Karen Kelsky says that publications from before a person is hired normally don't count for tenure. Does anyone have a sense of if that is true for Classics? I have always thought they do count. https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1356-does-it-count-for-tenure
It depends very much on the institution. Most places would expect you to maintain at least the same level of publication you did while VAP-ing, maybe a little less if you're coming in off a post-doc. It would be advisable to hold off on publishing a book until you get a T-T job, but once you're several years out, you probably need to get it done. Unfortunately, every year that goes by without you getting a T-T job means you have to produce more than you would if you were in a T-T job to stay competitive. If you're 3-4 years out with no publications, you're SOL.
It depends entirely on the institution. Karen Kelsky is writing from an R1 perspective, and her advice is going to be true for that kind of institution most of the time. For smaller institutions, this may or may not hold. In some cases, counting some of your pre-existing publications toward tenure can be part of the negotiation process; in other cases, the small school is buying not just their hopes of your future record but also your current record, so they'll want to count your pre-existing publications. The point is, this is school-specific more than it is field-specific (if it is the latter at all).
As for 10:36's advice about holding off on a book--I strongly disagree. If you want a TT job today, you are well-served by having a book under contract. You are better served by having one in print and at least the plans for another in the works.
I wouldn't say that VAPs are required to produce more than TTs to be competitive. Instead, I'd say that people on the market are required to produce more to get a job than they would be to get tenure at that job. So a TT person who wants to move (even to a comparable school) also has to produce more than that same person if they didn't want to move.
Don't hold off articles either. It can take up to two years from acceptance to get an article published, and the review process can take a minimum four months, and up to a year in the event of a revise and resubmit. So the article you are working on now might not come out until the random lightning of a TT job strikes.
Re 12:06: These days publishing in grad school is absolutely necessary, at least by the ABD stage. While a few golden children still get jobs without publication records, most people getting jobs need at least two peer reviewed articles that are in print. Given the delay between submission and publication, this usually means starting the process in grad school.
12:06 here. I gave that advice because I published a few articles in grad school, but no one gave a shit, I was underemployed for several years, and I then left academia. But honestly I doubt having no articles would have helped either. The moral is really that no matter what you do, no one gives a shit and you will have to leave academia.
I find it puzzling that the ones at my university who gave me the hardest time about the quality of my monograph and its publisher have never published one. I'm beginning to think there is something to the Boomer/HRC "rules are for peasants and inferiors" notion. The special snowflake millennials we see in our classrooms were apparently taught by the best.
To be fair to 12:06, I know of a couple people who have gotten TT jobs this year with no published articles. One I know for sure does not even have any articles under review. Just sayin'--there don't seem to be any hard and fast rules.
Re publishing. The fact that the rules do not seem to apply to a few Golden Children does not mean that they do not apply to the rest of us non-Golden children. And most of us here are non-Golden Children. That means publishing early and often just to stay competitive.
Those Golden Children who land TT jobs without publication are not necessarily advantaged by that fact. It means their tenure clock is ticking before they have even started to establish a publication pipeline.
For Pete's sake, if you're going to publish an article while in grad school PLEASE make sure that it actually deserves to be in print. Your advisor(s) will not always be the best judge of this. Not only does the field need fewer mediocre articles to be in print, but you don't help yourself by publishing something prematurely. And grad students don't always recognize how much they don't yet know.
Of course, what do I know? I can remember an enormously flawed article published in a prominent journal a few years ago, since the student who worked on X had decided to take a grad seminar term paper on Y and turn it into an article that evidently was too sexy for the journal to pass up (or its editor chose unqualified peer reviewers), and this helped the author get a tenure-track job at a top school. A year or two later a real expert in the field of Y wrote an article tearing the original to shreds... which quite possibly its author doesn't even know, since he/she works on X but not Y. So I guess everyone's happy, except for those who have to take the time to read both articles, neither of which would exist in an ideal world. (Derive from this whatever lessons you may wish. I'll add that the author's hiring was a fine choice by that school, so I have no personal animus towards him/her. Only that seminar-paper-turned-article.)
The above confuses the stated purpose of peer-reviewed research ("advance knowledge in the field") with its actual purpose ("get and keep an academic job").
... and in the bloodbath that is the job market, nobody can afford to wait until they're an actual expert to start publishing. No, publications don't guarantee a job (nope, they sure didn't land me one!), but they are one small factor that the job candidate can control in what seems to be a largely random process. In the case mentioned above, the peer review process and the journal, and possibly departmental mentoring, failed worse than the graduate student.
The field does indeed need fewer mediocre articles. I regret that when I signed up for the CAMWS journal that I requested a print copy. Ends up in the recycle bin every time.
It should be clear to all that there are journals and there are journals. An article in CJ or CW isn't going to count for as much as something in JRS/JHS. Similarly, a book with Bloomsbury isn't going to impress as much as a book with OUP/CUP. That's not to say there aren't terrible articles published in JRS/JHS, or terrible books published with OUP/CUP. But they are rarer, and they do a lot more for the author's career, regardless. Is a terrible article in JRS better for your career than an excellent article in CJ? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
It is subjective. But our field is so big, with so many subfields, that it is important as a matter of professional survival to keep in mind that many colleagues who will be on hiring or promotion committees are in fact not equipped to judge the quality of your specialist work. You may be interested in Flavian poetry, but the committee chair does Archaic epigraphy, and does not realize the clever things you are saying about Silius Italicus. So journal rank can be taken as an imperfect but not completely daft proxy for quality. Your article about Silius will be judged very differently in the JRS than the same article in CJ. So while you want to write the best article possible, it is critical to try and pitch it to the best journal possible--and to develop a sense of what the journal pecking order is.
True only for R1s, super-selective SLACS and *maybe* some R2s that have pretentions. Anywhere else (90% of schools), # of articles/books and/or topic of articles/books matters more than placement or quality. Get your head out of your grad school advisor's ass, and you'll see that right away.
@11:22--If you're at a point where anything like that really matters to you, then you're better off asking a trusted senior colleague to rank the journals as they appear to other members of your department. Or are you just trying to stir up shit?
It shouldn't. We are one of the most likely destinations for people who, on purpose, want to pursue the least relevant possible course of study. I know I started out with this shit in high school by choosing to study the most useless available language.
If you're in Classics and can't convey to students why this field is one of the best preparations for life and career, then I sincerely hope you're bombing out on the job market.
Of course it's subjective. It depends in large part on the external reviewers, who are not endowed with infallibility. Or topics the journal currently wants to see represented. Or the mood and whims of the editor(s). Etc. etc.
Totally fake. There is a person on staff who does archaeology of the Western Provinces--and is from a European country, so s/he might be in need of the fake search for immigration/naturalization purposes. Nothing wrong with this, as this is responding to a U.S. requirement, but still this one looks so transparently fake that there is little reason to apply.
Article quality is definitely subjective, but that does not mean that any article could be perceived by someone as a "good" article--there are limits. Much of the time I think what is going on is that there are "open" readers and "closed" readers. "Open" readers read an article and think "hmm...I see their point, and it's somewhat interesting...I'll have think a bit more about that, but in the meantime good work for them to have put this out on the table in a reasonably clear and orderly way so that we can all talk about it" and then point out the few weaknesses that could or need to be addressed before publication. "Closed" readers read an article and think "bah! This is ridiculous! How could they think that!? This is a completely wrong direction for this question!" and proceed to find in relatively small errors or leaps in logic the grounds for damning the whole thing to the wastebasket. This accounts for the feeling of "subjectivity." (This is assuming the article is well-written and has an appropriate amount of research, citations of past scholarship, etc.)
On "it doesn't matter where you publish as long as you have a long publication list"--there are still people out there saying you need to have "well-placed" articles, and I don't mean dinosaurs, but relatively young people. All the evidence either way is anecdotal. We need some actual data on this.
There has yet to be any proof of a single fake search, and the argumentation has been scant. Some of you need to a metaphorical or literal bitch-slap to bring you back to reality.
More than 10% of the jobs this year went to candidates with longstanding personal connections to the SC in question. I doubt that these SCs thought they were running rigged searches, but that statistic sure makes it seem like candidates without longstanding personal connections were not receiving the same degree of consideration. (Which is not to say that I think these candidates were unworthy, dear troll!)
More than 10% of the jobs this year went to candidates with longstanding personal connections to the SC in question. Assertion, not evidence, proof, or argument. No attempt to define "personal connections" or "longstanding". No attempt to argue that the pulled-from-the-ass number of "10%" has any meaning.
I doubt that these SCs thought they were running rigged searches, So you agree that these were not fake searches, but you still want to rage against the machine. How nice for you.
but that statistic sure makes it seem like candidates without longstanding personal connections were not receiving the same degree of consideration. A reintroduction of earlier assumptions as if those assumptions by being repeated had been proven. Invocation of "statistics" as if a scientific model that somehow garners "truth", but done without any evidence of the appropriateness of your "statistical" approach or even any evidence of statistical knowledge on your part.
(Which is not to say that I think these candidates were unworthy, dear troll!) And finally, an ad hominem designed to negate any response other than agreement with you.
Do you see why your complaints can't be taken seriously? CAN you see?
There are searches with an inside candidate, which is true for almost any TT position that has a VAP filling it. These may not be fake, although the VAP may have some advantage if they have done a good job and are well liked--a toxic personality can wreak a department, so departments may see some advantage in hiring someone they know is a good social fit.
Then there are fake searches. The Duke job seems to be an utter fake, likely made for immigration/naturalization purposes. You can find someone on the Duke website who exactly fits the profile of the search, and comes from abroad. Here the limited advertisement it a courtesy to the rest of us: Duke wants us to know this is a fake search by not advertising through the SCS, burying the search in the Chronicle and making the job description so specific that few would feel themselves qualified to apply.
So thank you Duke, that is how you are supposed to run a fake pro forma search that doesn't waste anyone's time.
I believe it is high time we Classicists talke matters regarding job search fraud into our own hands. Fortunately, the government allows for anonymous reports, especially when it comes to immigration fraud. Duke has repeatedly violated labor law in the past, at least when it came to Classicist hires, so it is high time they face the music. If their foreign candidate is any good, the law allows for this person to get a green card pretty quickly with, or even without a sponsor. If they didn't go that way, this means the inside candidate has a strong foreign supporter, but he/she is not good enough to go through the immigration process for distinguished candidates. In this case, immigration law indeed requires that the position be advertised through the appropriate channels. When done legally, this means that the ad has been printed in several publications, including some very expensive ones like the New York Times. If Duke did not advertise properly, then they have broken immigration law in the hopes that no job candidate will dare report them, and the government won't notice.. Someone must report them to the government, then sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Of course that presupposes that they advertised a fake position, a foreign internal candidate was hired as a future EB 3 green card candidate (so neither EB 1 nor EB 2), and they did not really hold a real search.
