my list for potential meeting sites.
The APA moves around (as does the MLA). Next year, for instance, it's in New Orleans. I've wondered for 25 years now why the organizers don't just decide that it will always be in a southern city and rotate among San Diego, New Orleans, Houston or Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, etc. -- places where one could be fairly sure that the airports would be open and the streets navigable. But for whatever reason, it's never been done that way. There have been lots of APAs in Chicago, Boston, and New York, none of which make much sense in January. To be fair, there have also been several in California over the past 25 years, too.
This Chicago one's going to be a doozy, though. I'm sitting here looking out the Hyatt Regency window at the blowing snow and listening to the howling wind ...
I guess the poor souls who have to live in these sorts of climates year round want to make the rest of us suffer so that they can have a shorter distance to travel.
I am a little excited about getting to see snow, though. It's been many, many years.
"It alternates between south and north (more or less) so as to be fair to travellers coming from all destinations."
Yes, sure, I get that. BUT I live in a northerly clime myself, and I understand that "fairness" isn't the only factor to consider here. It seems to me that the risk of massive flight cancellations, weather so bad that it's misery to venture outside the hotel, closures of local businesses, etc. -- all of which describe Chicago right now -- outweigh the "fairness" factor.
I do understand the burden of travel expenses for grad students (having been one myself), and it seems on the face of it to make sense to say "those of you who live in the south should have to pay to travel north every other year or so." But that inevitably risks the expense of cancelled flights which the airlines don't have to refund and hotel deposits which are gone forever.
Indeed. My flight was canceled. I have a credit, but would rather have that cash. Why do SCs insist on in-person interviews? Now I will do a Skype, but compete with some who did in-person. Worst of all possibilities: stressed, poorer, and disadvantaged!!! I hate this system.
CAA (College Art Association) meets every year in February or March (this year it meets in Chicago in mid Feb). Somehow art historians manage to travel to their big conference during the spring semester. So I am not sure why classicists need to travel during the winter break. Maybe we just like to suffer (e.g., colder, more snow, more expensive) or maybe it is good for a minority of members and the administrators to have the conference at this time. Was the APA/AIA conference always in December/January?
for the love of the gods, could the search committees PLEASE DECIDE WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANT before they conduct the interview? is that too much to ask? I think I'd rather do anything but be a Classicist in academia at this point. anything.
Some of them don't even decide when it's time to make the hire! Just wait and see. We'll have a nice crop of failed searches again this year, I'm sure.
And yes, fuck Classics up the ass with a broom. There are other options; you just have to start over from the beginning.
"Was the APA/AIA conference always in December/January?"
I don't know about "always," but it's certainly been in the dead of winter since the late 70s and probably earlier.
Until 1999 (? I think? around then, anyway), it was the week between Christmas and New Year's. The MLA was, too. Both the APA and the MLA finally changed to early January, which is marginally better -- this is bad, but trying to fit visiting family (two sets, if you're married/partnered) AND travel to the APA into the worst holiday travel week of the year was just a flat-out nightmare.
But I've never understood why we, and the MLA, are fixated on meeting the dead of winter.
We should move the holidays, too. They come from an era when people weren't trying to fly across the globe to see their families. If they were back then, you better fucking believe Christmas would be in the summer.
I wish I could join you. I'm stranded at the O'Hare Sheraton. No flight out until Tuesday, and that only if I'm lucky and a seat opens up. At least the drinks here are marginally cheaper than those at the Hyatt.
Why would Duke even bother to advertize if they already know who they are going to hire? Duke is a private institution and should be able to hire whomever they want without doing a full, open search. I think they have done such targeted hires in the past...?
Pls, let us all boycott the APA. Quality of papers below standards, a stupid stupid panel on the future of liberal arts and tnegative energy all around. In this time and age, we can SKYPE. fuck this system, the placement service and the APA.
Moving all conference interviews to Skype would actually revitalize the conference by removing that negative energy of which you speak. It could be (gasp!) an actual conference instead of a job fair.
The conference interview process as it stands is low on dignity and high on expense, with precious little return on investment for anyone who isn’t already rich. So kill it.
Of course it's sour grapes. Duke has great archaeology and it's a dream job. Some may find it comforting to think that it's not an open search. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We'll all know soon enough.
I might hold too high an opinion of Duke, but I don't buy the scuttlebutt posted on here. I don't doubt that one of the resident postdocs or ABDs is applying, but I would be quite surprised if Duke slid one of them into a tenure track position. A post-doc would have a better chance, but the one who seems to be the unnamed applicant does not fit the job description very well and has classics credentials a bit too thin for even Duke. Speaking of the job ad, it's fairly general, which is not how a inside job skews. In fact, the ad specifically asks for candidates who deal with material culture in its contexts. This is basically telling most art historians not to apply. There is really nothing in the ad that would suggest links with a different department like Religion. Unless Duke is attempting to fly way under the radar or is lazily copying an old ad, I don't see the typical insider flags.
Anybody hear anything solid about Cincinnati? I keep getting mixed reports about the place. Some say it's OK, others that it's an absolute hellish work environment.
I think the old reputation of Cincinnati is rather outdated from the 80s and 90s. Those I've interacted with over the past few years have seemed happy and collegial.
I think a lot of committees only got back to campus in the middle of last week due to weather. Sometimes deans have to vet and approve finalists before they can be invited, and sometimes the committee has to decide on the finalists and get approval from the full faculty. That said-I also find the waiting to be maddening and soul-crushing.
Every year it seems like the wiki is updated less. I think a lot of candidates entering the market for the first time are being discouraged from coming to Famae at all because:
1) Rage, depression, vitriol 2) Your chances of getting a job are marginally better if you remain hopelessly naive about exactly how justified 1) is
Leave the field. I've been contemplating doing it for years now. I've been preparing to do it for about a year. Even after I made the decision to *probably* do it, my sanity improved by leaps and bounds. Suddenly, I kind of enjoyed some aspects of life again. Now that I am about to be out for good, I am ectstatic. Yes, reading ancient Greek and Latin is incredibly fun. But we can do it without it being our careers, and all that fun will be poisoned anyway by the perpetual rage and depression of serial unemployment/underemployment/employment at shitty fucking schools were the students are stupider than badgers and your colleagues smell like a badger's taint.
There are ways of dealing with all the stress and misery, though. Perhaps we should take a page (or advert) from our colleagues at the MLA? http://gawker.com/horny-english-profs-seek-dirty-conference-fantasy-sex-o-1498857027
Professional suicide is what graduate students are already committing on a daily basis as they confront the reality of a Ph.D. that cannot be turned into meaningful work, and the looming default on what are often hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans.
Professional suicide is what adjuncts are committing each year that they spill out their time, energy, and spirit in an endless, pointless and ultimately fruitless quest for security.
Professional suicide is what Ph.D.s contemplate when they have to painfully and laboriously attempt to reinvent themselves for a non-academic position, for which the Ph.D. is appallingly expensive, slow, and imprecise training, when they are already often in their mid-40s or beyond.
Professional suicide is what Ph.D.s face when they discover ten or more years of their peak earning years have been lost in the black hole of a graduate program that yields nothing in the end but devastating opportunity costs.
That's a good article, even if it does come from someone who profits off the dismal employment situation for young academics much more than the people she is criticizing in it.
I just cannot believe that so many schools have yet to schedule on-campus interviews. Pls, people, update the wiki and get us out of this misery. thanks.
Unless you live in an expensive city or have an unforeseen emergency (or a baby), I thought the rule was not to take out loans for a humanities or arts PhD. If I am not good enough to be funded or attend a good program with good funding, what does that say about my likelihood of getting hired in a super competitive job market? Who in the humanities can ever make up financially for opportunity costs *and* debt, unless he or she becomes independently wealthy, or partners with a high-earning person (or wins a MacArthur)?
This is silly. The amount of money the average PhD has to take out in debt is insignificant next to the opportunity cost of all those wasted years.
I wouldn't say that $150,000 or $100,000 are "insignificant" at all. Yes, opportunity costs are high, but student loans are a bitch. Plus, those numbers don't capture the actual amount you pay over time, with interest.
Only a loon would go to graduate school in the humanities nowadays. So, you might as well go full-loon and take out loans to do so if that is what it takes.
Anyone who took out a sizable loan for *Classics* grad school just doesn't understand how money/math works. That would probably have been a problem anyway.
On scheduling campus-interviews: as someone pointed out above, our committee didn't make it back to our respective campus until several days after the APA, at which point we had to report to those on the committee who didn't go to the APA and who needed to approve our shortlist. This then went to Affirmative Action, the Dean, others, for further vetting. We (the committee) would love to schedule these on-campus interviews now, but our hands are tied by the system/process as we still haven't heard from the above.
Could the person who left this message give a hint as to where/in what field he or she will be working now? Ideas for alternative employment would be helpful.
"Leave the field. I've been contemplating doing it for years now. I've been preparing to do it for about a year. Even after I made the decision to *probably* do it, my sanity improved by leaps and bounds. Suddenly, I kind of enjoyed some aspects of life again. Now that I am about to be out for good, I am ectstatic. Yes, reading ancient Greek and Latin is incredibly fun. But we can do it without it being our careers, and all that fun will be poisoned anyway by the perpetual rage and depression of serial unemployment/underemployment/employment at shitty fucking schools were the students are stupider than badgers and your colleagues smell like a badger's taint.
Re: the above, I'm going into computer programming. Yes, you will have to train for it, but no, you will not have to go get a computer science BA. Practical skills come at a premium, and you can teach those to yourself over the course of a year or two while adjuncting for food money.
At the end of that you're in demand, and likely to make significantly more than an Assistant Prof. at entry level. Plus it's challenging in a fun way, like Greek and Latin. And you can live wherever the fvck you want.
Do art history/archaeology jobs make up a higher percentage of jobs this year than usual? Thought I saw a comment to that effect while skimming earlier, but can't seem to find it now....
@January 15, 2014 at 3:29 PM Re alternative careers for PhDs.
Also some big ticket consulting firms actively recruit PhDs alongside MBAs.
And obviously there's always teaching high school.
And possibly if you get the right experience in grad school you could position yourself for a job in university administration? That is just a speculation.
I'd also be interested to hear anymore anecdotal stories of Classics/humanities phds achieving fame or more especially fortune or more realistically a living wage outside academia. I'm almost definitely leaving the field myself.
On borrowing -- for years now I've been telling my classics seniors who are considering grad school that the first rule is: You absolutely MUST NOT borrow money for a graduate program in the Humanities (any humanities). If a program offers you full funding, then you may cautiously consider it, though you still need to think carefully about the lack of employment opportunities at the other end. But under no circumstances, ever, EVER, borrow money for graduate school in humanities.
They don't like hearing this. Sometimes they cry. And sometimes they ignore my advice (and those are the ones that keep me awake at night at 3:00 a.m. wondering how the hell I can justify doing this job, frankly). But usually they seem to hear me.
I think those of us who are employed as classics professors have an absolute duty to hammer home, over and over, that you simply absolutely must not borrow money for grad. school. Doing so is beyond reckless; it's downright delusional.
In general, one should never borrow money for any reason. There is a reason those people want to lend you that money, and the reason is that you're getting a shitty deal.
If you have no intention of inviting me to campus after our ostensibly fantastic APA interview, do not send me friendly, chatty e-mails leading me to believe that you like me and want to talk to me some more in person at a near future date in your current location. It will only make me want to destroy you and everyone that your black heart thinks it cares about after you send me the rejection e-mail.
Sincerely,
Person Who Waited This Long To Find Out That (S)He isn't Coming to Campus
For Anonymous who wrote to 'Dear Search Committee Members': I agree with you completely! Such misplaced kindness makes the rejection all the more devastating when it comes.
Oh, and my ideas. If I can't get fucking paid, they'll die with me if I can help it. Some fucker who's getting a paycheck can come up with them for himself.
All of us unemployed failures should collect somewhere. That way, if we need to resort to cannibalism, we can draw lots and go right ahead without the need for refrigeration and shipping.
On second thought, let's just eat the tenured. BBQ bash at the next APA!
If you are doing this for money then you are doing it wrong! Scholarship in Classics is a calling best exercised on an empty stomach, otherwise you become, as Hesiod says, a "mere belly!" Keep writing, keep publishing, and all else will follow!!
Should we warn the wee ones at Grad Cafe? They are so adorably deluded, worrying whether they will get into the Ph.D. program at Colorado or not. It's like watching children building sand-castles while a tsunami approaches.
To the Tenured Classicist: I find you comments annoying to say the least. Do not assume that we all fresh out of grad school. I published 4 refereed articles, 1 book and about 7 invited chapters. These are all with top presses. Got me nowhere.
Cream rises to the top. This field is a strict meritocracy. If you have articles and book and can't find job then you are doing something else wrong. Have you networked well? Have you been invited to give talks? Have you excelled at teaching? If not, then keep trying! Work hard, do what you love, it will all turn out for the best!!
