If the rumor mill is to be believed, many offers have been made. Not all, but many. Negotiations take some time while people weigh their options. SCs may still go to a second candidate, so not all hope is lost.
I know for sure of several offers that have been made but not accepted yet (negotiations in progress). I also know of a few schools that are just finishing up campus visits. I expect the wiki will start turning red within the next week or so.
Re: Toronto, trying to get two departments to agree on something is not always easy. That said, shambles might be too strong a term, but there are plenty of rumours of leadership fail.
Whatever happened, a failure to find a suitable candidate in this market lies squarely on their shoulders. And the impulse to use this failure to publicly kick people who are down is very ugly.
This is a career question and not necessarily a job-seeking question, but I'd appreciate the collective insight on it, if it's not totally off-topic.
How common is it for someone to have a book published, say, in February, and receive tenure before any reviews of the book are released?
Obviously this is not much of a problem if the book is an obvious home-run or the department in question thinks it is, but this would seem to be a potentially risky and embarrassing situation for the institution if the book is subsequently panned.
I don't think reviews matter to most schools. I'd say they matter to R1s and maybe to very status conscious R2s and SLACs. Even in the last two, though, reviews should be more important at the promotion to full stage rather than at the tenure stage (unless someone is really geared up to tank you).
"How common is it for someone to have a book published, say, in February, and receive tenure before any reviews of the book are released?"
I would say fairly common, as is (incredibly) getting tenure on the basis of a mere book contract (with the finished product still not in existence). Is the former a bad thing? Probably not, given a) how long it takes for reviews to come out in our field, and b) how capricious they can be (why should one book review be given more weight or indeed any weight at all, given that if the book came out with a half-way decent press it's already been read by at least twice that number of outside readers?).
How much weight do search committees put on negative reviews of books by applicants? My book has just come out, and I know that by the time I go back on the market in the fall it will only have been reviewed in BMCR (if anywhere). It's with a good press, and has been thoroughly vetted by the readers, but I'm terrified that one bad review (in a place everyone in the field reads) will be my undoing.
Re: the Toronto letter, it said what the wiki says it said: "in the end the committee did not think it had identified any candidate with just the right fit." It should be noted that there are relatively few specialists in ancient philosophy who are in fact highly qualified to teach at all levels in both disciplines, which is what that job required. Still, it's hard to believe that none of their candidates were so qualified, though I suppose it's possible. Note too that they were willing to appoint at either the assistant or the associate level, so their choices were not restricted solely to recent PhDs. We'll see what they do next year. I wouldn't be surprised if they hire at the senior level.
Speaking of U of Toronto, it looks like they just hired Peter Bing. http://classics.chass.utoronto.ca/index.php/department-news/177-peter-bing-renowned-scholar-of-greek-poetry-joins-the-department-of-classics
Regarding Reed, it is criminal in this job market to put people through the time and trouble of an application you have no intention of even looking at seriously. The best that can be said is that they didn't ask for a diversity statement, course proposals, teaching portfolio, or other such time-consuming documents.
Has anyone else noticed that the required documents for the Santa Clara job on the actual submission website do not match well with the job description as posted on the SCS website? Confusing.
Rage-- Sing, Interfolio, the Search Committee's rage Black and murderous, that cost the Applicants Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of PhDs into Joblessness's dark, and left their CVs to rot as feasts for traschans and dumpsters, and the Dean's will was done.
Begin with the clash between the Applicant, Academic Wunderkind, and the godlike Search Committee.
Guys, will you please update the wiki, even just in a "word of mouth" way? There are a lot of us waiting to be put out of our misery, and there is no way that most, if not all, of the yellow positions are not already done deals.
One of the yellow positions was still holding campus visits two weeks ago, another last week. Both indicated that it would be several weeks before they contacted their final choice.
Yeah, I know for a fact that one school lost a candidate to an offer from another recently. But there are often institutional roadblocks--once the SC selects a candidate they have to get administrational approval and that can take time especially at larger institutions.
The newer folks here should realize that quite a lot of time can elapse from a verbal offer being made to an actual contract being signed. That period can be four weeks in length, in some cases (mine was). There can be lots of negotiations, back and forth, sometimes involving more than one institution and multiple sets of administrators - even counter or competing offers. So while everyone "wants to know" etc., it's not that easy.
In my humble opinion, none of that matters (at the several recent posts): if you've heard nothing about a position by now, it's not going to come knocking at your emailbox. Positions that have yet to shortlist or longlist or otherwise list their candidates are possibly still on the table, but everything else is gone. If a job has been "oranged" already and you weren't oranged as well, then focus your energy on jobs that greened you or have yet to green. That's my advice. Also, unless you're a Super-Pedigree or extremely well bankrolled, visiting positions are now very very very very good things to pursue. Because they're legitimate academic jobs. And that's why we're all here, right?
2:57 is correct. While it is the case the the various oranged searches are not yet formally closed - and may not even have extended an offer yet - unless you were one of their on-campus finalists you are not going to be offered those jobs. Sorry. I'm there with you.
To the above posters, I think the anxiety is probably coming from people who have been on campus and are hearing crickets, not people who somehow think they're going to get a SCS or on-campus interview at this point.
@4:34 -- Exactly. And that can take a while. Institutions are not going to let you know your their top candidate or make an offer before it has cleared the bureaucracy. Even if your campus visit was several weeks ago, it's possible that administrative hurdles are still being cleared.
@8:09 I've got nothing on the search, but historically: (1) The department is circling the drain. (2) The last hire left after only a couple of years. (3) Florida just decided that computer languages satisfy language requirements. (4) The admin keeps raising tenure standards mid-stream and applying science publication norms to humanities scholars.
@4:34, my rejection from Carleton was personalized with my name and a few words about my research ("we enjoyed learning about your interesting work on xxxx") and thanked me for my thoughtful course proposals. Truly inspiring in the current climate--way to make job-seekers feel like human beings, Carleton!
The situation at USF is a disaster. There are no language courses offered above 2nd-year Latin and 1st-year Greek and the only Civ courses are huge, 100+ enrollment lectures. Their hire will probably not teach anything interesting for the rest of his/her career. Without going into too much detail, the personalities (both within Classics and the larger World Languages dept. in which the program is situated) are toxic. Avoid at all costs.
They did 20 minute phone interviews (and in reality not even) to select on-campus candidates for a tenure track position, seven of which was them introducing themselves. They can't even really care themselves about the future of their department, can they?
@ 4:01 PM I'm not so sure about that. Unemployment in Classics means moving on with your life, potentially to a more lucrative and fulfilling career. TT employment in a toxic department means the gradual crushing of your soul as you grow ever more depressed, cynical, and embittered toward your colleagues, your students, and your life. So, no, it's not better.
If the majority of the department is staffed with baby boomers (or a few of them have inordinate amounts of power), it's almost guaranteed to be a toxic environment with huge egos and winner-take-all attitudes continually fueling an unbending dogmatism that poisons everything. I would rather be unemployed in the Shire than some goon in Mordor.
It sounds to me that USF is in no worse shape than many of the classics programs at state schools these days. That anti-humanities sentiment is powerful and one that anyone taking a TT in Classics will have to deal with for the rest of his/her career.
The fun thing about the Shire in this scenario is that it also includes employment in literally every other field in existence. Some of those even have elevenses!
If you survive this type of department, you will still be crushed. If the boomer is defeated and someone younger made chair and all that you hope for comes true you will still have to taste the bitterness of endless politics. Whether by droning speech or the slow decay of time, your hope will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of its passing. It will come to death an image of the splendor of the scholars of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of academia. But you, my budding classicist, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell bound to your grief under the fading books until all the world is changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent.
I'm not going to out myself with any more details, but those of you saying "this type of department" or "sound like par for the course" obviously have not had any contact with USF's World Languages dept. It's a special kind of hell that goes way beyond the "usual politics" or "boomers vs. millennials" or hazing junior colleagues or any of that other nonsense.
Do they sacrifice their junior colleagues to Dionysus? This kind of general doom-and-gloom is exactly why FV is not worth the time to read. If there are legitimate grievances with USF, enumerate them. That can be done without "outing" oneself.
@6:52PM: I think FV exists primarily to depress other people into leaving the field so that there will be less competition. Gloom and doom does the trick.
Meanwhile, these people from Ohio State and other non-first-tier schools need to stop getting jobs; it's ruining the whole only-Ivy-and-Berkeley-PhDs-get-jobs narrative.
Then again, that narrative has never been sensitive to counter-examples, so I suppose it doesn't really matter. Maybe soon we'll learn that Ohio State is in fact an elite institution.
But I was so looking forward to second-rate, self-important white dudes talking about how they're unacknowledged and misunderstood geniuses just because they didn't go to Ivies.
Let's bring back the LOTR stuff, those were the best comments on the threat IMO. Anyone want to compose a Tolkein-themed rant about the perfidy of inside hiring?
I'm pretty sure a Nazgûl boomer would do anything to get his man into a position, for boomers desire power above all else. I once witnessed a search where the SC thought they had an agreement on the person to hire. But they were all of them deceived, for another hire was made. In the land of deans, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Nazgûl boomer recommended, in secret, a hire that would capitulate like no other. And into this hire he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One stooge to overrule them all.
ahhhh the inside-spousal hires have begin to roll in. we will now experience yet another slew of posts (probably by the very people responsible) defending this odious practice in one twisted way or another. Before that happens let's just flashback to the fall and recall that although it is inhabited by bitter jobless people (myself included), FV was right.
To give credit where credit is due (none of these me)
Re Bard: do you mean the significant other of a faculty member there? December 17, 2015 at 6:47 PM Anonymous said... It's a spousal hire disguised as a real search. December 17, 2015 at 6:56 PM Anonymous said... If true...that's despicable in this market. December 17, 2015 at 7:54 PM Anonymous said... Nebraska's an inside spousal hire, too, unfortunately.
So many balrogs. Nothing for it, we need to take a trip to the Gandalf store. Does anyone's apartment allow pets? They make you show a note from your landlord before you can take one home.
I can't speak to Bard, but I know for a fact that Nebraska was NOT a spousal-hire -- just a regular, garden-variety 'inside hire' where the VAP got the TT job. And the Bard hire may have been something similar: somebody who had previously (two years ago) been a VAP in that department got the TT job. So, before we all lose our minds over the injustice of inside spousal hires, we should at least make sure we are absolutely 100% clear on the facts.
More to the point, I think we all have personal experience or anecdotal evidence that proves that the 'inside hire' is never a shoe-in, so clearly those candidates who get such jobs must have done something right. Maybe we can begrudge their luck at being in the right place at the right time, but the idea of a 'sham search' because there was an inside candidate is a canard. If you go back through the wiki data, it is clear that every year there are at least half a dozen TT jobs that are snapped up by current VAPs at those institutions, while surely there are just as many 'inside candidates' who either don't get the offer or don't accept the offer. The latter case perfectly illustrates why schools conduct national searches when they have an 'inside candidate': said candidate may get a better job elsewhere, and the school needs to make sure that they have second and third choices in case of such an outcome.
The market has always operated this way, and it always will operate this way, though this doesn't make it any more palatable when we are not the beneficiary of an 'inside hire'.
It is so refreshing that this blog reveals truth. Everyone comes here to vent about the system, rage against the man, shout at the rain, purport to advocate for merit and justice and fairness. But in the end, you all hate each other more than you hate the system. If you think it is easy or even common in 2016 for one's partner or spouse to be hired on an academic line as an 'accommodation' to the other partner or spouse, then you are using too many drugs. Or not enough drugs. Stop looking for villains to create, as there are plenty already. Most of you will not land t-t jobs in Classics. Face it. Do the math.