I also read a comment here that you guys only discovered who got the Toronto job in February. I know it was given much earlier than February. It came to my attention a long time ago that Toronto is a little .... ahem ..... strange when it comes to hiring Classicists.
I would hate to see Duke punished for *not* violating community standards. They are communicating clearly with anyone who knows how to read job ads. They are not using candidates' time and energy and getting desperate people's hopes up by not indicating that the search is actually destined to be a conversion or a spousal hire. I think that is what most people here object to. But I don't think there's any way to stop either type, and you'll get yourself blacklisted by trying to.
You would hate to see the law enforced?! That's odd. So you don't believe in the rule of law? No, what Duke and others should do is observe the law. The university does not belong to the department. They presumably advertise a position in order to find the best person and serve the field and their students. What does "I would hate to see Duke punished" even mean? Or "they are communicating clearly with anyone who knows how to read job ads"? If this were legal, then they could communicate clearly "we are hiring X or Y and there won't be a real search." That'll save everybody money and time. They don't do that, why? Because it is obviously illegal. And you would hate to see illegal gone? That's why our field is partly going down the drain, and things will get a lot worse in the future. Spinelessness doesn't help,people! It's something like the big and small drug dealers, I suppose: support this activity in the hopes our turn will come to torture young colleagues later. You can read all about this mentality in Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day.
So next to the pedophile colleagues (and trust me, we've had a lot of those and there are a lot more around who "found refuge in Classics"), we will support the destruction of our field that departments perpetrate through illegal hiring practices? Of course, they know they can get away with it because they haven't screwed anyone yet who is well connected and with money to sue the hell out of them.
Anyone who puts up, or even excuses this behavior deserves their professional woes.
Sure, it's illegal, but trying to enforce this law will just make things worse. Because in the end, all they have to say is that the person they wanted to hire was a better "fit," and interviewed better. Totally subjective, they can hire whomever they want. And you can't do a thing about it: as job candidate, you have zero power and zero rights. And by trying to make any one place follow the law, you will just drive others to pretend that more closed searches are open, rather than making it obviously closed as these people did, which will in the end increase everyone's misery. One thing nobody wants is more fake searches.
I actually believe in the rule of law, and no, I don't think things will get worse if it is enforced. I don't know whether you guys have realized this, but our field is dying. We simply cannot afford to tolerate corruption or accommodate agendas. We need the best to get the jobs, and we need this now. I've seen terrible things in my career in this field, from worthless people sleeping their way to jobs (!) to foreign professors imposing their mediocre protégés, not to mention the bluffers with the "cool," "trendy," and dated research, who don't even have the background or indeed knowledge to be in the field in the first place.
I personally have tenure, and I am quite happy at my current institution, but it pains me enormously to see this field go down the drain, and good people to go without jobs, wasting away as adjuncts, getting depressed, abused, harassed, hazed, bitter, and eventually leaving the field. I recently refereed a book manuscript for a major press and was stunned at the abilities, sheer brilliance, the depth of knowledge, and the high quality of research its author had done. I easily deduced who it was, and what blew me away was how this person managed to write a book that few of our colleagues can in a lifetime, a mature work that would be in place as the third or fourth monograph of a major scholar. Well, this person was a little adjunct somewhere, trying to make ends meet, and stay in the field, where he deserves to stay. Our field would be better off if people like this were appointed to major positions, rather than those with connections I see get the fake jobs. I was extremely angry at the author's plight and marveled at their grace to remain in the field, work extremely hard, and make a difference. In my comments I just added some sentences of praise that I know were very much appreciated.
I hope this person gets a real job. For the sake of the field, if not for law and justice.
Oh get off your soapbox. I am so tired of hearing about how great these poor adjuncts are, and how unfairly some other people got jobs. Every adjunct I ever met, it was clear as day why they were an adjunct. And everyone who was a tenure-track assistant...ditto.
You are one of the corrupt ones, aren't you? And you don't mind insulting all those colleagues who write here. Apparently you are also an expert in my field and can judge a person I referred to, who has written something worthwhile without reading the book?
I rest my case: here we have an excellent example of ignorance and corruption.
Calmly assert that people sleep their way to positions or use their alleged privilege...and that's fine, we're supposed to think you're some champion of classics and the law. Because hey, you read one adjunct's book, and it's so great and brilliant the author just must be an adjunct because all those incompetents with loose morals stole the position he deserved. Give me a break.
.... there are so many possibilities this year, it is hard to guess where this person may be from.... But obviously, whoever this uppity book-writing adjunct is, clearly he or she deserves to be an adjunct and every job is always offered justly, and we'll just not think about the possibility that that is not the case....
Did anyone else go to the SCS presidential panel on contingent faculty? The one with the much-published-and-deserving-yet-still-a-perpetual-adjunct speaker? Lol, it was perfectly clear why that person was condemned to perpetual adjuncthood and if you google their name and read their RateMyProfessor reviews it becomes clearer still. There are brilliant people who do good work and yet are terrible colleagues and teachers. There are also people who are deserving on all levels and yet are stuck in the trenches of adjuncting, but it's not always possible to distinguish the two based solely on their monograph.
Tell me about it. We're supposed to take people seriously when they complain about the plight of these allegedly deserving adjuncts, and then you take 5 mins on RMP and see the story of why they're adjuncts.
Lets remember what the real crisis for the profession is: in 2007-08, before the crisis hit, there were 132 TT jobs listed on the SCS Placement service. Last year there were 55, and I don't think there were many more this year. The number of job seekers has only increased. So there are a lot of people out there, roughly 80 a year, who would have gotten a TT job in 07-08 conditions, but cannot today because there are not enough jobs.
I am so tired of hearing about how great these poor adjuncts are, and how unfairly some other people got jobs. Every adjunct I ever met, it was clear as day why they were an adjunct. And everyone who was a tenure-track assistant...ditto.
Statements from dick holes like this person say a lot about why classics, and academia, are broken. If you're a dick here on this stupid blog, one can bet your colleagues and students perceive you as such.
Yeah, and I love how they say "every adjunct I ever met" as if no people who were once adjuncts ever got tenure-track jobs later on. As if the personality/(in)competence of a person in the state of "adjunct" at any moment in time were something we could generalize about. Plenty of the people who eventually got lucky had to adjunct briefly at some point or other. I hope this person isn't on a search committee, a person who sees the label "adjunct" or "visiting" and automatically assumes that the candidate must be defective, even if in actual fact in a year they may go on to a tenure-track position.
What's really scary is that it is people with these kinds of attitudes who are making hiring decisions. As if they are totally unaware that, had they been on this job market, it might well have been them who had to adjunct for a while. Most of us lowly adjuncts or VAPs are neither bad researchers nor bad teachers -- many of us are successfully doing both, without the kinds of resources available to TT people.
Another trend, developing for a while and perhaps reaching a crescendo this year, is that it is now very hard to get even a temporary position. Many VAPs have as many applications as TT jobs (the Georgetown VAP had 90 applicants). Many VAPs also now have a multiple round interview process, with campus visits and job talks. They require writing samples from published work, etc. The vetting processes even for a one year job that pays a pittance is increasingly at the level of a job for life.
Compare what April 17, 2016 at 8:54 PM said (data published by SCS). We're down about 80 TT jobs per year over the last 8 years. If PhD outputs have remained relatively stable, then there are 640ish PhDs floating around without TT jobs who would have gotten TT jobs.
Many will have left the field by now, but you can see WHY there is the credentialing inflation for VAPs and adjunct positions. Search Committees need some way to distinguish candidates, and they take the easiest possible route, even though that is not necessarily the best.
I haven't seen any discussion on here about what this trend has done to hiring at LACs and CCs. Those places need good teachers first and researchers second (or third, if you throw in service). What happens when search committees revert to their grad. school biases and start hiring the best pedigreed or most published for these positions? Does it make the LAC/CC better because they have "better" people? Or does it mean that the LAC/CC is now staffed by people who do not understand the mission, cannot reach or understand the students, and are deeply unhappy to be there but unable to leave due to the market?
As 6:32 pm above shows, it is easy to become dismissive of adjuncts, and perhaps also VAPs, as a whole based on some perceived flaw. This in spite of the fact that all of us, even the most golden of children, will have some flaw that could be highlighted in our teaching/researching/collegiality portfolio under the most careful of scrutiny. I consider myself very fortunate to have had a successful outcome to my job search. For the first few years after accepting my position, I skipped the SCS because I lost my desire to encounter all of the so-called friends and colleagues who did not hesitate to tell me that my employment was based entirely on luck and/or that someone better probably deserved the job. While there is inevitably some truth to both notions for any successful job candidate (and this would be true for anyone currently unemployed who succeeds in his/her job search in upcoming years), the lack of support had an impact. I’ve managed to regain some sympathy for candidates struggling on the job market, but it has taken a few years. At this point, if the department was able to make another T-T hire, I would advocate for one of our adjuncts over anyone else since I have seen their struggles first-hand and know that they would be valuable, permanent colleagues with respect to teaching, research, and service.
I had three first round interviews this year, two graduate institutions and one undergraduate. I got a campus visit at the undergraduate place. I almost said to my disappointed advisor: "seriously, I'd *much* rather not have graduate students. I mean, how would you sleep at night??" Fortunately my brain turned back on just before the words exited my mouth.
The real conversation should not be "should we treat adjuncts nicely or not," as with the SCS panel. The answer is "of course!" But being nice to adjuncts does little to alleviate the underlying supply and demand issue in the academic labor market. As noted above, every year 80 more PhDs appear for whom there are no jobs.
The real conversation should be "we need to radically trim the size of graduate programs everywhere." Some, even top programs, should no doubt cut the size of their incoming classes. Others need to disappear altogether.
The SCS could outline best practice and exert moral pressure. But ultimately it will be on individual programs. They need graduate students to teach and grade cheaply, so there is perverse incentives to maintain full cohorts even if most are being trained as erudite versions of buggy-whip makers. Again, since the number of jobs has been cut in half, the number of grad students needs to be cut in half.