So does Florida. Not sure which is more hopelessly unnecessary. My money is on UF since the state also has FSU, which itself is no great shakes. Nearest one to Boulder is probably Iowa. Wait, Iowa has a PhD program? Why, why, why?!
To the tenured classicist. I'd love to know who you are! You may realise that my CV is more impressive that yours! Pls. shut the fuck up. DO NOT LURE PPL INTO THIS CAREER WITH YOUR STUPID COMMENTS.
We need three PhD-granting Classics institutions in the English-speaking world. Maybe just two. Definitley not however many there are (at least 30, I'd guess).
I do worry that student of this generation rely too much on the work of senior philologists. If you are struggling to find a tenure-track job then perhaps you should spend more time honing your languages! I am always amazed at how ill-prepared so many applicants are in this area.
A few years ago a department in North Carolina gave all of their job finalists a sight-reading exam. More colleagues should follow this example as it would truly separate the wheat from the chaff!!
Hey now. I actually think the above is a good fucking idea.
Then I'd actually have been in a TT job for the past three years instead of setting on my ass. I can actually read Greek and Latin, unlike a lot of these fuckers who are getting hired.
Of course a substantial number of search committee members also can't read Greek or Latin to save their asses, so I'm not sure how they would evaluate a real applicant if they add one.
Fundamentally, the bullshitters outnumber the real deals in Classics to such an extent that there is no advantage whatsoever in being the real deal. Some of the bullshitters even appear to think they are competent.
That's ok though, you can all totally go stick your head in a fucking Loeb or one of those Aris & Phillips pieces of shit. You don't even have to feel ashamed about it. No one cares anymore.
it pisses me off to hear things like, 'this is a strict meritocracy.' Do you come here to tell us that we got no job because we are incompetent? Because we cannot read the languages after we were trained for many years by people like you? The reality is that we were trained for non existent jobs and that people like you are simply serving the needs of existing departments.
"'*Colorado* has a fucking PhD program? Today I learned.'
Fucking criminal, that is. How do those faculty sleep at night?"
I wonder why this is so surprising, given that it's the self-chosen location of the person who was being lauded a year ago in this very space for resisting the charms of both Harvard and Cornell. But I suppose it's more therapeutic to make allegations about fake searches than to follow these stories through to their end.
I don't follow. Of course I'd rather teach at Colorado and live in Boulder than Harvard/Cambridge or Cornell/Ithaca. But that does not mean that I would think it appropriate for such a department to offer a Ph.D. in Classics! I would be happy to be proven wrong by seeing how Colorado places their Ph.D. students, though. If they are competitive with the likes of Texas and UNC, then maybe we should all shut up. But I seriously doubt they are.
Welcome to the Brave New World of academia. You need to really question whether or not you want a tenure track job in this kind of environment (see the Chronicle Fora):
"I started a TT line at a big public university in August 2013. When I was hired I was told the existing tenure standards for our department, which looked totally do-able. The Dean of the College (since replaced) said there was talk of changing the tenure standards, but that this talk had been ongoing for ages and that probably it wouldn't happen for years. I was a little nervous about this talk of changes, but not enough to turn down the job.
Come September, all had changed. In spring 2013 our Provost made 2 tenure denials of candidates supported by their departments, school, and college, and refused to explain why. The Provost also announced that if you supported the tenure case of someone rejected by the layer above, you would lose the TT line and they would keep it to re-allocate (so if a department approve someone for tenure and the School reject them, the department loses that TT line but the school has a TT line they can give to a more favored department). The College Dean and School committees are running scared. Faculty are shell-shocked and some are muttering about taking votes of no confidence.
This week we learned that 4 of the current 10 tenure candidates that got departmental approval, including someone in my department, were denied by the School or College. This is an unprecedented denial rate, and the stated reason is that their publication volumes were too low. Our university hasn't yet approved new tenure policies, but the denials have been made anyway and we're left trying to infer the standards now required in practice. The number of publications now required for tenure in Social Science and Humanities seems to be double that previously required in my department, and this is creating tenure denials in fields where co-authorship is rare. In our (mostly single author) field, those would be amongst the highest tenure standards in the country, and we don't have anywhere close to the resources needed to achieve that. Our tenured faculty wouldn't have got tenure with those requirements.
The university are clearly not honoring the tenure standards people were hired under, or letting departments adopt their own standards reflecting norms in their fields. If I go up for tenure here then I'll be evaluated under whatever standards the School, College, and Provost feel like, whether or not they have ever articulated those standards before and however unrealistic they may be. I am worried that I can't publish enough pieces fast enough to meet their current requirements for publications, even assuming those requirements stay the same. In our field there's a 2-6 year time lag from submitting an article to a journal to seeing your work in print, even assuming you get a positive response from the first journal. I could try to get sheer volume by sending out everything I've ever scribbled RIGHT NOW to crap journals with high acceptance rates, but if I do that and the university later start caring about publishing in good journals then I might still be denied. Moreover, the prospect of naked quantity-not-quality scholarship makes me feel faintly sick.
So far I've been focusing my energies on collecting lots of data to prove what publication norms and tenure norms are in our field for departments like ours in the hope that this will change administrative minds. This has got buy-in within my department, where people seem hopeful that the administrative insanity will wear off (like ergot poisoning?) but does not seem to be changing any minds in the College. At minimum, we know the College isn't reversing my colleague's tenure denial after seeing the data. Now I'm starting to wonder if the smart move is to stop trying to reason with people at this university and start planning an exit route ASAP. The job market is bad, but I'm not sure it's worse than tenure prospects here."
"I don't follow. Of course I'd rather teach at Colorado and live in Boulder than Harvard/Cambridge or Cornell/Ithaca. But that does not mean that I would think it appropriate for such a department to offer a Ph.D. in Classics! I would be happy to be proven wrong by seeing how Colorado places their Ph.D. students, though. If they are competitive with the likes of Texas and UNC, then maybe we should all shut up. But I seriously doubt they are."
I never made any such claim. My point was simply that ignorance of the fact that Colorado has a Ph.D. program, apparently widespread here, suggests a failure to follow through the narrative of last year's job market and consider more thoughtfully where people end up and why.
Of course a lot of that is unknowable, but the equally-widespread allegations of fake searches and toxic departments here appear not to be based on even a good-faith attempt to learn what facts are available, to study the market and learn what you can from year to year that you might be able to apply in your own search.
I know that people come here to commiserate, and I know there's a lot about the academic job market that's worth complaining about. I only bring any of this up because during the several years I was on the market, Famae Volent was a very helpful resource for me to learn about aspects of the search that I wasn't prepared for by my graduate department. Useful information was exchanged here, sincere advice given, etc., though of course it was presented against a backdrop of black humor. I'm a bit saddened to check back now and find that this sincere attempt to band together and figure out the market has largely been replaced by fact-free vitriol and paranoia.
I think we could do better by one another than offering trolling parodies of what people with tenure are imagined to think and papers for sale.
The discussion of alternative careers seems like a good start on this. There are some good threads on that (on programming in particular, and many other ideas as well) over at the Chronicle "Leaving Academe" forum. It's useful to talk these things through with people who know some of the pitfalls as well (e.g. what's the best path to prepare yourself for a career in a field like programming, which is itself pretty overstuffed and vulnerable to outsourcing).
Of course a lot of that is unknowable, but the equally-widespread allegations of fake searches and toxic departments here appear not to be based on even a good-faith attempt to learn what facts are available...
Uhh, were you at the same conference I was just at? If so, and if you kept your ears open, you would have learned that Vanderbilt is losing its MA program and is in receivership, and Arizona had an external review last year that was so critical that big changes are going to happen there, too. As far as I can remember those are the only two places being discussed here as toxic (especially for junior faculty) over the past half-year or year, so obviously at least some of the people coming to Famae Volent knew what they were saying. In fact, it looks like those warnings against applying to Vanderbilt a few months ago were dead-on accurate.
And me saying upthread that the Cornell job isn't real is based entirely on the fact that they've run the same fucking search for the past two years without hiring anybody.
Hell, maybe they will finally hire somebody this year, though I can't say I'd want to work somewhere that can't agree on hiring someone two years in a row in this kind of a market.
I'm not the original Duke source, but I can confirm what the last poster said. From what I've heard, it's not a genuine "inside job" but it's not a genuinely open search either.
People at the meeting drink a lot and chat with friends who then talk to other friends. Famae volent.
If a department can't fill a position for some time, it's not because the position isn't real. It's either because faculty can't agree on what exactly they want or because they have unrealistic expectations about the position.
Running a search for the second time is not that unusual. Maybe the preferred candidate declined the offer and the department didn't want to move down the list. Maybe one or two candidates bombed their interviews and the department felt that the field was not strong enough. Or maybe the dean didn't like the chosen one and didn't approve the hire, which happens very very rarely, but it does happen.
If a search has been running for three or four consecutive years, you should probably stay away from that department, because there is almost certainly something wrong there.
I think it's time for Servius to step in. 10:27's ad hominem attacks are clearly motivated by some personal grievance, and are not at all indicative of the character of the person in question, according to my personal experience. Whatever issues there are in that department, this kind of petty name-calling isn't productive in the slightest.
yes, name calling is unproductive. I would hate to see this blog degenerate into a Classics version of the poll-sci or econ rumor mills. Also there is no point in discouraging classicists from applying for a job or another. In this market, you have to take any job you can get, even if it's in a toxic department.
That said, I would strongly counsel all junior faculty to go back on the market if they are uncomfortable at their first institution. It's also crucial to go on the market when your first book is out or accepted. Getting an outside offer gives you leverage for negotiating early tenure or maybe a t-t job at a place that's a better fit for you. A good way of framing an outside application is that you want leverage with the administration. Your senior colleagues will almost always understand...
"If a department can't fill a position for some time, it's not because the position isn't real. It's either because faculty can't agree on what exactly they want or because they have unrealistic expectations about the position."
"Running a search for the second time is not that unusual. Maybe the preferred candidate declined the offer and the department didn't want to move down the list."
At many places, the dept. doesn't get the option of "moving down the list."
Here, we have to "certify" a list of our top-five candidates and send it to the Dean for approval before we make on-campus interview invitations. A few years back, here's what happened:
Candidates 1 and 2 each called us right before on-campus interview to say s/he'd accepted another position already.
Candidate 3 bombed entirely.
Candidate 4 e-mailed and said s/he'd decided to stay in the tenure-track s/he already had, and so was withdrawing his/her application.
Candidate 5 was on his/her way to campus. At this point, we asked for permission to offer Candidate 6 an on-campus interview as well, so that we'd have the normal pool of 3 on-campus interviewees to choose from. Answer: NO. The certified list was the certified list; we could not move down it. So it came down to Candidate 5 or nobody.
Luckily, Candidate 5 was great and got the job. But had s/he bombed as Candidate 3 did, we would have had a failed search. Not because there weren't good candidates just slightly further down the list, but because our institutional structure explicitly forbids going further down the list if something goes wrong with the top five.
Unless by "bombed" you mean "fucked the Dean's wife up the ass on the grave of the university's first president while incorrectly declining amo amare", it would have been unconscionable for you to have not hired one of the two bombing candidates over not hiring anyone at all.
Look, departments have to live with a new hire until renewal/tenure time and, potentially, for ever. We have campus visits to figure out whether we really want to work with someone for that long. So, yes, candidates can sometimes leave such a horrible impression that they don't get an offer.
Sometimes, candidates do behave very badly. My favorite story is of a candidate who went for drinks with the graduate students and went home with one of them. The department learned about this because his distraught wife called the chair of the search committee at 2a.m. to find out where her husband was. Guess who didn't get the job?
As a general point of advice, candidates shouldn't really drink during campus visits, except maybe a glass of wine during dinner to be social. I have seen people scuttle their candidacies for saying stupid things they should not have.
Easily one of the best anecdotes ever shared here. Do you know whether the 2:00 a.m. phone call was about a potentially senior hire, or someone junior?
A philandering drunkard may be a brilliant scholar and a talented teacher, but departments are also looking for dependable and professional colleagues. None wants to deal with a loose cannon, who will make life difficult for everyone.
T-T positions are no charity and are not advertised to help unemployed classicists find a job.
Servius? help? I've seen some hostile posts here over the years but things seem to have taken a very bad turn in the last 2-3 days. 4:13 is very worrying in his/her violence and misogyny. Also 7:19 and 7:22.
Right, now's the part where we pretend to be terribly offended.
Recruiting people into this hellhole of a profession and then casting them out to die is all well and good--TT jobs aren't charity, after all--but heavens forfend someone should use strong language.
Some of the most brilliant people I know, never got a t-t job. Some of the most brilliant people I know were denied tenure. And I have also seen many fine classicists who would have been great college professors.