Of course you're right about the math: thanks for the kind reminder, we almost forgot! But I think the pushback you're seeing here is not against spousal hires as such*, but spousal hires done in dirty or careless ways. If there is no getting around running a "national search," the job ad can be written in a way that limits the number of applicants and signals to them not to spend precious time scouring the website to decide what course to propose that might complement the curriculum, trying to incorporate the university mission statement's main themes into the cover letter, etc. etc. etc. This goes for strong inside candidates as well, although of course less so, since, as was pointed out above, they might get a better offer and leave, so the university is also less committed to them.
*I'm all for them -- otherwise only the childless can be classicists!
A strong second to everything 10:10 said. Spousal hires are not a bad thing, but there are better and worse ways to do them. Also, to be clear, the "hate" about such hires expressed here does not appear to be directed at those hired but at the departments and institutions who go about the hiring in careless or uncompassionate ways. It is not each other that we hate, but the system.
Third to everything said above. With the market this bad, many of us cling to the hope of TT generalist jobs like Odysseus clinging to his raft. I am a Latinist, and Bard and Nebraska were two of a very small number of jobs I had any chance at this year. It is deeply frustrating--not to mention humiliating--to invest time and trouble in tailoring an application for which you are not even seriously considered. Most of us can spot spousal/inside hires based on the job ad and come to an informed decision on whether to take the risk and invest the time. A broad generalist search falsely encourages people who have no shot and limited resources.
I just wanted to add to 10:22: I too have no hard feelings whatsoever toward someone who takes a job like this. And I think anyone who does -- and I don't believe that's very many -- is being extremely unfair, since we would all jump on such an opportunity if we had it. The problem is when departments manage such hires in a thoughtless or callous way, and has nothing to do with the candidate.
So I'm seconding the person who seconded me. Second squared?
@11:52 The "others" don't have real points. 9:33 was right on the money. The "others" are embittered and angry. "They" are looking for reasons (falsified though those reasons may be) to explain away why "they" did not get this or that specific job, why the system was set up unfairly, why the job recipient was undeserving or had an "unfair" advantage, etc. You pick. "They" would be just as upset (likely *more* upset) if a TT job came out with a hyper-specialized ad that prevented their applying or if there were an unpublicized search.
What committees are doing is making the process *more* open and *more* fair by making public, open searches. It is *never* a done deal that an insider or a spouse will be hired. They could get better offers elsewhere, which happens. They could have detractors in the department that you don't know about. They could screw everything up. (I observed a search just this semester where the insider, a clear and obvious winner loudly beloved by students and colleagues alike completely flubbed the application process, interview, and teaching demonstration. Someone else was hired.)
When you see an insider hired, it's because they met and exceeded all the requirements of the job, nailed their application, interview, and on-campus visit, AND were perceived to exceed the other candidates. Is it "unfair" if that perception happened because the committee members knew the insider better than they knew the other applicants? No. That's *THE SAME REASON* why we *NETWORK*--so that our colleagues across the discipline will know who we are. (And this is setting aside the very many ways that being known well in a department actively count against an insider.)
So grow up. Get to know more people. The systemic problems do not sit with the search committees. The root of the problem is oversupply and nothing more.
"Grow up:" we are witnessing the glorious return of Mr. Snowman, gracing the spring job market as well with his presence!!
In all seriousness, I do think that one thing string about this year's FV is that we are seeing an awful lot more anger, insults and immaturity from those who *aren't* job candidates than those who are. If you look at the wiki, for example, you see that many people who are rejected do not resent the rejection at all but are very grateful for being treated with respect and humanity. This isn't just about getting a job for most of us, it is also about being treated as potential colleagues and fellow human beings.
Agreeing with 12:51 (and this is 10:22, by the way, and not anyone else who has written in the mean time).
While more PhDs than jobs is the reason why so many PhDs don't get jobs, to say that "oversupply and nothing more" is the root of the problem is to misunderstand what the problems are. We the candidates are frustrated and angry not only because we don't get jobs, but because the process of trying to do so is exhausting and demoralizing at best and often degrading and dehumanizing as well. And when we get into as well territory, that is the fault not so much of the invisible hand of the market as the of the particular search committees, who act (out of negligence or less often out of malice) in a way that makes the lives of job candidates all the worse.
People who have jobs, and especially those on search committees or with former students on the market, are confronted more and more each year with how exceptional they are in having those jobs. There are lots of potential responses to that, but one of the easiest is "There is something different about me and mine that makes us special, and we deserve these jobs, unlike these others." Once you go down that road, anger at job applicants is natural. You are angry with them because by applying for these jobs, and even expressing frustration at that application process, they are implying that they think they are special in the way that only you and yours are.
Of course many people with jobs have much more humane and rational responses to this horrible situation. Unfortunately for them, those humane and rational responses take a larger toll.
12:42, you've thought that I was opposed to inside hires, which I'm not, but now I'll take the other side: you have someone who you like as a colleague and who you know does the job well. Why is the extremely artificial interview setting so important that it outweighs everything else? If the person is a good scholar, teacher and colleague, and you know these things to be true, what does it matter if he flubbed an interview and teaching demo? (I assume "flubbed" must mean "got nervous in.")
Agree with 2:01 re "flubbing." There's something seriously wrong with your people if you are confident that Candidate X will be solid all around (beloved of colleagues and students) and yet you decide to go with someone else because the else aced the interview. This kind of interview fetishizing has led to many a bad hire who flubbed out of the game and were not replaced by other, better suited people.
It seems to me that the performance aspect of interviews only sometimes correlates with actually being good at the job. I could imagine, but don't necessarily agree with, an argument that all candidates need to be judged on the same scale, and so the SC in question had to force themselves not to take into account "Flubber's" excellent performance at actually doing the job. But then the same person who says this can't turn around and say that networking with all its randomness *should* count.
To sum up: - Search committee privileges inside candidate because of extra information about inside candidate: search committee is evil and the system is abominable. - Search committee does not privilege inside candidate despite extra information about inside candidate: search committee is evil and the system is abominable. - Inside candidate performs better under stress because s/he knows the search committee: the search committee is evil, inside candidate may or may not be execrable, and the system is flawed. - Inside candidate performs worse under stress because s/he knows the search committee: the search committee is evil, and the system is flawed. - Poster questions the individuality of several very similar posts posted back-to-back over a short stretch of time: poster is using anonymity to squelch real people's concerns, is execrable. - Poster gets hurt feelings and uses derogatory nickname to lump a critical post in with something from a different month/semester/whatever: poster is standing up for the little guy.
I think there is actually a central theme here: people are anxious that being a good scholar/teacher/colleague, the actual job, is becoming increasingly disconnected from professional success. That's where the worries about pedigree, spousal/inside/spousal-inside hires, or the importance of interviewing without getting nervous all comes from.
yes, but more than that people are concerned about how to feed themselves and are depressed by having a wagon load of skills and expertise that is largely meaningless to most of the world. Those people of whom I speak feels like chumps. And if they've played this circus for a few years (or more) ... it ain't pretty.
Speaking personally, I thought the job market being bad meant having to move every year for a long time to work low-paying, transient jobs before eventually landing an elusive tenure track position, assuming I managed to research and teach well in those years. I did not realize it meant not being able to get anything, not even temporary, part-time work with no benefits, after an international search, year after year.
The ability to put a patty between two buns is literally worth minimum wage an hour more than a PhD in Classics.
^^ This. I have always accepted that I would almost certainly not get a tenure-track job out of the starting gate. I anticipated a long haul of adjunct/VAP-ing. I did not anticipate--after years of teaching experience, excellent course evals, and a few publications--that I would not get any job AT ALL.
Of course, it's not over yet. But I know many people in my same situation--more people than jobs--so some very qualified people will, again, wind up jobless this year.
Oh my god the whine fest. Nobody forced you to get a PhD in Classics. Nobody kept you from knowing the odds have been against you landing a job for a long time now.
Yeah, jeez, you think you deserve to eat? Grow up already!
Guy up above, a lot if not most of us started PhDs *before* the crash. Numbers were nothing like they are today. A lot of us were, deliberately or not, mislead about placement even before the whole thing went south. A lot of people are naive when they are 22, and get excited about graduate study and then they're in the program and love the work and want a career in it and that is what every signal around them is telling them is the correct thing to do. And then they get done and there is no work and they're basically unsuited for any other job, not to mention having spent the last seven or so years having been told that this is the only life worth living, and it is at this point the center of their identities and their social world, from which they don't want to be cast out as a failure.
You can't find any compassion in your heart for desperate people in this situation?
This is about German, but languages go in similar directions, and it shows how very very much worse the job market is today than in the past. And we now have two more years of glut.
"I would like to drive a stake through the heart of the myth that the academic job market in German has always been bad. This is going to be long, but keep reading. If you want to understand why your career is such a mess and what the threat is facing our discipline right now, you have to stop believing that the way things are now is simply how things have always been...."
It makes people feel better to think they're just the victims of the "worst ever" market. That's a really self-centered way of looking at what's long been a disaster. The problem is that while the disaster has long been there, people have still kept going to grad school, despite plenty of clear warnings that Classics grad school is a bad, bad idea if you're not independently wealthy, or don't care if you land an academic job.
I can't speak for others, but the prevailing message when I started grad school (pre-2008) was that if you were "good" you would eventually get a job. "The market is bad" was understood to mean what some people have described above--you would have to struggle for a while in temporary jobs but if you stuck with it, published, networked, were a good colleague, a good teacher, etc., you would eventually land a TT job. Of course it was well known that some people would never get that TT job, but for graduates of top-tier undergrad and graduate institutions it was strongly suggested, if not said outright, that this would not happen to OUR students. My former dept chair told me when I interviewed how successful the department was in placement, how everyone who wanted a job got a job, how they would not shepherd us through 6-7 years of grad school only to abandon us at the end...and of course here we all are.
Most discouraging, the issue is STILL being framed like this--"if you are GOOD, you will get a good job." The implication being that only losers don't get jobs and if you haven't succeeded yet it's your fault. That's just not true anymore, and institutions need to be honest about that, not sell a line about "OUR graduates" getting jobs while others flounder.
Going to grad school is like trying out crack. Are you a dumb shit for getting hooked on crack? Damn right you are, and I'm right there with you. But none of this makes the crack *dealers* fine upstanding citizens.
No. I got out of the crack-dealing game years ago. But yes, for a specific point in time, this is accurate. The a cognitive dissonance around that issue is part of what breaks people.
And not all employed Classicists are crack dealers. There are certainly some who actively discourage their students from pursuing graduate level study.
"And not all employed Classicists are crack dealers. There are certainly some who actively discourage their students from pursuing graduate level study."
Indeed there are. I have been at my SLAC for 12 years now. I have consistently done everything I can to DIScourage majors from going on to grad. school. If they've made the decision to come to a SLAC for their B.A., I think Classics is a fine major; any humanities or social science major from an SLAC is going to equip them about equally well to negotiate the "real world" once they graduate. But when a major comes to me all starry-eyed saying that s/he wants to get a PhD and be a professor, I pour as many buckets of cold water as I can on that. I tell them that they will in all likelihood NEVER get an academic job. (After this year's SCS panel, I'll be able to tell them the precise chances of a t-t job: 1 in 5.) I tell them that there were 105 applicants for my position in 2004, and that the market is much, much worse now. I tell them that if they try to apply for non-academic jobs with a PhD, they will have to explain the six "missing" years on their cv and that a PhD will be looked on with suspicion. I tell them if they can imagine themselves doing anything else -- ANYthing else -- other than being a classics professor, to go for that something else. They get angry. They cry. They look at me with big "How could you???" eyes. But I cannot imagine how any classics professor today could justify telling an undergraduate anything else.