Different programs, if they are run by conscientious people (and not the trolls that lurk on this site) will evaluate their placements and reduce incoming cohorts accordingly. Unfortunately, the pressures to maintain more grad students than the market can handle seem likely to prevail for the time being.
The problem with encouraging programs to reduce their intake of new graduate students is that in most, if not all, universities, the size of the department correlates with "success" and therefore funding (or worse, continuation of the existence of the department). I'm aware of at least one currently non-graduate language department that feels that to compete for resources with other humanities and STEM departments means to look towards getting their own graduate program, even though their own job market is glutted with underemployed recent PhDs.
Another problem is killing students' dreams. I myself have told students, in no uncertain terms, not to go to graduate school. They absolutely never listen. Not one. I of course still support their effort after they have not heeded my advice--I'm not cruel, and, who knows? they could come out ok--but I can't say I feel good about it at all.
I think that is the case with any field, to be honest. Look at the hoards signing up for law school (and taking on massive debt to do it) when the law job market is at an all-time low. You can tell students about the realities of the market, but no one believes that they are going to wind up the sad sack with no job or a shitty job or (worse still) a high school job. My students either believe that they are bright and dedicated enough to be one of the lucky ones or that the market will be better by the time they graduate.
Too a degree, the solution may be crowdsourced. After a while, people hear the horror stories and decide not to enroll, or perhaps most commonly, to drop out of programs. Some departments that stop making placements will have trouble attracting new grad students, or will convert to MA programs. This is happening on a very small scale, but nearly 8 years into the jobs crisis, it is surprising how little has been done to reduce oversupply, or even talk about it. The AHA is pushing the happy horseshit of "look into alternate career paths," which is fine, but there is no point wasting your time on a PhD if you plan to do a non-academic job. And the SCS is only pushing the "be nice to adjuncts" message rather than addressing the fact that its member institutions are pumping out far to many grad students for the current market to support.
I'm sympathetic to what you and most of the immediately previous posters are saying. I'd like to ask you, genuinely and sympathetically, What do you suggest the SCS do? They've got people who read FV (horribile dictu!), so if you suggest something it just might happen.
Yes, and the "alternate career paths" message is just disheartening and unhelpful for those who love this field and are passionate enough about the material to have dedicated untold hours and dollars to their PhD. Few if any of us have been in it to make the big $$$$.
Track and prominently publish /actual/ attrition and placement records? A lot of what is going on is not just undergraduate idiocy, although there is a fair amount of that (10-year-ago-me is guilty as charged! As are we all here). Programs mislead people about placement, and it isn't rare as far as I can tell.
A tracking of placement and attrition would be an enormous service, if the SCS has the clout to organize such an endeavor. I am surprised by how much placement information is anecdotal, with programs cherry-picking good placement years to sell the program to gullible prospects. It has been noted above that Ohio State had an exceptional year this year. I imagine that even if Ohio state places no one next year, prospects will be told about 2015-16 as if it was the standard. I know this is how placement worked at everywhere I toured as a prospect, and the institution I eventually attended.
Instead of spending collected funds (such as membership fees) on hosting yet another conference, starting yet another (increasingly specialist) journal, sponsoring a few graduate students to undertake some 3-week summer program, or waiving the Placement Service fee (or some other, ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things, "gift"), why not spend a good chunk of the cash on establishing a body set up for the specific purpose of helping recent PhDs transition into the non-academic job market? For instance, a body made up of senior and junior faculty in Classics and a number of folks who have successfully transitioned into a non-academic career, to help recent graduates with being on the non-academic job market, with advertising one's skills, moulding one's non-academic C.V., and so forth? That would seem to be a logical service for those who pour years and years of their energy, service, and money into the field? As an organization that purports to be there for its members, this would seem to be a worthwhile and ethically responsible service to offer. What is more, it would be beneficial for the field and possibly also for its perceived utility: if students know that the SCS will at least *help* them transition, should they wish to or have to leave the field, it may encourage them to enter the field instead of preemptively saying no thank you! (which is the response that any rational mind should have, if placement numbers were presented honestly to them at the time of application to grad programs).
I don't think most career academics will be very valuable resources for people who want to transition outside of academia. Experience in academia really, really does not translate to anything outside it (speaking as someone who has been out for years now). So I'd say any advisory body for people making the transition out of academia should use as few faculty and as many former academics as possible.
I don't think it would be that hard to track attrition and placement. All you would have to do for attrition is look at graduate students on department websites. Then you could say, Cohort 2004 had six students year one, three students year four etc. The wiki tracks placement, and that information would just have to be organized ("Cohort 2004: no nationally-advertised tenure track placements"). It is too late to record the demographic disaster of our generation, but this could start now and offer future prospective students much more truthful information than we ever had.
"It is too late to record the demographic disaster of our generation" -- surely we all know how many people entered in our cohort, how many got the PhD, and how many now have some kind of job?
Entirely agree with both 9:52 and 11:11 ---> the initiative proposed by 9:52 is an excellent idea, but the body, as 11:11 suggests, should consist of those who have transitioned, not those who haven't
11:22: Yes, if people are willing to share it. My own cohort data is so disastrous that I think I might be recognized. I will tell you how many people got "real" jobs with normal searches: none. All subsequent years: one, and in circumstances that rendered the vast majority of candidates ineligible.
Data on my cohort would also potentially indicate to anyone who knows what institution I am from and what year. But I can also say that out of my cohort as of right now exactly zero have tenure-track jobs.
What if we set up a wiki for the data? Those who know, whether they went to that institution or not, would update the wiki completely anonymously. If any data are wrong, other wiki users would correct it. Then we would have a place to send would-be graduate students when they are trying to choose between departments.
The format could be like the job market wiki with a list of all PhD-granting institutions. Underneath could be the year of the cohort and a list of outcomes. Like this:
Someplace University -cohort 2005 (5 matriculated): 2 ABD, 2 TT, 1 alt-ac -cohort 2006 (4 matriculated): 1 TT, 1 high school, 1 adjunct, 1 drop out before degree -cohort 2007 (4 matriculated): 1 VAP, 2 high school, 1 adjunct, 1 ABD
This would obviously be updated as peoples' outcomes changed (e.g., VAPs becoming TT in the next job cycle).
A wiki as this would be useful, although some people might have privacy concerns with their career being tracked on the internet. There is no excuse for departments not doing this.
Someplace U
Cohort 1995: (6 matriculated): 5 TT, 1 serving life sentence for child pornography Cohort 2002 (6 matriculated: 5 TT, 3 jerks on search committees, 1 online troll on FV Cohort 2009 (5 matriculated): 1 drop out before degree, 2 VAP, 1 suicide Cohort 2010: (5 matriculated): 5 VAP Cohort 2011: (5 matriculated): 2 VAP, 2 High School, 1 froze to death in a gutter Cohort 2015: (6 matriculated): 6 VAP, 0 hope.
4:00 here. Yeah, 8:21, I see that keeping it simple would probably be better than trying to actually keep track of all these people's careers. So something like:
To answer 5:02, I think it might depend on the department. For most it will be when they matriculated to start their PhD work, BUT if it is one of these places that does an "on the way" MA after which you have the option to stay on for the PhD or move on to something else, you might want to do something like this to indicate some students left after receiving the MA:
If someone makes it, I'll enter the information that I know. But I really think this is something that departments, or the SCS, or the SCS via moral pressure on departments, should be keeping track of. Deliberate ignorance should not be considered ethical or professional. Especially given that most of its victims, if are anything like me when I was 22, have no clue that they should see professors as anything but benevolent, all-knowing, truth-telling gods.
When I was 22, I did take placement into account when I was accepted into two different programs. But the information I had was largely anecdotal (and also based on the pre-recession job market, when things didn't seem too bad. It would have been nice to have more concrete statistics--because even at 22 I knew this was important, although again this was choosing between two programs, not choosing between graduate school and less ruinous life-choices, such as becoming a heroin addict.
Ironically, this year, the school I rejected had better placement than the school I ultimately attended.
Maybe if the wiki is created and starts to get populated with data, it will come to the attention of the SCS who will realize that they should make something like this. The problem is that they would have to get departments to voluntarily submit the information. I'm not sure it's easily available in any public way.
I do NOT believe that any department would of its own accord admit to a terrible placement record. People don't just work against themselves that way. And there are pressures from the department's university to keep up the appearance of bustling activity and success.
Once a wiki gets off the ground, prospective grad students could be advised not only to consult it for themselves but to judge departments based on whether they refer students to it or not. Even if no dept will actively undermine their own interest in recruiting, I could see acknowledging the wiki or not as a good way to judge the ethics of a department regarding placement.
A workshop for TT faculty on how to advocate for their department to the administration. Advocating, that is, for adding a new tenure line instead of annual searches for VAPs (think of how much money is wasted every year on this, especially at the schools that have campus visits for VAPs!), advocating for their adjuncts to get upgraded to lecturer status, demonstrating to the administration that classics is important to the university as a whole, and so on.
Most TT faculty have had no training in working with administrators, and so don't even bother to try, or aren't even aware that trying is an option.
Or, more likely, simply leave it at "1PhD (John Doe, 2012)" and let the lack of tenure-track placement speak for itself. In a field this size, nobody is going to be able to claim false placements.
"Most TT faculty have had no training in working with administrators, and so don't even bother to try, or aren't even aware that trying is an option."
Do you really think that it hasn't occurred to tenured faculty that more tenure lines are better than VAPs and adjuncts? That they don't ask the administration for them with whatever data they have? That if they just asked more nicely, things would get done? This seems absurd.
By all means let's discuss how departments can advocate for themselves, but the idea that departments in this day and age don't even try to do so already is downright laughable.
The idea of a placement wiki with names attached makes me uncomfortable, and seems unnecessary. The basic information in an anonymized wiki (institution, matriculation year, type of placement) would be enough fodder for a google search to discredit a false claim of a TT placement, the type of claim most likely to be made spuriously.
Some departments are clueless, but in this Darwinian world of higher ed, those will not be around for a while. Humanities departments that cannot maintain their enrollment are being eliminated altogether, and Classics is the sort of small, obscure department that is on the chopping block. Even Departments chaired by drooling imbeciles know that they need to fight tooth and nail for more tenure lines, given that undergraduates tend to prefer professors with positive reputations, rather than the latest VAP/adjunct passing through. This is not to say VAPs and adjuncts don't do good jobs, but by the time they can accrue a positive reputation, they have moved on to someplace else.