I wished every Classcis PhD could get a t-t-t job, but this is not going to happen. My point was not about throwing people to the wolves, but manage expectations.
Many grad students believe that a t-t job is a reward for their brilliance and great teaching skills, when it's not. Departments hire professors for a whole variety of reasons. Everyone feels for colleagues who are unemployed or on a temporary job, but, in the end, professors will hire colleagues they think they are good for them. That's obvious, true, but clearly not to some. Enough troll feeding for today
"Right, now's the part where we pretend to be terribly offended. … heavens forfend someone should use strong language."
Are you really unable to see why "fucked the Dean's wife up the ass" is disturbingly violent and misogynistic? (Btw, I am not the person who wrote the post you're replying to.) Those who are appalled by that are not just "pretending to be offended".
You seem to have failed to realize that the potty-mouthed person up above could easily have written instead "make sweet -- unconventional, but nonetheless truly sweet -- love to the dean's wife" but chose not to. So yes, the language used certainly reveals that that poster has some issues with women.
(By the way, one of my "captcha" terms that I need to type before posting this is "Harvard.")
Not to mention the implicit assumption that a woman's sexual activity is a weapon to use against her husband ('fucked *the dean's wife* -- not "fucked the dean", nor "fucked the dean's husband"); not to mention the implicit assumption that the dean is of course male (no, I don't think the poster was assuming a marriage of two lesbians); not to mention the assumption that the candidate too of course was male ("fucked the dean's wife up the ass" implies penetration). The comment is dripping with hostile misogyny. It doesn't have to be targeted at a named individual to be offensive, and I don't apologize for "censuring" this old-school, Norman-Maileresque misogyny.
Maybe it's a partner hire? I wouldn't be surprised. It's seems all the rage to hire Italians who putt from that side of the rough.
On a side note, I always teach my students that it's almost as important to come off as a classicist (whatever that might mean at the moment) as it is to actually be one. Yeah...our discipline is pretty fucked up. No arguments there.
Wait. If he (we assume it is he, right?) wrote "penetrated the Dean's wife anally," or "performed anal sex on the Dean's wife," it wouldn't be "miogynistic" and therefore OK? What about "pegged the Dean's husband on the grave..."? Is that offensive? Is anal penetration the problem here? If so, why? Some of us enjoy anal sex.
The point of the up-the-ass-on-a-grave bit, in its context, was to create a caricature of the most unpleasant possible thing a candidate could do on his or her campus visit. Of course this little vignette relies on common shared cultural assumptions (such as that a Dean will not like his/her wife being bonked by a candidate, in a cemetery, with incorrect Latin). I think those who are jumping up in outrage just like being outraged, and/or have confused feminism with prudishness. Or maybe they just found a welcome and easy way to distract from the actual substance of the conversation.
Anyway, I thought people would be all over me about using "declining" where I clearly meant "conjugating", but no one's even mentioned that!
From what I've heard, it's not necessarily a partner hire, but it's definitely the hire of someone who is already at Duke. I won't go into specifics, but it's obvious that it's not just me who has been told the same story. That doesn't mean that it's true, but there are some well-informed people posting on this blog.
The most unpleasant possible thing a candidate could do on his campus visit is to come across as a pompous and misogynistic dick, who feels entitled to getting the job.
PhDs have spent the better part of a decade training specifically for this career. Are you really contending that they *aren't* entitled to jobs at the end of that?
I reiterate: search committees that hire no one in this market are reprehensible.
None is entitled to a job in his chosen career, none. That is not to say that the job market is fair or just, which it certainly is not. There are many, many things wrong with the profession, but that doesn't entitle classics grads to anything, except maybe compassion for the shitty situation they have maneuvered themselves into.
On the bright side, as a failure, I will never get the chance to implicate myself fully in this machine of death that requires Classicists to recruit prospective Classicists for the meat grinder in order to keep their jobs.
I fully agree that it's amoral to create PhD programs, which won't produce successful grads. But if you were into feeding a family, going to grad school in a small and obscure field was perhaps not the best career choice. After all, academia is not an easy profession and it's badly paid to boot. I'm not saying that classicists should heroically embrace economic self-sacrifice, which would be very silly. But, c'mon, are you telling me that you never worried about your chances of gainful employment before you went to grad school in Classics - as opposed to getting an MBA or going to Law School ??? !!! ???
then when do the classicists in the U.S. have a field-wide gut-check and decide to stop training qualified professionals for a profession that cannot accommodate them? find me other fields, beyond the unfortunate humanities, where achieving a specialized, professional degree (and doing so with distinction) leaves you basically unqualified for professional employment with salary. when will the tenured concede that a lot of this mess largely serves their needs? when will we start shutting down PhD programs and convert them to terminal MA programs? in effect, one shoe has already fallen (no jobs for qualified degree holders and few cognate fields into which they may transfer) but the other never will, because the tenured faculty with their job security and their need for TA/RA help will never give up that luxury and will never be willing to be straight with the starry-eyed geniuses who come in the door wanting to be the next great classical mind. we are enjambed, ass-fucked, and ill-starred in this pursuit. the platitudes and sympathies of out of touch senior colleagues does little to help those of us without the means to go forward or support ourselves or our families - all the while feeling bitter because not only did we buy the snake oil, but we drank deeply
Many people fail to consider the fact that their undergraduate and graduate programs are actively lying to them about their prospects. They think: "All these professors must know what they are talking about. They're professors!" They then fail to do the research for themselves, or if they do it and find a conflict with what they have been told, believe their professors instead of a website.
And to the inevitable person who maintains staunchly that whole departments of Classics faculty are NOT actively trying to deceive their students about job prospects, you're full of shit.
The one indispensable service that FV provides is to counteract this faculty propaganda with the strangled swansongs of their victims. This is precisely why so many graduate programs tell their candidates not to read FV.
I find it hard to believe that you were lured into Classics by a devious professor who has looking for a cheap RA/TA. In my experience, professors are very clear about the risks involved with going to grad school.
At least I, have been very upfront with my students about the challenges, difficulties, and dangers of grad school, and I have shared how heart-wrenchingly difficult and nerve-wrecking it was to find any job in the beginning. How I, at various points of my post-graduate career, was close to giving up, and how I got a very plum position not because I was the best junior person out there but because I was very, very lucky.
Your situation sucks and I'm sure it's unfair. But I don't think that a smart person can really claim to have been bamboozled into becoming an academic.
I really do love to study ancient Greece and Rome, but I hope this field dies a horrible death. Current faculty are implicated enough to deserve everything that would entail, while prospective faculty are still innocent enough to not deserve the tenure track, with its gradual transformation of human beings into evil fucking vampires.
But, c'mon, are you telling me that you never worried about your chances of gainful employment before you went to grad school in Classics - as opposed to getting an MBA or going to Law School ??? !!! ???
point 1 - prospects for the J.D. holders at the early career stage are not so fun, either.
point 2 - yes, I thought it would be a challenge. I did not appreciate that it was a near-impossible labor and that meritocratic considerations would largely be thrown out the window in favor of more immeasurable metrics like 'fit' (whatever the hell that means), schmoozing, and ass-licking. to hell with all of it. the classics and its practitioners deserve oblivion.
True, academia is not a flawless meritocracy, but which profession is? Is there really a line of work where people aren't hired and promoted based on "immeasurable metrics" and where no schmoozing or maybe even ass-licking is required?
Angry Poster, please consider that in the last ten years, classicists with PhDs in hand, and also some ABDs, have gone into these fields. The assertion by a poster (possibly you) that classics trains you for nothing else is demonstrably false. Perhaps something here will look attractive to you, and you can find both employment and personal fulfillment in a field you enjoy and respect. Law Medicine Publishing Music Teaching in other than professorial circs Work with international tour groups Christian ministry (I think also Jewish rabbinate but data are older) Academic administration Computer software Academic libraries Museums, in various capacities.
Some of these require additional training; some do not. Some are more lucrative, some less; some require specific geographical locations, some do not.
Some only start at certain times of the year; perhaps you could begin by picking the ones that look most interesting and fastest toward a paycheck, and working out from there.
Good luck. And yes, I'd make you a sandwich, if it would help. Please consider this a sandwich in a helping hand.
I doubt the tenured are deliberately lying to us about the job market. I think they are just in denial about how bad it is out there. (For prospective grad students, though, I admit there might be more of an element of deceit.) One thing that I have heard *over and over* since 2008 is how shocked, shocked our faculty are that some bright young thing isn't racking up the interviews. They conclude that this was some bizarre fluke, or everyone is intimidated by someone bright enough to work on Theocritus, or whatever. To put the depths of their denial in perspective, some of these graduate students have been ABD and the faculty STILL expected them to rock the job market. The end result, nothing, after having been assured that universities would fight over us, is no less painful from the job-seeker's perspective, but I don't think there is any malice in it.
those who earn the M.D. work as doctors, those who earn the M.B.A. work in business, NGOs, govt agencies. J.D. law firms. the question here is if the PhD is a professional degree, requiring the candidate to invest the time, effort, cost in getting the training, what, then, would society have them do when there is no professional outlet for the acquired skills? sure, every business has nebulous job-getting, but the predicament of humanities PhDs is especially bleak and increasingly dire, if the professional and popular press is any measure, not to mention the anecdotal evidence. even if we shorten time to degree, there is still no outlet for these people to apply their professional training. (and I would say shorter degree time will mean more degree seekers, thus increasing the glut and the attendant problems.) beyond those here - invested, disaffected, dejected, and otherwise - ranting on this, when will the professional bodies APA (or whatever it is called) and AIA (and others) actually have an earnest discussion about this? a little lunchtime roundtable at the meetings is not enough. where is professional training in 'ancient studies' headed? does it actually have a viable future? at the moment, the viability of this path is much debated, no matter what your footing.
Look, we're not going to get anywhere sitting around being bitter, or continually trying to get jobs that just don't exist. We need to pick ourselves up and find alternate careers. Yes, it isn't fair. Yes, we were deceived. Yes, the Classics community at large is like an abusive spouse. But you don't spend time trying to change an abusive spouse; the only thing to do is get up and leave, even though that is difficult to make yourself do, because you still love him despite the abuse.
I want to share my experience. I graduated in 2006 from a respected school (not ivy league though) and I have been in temporary positions ever since. I moved from one coast to the other, leaving behind family and friends. I published my butt off--despite the often heavy teaching loads and all the problems that come with constant moving. I am known in my field. I get invited to contribute to volumes and to speak at lecture series. I will be unemployed in May. If you ask me how I feel, I truly want to die.
Yes, it's awful. In the end, it all comes down to sheer dumb luck. I always thought that you had to be many things to be an academic, but having to be a gambler was not one of them.
I hear you. I graduated from a top program, published articles, and have been on the market for three years post-PhD. I have never received even a one-year job offer that was full time. I have applied to literally hundreds of positions, including all the Mellons and JRFs as well as the TT jobs and VAPs. I used to want to die. Now I want to take the whole field apart, piece by piece.
To be fair, Classics is less horrible than some fields -- Philosophy and German spring to mind. Academia as a whole is in terrible condition, so our anger can't be directed only at senior classicists.
As a recently minted PhD in Classics, and one who is very likely soon to be unemployed, I have to say I've really heard enough of this "we were deceived" line. Personally, I've never heard of a humanities prof who promised anyone that a job would be waiting at the end of a doctorate, but that doesn't matter: you're responsible for your own life choices, above all for the one where you decided to spend 5-8 years of your life on one degree, in a field universally known to be a risky bet at best. I went in with my eyes open, I knew I was taking a risk, but most of us hitting the market now started before August 2008, which changed everything. This was just bad luck; the risk turned out to be much greater than I'd thought. If someone had suggested I would get a job before 2008, I wouldn't hold it against them: the crash has changed everything, and almost nobody predicted it. My upcoming predicament is the result of my choices, and regardless of whatever anyone told me beforehand, I'm the one who's responsible. I think I'm very good at what I do, and it certainly has been spirit-breaking to see how little merit seems to matter, but really, that's just another reason to be happy about getting out. There are an awful lot of disadvantages to being a classics professor. Humanities profs are the worst paid people for the amount of education they have. The transition will be hard, but soon I'll be able to live wherever I want, and I plan to be making far more than any classics prof in 4-5 years. Enjoy your crushing, endless hours of work for 80k/year, suckers! (or, in many cases, much less)
Right. Leaving is really the only actual solution. The hardest part is getting the resolution to leave the field to stick. We are very well conditioned.
If I could cause whole departments to close by chopping off limbs, I would gladly go through the rest of my life as a dickless torso.
Now, this post has vulgarity, but it also has cleverness -- something lacking in the infamous "dean's wife" post, which the poster should have held on to a bit longer to see if he might find something truly entertaining.
Now, in the case of this post that I quote I have been entertained by trying to figure out how one would chop off all ones own limbs, not to mention performing an autopeotomy. I'm assuming that there must some contraption involved, since if one just wields an ax or knife one will be left with that limb still attached.