If after all this they still insist that their lives will not be worth living unless they get a PhD in classics, then I will write letters for them and do my best for them. But then comes the second talk: DO NOT enter a PhD program unless you have full funding. Don't, under any circumstances whatsoever, borrow money for grad school. Just DON'T. Once again, they do not like hearing this. But once again, I can't see how our consciences could allow us to say anything else.
Now that we're going on 8 years since the big crash, my sympathies for the "we just didn't know" crowd are ebbing. There are a few who legitimately started before that crash or just after it (before their UG profs got the memo), but guess what? You had a chance to get out after your MA. And you know the score now. Don't fall prey to the sunk costs fallacy. (Or in a more vulgar expression, don't throw good money after bad.) Get out! You can grieve and rightly so, but after that you'll have a chance to pursue happiness again and not keep chasing a phantom. But I digress.
Those of who completed PhDs need ANOTHER talk: most of those TT jobs out there SUCK. Yeah, you get to be a full-time professor with job security. You also get terrible students who don't want to be in your classes because their business and social science professors tell them that the Humanities are worthless and their parents tell them that the Humanities won't get them a job. Your administration will come around every couple years with threats about closing down the language programs. (So much for job security!) Your colleagues will show open contempt at those "non-practical" majors. You'll get a 1% raise each year in the good years and thank God not to have been downsized out of existence in the bad years. You'll lower your standards so much just to keep butts in seats that you won't be able to remember the last time you read a text instead of just cheerleading someone for recognizing a dative or correctly identifying a verb as a verb and not as a noun or "masculine". All this while serving on two-dozen campus committees and changing light bulbs because that's somehow part of your mandate as faculty. I could go on.
Of those "lucky" 1 in 5 that get the TT job, how many do you think are at R1s that are also healthy (i.e., not under attack by state legislatures)? 5%? Cry, gnash your teeth, shout "How could YOOUUUU!!!" and rail against the system, but hear the truth.
I got my MA in 2007, and I don't think I'm an unusual cohort among FV users. In 2008 I was passing my qualifying exams, starting my dissertation, and the job market still seemed like it would have plenty of time to recover. Then, what, you're supposed to cast an appraising eye on the job market, conclude you are unlikely to find employment, and just stop writing your dissertation halfway through? People don't work like that, and people who haven't done the job market experience tend to be as naive about it as undergraduates are about grad school, or at least they were in that era. Now I am looking for other work, but as 8:30 points out, employers are not exactly falling all over themselves to hire someone they think may be an arrogant egghead without any real skills. I bet the people here insisting that it is easy to find an outside job with a Classics PhD are just ignorant Classicists, but if any of them have real advice about other career paths, I am all ears.
Sounds like they've got your number! 1-800-too-angry-to-hire.
Do you always turn to the internet to find your answers for you? Is your dissertation "All the insights I could find on Wikipedia"? Or do you actually have research and problem solving skills?
Those saying people should have gotten out of school after the 2008 crash seem to be forgetting that THERE WAS NOWHERE ELSE TO GO. I was a couple of years into grad school at the time and all my friends who had gone into the business world were getting laid off. What should I have done, dropped out of a guaranteed 5-year income to try to get an entry-level job in the worst economic crisis in decades? Keep in mind that 2009 and 2010 saw a drastic surge in grad school and law school applications by people who had been laid off or were finishing school and were hoping to ride out the crisis. At the same time, I think people are overstating how hard it is to get another job outside of academia. You may need to start again at entry level, but generally PhDs rise through the ranks a lot quicker than people fresh out of BAs. FWIW, everyone from my (second-tier) graduate program who has graduated in the past five years and got out of academia straightaway or after a year or two has a good, secure, well-paying job. Consulting, non-profits, finance, security analysis, government, high school - there are lots of options out there. The presumption (flippant or otherwise) that the choice is between "flipping burgers" and working in academia is misguided.
At the same time, I think people are overstating how hard it is to get another job outside of academia. You may need to start again at entry level, but generally PhDs rise through the ranks a lot quicker than people fresh out of BAs. FWIW, everyone from my (second-tier) graduate program who has graduated in the past five years and got out of academia straightaway or after a year or two has a good, secure, well-paying job. Consulting, non-profits, finance, security analysis, government, high school - there are lots of options out there. The presumption (flippant or otherwise) that the choice is between "flipping burgers" and working in academia is misguided.
I haven't seen that anyone else has posted a link to this table (https://classicalstudies.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/PlacementStats2013-15.pdf) but I sense that it adds some data that might be helpful as we justify the many servings of woecakes that adorn our collective mensa.
The numbers here show how stark a turning point 2008 really was: a drastic decrease in TT jobs combined with an increase in job candidates. The worse news is that column has never recovered, all the while that final column--of total job candidates--just keeps growing, and if last year felt awful that's because it really was the worst.
Note that I had nothing to do with the compilation of this information (so, I can't tell you who all the "non-members" that appear in force in the last two years are. AIA members in disguise? I don't know.) I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share it.
Wow. Thanks for that very horrifying SCS table. I'm 3/9 8:30 p.m., from above, and I have just downloaded a copy. I will now hand that table out to the undergraduate majors who tell me they want to go to grad school.
Am I the only person who is constantly annoyed by the fact that "1. 2015-2016 Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology Job Market Wiki" is LONGER THAN the links to past years' pages (due to the spelling out of "and")? AHHH I WANT TO FIX IT SO BAD
Let's discuss these above-mentioned ideas of alternative employment:
Consulting: code for unemployed. What kind of consulting can a failed Classicist do? Non-profits: another market completely oversaturated with applicants Finance/security analysis: not sure how one makes the jump from humanities PhD to this Government: let's not forget that government jobs are also highly competitive and exclusive High school: possible, after getting certification
Yeah, I think the only people who are under the impression that those "go-to" second career choices are reasonable options (the only one missing there is "Why, you could work in a museum!") are people who have never actually had to think about/attempt to find alternative careers. Please, tell me how I, who have not touched a math book since I was 18, can make a living in finance. I'm serious, please, tell me.
Yeah, and can I just add to the above that teaching high school is really unpleasant. I did it for two years and I hated it. Don't get me wrong, my students were delightful and I'm still in touch with some of them--in that respect, it's a great opportunity to really get to know your students since you see the same ones every day for years. But it is exhausting, both physically and emotionally, to teach five preps a day (actually six since once of my classes was Latin 4 / AP in the same period), plus the grading is CONSTANT -- six classes' worth EVERY NIGHT. There is constant paperwork/bureaucracy, plus ludicrous and boring "professional development" activities. And of course there is supervising the Latin club/certamen team. I would get to school at 7am and leave around 6pm, grab dinner, and then straight into grading/class prep. I slept maybe 4-5 hours a night for TWO YEARS. I will never, ever go back to it.
And of course, 4:22 is right that you have to get certification if you want to teach long-term, which means the humiliating prospect of returning to school after achieving the HIGHEST DEGREE in your field to take worthless pedagogy classes, many of which are totally irrelevant for you (Early Childhood Development was required in my state) and which you have to pay for out of your laughably meager salary.
No thanks. Never again. Some people might be able to do it, but I can't.
@4:52 You can't. But other people have. Whether through family contacts or just because they had opened a math book in their post-18 years, I know of two humanities PhDs who have made the jump to finance. For those whose math days are behind them, look elsewhere. Think about what type of work would motivate you to get out of bed in the morning. Look at websites of companies and organizations that you are interested in or that are located in areas where you want to live/work. Talk to friends, neighbors, people in coffee shops and at bus stops about their jobs or their friends' jobs or their kids' jobs. Go on LinkedIn and look at the alumni of your undergraduate institution. See if there is anyone there doing something interesting who you might like to talk to. Try to target companies or organizations who have reputations for treating their employees well. Because if you take a job for a lower starting salary than you might like because you are beginning a new career track, at least you can feel good about working at a place whose employees are happy and whose mission you believe in. And besides, you deserve to be treated well.
The skills of a Classicist almost certainly aren't going to be relevant for any career in which there are actual jobs; luckily, you are likely a very smart person who can learn new skills easily. Investigate careers with good job markets, low barriers to entry, and where intelligence is highly advantageous. This is where you want to be, if you want to earn a living outside of Classics. But it will probably take a few years of training while supporting yourself with some shitty VAP (or whatever) to get there.
Honestly, I have a lot of advice for someone looking for a new career, and it's based on hard evidence. But honestly (again), I have no motivation to share it with the whiners on this board and every motivation (including schadenfreude) not to. You create false dichotomies and false impossibilities for yourself as a way to try to corner everyone else into some sort of self-destructive guilt or self-negation. I'm not interested. I'm not interested in self-blame or in entertaining you and your woe-is-me, woe-is-you attitude. Get over yourselves. Go somewhere else. Do something else. Move on with your lives. If that's impossible, then wallow, but wallow in the silence you deserve for your self-imposed incapacity.
Said the pot to the kettle, except the kettle didn't use obscenity or a portmanteau based on an offensive term for a genetic/mental disability. So, there's that.
/PS: Have you thought about getting a job proving other people's points for them? You're awfully good at it.
Every so often someone with a TT job comes on here to talk about how hard those jobs, especially at crappy places, can be. Someone was here a while back talking about how the job was literally killing her/him. -- And that is fine, this is the thread to "bitch, moan, and let off some steam," and anyone who is just here to beat up other people is kindly invited to fuck off. -- And I'm sure a lot of TT jobs are crushingly difficult, to the point of threatening people's health. But I have literally never once heard of tenured faculty decamping for greener pastures, despite the fact that this field is set up so you could do that if you wanted to. Quit research for a year or two, dedicate that time plus a summer or two to gearing up on your finance skills, and you're off. I think this tells you all you need to know about the transferability of a classics PhD.
Most of the ones I know who decamped left just before tenure, after four or five years slogging away and realizing that they hated it. Some left after only two years. Sticking it out for six just to get tenure in a field you don't want to be in shows some real dedication. Or maybe it just took them that long to figure out what paths to take next. Either way, why judge others' decisions, 1:31, when all you have it a handful of anecdotal evidence that's already been rendered incomplete by 1:39?
"You create false dichotomies and false impossibilities for yourself as a way to try to corner everyone else into some sort of self-destructive guilt or self-negation."
Not true! Many of us are totally willing to move on to a different career! Open to feasible suggestions. Can we avoid the kindly meant "think of what you might like to do" advice though, since that's what led us to classics?
I wouldn't NOT think of what you might like you do. Then...what? You go to work for a douchebag company, where you get filthy rich pimping a product that people don't really need and that is made by underpaid laborers in a country far, far away. (Wait a minute, I realize that this sounds like the discipline of classics itself - ha!) Will that be satisfying to you? If so, by all means do it. If not, realize that you will become a douchebag like everyone else at the company and a miserable one at that.
Otherwise, take the advice given out by well-meaning people here and elsewhere. Do the thing that most of us (myself included) didn't do before starting grad school which is to get some honest opinions and advice about future paths and think carefully about what you want to do with your life.
Just because thinking brought you to classics when you were 21 doesn't mean that thinking again now at your current age is a bad idea.
If you don't have a clear idea of what you want in a new career, no one can help you get your new career.
If you insist that the labor you trade for money has to have some deep meaning, as someone upthread implied, then your options are indeed pretty limited. I suggest selling out; it is literally what our economy is based on.