But in these Darwinian times, Departments know they need graduate students they have no hope of placing to serve as cheap TAs, and in some places, even paying tuition. In a cruel irony, the presence of graduate students can be a selling point for recruiting and retaining those precious TT lines, saying "we are a serious PhD granting institution," even if its PhDs go on to little more than a short professional life of poverty, misery and squalor.
In a cruel irony, the presence of graduate students can be a selling point for recruiting and retaining those precious TT lines, saying "we are a serious PhD granting institution," even if its PhDs go on to little more than a short professional life of poverty, misery and squalor.
Yes, this. This is the problem. Even if faculty know that they are and are sad about overpopulating the world with useless PhDs and are willing to solve the whole TA issue (which I believe could be solved with the right application of force and money if we--and I include the SCS as a body--really put our minds and resources behind our efforts), they can't fight this.
It seems to me that with the path to TT getting extended (perhaps some adjuncting before and after the PhD, followed by a VAP position or maybe more than one, then possibly TT if things turn out well) that it would in theory be in one's interest to try to get first to the level of "inside candidate." Newly exiting PhDs and working VAPs can all be potentially valuable TT faculty members, but the VAPs who have inside candidate status at least have a shot at being considered on the basis of longer and deeper acquaintance. The essential problem that remains is that it's often (almost always? always?) impossible to tell which VAP positions are at institutions that might be hiring TT in the near future.
The VAP balance is a very hard one. VAPs have the advantage in a TT search over new PhDs in that they've been in the trenches, generally at higher-than-TT loads, and they know the ropes in a way that graduate students soon will, but do not yet. At the same time, however, VAPs often cannot publish as quickly, and too much teaching can slow down a research trajectory to the point where it can look like tenure is going to be a difficult bid.
I don't have any answers. But I do warn students who are already on the PhD trail that there is likely a long, underpaid apprenticeship awaiting ahead of any even remotely possible TT job.
The main problem is few get to "choose" their VAP. Most temporary positions this year have had 90-130 applicants, owing the surplus of PhDs. You apply, and you accept if offered. If you are lucky, it is a VAP covering a spot that will soon have a TT search, and if you prove yourself, you may have a serious advantage. If you are unlucky, you get a sabbatical fill, and they definitely will want you gone in a year.
Few candidates have the luxury of picking and choosing, given that if they fail to obtain a short term position they will be without affiliation, and basically out of the field for good.
That's quite true. I think the most I can say is that I've seen more success from those who are willing/able to forego most geographic restrictions in these kinds of searches, but that's probably on some level just simple math. I would think that most folks have built-in deal-breakers (academic, personal, familial, political, climate-al) in terms of academic geography, and that's quite legitimate in my book. I know I did, and do.
Yikes. Do we really feel that anyone who spends a year without a job/institutional affiliation is "out of the field for good"? That is seriously bad news for almost my entire cohort, and lots and lots of other recent grads. Are there no stories of people who independent scholared it up for a year or so and got a job the next season (armed with PhD-in-hand status and perhaps an article or two)?
Offhand I can think of two people who had an "unaffiliated" year (not even an unpaid research associate position) who went on to get VAPs and ultimately permanent positions - one last year, one the year before. But neither of the permanent positions were in the US. So it does happen, but it's exceptional.
To any who are fortunate enough to have a choice of VAPs, the advice above about trying to be an internal candidate is sound, though with the caveat that being an internal candidate does not guarantee landing a job, as we know.
Better than being an internal candidate, I think is landing a VAP or lectureship that is multi-year. Having the time and energy that would otherwise go into relocating and reacclimating to put into research and teaching can only improve one's profile.
What's more, if you are on a one year VAP in a department that's running a TT search, you will only have been in that department for a month or two before they start reading applications. Not much better than a stranger, and maybe even worse than one, because now you are no longer exciting and new.
I don't think temporary unaffiliation is necessarily a guaranteed path out of academia, but if I were giving advice to someone looking at that possibility, I'd suggest that they try hard to adjunct--and to adjunct for courses that will make their efforts look interesting and pay longer-term dividends, if they possibly can. That means maybe doing myth (because everyone needs myth!), upper-level language/lit, or perhaps something freshly designed. My department invites our continuing adjuncts to design new courses about half of their time, while fully respecting that they may want to repeat instead in order to save effort and energy. We also give them a decent (shared) office, a warm welcome, and invitations to everything except faculty meetings (to which they really could come if they wanted, but who wants to come to faculty meetings?). It's not much, but we're at least their pied-a-terre, their library card, their letterhead, and in some cases their recommenders for a future upgrade to full-time or TT.
Last year there on the wiki was a person who moved from a job teaching private high school to a multi-year VAP. So it can happen, although in this instance the individual was teaching Latin during their unaffiliated year, and then moved to a VAP that required a Latin teacher. Such a gap year might work for a Latin literature person (and boy was this a rough year for them), but would work less well for Greek lit, history, archaeology or any other specialty that does not have much high school/college crossover.
While leaving the field is still mostly a professional death sentence, I do think we will see a trickle of people reenter after short periods outside of academia, if only because there are currently not enough temporary positions to absorb the collapse of the TT market, and the high quality of the people leaving the field will make it more plausible that some will manage to, against all odds, to get back in.
Such a daunting prospect would be easier for those with independent wealth, or a spouse that can support them while they publish as an independent scholar.
Here's a long-term solution to the job market woes. It will never be adopted, but why not dream?
As we all know, there are too many people getting PhDs for the number of jobs available, but large departments are reluctant to decrease the number of graduate students because they provide cheap teaching assistant labor, and so they keep glutting the market even further. Well, why not just hire recent PhDs for that cheap teaching assistant labor? After all, if we lived on TA wages for 5-7 years, we can probably keep living on them, and wouldn't that be better than unemployment (or worse, non-academic employment!)? The quality of the TAs would rise, the amount of time instructors have to spend training and supervising them would decrease, and the recent PhDs now TAing would have plenty of time to focus on research. Perhaps best of all, it would allow those recent PhDs to keep dreaming of eventually securing real adult academic employment someday, and it will probably happen just often enough to make that dream not entirely insane. Sure, maybe you need to pay PhDs a little more to TA, but surely enough of them are desperate enough that costs can be kept down (I mean, if people will adjunct for less than $7000 a semester, then surely they can be bought for less to do much less). Then, in 15 years, the number of jobs and candidates will have balanced out to something remotely tolerable again. What's not to love?
Anyone know anything about Knox College? It's so late in the season, and they advertised the exact same part-time job in the Fall. Now an anthropologist is chairing the SC? Sounds fishy.
In response to fixing the TT market, I am not sure there is a fix. I think we can look to Continental Europe to see what the endgame looks like. The only way to divvy up fewer TT jobs among more people is to make everyone's career in the professorship shorter. The European model currently has people obtaining professorships at around 40. In the glory days of the US model you had a TT job at 27, tenure at 33 and were a full professor by 40. It still happens, prodigies and golden children and the like. But most of us have to wait, even if well qualified. Already the time to PhD is pushing 10 years. Then add another two-four years of VAPing. This time lag is likely to increase. At least one successful candidate on the wiki had 6 years as a VAP before getting first TT job--essentially a second PhD period of non TT academic purgatory. Thus even people in today's generation who get TT jobs will hold them for shorter period of time. This also represents a profound pay-cut, as less time in TT jobs means lower life time earnings. None of us are in it for the money, but this pay cut will affect our chances at basic financial stability.
@9:42 one key difference in Europe is that Europeans actually have to retire. This shortens their careers, but it means that you don't have people staying in jobs until they keel over dead or lose their marbles. It also makes job openings relatively predictable.
Switching to something like the European model would not counter certain issues that affect the job market, unfortunately. I know that at my institution the line of a retiring professor is more likely to be shifted to a department considered more of a priority by the administration or cut altogether rather than given back to the home department for a new hire. We battle to the point of exhaustion to maintain those lines and justify why we need more bodies in place, but administrators have certain priorities and they rarely include the humanities. Perhaps this is different at other institutions, but T-T lines here are associated with the faculty and not the department and can be shifted by deans and provosts where they want them. I know many who are on the outside looking in who express their frustration at what seems to be lethargic departments with faculty doing little advocation for hires and new lines. I think that is the exception to the rule and that all departments, particularly those in the humanities, spend a great deal of time trying to justify their positions to upper administration. Perhaps some training, as was mentioned above, would be beneficial, but in my experience the only argument that seems to work well is showing that your department is revenue-generating or the recipient of large donations. By revenue-generating, I do not just mean teaching large service courses that bring in tuition money since that would exist for the university anyways. I mean finding some method where the university does not have to supply much capital that regularly brings money into the institution. Patents shared by a researcher and the institution would be an example. This is tricky for humanities departments to do, even when the university increasingly demands that we be "entrepreneurial".
This relates to an older discussion (just catching up on the past few weeks of comments), but I am surprised that no one mentioned Helios as a top Classics journal (particularly excellent in its openness to modern critical approaches). Or Eugesta--still very recent, but absolutely top-notch so far, and I think it's fantastic that it is open-source.
If we are going to claim that Eugesta is a "top-notch" journal or that "the very impressive names in the opening issues" are evidence of such, it seems only reasonable to point out that a ridiculously high percentage of those same names are also those belonging to the publication's editors or members of its "scientific committee". You can draw your own conclusions about what Eugesta actually is, but I fail to see how it meets even the most basic criteria needed to qualify as an academic journal.
Just pulled it up, and to be fair Eugesta's editorial page lists Daddy Cruel as "suspended." At least they are acknowledging the issue rather than trying to whitewash or ignore it (as merely erasing his name and pretending it was never there would suggest).
Euguesta does look like the European "Node" version of the old house journals run out of departments (HSCP, CA), which may mean don't bother submitting unless you are on the advisory committee or know somebody who is.
To be fair re: CD, he may be suspended pending the resolution of the case: until he confesses in open court, is found guilty by a jury or is acquitted. It seems that they have him, but we do live in a society where innocent until proven guilty, and so suspension is appropriate until the issue has been formally resolved.