Unless by "bombed" you mean "fucked the Dean's wife up the ass on the grave of the university's first president while incorrectly declining amo amare"
This is exhibit A for why I think our field is doomed, and why I despair whenever I visit this cesspool of incompetence.
You either fucking *parse* amo and/or amare or you fucking *conjugate* the verb amo-amare. You don't fucking *decline* a fucking verb you useless excuse for a dumb-as-rocks weeping anal wart.
Different person here, but sure, that's why Classics is doomed. Never mind that we're a discipline that's been largely ignoring the fifty year memo that people don't give a shit about our hyper acute specializations. I regularly read CVs where people wrote an entire dissertation on a book of Vergil and think WTF? Lest you think I'm a biased historian or archaeologist, the same can be said with a diss about LH IIIB2 kylixes found in some dig house of some obscure site in northern Greece. Who gives a fuck? Now these misguided souls are on here venting wondering what the fuck happened to the hope of gainful employement. Idiotic advisors with no pulse on current events let alone decades-old trends is what happened. But the problem is someone in an internet moment mixing up declensions with conjugations. How about the person who said chapters instead of books a while back? A dozen Vergil scholars who wrote their diss (and nothing much else since I suspect) then jumped down this person's throat. Yeah, that's what killed Vergil, Homer, and every other person that the vast majority of the population doesn't give a shit about, at least not enough to sponsor and support myopic research based on some artificial sliver of material devised by us insular morons.
Before the discussion degenerated, someone asked about Hunter College. I'd also be curious to know if anybody knows anything more about the progress their search. A couple of days after the APA I got a 'dear candidate' email saying they were putting together a shortlist for interviews in February - which is fast approaching, and I've heard nothing else (and there's nothing on the wiki). Am I out of the running, or are others also not hearing anything more out of them?
But can you blame people for doing safe/boring work? People might be more interested in talking about your work at cocktail parties if your phd a theoretically innovative and thematically wide-ranging tour de force, but they are still going to hire Virgil guys. And you can bet the Virgil guy hasn't made any controversial claims that are hard to defend or even grasp - because he hasn't said anything at all. Whereas someone who has tried to do something new, or innovate methodologically is incredibly easy to shoot down -- because everyone is well-versed in the orthodoxy.
Most classicists are simply not interested in innovation. If they say they are, then nine times out of ten what they mean is they are interested in ideas that were innovative 20 years ago, and are still treated as such: watered-down and theoretically shallow versions of new historicism or deconstructionism, ideas that are familiar and easy to grasp, but exotic sounding enough that it makes people feel like they're doing something extremely clever and radical by repeating them.
The inherent conservatism in this field means that students who try to innovate are not rewarded but punished for their efforts. From what I have seen, the most successful candidates are those whose dissertations are solid, safe and dull.
Yep, it's like the moment in movies where the protagonist realizes that they're batteries for robots or something similar. Why do you think so many tenured scholars are so depressed and drunk at the APA?
And yeah, the comments complained about above are misogynistic and hateful and completely part of the problem. If you're so tone deaf you can't hear the misogyny here, are you really going to be fabulously in tune with the nuances of long-gone literatures and cultures? No, you are not, you are going to be churning out shitty, boring, pedantic work, and wondering why no one gives a shit about you even though you have memorized the whole of Smyth and can scan aeolic meters right almost every time.
Yeah, we are sad, strange little people but we have no one's pity. Who killed Homer? The more appropriate question is which discipline shot itself in the genitals and called it murder.
on innovation: yes indeed the above is right. That's how we got to the point where leading scholars defending the field in the APA panel 'the future of liberal education' speak of the 'pleasure of reading Greek and Latin.' If this is the leadership...
"Might as well become a plumber" - made me laugh. I'm not the poster who wrote despairingly of that panel, but while I am certainly in favor of people learning Latin and Greek, if we are going to encourage them to do so, we probably do have to do a bit more than point to the majesty of the ancients and hope that everyone understands their inherent value to the young.
Before you've got tenure, it is career suicide to publish anything controversial. Most tenured profs like young scholars to be brave - as long as they are on their side of the argument. If they are not, they'll write bad reviews, knowing full well that a single bad review can ruin someone's tenure bid, because administrators take bad reviews in important journals very seriously. It doesn't matter whether others love your work.
So, by all means, get into a big name program, cultivate influential patrons, and do some very comprehensive and very solid work that will be considered USEFUL and smart by the overwhelming majority of your colleagues in your field. This will dramatically increase your chances of finding a job and will win you tenure. Yes, senior colleagues will go on and on about how important it is to be innovative, because they can afford to be controversial. That's what's tenure is for. But junior colleagues cannot, until they want to be expelled from the profession.
I did a year and a half of grad school before I left the bullshit of Academia.
No Ph.D, no M.A, but I certainly don't regret it. I got out with my sanity still somewhat intact, although I did develop a minor anxiety disorder. Not joking, the faculty in my dept were verbally, emotionally, and psychologically abusive. But hey, at least they weren't physically abusive...unless sexually abusive counts, in which case, a couple of them have records. Attrition rate is somewhere between 60-80%, ie, normal.
Even the tenured profs were miserable, and they're the supposed "success" stories in whose footsteps I was going to follow.
Yeah, no thanks. Got out, got a job, MUCH happier, and can still read and research whatever I damn well please, hassle and stress free. Y'all remember when Classics was fun? Leave the field. It becomes fun again.
Also, anybody read "Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis?"? It sounds like it should be required reading for all 1st year grad students.
Yes, I can see that you are right that it is 'career suicide' to innovate pre-tenure. But let's not kid ourselves about what a terrible system this is: younger scholars starting out in the discipline are always going to be a prime source for new ideas and perspectives, both because they haven't had time to fall into the habits of the discipline and because young people are temperamentally inclined to want to make their mark. Denying those people their voice is inevitably going to be a disaster for the discipline.
And it's no good hoping that scholars will start being daring once they have tenure. For one thing if you're selecting candidates for tenure on the grounds of their ability to conform you're hardly going to have a likely looking bunch of innovators there anyway. And if you've got into the habit of not thinking critically about the discipline for the first 10 years of your career, you're not necessarily suddenly going to start doing this in the second 10 years, especially as you will already have absorbed the prejudices of the field (prejudices which ensured your own success).
Yes, part of the problem is the tenure system (I've always thought it's horrible). But general attitudes towards new ideas and the purpose of classical scholarship don't help either. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the discipline on the whole is intellectually bereft.
I couldn't agree more. And I am deeply grateful to some young scholars who ruined their careers for writing really important books. It's a crying shame!
Everyone knows that the statements made above about Vergil are completely full of it, right?
"I regularly read CVs where people wrote an entire dissertation on a book of Vergil."
Yeah, this happens about once every ten years. I can think of two guys with endowed chairs who did this on their way to writing multiple books.
"you can bet the Virgil guy hasn't made any controversial claims that are hard to defend or even grasp - because he hasn't said anything at all."
You think Vergil is a safe field where you can get away with saying nothing at all? No controversial claims? Nothing innovative?
You are completely clueless. Good innovative work is highly prized, in hiring, tenure cases, grant applications. Innovate work that does not convince ("let's start making square bicycle wheels") is not.
If you mean by innovate "let's apply the same theoretical lens that was fashionable in English departments 20 years ago to whatever text we are currently reading," you are right.
This type of "innovative" work will always "convince," because it doesn't really offend anyone. Truly paradigm-shifting stuff is, by definition, controversial.
Scholars like Wilamowitz and Finley were HUGELY controversial when they were young, and, indeed, Finley was turned down for tenure at Rutgers.
The idea that a book that convinces everyone could be innovative is proof how conservative and risk-averse Classics is a discipline.
694 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 694 Newer› Newest»Speaking of "we": how do "we" feel about the APA's name change? Striking move in the face of irrelevancy and looming unemployment?
Anonymous 8:30,
You're not as clever as you think, raising that Israel question as if you don't have a specific goal. Next time you want to agitate politically I suggest that you take a more direct approach and have the guts to use your name.
Personally, if the APA ever passed such a rule I would resign. Perhaps a small loss, but there are some who would be displeased to see that.
Re: the immediately above, I guess it's nice to know that the APA is not without its militaristic, fascist contingent?
Re: APA Quitter
Um, I asked about Boycotting Israel and had absolutely no political agenda. Partly, I was mocking the sturm und drang about the American Studies Association doing so and the prediction that the MLA would. Oh, and really I was just fucking around.
I did not expect such anger. Maybe that's why I am such a shitty Classicist.
Yes. In Classics, one must always expect irrational anger. In this respect, Classicists are not dissimilar to Rush Limbaugh listeners.
And for the same reasons! Despite our feeling that we should occupy a privileged position in society, we find ourselves increasingly irrelevant.
Why do people complain that they have been notified for an interview through the placement service? Isn't an interview a good thing? Shouldn't you feel thankful to get one?
Shouldn't you fuck off?
Perhaps I should. Yes.
Anybody know what's going on over at UC Santa Cruz? Applications were due in October and it's been radio silence ever since...
The same might be asked about Georgetown, though perhaps since they are not interviewing at the APA they are on a different schedule.
Radio silence from Loyola Marymount too, even on the Archaeology job wiki.
Any news at all from IA State? They say they're doing APA interviews...
RE: December 17, 2013 at 12:59 PM
If the APA ever agreed to have a discussion about the BDS movement and passed a resolution in support of the Palestinians...then good riddance to you!
And maybe you will have the guts to use your name next time you chastise someone else for not using their name.
I have exactly one APA interview, which I received last week. I'm going to spend ~$1800 for a 30 minute conversation, which may lead to a non-TT job. This article, and the comments on the German blog, resonate!
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/21/email-job-candidates-renews-debate-about-conference-interviewing
Anonymous 3:09,
Are you joking, or did you just anonymously chastise someone for anonymously chastising someone for being anonymous?
I'll assume that it's a joke -- in which case, my compliments! -- since your first sentence certainly is an absurdity.
Video conferencing technology has made the conference interview obsolete. Let's ditch them already, and save everyone a ton of money, time, and energy.
Seriously, who thought that scheduling a conference in Chicago in January was a good idea? Thank you, APA Planners, for making travel plans even more stressful than they have to be.
Also: why *right* after New Year's?
We could have waited a week and had way lower airfares, and the possibility of using airline miles.
Though I guess actual faculty mostly get their departments to pay for their travel, and no one gives a fuck about candidates.
Calm down, young one. It's after New Year's because it used to be between XMas and NY but people bitched that was inconvenient. If it were a week later than it is now, many schools (maybe not yours) are already in classes. It meets in Chicago because there are facilities and personnel there to do all the work... Either all that, or I fed the troll?
I don't find the timing problematic, but I agree with Anon about the location. I freely admit that I know nothing about the logistics of planning these things, but were I among the PTB, I think that places not prone to snowstorms would be high on my list for potential meeting sites.
The MLA meets in Chicago next week, though, so this apparent love of being covered in snow and possibly freezing to death may be a humanities thing.
The APA moves around (as does the MLA). Next year, for instance, it's in New Orleans. I've wondered for 25 years now why the organizers don't just decide that it will always be in a southern city and rotate among San Diego, New Orleans, Houston or Dallas, Atlanta, Miami, etc. -- places where one could be fairly sure that the airports would be open and the streets navigable. But for whatever reason, it's never been done that way. There have been lots of APAs in Chicago, Boston, and New York, none of which make much sense in January. To be fair, there have also been several in California over the past 25 years, too.
This Chicago one's going to be a doozy, though. I'm sitting here looking out the Hyatt Regency window at the blowing snow and listening to the howling wind ...
I guess the poor souls who have to live in these sorts of climates year round want to make the rest of us suffer so that they can have a shorter distance to travel.
I am a little excited about getting to see snow, though. It's been many, many years.
It alternates between south and north (more or less) so as to be fair to travellers coming from all destinations.
But shouldn't travelers from the desolate North be glad for the vacation from their icy lairs?
"It alternates between south and north (more or less) so as to be fair to travellers coming from all destinations."
Yes, sure, I get that. BUT I live in a northerly clime myself, and I understand that "fairness" isn't the only factor to consider here. It seems to me that the risk of massive flight cancellations, weather so bad that it's misery to venture outside the hotel, closures of local businesses, etc. -- all of which describe Chicago right now -- outweigh the "fairness" factor.
I do understand the burden of travel expenses for grad students (having been one myself), and it seems on the face of it to make sense to say "those of you who live in the south should have to pay to travel north every other year or so." But that inevitably risks the expense of cancelled flights which the airlines don't have to refund and hotel deposits which are gone forever.
Also, how many APA interviews are going to not happen because of this weather?
Though the moral there is less about the problems of the Snowy North and more about the silliness of interviewing in meatspace.
