Tried to post this earlier, but for some reason FV wouldn't let me.
@November 29, 2015 at 1:03 PM
I was a SC chair last year. A lot of your points seem reasonable, and I'd expect that most of us agree with them. I'll respond to a few of the points just so you and others can see that we often share your frustrations.
*We are required by HR to use our HR system. This is frustrating, but HR will not let us consider any materials sent directly to a member of the SC.
*I've experienced our HR system from both sides. It usually works well, but sometimes there are inexplicable bugs that make it impossible for some (but not all) candidates to upload files. My department was not the first to experience this, but HR did not believe us or the other department that had the problem until I walked over to their offices with a computer and went through the uploading process step by step with the HR tech person. They were stunned, because their response in previous searches had been that it was the candidate's error. Candidates had been dropped from searches due to HR's unwillingness to consider that they themselves were the source of a problem. I got it fixed for my search, but it took literal legwork.
*I agree about Skype. We use it as the best of bad choices. It is a suboptimal interviewing interface for a variety of reasons: unreliable internet connections distract everyone, it makes interviewing more awkward and privileges those who are good at "constructing an experience" as opposed to those who would make good colleagues, and it just feels weird. Other people have other problems with it. I personally think that the decreased cost to the candidates outweighs those negatives, but not everyone agrees.
*Fewer documents at first, and multiple rounds of "additional documents requested". I agree. Only exception: when there's a short deadline for the search.
*Leaving people hanging. HR again. Our rules are: once a person has been notified that they are ruled out, they are out of the search permanently. So, before we interview our top 12, we will intentionally not notify our top 20 or so, just in case we want to dip back into that pool after the interviews. When we pick our top three, we will still avoid rejecting the top 6-8, in case we need to dip back in. And when we won't notify those people until we have a signed contract. Otherwise, the search could fail and we'd have to start over or lose the line.
I sympathize with your difficulties based on HR rules, and the threat of losing a line is real; but there are still two things you could do:
1. Tell people in the top-20 that you cannot fit them on your interview list but that you have not given up on them entirely. Tell people in the top-6-to-8 that they have not been invited to campus, but might still be in the running.
I assume that you don't want to do that because you don't want your eventual colleague to feel like a consolation prize. But here's the thing: no one cares. A more transparent process would make everyone happier.
...or is it that HR won't let you update people on their standing? If so:
2. Tell HR to change their rules. I am sure that the faculty can have a say in the rules your institution uses. Yes, it might take a bit of leg work, but your hiring process could eventually match your faculty's humanity, instead of your HR department's bureaucratic heartlessness.
Thanks, 3:21. I'm 1:03, and am not the same person as 3:41, although that person seems to be impersonating me. I know you can't just order HR to change their rules, and I appreciate the literal legwork.
Thanks for being a sane person in an insane and brutal process. It matters.
As someone who has been a finalist for two TT positions and didn't get either, I disagree wit 1:09PM's suggestion that committees not call people at the final stages to tell them that they didn't make the cut. In one case, I got a phone call telling me that the position had been offered to someone else, and while it was of course a painful experience -- especially since I'd stupidly allowed myself to think that the call was going to be a job offer -- it has left a much less bitter taste in my mouth than my other experience. In that case, I learned via the wiki that the position had been offered to someone else and accepted, and though I eventually received a phone call three weeks later, the whole thing made me feel as though I was being treated as a non-person because I hadn't been offered the job. After spending two enjoyable evenings with people who at least did a good job of pretending to like me and leaving with the expectation that I'd at least have some interesting new contacts if I didn't get the job, being ignored for three weeks and given only a perfunctory phone call to tell me what I already knew felt insulting and made me doubt the sincerity of the people I'd met. It's possible that a very particular sort of email would have made me feel as fine about it as I could have, but I doubt it. After these experiences, I'd much prefer the phone call.
Of course, others will feel differently, so unless I'm alone in my attitude either choice will make somebody feel worse than they might have.
It's important to distinguish how an experience makes you feel and whether the other people involved were being good actors.
I know exactly how it feels to be rejected, as does nearly everyone reading this board. In the experience you describe, though, getting a phone call three weeks after the job was offered to someone else is extra-ordinarily civil and collegial. It says to me that your first impression -- that the people you interviewed with genuinely liked you and would be good contacts -- was correct. Your emotional response is just that: your emotional response. You have my sympathies, in the literalist sense of that word.
Still, if you resent the department that called you to deliver the bad news, then you need to know that the issue isn't with them but with you. The uncivil norm in this field is either to hear nothing or to get a form email some months later. Instead, you got a personal phone call after a mere three weeks. Given that the department probably had to make an offer, wait the offer period, get an acceptance, send a contract, and then get a signed contract back, that timing is phenomenal.
I would also agree that getting a personal phone call from the chair to let me know that I wasn't getting the job, after a campus visit, was the right thing for me. I thought it was a class act on the chair's part, and was much, much better than learning about it on the wiki. I've stayed in touch with people at that department, with no hard feelings.
In agreement with several who have posted already:
- Our SLAC does not allow departments to convert VAPs to TT, so the department must do a full search regardless of how much they do or don't like their VAP.
- Many colleges require diversity statements. A quick look at Hamilton's website shows that they are running over a dozen searches this year, and all request diversity statements.
- Such diversity statement don't ask about the candidate's identity, but rather how the candidate would "engage and sustain [the college's] commitment to diversity and inclusion."
- I've never met a search committee member who didn't take a search seriously, hoping to get the absolute best candidate out there, regardless of whether they've got an inside candidate, or an applicant that identifies as a Afro-latina transgender lesbian paraplegic martian.
- Many colleges require the SC to use their school's HR website, or interfolio, or Academic Jobs Online. I appreciate the post of Nov. 29 1:03pm, who reminds us that it is important to inform the administration of the pitfalls of each of these, especially if it is possible to make a few easy changes to save candidates a few bucks.
I really appreciated reading about another's experience at the bitter end of a long-drawn-out TT search. I also felt hurt by it, and I think it's good to express that to each other to help with the healing. I know, intellectually, that the phone call I received weeks after the wiki let me know I wasn't it came from a person who had genuinely good thoughts towards me, but it is still painful to forge those connections, to imaginatively project a life with those colleagues, in that city, only to have to forget it all. It's like breaking up with someone you thought you were going to marry: "it's not you, it's me."
I don't have much add to your post, but I do want to validate your feelings. You're right. It does feel that way. And you're right to express those feelings and to own them.
To all the others who have posted lately: I'm really impressed by the empathy and good will on this board. It makes me feel some hope that this generation of Classicists may actually be better people than the good ole boys that raised so many of us.
@ 11/29 8:06PM. Nope, sorry. Maybe at some places three weeks would be phenomenal, but not when the offer has already been made and accepted for three weeks. The proof of this is that I didn't wait nearly so long in the other case, and I was notified before it became public knowledge that the position had been filled. Perhaps there were some rules in place at the institution that prevented the chair from calling me within three weeks of the candidate's acceptance; if so, then it would be better for those rules to change. The fact that the norm is not to get anything at all -- if it is a fact; my understanding is that it is very definitely not the norm at the final stage -- wouldn't make the relatively better perfunctory phone call after 3 weeks any better; it would just mean that the norm is worse. But I'm not even sure the alleged norm would be worse; I think I would rather get an impersonal email shortly after the position had been accepted than an impersonal phone call long after everyone in the field knew that the position had been offered and accepted. You say that the problem is mine and not anybody else's, and that may be so, but I thought what we were talking about here is what kind of treatment finalists who don't get the job prefer. If my preference were completely irrational, that'd be one thing, but I don't think it's such at all. But in any case, I didn't offer it as the most reasonable preference to have, I offered it as one that I -- and I suspect I'm not alone here -- do in fact have.
Of course, if SCs can't do anything about it, then they can't do anything about it. But the point of the discussion, I thought, was to consider what candidates would prefer if SCs were in a position to decide. Telling me that it's my fault or that it's usually worse misses the point.
@8:16, the empathy and goodwill is an anomaly. Externalized self-loathing is the usual norm here. But it's nice to see a change. We'll see whether it continues.
@8:16, the empathy and goodwill is an anomaly. Externalized self-loathing is the usual norm here. But it's nice to see a change. We'll see whether it continues.
Looks like you're right now target, 8:21.
Ah, well. Back to the status quo. The SC that didn't pick 8:19 dodged a bullet. S/he takes the wiki as God's own truth, despises a timely attempt at a human(izing) touch, and cannot or will not admit of realities out of his/her own. That's all unhealthy and -- worse -- unproductive in every way.
3:28, the problem is not asking for a diversity statement per se, but a personalized diversity statement written especially for this university. Nobody teaching four new preps and frantically trying to publish with zero job security, which is the situation of many candidates, has the time to write a different diversity statement reflecting each college's unique commitment to diversity.
There's that externalized self-loathing again. Someone expresses her or his feelings honestly and is harshly dismissed as unworthy of having a job. Somehow that earlier hope that the current generation of classicists will be more kind than its predecessors strikes me as rather unrealistic. The best advice I can think of for anyone who plans to continue trying to make it in this field is to not to have feelings, or at least not to express them. Doing so just makes you easy prey for the vultures.
This isn't a complaint so much as an open question. I'm not on the market this year but am looking towards next year. Do we have any statistics or informed impressions about how ABDs fare on the winter market cycle as opposed to candidates with degrees in hand or who are in VAPs? Another way to ask: Should ABDs even bother applying to TT positions? How often do they make the first cut? How many of those make campus visits? How many of those get the job? Is their time better spent just writing the dissertation and waiting until the spring cycle?
There are no reputable statistics on those questions (and probably no statistics at all). Why not? It is not in the interest of any party who could collect such statistic to do so, or to publish them if they did.
Anecdotal evidence: if you know people at the school, then you have a shot at a VAP as an ABD, especially if you went there was an undergrad. But if you have this shot, then you already know that from your connections. For the rest? It is possible but much less likely. If the school is in a very undesirable location and the VAP is one year and you are a particularly good fit (due to religion, area of study, personality, etc.), then you might get such a job. Generally speaking, though, the glut is so extreme at the moment that there's really no reason outside of personal connections for the search committee even to consider you. Take this year: no Latin Lit. jobs. Why would a SC consider an ABD when they could have someone who has finished, has already been teaching, has taught the specific courses they need filled that year, etc.?
So, does it happen? Yes. Should you be counting you chances if you don't already have a pretty clear in? No.
The problem is not expressing your feelings. The problem is imputing your irrational anger onto individuals at a particular department and considering them bad actors for doing what was in fact objectively positive and professional behavior--indeed, superlatively nice behavior. Being upset at the way things turned out is one thing, and you were validated for those feelings. Blaming others for good actions that just weren't those you personally wanted is quite different. That deserves the condemnation you received.
Based on the last two years of wiki data, which is obviously not official data, nor have I checked the validity of any of the reported hires, 25% of TT jobs went to ABD candidates and 53% of non-TT jobs went to ABD candidates. 2013 and 2014 were remarkably similar as far as those statistics are concerned.
Should you bother to be on the market? Of course, you might get lucky. As they say, your chance of getting a job is 0% if you don't apply. If it gets in the way of completing your dissertation, you're probably not ready to be on the market in any case.
phonecall transcript: "Hi, Candidate! It was really great meeting you in our town, and I learned a lot from your job talk. I'm sorry to say that the position has been offered to and accepted by another candidate. This was a very difficult decision, since we know that you would have been a good fit, too. I hope you are having better luck with other applications. You will not get an official letter or email from HR until we have a signed contract from the lucky bastard. I will let you know when that happens. Heh, I'm not even supposed to be calling you right now, but I wanted you to hear it from me. Good luck, again."
Holy crap! There is a SCHOOL that says this: "We believe that there is a consistency between biblical truth and truth discovered through reason and experience; however, we hold that when apparent conflicts occur, all truth claims defer to the truth revealed in the Bible."
Bats are birds! Insects have four legs!
Is anyone here desperate enough to sign the pledge even if they don't agree with it?
@ December 1, 2:25: I did not get the impression that any college asked for a personalized diversity statement, tailored to their school. For me, your best argument about how you can foster an inclusive learning environment should work equally well for all schools. If you've got some specific strategies that only work at, say, a small school, then you can have different SLAC and large Uni templates, as many people do with cover letters.
I agree that it is difficult for candidates to produce special docs beyond Cover Letter and CV, like a Research Statement (that's pretty much covered in the cover letter, right?) and Teaching Philosophy (what is this, anyway?!?!). Diversity statement is no different, but it seems to be catching more flak on FV because it's a new addition to the game in the last 5 years or so. For me, personally, I think I can learn a lot more about a candidate from a diversity statement than a research statement or teaching statement, since those docs, like cover letters, have become so uniform.
" The best advice I can think of for anyone who plans to continue trying to make it in this field is to not to have feelings, or at least not to express them."
We're highly educated adults, not tweens. We probably shouldn't be going around saying "Oh look at me, I am feeling emotions!"
@10:46AM: On the bright side, anyone who is willing to sign the pledge probably has better job prospects than most of us. I'd bet that school won't be getting 240 applications, anyway.
On second thought I'm not so sure that's a bright side after all.
On another note, is there any justification, in an age when sending batch emails is painfully easy, for failing to notify applicants when they've been rejected? If someone has taken the time to craft an application for your institution, isn't it the very least you can do to just send an email saying "Thanks for applying. We regret to inform you..."? What gives? I'm glad the wiki is available, but I'd rather hear any news from the search committees than learning third-hand here. I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring this up...
Re: rejection notification, there are places where HR policy (or state laws, at publics) prevents them from notifying applicants until a search is closed. Not to say there aren't places that fail to notify candidates even in the absence of such policies, but there are places that really just can't say anything until a signed contract comes back.
I think some of the discussion here about policies regarding notification to candidates who haven't made the cut has largely missed the point. We all recognize (I hope) that there are often policies in place that determine how SCs do and don't handle this issue, and that the members of the SC are not at liberty to act contrary to these policies. I take the suggestions we've recently seen here as ideas about what would be best and what the effects of various policies are, not about whether individual actors are behaving well or badly. Obviously SC members can only do so much, and I suppose it's not very likely that any suggestions they make to HR / administration will bring about any changes. But provided that we understand the recent suggestions here as suggestions about what would be best, I'm with those who have expressed a preference for hearing more quickly. Often these things are beyond the control of the SC, but to the extent that they are within their control, I don't see what's so objectionable about preferences for learning more quickly and in a more personal fashion (particularly at later stages).