After these high minded sentiments, I would say that the evidence presented so far suggests the guy is guilty, and Eugesta is yet another sex/gender institution tarnished by association with CD.
If you're going to make that argument, at least be intellectually consistent enough to apply it to Classics as a whole, Humanities as a whole, and all university professors. If you can't do that, then you're just another bigot.
Actually, the poster has a point. Eugesta is a perfect example of the subculture in Classics that turned Cruel Daddy into a major figure, praised and honored as a great scholar, when in fact his work is mediocre and he was only considered great because he worked on "edgy", "sexy" subjects.
I don't work on anything related (except tangentially) to sex/gender, so I'm not familiar with much of Daddy Cruel's work, but I think it's ludicrous to suggest that anyone is "tarnished by association" with him.
Possession of child pornography is one of the most common sex offenses in the United States. The likelihood, chilling as it is, is that all of us probably know one or more people who are guilty of it. These people are skilled at blending in and deflecting suspicion. Like many predators, they go undetected for years because they are expert at aping normal social behavior. They hide their deviance even from their closest family and friends (as indeed DC seems to have hidden it from his wife). I think a certain amount of soul-searching is appropriate under these circumstances, and many of the people who knew DC must be asking themselves if there were signs that they missed and wondering how they could have been friends/colleagues with a person like this. But these people fly under the radar every day. It is absurd to tar all of his colleagues with the same brush and consider all the (many many) people who were professionally associated with him as "tarnished." That number includes many people who have worked to bring to light ancient sexual exploitation, and some of whom have done good work against contemporary sexual exploitation as well.
Also, 11:53, your comment about Knox sounds angry. Is it personal? I know someone who was a visitor at Knox who loved it there. For those of us who have not completely given up on finding a job in classics, even in this miserable market, perhaps it is worth considering that Knox or USF might not seem toxic to everyone who has ever worked in these departments.
One of you wrote: "I don't work on anything related (except tangentially) to sex/gender, so I'm not familiar with much of Daddy Cruel's work, but I think it's ludicrous to suggest that anyone is "tarnished by association" with him."
I would normally agree, but this is not the case here. I have heard from the specific department. His students are devastated at how his arrest and upcoming conviction (after all, he did confess to the FBI if you read the complaint) will impact their program and subsequent career. I'm sure prospective employers won't blame the students, of course, but they did lose their mentor and a previously well-connected one at that.
I am actually not presumptuous to believe I can judge people from an anonymous post. Hell, I couldn't even possibly judge them by a statement they might make even if they weren't anonymous. I am more of the Albert Ellis persuasion, whose books on emotional disturbance I would recommend to everyone. Unless CD's colleagues defend his actions, given his confession of course and after his trial and probably conviction, no they are not tainted by association. Nevertheless, there are colleagues that I have heard pity his students, and I know for a fact his students are distressed and afraid about the future.
Myself I am troubled by something else: the number of Classicists who have already been arrested for activities similar to or worse than CD's, or who defend pedophilia (yes, I have actually heard some Classicists do that), or accuse those that abhor it as bigots (unless the above post was a joke). Last, but not least, I don't know how many of you actually remember, but this is the third such arrest in Cincinnati. There were two more Classicists who were arrested in the early 1990s. One was a librarian from the main library, and I think he got 175 to life or something like that, and one from a different university in the area. I am not sure what happened to the latter any more. It may be a coincidence, but it is troubling nevertheless.
Daddy Cruel didn't have any students and certainly wasn't anyone's "mentor". As far as I know, he was (nominal?) supervisor on one dissertation, the author of which now has tenure.
1:47PM again: I see now that the person writing @ 12:26 AM meant "people who take classes with X", not "people who write a dissertation under the direction of X". DC had students in the first sense (of course), but not in the second.
If you re-read, you'll see that the "bigots" post was directed at those who think that a scholar/person is tarnished just by having worked on sexuality or collaborated with HP or belonged to an organization in which HP was prominent. There is no indication that abhorring pedophilia makes one a bigot.
Anonymous 1:47, we seem to have different information. I am not affiliated with the specific department and only repeat what I have heard from colleagues, i.e. that there are students who are upset. Regarding the comment of Anonymous 2:12, I put a disclaimer. The whole Cincinnati incident is deplorable, of course, and I hope the field becomes concerned about several similar incidents of the last couple of decades.
@ Anon 8:21: Sorry if my previous post was a bit curt. I'm sure students in classes there now are very upset about the whole thing. But DC was in the dept a long time and, thankfully, with one or two nominal exceptions, never had any of his own advisees. Maybe somebody had the bad luck to sign on with him recently that I'm unaware of, but I doubt it.
No, your post was not curt at all. It is possible my information is inaccurate as it is not first-hand but rather something a non-Cincinnati colleague told me. That said, I checked the list of PhD graduates from Cincinnati on the department's website, and you are right that DC does not appear to have had many students, judging from the title list. On the other hand, I suspect he sat in several committees as a reader, again if the titles are any guide.
I would have thought he would have his own students; I wonder if they got a weird vibe from him. Those who took a class or two from him or even had him as a second reader are not particularly close to the disaster and won't see their careers seriously impacted, although I'm sure they are upset.
Personally I am getting bad vibes from several colleagues who appear to support a pedophile agenda and hope the FBI is aware of that. As for Cincinnati, it used to be dealing with severe internal issues that did not allow it to function well for many years. There were also areas that produced almost no PhDs at all. Ancient History used to be one, Greek another. A well-known Latinist there produced only one PhD student in their entire career. In all cases I understand it was the personality of the people who didn't care about their students. On the other hand, Cincinnati produced several archaeologists. I believe the younger generation of professors is excellent, however, and it is all a matter of when the last person of the "old guard" will mercifully retire, since the administration never cared to clean up the mess twenty years or so ago.
In the case of DC, I am not so much wondering whether the students were getting the vibes, but rather his wife of more than two decades.
Wow, @11:51, way to infer the wife's complicity without any evidence and for no apparent reason!
See April 24, 1:18 above--as that person points out, these people are sociopaths who are experts at deception. Family/friends/colleagues seldom have any inkling. That's the really scary thing--you probably know someone with these impulses, or other horrific predilections. They don't go around wearing "pedophile" signs. Think of Ted Bundy, apparently a really charming and normal-seeming guy. People who give off bad vibes are exposed early on. It's the ones who seem normal that fly under the radar for years, as CD did.
If you read my post again, I said that I WONDER, not that I know. I agree that perverts are masters of deception, however there are always signs. There are also studies that suggest that spouses often know. Whether the specific spouse did know or not, I don't know. However, I wonder.
This bickering is unbelievable! As is the lack of understanding of basic reading comprehension. Who talked about sins of the father passing to descendants? Did anyone talk about descendants? And who has been tarnished? The use of the verb wonder entails not actually knowing. On the other hand, there are those studies. And revisiting this person's publications I would argue offers several clues, in hindsight, of course.
At any rate, what this person really knew or did not is only known to herself.
When I read 5:39 PM my first thought was "But charm is inherently superficial, right? Maybe it will help you stand out in a high-stakes interview, but it won't go far in any real relationship, spousal or not, will it?" And then it hit me. Maybe this is why so many classicists are weirdos: we are actively screening *for* sociopaths!!
I think this our first year to have at least one full-time troll; that adds quite a bit to comment volume. Also, each year increases the number of people on the market.
Here is a horror story from the other end of the career spectrum.
Earlier this year, I decided to take early retirement at the end of next year. During all my negotiations with the Dean of Faculty, the working assumption of us both was that my position would be retained in Classics and would be filled; my colleagues would run a t-t search next year (this is why I agreed to retire at the end of NEXT year, not this year, to give them time to do a search).
Today, we were informed that the President of our SLAC has chosen NOT to recommend to the Board of Trustees that our search be authorized. No search. No replacement. And the retirement agreement I signed says my decision is irrevocable. I can't change my mind now.
If you want to know why many professors in their 60s are not retiring, look no further than this. They are trying to protect their programs. I genuinely thought my administration was negotiating with me in good faith. I genuinely thought I was doing a good thing, for my department and for the profession as well as for myself. I thought I was opening a line for a young, energetic classicist by quitting before I hit total burn-out (which I can feel coming). Instead, I have damaged my department, probably irrevocably. I don't want to give details that could identify me, but we are a very small department and without my position, my colleagues will have to discontinue the major.
I am alternating between raging and weeping. I killed my program.
This is for 11:24 and 12:08 pm. I'd just like to third the comments above and say that this is not your fault. I hope sympathetic faculty from other departments, and perhaps even from peer-institutions, exert some pressure on your administration. An institution calling itself a SLAC without providing a Classics major is a preposterous scenario.
The discipline is going extinct. There will likely be a thousand fewer active classicists in 2020 than there were in 2005. Classics will likely be the first victim of STEM-mania.
Don't think STEM hasn't already claimed victims, 12:50. My SLAC no longer teaches German and has significantly downsized French. Thankfully, Classics still remains afloat thanks to colleagues that 1)are excellent teachers who attract and keep students and 2)are also masters of internal politics and diversifying what we do for the school. But, if the upper administration can't be trusted to keep their word, ubique naufragium est. I'm sorry that happened to you 11:24, to your students, and the department you clearly worked so hard to build and preserve. This may not be the place to do so, but a message out via CAMWS or SCS so that other departments might rally their support, for whatever that is worth, sounds warranted.
@11:24 unfortunately this will happen much more frequently at SLACs that are under-endowed (with endowments lower than say $250 million). If I were you I'd look to those SLACs with lower endowments whose classics programs are flourishing (e.g. Monmouth College, Cornell College, Beloit college), and do the things that they are doing, which often involves refocusing curriculum towards culture courses and big enrollment courses and away from language instruction.
For any search to fail this season is a sign of grave incompetence on the part of the search committee, if not down right maliciousness. There are so many excellent candidates on the market that no search should fail.
The only justification (but a really frustrating one) for a failed search is if the university pulled the funding for the position after it was advertised. The department can only watch in dismay when that happens. If the search fails because the search committee does not feel that the candidates are adequate (e.g. Toronto for Ancient Philosophy), then that is a problem. There are far too many qualified candidates in every sub-field of Classics.
11:32 There are far too many qualified candidates in every sub-field of Classics.
Disclaimer: not a Medieval Latinist and not affiliated with CUA.