Indeed. My flight was canceled. I have a credit, but would rather have that cash. Why do SCs insist on in-person interviews? Now I will do a Skype, but compete with some who did in-person. Worst of all possibilities: stressed, poorer, and disadvantaged!!! I hate this system.
CAA (College Art Association) meets every year in February or March (this year it meets in Chicago in mid Feb). Somehow art historians manage to travel to their big conference during the spring semester. So I am not sure why classicists need to travel during the winter break. Maybe we just like to suffer (e.g., colder, more snow, more expensive) or maybe it is good for a minority of members and the administrators to have the conference at this time. Was the APA/AIA conference always in December/January?
for the love of the gods, could the search committees PLEASE DECIDE WHAT THE FUCK THEY WANT before they conduct the interview? is that too much to ask? I think I'd rather do anything but be a Classicist in academia at this point. anything.
Some of them don't even decide when it's time to make the hire! Just wait and see. We'll have a nice crop of failed searches again this year, I'm sure.
And yes, fuck Classics up the ass with a broom. There are other options; you just have to start over from the beginning.
"Was the APA/AIA conference always in December/January?"
I don't know about "always," but it's certainly been in the dead of winter since the late 70s and probably earlier.
Until 1999 (? I think? around then, anyway), it was the week between Christmas and New Year's. The MLA was, too. Both the APA and the MLA finally changed to early January, which is marginally better -- this is bad, but trying to fit visiting family (two sets, if you're married/partnered) AND travel to the APA into the worst holiday travel week of the year was just a flat-out nightmare.
But I've never understood why we, and the MLA, are fixated on meeting the dead of winter.
We should move the holidays, too. They come from an era when people weren't trying to fly across the globe to see their families. If they were back then, you better fucking believe Christmas would be in the summer.
http://quodshe.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/the-conference-job-interview-time-to-kill-it-a-few-thoughts/
If anyone else is still stuck in Chicago because the *$%&!@#-ed up roads in Indiana have stranded you here, come find me in the bar.
I wish I could join you. I'm stranded at the O'Hare Sheraton. No flight out until Tuesday, and that only if I'm lucky and a seat opens up. At least the drinks here are marginally cheaper than those at the Hyatt.
Re: Duke comment on the wiki
Why would Duke even bother to advertize if they already know who they are going to hire? Duke is a private institution and should be able to hire whomever they want without doing a full, open search. I think they have done such targeted hires in the past...?
Pls, let us all boycott the APA. Quality of papers below standards, a stupid stupid panel on the future of liberal arts and tnegative energy all around. In this time and age, we can SKYPE. fuck this system, the placement service and the APA.
Moving all conference interviews to Skype would actually revitalize the conference by removing that negative energy of which you speak. It could be (gasp!) an actual conference instead of a job fair.
Re: Anonymous 5:39
I strongly suspect we're seeing some sour grapes regarding the Duke search. Who would be the inside hire? They don't have a VAP teaching archaeology.
The conference interview process as it stands is low on dignity and high on expense, with precious little return on investment for anyone who isn’t already rich. So kill it.
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/251-market-crash-course-iv-kill-the-conference-interview
Re Duke:
The inside hire is already at Duke, but not in Classics. Cast your net more widely.
Of course it's sour grapes. Duke has great archaeology and it's a dream job. Some may find it comforting to think that it's not an open search. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. We'll all know soon enough.
Interesting discussion on Skype vs. conference interviews. Hercules might have tipped many into the Skype camp!
https://www.facebook.com/michael.berube.169/posts/434062910053576
I might hold too high an opinion of Duke, but I don't buy the scuttlebutt posted on here. I don't doubt that one of the resident postdocs or ABDs is applying, but I would be quite surprised if Duke slid one of them into a tenure track position. A post-doc would have a better chance, but the one who seems to be the unnamed applicant does not fit the job description very well and has classics credentials a bit too thin for even Duke. Speaking of the job ad, it's fairly general, which is not how a inside job skews. In fact, the ad specifically asks for candidates who deal with material culture in its contexts. This is basically telling most art historians not to apply. There is really nothing in the ad that would suggest links with a different department like Religion. Unless Duke is attempting to fly way under the radar or is lazily copying an old ad, I don't see the typical insider flags.
Anybody hear anything solid about Cincinnati? I keep getting mixed reports about the place. Some say it's OK, others that it's an absolute hellish work environment.
I think the old reputation of Cincinnati is rather outdated from the 80s and 90s. Those I've interacted with over the past few years have seemed happy and collegial.
is the wiki not being updated or why are these SC so slow in scheduling on campus interviews?
I think a lot of committees only got back to campus in the middle of last week due to weather. Sometimes deans have to vet and approve finalists before they can be invited, and sometimes the committee has to decide on the finalists and get approval from the full faculty. That said-I also find the waiting to be maddening and soul-crushing.
Every year it seems like the wiki is updated less. I think a lot of candidates entering the market for the first time are being discouraged from coming to Famae at all because:
1) Rage, depression, vitriol
2) Your chances of getting a job are marginally better if you remain hopelessly naive about exactly how justified 1) is
rage. blistering, paint-peeling, hair curling rage. followed by abject despair, bleak nothingness, confusion. fear, panic, woe.
the unsuccessful academic job hunt summarized. repeat for many cycles and arrive at insanity.
Leave the field. I've been contemplating doing it for years now. I've been preparing to do it for about a year. Even after I made the decision to *probably* do it, my sanity improved by leaps and bounds. Suddenly, I kind of enjoyed some aspects of life again. Now that I am about to be out for good, I am ectstatic. Yes, reading ancient Greek and Latin is incredibly fun. But we can do it without it being our careers, and all that fun will be poisoned anyway by the perpetual rage and depression of serial unemployment/underemployment/employment at shitty fucking schools were the students are stupider than badgers and your colleagues smell like a badger's taint.
Badgers.
As a Wisconsin fan I object to the above. But I have alternatives in mind that wouldn't insult some other Big Ten or MAC school, so there we are.
As for the rage, however. Yes. In spades.
Interesting take by an anthropologist on the MLA. Sounds much like the APA:
http://theprofessorisin.com/2014/01/13/who-is-us-thoughts-on-the-mla/
There are ways of dealing with all the stress and misery, though. Perhaps we should take a page (or advert) from our colleagues at the MLA? http://gawker.com/horny-english-profs-seek-dirty-conference-fantasy-sex-o-1498857027
Professional suicide is what graduate students are already committing on a daily basis as they confront the reality of a Ph.D. that cannot be turned into meaningful work, and the looming default on what are often hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans.
Professional suicide is what adjuncts are committing each year that they spill out their time, energy, and spirit in an endless, pointless and ultimately fruitless quest for security.
Professional suicide is what Ph.D.s contemplate when they have to painfully and laboriously attempt to reinvent themselves for a non-academic position, for which the Ph.D. is appallingly expensive, slow, and imprecise training, when they are already often in their mid-40s or beyond.
Professional suicide is what Ph.D.s face when they discover ten or more years of their peak earning years have been lost in the black hole of a graduate program that yields nothing in the end but devastating opportunity costs.
http://theprofessorisin.com/2014/01/13/who-is-us-thoughts-on-the-mla/
That's a good article, even if it does come from someone who profits off the dismal employment situation for young academics much more than the people she is criticizing in it.
I just cannot believe that so many schools have yet to schedule on-campus interviews. Pls, people, update the wiki and get us out of this misery. thanks.
Please contribute to the crowd-sourced Ph.D. Debt project:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/lv?key=0An-UdyZNOVCQdGVJN3hWU0EtbjRwR2t1R1JLR19Hd0E&toomany=true
This is silly. The amount of money the average PhD has to take out in debt is insignificant next to the opportunity cost of all those wasted years.
Does anybody know if Dartmouth and Cornell have already scheduled on campus visits?
Does anybody know if Dartmouth and Cornell have already scheduled on campus visits?
Unless you live in an expensive city or have an unforeseen emergency (or a baby), I thought the rule was not to take out loans for a humanities or arts PhD. If I am not good enough to be funded or attend a good program with good funding, what does that say about my likelihood of getting hired in a super competitive job market? Who in the humanities can ever make up financially for opportunity costs *and* debt, unless he or she becomes independently wealthy, or partners with a high-earning person (or wins a MacArthur)?
Maybe thinking about this is too depressing...
This is silly. The amount of money the average PhD has to take out in debt is insignificant next to the opportunity cost of all those wasted years.
I wouldn't say that $150,000 or $100,000 are "insignificant" at all. Yes, opportunity costs are high, but student loans are a bitch. Plus, those numbers don't capture the actual amount you pay over time, with interest.
Yes, but only a loon would take out such a loan to finance humanities graduate education, as pointed out above.
Dartmouth and Cornell have both scheduled flyouts (not that Cornell is a real job).
Only a loon would go to graduate school in the humanities nowadays. So, you might as well go full-loon and take out loans to do so if that is what it takes.
Uh, no. There's loon and then there's loon.
Anyone who took out a sizable loan for *Classics* grad school just doesn't understand how money/math works. That would probably have been a problem anyway.
On scheduling campus-interviews: as someone pointed out above, our committee didn't make it back to our respective campus until several days after the APA, at which point we had to report to those on the committee who didn't go to the APA and who needed to approve our shortlist. This then went to Affirmative Action, the Dean, others, for further vetting. We (the committee) would love to schedule these on-campus interviews now, but our hands are tied by the system/process as we still haven't heard from the above.
Could the person who left this message give a hint as to where/in what field he or she will be working now? Ideas for alternative employment would be helpful.
"Leave the field. I've been contemplating doing it for years now. I've been preparing to do it for about a year. Even after I made the decision to *probably* do it, my sanity improved by leaps and bounds. Suddenly, I kind of enjoyed some aspects of life again. Now that I am about to be out for good, I am ectstatic. Yes, reading ancient Greek and Latin is incredibly fun. But we can do it without it being our careers, and all that fun will be poisoned anyway by the perpetual rage and depression of serial unemployment/underemployment/employment at shitty fucking schools were the students are stupider than badgers and your colleagues smell like a badger's taint.
Badgers."
Re: the above, I'm going into computer programming. Yes, you will have to train for it, but no, you will not have to go get a computer science BA. Practical skills come at a premium, and you can teach those to yourself over the course of a year or two while adjuncting for food money.
At the end of that you're in demand, and likely to make significantly more than an Assistant Prof. at entry level. Plus it's challenging in a fun way, like Greek and Latin. And you can live wherever the fvck you want.
Do art history/archaeology jobs make up a higher percentage of jobs this year than usual? Thought I saw a comment to that effect while skimming earlier, but can't seem to find it now....
@January 15, 2014 at 3:29 PM
Re alternative careers for PhDs.
Several PhDs I know in the UK have gone to law school. But both the PhD and the law degree take less time there.
@January 15, 2014 at 3:29 PM
Re alternative careers for PhDs.
Also some big ticket consulting firms actively recruit PhDs alongside MBAs.
And obviously there's always teaching high school.
And possibly if you get the right experience in grad school you could position yourself for a job in university administration? That is just a speculation.
I'd also be interested to hear anymore anecdotal stories of Classics/humanities phds achieving fame or more especially fortune or more realistically a living wage outside academia. I'm almost definitely leaving the field myself.
On borrowing -- for years now I've been telling my classics seniors who are considering grad school that the first rule is: You absolutely MUST NOT borrow money for a graduate program in the Humanities (any humanities). If a program offers you full funding, then you may cautiously consider it, though you still need to think carefully about the lack of employment opportunities at the other end. But under no circumstances, ever, EVER, borrow money for graduate school in humanities.
They don't like hearing this. Sometimes they cry. And sometimes they ignore my advice (and those are the ones that keep me awake at night at 3:00 a.m. wondering how the hell I can justify doing this job, frankly). But usually they seem to hear me.
I think those of us who are employed as classics professors have an absolute duty to hammer home, over and over, that you simply absolutely must not borrow money for grad. school. Doing so is beyond reckless; it's downright delusional.
In general, one should never borrow money for any reason. There is a reason those people want to lend you that money, and the reason is that you're getting a shitty deal.
How DARE that guy talk about those people in this way!
Dear Search Committee Members,
If you have no intention of inviting me to campus after our ostensibly fantastic APA interview, do not send me friendly, chatty e-mails leading me to believe that you like me and want to talk to me some more in person at a near future date in your current location. It will only make me want to destroy you and everyone that your black heart thinks it cares about after you send me the rejection e-mail.
Sincerely,
Person Who Waited This Long To Find Out That (S)He isn't Coming to Campus
For Anonymous who wrote to 'Dear Search Committee Members': I agree with you completely! Such misplaced kindness makes the rejection all the more devastating when it comes.
That's a real bummer, Person. One hopes the CM is sincerely interested in your work and was not simply stringing you along.
What people with jobs don't realize is that no gives a fuck about whether you like their work if they can't get a job.