One of the healthiest things that those of us who receive rejections can do is remind ourselves that it isn't personal and that we almost certainly shouldn't have any personal animosity toward the individuals involved. But that's consistent with thinking that it would be better if SCs operated on differently policies. So, with all due acknowledgment to the fact that the SC members themselves often aren't able to determine the policies under which they act, is there really anyone here who thinks that it wouldn't be better if rejected candidates were notified early and that candidates, particularly ones who have visited campus, be contacted in a personalized way? Discussion at FV is very unlikely to change anything, but that hasn't prevented hundreds of posts griping about our plight. If there's a sliver of a chance that discussion here can improve the way SCs handle things, why not keep it going?
Let's spice things up and demonstrate what a crap shoot it is for both SCs and candidates. Without naming anyone, how woeful of a choice has a department familiar to you made? It can be about fit as much as competence. I just had this discussion with a friend and we realized that every department we've known, including our grad program, has whiffed quite badly - like Sam Bowie, Darko Milicic, and Greg Oden bad. We are not archaeologists, but we noted that archaeology was an area where the programs have done particularly bad. Why is this? In at least one case, the chosen one is no longer in the field and the other two campus invites are generally recognized as up and coming superstars with amazing projects. Yikes.
Anon 9:49 Oh, the stories I could tell. I have experience with a department that has a history of trying to hire (with varying levels of success) the weaker or weakest candidate. I'll think about how to anonymize.
One easy example: 4 on-campus job talks and demo classes for a TT Latin literature position. 2 of the candidates were stellar; 1 was good but not as popular as the top two; the last was lackluster across the board. In the demo class, s/he could not identify a hexameter in the text s/he chose to teach. The job talk was unfocused and unoriginal; philology was absent. All of the graduate students voted for one of the two "stellar" candidates (not that their vote had any impact - it was only for advisory purposes).
Guess which candidate the majority of the department voted to hire?
Hmmmmm, of all the hires I've seen go bad, most came down to choosing someone based mainly on the criterion of sexy research (which might me access to a particular dig for an archaeologist). And then (I'm trying to be vague here, so I'm combining multiple examples into one sentence) said person ends up being a terrible teacher, terrible colleague, a perfectionist who is not willing to take the risk of submitting publications for review, or sexual harasser of students and colleagues (yeah, that happens a lot).
The SCS Presidential Panel this year is about the plight of contingent faculty (that's good). Of the five speakers, one is a VAP, one works for ACLS, and the rest are full professors. That...could be better...
Yes, it could be better. But think of it this way: just how many contingent faculty would feel comfortable speaking in this venue, and of those, how many would be both good speakers and representative speakers? It's not surprising at all that instead we would look to mouthpieces who have nothing to lose.
The other reason that it could/might be better for full professors to do the speaking (assuming they've already done the listening): if we want any meaningful change, the words must reach an audience of Assoc. and Full Professors, so the words need to come from mouths that they will listen to. If they were willing to listen to contingent mouths, we wouldn't need a panel like this.
I just hope that some of the senior folks were contingent faculty at some point, and I don't mean some elite post-doc while jockeying for the best position possible while waiting out the machinations of connected advisors. In my experience, the vast majority of faculty who landed a position before 1980 have no clue despite all the stories they've heard second hand. They're busy working out course releases and vacation homes while judging us for not having two books for tenure when they often had none or a marginal one barely distinguishable from the diss.
Don't worry, 12:18; of the two tenured presenters on the Pres. Panel, one got the doctorate in 1994 and the other in 1993. A glance at their CVs will indicate that one of them, at least, held four (by my count) non t-t positions before getting a tenurable job; the other isn't clear about the nature of previous jobs.
As for the clueless pre-1980 hires -- well, there may be a few of them still, but since 1980 is 35 years ago, most of those who "landed a job before 1980" are well into retirement age now. Speaking for myself, I'll be retiring as soon as I possibly can, I hope before age 65 (I'm 58), IF the ACA survives the next election. If it doesn't survive, I'll have to hang in here until 65 and Medicare because I have a chronic illness that means I can't go without health insurance.
"Vacation homes?" I know very, very few full professors with one of those. Most are a lot more likely to be working out how to pay for their parents' assisted living needs than buying vacation homes for themselves.
Anon 6:03-- Not I. But then again, there are a lot of places I haven't heard from yet. It seems too early in the game to think anything is amiss, though.
It is possible that Loyola Chicago will make a short list first, then request letters after that. Some diversity consultants recommend this to combat unconscious bias, because letters can be more of a reflection of who you know (which reflects your privilege) than how good you are. Or maybe this particular SC has other reasons. But my point is, I know of at least one situation in which SCs elect not to read letters until they've drawn up a short list.
Loyola is compiling the interview list now and will send notification early next week. Anonymous above is right about letters (it is encouraged as 'best practice' at our university)
I completely understand where many of you are coming from but it is obvious to anyone working as faculty at a college or university that you have no idea that SCs have zero control over HR processes and policies. There is no way faculty can tell HR what to do or how to conduct a search, what interface to use, not to use interfolio in a way that does not force candidates to pay, when to notify of rejections, etc. Faculty are absolutely forbidden to accept applications in person. If you think that faculty have any power in these matters, you are in for a rude awakening when you actually start working as faculty. Same thing goes for the diversity statement. Again, the SCs don't get to make those decisions; they are told that they are to require it. Sure, it may be a pain for you to write but it has a purpose and it may be useful to a SC. Will it make you or break you? Probably not, but a thoughtful statement can certainly help an already strong application. A bad statement can certainly hurt you. I sympathize with everyone looking for employment and I appreciate the bitterness and the frustration but a lot of the complaints here seem to me the result of inexperience with the system (which is understandable). Hopefully this information will help at least explain some of the reasons behind these processes and the lack of power on the part of faculty to affect them.
The faculty have been powerless for decades, we're all disappointed with the status quo, and none of us has any power to change anything. Sorry about that. As you were.
Sound familiar? It would be hilarious, if it weren't so sad. On a more serious note, most of us as faculty do indeed have the power to voice our opinions about the systems we are forced to use, and on more than a few SLACs around the US voicing our concerns can be done over a cup of coffee with some person who lives just down the street from us. HR and IT are evil faceless monsters, but the people who work in those divisions are often genuinely interested in hearing how their systems work from people who actually use them. So that's just a thought, to go along a with quite a number of opinions already expressed about how the empty complaining and bitterness on FV could actually be used by current and future SC members to improve the state of the field, at least as far as the hiring process goes. As for the state of the field more generally, we already know that current faculty (myself included) are powerless to do anything about it because we're busy sitting on our hands and being complacent.
"As for the state of the field more generally, we already know that current faculty (myself included) are powerless to do anything about it because we're busy sitting on our hands and being complacent."
Well, maybe you spend most of your time sitting on your hands being complacent. Most of the classics faculty I know at SLACs aren't engaging in utterly useless arguments with HR (we have no leverage to make them change their practices, and talk gets us absolutely nowhere) because we ARE busy: not with "sitting on our hands" but with teaching both languages at all levels, along with the full range of civ. courses required to bring our numbers of students up high enough that the administration will continue to authorize our language programs, while also carrying our assigned share of freshman advisees, advising our majors, trying to keep up with our own research and writing, serving on three or four committees simultaneously, sometimes serving on a SC where we have to read well over 250 applications, and, yes, occasionally checking Famae Volent and writing a comment out of the (perhaps foolish?) belief that hearing tenured faculty's perspective could be useful for job seekers. Oh, and some of us have spouses and families who'd like to see us for more than fifteen minutes a day, too. When exactly would we have the time or energy to tilt against the HR windmill, and why would we waste our time and energy on something where we know we'd have exactly zero chance of being taken seriously, let alone of making changes?
Re teaching both languages at all levels -- because our enrollments are small, the only way we are allowed to offer our upper-level languages is as uncompensated overloads. Thus, for instance, this semester I am in the classroom for 14 hours per week, every week (this includes a one-hour senior seminar), and have five separate preparations. Just keeping on top of class preparation, grading, committee work, publication deadlines, and so on in a semester with 14 hours teaching per week leaves me very little time for anything else. I'm lucky to have a spouse who has taken over all the shopping, laundry, and housecleaning, but even so I'm just barely managing the necessary juggling. I am not such a fool as to take on HR in a battle I know I have no chance of winning.
Anon 3:19 here: Actually, in my previous comment I miscounted. When I include the senior seminar, I have SIX separate preparations per week (2 Latin authors, 2 Greek authors, one civ. course, senior seminar). Math was never my strong point.
3:19's experience is my own, right down to number of courses, new preps, etc, except I don't have a spouse to do the laundry or grocery shopping. I've been in a faculty position for 5 years now, and I've had well over 20 new preps (not just *different* preps). Part of this is from changing schools, but part of it is because my program is so small that I have to change the courses every semester so that my students can take enough classes to fulfill their major.
But 1:59's point has merit, too. In universities this small, personal relationships matter as much as and sometimes more than bureaucratic rules. Remembering that HR isn't just "evil, faceless HR" but is actually Susie at the front desk, Sam in the back, Taylor working contracts, and Lace on Title IX can go a long way in being heard. Sometimes those relationships make a difference in meaningful ways.
A petty, non-HR example: I've gotten a lot of literal free lunches just by being on a first name basis with the employees at my regular, on-campus lunch place. HR doesn't serve lunch, but being friendly has gotten my job ad placed sooner and updated more carefully.
Agreed with other former SC members who've lamented/apologized being unable to notify candidates in the negative (e.g. no SCS interview forthcoming) until late in the game, or even until after the entire game is over. I don't in any way think that silence is a polite or acceptable way to 'reject' applications that represent so much individual hard work, but I personally can't do anything about it at the moment, which bothers me. I'm sorry. And I know that doesn't mean much of anything under the circumstances to those experiencing the radio silence, but I'm still sorry.
I am wondering the same thing. I think they're just being super slow. With a generalist job one would think that the application pool is so big (à la Hamilton College) that someone will update the Wiki when there's an update to be had.
That said, allow me to bitch and moan about schools that take so long to generate their shortlist. *bitch, moan*
I'm not on a SC this year and can't speak for any other school's practice, but in my experience, if you haven't heard yet, that's a sign you're still in the running.
Imagine a pool of c. 200 files. The first task is to cut that number down. The first run through, brutal though this may seem, is to eliminate about 140 files out of those 200 as quickly as possible. This means glancing at the cover letter and the CV and cutting out as many as you possibly can. Some places then send the first set of rejection letters out at that point. If you hear back within a week after the deadline, that means you went out in this first cut.
Then each SC member (here at least) individually reads the 60 or so remaining files and tries to cull them down to a personal "deserves serious consideration" list of about 35. We read those very carefully indeed. Then, we each generate a personal list of our top 20 picks. Then and only then, we meet in full concave and hammer out the list of 12 people to interview at the SCS. This process takes a while (especially if we've set the deadline late enough that reading files coincides with grading finals!), and we do not tell anyone that they're out of the running until we have our short list of convention interviewees. There's usually a good deal of overlap in our individual short lists of 20, but there are also some areas of disagreement and we are careful not to tell anyone that they're out until they are really definitely OUT.
Thus, if you have not yet heard from a particular place, I would take that as reason to suspect that you're somewhere in that "deserves serious consideration" process.
That might have seemed like a helpful "chin-up!" to you, but everyone here knows that most schools will not notify people when they don't make the cut, because their inhumane HR rules prohibit such notifications. Most of us will know everything before the SCS meeting only because of the wiki. Then we will chuckle in March when we get a form letter telling us how much they appreciated our applications, but unfortunately we are no longer under consideration for interview at the conference.
I know that this is not the place to bitch about CAMWS practices, but I hope that it will get back to them.
This year, the CAMWS registration fee structure is designed to help poor students attend the conference. I love that idea. But what they did was charge members $150, with the banquet automatically included, in order to charge students only $90 (banquet also automatically included). That means that students are forced to attend the banquet, and are paying more for registration than they used to pay when rejecting the banquet. Yes, it's less than members, but why make everyone pay so much more? This is a petty con designed to make everyone attend the banquet.
So...members pay twice what they used to, and students pay at least 50% more than they used to; but at least the banquet won't be underattended.
I hate CAMWS. I hate the APA more, but the profs at my school tried to push this conference on the grads every chance they got. It's so great for grad students! So friendly! Maybe in comparison to the APA it is, but it feels like a knock-off. It lacks the critique that is an essential part of conferences. I got hit on inappropriately numerous times by drunk losers the year I attended. CAMWS is so much funnnnn, they said! I guess I'm a snob, but give me a real international conference over CAMWS anyday. If only we had one that wasn't as depressing as the sour sweat-stained APA.
Anyone remember the year CAMWS - which purports to be for midwestern states - was held in Tucson? Provo, UT? Yeah, that's affordable and friendly for grad students. Why do they continue to host this conference outside of the midwest? Makes no sense to me.
What are the chances that Brandeis (and Berkeley, for which people have gotten rejections but no one has yet reported an interview) have decided to interview exclusively at the associate prof level?
I posted the original complaint about CAMWS, but I wouldn't say that I hate it.
The program at CAMWS is always what the SCS program should be. It's not choked up with panels from affiliated groups (yay, Numismatics!) and panels organized by the same handful of people padding their tenure portfolios. Instead, there are just a lot of papers on ancient authors and texts. I learn new things at CAMWS, while at the SCS, I just find out what marginal topics are being worked on.
And (@December 19, 2015 at 5:35 AM) it's not supposed to be the Midwest: it's the Middle, West, and South (yes, that includes Arizona, Utah, and Virginia).
But I just don't understand why CAMWS is choosing to make everything more expensive. i guess it's the same faculty members who think that they need more associate deans, provosts, and vice presidents at their home institutions. They don't pay for the conference themselves, anyway. Their schools give them generous travel funding. It's the students, the adjuncts, and the NTTs who pay.
The tl;dr version: adjunct at a very small Catholic school puts on the Medea. Adjunct wants to include phalluses on the costumes. Administration asks adjunct not to use phalluses on the costumes. Adjunct insists. Administration chooses not to renew the adjunct for further teaching.
The article is full of hand-wringing, assertions about academic freedom, and appeals to emotion (single dad! cleaned toilets for extra money!), but really, it sounds like he was asking for it. (1) What single dad thinks that adjuncting plus cleaning toilets is a good use of his doctorate? At what point does one make mature choices for one's family? (2) What clear-thinking individual in a VERY tenuous circumstance (with dependents) intentionally riles up one's employers over a truly MINOR point (that is anyway inappropriate to the venue) AND refuses to backdown when given an out?