That actually might not be the case for Medieval Latin. It's not a sub-field commonly taught in Classics departments. It's not just about being able to read quia + subjunctive--it's a whole cultural context, a different set of literatures, philosophies, and theologies. CUA might also have religious requirements or preferences for candidates. I wouldn't be so quick to say that a failed search in THIS area is purely the search committee's fault. Maybe. Maybe not.
There are enough medievalists being trained in excellent programs (at, e.g., Notre Dame and Toronto) to make it unlikely that there really wasn't a suitably qualified candidate out there for the CUA job. CUA is a Catholic school, but it is not a school like Franciscan University or Christendom College that requires its faculty to take an oath of fidelity to the magisterium. Many medievalists are Catholic or at least comfortable enough with Catholicism to work at a place like CUA. No doubt there could be all sorts of factors that none of us could know about, and we shouldn't pretend to be in a position to reach any conclusions, but it seems to me unlikely that there simply was not a genuinely qualified candidate.
Much the same is true of the Toronto ancient philosophy search. You can identify the finalists for that position by looking at the departmental website and figuring out who was giving talks at the relevant time; my guess is that at least one of them was qualified for the job. Perhaps none of them were really suitable, but if so then the SC made a mistake in choosing them as finalists rather than any of the very many other people who applied. Besides, given that they've already turned around and opened up a search at full professor (with a description that might seem oddly precise to those who know the field), it seems not unlikely that they never intended the assistant/associate search to succeed, but were just trying to put themselves in a position to demand to the administration that they be allowed to hire at full. Given that they recently lost two full professors who are leaders in the field, one can hardly blame them for wanting to hire at that level. But whatever their intention was, they wasted a whole lot of people's time. Aside from cases where the administration is to blame, it's hard to see how a search can fail in this market unless the department is just screwing things up.
Whoever is considering applying to a non-permanent position at KCL or any other UK institution without being an EU citizen is wasting time. Who knows what will happen after the June referendum but for now that's the situation at most British universities.
The Toronto dept is rotten to the core. Hires made out of the blue, failed searches, searches aimed at hiring partners of faculty members. A rotten place that thinks to be at the top and yet cannot place their students in decent and stable positions.
Yes, though I suspect that those of us who work in ancient philosophy hoped that perhaps the special nature of Toronto's program there would make a difference. Really, it makes sense for them, because if they don't hire at full their ancient philosophy program will be guaranteed to decline to mediocrity and obscurity (one outstanding scholar and one extremely aged formerly outstanding scholar alongside a full professor who barely publishes and some young classicist would not add up to a top 5 graduate program). Hiring at assistant or even associate would not save them. So if in fact they calculated all along to make that search fail in order to hire at full, they were at least acting in the self-interest of their interdepartmental graduate program in ancient philosophy. Despite this, virtually no hire they can make will enable them to remain as outstanding as they once were. People who want to work on ancient philosophy should go to Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago or even Pittsburgh before considering Toronto. Toronto, along with Cornell and Texas, is a thing of the past so far as that field is concerned, and it will remain so even after they hire someone away from Cornell.
Programs that are or are considered second and third-tier programs (it would be good to have a list to advise people with) ought to closing up shop and reducing themselves to MAT/MA-only programs. I think it's disingenuous for departments, now almost entirely run by professors with an Ivy League-background, to pretend that their students have any hope of meaningful employment in the field.
What I see instead is departments encouraging their graduate students to give papers at every conference, forcing them to write glowing evaluations for faculty members so the latter can win campus awards, and so on. It's all meant to prove to the campus administration that the department is relevant. "X students gave conference papers at CAMWS this year. Professor Y is an innovative, inspiring teacher who receives high marks from all of his graduate students."
In re this year's batch of newly employed, it is remarkable that amid all these theories gender goes unmentioned. Really? No one noticed there's ca 14 Rachels for every Ronald? Tbc: a) this is terriffic; b) were I on sc this year, I would have put Rachel on top of pile, consciously or not; c) I'm not on market myself. Just laughing aloud (as the kids say) at the fact that, unless I've overlooked, no one here mentions--or celebrates--the most obvious factor in the mix.
6:41 I could not agree more. Close those third-tiers! There is zero advantage for anyone getting a cut-rate doctorate. What's more, there is little to no advantage in Awarding one! Yet many current programs produce cut-rate PhDs.
It is esp annoying because there's a clear economic argument for emphasizing MAs instead of doctorates: MA makes money for our administrative overlords. My local uni darn near publicizes as much, but refuses to entertain the notion of closing their shit PhD program.
This idea is also essential for the SCS. No, they do not have ultimate say on matter. But no matter: SCS role is to begin the conversation. To move the dialogue past treating-contingents-humanely.
I agree strongly that many doctorate programs should close, and even traditional "top" ones need to shrink their enrollment. Of course the calculation is not as easy as "all but first tier." Traditionally first tier schools feed into R1s, R1s feed into R2s and LACs, and third tiers might feed into CCs. While it briefly looked like "top" programs might dominate the whole market after 2008, that trend has reversed. The truth is, people produced at "top" programs do not necessarily fit the bill outside of a research university, and so people from "second tier" have proven very competitive on the SLAC/R2 market.
Note that the best placement this year was Ohio State, a solid but basically second tier program, with at least four TT placements. Many "top programs" (i.e. Berkeley, Penn, Cornell, if I read the wiki correctly) failing to place anyone TT at all.
So there must be some shrinkage, but it must be across the spectrum, with top programs reducing enrollment, combing grad programs, while second and third tier programs with dismal placement records should indeed shut down all together.
The tier system is largely meaningless in this post-apocalyptic world. There have always been absolute duds coming out of the top programs, and stars from less prestigious programs. If anything, it's probably easier now to get a good job from a less prestigious program, though harder overall because of the catastrophic market contraction.
We've certainly overproduced PhDs, but that's been true for a long time now, and the "top" programs have been the prime offenders there.
The lesser ranked places are also probably better at playing the placement game than the institutions that have just assumed anyone and everyone will embrace the golden child of the year. That game is long over.
7:14 is spot on here. With that said, everyone needs to reduce enrollments and many "third" tier places probably should push to close PhDs and go MA/T only. The rub of it is that, at least at most institutions I'm familiar with, the most common justification for retaining TT lines (or even the occasional addition of one) is the presence of a PhD program. (Note: having a "prestigious" MA program generally does not cut it when talking to admin types, EVEN if it is financially lucrative for the institution as a whole.) So, if we start cutting PhD programs, expect the number of jobs to decrease as well. Not that it can get much worse than it already is....
The situation at UK universities has been rotten to the core for a long time now. I can't believe that there are still folks from our side of the Atlantic bothering to apply! They only consider EU citizens with Oxbridge PhDs over there, and if you don't fit the bill, don't waste your time.
1,319 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 1001 – 1200 of 1319 Newer› Newest»Don't forget burying the survivors.
... a starving band of those denied the mercy of death upon impact sits on the mountainside and considers the impending winter....
So Famae Volent = the Donner Party?
That sounds right.
The Donner party had fewer jerks.
Jerked meat is good. It lasts longer.
I must be doing it wrong then. The more I jerk my meat the more quickly the whole thing is over.
Definitely wrong. Keep trying and improve your game. If you get artistic enough, you can put it on your CV. You'll get a job for sure.
Or at least give yourself a job.
The middle voice is no good in such situations.
On the contrary, there's a reason δέφομαι ends in "oh my".
Karen Kelsky says that publications from before a person is hired normally don't count for tenure. Does anyone have a sense of if that is true for Classics? I have always thought they do count. https://chroniclevitae.com/news/1356-does-it-count-for-tenure
It depends very much on the institution. Most places would expect you to maintain at least the same level of publication you did while VAP-ing, maybe a little less if you're coming in off a post-doc. It would be advisable to hold off on publishing a book until you get a T-T job, but once you're several years out, you probably need to get it done.
Unfortunately, every year that goes by without you getting a T-T job means you have to produce more than you would if you were in a T-T job to stay competitive. If you're 3-4 years out with no publications, you're SOL.
I mostly agree with 10:36.
It depends entirely on the institution. Karen Kelsky is writing from an R1 perspective, and her advice is going to be true for that kind of institution most of the time. For smaller institutions, this may or may not hold. In some cases, counting some of your pre-existing publications toward tenure can be part of the negotiation process; in other cases, the small school is buying not just their hopes of your future record but also your current record, so they'll want to count your pre-existing publications. The point is, this is school-specific more than it is field-specific (if it is the latter at all).
As for 10:36's advice about holding off on a book--I strongly disagree. If you want a TT job today, you are well-served by having a book under contract. You are better served by having one in print and at least the plans for another in the works.
I wouldn't say that VAPs are required to produce more than TTs to be competitive. Instead, I'd say that people on the market are required to produce more to get a job than they would be to get tenure at that job. So a TT person who wants to move (even to a comparable school) also has to produce more than that same person if they didn't want to move.
Don't hold off articles either. It can take up to two years from acceptance to get an article published, and the review process can take a minimum four months, and up to a year in the event of a revise and resubmit. So the article you are working on now might not come out until the random lightning of a TT job strikes.
Caveat: publishing articles while still in grad school isn't necessarily a good idea.
Re 12:06: These days publishing in grad school is absolutely necessary, at least by the ABD stage. While a few golden children still get jobs without publication records, most people getting jobs need at least two peer reviewed articles that are in print. Given the delay between submission and publication, this usually means starting the process in grad school.
12:06 is out of touch--dangerously so for anyone inclined to follow that advice.
12:06 here. I gave that advice because I published a few articles in grad school, but no one gave a shit, I was underemployed for several years, and I then left academia. But honestly I doubt having no articles would have helped either. The moral is really that no matter what you do, no one gives a shit and you will have to leave academia.
12:06 sounds like an old-timer who got a job for life 50 years ago with an unfinished dissertation and a few calls from a well placed advisor.
So if you publish a book before being hired, you need a second book to get tenure?
These days you probably need a second book to get tenure regardless.
I find it puzzling that the ones at my university who gave me the hardest time about the quality of my monograph and its publisher have never published one. I'm beginning to think there is something to the Boomer/HRC "rules are for peasants and inferiors" notion. The special snowflake millennials we see in our classrooms were apparently taught by the best.
Not to change the topic, but what's going on with the Chicago and Berkeley greek jobs? Can someone update the wiki?
As the wiki indicates, the Berkeley position has been offered, but it has not yet been accepted, so wiki etiquette requires names be left off.