I'm not a dog. I don't need a pat on the head. I need my Beggin' Strips, dognabit.
The job search isn't only about getting a job. It is also about networking and presenting your ideas!
Thanks, Tenured Classicist. Does that come complete with welfare?
Please don't edge away, I know I smell of The Poors.
Exactly what is the value of networking if I can't get a job?
Seriously, get over yourself. You're not that interesting. I don't want to chat you up for my personal edification.
Oh, and my ideas. If I can't get fucking paid, they'll die with me if I can help it. Some fucker who's getting a paycheck can come up with them for himself.
Don't worry! The best people all get jobs. Make connections, present your work, everything will be fine!
Gods dammit, I've been Poe's Lawed.
All of us unemployed failures should collect somewhere. That way, if we need to resort to cannibalism, we can draw lots and go right ahead without the need for refrigeration and shipping.
On second thought, let's just eat the tenured. BBQ bash at the next APA!
The tenured will definitely taste better, having gone through an extensive fattening process.
Adjuncts are probably all stringy and full of gristle.
If you are doing this for money then you are doing it wrong! Scholarship in Classics is a calling best exercised on an empty stomach, otherwise you become, as Hesiod says, a "mere belly!" Keep writing, keep publishing, and all else will follow!!
Should we warn the wee ones at Grad Cafe? They are so adorably deluded, worrying whether they will get into the Ph.D. program at Colorado or not. It's like watching children building sand-castles while a tsunami approaches.
To the Tenured Classicist: I find you comments annoying to say the least. Do not assume that we all fresh out of grad school. I published 4 refereed articles, 1 book and about 7 invited chapters. These are all with top presses. Got me nowhere.
*Colorado* has a fucking PhD program? Today I learned.
I try to warn people all. the. fucking. time.
Be prepared for them to get angry with you, the one person who isn't lying to them.
Not being delusional is a lonely road.
Cream rises to the top. This field is a strict meritocracy. If you have articles and book and can't find job then you are doing something else wrong. Have you networked well? Have you been invited to give talks? Have you excelled at teaching? If not, then keep trying! Work hard, do what you love, it will all turn out for the best!!
I know our dear Tenured Classicist is doing a bit, but I have *actually* heard the above, almost word for word, from my advisor.
Yes, he is a fucking stupid old cunt.
"*Colorado* has a fucking PhD program? Today I learned."
Fucking criminal, that is. How do those faculty sleep at night?
Jesus, I just looked it up. Colorado really does have a PhD program. I thought those above were joking.
Holy fuck is that depressing. I guess there really is no limit to what human beings can justify to themselves.
So does Florida. Not sure which is more hopelessly unnecessary. My money is on UF since the state also has FSU, which itself is no great shakes. Nearest one to Boulder is probably Iowa. Wait, Iowa has a PhD program? Why, why, why?!
To the tenured classicist. I'd love to know who you are! You may realise that my CV is more impressive that yours! Pls. shut the fuck up. DO NOT LURE PPL INTO THIS CAREER WITH YOUR STUPID COMMENTS.
We need three PhD-granting Classics institutions in the English-speaking world. Maybe just two. Definitley not however many there are (at least 30, I'd guess).
I do worry that student of this generation rely too much on the work of senior philologists. If you are struggling to find a tenure-track job then perhaps you should spend more time honing your languages! I am always amazed at how ill-prepared so many applicants are in this area.
A few years ago a department in North Carolina gave all of their job finalists a sight-reading exam. More colleagues should follow this example as it would truly separate the wheat from the chaff!!
Hey now. I actually think the above is a good fucking idea.
Then I'd actually have been in a TT job for the past three years instead of setting on my ass. I can actually read Greek and Latin, unlike a lot of these fuckers who are getting hired.
Of course a substantial number of search committee members also can't read Greek or Latin to save their asses, so I'm not sure how they would evaluate a real applicant if they add one.
Fundamentally, the bullshitters outnumber the real deals in Classics to such an extent that there is no advantage whatsoever in being the real deal. Some of the bullshitters even appear to think they are competent.
That's ok though, you can all totally go stick your head in a fucking Loeb or one of those Aris & Phillips pieces of shit. You don't even have to feel ashamed about it. No one cares anymore.
Fuck everything and everyone.
it pisses me off to hear things like, 'this is a strict meritocracy.' Do you come here to tell us that we got no job because we are incompetent? Because we cannot read the languages after we were trained for many years by people like you? The reality is that we were trained for non existent jobs and that people like you are simply serving the needs of existing departments.
Uh, guy. You're quoting the Tenured Classicist, who is *very* obviously trolling. Though I wouldn't even call it trolling, since it's so very obvious.
But yes, fuck everything and everyone. Hard.
"'*Colorado* has a fucking PhD program? Today I learned.'
Fucking criminal, that is. How do those faculty sleep at night?"
I wonder why this is so surprising, given that it's the self-chosen location of the person who was being lauded a year ago in this very space for resisting the charms of both Harvard and Cornell. But I suppose it's more therapeutic to make allegations about fake searches than to follow these stories through to their end.
I don't follow. Of course I'd rather teach at Colorado and live in Boulder than Harvard/Cambridge or Cornell/Ithaca. But that does not mean that I would think it appropriate for such a department to offer a Ph.D. in Classics! I would be happy to be proven wrong by seeing how Colorado places their Ph.D. students, though. If they are competitive with the likes of Texas and UNC, then maybe we should all shut up. But I seriously doubt they are.
Welcome to the Brave New World of academia. You need to really question whether or not you want a tenure track job in this kind of environment (see the Chronicle Fora):
"I started a TT line at a big public university in August 2013. When I was hired I was told the existing tenure standards for our department, which looked totally do-able. The Dean of the College (since replaced) said there was talk of changing the tenure standards, but that this talk had been ongoing for ages and that probably it wouldn't happen for years. I was a little nervous about this talk of changes, but not enough to turn down the job.
Come September, all had changed. In spring 2013 our Provost made 2 tenure denials of candidates supported by their departments, school, and college, and refused to explain why. The Provost also announced that if you supported the tenure case of someone rejected by the layer above, you would lose the TT line and they would keep it to re-allocate (so if a department approve someone for tenure and the School reject them, the department loses that TT line but the school has a TT line they can give to a more favored department). The College Dean and School committees are running scared. Faculty are shell-shocked and some are muttering about taking votes of no confidence.
This week we learned that 4 of the current 10 tenure candidates that got departmental approval, including someone in my department, were denied by the School or College. This is an unprecedented denial rate, and the stated reason is that their publication volumes were too low. Our university hasn't yet approved new tenure policies, but the denials have been made anyway and we're left trying to infer the standards now required in practice. The number of publications now required for tenure in Social Science and Humanities seems to be double that previously required in my department, and this is creating tenure denials in fields where co-authorship is rare. In our (mostly single author) field, those would be amongst the highest tenure standards in the country, and we don't have anywhere close to the resources needed to achieve that. Our tenured faculty wouldn't have got tenure with those requirements.
The university are clearly not honoring the tenure standards people were hired under, or letting departments adopt their own standards reflecting norms in their fields. If I go up for tenure here then I'll be evaluated under whatever standards the School, College, and Provost feel like, whether or not they have ever articulated those standards before and however unrealistic they may be. I am worried that I can't publish enough pieces fast enough to meet their current requirements for publications, even assuming those requirements stay the same. In our field there's a 2-6 year time lag from submitting an article to a journal to seeing your work in print, even assuming you get a positive response from the first journal. I could try to get sheer volume by sending out everything I've ever scribbled RIGHT NOW to crap journals with high acceptance rates, but if I do that and the university later start caring about publishing in good journals then I might still be denied. Moreover, the prospect of naked quantity-not-quality scholarship makes me feel faintly sick.
So far I've been focusing my energies on collecting lots of data to prove what publication norms and tenure norms are in our field for departments like ours in the hope that this will change administrative minds. This has got buy-in within my department, where people seem hopeful that the administrative insanity will wear off (like ergot poisoning?) but does not seem to be changing any minds in the College. At minimum, we know the College isn't reversing my colleague's tenure denial after seeing the data. Now I'm starting to wonder if the smart move is to stop trying to reason with people at this university and start planning an exit route ASAP. The job market is bad, but I'm not sure it's worse than tenure prospects here."
"I don't follow. Of course I'd rather teach at Colorado and live in Boulder than Harvard/Cambridge or Cornell/Ithaca. But that does not mean that I would think it appropriate for such a department to offer a Ph.D. in Classics! I would be happy to be proven wrong by seeing how Colorado places their Ph.D. students, though. If they are competitive with the likes of Texas and UNC, then maybe we should all shut up. But I seriously doubt they are."
I never made any such claim. My point was simply that ignorance of the fact that Colorado has a Ph.D. program, apparently widespread here, suggests a failure to follow through the narrative of last year's job market and consider more thoughtfully where people end up and why.
Of course a lot of that is unknowable, but the equally-widespread allegations of fake searches and toxic departments here appear not to be based on even a good-faith attempt to learn what facts are available, to study the market and learn what you can from year to year that you might be able to apply in your own search.
I know that people come here to commiserate, and I know there's a lot about the academic job market that's worth complaining about. I only bring any of this up because during the several years I was on the market, Famae Volent was a very helpful resource for me to learn about aspects of the search that I wasn't prepared for by my graduate department. Useful information was exchanged here, sincere advice given, etc., though of course it was presented against a backdrop of black humor. I'm a bit saddened to check back now and find that this sincere attempt to band together and figure out the market has largely been replaced by fact-free vitriol and paranoia.
I think we could do better by one another than offering trolling parodies of what people with tenure are imagined to think and papers for sale.
The discussion of alternative careers seems like a good start on this. There are some good threads on that (on programming in particular, and many other ideas as well) over at the Chronicle "Leaving Academe" forum. It's useful to talk these things through with people who know some of the pitfalls as well (e.g. what's the best path to prepare yourself for a career in a field like programming, which is itself pretty overstuffed and vulnerable to outsourcing).
Of course a lot of that is unknowable, but the equally-widespread allegations of fake searches and toxic departments here appear not to be based on even a good-faith attempt to learn what facts are available...
Uhh, were you at the same conference I was just at? If so, and if you kept your ears open, you would have learned that Vanderbilt is losing its MA program and is in receivership, and Arizona had an external review last year that was so critical that big changes are going to happen there, too. As far as I can remember those are the only two places being discussed here as toxic (especially for junior faculty) over the past half-year or year, so obviously at least some of the people coming to Famae Volent knew what they were saying. In fact, it looks like those warnings against applying to Vanderbilt a few months ago were dead-on accurate.
And me saying upthread that the Cornell job isn't real is based entirely on the fact that they've run the same fucking search for the past two years without hiring anybody.
Hell, maybe they will finally hire somebody this year, though I can't say I'd want to work somewhere that can't agree on hiring someone two years in a row in this kind of a market.
No word yet from Hunter or Xavier?
Anon @ 4:31: I'm still waiting on Xavier, as well, so either they've not yet contacted their short list or else we're both out of luck!
has U. Tennessee-Knoxville made its campus invites?
I'm not the original Duke source, but I heard some similar whispers so there might be something good to it.
I'm not the original Duke source, but I can confirm what the last poster said. From what I've heard, it's not a genuine "inside job" but it's not a genuinely open search either.
People at the meeting drink a lot and chat with friends who then talk to other friends. Famae volent.
If a department can't fill a position for some time, it's not because the position isn't real. It's either because faculty can't agree on what exactly they want or because they have unrealistic expectations about the position.
Running a search for the second time is not that unusual. Maybe the preferred candidate declined the offer and the department didn't want to move down the list. Maybe one or two candidates bombed their interviews and the department felt that the field was not strong enough. Or maybe the dean didn't like the chosen one and didn't approve the hire, which happens very very rarely, but it does happen.
If a search has been running for three or four consecutive years, you should probably stay away from that department, because there is almost certainly something wrong there.
I think it's time for Servius to step in. 10:27's ad hominem attacks are clearly motivated by some personal grievance, and are not at all indicative of the character of the person in question, according to my personal experience. Whatever issues there are in that department, this kind of petty name-calling isn't productive in the slightest.
yes, name calling is unproductive. I would hate to see this blog degenerate into a Classics version of the poll-sci or econ rumor mills. Also there is no point in discouraging classicists from applying for a job or another. In this market, you have to take any job you can get, even if it's in a toxic department.
That said, I would strongly counsel all junior faculty to go back on the market if they are uncomfortable at their first institution. It's also crucial to go on the market when your first book is out or accepted. Getting an outside offer gives you leverage for negotiating early tenure or maybe a t-t job at a place that's a better fit for you. A good way of framing an outside application is that you want leverage with the administration. Your senior colleagues will almost always understand...
Servius, we have an attack on an easily identified faculty member in Anon. 10:27 today.