Seriously. Aren't we taught to read text AND context? Don't we practice the interpretation of subtle nuance, shades of meaning, and the best ways to navigate difficulties? Aren't we educated in a politicized atmosphere? So what makes it SO VERY HARD for people to apply those lessons to the experiences in their daily lives? Why is it that so many of us keep the things we learn and practice as academics completely separate from situations in life where they are equally applicable?
Insisting on his precious phallus prop...telling undergrads to move "sensually"...horse whips...making a big issue of his alleged right to his precious phallus prop...yeah, this guy sounds like a prime candidate for non-renewal (which is not, in any case, the same thing as termination).
From the review: On comprendra donc qu'à l'issue de ce commentaire, nous ne recommandons pas l'achat de cet ouvrage, ni à titre privé, ni dans le cadre d'une institution. La bibliographie, brillant par sa pauvreté, ne justifie pas même sa consultation. Enfin, la lecture de cet ouvrage se révèle particulièrement éreintante, le lecteur étant sans cesse freiné par les inexactitudes et les remarques noyées d'aigreur ponctuant chacune des 243 pages...
I would take claims of a spousal hire with a healthy grain of salt (for Nebraska, Bard, or anywhere). If it was an out-and-out spousal hire, there wouldn't be any search, because the hire would have happened when the first spouse arrived. A committee may well hire the spouse of a current professor, but they may also choose not to hire a professor's spouse. (I've seen both happen.) So, just because a spouse is in the mix doesn't mean that the whole thing is a foregone conclusion. I suspect that only the committees themselves know whether it is planned to hire the spouse of a current professor, and they would have obvious reasons not to broadcast that.
I just want to say a big "Three Cheers!" to all of the departments choosing to interview people who have been on the market for a while. It used to be that a long time in visiting positions was a red flag, and strong programs wouldn't consider you. Now they know that not having secured a TT job is not a sign that there's something wrong with you. (Except, of course, that your publication record is a bit slim, since it is harder to write when teaching 8 or 9 courses each year, while writing 50 job applications, while moving each summer.)
If nothing else, at least we are seasoned teachers. I have been stunned by programs hiring people who taught minimally or not at all during grad school, only to find that they make poor teachers.
Well, since Nebraska for some reason wants a scholar who does digital humanities, wouldn't it make more sense for the candidates to show that they can CREATE a spouse, using whatever that was that made Kelly LeBrock come to life in "Weird Science"?
The fact that a tenured and a non-tt faculty member are married is far from conclusive proof that a search is going to end in a spousal hire. In fact, looking at the departmental website makes me less convinced that will be the outcome.
Job candidates are told again and again to customize our letters and materials for each institution to which we're applying. Of course we're going to look at the faculty page: to see the distribution of specialties and interests already present in the department.
That proves nothing. See the following I comment I recently made elsewhere:
There are different kinds of "inside" candidates.
(1) Department needs a TT hire, but the Provost approves a VAP line with a promise to come back with a TT the following year when the budget is secure. Department advertises a VAP nationally, asking for all the things they actually need filled (i.e., the same thing they will ask for in the eventual TT hire). After a national search, department hires VAP that fills all those criteria. Next year, the TT line is approved. It's a "new" job according to HR, so it must be re-advertised nationally. The "inside" candidate's CV matches the job description because -- surprise! -- the department still needs the same things.
This looks like a nefarious "inside search" to those just tuning in, but it's natural. And the inside candidate has improved odds because s/he is really only competing against the handful of people who didn't apply the previous year, have since graduated, or have changed their focuses in the past year. But the insider has the added benefit of actually knowing the school, students, and faculty.
Of course, the insider has the added difficulty of actually being known by the faculty.
(2) Department has one or more adjuncts, VAPs who were hired without a national search and/or just to fill some teaching requirements. Department gets approval for a specific TT line that may or may not fit the specialties of any one or more of those current contingent faculty. Department then conducts a national search. Suddenly and for the first time those local contingents are competing against every person in the country who might be a good fit. This can look like an inside search, but the chances for the local person are much slimmer. This is the kind of search that leads to many hard feelings and frequently makes Chronicle of Higher Ed. articles.
(3) Department has approval for a VAP line. Hires the "best" person out of the applicant pool because it's just for one or two years. This may or may not involve a national search. Department then gets approval for a TT line, steps back, really takes stock of what the department needs to balance out its offerings and specialties. Department then places a job add that may or may not have anything overlap at all with the current VAP's areas. Inside candidate, though liked by the department and students, is at a massive disadvantage.
(4) Any other scenario you can imagine. For example, there "shiny new thing" syndrome. An ivy ABD with one or fewer publications is a blank slate onto which a committee can project their every desire. An inside candidate is a known quantity. The insider has already proven that s/he will NOT fulfill every desire. Of course the ivy ABD won't either, but there's always that *chance*, or at least the chance that the ABD will fulfill *your personal* wishes in a new hire, and to hell with what your colleagues want.
I'm beginning to wonder whether those posting elaborate apologiai are either the internal candidates themselves or the departments posed to hire their internal candidates.
Anonymous Anonymous said... I'm beginning to wonder whether those posting elaborate apologiai are either the internal candidates themselves or the departments posed to hire their internal candidates.
December 27, 2015 at 9:46 AM
These posts have been helpful. Seriously. Your post sounds like sour grapes.
If you're not willing or able to engage rationally with the processes surrounding your discipline (i.e., meta-disciplinary or political analysis), then, well, that speaks all it needs to about your candidacy for a job. A significant portion of getting and keeping my job has entailed that sort of work, quite separate from teaching Latin, Greek, and civ courses, doing advising, and doing service.
No one at any place you would ever be willing to work gets a job just because of who their spouse is without themselves actually being objectively better than you. That may be hard to swallow, but you need to swallow it. Your measures of "better" may not be the same as the department's measures of "better," but, guess what, other people differ from you and that's okay.
All of this assumes (1) that you're right about the spousal hire nonsense, which is on its surface unlikely, (2) that you understand every nuance of what the department wants, needs, and values, which is impossible, and (3) that whatever information you found on the internet about the persons involved is accurate and complete, which is vanishingly unlikely.
"Objectively" better? Hardly. More like, better in the opinion of the people making the hire, who may be full of prejudices for any number of reasons. There's precious little that's "objective" about any of this.
Clearly you don't know what "objectives" are and/or you don't understand the concept of point #2 above, which obviously includes your "full of prejudices for any number of reasons." Seriously, you sound irrational and just not very good at this whole using words thing. Increasingly I am not surprised at your bad "luck."
On the other hand, if we can't get jobs for two academics at the same place, then we're doomed to keep losing good people. Constant turnover is not good for the institution, either. And if we can get jobs for both spouses at the same school, they'll likely stay for life.
This is also a feminist issue: back in the day, men took professor jobs and their home-maker wives followed them. Now we've got just as many professional women as men, and professional women are more likely than professional men to be married to other professionals (male or female). It's a huge demographic change that we are still trying to adjust to. My own institution is trying desperately to find money for spousal hires so that we stop losing good people (and we are losing good women at a faster rate than good men because, again, more men have non-professional wives willing to follow them around the country).
And lastly: these are human beings we are talking about. If both spouses offer something good for the institution, and we can give both of them jobs, then I'm glad.
Signed, Not someone affiliated with Nebraska, nor any school doing a "sham" search, nor someone with a spouse. I have no ulterior motives, just some experience trying to keep a school afloat.
Boy, lots of apologists for defending spousal hires. Now it's a feminist issue. Can spousal hire candidates be far off from becoming the newest protected class?
^ I try not to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but I'm glad to know that attitudes like yours are a self-correcting problem in the profession.
a lot of the grad students / ABDs / unemployed or underemployed PhDs / single VAPs / angst-filled faculty posting on this blog with certitude about how "spousal hires" work don't know shit about shit. get a life - and a reality check. if you think that a "spousal hire" is a lock or easy, you're out of your mind. not to mention incredibly naive.
Anon 1:03, almost all of these sound like reasonable requests (all except the Skype vs meeting interviews-- I think the in-person is necessary and the annual meeting a consolidated way to go about it). There is at least one SCS committee (on Graduate Student interests) that would make a natural advocate for this.
Thanks for being positive in a place of darkness (i.e. the internet blogosphere).
Can you articulate a bit more fully *why* you think in-person conference interviews are necessary? Your opinion on this is shared by many, particularly more experienced classicists, but I've never seen it defended coherently without recourse to appeals to the mos maiorum of the field, and by vague gestures towards intuitions.
I think this position needs more substantive reason-giving in order for it to continue as the default.
One line of reasoning used to be that applicants are professionals in the field and should therefore be attending the annual conference anyway. In this market, such a small fraction of applicants are actually going to become professionals in the field that this seems to no longer valid (if it ever was).
That still is a current line of reasoning in some quarters.
Another line of reasoning is that the in-person interview is more revealing than Skype interview. This is variously phrased. I've usually heard it said along the lines: "I can tell more about a candidate in person than on Skype." That sounds specious, but if we rephrase it to say, "In person interviews are less scripted (on the candidate's part) and therefore more indicative of real collegial and classroom interaction," it suddenly seems much more reasonable. The candidate has far more control in a Skype interview than in a conference interview. So while Skype levels the field of who can afford to attend the conference, it gives a serious advantage to those who can afford a very particular kind of interview coaching (or to those who attend schools who provide that coaching). The thing is, that coaching may get a job (or more precisely, an on-campus interview), but it does not correlate to any other professional behavior. So, this line of reasoning goes, Skype lowers one barrier for candidates while erecting another. It's a wash for candidates. But for committees, it impedes picking the best person for that particular school.
Is all of this true? Who knows. If it's true in the minds of the search committee, then it is true in that search, since in most relevant senses, the search exists only in and through the minds of the committee. And perhaps the differences will evanesce as technology improves. By the time we get to full body holographic scans or transporters or mental up-loads/links to the net, this will all be moot.
Search committees take their jobs a little too seriously, methinks. The market is such that, even assuming that somehow the vast majority of people with PhDs are actually vile murderers or simply stupid, any given search will still have dozens of candidates who would be perfect for the job. Seriously, admit/embrace the randomness and just pick someone without all the rigamarole.
I have a folder dedicated to e-mails from the APA/SCS. If I cut it perfectly down the middle and discard one half, it will contain the same amount of information…
How do you define "internal hire"? Is it "VAP who is offered TT position", or is it "PhD alumnus of program who is offered TT position", or is it "person who has prior personal connection to anyone in the department", and, as we get into the third option, does it become fair to ask whether any hire is ever *not* an internal hire?
I used to be sympathetic to your position, but after several years at a couple of small liberal arts colleges, I see now that you're completely wrong.
What you say *might* be true at a higher end research university, or any university that wants to become primarily research-oriented. It is most emphatically not true anywhere with a teaching orientation AND anywhere with a particular (non-generic) mission. At those places, the much-maligned "fit" makes the difference between maintaining the entire ethos of the university or degrading it into just another cookie-cutter set of classes and diplomas for the kids that couldn't go to Harvard.
I'm watching exactly that happen at my university as several departments have taken the hiring approach you suggest, and the entire character of the place has changed. This is not for the better because our student population has *not* changed: it's those who live close by. And the ones who would have traveled to attend here are no longer interested because we are less and less a distinct place.
And before you assert that anyone good enough to be hired would be good enough to figure it all out, let me add that this just isn't true. I've seen person after person fail utterly. Most just aren't interested in understanding a "lesser" environment. Some wrongly want to change the environment. Maybe 1 in 10 (or even fewer) can actually make the change successfully, and those tend to have had a small (and likely not "selective") liberal arts undergraduate experience.
Your description of the importance of fit is persuasive (to this long-time VAP at least), but to return to the earlier issue of face-to-face vs. skype interviews: is an in-person conference interview really a better method for determining fit than skype? For that matter, is it even a good method?
Every slate of campus interviews that I have seen has included at least one candidate whom everyone agrees is not hirable, whether it's a bad teaching demo, a bad job talk, an inability to converse with students and colleagues, or all of the above.
While this undermines the idea stated earlier by (e.g.) @Anon 12/30 10:39, that in this market the vast majority of candidates are viable, it also argues against the idea that a face-to-face interview is useful or necessary to assess collegiality, pedagogical or communication ability, or any of the myriad of other factors that contribute to "fit."
If face-to-face interviews are so good at this kind of assessment, why do a substantial majority of on-campus interviewees ultimately fail the fit test?
"At those places, the much-maligned "fit" makes the difference between maintaining the entire ethos of the university or degrading it into just another cookie-cutter set of classes and diplomas for the kids that couldn't go to Harvard."
A university is a place of education: it doesn't need an ethos, and it doesn't need to be special. It needs to do its fucking job and educate its students. It probably shouldn't educate kids though; elementary and middle schools are a better place for them.
A university is a place of education: it doesn't need an ethos, and it doesn't need to be special. It needs to do its fucking job and educate its students. It probably shouldn't educate kids though; elementary and middle schools are a better place for them.
So you're saying that you don't really understand universities.
Here are the problems with your simplistic statement. You assume that there is only one definition of education and that this definition of yours is the appropriate one. You are collapsing all students into a single "type" and you should know better. You assume as a given that education (of any type) doesn't need an ethos. That's as much nonsense as saying that literary interpretation can be uncritical/untheoretical. Every approach has a theoretical underpinning whether acknowledged or not. What you're really arguing, though, is that the particular definition of education that you have assumed has a particular ethos that you have also uncritically assumed and you think that those are appropriate for all environments at all times.
This is explicitly why you are not suited to most jobs. I say this without any rancor. It's just the unvarnished truth. People are different, places are different, and approaches, methods, and yes, even one's ethos must vary to match those occasions. In a buyer's market such as we have now, "fit" may be the thing *most* important for a committee to determine.
Your intentional misreading of "kids" (a common colloquialism, as you well know) is cute, by the way, but not to the point.
which is why your lats will always be underwhelming.
December 30, 2015 at 3:56 PM
Only true for a few.
This can only be a general truth is you believe that education, or at least access to education, is not appropriate for all people. (Don't talk to me about public high school in this nation and call that education. If you've ever stepped out of the R1 bubble, you know better.) Of course, if you do believe that (access to) education isn't for everybody, then you don't understand the ethos (there's that word again!) of most universities and colleges in the US.
[Note how I didn't make the joke that my lats are underwhelming because I don't exercise. That was class and restraint on my part.]
This kind of bullshit only flies in a humanities echo chamber. Try giving that speech to people in the sciences at your university, or better yet the people who actually run it, and see how long it takes for them to laugh or speed-walk away.