Hiring freezes at Chicago may have impacted those searches.
To be fair to 12:06, I know of a couple people who have gotten TT jobs this year with no published articles. One I know for sure does not even have any articles under review. Just sayin'--there don't seem to be any hard and fast rules.
Re publishing. The fact that the rules do not seem to apply to a few Golden Children does not mean that they do not apply to the rest of us non-Golden children. And most of us here are non-Golden Children. That means publishing early and often just to stay competitive.
Those Golden Children who land TT jobs without publication are not necessarily advantaged by that fact. It means their tenure clock is ticking before they have even started to establish a publication pipeline.
For Pete's sake, if you're going to publish an article while in grad school PLEASE make sure that it actually deserves to be in print. Your advisor(s) will not always be the best judge of this. Not only does the field need fewer mediocre articles to be in print, but you don't help yourself by publishing something prematurely. And grad students don't always recognize how much they don't yet know.
Of course, what do I know? I can remember an enormously flawed article published in a prominent journal a few years ago, since the student who worked on X had decided to take a grad seminar term paper on Y and turn it into an article that evidently was too sexy for the journal to pass up (or its editor chose unqualified peer reviewers), and this helped the author get a tenure-track job at a top school. A year or two later a real expert in the field of Y wrote an article tearing the original to shreds... which quite possibly its author doesn't even know, since he/she works on X but not Y. So I guess everyone's happy, except for those who have to take the time to read both articles, neither of which would exist in an ideal world. (Derive from this whatever lessons you may wish. I'll add that the author's hiring was a fine choice by that school, so I have no personal animus towards him/her. Only that seminar-paper-turned-article.)
The above confuses the stated purpose of peer-reviewed research ("advance knowledge in the field") with its actual purpose ("get and keep an academic job").
... and in the bloodbath that is the job market, nobody can afford to wait until they're an actual expert to start publishing. No, publications don't guarantee a job (nope, they sure didn't land me one!), but they are one small factor that the job candidate can control in what seems to be a largely random process. In the case mentioned above, the peer review process and the journal, and possibly departmental mentoring, failed worse than the graduate student.
The field does indeed need fewer mediocre articles. I regret that when I signed up for the CAMWS journal that I requested a print copy. Ends up in the recycle bin every time.
It should be clear to all that there are journals and there are journals. An article in CJ or CW isn't going to count for as much as something in JRS/JHS. Similarly, a book with Bloomsbury isn't going to impress as much as a book with OUP/CUP.
That's not to say there aren't terrible articles published in JRS/JHS, or terrible books published with OUP/CUP. But they are rarer, and they do a lot more for the author's career, regardless.
Is a terrible article in JRS better for your career than an excellent article in CJ? I honestly don't know the answer to that.
People seem to be missing that article quality is subjective.
It is subjective. But our field is so big, with so many subfields, that it is important as a matter of professional survival to keep in mind that many colleagues who will be on hiring or promotion committees are in fact not equipped to judge the quality of your specialist work. You may be interested in Flavian poetry, but the committee chair does Archaic epigraphy, and does not realize the clever things you are saying about Silius Italicus. So journal rank can be taken as an imperfect but not completely daft proxy for quality. Your article about Silius will be judged very differently in the JRS than the same article in CJ. So while you want to write the best article possible, it is critical to try and pitch it to the best journal possible--and to develop a sense of what the journal pecking order is.
8:36
True only for R1s, super-selective SLACS and *maybe* some R2s that have pretentions. Anywhere else (90% of schools), # of articles/books and/or topic of articles/books matters more than placement or quality. Get your head out of your grad school advisor's ass, and you'll see that right away.
So let's rank the top ten journals for philology
@11:22--If you're at a point where anything like that really matters to you, then you're better off asking a trusted senior colleague to rank the journals as they appear to other members of your department. Or are you just trying to stir up shit?
1. JRS
2. JHS
3. CP
4. AJP
5. CQ
6. HSCP
7. Mnem
8. CJ
9. TAPA
10. G&R
Wow, it never ceases to amaze me how out of touch classics is as a discipline even by humanities standards.
It shouldn't. We are one of the most likely destinations for people who, on purpose, want to pursue the least relevant possible course of study. I know I started out with this shit in high school by choosing to study the most useless available language.
If you're in Classics and can't convey to students why this field is one of the best preparations for life and career, then I sincerely hope you're bombing out on the job market.
"Article quality is subjective"? In a blog with more than its share of silly comments, that's among the silliest.
Of course it's subjective. It depends in large part on the external reviewers, who are not endowed with infallibility. Or topics the journal currently wants to see represented. Or the mood and whims of the editor(s). Etc. etc.
There's this ad for a Roman archaeologist at Duke listed on the Chronicle and so far only there. Another fake?
Totally fake. There is a person on staff who does archaeology of the Western Provinces--and is from a European country, so s/he might be in need of the fake search for immigration/naturalization purposes. Nothing wrong with this, as this is responding to a U.S. requirement, but still this one looks so transparently fake that there is little reason to apply.
Article quality is definitely subjective, but that does not mean that any article could be perceived by someone as a "good" article--there are limits. Much of the time I think what is going on is that there are "open" readers and "closed" readers. "Open" readers read an article and think "hmm...I see their point, and it's somewhat interesting...I'll have think a bit more about that, but in the meantime good work for them to have put this out on the table in a reasonably clear and orderly way so that we can all talk about it" and then point out the few weaknesses that could or need to be addressed before publication. "Closed" readers read an article and think "bah! This is ridiculous! How could they think that!? This is a completely wrong direction for this question!" and proceed to find in relatively small errors or leaps in logic the grounds for damning the whole thing to the wastebasket. This accounts for the feeling of "subjectivity." (This is assuming the article is well-written and has an appropriate amount of research, citations of past scholarship, etc.)
On "it doesn't matter where you publish as long as you have a long publication list"--there are still people out there saying you need to have "well-placed" articles, and I don't mean dinosaurs, but relatively young people. All the evidence either way is anecdotal. We need some actual data on this.
At this pace we'll need a section for fake searches on the wiki.
There has yet to be any proof of a single fake search, and the argumentation has been scant. Some of you need to a metaphorical or literal bitch-slap to bring you back to reality.
More than 10% of the jobs this year went to candidates with longstanding personal connections to the SC in question. I doubt that these SCs thought they were running rigged searches, but that statistic sure makes it seem like candidates without longstanding personal connections were not receiving the same degree of consideration. (Which is not to say that I think these candidates were unworthy, dear troll!)
More than 10% of the jobs this year went to candidates with longstanding personal connections to the SC in question.
Assertion, not evidence, proof, or argument. No attempt to define "personal connections" or "longstanding". No attempt to argue that the pulled-from-the-ass number of "10%" has any meaning.
I doubt that these SCs thought they were running rigged searches,
So you agree that these were not fake searches, but you still want to rage against the machine. How nice for you.
but that statistic sure makes it seem like candidates without longstanding personal connections were not receiving the same degree of consideration.
A reintroduction of earlier assumptions as if those assumptions by being repeated had been proven. Invocation of "statistics" as if a scientific model that somehow garners "truth", but done without any evidence of the appropriateness of your "statistical" approach or even any evidence of statistical knowledge on your part.
(Which is not to say that I think these candidates were unworthy, dear troll!)
And finally, an ad hominem designed to negate any response other than agreement with you.
Do you see why your complaints can't be taken seriously? CAN you see?
There are searches with an inside candidate, which is true for almost any TT position that has a VAP filling it. These may not be fake, although the VAP may have some advantage if they have done a good job and are well liked--a toxic personality can wreak a department, so departments may see some advantage in hiring someone they know is a good social fit.
Then there are fake searches. The Duke job seems to be an utter fake, likely made for immigration/naturalization purposes. You can find someone on the Duke website who exactly fits the profile of the search, and comes from abroad. Here the limited advertisement it a courtesy to the rest of us: Duke wants us to know this is a fake search by not advertising through the SCS, burying the search in the Chronicle and making the job description so specific that few would feel themselves qualified to apply.
So thank you Duke, that is how you are supposed to run a fake pro forma search that doesn't waste anyone's time.
I believe it is high time we Classicists talke matters regarding job search fraud into our own hands. Fortunately, the government allows for anonymous reports, especially when it comes to immigration fraud. Duke has repeatedly violated labor law in the past, at least when it came to Classicist hires, so it is high time they face the music. If their foreign candidate is any good, the law allows for this person to get a green card pretty quickly with, or even without a sponsor. If they didn't go that way, this means the inside candidate has a strong foreign supporter, but he/she is not good enough to go through the immigration process for distinguished candidates. In this case, immigration law indeed requires that the position be advertised through the appropriate channels. When done legally, this means that the ad has been printed in several publications, including some very expensive ones like the New York Times. If Duke did not advertise properly, then they have broken immigration law in the hopes that no job candidate will dare report them, and the government won't notice.. Someone must report them to the government, then sit back and enjoy the spectacle. Of course that presupposes that they advertised a fake position, a foreign internal candidate was hired as a future EB 3 green card candidate (so neither EB 1 nor EB 2), and they did not really hold a real search.
I also read a comment here that you guys only discovered who got the Toronto job in February. I know it was given much earlier than February. It came to my attention a long time ago that Toronto is a little .... ahem ..... strange when it comes to hiring Classicists.
I would hate to see Duke punished for *not* violating community standards. They are communicating clearly with anyone who knows how to read job ads. They are not using candidates' time and energy and getting desperate people's hopes up by not indicating that the search is actually destined to be a conversion or a spousal hire. I think that is what most people here object to. But I don't think there's any way to stop either type, and you'll get yourself blacklisted by trying to.
You would hate to see the law enforced?! That's odd. So you don't believe in the rule of law? No, what Duke and others should do is observe the law. The university does not belong to the department. They presumably advertise a position in order to find the best person and serve the field and their students. What does "I would hate to see Duke punished" even mean? Or "they are communicating clearly with anyone who knows how to read job ads"? If this were legal, then they could communicate clearly "we are hiring X or Y and there won't be a real search." That'll save everybody money and time. They don't do that, why? Because it is obviously illegal. And you would hate to see illegal gone? That's why our field is partly going down the drain, and things will get a lot worse in the future. Spinelessness doesn't help,people! It's something like the big and small drug dealers, I suppose: support this activity in the hopes our turn will come to torture young colleagues later. You can read all about this mentality in Venkatesh's Gang Leader for a Day.