"If a department can't fill a position for some time, it's not because the position isn't real. It's either because faculty can't agree on what exactly they want or because they have unrealistic expectations about the position."
You say tomato, I say tomato.
Re failed searches:
"Running a search for the second time is not that unusual. Maybe the preferred candidate declined the offer and the department didn't want to move down the list."
At many places, the dept. doesn't get the option of "moving down the list."
Here, we have to "certify" a list of our top-five candidates and send it to the Dean for approval before we make on-campus interview invitations. A few years back, here's what happened:
Candidates 1 and 2 each called us right before on-campus interview to say s/he'd accepted another position already.
Candidate 3 bombed entirely.
Candidate 4 e-mailed and said s/he'd decided to stay in the tenure-track s/he already had, and so was withdrawing his/her application.
Candidate 5 was on his/her way to campus. At this point, we asked for permission to offer Candidate 6 an on-campus interview as well, so that we'd have the normal pool of 3 on-campus interviewees to choose from. Answer: NO. The certified list was the certified list; we could not move down it. So it came down to Candidate 5 or nobody.
Luckily, Candidate 5 was great and got the job. But had s/he bombed as Candidate 3 did, we would have had a failed search. Not because there weren't good candidates just slightly further down the list, but because our institutional structure explicitly forbids going further down the list if something goes wrong with the top five.
It's insane. But there it is.
Unless by "bombed" you mean "fucked the Dean's wife up the ass on the grave of the university's first president while incorrectly declining amo amare", it would have been unconscionable for you to have not hired one of the two bombing candidates over not hiring anyone at all.
Look, departments have to live with a new hire until renewal/tenure time and, potentially, for ever. We have campus visits to figure out whether we really want to work with someone for that long. So, yes, candidates can sometimes leave such a horrible impression that they don't get an offer.
Sometimes, candidates do behave very badly. My favorite story is of a candidate who went for drinks with the graduate students and went home with one of them. The department learned about this because his distraught wife called the chair of the search committee at 2a.m. to find out where her husband was. Guess who didn't get the job?
As a general point of advice, candidates shouldn't really drink during campus visits, except maybe a glass of wine during dinner to be social. I have seen people scuttle their candidacies for saying stupid things they should not have.
Easily one of the best anecdotes ever shared here. Do you know whether the 2:00 a.m. phone call was about a potentially senior hire, or someone junior?
I will post no details here.
So what, search committees are the morality police now?
I assume the grad student was over 17.
A philandering drunkard may be a brilliant scholar and a talented teacher, but departments are also looking for dependable and professional colleagues. None wants to deal with a loose cannon, who will make life difficult for everyone.
T-T positions are no charity and are not advertised to help unemployed classicists find a job.
Oh, wow! Thank you for enlightening us, Captain Obvious! Any other great pearls of wisdom to bestow? No? Then SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Seriously. I hope the fucking social Darwinist gets denied tenure and then dies of starvation trying to make a living as a crack whore.
Servius? help? I've seen some hostile posts here over the years but things seem to have taken a very bad turn in the last 2-3 days. 4:13 is very worrying in his/her violence and misogyny. Also 7:19 and 7:22.
Right, now's the part where we pretend to be terribly offended.
Recruiting people into this hellhole of a profession and then casting them out to die is all well and good--TT jobs aren't charity, after all--but heavens forfend someone should use strong language.
That just isn't decent.
Some of the most brilliant people I know, never got a t-t job. Some of the most brilliant people I know were denied tenure. And I have also seen many fine classicists who would have been great college professors.
I wished every Classcis PhD could get a t-t-t job, but this is not going to happen. My point was not about throwing people to the wolves, but manage expectations.
Many grad students believe that a t-t job is a reward for their brilliance and great teaching skills, when it's not. Departments hire professors for a whole variety of reasons. Everyone feels for colleagues who are unemployed or on a temporary job, but, in the end, professors will hire colleagues they think they are good for them. That's obvious, true, but clearly not to some. Enough troll feeding for today
7:46 wrote:
"Right, now's the part where we pretend to be terribly offended. … heavens forfend someone should use strong language."
Are you really unable to see why "fucked the Dean's wife up the ass" is disturbingly violent and misogynistic? (Btw, I am not the person who wrote the post you're replying to.) Those who are appalled by that are not just "pretending to be offended".
I second the plea to Servius to step in.
Anyone who thinks that people posting here know what going on at Duke is very gullible.
Does fucking a thing imply hatred of said thing?
(Another poster here)
Anonymous 8:55,
You seem to have failed to realize that the potty-mouthed person up above could easily have written instead "make sweet -- unconventional, but nonetheless truly sweet -- love to the dean's wife" but chose not to. So yes, the language used certainly reveals that that poster has some issues with women.
(By the way, one of my "captcha" terms that I need to type before posting this is "Harvard.")
would seem that Duke will hire another Italian faculty member who does Roman topography without really entertaining the wealth of other candidates.
I heard a very similar rumor. Only that the new Italian colleague doesn't so much work on topography as on digital reconstruction.
Meh. This language is coarse and rude, but hardly justifies censure, especially since it isn't directed at any one person.
Taking down the personal slander was the right call, though.
Not to mention the implicit assumption that a woman's sexual activity is a weapon to use against her husband ('fucked *the dean's wife* -- not "fucked the dean", nor "fucked the dean's husband"); not to mention the implicit assumption that the dean is of course male (no, I don't think the poster was assuming a marriage of two lesbians); not to mention the assumption that the candidate too of course was male ("fucked the dean's wife up the ass" implies penetration). The comment is dripping with hostile misogyny. It doesn't have to be targeted at a named individual to be offensive, and I don't apologize for "censuring" this old-school, Norman-Maileresque misogyny.
Maybe it's a partner hire? I wouldn't be surprised. It's seems all the rage to hire Italians who putt from that side of the rough.
On a side note, I always teach my students that it's almost as important to come off as a classicist (whatever that might mean at the moment) as it is to actually be one. Yeah...our discipline is pretty fucked up. No arguments there.
Wait. If he (we assume it is he, right?) wrote "penetrated the Dean's wife anally," or "performed anal sex on the Dean's wife," it wouldn't be "miogynistic" and therefore OK? What about "pegged the Dean's husband on the grave..."? Is that offensive? Is anal penetration the problem here? If so, why? Some of us enjoy anal sex.
The point of the up-the-ass-on-a-grave bit, in its context, was to create a caricature of the most unpleasant possible thing a candidate could do on his or her campus visit. Of course this little vignette relies on common shared cultural assumptions (such as that a Dean will not like his/her wife being bonked by a candidate, in a cemetery, with incorrect Latin). I think those who are jumping up in outrage just like being outraged, and/or have confused feminism with prudishness. Or maybe they just found a welcome and easy way to distract from the actual substance of the conversation.
Anyway, I thought people would be all over me about using "declining" where I clearly meant "conjugating", but no one's even mentioned that!
From what I've heard, it's not necessarily a partner hire, but it's definitely the hire of someone who is already at Duke. I won't go into specifics, but it's obvious that it's not just me who has been told the same story. That doesn't mean that it's true, but there are some well-informed people posting on this blog.
4:13 is very worrying in his/her violence and misogyny. Also 7:19 and 7:22.
Go make me a sandwich.
The most unpleasant possible thing a candidate could do on his campus visit is to come across as a pompous and misogynistic dick, who feels entitled to getting the job.
No, I am pretty sure I can think of lots of things more unpleasant than that.
PhDs have spent the better part of a decade training specifically for this career. Are you really contending that they *aren't* entitled to jobs at the end of that?
I reiterate: search committees that hire no one in this market are reprehensible.
None is entitled to a job in his chosen career, none. That is not to say that the job market is fair or just, which it certainly is not. There are many, many things wrong with the profession, but that doesn't entitle classics grads to anything, except maybe compassion for the shitty situation they have maneuvered themselves into.
Compassion? Hah! Good one.
On the bright side, as a failure, I will never get the chance to implicate myself fully in this machine of death that requires Classicists to recruit prospective Classicists for the meat grinder in order to keep their jobs.
On the dark side, my children may starve to death.
I fully agree that it's amoral to create PhD programs, which won't produce successful grads. But if you were into feeding a family, going to grad school in a small and obscure field was perhaps not the best career choice. After all, academia is not an easy profession and it's badly paid to boot. I'm not saying that classicists should heroically embrace economic self-sacrifice, which would be very silly. But, c'mon, are you telling me that you never worried about your chances of gainful employment before you went to grad school in Classics - as opposed to getting an MBA or going to Law School ??? !!! ???
then when do the classicists in the U.S. have a field-wide gut-check and decide to stop training qualified professionals for a profession that cannot accommodate them? find me other fields, beyond the unfortunate humanities, where achieving a specialized, professional degree (and doing so with distinction) leaves you basically unqualified for professional employment with salary. when will the tenured concede that a lot of this mess largely serves their needs? when will we start shutting down PhD programs and convert them to terminal MA programs? in effect, one shoe has already fallen (no jobs for qualified degree holders and few cognate fields into which they may transfer) but the other never will, because the tenured faculty with their job security and their need for TA/RA help will never give up that luxury and will never be willing to be straight with the starry-eyed geniuses who come in the door wanting to be the next great classical mind. we are enjambed, ass-fucked, and ill-starred in this pursuit. the platitudes and sympathies of out of touch senior colleagues does little to help those of us without the means to go forward or support ourselves or our families - all the while feeling bitter because not only did we buy the snake oil, but we drank deeply
Many people fail to consider the fact that their undergraduate and graduate programs are actively lying to them about their prospects. They think: "All these professors must know what they are talking about. They're professors!" They then fail to do the research for themselves, or if they do it and find a conflict with what they have been told, believe their professors instead of a website.
And to the inevitable person who maintains staunchly that whole departments of Classics faculty are NOT actively trying to deceive their students about job prospects, you're full of shit.
The one indispensable service that FV provides is to counteract this faculty propaganda with the strangled swansongs of their victims. This is precisely why so many graduate programs tell their candidates not to read FV.
I find it hard to believe that you were lured into Classics by a devious professor who has looking for a cheap RA/TA. In my experience, professors are very clear about the risks involved with going to grad school.
At least I, have been very upfront with my students about the challenges, difficulties, and dangers of grad school, and I have shared how heart-wrenchingly difficult and nerve-wrecking it was to find any job in the beginning. How I, at various points of my post-graduate career, was close to giving up, and how I got a very plum position not because I was the best junior person out there but because I was very, very lucky.
Your situation sucks and I'm sure it's unfair. But I don't think that a smart person can really claim to have been bamboozled into becoming an academic.
I really do love to study ancient Greece and Rome, but I hope this field dies a horrible death. Current faculty are implicated enough to deserve everything that would entail, while prospective faculty are still innocent enough to not deserve the tenure track, with its gradual transformation of human beings into evil fucking vampires.
You're right, I wasn't lured into Classics by a devious professor. It was a whole slew of them.
If I could cause whole departments to close by chopping off limbs, I would gladly go through the rest of my life as a dickless torso.
But, c'mon, are you telling me that you never worried about your chances of gainful employment before you went to grad school in Classics - as opposed to getting an MBA or going to Law School ??? !!! ???
point 1 - prospects for the J.D. holders at the early career stage are not so fun, either.
point 2 - yes, I thought it would be a challenge. I did not appreciate that it was a near-impossible labor and that meritocratic considerations would largely be thrown out the window in favor of more immeasurable metrics like 'fit' (whatever the hell that means), schmoozing, and ass-licking. to hell with all of it. the classics and its practitioners deserve oblivion.
Screw oblivion. We should all be tortured forever in hell.
True, academia is not a flawless meritocracy, but which profession is? Is there really a line of work where people aren't hired and promoted based on "immeasurable metrics" and where no schmoozing or maybe even ass-licking is required?
Angry Poster, please consider that in the last ten years, classicists with PhDs in hand, and also some ABDs, have gone into these fields. The assertion by a poster (possibly you) that classics trains you for nothing else is demonstrably false. Perhaps something here will look attractive to you, and you can find both employment and personal fulfillment in a field you enjoy and respect.
Law
Medicine
Publishing
Music
Teaching in other than professorial circs
Work with international tour groups
Christian ministry (I think also Jewish rabbinate but data are older)
Academic administration
Computer software
Academic libraries
Museums, in various capacities.
Some of these require additional training; some do not. Some are more lucrative, some less; some require specific geographical locations, some do not.
Some only start at certain times of the year; perhaps you could begin by picking the ones that look most interesting and fastest toward a paycheck, and working out from there.
Good luck. And yes, I'd make you a sandwich, if it would help. Please consider this a sandwich in a helping hand.