-Many, many people who have the necessary schooling and educational attainment. -Many people who are possessed not only of the required skills but of excellent versions of those skills and of strong research portfolios. -Plenty of people who can also teach well, perhaps superbly well. -A decent number of people who are also willing to go the extra mile in terms of advising, mentoring, and service. -Several people who are also sufficiently tolerant, flexible, patient, socialized, and self-effacing to swallow their pride, shoulder their share (or more than their share), and try to make things a little better next week than they were this week. -A few people who combine all of the above with an ability to read the institution, to build relationships with colleagues and students, and to bloom where they are planted.
Those last two categories are actually the most important in creating a successful version of the human organization that is an academic department. Excellent research skills are a given; the prospect of great teaching is a reasonable expectation now. But only personal contact, ideally in the form of in-person interviews and campus visits, really has any prayer of trying to assess that admittedly nebulous quality that we all call 'fit.'
I would still be interested to hear the virtues of the in-person interview (vs. the cheaper skype option) articulated. A poster earlier mentioned that skype interviews favor those able to find or buy interview coaching, but that seems like it would be more the case for in-persons.
Maybe this is just pre-SCS nerves, but in-person interviews often feel like bad pop quizzes, in which the candidate is judged on their ability to answer very specific questions (what textbook would you use for a Statius course when you specialize in Caesar) without the opportunity to prepare. Course design isn't (or shouldn't be) done on the fly, so what are SCs learning from our (in)ability to answer questions like this? In an in-person interview, it seems like the negatives that they would pick up on (signs of nervousness, mostly) would come through clearly.
Obviously, this disadvantages the candidates. How, if at all, does it help the SC? Or are interview nerves of themselves an indication of a lack of "fit"?
As a faculty member in a college looking to hire next year, I'd say that an ability to answer dumb pop-quiz questions gracefully is a big plus. I have several colleagues who, bless their little cotton socks, mean well, but will trot out those tired what-text-do-you-use questions just because they're a bit out of their field and think it's the sort of thing they *should* be asking. I doubt they could tell you what they are looking for. See also: random tangential things they thought of on the fly. In that case, if you can smile and lend the dumb question a grace it does not deserve, I will feel a lot better about you as a potential colleague. Bonus points if you can answer robustly enough to make the question-asker feel like the question was profound and searching instead of mundane and dumb. And personally, I'm reassured by a few nerves as they show me that you care and you're not a cocky little s**t, but I'm sure mileage varies on that one.
Thinking of graduate students as inherently needing "growing up" reflects the same problematic attitude as calling college students kids. Making it to your mid-thirties or beyond without dying doesn't make you special, and if that's where you need to go to try to make an argument, you're a sad person. I guess that a person with that attitude does get a certain kind of itch scratched by choosing a career that keeps them around college students constantly, but I can't imagine that's a good arrangement for the students themselves.
You only think I'm nasty because I have little use and less patience for the self-absorbed and willfully ignorant. Life isn't all rainbows and puppy dogs. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you'll be grown up too. Then you might have the rational sense to understand good advice and the self-discipline to take it. Until then, you're just another petulant washout who thinks the world is so unfair, the system out to get you, the meanie-pants old men putting you down, and nobody getting your particular, special snowflake genius. There are no jobs for people like you any more.
Not a troll, actually. Former SCC speaking truth. You don't have to like it, but dismissing it out of hand rather than facing up to it shows a distinct lack of maturity and intellectual honesty.
Oh my, a SCC member. Let me recover from my sense of awe.
You come across as little more than a nasty, arrogant know it all. Admittedly, not a rare thing in academia. But let's not pretend you're coming across as much more than that. The people who didn't get a job in your department might be the lucky ones.
"SCC" stands for "search committee chair". You're not helping your case, if that case is to present yourself as anything other than ignorant and resentful.
I say bury the conference interviews sooner rather than later, because will eventually die no matter how much the dinosaurs plea with administrators who clearly see the increasing costs. I've now witnessed our professional schools and the sciences do first round cuts by video. Before we hear about how special our discipline is and how we need to channel this phenomenon in person, there are several factors that will lead to the inevitable death of conference interviews, and I won't even discuss the incredulity of administrators who don't understand why the humanities is spending much more money on this than the "more important" disciplines.
For starters, video technology (and internet access) is becoming incredibly good, cheap, and easy to use. We did grad school interviews last year using university facilities and it was amazing how clear the video and audio turned out. You could see every freckle on the applicants' faces on the huge ultra HD flatscreens that make them life size. This alone won over many of the old guard for future job searches.
I agree with an earlier statement that applicants with special interview training and advisor connections are at a significant advantage with in-person interviews. There is no time for informal chit chat before and after video interviews. No secret handshakes and "how's my best friend (aka your advisor) doing" sessions that can skew the all important first cut. I also suspect that the irrational justification of in-person interviews is to see how "classical" candidates are. We justify it with words like "fit" but has anyone asked if this acts as a severe bias based on our expectations that have marginal relevance for the actual job? There are plenty of "classical" types who have charmed the pants off departments during conference interviews (who doesn't subconsciously like a British accent?), but have ended up being total assholes and duds on the job.
I know people will say it's a part of the inequities of life, but I know that certain departments pony up for their students once they land an interview. Maybe that asshole you hired ended up impressing you because he had his hotel, airfare, and food covered by his department while the one who would have done better was biting her nails worrying where next month's rent was coming from after blowing it on the conference. Just some food for thought for those claiming to favor as level of a playing field as possible.
Speaking of first cuts, I'm convinced that many searches fail because the severe limit placed on the number of interview slots at the annual meeting. Twelve interviews is pushing it in my experience due to varying SC member schedules and Placement Service edicts. We're planning on casting our nets out wider by video interviewing at least 20 applicants during our next search, maybe even push it to 30 which several colleagues in the sciences have told me is quite doable. I think the ability to interview twice as many applications alone makes it a no brainer.
After reading the whining here, I no longer favor a level playing field. I'd rather hire someone who has already been vetted by someone I trust at another institution.
The search committee chair is spot on, and the people arguing with her/him are definitely coming across as resentful and ignorant. Fortunately this market will definitely keep them all out of jobs.
Re all these "has anyone heard posts"...don't you think the hyper obsessive will have updated the Wiki the second there is news? Don't worry, you haven't missed anything.
Anonymous said... Has anyone heard from Vassar or Georgetown? (Some of us are still coming here for job-related information, rather than tedious back-and-forth.)
January 1, 2016 at 1:29 PM
If you checked the wiki like any halfway intelligent person would, you'd know that both have already contacted their interviewees. Vassar on 12/19 and Georgetown on 12/17. What a lazy and/or incompetent ass you are! It's no surprise you weren't among those contacted.
Yeah, shame on you, 1.29! May you forever languish in the stocks of famae volent while our resident troll hurls the rotten cabbages of his discontent in. your. face.
If you can't own up to your own failures, you can't begin to improve upon them. Grow a thicker skin and learn. Keep in mind the old saw: if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
I can't wait until San Francisco. It's only a matter of time before this happens - http://dailyhaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Spoiler-alert-Han-solo-killed-by-son-kylo-ren.jpg.
Nah. I'm technically a Millennial myself, duking it out with my "fellow" Millennials who won't take a good look in the mirror and either improve themselves or move on. I know full well the odds, the system, the work, and what it means to have to have a publication record equal to or greater than the full professors in my own department just to have gotten hired on the TT. I have huge sympathies for those making an honest effort and I go far out of my way to help the ones I know in person. I have nothing but contempt for those who show off their flaws as if they were merit badges and then cry about how the nasty, meanie-pantses are keeping them down. They belittle and mask with their mediocrity the very real systemic problems that afflict the good candidates.
@ 7:19 PM Incitements to violence are even more contemptible. If all you can think to do is strike out physically, then your intellect is incapable of playing ball in the big leagues.
Oh, fuck off out of here with your bullshit and your "contemptible" this and "willfully ignorant" that. You're making us all look terrible. If you're such a superhero with your full-professor-level publications and your TT job, why the fuck are you hanging around here getting your jollies trying to make random job-seekers feel bad? Because you are a lousy troll, that's why.
Job-seekers, you don't actually have to be a total prick to get a job, I promise. Lots of people you will meet out there, here, and in San Francisco are smart,kind, dedicated to their jobs,and not choking to death on their own bitterness.
I hang around because I like to make thoughtful posts in response to thoughtful questions. I also like to edit the wiki when I can. As for other reasons why a non-job seeker would be here, see up thread. But I also like to point out when someone's soul is a mixture of bronze and iron. As for making you look terrible, you're the only one who can do that. And good on ya for all the progress you've made there. It makes the search committees' jobs easier.
^ Try not to be a crybaby. There are plenty of really GREAT people to pick from. That you're not one of them is unfortunate for you. It's of little concern to the rest of us.
^ That's how the rest of us feel when we read your "scholarship." Or we would, if you'd actually published anything. Go back to studying for comps. When you've grown up, you might be ready to join the profession.
Damn, 11:28 PM, 10:48 PM (same person?), enhance your calm. You realize that nothing we publish makes a damn bit of difference in the wider world, right? No high school student is ever going to say"Wow! I want to go to A University because of the ground-breaking work Prof. B is doing on Ennius!" We publish for ourselves, we teach for others -- I have no illusions that my scholarship is making a difference, but yet I write and I publish and continue to do it because I enjoy it and because I think intellectual curiosity is something that we all need to have, especially in our roles as teachers. I've published more than a few things, and I think you're being extremely petty.
Don't waste your breath. The self-important, asshole boomer trying to play himself off as a millennial is not worth our time. Yes, he's a boomer despite what denial and vitriol, only pithy to himself, follows shortly. Kudos to the person who used grumpy cat to out him.
@January 3, 2016 at 4:54 PM What a narrow view you have.
@January 3, 2016 at 5:06 PM Do you ever have the experiencing of knowing that someone is completely wrong? I mean, not believing it, but actually knowing because you have access to information that they don't? And then watching them insist that, based on their superior reasoning, they must be right? Sort of like when they make a numerological argument about the order of poems in a collection without knowing that several of the poems are spurious? That's how I feel about you right now. I *know* you're wrong. And that makes me glad. It makes me glad to test your interpretive powers and to see them fail. It's nice to know when the "competition" isn't. :-D
No one of consequence despite his bluster. Another boomer handed a job and just about everything else back in the day and now passing judgment on young scholars who are twice the person he ever was. Now he just needs to ride off into the sunset (fat chance) despite his self-compelling narcissism that rationalizes his long worn out welcome by thinking we all need his brilliance. Decades of sublimating how good fortune has smiled upon him will do that to someone, especially when they hang out here for no good reason other than a misplaced sense of worth to the discipline.
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«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 400 of 1319 Newer› Newest»Tried to post this earlier, but for some reason FV wouldn't let me.
@November 29, 2015 at 1:03 PM
I was a SC chair last year. A lot of your points seem reasonable, and I'd expect that most of us agree with them. I'll respond to a few of the points just so you and others can see that we often share your frustrations.
*We are required by HR to use our HR system. This is frustrating, but HR will not let us consider any materials sent directly to a member of the SC.
*I've experienced our HR system from both sides. It usually works well, but sometimes there are inexplicable bugs that make it impossible for some (but not all) candidates to upload files. My department was not the first to experience this, but HR did not believe us or the other department that had the problem until I walked over to their offices with a computer and went through the uploading process step by step with the HR tech person. They were stunned, because their response in previous searches had been that it was the candidate's error. Candidates had been dropped from searches due to HR's unwillingness to consider that they themselves were the source of a problem. I got it fixed for my search, but it took literal legwork.
*I agree about Skype. We use it as the best of bad choices. It is a suboptimal interviewing interface for a variety of reasons: unreliable internet connections distract everyone, it makes interviewing more awkward and privileges those who are good at "constructing an experience" as opposed to those who would make good colleagues, and it just feels weird. Other people have other problems with it. I personally think that the decreased cost to the candidates outweighs those negatives, but not everyone agrees.
*Fewer documents at first, and multiple rounds of "additional documents requested". I agree. Only exception: when there's a short deadline for the search.
*Leaving people hanging. HR again. Our rules are: once a person has been notified that they are ruled out, they are out of the search permanently. So, before we interview our top 12, we will intentionally not notify our top 20 or so, just in case we want to dip back into that pool after the interviews. When we pick our top three, we will still avoid rejecting the top 6-8, in case we need to dip back in. And when we won't notify those people until we have a signed contract. Otherwise, the search could fail and we'd have to start over or lose the line.
*Allowing four letters: yes, I agree.
re:
@November 29, 2015 at 1:03 PM
Thank you for your comments.
I sympathize with your difficulties based on HR rules, and the threat of losing a line is real; but there are still two things you could do:
1. Tell people in the top-20 that you cannot fit them on your interview list but that you have not given up on them entirely. Tell people in the top-6-to-8 that they have not been invited to campus, but might still be in the running.
I assume that you don't want to do that because you don't want your eventual colleague to feel like a consolation prize. But here's the thing: no one cares. A more transparent process would make everyone happier.
...or is it that HR won't let you update people on their standing? If so:
2. Tell HR to change their rules. I am sure that the faculty can have a say in the rules your institution uses. Yes, it might take a bit of leg work, but your hiring process could eventually match your faculty's humanity, instead of your HR department's bureaucratic heartlessness.
Thanks, 3:21. I'm 1:03, and am not the same person as 3:41, although that person seems to be impersonating me. I know you can't just order HR to change their rules, and I appreciate the literal legwork.
Thanks for being a sane person in an insane and brutal process. It matters.
As someone who has been a finalist for two TT positions and didn't get either, I disagree wit 1:09PM's suggestion that committees not call people at the final stages to tell them that they didn't make the cut. In one case, I got a phone call telling me that the position had been offered to someone else, and while it was of course a painful experience -- especially since I'd stupidly allowed myself to think that the call was going to be a job offer -- it has left a much less bitter taste in my mouth than my other experience. In that case, I learned via the wiki that the position had been offered to someone else and accepted, and though I eventually received a phone call three weeks later, the whole thing made me feel as though I was being treated as a non-person because I hadn't been offered the job. After spending two enjoyable evenings with people who at least did a good job of pretending to like me and leaving with the expectation that I'd at least have some interesting new contacts if I didn't get the job, being ignored for three weeks and given only a perfunctory phone call to tell me what I already knew felt insulting and made me doubt the sincerity of the people I'd met. It's possible that a very particular sort of email would have made me feel as fine about it as I could have, but I doubt it. After these experiences, I'd much prefer the phone call.
Of course, others will feel differently, so unless I'm alone in my attitude either choice will make somebody feel worse than they might have.