For those who want to stick with it, I offer a piece of encouragement that I was told and helped me: are you publishing articles in good places, are you making progress on your book manuscript, are you inspiring and challenging your students? Then you're a good classicist. Job status isn't everything, and there are plenty of people *with* jobs who are not doing all of the above.
It's not unreasonable for people to be upset and even to despair when realizing that, after much effort, they might not be able to pursue careers in classics. This realization that the labor market doesn't value graduate work in classics particularly highly is similarly unpleasant. And, however true it may be that classics PhDs will find success after six months or a year after they get their foot in the door somewhere, statements like this aren't very comforting.
That said, I would agree with these statements. I'm in an industry rather unrelated to classics, and the other fallen classicists from my program have done and are doing quite a number of different things.
When looking for other options, geography is important. If you aren't in the city where you want to work, it might be best to move there and then look for employment.
I'd like to second the point about geography. Before embarking on a PhD, I worked outside the academy and was party to the hiring process (I didn't make the decisions but had some input). Resumes with addresses from outside the city (let me emphasize city here...the difficulty of your job search is multiplied many times over if you cannot or will not move to a major metropolitan area) were automatically discarded. Anecdotal? Sure. Do managers need a quick metric to determine whether candidates are serious? Absolutely.
Also emphasize skills, rather than content; (almost) no hiring manager will care about the content of your doctoral studies.
This is not 3:17 here. But I can share some resources with you.
I found this video to be incredibly helpful: humwork.uchri.org/past-events/san-diego-workshop/
It's a talk by Jared Redick, a SF-based consultant who helps C-level executives retool their resumes and apply for jobs. People like us can't afford to hire him one-on-one, but he has given a couple of talks at the Humanists@Work series run by the UC system. His most recent talk, at the Sacramento conference, will hopefully go online as well.
I also recommend poking around the website (uchri.org/) of the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute), which is the organization that hosts that conference. There are a lot of other great resources to be found there, such as ideas about possible career paths, other people's stories of finding work outside of the tenure track, and how to do an informational interview.
The "what gets you out of bed" question didn't work for me when I was transitioning away from the academy. The depression, both by my own situation and the state of the market in general, was too great for me to be able to answer that question.
The approach that did work was to ask myself: What do I want to change? From there, I could find programs and initiatives already in place that address the issue(s) that I want to change, and then I knew where to start networking.
You guys, this Mr. Cruel Daddy scandal is probably the best thing to happen to Classics in a long time. Look at it this way; judging by some of the posts of those here who are already in TT positions or have tenure, this is a fucked up group of people. In all likelihood many are perverted sickos just like Mr. Cruel Daddy. If we can expose all the pedophiles, rapists, flashers, peeping toms, and other assorted deviants we can probably at least double or triple the number of job openings over the next few years.
Agreed, completely. I think it's fascinating the individual in question was treated in some quarters as a virtual hero because of work on weird sex stuff.
Um, on the flip side, let's not condemn all people who work on sexuality because of the actions of one person. That would be a hell of a rush to judgment.
I would be very surprised if this translates to an open position in Classics at UC. At least at my own institution, Deans can transfer open lines between departments at will. The logic is that these lines are not wedded to departments but are part of the overarching faculty (arts & science, business, etc.). It may seem unfair to punish the department for the despicable actions of one individual, but the university will attempt, and currently is attempting, to distance itself from the disgraced ex-prof as much as possible. Quietly hiring someone in a department far-removed from Classics would avoid any connection in the future. Maybe I will be wrong, but I've seen administrators use far less justification than this to move lines to different units.
Let's remember that real people are involved here. His students, his colleagues, his friends. To some it is not a matter of "entertainment." No matter how this shakes out, this is a major blow to Cincy's programs and the people involved with it.
This sh** is f***ed up. A couple of news sources mention the scholarship, "sexuality, slavery, and sadism" implicitly conveying a link between the pervo private life and the public scholarship. In this particular case, I think that connection is there.
I don't know about revoking awards, but I have been wondering since the news broke about the effect if any that this information should have on our use of the scholarship. On the one hand, it's not as if arguments that were valid are now invalid because of what the individual was engaged in. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I want to put their articles and books on a syllabus or otherwise encourage students to read them.
These are contradictory impulses, I recognize. Can we separate scholarship from the scholar that produces it?
I am having this same internal battle right now. His scholarship has been really influential to my work, and as I sit here working on an article for which his work is highly relevant, I keep wondering: do I cite him? omit it? dance around it? change my argument entirely? As another commenter pointed out, the scholarship is still valid. The arguments are still sound. The evidence is still good. I just can't bring myself to write his actual name on the page. I have several projects in progress, and three days ago I was excitedly citing his work. But everything is different now.
I sure as hell hope so. If intellectual work loses its value and validity because of the flaws of its author, however horrific, then we should probably stop studying Classics entirely. I doubt many of the upper class Greek and Roman slave owners who wrote virtually everything we have would meet our current moral standards.
Beyond the child victims in this case, one feels sorry for his graduate students who have not yet landed. A letter of recommendation from him might as well have been written by Hitler. And even if other recommenders can be found, he is still listed as the advisor for dissertations, warmly thanked in published articles, etc. Hopefully his students can be recognized on their own merits, but one would not want to be tainted by having this freak as a doktorvater.
I would never cite him. Classics may have made the mistake of accepting him as a member of the profession once, but we don't have to continue making that mistake by treating him as if he continues to be. And I'm sorry, there is a connection between his scholarship and his "extracurriculars." It couldn't be more obvious. It's not like his day job was homer's use of the metaphor. You want to get your hands dirty in that sh**?
This isn't the same as the Cicero case, where the subject of scholarship and author's sins have nothing in common. There's a direct link here between subject and sin. That's the difference. I'm in agreement with the not citing.
" I doubt many of the upper class Greek and Roman slave owners who wrote virtually everything we have would meet our current moral standards." Are you really saying that people who were acting according to the moral standards of their own times and societies can be equated with this monster?? You do know about the industry he helped fund and perpetuate, yes? Children. Very young children.
While I agree that there is a connection between "subject and sin" as another poster put it, I'm not sure that connection is so direct that the content of the work is itself tainted. While the author's diseased brain may have helped him to recognize patterns and connections in the texts on which he was commenting, that does not mean that the patterns and connection do not exist, or that they are themselves diseased and tainted. I think I will cite the work if it's relevant. I'm still not sure about assigning the work to students, though. That seems too much like, if not endorsing, then at least tolerating monstrous acts.
I see no reason to cite this guy. Citation has two purposes. The lesser is to avoid blatant plagarism, the greater to acknowledge the place of your work within the larger field. This guy is not going to be in the field for the next twenty-five years to life. If his archive of work seems useful to a project, cite who he cites.
"Are you really saying that people who were acting according to the moral standards of their own times and societies can be equated with this monster?"
To the extent that some of them were engaged in similar acts, yes.
Morality is not relative. People don't get a pass because the standards of their time were different. They don't need to get a pass for our purposes though, because engaging with their works does not imply endorsement of their characters.
3:12 PM wrote: "Morality is not relative. People don't get a pass because the standards of their time were different. They don't need to get a pass for our purposes though, because engaging with their works does not imply endorsement of their characters."
According to you. There's plenty of people who subscribe to the idea of moral relativism. It's ludicrous to project present-day standards onto people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and complain about how terrible or problematic they were. Societies differ spatially and temporally and attempting to apply some one size fits all metric to their morality is tone deaf.
That's a fine and laudable perspective for your scholarly work. But I think we can all agree that there are some absolutes: for instance, preying on children is wrong, at any time, and in any place.
"I see no reason to cite this guy. If his archive of work seems useful to a project, cite who he cites."
I'm not sure that is how scholarship works. Especially for a body of work as influential as this one. I'm not saying I like it or want to read it myself at the moment, but I don't think we can excise his influence from the field simply by pretending that his work was nothing but a collection of citations.
Coming a bit late to this story... My unsolicited advice is that you do not list your awards for bread- or pickle-making on your professional curriculum vitae until AFTER you have tenure.
1,319 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 601 – 800 of 1319 Newer› Newest»If the rumor mill is to be believed, many offers have been made. Not all, but many. Negotiations take some time while people weigh their options. SCs may still go to a second candidate, so not all hope is lost.
Any rumors about specific places?
I know for sure of several offers that have been made but not accepted yet (negotiations in progress). I also know of a few schools that are just finishing up campus visits. I expect the wiki will start turning red within the next week or so.
One of the TT Greek jobs still has campus visits over the next two weeks.
So what's going on at Toronto? Is the department in shambles or what? How do you fail a search in this market?
Re: Toronto, trying to get two departments to agree on something is not always easy. That said, shambles might be too strong a term, but there are plenty of rumours of leadership fail.
Whatever happened, a failure to find a suitable candidate in this market lies squarely on their shoulders. And the impulse to use this failure to publicly kick people who are down is very ugly.
How does a failed search "publicly kick people who are down"?
Wait a second, is Miami asking for applications submitted by MAIL?
Any rumors about Cornell?
UofT has a history of failed searches. It's not just departments having to agree but also individuals to placate.
4:44, the SCC announced the failed search in an email that blamed the three on-campus candidates.
Can somebody post the full text of the Toronto GFY letter? They need to be publicly shamed if the rumors about that letter are true.
This is a career question and not necessarily a job-seeking question, but I'd appreciate the collective insight on it, if it's not totally off-topic.
How common is it for someone to have a book published, say, in February, and receive tenure before any reviews of the book are released?
Obviously this is not much of a problem if the book is an obvious home-run or the department in question thinks it is, but this would seem to be a potentially risky and embarrassing situation for the institution if the book is subsequently panned.
@ Feb 21, 2016 at 1:26 PM
I don't think reviews matter to most schools. I'd say they matter to R1s and maybe to very status conscious R2s and SLACs. Even in the last two, though, reviews should be more important at the promotion to full stage rather than at the tenure stage (unless someone is really geared up to tank you).
Any other perspectives?
@ 1:26 again,
If you're more than idly curious about your question, a good (probably better) place to ask it is here:
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/board,33.0.html
"How common is it for someone to have a book published, say, in February, and receive tenure before any reviews of the book are released?"
I would say fairly common, as is (incredibly) getting tenure on the basis of a mere book contract (with the finished product still not in existence). Is the former a bad thing? Probably not, given a) how long it takes for reviews to come out in our field, and b) how capricious they can be (why should one book review be given more weight or indeed any weight at all, given that if the book came out with a half-way decent press it's already been read by at least twice that number of outside readers?).
How much weight do search committees put on negative reviews of books by applicants? My book has just come out, and I know that by the time I go back on the market in the fall it will only have been reviewed in BMCR (if anywhere). It's with a good press, and has been thoroughly vetted by the readers, but I'm terrified that one bad review (in a place everyone in the field reads) will be my undoing.
Re: the Toronto letter, it said what the wiki says it said: "in the end the committee did not think it had identified any candidate with just the right fit." It should be noted that there are relatively few specialists in ancient philosophy who are in fact highly qualified to teach at all levels in both disciplines, which is what that job required. Still, it's hard to believe that none of their candidates were so qualified, though I suppose it's possible. Note too that they were willing to appoint at either the assistant or the associate level, so their choices were not restricted solely to recent PhDs. We'll see what they do next year. I wouldn't be surprised if they hire at the senior level.
Does anyone know what happened with Reed? They don't seem to have had time to do interviews.