I doubt the tenured are deliberately lying to us about the job market. I think they are just in denial about how bad it is out there. (For prospective grad students, though, I admit there might be more of an element of deceit.) One thing that I have heard *over and over* since 2008 is how shocked, shocked our faculty are that some bright young thing isn't racking up the interviews. They conclude that this was some bizarre fluke, or everyone is intimidated by someone bright enough to work on Theocritus, or whatever. To put the depths of their denial in perspective, some of these graduate students have been ABD and the faculty STILL expected them to rock the job market. The end result, nothing, after having been assured that universities would fight over us, is no less painful from the job-seeker's perspective, but I don't think there is any malice in it.
those who earn the M.D. work as doctors, those who earn the M.B.A. work in business, NGOs, govt agencies. J.D. law firms. the question here is if the PhD is a professional degree, requiring the candidate to invest the time, effort, cost in getting the training, what, then, would society have them do when there is no professional outlet for the acquired skills? sure, every business has nebulous job-getting, but the predicament of humanities PhDs is especially bleak and increasingly dire, if the professional and popular press is any measure, not to mention the anecdotal evidence. even if we shorten time to degree, there is still no outlet for these people to apply their professional training. (and I would say shorter degree time will mean more degree seekers, thus increasing the glut and the attendant problems.) beyond those here - invested, disaffected, dejected, and otherwise - ranting on this, when will the professional bodies APA (or whatever it is called) and AIA (and others) actually have an earnest discussion about this? a little lunchtime roundtable at the meetings is not enough. where is professional training in 'ancient studies' headed? does it actually have a viable future? at the moment, the viability of this path is much debated, no matter what your footing.
internet - land of trolls.
So profound, poster above! Me much impressed!
Look, we're not going to get anywhere sitting around being bitter, or continually trying to get jobs that just don't exist. We need to pick ourselves up and find alternate careers. Yes, it isn't fair. Yes, we were deceived. Yes, the Classics community at large is like an abusive spouse. But you don't spend time trying to change an abusive spouse; the only thing to do is get up and leave, even though that is difficult to make yourself do, because you still love him despite the abuse.
I want to share my experience. I graduated in 2006 from a respected school (not ivy league though) and I have been in temporary positions ever since. I moved from one coast to the other, leaving behind family and friends. I published my butt off--despite the often heavy teaching loads and all the problems that come with constant moving. I am known in my field. I get invited to contribute to volumes and to speak at lecture series. I will be unemployed in May. If you ask me how I feel, I truly want to die.
Yes, it's awful. In the end, it all comes down to sheer dumb luck. I always thought that you had to be many things to be an academic, but having to be a gambler was not one of them.
I hear you. I graduated from a top program, published articles, and have been on the market for three years post-PhD. I have never received even a one-year job offer that was full time. I have applied to literally hundreds of positions, including all the Mellons and JRFs as well as the TT jobs and VAPs. I used to want to die. Now I want to take the whole field apart, piece by piece.
To be fair, Classics is less horrible than some fields -- Philosophy and German spring to mind. Academia as a whole is in terrible condition, so our anger can't be directed only at senior classicists.
As a recently minted PhD in Classics, and one who is very likely soon to be unemployed, I have to say I've really heard enough of this "we were deceived" line. Personally, I've never heard of a humanities prof who promised anyone that a job would be waiting at the end of a doctorate, but that doesn't matter: you're responsible for your own life choices, above all for the one where you decided to spend 5-8 years of your life on one degree, in a field universally known to be a risky bet at best.
I went in with my eyes open, I knew I was taking a risk, but most of us hitting the market now started before August 2008, which changed everything. This was just bad luck; the risk turned out to be much greater than I'd thought. If someone had suggested I would get a job before 2008, I wouldn't hold it against them: the crash has changed everything, and almost nobody predicted it. My upcoming predicament is the result of my choices, and regardless of whatever anyone told me beforehand, I'm the one who's responsible.
I think I'm very good at what I do, and it certainly has been spirit-breaking to see how little merit seems to matter, but really, that's just another reason to be happy about getting out. There are an awful lot of disadvantages to being a classics professor. Humanities profs are the worst paid people for the amount of education they have. The transition will be hard, but soon I'll be able to live wherever I want, and I plan to be making far more than any classics prof in 4-5 years.
Enjoy your crushing, endless hours of work for 80k/year, suckers! (or, in many cases, much less)
Right. Leaving is really the only actual solution. The hardest part is getting the resolution to leave the field to stick. We are very well conditioned.
If I could cause whole departments to close by chopping off limbs, I would gladly go through the rest of my life as a dickless torso.
Now, this post has vulgarity, but it also has cleverness -- something lacking in the infamous "dean's wife" post, which the poster should have held on to a bit longer to see if he might find something truly entertaining.
Now, in the case of this post that I quote I have been entertained by trying to figure out how one would chop off all ones own limbs, not to mention performing an autopeotomy. I'm assuming that there must some contraption involved, since if one just wields an ax or knife one will be left with that limb still attached.
Unless by "bombed" you mean "fucked the Dean's wife up the ass on the grave of the university's first president while incorrectly declining amo amare"
This is exhibit A for why I think our field is doomed, and why I despair whenever I visit this cesspool of incompetence.
You either fucking *parse* amo and/or amare or you fucking *conjugate* the verb amo-amare. You don't fucking *decline* a fucking verb you useless excuse for a dumb-as-rocks weeping anal wart.
Yes! Yes! This is the Classics I know and love.
I am indeed an anal wart. I lurk in the ass of the Dean's wife indefinitely.
Different person here, but sure, that's why Classics is doomed. Never mind that we're a discipline that's been largely ignoring the fifty year memo that people don't give a shit about our hyper acute specializations. I regularly read CVs where people wrote an entire dissertation on a book of Vergil and think WTF? Lest you think I'm a biased historian or archaeologist, the same can be said with a diss about LH IIIB2 kylixes found in some dig house of some obscure site in northern Greece. Who gives a fuck? Now these misguided souls are on here venting wondering what the fuck happened to the hope of gainful employement. Idiotic advisors with no pulse on current events let alone decades-old trends is what happened. But the problem is someone in an internet moment mixing up declensions with conjugations. How about the person who said chapters instead of books a while back? A dozen Vergil scholars who wrote their diss (and nothing much else since I suspect) then jumped down this person's throat. Yeah, that's what killed Vergil, Homer, and every other person that the vast majority of the population doesn't give a shit about, at least not enough to sponsor and support myopic research based on some artificial sliver of material devised by us insular morons.
Before the discussion degenerated, someone asked about Hunter College. I'd also be curious to know if anybody knows anything more about the progress their search. A couple of days after the APA I got a 'dear candidate' email saying they were putting together a shortlist for interviews in February - which is fast approaching, and I've heard nothing else (and there's nothing on the wiki). Am I out of the running, or are others also not hearing anything more out of them?
But can you blame people for doing safe/boring work? People might be more interested in talking about your work at cocktail parties if your phd a theoretically innovative and thematically wide-ranging tour de force, but they are still going to hire Virgil guys. And you can bet the Virgil guy hasn't made any controversial claims that are hard to defend or even grasp - because he hasn't said anything at all. Whereas someone who has tried to do something new, or innovate methodologically is incredibly easy to shoot down -- because everyone is well-versed in the orthodoxy.
Most classicists are simply not interested in innovation. If they say they are, then nine times out of ten what they mean is they are interested in ideas that were innovative 20 years ago, and are still treated as such: watered-down and theoretically shallow versions of new historicism or deconstructionism, ideas that are familiar and easy to grasp, but exotic sounding enough that it makes people feel like they're doing something extremely clever and radical by repeating them.
The inherent conservatism in this field means that students who try to innovate are not rewarded but punished for their efforts. From what I have seen, the most successful candidates are those whose dissertations are solid, safe and dull.
Nailed it in one!
(Sorry, had to do it for old times' sake).
Yep, it's like the moment in movies where the protagonist realizes that they're batteries for robots or something similar. Why do you think so many tenured scholars are so depressed and drunk at the APA?
And yeah, the comments complained about above are misogynistic and hateful and completely part of the problem. If you're so tone deaf you can't hear the misogyny here, are you really going to be fabulously in tune with the nuances of long-gone literatures and cultures? No, you are not, you are going to be churning out shitty, boring, pedantic work, and wondering why no one gives a shit about you even though you have memorized the whole of Smyth and can scan aeolic meters right almost every time.
Yeah, we are sad, strange little people but we have no one's pity. Who killed Homer? The more appropriate question is which discipline shot itself in the genitals and called it murder.
Ooh, ooh! Is it us? I bet it's us!
I never realized before how many of you are just good, old-fashioned stupid.
on innovation: yes indeed the above is right. That's how we got to the point where leading scholars defending the field in the APA panel 'the future of liberal education' speak of the 'pleasure of reading Greek and Latin.' If this is the leadership...
Honestly though, if we're not reading Greek and Latin, what's the point?
If I'm going to have to teach a bunch of shit in English I might as well become a plumber.
"Might as well become a plumber" - made me laugh. I'm not the poster who wrote despairingly of that panel, but while I am certainly in favor of people learning Latin and Greek, if we are going to encourage them to do so, we probably do have to do a bit more than point to the majesty of the ancients and hope that everyone understands their inherent value to the young.
Before you've got tenure, it is career suicide to publish anything controversial. Most tenured profs like young scholars to be brave - as long as they are on their side of the argument. If they are not, they'll write bad reviews, knowing full well that a single bad review can ruin someone's tenure bid, because administrators take bad reviews in important journals very seriously. It doesn't matter whether others love your work.
So, by all means, get into a big name program, cultivate influential patrons, and do some very comprehensive and very solid work that will be considered USEFUL and smart by the overwhelming majority of your colleagues in your field. This will dramatically increase your chances of finding a job and will win you tenure. Yes, senior colleagues will go on and on about how important it is to be innovative, because they can afford to be controversial. That's what's tenure is for. But junior colleagues cannot, until they want to be expelled from the profession.
I did a year and a half of grad school before I left the bullshit of Academia.
No Ph.D, no M.A, but I certainly don't regret it. I got out with my sanity still somewhat intact, although I did develop a minor anxiety disorder. Not joking, the faculty in my dept were verbally, emotionally, and psychologically abusive. But hey, at least they weren't physically abusive...unless sexually abusive counts, in which case, a couple of them have records. Attrition rate is somewhere between 60-80%, ie, normal.
Even the tenured profs were miserable, and they're the supposed "success" stories in whose footsteps I was going to follow.
Yeah, no thanks. Got out, got a job, MUCH happier, and can still read and research whatever I damn well please, hassle and stress free. Y'all remember when Classics was fun? Leave the field. It becomes fun again.
Also, anybody read "Classics: A Discipline and Profession in Crisis?"? It sounds like it should be required reading for all 1st year grad students.
Yes, I can see that you are right that it is 'career suicide' to innovate pre-tenure. But let's not kid ourselves about what a terrible system this is: younger scholars starting out in the discipline are always going to be a prime source for new ideas and perspectives, both because they haven't had time to fall into the habits of the discipline and because young people are temperamentally inclined to want to make their mark. Denying those people their voice is inevitably going to be a disaster for the discipline.
And it's no good hoping that scholars will start being daring once they have tenure. For one thing if you're selecting candidates for tenure on the grounds of their ability to conform you're hardly going to have a likely looking bunch of innovators there anyway. And if you've got into the habit of not thinking critically about the discipline for the first 10 years of your career, you're not necessarily suddenly going to start doing this in the second 10 years, especially as you will already have absorbed the prejudices of the field (prejudices which ensured your own success).
Yes, part of the problem is the tenure system (I've always thought it's horrible). But general attitudes towards new ideas and the purpose of classical scholarship don't help either. I'm becoming more and more convinced that the discipline on the whole is intellectually bereft.
I couldn't agree more. And I am deeply grateful to some young scholars who ruined their careers for writing really important books. It's a crying shame!
Everyone knows that the statements made above about Vergil are completely full of it, right?
"I regularly read CVs where people wrote an entire dissertation on a book of Vergil."
Yeah, this happens about once every ten years. I can think of two guys with endowed chairs who did this on their way to writing multiple books.
"you can bet the Virgil guy hasn't made any controversial claims that are hard to defend or even grasp - because he hasn't said anything at all."
You think Vergil is a safe field where you can get away with saying nothing at all? No controversial claims? Nothing innovative?
You are completely clueless. Good innovative work is highly prized, in hiring, tenure cases, grant applications. Innovate work that does not convince ("let's start making square bicycle wheels") is not.
If you mean by innovate "let's apply the same theoretical lens that was fashionable in English departments 20 years ago to whatever text we are currently reading," you are right.
This type of "innovative" work will always "convince," because it doesn't really offend anyone. Truly paradigm-shifting stuff is, by definition, controversial.
Scholars like Wilamowitz and Finley were HUGELY controversial when they were young, and, indeed, Finley was turned down for tenure at Rutgers.
The idea that a book that convinces everyone could be innovative is proof how conservative and risk-averse Classics is a discipline.
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