@ 6:56 pm
It's important to distinguish how an experience makes you feel and whether the other people involved were being good actors.
I know exactly how it feels to be rejected, as does nearly everyone reading this board. In the experience you describe, though, getting a phone call three weeks after the job was offered to someone else is extra-ordinarily civil and collegial. It says to me that your first impression -- that the people you interviewed with genuinely liked you and would be good contacts -- was correct. Your emotional response is just that: your emotional response. You have my sympathies, in the literalist sense of that word.
Still, if you resent the department that called you to deliver the bad news, then you need to know that the issue isn't with them but with you. The uncivil norm in this field is either to hear nothing or to get a form email some months later. Instead, you got a personal phone call after a mere three weeks. Given that the department probably had to make an offer, wait the offer period, get an acceptance, send a contract, and then get a signed contract back, that timing is phenomenal.
I would also agree that getting a personal phone call from the chair to let me know that I wasn't getting the job, after a campus visit, was the right thing for me. I thought it was a class act on the chair's part, and was much, much better than learning about it on the wiki. I've stayed in touch with people at that department, with no hard feelings.
In agreement with several who have posted already:
- Our SLAC does not allow departments to convert VAPs to TT, so the department must do a full search regardless of how much they do or don't like their VAP.
- Many colleges require diversity statements. A quick look at Hamilton's website shows that they are running over a dozen searches this year, and all request diversity statements.
- Such diversity statement don't ask about the candidate's identity, but rather how the candidate would "engage and sustain [the college's] commitment to diversity and inclusion."
- I've never met a search committee member who didn't take a search seriously, hoping to get the absolute best candidate out there, regardless of whether they've got an inside candidate, or an applicant that identifies as a Afro-latina transgender lesbian paraplegic martian.
- Many colleges require the SC to use their school's HR website, or interfolio, or Academic Jobs Online. I appreciate the post of Nov. 29 1:03pm, who reminds us that it is important to inform the administration of the pitfalls of each of these, especially if it is possible to make a few easy changes to save candidates a few bucks.
I really appreciated reading about another's experience at the bitter end of a long-drawn-out TT search. I also felt hurt by it, and I think it's good to express that to each other to help with the healing. I know, intellectually, that the phone call I received weeks after the wiki let me know I wasn't it came from a person who had genuinely good thoughts towards me, but it is still painful to forge those connections, to imaginatively project a life with those colleagues, in that city, only to have to forget it all. It's like breaking up with someone you thought you were going to marry: "it's not you, it's me."
8:06 pm (Nov. 29) here again, replying to 6:11 pm
I don't have much add to your post, but I do want to validate your feelings. You're right. It does feel that way. And you're right to express those feelings and to own them.
To all the others who have posted lately: I'm really impressed by the empathy and good will on this board. It makes me feel some hope that this generation of Classicists may actually be better people than the good ole boys that raised so many of us.
@ 11/29 8:06PM. Nope, sorry. Maybe at some places three weeks would be phenomenal, but not when the offer has already been made and accepted for three weeks. The proof of this is that I didn't wait nearly so long in the other case, and I was notified before it became public knowledge that the position had been filled. Perhaps there were some rules in place at the institution that prevented the chair from calling me within three weeks of the candidate's acceptance; if so, then it would be better for those rules to change. The fact that the norm is not to get anything at all -- if it is a fact; my understanding is that it is very definitely not the norm at the final stage -- wouldn't make the relatively better perfunctory phone call after 3 weeks any better; it would just mean that the norm is worse. But I'm not even sure the alleged norm would be worse; I think I would rather get an impersonal email shortly after the position had been accepted than an impersonal phone call long after everyone in the field knew that the position had been offered and accepted. You say that the problem is mine and not anybody else's, and that may be so, but I thought what we were talking about here is what kind of treatment finalists who don't get the job prefer. If my preference were completely irrational, that'd be one thing, but I don't think it's such at all. But in any case, I didn't offer it as the most reasonable preference to have, I offered it as one that I -- and I suspect I'm not alone here -- do in fact have.
Of course, if SCs can't do anything about it, then they can't do anything about it. But the point of the discussion, I thought, was to consider what candidates would prefer if SCs were in a position to decide. Telling me that it's my fault or that it's usually worse misses the point.
@8:16, the empathy and goodwill is an anomaly. Externalized self-loathing is the usual norm here. But it's nice to see a change. We'll see whether it continues.
@8:16, the empathy and goodwill is an anomaly. Externalized self-loathing is the usual norm here. But it's nice to see a change. We'll see whether it continues.
Looks like you're right now target, 8:21.
Ah, well. Back to the status quo. The SC that didn't pick 8:19 dodged a bullet. S/he takes the wiki as God's own truth, despises a timely attempt at a human(izing) touch, and cannot or will not admit of realities out of his/her own. That's all unhealthy and -- worse -- unproductive in every way.
3:28, the problem is not asking for a diversity statement per se, but a personalized diversity statement written especially for this university. Nobody teaching four new preps and frantically trying to publish with zero job security, which is the situation of many candidates, has the time to write a different diversity statement reflecting each college's unique commitment to diversity.
There's that externalized self-loathing again. Someone expresses her or his feelings honestly and is harshly dismissed as unworthy of having a job. Somehow that earlier hope that the current generation of classicists will be more kind than its predecessors strikes me as rather unrealistic. The best advice I can think of for anyone who plans to continue trying to make it in this field is to not to have feelings, or at least not to express them. Doing so just makes you easy prey for the vultures.
This isn't a complaint so much as an open question. I'm not on the market this year but am looking towards next year. Do we have any statistics or informed impressions about how ABDs fare on the winter market cycle as opposed to candidates with degrees in hand or who are in VAPs? Another way to ask: Should ABDs even bother applying to TT positions? How often do they make the first cut? How many of those make campus visits? How many of those get the job? Is their time better spent just writing the dissertation and waiting until the spring cycle?
@8:07
There are no reputable statistics on those questions (and probably no statistics at all). Why not? It is not in the interest of any party who could collect such statistic to do so, or to publish them if they did.
Anecdotal evidence: if you know people at the school, then you have a shot at a VAP as an ABD, especially if you went there was an undergrad. But if you have this shot, then you already know that from your connections. For the rest? It is possible but much less likely. If the school is in a very undesirable location and the VAP is one year and you are a particularly good fit (due to religion, area of study, personality, etc.), then you might get such a job. Generally speaking, though, the glut is so extreme at the moment that there's really no reason outside of personal connections for the search committee even to consider you. Take this year: no Latin Lit. jobs. Why would a SC consider an ABD when they could have someone who has finished, has already been teaching, has taught the specific courses they need filled that year, etc.?
So, does it happen? Yes. Should you be counting you chances if you don't already have a pretty clear in? No.
-- 6:11 pm --
The problem is not expressing your feelings. The problem is imputing your irrational anger onto individuals at a particular department and considering them bad actors for doing what was in fact objectively positive and professional behavior--indeed, superlatively nice behavior. Being upset at the way things turned out is one thing, and you were validated for those feelings. Blaming others for good actions that just weren't those you personally wanted is quite different. That deserves the condemnation you received.
Based on the last two years of wiki data, which is obviously not official data, nor have I checked the validity of any of the reported hires, 25% of TT jobs went to ABD candidates and 53% of non-TT jobs went to ABD candidates. 2013 and 2014 were remarkably similar as far as those statistics are concerned.
Should you bother to be on the market? Of course, you might get lucky. As they say, your chance of getting a job is 0% if you don't apply. If it gets in the way of completing your dissertation, you're probably not ready to be on the market in any case.
What school are you ABD at? This really matters.
phonecall transcript:
"Hi, Candidate! It was really great meeting you in our town, and I learned a lot from your job talk. I'm sorry to say that the position has been offered to and accepted by another candidate. This was a very difficult decision, since we know that you would have been a good fit, too. I hope you are having better luck with other applications. You will not get an official letter or email from HR until we have a signed contract from the lucky bastard. I will let you know when that happens. Heh, I'm not even supposed to be calling you right now, but I wanted you to hear it from me. Good luck, again."
Holy crap! There is a SCHOOL that says this:
"We believe that there is a consistency between biblical truth and truth discovered through reason and experience; however, we hold that when apparent conflicts occur, all truth claims defer to the truth revealed in the Bible."
Bats are birds!
Insects have four legs!
Is anyone here desperate enough to sign the pledge even if they don't agree with it?
@ December 1, 2:25: I did not get the impression that any college asked for a personalized diversity statement, tailored to their school. For me, your best argument about how you can foster an inclusive learning environment should work equally well for all schools. If you've got some specific strategies that only work at, say, a small school, then you can have different SLAC and large Uni templates, as many people do with cover letters.
I agree that it is difficult for candidates to produce special docs beyond Cover Letter and CV, like a Research Statement (that's pretty much covered in the cover letter, right?) and Teaching Philosophy (what is this, anyway?!?!). Diversity statement is no different, but it seems to be catching more flak on FV because it's a new addition to the game in the last 5 years or so. For me, personally, I think I can learn a lot more about a candidate from a diversity statement than a research statement or teaching statement, since those docs, like cover letters, have become so uniform.
" The best advice I can think of for anyone who plans to continue trying to make it in this field is to not to have feelings, or at least not to express them."
We're highly educated adults, not tweens. We probably shouldn't be going around saying "Oh look at me, I am feeling emotions!"
anyone else find Hamilton's claim to have received 240 applications ludicrous?
Absolutely not.
From my time on the market a few years ago, 240 seems low.
240 sounds plausible for a generalist position, particularly in a year where Latin jobs are pretty much nowhere to be found. We're in deep shit.
Quantifying the condemnation of that department for an obvious inside hire: 240 people whose time has been wasted...
12:19 PM here. What I meant by ludicrous is that job prospects are becoming truly microscopic. What the hell are we doing here?
@10:46AM: On the bright side, anyone who is willing to sign the pledge probably has better job prospects than most of us. I'd bet that school won't be getting 240 applications, anyway.
On second thought I'm not so sure that's a bright side after all.
On another note, is there any justification, in an age when sending batch emails is painfully easy, for failing to notify applicants when they've been rejected? If someone has taken the time to craft an application for your institution, isn't it the very least you can do to just send an email saying "Thanks for applying. We regret to inform you..."? What gives? I'm glad the wiki is available, but I'd rather hear any news from the search committees than learning third-hand here. I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring this up...
Re: rejection notification, there are places where HR policy (or state laws, at publics) prevents them from notifying applicants until a search is closed. Not to say there aren't places that fail to notify candidates even in the absence of such policies, but there are places that really just can't say anything until a signed contract comes back.
I think some of the discussion here about policies regarding notification to candidates who haven't made the cut has largely missed the point. We all recognize (I hope) that there are often policies in place that determine how SCs do and don't handle this issue, and that the members of the SC are not at liberty to act contrary to these policies. I take the suggestions we've recently seen here as ideas about what would be best and what the effects of various policies are, not about whether individual actors are behaving well or badly. Obviously SC members can only do so much, and I suppose it's not very likely that any suggestions they make to HR / administration will bring about any changes. But provided that we understand the recent suggestions here as suggestions about what would be best, I'm with those who have expressed a preference for hearing more quickly. Often these things are beyond the control of the SC, but to the extent that they are within their control, I don't see what's so objectionable about preferences for learning more quickly and in a more personal fashion (particularly at later stages).
One of the healthiest things that those of us who receive rejections can do is remind ourselves that it isn't personal and that we almost certainly shouldn't have any personal animosity toward the individuals involved. But that's consistent with thinking that it would be better if SCs operated on differently policies. So, with all due acknowledgment to the fact that the SC members themselves often aren't able to determine the policies under which they act, is there really anyone here who thinks that it wouldn't be better if rejected candidates were notified early and that candidates, particularly ones who have visited campus, be contacted in a personalized way? Discussion at FV is very unlikely to change anything, but that hasn't prevented hundreds of posts griping about our plight. If there's a sliver of a chance that discussion here can improve the way SCs handle things, why not keep it going?
Let's spice things up and demonstrate what a crap shoot it is for both SCs and candidates. Without naming anyone, how woeful of a choice has a department familiar to you made? It can be about fit as much as competence. I just had this discussion with a friend and we realized that every department we've known, including our grad program, has whiffed quite badly - like Sam Bowie, Darko Milicic, and Greg Oden bad. We are not archaeologists, but we noted that archaeology was an area where the programs have done particularly bad. Why is this? In at least one case, the chosen one is no longer in the field and the other two campus invites are generally recognized as up and coming superstars with amazing projects. Yikes.
Anon 9:49
Oh, the stories I could tell. I have experience with a department that has a history of trying to hire (with varying levels of success) the weaker or weakest candidate. I'll think about how to anonymize.
One easy example: 4 on-campus job talks and demo classes for a TT Latin literature position. 2 of the candidates were stellar; 1 was good but not as popular as the top two; the last was lackluster across the board. In the demo class, s/he could not identify a hexameter in the text s/he chose to teach. The job talk was unfocused and unoriginal; philology was absent. All of the graduate students voted for one of the two "stellar" candidates (not that their vote had any impact - it was only for advisory purposes).
Guess which candidate the majority of the department voted to hire?
Hmmmmm, of all the hires I've seen go bad, most came down to choosing someone based mainly on the criterion of sexy research (which might me access to a particular dig for an archaeologist). And then (I'm trying to be vague here, so I'm combining multiple examples into one sentence) said person ends up being a terrible teacher, terrible colleague, a perfectionist who is not willing to take the risk of submitting publications for review, or sexual harasser of students and colleagues (yeah, that happens a lot).
The SCS Presidential Panel this year is about the plight of contingent faculty (that's good). Of the five speakers, one is a VAP, one works for ACLS, and the rest are full professors. That...could be better...
@ 6:18
Yes, it could be better. But think of it this way: just how many contingent faculty would feel comfortable speaking in this venue, and of those, how many would be both good speakers and representative speakers? It's not surprising at all that instead we would look to mouthpieces who have nothing to lose.
The other reason that it could/might be better for full professors to do the speaking (assuming they've already done the listening): if we want any meaningful change, the words must reach an audience of Assoc. and Full Professors, so the words need to come from mouths that they will listen to. If they were willing to listen to contingent mouths, we wouldn't need a panel like this.
I just hope that some of the senior folks were contingent faculty at some point, and I don't mean some elite post-doc while jockeying for the best position possible while waiting out the machinations of connected advisors. In my experience, the vast majority of faculty who landed a position before 1980 have no clue despite all the stories they've heard second hand. They're busy working out course releases and vacation homes while judging us for not having two books for tenure when they often had none or a marginal one barely distinguishable from the diss.