Speaking of U of Toronto, it looks like they just hired Peter Bing. http://classics.chass.utoronto.ca/index.php/department-news/177-peter-bing-renowned-scholar-of-greek-poetry-joins-the-department-of-classics
10:31pm, Reed has the appearance of being an 'inside hire.'
Regarding Reed, it is criminal in this job market to put people through the time and trouble of an application you have no intention of even looking at seriously. The best that can be said is that they didn't ask for a diversity statement, course proposals, teaching portfolio, or other such time-consuming documents.
@10:59-Story I heard is that the Chair made that hire without so much as even discussing it with the rest of the department.
Any word on Chicago, either the junior or senior job? The junior campus visits started in late January, so that should be pretty much done, right?
Has anyone else noticed that the required documents for the Santa Clara job on the actual submission website do not match well with the job description as posted on the SCS website? Confusing.
Some perspectives on the questions about book reviews in tenure file...
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,116378.0.html
http://chronicle.com/forums/index.php/topic,91987.0.html
'tis the season of classics rage, followed closely by classics desperation.
With apologies to Lombardo.
Rage--
Sing, Interfolio, the Search Committee's rage
Black and murderous, that cost the Applicants
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
of PhDs into Joblessness's dark,
and left their CVs to rot as feasts
for traschans and dumpsters, and the Dean's will was done.
Begin with the clash between the Applicant,
Academic Wunderkind, and the godlike Search Committee.
SCs appear godlike because you happen to be an ant, but they're actually just toddlers with magnifying glasses.
point <-------------------------------> you
I thought it was funny.... in the sort of half-sob February way.
God, what are we all going to do with ourselves?
Personally, I try to be a full SOB.
Guys, will you please update the wiki, even just in a "word of mouth" way? There are a lot of us waiting to be put out of our misery, and there is no way that most, if not all, of the yellow positions are not already done deals.
One of the yellow positions was still holding campus visits two weeks ago, another last week. Both indicated that it would be several weeks before they contacted their final choice.
Care to say the field? I would have thought they'd risk losing people to other offers by making them wait this long.
Greek lit. And in one case they indicated that the wait was intentional, to let other offers come in.
Yeah, I know for a fact that one school lost a candidate to an offer from another recently. But there are often institutional roadblocks--once the SC selects a candidate they have to get administrational approval and that can take time especially at larger institutions.
The newer folks here should realize that quite a lot of time can elapse from a verbal offer being made to an actual contract being signed. That period can be four weeks in length, in some cases (mine was). There can be lots of negotiations, back and forth, sometimes involving more than one institution and multiple sets of administrators - even counter or competing offers. So while everyone "wants to know" etc., it's not that easy.
In my humble opinion, none of that matters (at the several recent posts): if you've heard nothing about a position by now, it's not going to come knocking at your emailbox. Positions that have yet to shortlist or longlist or otherwise list their candidates are possibly still on the table, but everything else is gone. If a job has been "oranged" already and you weren't oranged as well, then focus your energy on jobs that greened you or have yet to green. That's my advice. Also, unless you're a Super-Pedigree or extremely well bankrolled, visiting positions are now very very very very good things to pursue. Because they're legitimate academic jobs. And that's why we're all here, right?
@a recent poster:
2:57 is correct. While it is the case the the various oranged searches are not yet formally closed - and may not even have extended an offer yet - unless you were one of their on-campus finalists you are not going to be offered those jobs. Sorry. I'm there with you.
To the above posters, I think the anxiety is probably coming from people who have been on campus and are hearing crickets, not people who somehow think they're going to get a SCS or on-campus interview at this point.
@4:34 -- Exactly. And that can take a while. Institutions are not going to let you know your their top candidate or make an offer before it has cleared the bureaucracy. Even if your campus visit was several weeks ago, it's possible that administrative hurdles are still being cleared.
OSU, cleaning up so far!
Oklahoma State University has a PhD program? No wonder there are so many unemployed classicists.
Apparently they also have a state university in Ohio.
An Ohio state university, you say?
Yeah, their mascot is some sort of acorn
Ok, now I know you're pulling my leg. An acorn? Who ever heard of such a thing?
Dude, you don't say "an acorn". It's already got an indefinite article right there on the front.
Besides, the preferred nomenclature is amaize.
OSU with a THE.
THE acorn. Jeez, get it right.
Wouldn't that be thecorn?
That's Nebraska.
What did the Carleton rejection say? I know they're nice people.
Anyone know anything about South Florida? Either news on this search or the department historically?
@8:09
I've got nothing on the search, but historically:
(1) The department is circling the drain. (2) The last hire left after only a couple of years. (3) Florida just decided that computer languages satisfy language requirements. (4) The admin keeps raising tenure standards mid-stream and applying science publication norms to humanities scholars.
What more do you want?
@4:34, my rejection from Carleton was personalized with my name and a few words about my research ("we enjoyed learning about your interesting work on xxxx") and thanked me for my thoughtful course proposals. Truly inspiring in the current climate--way to make job-seekers feel like human beings, Carleton!
The situation at USF is a disaster. There are no language courses offered above 2nd-year Latin and 1st-year Greek and the only Civ courses are huge, 100+ enrollment lectures. Their hire will probably not teach anything interesting for the rest of his/her career. Without going into too much detail, the personalities (both within Classics and the larger World Languages dept. in which the program is situated) are toxic. Avoid at all costs.
They did 20 minute phone interviews (and in reality not even) to select on-campus candidates for a tenure track position, seven of which was them introducing themselves. They can't even really care themselves about the future of their department, can they?
Toxic personalities? Any specifics? No need to mention names.
Come on, in a market this bad, a TT even if it's in a toxic department is better than unemployment, right?
@ 4:01 PM
I'm not so sure about that. Unemployment in Classics means moving on with your life, potentially to a more lucrative and fulfilling career. TT employment in a toxic department means the gradual crushing of your soul as you grow ever more depressed, cynical, and embittered toward your colleagues, your students, and your life. So, no, it's not better.
I guess it depends in what kind of toxicity we're talking about.
If the majority of the department is staffed with baby boomers (or a few of them have inordinate amounts of power), it's almost guaranteed to be a toxic environment with huge egos and winner-take-all attitudes continually fueling an unbending dogmatism that poisons everything. I would rather be unemployed in the Shire than some goon in Mordor.
Are suggesting that USF is Mordor?
It sounds to me that USF is in no worse shape than many of the classics programs at state schools these days. That anti-humanities sentiment is powerful and one that anyone taking a TT in Classics will have to deal with for the rest of his/her career.
The fun thing about the Shire in this scenario is that it also includes employment in literally every other field in existence. Some of those even have elevenses!
If you survive this type of department, you will still be crushed. If the boomer is defeated and someone younger made chair and all that you hope for comes true you will still have to taste the bitterness of endless politics. Whether by droning speech or the slow decay of time, your hope will die. And there will be no comfort for you, no comfort to ease the pain of its passing. It will come to death an image of the splendor of the scholars of Men in glory undimmed before the breaking of academia. But you, my budding classicist, you will linger on in darkness and in doubt as nightfall in winter that comes without a star. Here you will dwell bound to your grief under the fading books until all the world is changed and the long years of your life are utterly spent.
If baby boomers and big egos are the problem, USF is no different from any classics department in the country!
I just got tenure and this pretty much sums up my last seven years and my foreseeable future. :-(
Sounds like a bunch of noobs on here. What do you think being a junior colleague is supposed to entail except swallowing your disgust at toxicity?
I'm not going to out myself with any more details, but those of you saying "this type of department" or "sound like par for the course" obviously have not had any contact with USF's World Languages dept. It's a special kind of hell that goes way beyond the "usual politics" or "boomers vs. millennials" or hazing junior colleagues or any of that other nonsense.
Remake the situation according to your own desires! Rise above, and crush beneath! I am Ugluk. I have spoken.
Yeah, the idea that people can change reality is what got all of us in this situation to begin with. No thanks.
Do they sacrifice their junior colleagues to Dionysus? This kind of general doom-and-gloom is exactly why FV is not worth the time to read. If there are legitimate grievances with USF, enumerate them. That can be done without "outing" oneself.
The wiki has now confirmed that bard and Nebraska were inside hires. How shameful!
@6:52PM: I think FV exists primarily to depress other people into leaving the field so that there will be less competition. Gloom and doom does the trick.
Meanwhile, these people from Ohio State and other non-first-tier schools need to stop getting jobs; it's ruining the whole only-Ivy-and-Berkeley-PhDs-get-jobs narrative.
Then again, that narrative has never been sensitive to counter-examples, so I suppose it doesn't really matter. Maybe soon we'll learn that Ohio State is in fact an elite institution.
@8:25
But I was so looking forward to second-rate, self-important white dudes talking about how they're unacknowledged and misunderstood geniuses just because they didn't go to Ivies.
Racist, classist, and sexist all in one post. A trifecta!
@8:21: also Boston College.
Let's bring back the LOTR stuff, those were the best comments on the threat IMO. Anyone want to compose a Tolkein-themed rant about the perfidy of inside hiring?
Only a balrog would perform an inside hire!
I'm pretty sure a Nazgûl boomer would do anything to get his man into a position, for boomers desire power above all else. I once witnessed a search where the SC thought they had an agreement on the person to hire. But they were all of them deceived, for another hire was made. In the land of deans, in the fires of Mount Doom, the Nazgûl boomer recommended, in secret, a hire that would capitulate like no other. And into this hire he poured his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate all life. One stooge to overrule them all.
ahhhh the inside-spousal hires have begin to roll in. we will now experience yet another slew of posts (probably by the very people responsible) defending this odious practice in one twisted way or another. Before that happens let's just flashback to the fall and recall that although it is inhabited by bitter jobless people (myself included), FV was right.
To give credit where credit is due (none of these me)
Re Bard: do you mean the significant other of a faculty member there?
December 17, 2015 at 6:47 PM
Anonymous said...
It's a spousal hire disguised as a real search.
December 17, 2015 at 6:56 PM
Anonymous said...
If true...that's despicable in this market.
December 17, 2015 at 7:54 PM
Anonymous said...
Nebraska's an inside spousal hire, too, unfortunately.
So many balrogs. Nothing for it, we need to take a trip to the Gandalf store. Does anyone's apartment allow pets? They make you show a note from your landlord before you can take one home.
I can't speak to Bard, but I know for a fact that Nebraska was NOT a spousal-hire -- just a regular, garden-variety 'inside hire' where the VAP got the TT job. And the Bard hire may have been something similar: somebody who had previously (two years ago) been a VAP in that department got the TT job. So, before we all lose our minds over the injustice of inside spousal hires, we should at least make sure we are absolutely 100% clear on the facts.
More to the point, I think we all have personal experience or anecdotal evidence that proves that the 'inside hire' is never a shoe-in, so clearly those candidates who get such jobs must have done something right. Maybe we can begrudge their luck at being in the right place at the right time, but the idea of a 'sham search' because there was an inside candidate is a canard. If you go back through the wiki data, it is clear that every year there are at least half a dozen TT jobs that are snapped up by current VAPs at those institutions, while surely there are just as many 'inside candidates' who either don't get the offer or don't accept the offer. The latter case perfectly illustrates why schools conduct national searches when they have an 'inside candidate': said candidate may get a better job elsewhere, and the school needs to make sure that they have second and third choices in case of such an outcome.
The market has always operated this way, and it always will operate this way, though this doesn't make it any more palatable when we are not the beneficiary of an 'inside hire'.
I don't know anything about Nebraska, but I know for sure that Bard is spousal.