Don't worry, 12:18; of the two tenured presenters on the Pres. Panel, one got the doctorate in 1994 and the other in 1993. A glance at their CVs will indicate that one of them, at least, held four (by my count) non t-t positions before getting a tenurable job; the other isn't clear about the nature of previous jobs.
As for the clueless pre-1980 hires -- well, there may be a few of them still, but since 1980 is 35 years ago, most of those who "landed a job before 1980" are well into retirement age now. Speaking for myself, I'll be retiring as soon as I possibly can, I hope before age 65 (I'm 58), IF the ACA survives the next election. If it doesn't survive, I'll have to hang in here until 65 and Medicare because I have a chronic illness that means I can't go without health insurance.
"Vacation homes?" I know very, very few full professors with one of those. Most are a lot more likely to be working out how to pay for their parents' assisted living needs than buying vacation homes for themselves.
Has anyone heard anything from Loyola Chicago? Like even a request for letters?
Anon 6:03--
Not I. But then again, there are a lot of places I haven't heard from yet. It seems too early in the game to think anything is amiss, though.
It is possible that Loyola Chicago will make a short list first, then request letters after that. Some diversity consultants recommend this to combat unconscious bias, because letters can be more of a reflection of who you know (which reflects your privilege) than how good you are. Or maybe this particular SC has other reasons. But my point is, I know of at least one situation in which SCs elect not to read letters until they've drawn up a short list.
Loyola is compiling the interview list now and will send notification early next week. Anonymous above is right about letters (it is encouraged as 'best practice' at our university)
I completely understand where many of you are coming from but it is obvious to anyone working as faculty at a college or university that you have no idea that SCs have zero control over HR processes and policies. There is no way faculty can tell HR what to do or how to conduct a search, what interface to use, not to use interfolio in a way that does not force candidates to pay, when to notify of rejections, etc. Faculty are absolutely forbidden to accept applications in person. If you think that faculty have any power in these matters, you are in for a rude awakening when you actually start working as faculty. Same thing goes for the diversity statement. Again, the SCs don't get to make those decisions; they are told that they are to require it. Sure, it may be a pain for you to write but it has a purpose and it may be useful to a SC. Will it make you or break you? Probably not, but a thoughtful statement can certainly help an already strong application. A bad statement can certainly hurt you. I sympathize with everyone looking for employment and I appreciate the bitterness and the frustration but a lot of the complaints here seem to me the result of inexperience with the system (which is understandable). Hopefully this information will help at least explain some of the reasons behind these processes and the lack of power on the part of faculty to affect them.
The faculty have been powerless for decades, we're all disappointed with the status quo, and none of us has any power to change anything. Sorry about that. As you were.
Sound familiar? It would be hilarious, if it weren't so sad. On a more serious note, most of us as faculty do indeed have the power to voice our opinions about the systems we are forced to use, and on more than a few SLACs around the US voicing our concerns can be done over a cup of coffee with some person who lives just down the street from us. HR and IT are evil faceless monsters, but the people who work in those divisions are often genuinely interested in hearing how their systems work from people who actually use them. So that's just a thought, to go along a with quite a number of opinions already expressed about how the empty complaining and bitterness on FV could actually be used by current and future SC members to improve the state of the field, at least as far as the hiring process goes. As for the state of the field more generally, we already know that current faculty (myself included) are powerless to do anything about it because we're busy sitting on our hands and being complacent.
"As for the state of the field more generally, we already know that current faculty (myself included) are powerless to do anything about it because we're busy sitting on our hands and being complacent."
Well, maybe you spend most of your time sitting on your hands being complacent. Most of the classics faculty I know at SLACs aren't engaging in utterly useless arguments with HR (we have no leverage to make them change their practices, and talk gets us absolutely nowhere) because we ARE busy: not with "sitting on our hands" but with teaching both languages at all levels, along with the full range of civ. courses required to bring our numbers of students up high enough that the administration will continue to authorize our language programs, while also carrying our assigned share of freshman advisees, advising our majors, trying to keep up with our own research and writing, serving on three or four committees simultaneously, sometimes serving on a SC where we have to read well over 250 applications, and, yes, occasionally checking Famae Volent and writing a comment out of the (perhaps foolish?) belief that hearing tenured faculty's perspective could be useful for job seekers. Oh, and some of us have spouses and families who'd like to see us for more than fifteen minutes a day, too. When exactly would we have the time or energy to tilt against the HR windmill, and why would we waste our time and energy on something where we know we'd have exactly zero chance of being taken seriously, let alone of making changes?
Re teaching both languages at all levels -- because our enrollments are small, the only way we are allowed to offer our upper-level languages is as uncompensated overloads. Thus, for instance, this semester I am in the classroom for 14 hours per week, every week (this includes a one-hour senior seminar), and have five separate preparations. Just keeping on top of class preparation, grading, committee work, publication deadlines, and so on in a semester with 14 hours teaching per week leaves me very little time for anything else. I'm lucky to have a spouse who has taken over all the shopping, laundry, and housecleaning, but even so I'm just barely managing the necessary juggling. I am not such a fool as to take on HR in a battle I know I have no chance of winning.
Anon 3:19 here: Actually, in my previous comment I miscounted. When I include the senior seminar, I have SIX separate preparations per week (2 Latin authors, 2 Greek authors, one civ. course, senior seminar). Math was never my strong point.
@3:19 and @1:59
3:19's experience is my own, right down to number of courses, new preps, etc, except I don't have a spouse to do the laundry or grocery shopping. I've been in a faculty position for 5 years now, and I've had well over 20 new preps (not just *different* preps). Part of this is from changing schools, but part of it is because my program is so small that I have to change the courses every semester so that my students can take enough classes to fulfill their major.
But 1:59's point has merit, too. In universities this small, personal relationships matter as much as and sometimes more than bureaucratic rules. Remembering that HR isn't just "evil, faceless HR" but is actually Susie at the front desk, Sam in the back, Taylor working contracts, and Lace on Title IX can go a long way in being heard. Sometimes those relationships make a difference in meaningful ways.
A petty, non-HR example: I've gotten a lot of literal free lunches just by being on a first name basis with the employees at my regular, on-campus lunch place. HR doesn't serve lunch, but being friendly has gotten my job ad placed sooner and updated more carefully.
Agreed with other former SC members who've lamented/apologized being unable to notify candidates in the negative (e.g. no SCS interview forthcoming) until late in the game, or even until after the entire game is over. I don't in any way think that silence is a polite or acceptable way to 'reject' applications that represent so much individual hard work, but I personally can't do anything about it at the moment, which bothers me. I'm sorry. And I know that doesn't mean much of anything under the circumstances to those experiencing the radio silence, but I'm still sorry.
Is anyone seeing Colorado-Boulder interviews showing up in their SCS placement service calendar?
Is anyone seeing anything at all yet on their SCS placement service calendar? Or will it take a little while? (I'm not 10:54.)
Nothing yet. I assume it's because I'm getting zero interviews this year.
One of my interviews is showing up.
Any hope that Bard is still finalizing their list? Or has that bird flown and the wiki just hasn't been updated?
@December 15, 2015 at 5:42 PM
I am wondering the same thing. I think they're just being super slow. With a generalist job one would think that the application pool is so big (à la Hamilton College) that someone will update the Wiki when there's an update to be had.
That said, allow me to bitch and moan about schools that take so long to generate their shortlist. *bitch, moan*
^Especially when other schools, like Trinity, take less than a week to decide not to interview me.
I'm not on a SC this year and can't speak for any other school's practice, but in my experience, if you haven't heard yet, that's a sign you're still in the running.
Imagine a pool of c. 200 files. The first task is to cut that number down. The first run through, brutal though this may seem, is to eliminate about 140 files out of those 200 as quickly as possible. This means glancing at the cover letter and the CV and cutting out as many as you possibly can. Some places then send the first set of rejection letters out at that point. If you hear back within a week after the deadline, that means you went out in this first cut.
Then each SC member (here at least) individually reads the 60 or so remaining files and tries to cull them down to a personal "deserves serious consideration" list of about 35. We read those very carefully indeed. Then, we each generate a personal list of our top 20 picks. Then and only then, we meet in full concave and hammer out the list of 12 people to interview at the SCS. This process takes a while (especially if we've set the deadline late enough that reading files coincides with grading finals!), and we do not tell anyone that they're out of the running until we have our short list of convention interviewees. There's usually a good deal of overlap in our individual short lists of 20, but there are also some areas of disagreement and we are careful not to tell anyone that they're out until they are really definitely OUT.
Thus, if you have not yet heard from a particular place, I would take that as reason to suspect that you're somewhere in that "deserves serious consideration" process.
^^unless the wiki already shows the interview invitations have been sent out
Brandeis? Anyone?
That BARD has flown, methinks....
I don't know: one year I got an interview notification on Dec. 23, and via the placement service to boot.
The Bard job is complicated because there is a (semi-) internal candidate, so that may be why it is taking a bit longer.
Nebraska, anyone?
This season has convinced me that it's sheer idiocy for a grad student to stay in this field.
Re Bard: do you mean the significant other of a faculty member there?
It's a spousal hire disguised as a real search.
If true...that's despicable in this market.
Nebraska's an inside spousal hire, too, unfortunately.
i guess it's time to give old harvey lomax a call, see if he wants to read some metrodorus of lampsacus.
Is anyone's Trinity interview showing up in their placement service calendar?
@December 16, 2015 at 3:26 PM
That might have seemed like a helpful "chin-up!" to you, but everyone here knows that most schools will not notify people when they don't make the cut, because their inhumane HR rules prohibit such notifications. Most of us will know everything before the SCS meeting only because of the wiki. Then we will chuckle in March when we get a form letter telling us how much they appreciated our applications, but unfortunately we are no longer under consideration for interview at the conference.
I know that this is not the place to bitch about CAMWS practices, but I hope that it will get back to them.
This year, the CAMWS registration fee structure is designed to help poor students attend the conference. I love that idea. But what they did was charge members $150, with the banquet automatically included, in order to charge students only $90 (banquet also automatically included). That means that students are forced to attend the banquet, and are paying more for registration than they used to pay when rejecting the banquet. Yes, it's less than members, but why make everyone pay so much more? This is a petty con designed to make everyone attend the banquet.
So...members pay twice what they used to, and students pay at least 50% more than they used to; but at least the banquet won't be underattended.
Why not just dispense with the banquet altogether and have a cash bar?
Why not indeed. Those CAMWS banquets are depressing as fuck.
I hate CAMWS. I hate the APA more, but the profs at my school tried to push this conference on the grads every chance they got. It's so great for grad students! So friendly! Maybe in comparison to the APA it is, but it feels like a knock-off. It lacks the critique that is an essential part of conferences. I got hit on inappropriately numerous times by drunk losers the year I attended. CAMWS is so much funnnnn, they said! I guess I'm a snob, but give me a real international conference over CAMWS anyday. If only we had one that wasn't as depressing as the sour sweat-stained APA.
Anyone remember the year CAMWS - which purports to be for midwestern states - was held in Tucson? Provo, UT? Yeah, that's affordable and friendly for grad students. Why do they continue to host this conference outside of the midwest? Makes no sense to me.
Reading these posts, could we have any more whiners in the field?
What are the chances that Brandeis (and Berkeley, for which people have gotten rejections but no one has yet reported an interview) have decided to interview exclusively at the associate prof level?
I posted the original complaint about CAMWS, but I wouldn't say that I hate it.
The program at CAMWS is always what the SCS program should be. It's not choked up with panels from affiliated groups (yay, Numismatics!) and panels organized by the same handful of people padding their tenure portfolios. Instead, there are just a lot of papers on ancient authors and texts. I learn new things at CAMWS, while at the SCS, I just find out what marginal topics are being worked on.
And (@December 19, 2015 at 5:35 AM) it's not supposed to be the Midwest: it's the Middle, West, and South (yes, that includes Arizona, Utah, and Virginia).
But I just don't understand why CAMWS is choosing to make everything more expensive. i guess it's the same faculty members who think that they need more associate deans, provosts, and vice presidents at their home institutions. They don't pay for the conference themselves, anyway. Their schools give them generous travel funding. It's the students, the adjuncts, and the NTTs who pay.
Berkeley is not only interviewing at the associate level, but they have scheduled interviews.
Has anyone's Harvey Lomax interview appeared on their calendar?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/12/18/saint-marys-university-minnesota-adjunct-says-he-was-let-go-due-props-play
Interesting article.
The tl;dr version: adjunct at a very small Catholic school puts on the Medea. Adjunct wants to include phalluses on the costumes. Administration asks adjunct not to use phalluses on the costumes. Adjunct insists. Administration chooses not to renew the adjunct for further teaching.
The article is full of hand-wringing, assertions about academic freedom, and appeals to emotion (single dad! cleaned toilets for extra money!), but really, it sounds like he was asking for it.
(1) What single dad thinks that adjuncting plus cleaning toilets is a good use of his doctorate? At what point does one make mature choices for one's family?
(2) What clear-thinking individual in a VERY tenuous circumstance (with dependents) intentionally riles up one's employers over a truly MINOR point (that is anyway inappropriate to the venue) AND refuses to backdown when given an out?
Seriously. Aren't we taught to read text AND context? Don't we practice the interpretation of subtle nuance, shades of meaning, and the best ways to navigate difficulties? Aren't we educated in a politicized atmosphere? So what makes it SO VERY HARD for people to apply those lessons to the experiences in their daily lives? Why is it that so many of us keep the things we learn and practice as academics completely separate from situations in life where they are equally applicable?
Insisting on his precious phallus prop...telling undergrads to move "sensually"...horse whips...making a big issue of his alleged right to his precious phallus prop...yeah, this guy sounds like a prime candidate for non-renewal (which is not, in any case, the same thing as termination).
And this was Seneca's Medea. So, the phallus-prop is debatable and certainly not necessary.
He's totes counter-culture!
This sums up all there is to say about this topic...
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2008/2008-12-29.html
^ Please excuse my French, but holy sh*t f*ck.
From the review:
On comprendra donc qu'à l'issue de ce commentaire, nous ne recommandons pas l'achat de cet ouvrage, ni à titre privé, ni dans le cadre d'une institution. La bibliographie, brillant par sa pauvreté, ne justifie pas même sa consultation. Enfin, la lecture de cet ouvrage se révèle particulièrement éreintante, le lecteur étant sans cesse freiné par les inexactitudes et les remarques noyées d'aigreur ponctuant chacune des 243 pages...
CAMWS: It isn't "middle, west" but "middle west" = midwest.
From https://camws.org/camws/camws-profile:
"The CAMWS region covers 32 midwestern, western, and southern states and three Canadian provinces."
Brandeis interview appeared on SCS schedule without other notification.
I also thought CAMWS was the Classical Association of the Midwestern States. No idea why I thought that. Correction noted.
So is everyone positive that Nebraska is a spousal hire?
Gettysburg interview showed up in placement calendar without official notification.
I would take claims of a spousal hire with a healthy grain of salt (for Nebraska, Bard, or anywhere). If it was an out-and-out spousal hire, there wouldn't be any search, because the hire would have happened when the first spouse arrived. A committee may well hire the spouse of a current professor, but they may also choose not to hire a professor's spouse. (I've seen both happen.) So, just because a spouse is in the mix doesn't mean that the whole thing is a foregone conclusion. I suspect that only the committees themselves know whether it is planned to hire the spouse of a current professor, and they would have obvious reasons not to broadcast that.
I just want to say a big "Three Cheers!" to all of the departments choosing to interview people who have been on the market for a while. It used to be that a long time in visiting positions was a red flag, and strong programs wouldn't consider you. Now they know that not having secured a TT job is not a sign that there's something wrong with you. (Except, of course, that your publication record is a bit slim, since it is harder to write when teaching 8 or 9 courses each year, while writing 50 job applications, while moving each summer.)
If nothing else, at least we are seasoned teachers. I have been stunned by programs hiring people who taught minimally or not at all during grad school, only to find that they make poor teachers.
Seconded!
Well, since Nebraska for some reason wants a scholar who does digital humanities, wouldn't it make more sense for the candidates to show that they can CREATE a spouse, using whatever that was that made Kelly LeBrock come to life in "Weird Science"?
Once again, Nebraska is an inside hire for the partner of another department faculty member. Check out their website. It's plain as day.
The fact that a tenured and a non-tt faculty member are married is far from conclusive proof that a search is going to end in a spousal hire. In fact, looking at the departmental website makes me less convinced that will be the outcome.
Why?
Are you looking at the right lecturer and assistant prof? Not tenured, actually.
For all the time some of you clearly spend stalking websites...
Job candidates are told again and again to customize our letters and materials for each institution to which we're applying. Of course we're going to look at the faculty page: to see the distribution of specialties and interests already present in the department.
It's an inside candidate...just sayin'
I know two people with interviews at UNL and their research interests closely resemble those of the internal candidate.
more proof?
isn't that proof enough?
@ Dec 26, 2016, 6:00 PM and 7:11 PM
That proves nothing. See the following I comment I recently made elsewhere:
There are different kinds of "inside" candidates.
(1) Department needs a TT hire, but the Provost approves a VAP line with a promise to come back with a TT the following year when the budget is secure. Department advertises a VAP nationally, asking for all the things they actually need filled (i.e., the same thing they will ask for in the eventual TT hire). After a national search, department hires VAP that fills all those criteria. Next year, the TT line is approved. It's a "new" job according to HR, so it must be re-advertised nationally. The "inside" candidate's CV matches the job description because -- surprise! -- the department still needs the same things.
This looks like a nefarious "inside search" to those just tuning in, but it's natural. And the inside candidate has improved odds because s/he is really only competing against the handful of people who didn't apply the previous year, have since graduated, or have changed their focuses in the past year. But the insider has the added benefit of actually knowing the school, students, and faculty.
Of course, the insider has the added difficulty of actually being known by the faculty.
(2) Department has one or more adjuncts, VAPs who were hired without a national search and/or just to fill some teaching requirements. Department gets approval for a specific TT line that may or may not fit the specialties of any one or more of those current contingent faculty. Department then conducts a national search. Suddenly and for the first time those local contingents are competing against every person in the country who might be a good fit. This can look like an inside search, but the chances for the local person are much slimmer. This is the kind of search that leads to many hard feelings and frequently makes Chronicle of Higher Ed. articles.
(3) Department has approval for a VAP line. Hires the "best" person out of the applicant pool because it's just for one or two years. This may or may not involve a national search. Department then gets approval for a TT line, steps back, really takes stock of what the department needs to balance out its offerings and specialties. Department then places a job add that may or may not have anything overlap at all with the current VAP's areas. Inside candidate, though liked by the department and students, is at a massive disadvantage.
(4) Any other scenario you can imagine. For example, there "shiny new thing" syndrome. An ivy ABD with one or fewer publications is a blank slate onto which a committee can project their every desire. An inside candidate is a known quantity. The insider has already proven that s/he will NOT fulfill every desire. Of course the ivy ABD won't either, but there's always that *chance*, or at least the chance that the ABD will fulfill *your personal* wishes in a new hire, and to hell with what your colleagues want.
Etc.
I'm beginning to wonder whether those posting elaborate apologiai are either the internal candidates themselves or the departments posed to hire their internal candidates.
Anonymous
Anonymous said...
I'm beginning to wonder whether those posting elaborate apologiai are either the internal candidates themselves or the departments posed to hire their internal candidates.
December 27, 2015 at 9:46 AM
These posts have been helpful. Seriously. Your post sounds like sour grapes.
If you're not willing or able to engage rationally with the processes surrounding your discipline (i.e., meta-disciplinary or political analysis), then, well, that speaks all it needs to about your candidacy for a job. A significant portion of getting and keeping my job has entailed that sort of work, quite separate from teaching Latin, Greek, and civ courses, doing advising, and doing service.
No, some people are just rightly contemptuous of the mentality in some places that someone deserves a job simply because of who their spouse is.
^ Reading fail. Grapes sour. Job fail.
@ December 27, 2015 at 12:25 PM
No one at any place you would ever be willing to work gets a job just because of who their spouse is without themselves actually being objectively better than you. That may be hard to swallow, but you need to swallow it. Your measures of "better" may not be the same as the department's measures of "better," but, guess what, other people differ from you and that's okay.
All of this assumes (1) that you're right about the spousal hire nonsense, which is on its surface unlikely, (2) that you understand every nuance of what the department wants, needs, and values, which is impossible, and (3) that whatever information you found on the internet about the persons involved is accurate and complete, which is vanishingly unlikely.
tl;dr: get over yourself.
"Objectively" better? Hardly. More like, better in the opinion of the people making the hire, who may be full of prejudices for any number of reasons. There's precious little that's "objective" about any of this.
@ Dec 27 1:22 PM
Clearly you don't know what "objectives" are and/or you don't understand the concept of point #2 above, which obviously includes your "full of prejudices for any number of reasons." Seriously, you sound irrational and just not very good at this whole using words thing. Increasingly I am not surprised at your bad "luck."
On the other hand, if we can't get jobs for two academics at the same place, then we're doomed to keep losing good people. Constant turnover is not good for the institution, either. And if we can get jobs for both spouses at the same school, they'll likely stay for life.
This is also a feminist issue: back in the day, men took professor jobs and their home-maker wives followed them. Now we've got just as many professional women as men, and professional women are more likely than professional men to be married to other professionals (male or female). It's a huge demographic change that we are still trying to adjust to. My own institution is trying desperately to find money for spousal hires so that we stop losing good people (and we are losing good women at a faster rate than good men because, again, more men have non-professional wives willing to follow them around the country).
And lastly: these are human beings we are talking about. If both spouses offer something good for the institution, and we can give both of them jobs, then I'm glad.
Signed,
Not someone affiliated with Nebraska, nor any school doing a "sham" search, nor someone with a spouse. I have no ulterior motives, just some experience trying to keep a school afloat.
Boy, lots of apologists for defending spousal hires. Now it's a feminist issue. Can spousal hire candidates be far off from becoming the newest protected class?
^ I try not to take pleasure in the misfortune of others, but I'm glad to know that attitudes like yours are a self-correcting problem in the profession.
Damn. We're a bunch of cold-hearted fucks in here.
a lot of the grad students / ABDs / unemployed or underemployed PhDs / single VAPs / angst-filled faculty posting on this blog with certitude about how "spousal hires" work don't know shit about shit. get a life - and a reality check. if you think that a "spousal hire" is a lock or easy, you're out of your mind. not to mention incredibly naive.
Anon 1:03, almost all of these sound like reasonable requests (all except the Skype vs meeting interviews-- I think the in-person is necessary and the annual meeting a consolidated way to go about it). There is at least one SCS committee (on Graduate Student interests) that would make a natural advocate for this.
Thanks for being positive in a place of darkness (i.e. the internet blogosphere).
Thanks to you, too. I've been a little shocked at how ugly things have gotten over the past few days.
Anon 1:38,
Can you articulate a bit more fully *why* you think in-person conference interviews are necessary? Your opinion on this is shared by many, particularly more experienced classicists, but I've never seen it defended coherently without recourse to appeals to the mos maiorum of the field, and by vague gestures towards intuitions.
I think this position needs more substantive reason-giving in order for it to continue as the default.
Thanks,
TBA (Tenured But Anonymous)
One line of reasoning used to be that applicants are professionals in the field and should therefore be attending the annual conference anyway. In this market, such a small fraction of applicants are actually going to become professionals in the field that this seems to no longer valid (if it ever was).
@December 29, 2015 at 8:05 PM
That still is a current line of reasoning in some quarters.
Another line of reasoning is that the in-person interview is more revealing than Skype interview. This is variously phrased. I've usually heard it said along the lines: "I can tell more about a candidate in person than on Skype." That sounds specious, but if we rephrase it to say, "In person interviews are less scripted (on the candidate's part) and therefore more indicative of real collegial and classroom interaction," it suddenly seems much more reasonable. The candidate has far more control in a Skype interview than in a conference interview. So while Skype levels the field of who can afford to attend the conference, it gives a serious advantage to those who can afford a very particular kind of interview coaching (or to those who attend schools who provide that coaching). The thing is, that coaching may get a job (or more precisely, an on-campus interview), but it does not correlate to any other professional behavior. So, this line of reasoning goes, Skype lowers one barrier for candidates while erecting another. It's a wash for candidates. But for committees, it impedes picking the best person for that particular school.
Is all of this true? Who knows. If it's true in the minds of the search committee, then it is true in that search, since in most relevant senses, the search exists only in and through the minds of the committee. And perhaps the differences will evanesce as technology improves. By the time we get to full body holographic scans or transporters or mental up-loads/links to the net, this will all be moot.
Search committees take their jobs a little too seriously, methinks. The market is such that, even assuming that somehow the vast majority of people with PhDs are actually vile murderers or simply stupid, any given search will still have dozens of candidates who would be perfect for the job. Seriously, admit/embrace the randomness and just pick someone without all the rigamarole.
That way search committee members can get on with doing their actual jobs and job applicants can start the transition to another career in earnest.
I have a folder dedicated to e-mails from the APA/SCS. If I cut it perfectly down the middle and discard one half, it will contain the same amount of information…
How do you define "internal hire"? Is it "VAP who is offered TT position", or is it "PhD alumnus of program who is offered TT position", or is it "person who has prior personal connection to anyone in the department", and, as we get into the third option, does it become fair to ask whether any hire is ever *not* an internal hire?
@ December 30, 2015 at 10:39 AM
I used to be sympathetic to your position, but after several years at a couple of small liberal arts colleges, I see now that you're completely wrong.
What you say *might* be true at a higher end research university, or any university that wants to become primarily research-oriented. It is most emphatically not true anywhere with a teaching orientation AND anywhere with a particular (non-generic) mission. At those places, the much-maligned "fit" makes the difference between maintaining the entire ethos of the university or degrading it into just another cookie-cutter set of classes and diplomas for the kids that couldn't go to Harvard.
I'm watching exactly that happen at my university as several departments have taken the hiring approach you suggest, and the entire character of the place has changed. This is not for the better because our student population has *not* changed: it's those who live close by. And the ones who would have traveled to attend here are no longer interested because we are less and less a distinct place.
And before you assert that anyone good enough to be hired would be good enough to figure it all out, let me add that this just isn't true. I've seen person after person fail utterly. Most just aren't interested in understanding a "lesser" environment. Some wrongly want to change the environment. Maybe 1 in 10 (or even fewer) can actually make the change successfully, and those tend to have had a small (and likely not "selective") liberal arts undergraduate experience.
tl;dr: December 27, 2015 at 7:59 PM is right.
this feels topical:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9zCgPtsups
too long; didn't watch
@ December 30, 2015 at 2:51 PM
Your description of the importance of fit is persuasive (to this long-time VAP at least), but to return to the earlier issue of face-to-face vs. skype interviews: is an in-person conference interview really a better method for determining fit than skype? For that matter, is it even a good method?
Every slate of campus interviews that I have seen has included at least one candidate whom everyone agrees is not hirable, whether it's a bad teaching demo, a bad job talk, an inability to converse with students and colleagues, or all of the above.
While this undermines the idea stated earlier by (e.g.) @Anon 12/30 10:39, that in this market the vast majority of candidates are viable, it also argues against the idea that a face-to-face interview is useful or necessary to assess collegiality, pedagogical or communication ability, or any of the myriad of other factors that contribute to "fit."
If face-to-face interviews are so good at this kind of assessment, why do a substantial majority of on-campus interviewees ultimately fail the fit test?
@ December 30, 2015 at 3:19 PM
which is why your lats will always be underwhelming.
"At those places, the much-maligned "fit" makes the difference between maintaining the entire ethos of the university or degrading it into just another cookie-cutter set of classes and diplomas for the kids that couldn't go to Harvard."
A university is a place of education: it doesn't need an ethos, and it doesn't need to be special. It needs to do its fucking job and educate its students. It probably shouldn't educate kids though; elementary and middle schools are a better place for them.
A university is a place of education: it doesn't need an ethos, and it doesn't need to be special. It needs to do its fucking job and educate its students. It probably shouldn't educate kids though; elementary and middle schools are a better place for them.
So you're saying that you don't really understand universities.
Here are the problems with your simplistic statement. You assume that there is only one definition of education and that this definition of yours is the appropriate one. You are collapsing all students into a single "type" and you should know better. You assume as a given that education (of any type) doesn't need an ethos. That's as much nonsense as saying that literary interpretation can be uncritical/untheoretical. Every approach has a theoretical underpinning whether acknowledged or not. What you're really arguing, though, is that the particular definition of education that you have assumed has a particular ethos that you have also uncritically assumed and you think that those are appropriate for all environments at all times.
This is explicitly why you are not suited to most jobs. I say this without any rancor. It's just the unvarnished truth. People are different, places are different, and approaches, methods, and yes, even one's ethos must vary to match those occasions. In a buyer's market such as we have now, "fit" may be the thing *most* important for a committee to determine.