It is so refreshing that this blog reveals truth. Everyone comes here to vent about the system, rage against the man, shout at the rain, purport to advocate for merit and justice and fairness. But in the end, you all hate each other more than you hate the system. If you think it is easy or even common in 2016 for one's partner or spouse to be hired on an academic line as an 'accommodation' to the other partner or spouse, then you are using too many drugs. Or not enough drugs. Stop looking for villains to create, as there are plenty already. Most of you will not land t-t jobs in Classics. Face it. Do the math.
Of course you're right about the math: thanks for the kind reminder, we almost forgot! But I think the pushback you're seeing here is not against spousal hires as such*, but spousal hires done in dirty or careless ways. If there is no getting around running a "national search," the job ad can be written in a way that limits the number of applicants and signals to them not to spend precious time scouring the website to decide what course to propose that might complement the curriculum, trying to incorporate the university mission statement's main themes into the cover letter, etc. etc. etc. This goes for strong inside candidates as well, although of course less so, since, as was pointed out above, they might get a better offer and leave, so the university is also less committed to them.
*I'm all for them -- otherwise only the childless can be classicists!
A strong second to everything 10:10 said. Spousal hires are not a bad thing, but there are better and worse ways to do them. Also, to be clear, the "hate" about such hires expressed here does not appear to be directed at those hired but at the departments and institutions who go about the hiring in careless or uncompassionate ways. It is not each other that we hate, but the system.
Third to everything said above. With the market this bad, many of us cling to the hope of TT generalist jobs like Odysseus clinging to his raft. I am a Latinist, and Bard and Nebraska were two of a very small number of jobs I had any chance at this year. It is deeply frustrating--not to mention humiliating--to invest time and trouble in tailoring an application for which you are not even seriously considered. Most of us can spot spousal/inside hires based on the job ad and come to an informed decision on whether to take the risk and invest the time. A broad generalist search falsely encourages people who have no shot and limited resources.
You know it doesn't count as seconding and thirding when you do it for yourself, right?
A strong second to 11:09!
A third to everything from the last two posters!
I'm 10:10, and those others are not me....
I just wanted to add to 10:22: I too have no hard feelings whatsoever toward someone who takes a job like this. And I think anyone who does -- and I don't believe that's very many -- is being extremely unfair, since we would all jump on such an opportunity if we had it. The problem is when departments manage such hires in a thoughtless or callous way, and has nothing to do with the candidate.
So I'm seconding the person who seconded me. Second squared?
Haha, I am 10:56 and the others are not me either! But way to use the anonymity of this board to try to undermine others' points and concerns!
I'm not myself or anyone else, and I'm fourthing everything!
@11:52
The "others" don't have real points. 9:33 was right on the money. The "others" are embittered and angry. "They" are looking for reasons (falsified though those reasons may be) to explain away why "they" did not get this or that specific job, why the system was set up unfairly, why the job recipient was undeserving or had an "unfair" advantage, etc. You pick. "They" would be just as upset (likely *more* upset) if a TT job came out with a hyper-specialized ad that prevented their applying or if there were an unpublicized search.
What committees are doing is making the process *more* open and *more* fair by making public, open searches. It is *never* a done deal that an insider or a spouse will be hired. They could get better offers elsewhere, which happens. They could have detractors in the department that you don't know about. They could screw everything up. (I observed a search just this semester where the insider, a clear and obvious winner loudly beloved by students and colleagues alike completely flubbed the application process, interview, and teaching demonstration. Someone else was hired.)
When you see an insider hired, it's because they met and exceeded all the requirements of the job, nailed their application, interview, and on-campus visit, AND were perceived to exceed the other candidates. Is it "unfair" if that perception happened because the committee members knew the insider better than they knew the other applicants? No. That's *THE SAME REASON* why we *NETWORK*--so that our colleagues across the discipline will know who we are. (And this is setting aside the very many ways that being known well in a department actively count against an insider.)
So grow up. Get to know more people. The systemic problems do not sit with the search committees. The root of the problem is oversupply and nothing more.
"Grow up:" we are witnessing the glorious return of Mr. Snowman, gracing the spring job market as well with his presence!!
In all seriousness, I do think that one thing string about this year's FV is that we are seeing an awful lot more anger, insults and immaturity from those who *aren't* job candidates than those who are. If you look at the wiki, for example, you see that many people who are rejected do not resent the rejection at all but are very grateful for being treated with respect and humanity. This isn't just about getting a job for most of us, it is also about being treated as potential colleagues and fellow human beings.
*striking, not string
Agreeing with 12:51 (and this is 10:22, by the way, and not anyone else who has written in the mean time).
While more PhDs than jobs is the reason why so many PhDs don't get jobs, to say that "oversupply and nothing more" is the root of the problem is to misunderstand what the problems are. We the candidates are frustrated and angry not only because we don't get jobs, but because the process of trying to do so is exhausting and demoralizing at best and often degrading and dehumanizing as well. And when we get into as well territory, that is the fault not so much of the invisible hand of the market as the of the particular search committees, who act (out of negligence or less often out of malice) in a way that makes the lives of job candidates all the worse.
People who have jobs, and especially those on search committees or with former students on the market, are confronted more and more each year with how exceptional they are in having those jobs. There are lots of potential responses to that, but one of the easiest is "There is something different about me and mine that makes us special, and we deserve these jobs, unlike these others." Once you go down that road, anger at job applicants is natural. You are angry with them because by applying for these jobs, and even expressing frustration at that application process, they are implying that they think they are special in the way that only you and yours are.
Of course many people with jobs have much more humane and rational responses to this horrible situation. Unfortunately for them, those humane and rational responses take a larger toll.
12:42, you've thought that I was opposed to inside hires, which I'm not, but now I'll take the other side: you have someone who you like as a colleague and who you know does the job well. Why is the extremely artificial interview setting so important that it outweighs everything else? If the person is a good scholar, teacher and colleague, and you know these things to be true, what does it matter if he flubbed an interview and teaching demo? (I assume "flubbed" must mean "got nervous in.")
Agree with 2:01 re "flubbing." There's something seriously wrong with your people if you are confident that Candidate X will be solid all around (beloved of colleagues and students) and yet you decide to go with someone else because the else aced the interview. This kind of interview fetishizing has led to many a bad hire who flubbed out of the game and were not replaced by other, better suited people.
It seems to me that the performance aspect of interviews only sometimes correlates with actually being good at the job. I could imagine, but don't necessarily agree with, an argument that all candidates need to be judged on the same scale, and so the SC in question had to force themselves not to take into account "Flubber's" excellent performance at actually doing the job. But then the same person who says this can't turn around and say that networking with all its randomness *should* count.
There sure is a lot of confirmation bias in these posts....
To sum up:
- Search committee privileges inside candidate because of extra information about inside candidate: search committee is evil and the system is abominable.
- Search committee does not privilege inside candidate despite extra information about inside candidate: search committee is evil and the system is abominable.
- Inside candidate performs better under stress because s/he knows the search committee: the search committee is evil, inside candidate may or may not be execrable, and the system is flawed.
- Inside candidate performs worse under stress because s/he knows the search committee: the search committee is evil, and the system is flawed.
- Poster questions the individuality of several very similar posts posted back-to-back over a short stretch of time: poster is using anonymity to squelch real people's concerns, is execrable.
- Poster gets hurt feelings and uses derogatory nickname to lump a critical post in with something from a different month/semester/whatever: poster is standing up for the little guy.
'k.
The thing about "grow up" is...if the shoe fits, wear it.
"Grow up" is a string, not a shoe.
We need a new thread for so-bitter-reality-is-twisted-and-can't-think-straight.
This is and has always been that thread.
I feel like the stripper latching onto that one nerdy guy at the club....
I feel like we're the Republicans fighting it out.
I think there is actually a central theme here: people are anxious that being a good scholar/teacher/colleague, the actual job, is becoming increasingly disconnected from professional success. That's where the worries about pedigree, spousal/inside/spousal-inside hires, or the importance of interviewing without getting nervous all comes from.
yes, but more than that people are concerned about how to feed themselves and are depressed by having a wagon load of skills and expertise that is largely meaningless to most of the world. Those people of whom I speak feels like chumps. And if they've played this circus for a few years (or more) ... it ain't pretty.
Yeah.
Speaking personally, I thought the job market being bad meant having to move every year for a long time to work low-paying, transient jobs before eventually landing an elusive tenure track position, assuming I managed to research and teach well in those years. I did not realize it meant not being able to get anything, not even temporary, part-time work with no benefits, after an international search, year after year.
The ability to put a patty between two buns is literally worth minimum wage an hour more than a PhD in Classics.
^^ This. I have always accepted that I would almost certainly not get a tenure-track job out of the starting gate. I anticipated a long haul of adjunct/VAP-ing. I did not anticipate--after years of teaching experience, excellent course evals, and a few publications--that I would not get any job AT ALL.
Of course, it's not over yet. But I know many people in my same situation--more people than jobs--so some very qualified people will, again, wind up jobless this year.
Oh my god the whine fest. Nobody forced you to get a PhD in Classics. Nobody kept you from knowing the odds have been against you landing a job for a long time now.
Yeah, jeez, you think you deserve to eat? Grow up already!
Guy up above, a lot if not most of us started PhDs *before* the crash. Numbers were nothing like they are today. A lot of us were, deliberately or not, mislead about placement even before the whole thing went south. A lot of people are naive when they are 22, and get excited about graduate study and then they're in the program and love the work and want a career in it and that is what every signal around them is telling them is the correct thing to do. And then they get done and there is no work and they're basically unsuited for any other job, not to mention having spent the last seven or so years having been told that this is the only life worth living, and it is at this point the center of their identities and their social world, from which they don't want to be cast out as a failure.
You can't find any compassion in your heart for desperate people in this situation?
Dear fuck, don't try to reason with it. They feed on that shit.
Anybody have any idea when ISAW lets people know about the post-docs?
The market was bad before the crash. Plenty of people didn't get jobs of any kind. This has long been a high risk career plan.
A Classics PhD is also marketable for more than academic jobs.
This is about German, but languages go in similar directions, and it shows how very very much worse the job market is today than in the past. And we now have two more years of glut.
http://zugunglueck.blogspot.de/2014/01/how-job-market-in-german-really-works_31.html
"I would like to drive a stake through the heart of the myth that the academic job market in German has always been bad. This is going to be long, but keep reading. If you want to understand why your career is such a mess and what the threat is facing our discipline right now, you have to stop believing that the way things are now is simply how things have always been...."
It makes people feel better to think they're just the victims of the "worst ever" market. That's a really self-centered way of looking at what's long been a disaster. The problem is that while the disaster has long been there, people have still kept going to grad school, despite plenty of clear warnings that Classics grad school is a bad, bad idea if you're not independently wealthy, or don't care if you land an academic job.
I can't speak for others, but the prevailing message when I started grad school (pre-2008) was that if you were "good" you would eventually get a job. "The market is bad" was understood to mean what some people have described above--you would have to struggle for a while in temporary jobs but if you stuck with it, published, networked, were a good colleague, a good teacher, etc., you would eventually land a TT job. Of course it was well known that some people would never get that TT job, but for graduates of top-tier undergrad and graduate institutions it was strongly suggested, if not said outright, that this would not happen to OUR students. My former dept chair told me when I interviewed how successful the department was in placement, how everyone who wanted a job got a job, how they would not shepherd us through 6-7 years of grad school only to abandon us at the end...and of course here we all are.
Most discouraging, the issue is STILL being framed like this--"if you are GOOD, you will get a good job." The implication being that only losers don't get jobs and if you haven't succeeded yet it's your fault. That's just not true anymore, and institutions need to be honest about that, not sell a line about "OUR graduates" getting jobs while others flounder.