Your intentional misreading of "kids" (a common colloquialism, as you well know) is cute, by the way, but not to the point.
which is why your lats will always be underwhelming.
December 30, 2015 at 3:56 PM
Only true for a few.
This can only be a general truth is you believe that education, or at least access to education, is not appropriate for all people. (Don't talk to me about public high school in this nation and call that education. If you've ever stepped out of the R1 bubble, you know better.) Of course, if you do believe that (access to) education isn't for everybody, then you don't understand the ethos (there's that word again!) of most universities and colleges in the US.
[Note how I didn't make the joke that my lats are underwhelming because I don't exercise. That was class and restraint on my part.]
Oh god, I drew out a theory nut.
This kind of bullshit only flies in a humanities echo chamber. Try giving that speech to people in the sciences at your university, or better yet the people who actually run it, and see how long it takes for them to laugh or speed-walk away.
No wonder our field is dead.
^ Self-correcting attitude. Goodbye and good riddance. Enjoy your unexamined life doing whatever it is you end up doing.
Vassar anyone?
My life is, if anything, too examined, but thanks anyway.
^ grad student-like typing detected.
get back to comps.
worry about jobs when you've grown up.
To quote Nestor:
ὦ πόποι ἦ δὴ παισὶν ἐοικότες ἀγοράασθε!
For any given job, there are probably:
-Many, many people who have the necessary schooling and educational attainment.
-Many people who are possessed not only of the required skills but of excellent versions of those skills and of strong research portfolios.
-Plenty of people who can also teach well, perhaps superbly well.
-A decent number of people who are also willing to go the extra mile in terms of advising, mentoring, and service.
-Several people who are also sufficiently tolerant, flexible, patient, socialized, and self-effacing to swallow their pride, shoulder their share (or more than their share), and try to make things a little better next week than they were this week.
-A few people who combine all of the above with an ability to read the institution, to build relationships with colleagues and students, and to bloom where they are planted.
Those last two categories are actually the most important in creating a successful version of the human organization that is an academic department. Excellent research skills are a given; the prospect of great teaching is a reasonable expectation now. But only personal contact, ideally in the form of in-person interviews and campus visits, really has any prayer of trying to assess that admittedly nebulous quality that we all call 'fit.'
^ Amen
I would still be interested to hear the virtues of the in-person interview (vs. the cheaper skype option) articulated. A poster earlier mentioned that skype interviews favor those able to find or buy interview coaching, but that seems like it would be more the case for in-persons.
Maybe this is just pre-SCS nerves, but in-person interviews often feel like bad pop quizzes, in which the candidate is judged on their ability to answer very specific questions (what textbook would you use for a Statius course when you specialize in Caesar) without the opportunity to prepare. Course design isn't (or shouldn't be) done on the fly, so what are SCs learning from our (in)ability to answer questions like this? In an in-person interview, it seems like the negatives that they would pick up on (signs of nervousness, mostly) would come through clearly.
Obviously, this disadvantages the candidates. How, if at all, does it help the SC? Or are interview nerves of themselves an indication of a lack of "fit"?
As a faculty member in a college looking to hire next year, I'd say that an ability to answer dumb pop-quiz questions gracefully is a big plus. I have several colleagues who, bless their little cotton socks, mean well, but will trot out those tired what-text-do-you-use questions just because they're a bit out of their field and think it's the sort of thing they *should* be asking. I doubt they could tell you what they are looking for. See also: random tangential things they thought of on the fly. In that case, if you can smile and lend the dumb question a grace it does not deserve, I will feel a lot better about you as a potential colleague. Bonus points if you can answer robustly enough to make the question-asker feel like the question was profound and searching instead of mundane and dumb. And personally, I'm reassured by a few nerves as they show me that you care and you're not a cocky little s**t, but I'm sure mileage varies on that one.
Thinking of graduate students as inherently needing "growing up" reflects the same problematic attitude as calling college students kids. Making it to your mid-thirties or beyond without dying doesn't make you special, and if that's where you need to go to try to make an argument, you're a sad person. I guess that a person with that attitude does get a certain kind of itch scratched by choosing a career that keeps them around college students constantly, but I can't imagine that's a good arrangement for the students themselves.
"But I AM grown-up!" is the refuge of a child.
And you are one of the nastiest commenters here. Get a life.
You only think I'm nasty because I have little use and less patience for the self-absorbed and willfully ignorant. Life isn't all rainbows and puppy dogs. The sooner you understand that, the sooner you'll be grown up too. Then you might have the rational sense to understand good advice and the self-discipline to take it. Until then, you're just another petulant washout who thinks the world is so unfair, the system out to get you, the meanie-pants old men putting you down, and nobody getting your particular, special snowflake genius. There are no jobs for people like you any more.
No more poking the troll, people.
Not a troll, actually. Former SCC speaking truth. You don't have to like it, but dismissing it out of hand rather than facing up to it shows a distinct lack of maturity and intellectual honesty.
Oh my, a SCC member. Let me recover from my sense of awe.
You come across as little more than a nasty, arrogant know it all. Admittedly, not a rare thing in academia. But let's not pretend you're coming across as much more than that. The people who didn't get a job in your department might be the lucky ones.
"SCC" stands for "search committee chair". You're not helping your case, if that case is to present yourself as anything other than ignorant and resentful.
Dude got pwned! Lolz!
People of Famae Volent! This anonymous commenter has chaired a search committee! Quick, let us make it our ruler!
You sound bitter.
You can hear me? Where are you?
I say bury the conference interviews sooner rather than later, because will eventually die no matter how much the dinosaurs plea with administrators who clearly see the increasing costs. I've now witnessed our professional schools and the sciences do first round cuts by video. Before we hear about how special our discipline is and how we need to channel this phenomenon in person, there are several factors that will lead to the inevitable death of conference interviews, and I won't even discuss the incredulity of administrators who don't understand why the humanities is spending much more money on this than the "more important" disciplines.
For starters, video technology (and internet access) is becoming incredibly good, cheap, and easy to use. We did grad school interviews last year using university facilities and it was amazing how clear the video and audio turned out. You could see every freckle on the applicants' faces on the huge ultra HD flatscreens that make them life size. This alone won over many of the old guard for future job searches.
I agree with an earlier statement that applicants with special interview training and advisor connections are at a significant advantage with in-person interviews. There is no time for informal chit chat before and after video interviews. No secret handshakes and "how's my best friend (aka your advisor) doing" sessions that can skew the all important first cut. I also suspect that the irrational justification of in-person interviews is to see how "classical" candidates are. We justify it with words like "fit" but has anyone asked if this acts as a severe bias based on our expectations that have marginal relevance for the actual job? There are plenty of "classical" types who have charmed the pants off departments during conference interviews (who doesn't subconsciously like a British accent?), but have ended up being total assholes and duds on the job.
I know people will say it's a part of the inequities of life, but I know that certain departments pony up for their students once they land an interview. Maybe that asshole you hired ended up impressing you because he had his hotel, airfare, and food covered by his department while the one who would have done better was biting her nails worrying where next month's rent was coming from after blowing it on the conference. Just some food for thought for those claiming to favor as level of a playing field as possible.
Speaking of first cuts, I'm convinced that many searches fail because the severe limit placed on the number of interview slots at the annual meeting. Twelve interviews is pushing it in my experience due to varying SC member schedules and Placement Service edicts. We're planning on casting our nets out wider by video interviewing at least 20 applicants during our next search, maybe even push it to 30 which several colleagues in the sciences have told me is quite doable. I think the ability to interview twice as many applications alone makes it a no brainer.
After reading the whining here, I no longer favor a level playing field. I'd rather hire someone who has already been vetted by someone I trust at another institution.
Yeah, because what could go wrong with totally trusting someone else with a hire within your own institution, said no one ever.
Anonymous said...
You can hear me? Where are you?
January 1, 2016 at 3:11 AM
You fail at colloquial English. No doubt your scholarship is as pitiful. Water finds its own level.
@ January 1, 2016 at 3:30 AM
If a return to the Good Ole Boys' network will keep you out of the profession, then it's all to the good.
People, what is wrong with you?? What exactly are you getting out of this nastiness (on both sides of the argument)? Chill out.
The search committee chair is spot on, and the people arguing with her/him are definitely coming across as resentful and ignorant. Fortunately this market will definitely keep them all out of jobs.
Happy New Year!
Has anyone heard from Vassar or Georgetown? (Some of us are still coming here for job-related information, rather than tedious back-and-forth.)
Re all these "has anyone heard posts"...don't you think the hyper obsessive will have updated the Wiki the second there is news? Don't worry, you haven't missed anything.
Anonymous said...
Has anyone heard from Vassar or Georgetown? (Some of us are still coming here for job-related information, rather than tedious back-and-forth.)
January 1, 2016 at 1:29 PM
If you checked the wiki like any halfway intelligent person would, you'd know that both have already contacted their interviewees. Vassar on 12/19 and Georgetown on 12/17. What a lazy and/or incompetent ass you are! It's no surprise you weren't among those contacted.
Yeah, shame on you, 1.29! May you forever languish in the stocks of famae volent while our resident troll hurls the rotten cabbages of his discontent in. your. face.
Do you always think everyone you dislike is the same person?
@January 1, 2016 at 4:04 PM
If you can't own up to your own failures, you can't begin to improve upon them. Grow a thicker skin and learn. Keep in mind the old saw: if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Most of you job seekers can't read Greek and Latin competently either, and yet aspire to teach other people so as to perpetuate your own mediocrity.
^ Amen
And we smell bad too!
About time this place stopped being a "safe space" for the entitled "snowflake geniuses" who can't figure out why they're not getting 10 interviews.
Self-important, blowhard boomers duking it out with their entitled, underemployed millennial progeny. This is better than pro wrestling.
I can't wait until San Francisco. It's only a matter of time before this happens - http://dailyhaze.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Spoiler-alert-Han-solo-killed-by-son-kylo-ren.jpg.
@January 1, 2016 at 7:15 PM
Nah. I'm technically a Millennial myself, duking it out with my "fellow" Millennials who won't take a good look in the mirror and either improve themselves or move on. I know full well the odds, the system, the work, and what it means to have to have a publication record equal to or greater than the full professors in my own department just to have gotten hired on the TT. I have huge sympathies for those making an honest effort and I go far out of my way to help the ones I know in person. I have nothing but contempt for those who show off their flaws as if they were merit badges and then cry about how the nasty, meanie-pantses are keeping them down. They belittle and mask with their mediocrity the very real systemic problems that afflict the good candidates.
@ 7:19 PM
Incitements to violence are even more contemptible. If all you can think to do is strike out physically, then your intellect is incapable of playing ball in the big leagues.
Oh, fuck off out of here with your bullshit and your "contemptible" this and "willfully ignorant" that. You're making us all look terrible. If you're such a superhero with your full-professor-level publications and your TT job, why the fuck are you hanging around here getting your jollies trying to make random job-seekers feel bad? Because you are a lousy troll, that's why.
Job-seekers, you don't actually have to be a total prick to get a job, I promise. Lots of people you will meet out there, here, and in San Francisco are smart,kind, dedicated to their jobs,and not choking to death on their own bitterness.
Resorting to saying "fuck off" is an admission you've lost the argument.
@ 9:13 PM
9:19 is right.
I hang around because I like to make thoughtful posts in response to thoughtful questions. I also like to edit the wiki when I can. As for other reasons why a non-job seeker would be here, see up thread. But I also like to point out when someone's soul is a mixture of bronze and iron. As for making you look terrible, you're the only one who can do that. And good on ya for all the progress you've made there. It makes the search committees' jobs easier.
If job-seekers are so unpleasant, just don't post your ad and let another department take the line. You'll be doing everyone a favor in the long run.
^ Try not to be a crybaby. There are plenty of really GREAT people to pick from. That you're not one of them is unfortunate for you. It's of little concern to the rest of us.
Huh? I'm not even on the market. Why assume you know the situation of people you're replying to on an anonymous forum?
Nice try. But not really.
I have a bad feeling that there's a schizophrenic doing 90% of the posting of late and it's a 13 year old in Des Moines laughing his ass off.
^ That's how the rest of us feel when we read your "scholarship." Or we would, if you'd actually published anything. Go back to studying for comps. When you've grown up, you might be ready to join the profession.
Who let grumpy cat into FV?
http://giphy.com/gifs/arnold-schwarzenegger-cat-work-out-10NI9u4qOWNdmw
Damn, 11:28 PM, 10:48 PM (same person?), enhance your calm. You realize that nothing we publish makes a damn bit of difference in the wider world, right? No high school student is ever going to say"Wow! I want to go to A University because of the ground-breaking work Prof. B is doing on Ennius!" We publish for ourselves, we teach for others -- I have no illusions that my scholarship is making a difference, but yet I write and I publish and continue to do it because I enjoy it and because I think intellectual curiosity is something that we all need to have, especially in our roles as teachers. I've published more than a few things, and I think you're being extremely petty.
Don't waste your breath. The self-important, asshole boomer trying to play himself off as a millennial is not worth our time. Yes, he's a boomer despite what denial and vitriol, only pithy to himself, follows shortly. Kudos to the person who used grumpy cat to out him.
@January 3, 2016 at 4:54 PM
What a narrow view you have.
@January 3, 2016 at 5:06 PM
Do you ever have the experiencing of knowing that someone is completely wrong? I mean, not believing it, but actually knowing because you have access to information that they don't? And then watching them insist that, based on their superior reasoning, they must be right? Sort of like when they make a numerological argument about the order of poems in a collection without knowing that several of the poems are spurious? That's how I feel about you right now. I *know* you're wrong. And that makes me glad. It makes me glad to test your interpretive powers and to see them fail. It's nice to know when the "competition" isn't. :-D
Wow, 5:06, you called it on the asshole boomer! 5:06 ftw.
8:26 = 5:06
Epic fail.
The best part is that he geezer has no idea how he was outed.
Inquiring minds want to know. Who is grumpy cat/boomer troll? Initials please!
No one of consequence despite his bluster. Another boomer handed a job and just about everything else back in the day and now passing judgment on young scholars who are twice the person he ever was. Now he just needs to ride off into the sunset (fat chance) despite his self-compelling narcissism that rationalizes his long worn out welcome by thinking we all need his brilliance. Decades of sublimating how good fortune has smiled upon him will do that to someone, especially when they hang out here for no good reason other than a misplaced sense of worth to the discipline.
So basically you're full of it and you got showed up? Got it.
I'll see all y'all in SF!!!
I'll be the one in a suit at the bar smelling of desperation and anxiety. Drinks are on you.
I'll be the one in a suit at the bar sniggering at the candidates smelling of desperation and anxiety.
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