"Good people get jobs" is the line I was sold... I'm pretty sure my record is "good" on all counts, but I don't seem to have that job....
Going to grad school is like trying out crack. Are you a dumb shit for getting hooked on crack? Damn right you are, and I'm right there with you. But none of this makes the crack *dealers* fine upstanding citizens.
And yet here you are, still trying your best to become a crack dealer. What does that say about you?
No. I got out of the crack-dealing game years ago. But yes, for a specific point in time, this is accurate. The a cognitive dissonance around that issue is part of what breaks people.
And not all employed Classicists are crack dealers. There are certainly some who actively discourage their students from pursuing graduate level study.
"And not all employed Classicists are crack dealers. There are certainly some who actively discourage their students from pursuing graduate level study."
Indeed there are. I have been at my SLAC for 12 years now. I have consistently done everything I can to DIScourage majors from going on to grad. school. If they've made the decision to come to a SLAC for their B.A., I think Classics is a fine major; any humanities or social science major from an SLAC is going to equip them about equally well to negotiate the "real world" once they graduate. But when a major comes to me all starry-eyed saying that s/he wants to get a PhD and be a professor, I pour as many buckets of cold water as I can on that. I tell them that they will in all likelihood NEVER get an academic job. (After this year's SCS panel, I'll be able to tell them the precise chances of a t-t job: 1 in 5.) I tell them that there were 105 applicants for my position in 2004, and that the market is much, much worse now. I tell them that if they try to apply for non-academic jobs with a PhD, they will have to explain the six "missing" years on their cv and that a PhD will be looked on with suspicion. I tell them if they can imagine themselves doing anything else -- ANYthing else -- other than being a classics professor, to go for that something else. They get angry. They cry. They look at me with big "How could you???" eyes. But I cannot imagine how any classics professor today could justify telling an undergraduate anything else.
If after all this they still insist that their lives will not be worth living unless they get a PhD in classics, then I will write letters for them and do my best for them. But then comes the second talk: DO NOT enter a PhD program unless you have full funding. Don't, under any circumstances whatsoever, borrow money for grad school. Just DON'T. Once again, they do not like hearing this. But once again, I can't see how our consciences could allow us to say anything else.
^ Outstanding.
This is what I do, too.
Now that we're going on 8 years since the big crash, my sympathies for the "we just didn't know" crowd are ebbing. There are a few who legitimately started before that crash or just after it (before their UG profs got the memo), but guess what? You had a chance to get out after your MA. And you know the score now. Don't fall prey to the sunk costs fallacy. (Or in a more vulgar expression, don't throw good money after bad.) Get out! You can grieve and rightly so, but after that you'll have a chance to pursue happiness again and not keep chasing a phantom. But I digress.
Those of who completed PhDs need ANOTHER talk: most of those TT jobs out there SUCK. Yeah, you get to be a full-time professor with job security. You also get terrible students who don't want to be in your classes because their business and social science professors tell them that the Humanities are worthless and their parents tell them that the Humanities won't get them a job. Your administration will come around every couple years with threats about closing down the language programs. (So much for job security!) Your colleagues will show open contempt at those "non-practical" majors. You'll get a 1% raise each year in the good years and thank God not to have been downsized out of existence in the bad years. You'll lower your standards so much just to keep butts in seats that you won't be able to remember the last time you read a text instead of just cheerleading someone for recognizing a dative or correctly identifying a verb as a verb and not as a noun or "masculine". All this while serving on two-dozen campus committees and changing light bulbs because that's somehow part of your mandate as faculty. I could go on.
Of those "lucky" 1 in 5 that get the TT job, how many do you think are at R1s that are also healthy (i.e., not under attack by state legislatures)? 5%? Cry, gnash your teeth, shout "How could YOOUUUU!!!" and rail against the system, but hear the truth.
I got my MA in 2007, and I don't think I'm an unusual cohort among FV users. In 2008 I was passing my qualifying exams, starting my dissertation, and the job market still seemed like it would have plenty of time to recover. Then, what, you're supposed to cast an appraising eye on the job market, conclude you are unlikely to find employment, and just stop writing your dissertation halfway through? People don't work like that, and people who haven't done the job market experience tend to be as naive about it as undergraduates are about grad school, or at least they were in that era. Now I am looking for other work, but as 8:30 points out, employers are not exactly falling all over themselves to hire someone they think may be an arrogant egghead without any real skills. I bet the people here insisting that it is easy to find an outside job with a Classics PhD are just ignorant Classicists, but if any of them have real advice about other career paths, I am all ears.
@ 2:30
arrogant egghead without any real skills
Sounds like they've got your number! 1-800-too-angry-to-hire.
Do you always turn to the internet to find your answers for you? Is your dissertation "All the insights I could find on Wikipedia"? Or do you actually have research and problem solving skills?
Those saying people should have gotten out of school after the 2008 crash seem to be forgetting that THERE WAS NOWHERE ELSE TO GO. I was a couple of years into grad school at the time and all my friends who had gone into the business world were getting laid off. What should I have done, dropped out of a guaranteed 5-year income to try to get an entry-level job in the worst economic crisis in decades? Keep in mind that 2009 and 2010 saw a drastic surge in grad school and law school applications by people who had been laid off or were finishing school and were hoping to ride out the crisis.
At the same time, I think people are overstating how hard it is to get another job outside of academia. You may need to start again at entry level, but generally PhDs rise through the ranks a lot quicker than people fresh out of BAs. FWIW, everyone from my (second-tier) graduate program who has graduated in the past five years and got out of academia straightaway or after a year or two has a good, secure, well-paying job. Consulting, non-profits, finance, security analysis, government, high school - there are lots of options out there. The presumption (flippant or otherwise) that the choice is between "flipping burgers" and working in academia is misguided.
At the same time, I think people are overstating how hard it is to get another job outside of academia. You may need to start again at entry level, but generally PhDs rise through the ranks a lot quicker than people fresh out of BAs. FWIW, everyone from my (second-tier) graduate program who has graduated in the past five years and got out of academia straightaway or after a year or two has a good, secure, well-paying job. Consulting, non-profits, finance, security analysis, government, high school - there are lots of options out there. The presumption (flippant or otherwise) that the choice is between "flipping burgers" and working in academia is misguided.
Amen.
I haven't seen that anyone else has posted a link to this table (https://classicalstudies.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/PlacementStats2013-15.pdf) but I sense that it adds some data that might be helpful as we justify the many servings of woecakes that adorn our collective mensa.
The numbers here show how stark a turning point 2008 really was: a drastic decrease in TT jobs combined with an increase in job candidates. The worse news is that column has never recovered, all the while that final column--of total job candidates--just keeps growing, and if last year felt awful that's because it really was the worst.
Note that I had nothing to do with the compilation of this information (so, I can't tell you who all the "non-members" that appear in force in the last two years are. AIA members in disguise? I don't know.) I just thought it was interesting and wanted to share it.
Wow. Thanks for that very horrifying SCS table. I'm 3/9 8:30 p.m., from above, and I have just downloaded a copy. I will now hand that table out to the undergraduate majors who tell me they want to go to grad school.
Yeesh. I wonder why so few jobs were listed last year?
Am I the only person who is constantly annoyed by the fact that "1. 2015-2016 Classics, Ancient History, and Archaeology Job Market Wiki" is LONGER THAN the links to past years' pages (due to the spelling out of "and")? AHHH I WANT TO FIX IT SO BAD
Let's discuss these above-mentioned ideas of alternative employment:
Consulting: code for unemployed. What kind of consulting can a failed Classicist do?
Non-profits: another market completely oversaturated with applicants
Finance/security analysis: not sure how one makes the jump from humanities PhD to this
Government: let's not forget that government jobs are also highly competitive and exclusive
High school: possible, after getting certification
Other ideas out there?
Yeah, I think the only people who are under the impression that those "go-to" second career choices are reasonable options (the only one missing there is "Why, you could work in a museum!") are people who have never actually had to think about/attempt to find alternative careers. Please, tell me how I, who have not touched a math book since I was 18, can make a living in finance. I'm serious, please, tell me.
Yeah, and can I just add to the above that teaching high school is really unpleasant. I did it for two years and I hated it. Don't get me wrong, my students were delightful and I'm still in touch with some of them--in that respect, it's a great opportunity to really get to know your students since you see the same ones every day for years. But it is exhausting, both physically and emotionally, to teach five preps a day (actually six since once of my classes was Latin 4 / AP in the same period), plus the grading is CONSTANT -- six classes' worth EVERY NIGHT. There is constant paperwork/bureaucracy, plus ludicrous and boring "professional development" activities. And of course there is supervising the Latin club/certamen team. I would get to school at 7am and leave around 6pm, grab dinner, and then straight into grading/class prep. I slept maybe 4-5 hours a night for TWO YEARS. I will never, ever go back to it.
And of course, 4:22 is right that you have to get certification if you want to teach long-term, which means the humiliating prospect of returning to school after achieving the HIGHEST DEGREE in your field to take worthless pedagogy classes, many of which are totally irrelevant for you (Early Childhood Development was required in my state) and which you have to pay for out of your laughably meager salary.
No thanks. Never again. Some people might be able to do it, but I can't.
@4:52
You can't. But other people have. Whether through family contacts or just because they had opened a math book in their post-18 years, I know of two humanities PhDs who have made the jump to finance.
For those whose math days are behind them, look elsewhere.
Think about what type of work would motivate you to get out of bed in the morning. Look at websites of companies and organizations that you are interested in or that are located in areas where you want to live/work. Talk to friends, neighbors, people in coffee shops and at bus stops about their jobs or their friends' jobs or their kids' jobs. Go on LinkedIn and look at the alumni of your undergraduate institution. See if there is anyone there doing something interesting who you might like to talk to. Try to target companies or organizations who have reputations for treating their employees well. Because if you take a job for a lower starting salary than you might like because you are beginning a new career track, at least you can feel good about working at a place whose employees are happy and whose mission you believe in. And besides, you deserve to be treated well.
The skills of a Classicist almost certainly aren't going to be relevant for any career in which there are actual jobs; luckily, you are likely a very smart person who can learn new skills easily. Investigate careers with good job markets, low barriers to entry, and where intelligence is highly advantageous. This is where you want to be, if you want to earn a living outside of Classics. But it will probably take a few years of training while supporting yourself with some shitty VAP (or whatever) to get there.
Life is soooooo haaaaaaaard.
Honestly, I have a lot of advice for someone looking for a new career, and it's based on hard evidence. But honestly (again), I have no motivation to share it with the whiners on this board and every motivation (including schadenfreude) not to. You create false dichotomies and false impossibilities for yourself as a way to try to corner everyone else into some sort of self-destructive guilt or self-negation. I'm not interested. I'm not interested in self-blame or in entertaining you and your woe-is-me, woe-is-you attitude. Get over yourselves. Go somewhere else. Do something else. Move on with your lives. If that's impossible, then wallow, but wallow in the silence you deserve for your self-imposed incapacity.
No one makes you come here, fucktard.
@ 11:52
Said the pot to the kettle, except the kettle didn't use obscenity or a portmanteau based on an offensive term for a genetic/mental disability. So, there's that.
/PS: Have you thought about getting a job proving other people's points for them? You're awfully good at it.
Every so often someone with a TT job comes on here to talk about how hard those jobs, especially at crappy places, can be. Someone was here a while back talking about how the job was literally killing her/him. -- And that is fine, this is the thread to "bitch, moan, and let off some steam," and anyone who is just here to beat up other people is kindly invited to fuck off. -- And I'm sure a lot of TT jobs are crushingly difficult, to the point of threatening people's health. But I have literally never once heard of tenured faculty decamping for greener pastures, despite the fact that this field is set up so you could do that if you wanted to. Quit research for a year or two, dedicate that time plus a summer or two to gearing up on your finance skills, and you're off. I think this tells you all you need to know about the transferability of a classics PhD.
^ Whatever helps you complain at night.
@1:31 AM
That's funny, I've known a couple.... But I guess my anecdata are trumped by your lack of anecdata, right?
Most of the ones I know who decamped left just before tenure, after four or five years slogging away and realizing that they hated it. Some left after only two years. Sticking it out for six just to get tenure in a field you don't want to be in shows some real dedication. Or maybe it just took them that long to figure out what paths to take next.
Either way, why judge others' decisions, 1:31, when all you have it a handful of anecdotal evidence that's already been rendered incomplete by 1:39?
March 10, 2016 at 4:08 PM here. Thanks whoever fixed it. My life is now complete (well, except for getting a job).
"You create false dichotomies and false impossibilities for yourself as a way to try to corner everyone else into some sort of self-destructive guilt or self-negation."
Not true! Many of us are totally willing to move on to a different career! Open to feasible suggestions. Can we avoid the kindly meant "think of what you might like to do" advice though, since that's what led us to classics?
I wouldn't NOT think of what you might like you do. Then...what? You go to work for a douchebag company, where you get filthy rich pimping a product that people don't really need and that is made by underpaid laborers in a country far, far away. (Wait a minute, I realize that this sounds like the discipline of classics itself - ha!) Will that be satisfying to you? If so, by all means do it. If not, realize that you will become a douchebag like everyone else at the company and a miserable one at that.
Otherwise, take the advice given out by well-meaning people here and elsewhere. Do the thing that most of us (myself included) didn't do before starting grad school which is to get some honest opinions and advice about future paths and think carefully about what you want to do with your life.
Just because thinking brought you to classics when you were 21 doesn't mean that thinking again now at your current age is a bad idea.
If you don't have a clear idea of what you want in a new career, no one can help you get your new career.
I wrote on here about how to transition to healthcare, but my post got deleted. You wouldn't believe what's out there.
If you insist that the labor you trade for money has to have some deep meaning, as someone upthread implied, then your options are indeed pretty limited. I suggest selling out; it is literally what our economy is based on.
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2722
Time for a new life
For those who want to stick with it, I offer a piece of encouragement that I was told and helped me: are you publishing articles in good places, are you making progress on your book manuscript, are you inspiring and challenging your students? Then you're a good classicist. Job status isn't everything, and there are plenty of people *with* jobs who are not doing all of the above.
The market may be bad, but after reading the comments on Famae Volent, at least it's completely understandable why some of you can't land jobs.
It's not unreasonable for people to be upset and even to despair when realizing that, after much effort, they might not be able to pursue careers in classics. This realization that the labor market doesn't value graduate work in classics particularly highly is similarly unpleasant. And, however true it may be that classics PhDs will find success after six months or a year after they get their foot in the door somewhere, statements like this aren't very comforting.
That said, I would agree with these statements. I'm in an industry rather unrelated to classics, and the other fallen classicists from my program have done and are doing quite a number of different things.
When looking for other options, geography is important. If you aren't in the city where you want to work, it might be best to move there and then look for employment.
I'd like to second the point about geography. Before embarking on a PhD, I worked outside the academy and was party to the hiring process (I didn't make the decisions but had some input). Resumes with addresses from outside the city (let me emphasize city here...the difficulty of your job search is multiplied many times over if you cannot or will not move to a major metropolitan area) were automatically discarded. Anecdotal? Sure. Do managers need a quick metric to determine whether candidates are serious? Absolutely.
Also emphasize skills, rather than content; (almost) no hiring manager will care about the content of your doctoral studies.
Thanks, 3:17. Could you help out with how to describe our skill set for a corporate audience?
@ 4:26 AM
This is not 3:17 here. But I can share some resources with you.
I found this video to be incredibly helpful:
humwork.uchri.org/past-events/san-diego-workshop/
It's a talk by Jared Redick, a SF-based consultant who helps C-level executives retool their resumes and apply for jobs. People like us can't afford to hire him one-on-one, but he has given a couple of talks at the Humanists@Work series run by the UC system. His most recent talk, at the Sacramento conference, will hopefully go online as well.
I also recommend poking around the website (uchri.org/) of the UCHRI (University of California Humanities Research Institute), which is the organization that hosts that conference. There are a lot of other great resources to be found there, such as ideas about possible career paths, other people's stories of finding work outside of the tenure track, and how to do an informational interview.
The "what gets you out of bed" question didn't work for me when I was transitioning away from the academy. The depression, both by my own situation and the state of the market in general, was too great for me to be able to answer that question.
The approach that did work was to ask myself: What do I want to change? From there, I could find programs and initiatives already in place that address the issue(s) that I want to change, and then I knew where to start networking.
Earth-shattering classics news today.
What?
I presume he or she refers to the outing of DADDY CRUEL.
Today has been the best entertainment in Classics in recent memory.
Yeah. That Daddy Cruel stuff is effed up.
It's another potential job opening.
There's not enough sage in the world for that office.
That shit is fucking
Crazy!!!!
You guys, this Mr. Cruel Daddy scandal is probably the best thing to happen to Classics in a long time. Look at it this way; judging by some of the posts of those here who are already in TT positions or have tenure, this is a fucked up group of people. In all likelihood many are perverted sickos just like Mr. Cruel Daddy. If we can expose all the pedophiles, rapists, flashers, peeping toms, and other assorted deviants we can probably at least double or triple the number of job openings over the next few years.
the full affidavit is sobering:
http://local12.com/news/local/uc-professor-arrested-on-child-porn-charges
Bring on the damnatio memoriae!
Maybe as a field we should rethink our preference for people who work on "cool" weird sexual stuff...
Agreed, completely. I think it's fascinating the individual in question was treated in some quarters as a virtual hero because of work on weird sex stuff.
Um, on the flip side, let's not condemn all people who work on sexuality because of the actions of one person. That would be a hell of a rush to judgment.
I would be very surprised if this translates to an open position in Classics at UC. At least at my own institution, Deans can transfer open lines between departments at will. The logic is that these lines are not wedded to departments but are part of the overarching faculty (arts & science, business, etc.). It may seem unfair to punish the department for the despicable actions of one individual, but the university will attempt, and currently is attempting, to distance itself from the disgraced ex-prof as much as possible. Quietly hiring someone in a department far-removed from Classics would avoid any connection in the future. Maybe I will be wrong, but I've seen administrators use far less justification than this to move lines to different units.
Let's remember that real people are involved here. His students, his colleagues, his friends. To some it is not a matter of "entertainment." No matter how this shakes out, this is a major blow to Cincy's programs and the people involved with it.
This sh** is f***ed up. A couple of news sources mention the scholarship, "sexuality, slavery, and sadism" implicitly conveying a link between the pervo private life and the public scholarship. In this particular case, I think that connection is there.
Frankly the "scholarship" in question is all stained now with this disgusting news. They really should revoke the many awards that were won for it.
I don't know about revoking awards, but I have been wondering since the news broke about the effect if any that this information should have on our use of the scholarship. On the one hand, it's not as if arguments that were valid are now invalid because of what the individual was engaged in. On the other hand, I'm not sure that I want to put their articles and books on a syllabus or otherwise encourage students to read them.
These are contradictory impulses, I recognize. Can we separate scholarship from the scholar that produces it?
I am having this same internal battle right now. His scholarship has been really influential to my work, and as I sit here working on an article for which his work is highly relevant, I keep wondering: do I cite him? omit it? dance around it? change my argument entirely? As another commenter pointed out, the scholarship is still valid. The arguments are still sound. The evidence is still good. I just can't bring myself to write his actual name on the page. I have several projects in progress, and three days ago I was excitedly citing his work. But everything is different now.
I sure as hell hope so. If intellectual work loses its value and validity because of the flaws of its author, however horrific, then we should probably stop studying Classics entirely. I doubt many of the upper class Greek and Roman slave owners who wrote virtually everything we have would meet our current moral standards.
Dyck's Green and Yellow of Cicero will certainly still be cited for some time to come...
Beyond the child victims in this case, one feels sorry for his graduate students who have not yet landed. A letter of recommendation from him might as well have been written by Hitler. And even if other recommenders can be found, he is still listed as the advisor for dissertations, warmly thanked in published articles, etc. Hopefully his students can be recognized on their own merits, but one would not want to be tainted by having this freak as a doktorvater.
I would never cite him. Classics may have made the mistake of accepting him as a member of the profession once, but we don't have to continue making that mistake by treating him as if he continues to be. And I'm sorry, there is a connection between his scholarship and his "extracurriculars." It couldn't be more obvious. It's not like his day job was homer's use of the metaphor. You want to get your hands dirty in that sh**?
This isn't the same as the Cicero case, where the subject of scholarship and author's sins have nothing in common. There's a direct link here between subject and sin. That's the difference. I'm in agreement with the not citing.
" I doubt many of the upper class Greek and Roman slave owners who wrote virtually everything we have would meet our current moral standards." Are you really saying that people who were acting according to the moral standards of their own times and societies can be equated with this monster?? You do know about the industry he helped fund and perpetuate, yes? Children. Very young children.
While I agree that there is a connection between "subject and sin" as another poster put it, I'm not sure that connection is so direct that the content of the work is itself tainted. While the author's diseased brain may have helped him to recognize patterns and connections in the texts on which he was commenting, that does not mean that the patterns and connection do not exist, or that they are themselves diseased and tainted. I think I will cite the work if it's relevant. I'm still not sure about assigning the work to students, though. That seems too much like, if not endorsing, then at least tolerating monstrous acts.
I see no reason to cite this guy. Citation has two purposes. The lesser is to avoid blatant plagarism, the greater to acknowledge the place of your work within the larger field. This guy is not going to be in the field for the next twenty-five years to life. If his archive of work seems useful to a project, cite who he cites.
"Are you really saying that people who were acting according to the moral standards of their own times and societies can be equated with this monster?"
To the extent that some of them were engaged in similar acts, yes.
Morality is not relative. People don't get a pass because the standards of their time were different. They don't need to get a pass for our purposes though, because engaging with their works does not imply endorsement of their characters.
3:12 PM wrote: "Morality is not relative. People don't get a pass because the standards of their time were different. They don't need to get a pass for our purposes though, because engaging with their works does not imply endorsement of their characters."
According to you. There's plenty of people who subscribe to the idea of moral relativism. It's ludicrous to project present-day standards onto people who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago and complain about how terrible or problematic they were. Societies differ spatially and temporally and attempting to apply some one size fits all metric to their morality is tone deaf.
That's a fine and laudable perspective for your scholarly work. But I think we can all agree that there are some absolutes: for instance, preying on children is wrong, at any time, and in any place.
"I see no reason to cite this guy. If his archive of work seems useful to a project, cite who he cites."
I'm not sure that is how scholarship works. Especially for a body of work as influential as this one. I'm not saying I like it or want to read it myself at the moment, but I don't think we can excise his influence from the field simply by pretending that his work was nothing but a collection of citations.
Coming a bit late to this story... My unsolicited advice is that you do not list your awards for bread- or pickle-making on your professional curriculum vitae until AFTER you have tenure.
The prizes for food are just surreal.
As for influence in the field, I think this case can be safely ignored given what happened.
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