So next to the pedophile colleagues (and trust me, we've had a lot of those and there are a lot more around who "found refuge in Classics"), we will support the destruction of our field that departments perpetrate through illegal hiring practices? Of course, they know they can get away with it because they haven't screwed anyone yet who is well connected and with money to sue the hell out of them.
Anyone who puts up, or even excuses this behavior deserves their professional woes.
Sure, it's illegal, but trying to enforce this law will just make things worse. Because in the end, all they have to say is that the person they wanted to hire was a better "fit," and interviewed better. Totally subjective, they can hire whomever they want. And you can't do a thing about it: as job candidate, you have zero power and zero rights. And by trying to make any one place follow the law, you will just drive others to pretend that more closed searches are open, rather than making it obviously closed as these people did, which will in the end increase everyone's misery. One thing nobody wants is more fake searches.
Berkeley was also a 'fake' search. Everybody knew who was going to he hired before the search even started.
DNFTT
Who got the Berkeley job? Someone update the wiki!
As noted above, there is a difference between "fake search" and "inside hire". Fact is Berkeley's search was neither.
I actually believe in the rule of law, and no, I don't think things will get worse if it is enforced. I don't know whether you guys have realized this, but our field is dying. We simply cannot afford to tolerate corruption or accommodate agendas. We need the best to get the jobs, and we need this now. I've seen terrible things in my career in this field, from worthless people sleeping their way to jobs (!) to foreign professors imposing their mediocre protégés, not to mention the bluffers with the "cool," "trendy," and dated research, who don't even have the background or indeed knowledge to be in the field in the first place.
I personally have tenure, and I am quite happy at my current institution, but it pains me enormously to see this field go down the drain, and good people to go without jobs, wasting away as adjuncts, getting depressed, abused, harassed, hazed, bitter, and eventually leaving the field. I recently refereed a book manuscript for a major press and was stunned at the abilities, sheer brilliance, the depth of knowledge, and the high quality of research its author had done. I easily deduced who it was, and what blew me away was how this person managed to write a book that few of our colleagues can in a lifetime, a mature work that would be in place as the third or fourth monograph of a major scholar. Well, this person was a little adjunct somewhere, trying to make ends meet, and stay in the field, where he deserves to stay. Our field would be better off if people like this were appointed to major positions, rather than those with connections I see get the fake jobs. I was extremely angry at the author's plight and marveled at their grace to remain in the field, work extremely hard, and make a difference. In my comments I just added some sentences of praise that I know were very much appreciated.
I hope this person gets a real job. For the sake of the field, if not for law and justice.
Oh get off your soapbox. I am so tired of hearing about how great these poor adjuncts are, and how unfairly some other people got jobs. Every adjunct I ever met, it was clear as day why they were an adjunct. And everyone who was a tenure-track assistant...ditto.
You are one of the corrupt ones, aren't you? And you don't mind insulting all those colleagues who write here. Apparently you are also an expert in my field and can judge a person I referred to, who has written something worthwhile without reading the book?
I rest my case: here we have an excellent example of ignorance and corruption.
Someone hit a raw nerve! Love this conversation. I wonder which institution the indignant one represents, Berkeley or Duke? lol
Calmly assert that people sleep their way to positions or use their alleged privilege...and that's fine, we're supposed to think you're some champion of classics and the law. Because hey, you read one adjunct's book, and it's so great and brilliant the author just must be an adjunct because all those incompetents with loose morals stole the position he deserved. Give me a break.
.... there are so many possibilities this year, it is hard to guess where this person may be from.... But obviously, whoever this uppity book-writing adjunct is, clearly he or she deserves to be an adjunct and every job is always offered justly, and we'll just not think about the possibility that that is not the case....
Did anyone else go to the SCS presidential panel on contingent faculty? The one with the much-published-and-deserving-yet-still-a-perpetual-adjunct speaker? Lol, it was perfectly clear why that person was condemned to perpetual adjuncthood and if you google their name and read their RateMyProfessor reviews it becomes clearer still. There are brilliant people who do good work and yet are terrible colleagues and teachers. There are also people who are deserving on all levels and yet are stuck in the trenches of adjuncting, but it's not always possible to distinguish the two based solely on their monograph.
Tell me about it. We're supposed to take people seriously when they complain about the plight of these allegedly deserving adjuncts, and then you take 5 mins on RMP and see the story of why they're adjuncts.
Lets remember what the real crisis for the profession is: in 2007-08, before the crisis hit, there were 132 TT jobs listed on the SCS Placement service. Last year there were 55, and I don't think there were many more this year. The number of job seekers has only increased. So there are a lot of people out there, roughly 80 a year, who would have gotten a TT job in 07-08 conditions, but cannot today because there are not enough jobs.
I am so tired of hearing about how great these poor adjuncts are, and how unfairly some other people got jobs. Every adjunct I ever met, it was clear as day why they were an adjunct. And everyone who was a tenure-track assistant...ditto.
Statements from dick holes like this person say a lot about why classics, and academia, are broken. If you're a dick here on this stupid blog, one can bet your colleagues and students perceive you as such.
@ 9:24
Yeah, and I love how they say "every adjunct I ever met" as if no people who were once adjuncts ever got tenure-track jobs later on. As if the personality/(in)competence of a person in the state of "adjunct" at any moment in time were something we could generalize about. Plenty of the people who eventually got lucky had to adjunct briefly at some point or other. I hope this person isn't on a search committee, a person who sees the label "adjunct" or "visiting" and automatically assumes that the candidate must be defective, even if in actual fact in a year they may go on to a tenure-track position.
What's really scary is that it is people with these kinds of attitudes who are making hiring decisions. As if they are totally unaware that, had they been on this job market, it might well have been them who had to adjunct for a while. Most of us lowly adjuncts or VAPs are neither bad researchers nor bad teachers -- many of us are successfully doing both, without the kinds of resources available to TT people.
Another trend, developing for a while and perhaps reaching a crescendo this year, is that it is now very hard to get even a temporary position. Many VAPs have as many applications as TT jobs (the Georgetown VAP had 90 applicants). Many VAPs also now have a multiple round interview process, with campus visits and job talks. They require writing samples from published work, etc. The vetting processes even for a one year job that pays a pittance is increasingly at the level of a job for life.
Compare what April 17, 2016 at 8:54 PM said (data published by SCS). We're down about 80 TT jobs per year over the last 8 years. If PhD outputs have remained relatively stable, then there are 640ish PhDs floating around without TT jobs who would have gotten TT jobs.
Many will have left the field by now, but you can see WHY there is the credentialing inflation for VAPs and adjunct positions. Search Committees need some way to distinguish candidates, and they take the easiest possible route, even though that is not necessarily the best.
I haven't seen any discussion on here about what this trend has done to hiring at LACs and CCs. Those places need good teachers first and researchers second (or third, if you throw in service). What happens when search committees revert to their grad. school biases and start hiring the best pedigreed or most published for these positions? Does it make the LAC/CC better because they have "better" people? Or does it mean that the LAC/CC is now staffed by people who do not understand the mission, cannot reach or understand the students, and are deeply unhappy to be there but unable to leave due to the market?
As 6:32 pm above shows, it is easy to become dismissive of adjuncts, and perhaps also VAPs, as a whole based on some perceived flaw. This in spite of the fact that all of us, even the most golden of children, will have some flaw that could be highlighted in our teaching/researching/collegiality portfolio under the most careful of scrutiny. I consider myself very fortunate to have had a successful outcome to my job search. For the first few years after accepting my position, I skipped the SCS because I lost my desire to encounter all of the so-called friends and colleagues who did not hesitate to tell me that my employment was based entirely on luck and/or that someone better probably deserved the job. While there is inevitably some truth to both notions for any successful job candidate (and this would be true for anyone currently unemployed who succeeds in his/her job search in upcoming years), the lack of support had an impact. I’ve managed to regain some sympathy for candidates struggling on the job market, but it has taken a few years. At this point, if the department was able to make another T-T hire, I would advocate for one of our adjuncts over anyone else since I have seen their struggles first-hand and know that they would be valuable, permanent colleagues with respect to teaching, research, and service.
I had three first round interviews this year, two graduate institutions and one undergraduate. I got a campus visit at the undergraduate place. I almost said to my disappointed advisor: "seriously, I'd *much* rather not have graduate students. I mean, how would you sleep at night??" Fortunately my brain turned back on just before the words exited my mouth.
The real conversation should not be "should we treat adjuncts nicely or not," as with the SCS panel. The answer is "of course!" But being nice to adjuncts does little to alleviate the underlying supply and demand issue in the academic labor market. As noted above, every year 80 more PhDs appear for whom there are no jobs.
The real conversation should be "we need to radically trim the size of graduate programs everywhere." Some, even top programs, should no doubt cut the size of their incoming classes. Others need to disappear altogether.
Is the SCS encouraging programs to do this kind of thing? Can it?
@12:48
No and no.
The SCS could outline best practice and exert moral pressure. But ultimately it will be on individual programs. They need graduate students to teach and grade cheaply, so there is perverse incentives to maintain full cohorts even if most are being trained as erudite versions of buggy-whip makers. Again, since the number of jobs has been cut in half, the number of grad students needs to be cut in half.
Different programs, if they are run by conscientious people (and not the trolls that lurk on this site) will evaluate their placements and reduce incoming cohorts accordingly. Unfortunately, the pressures to maintain more grad students than the market can handle seem likely to prevail for the time being.
The problem with encouraging programs to reduce their intake of new graduate students is that in most, if not all, universities, the size of the department correlates with "success" and therefore funding (or worse, continuation of the existence of the department). I'm aware of at least one currently non-graduate language department that feels that to compete for resources with other humanities and STEM departments means to look towards getting their own graduate program, even though their own job market is glutted with underemployed recent PhDs.
Another problem is killing students' dreams. I myself have told students, in no uncertain terms, not to go to graduate school. They absolutely never listen. Not one. I of course still support their effort after they have not heeded my advice--I'm not cruel, and, who knows? they could come out ok--but I can't say I feel good about it at all.
I think that is the case with any field, to be honest. Look at the hoards signing up for law school (and taking on massive debt to do it) when the law job market is at an all-time low. You can tell students about the realities of the market, but no one believes that they are going to wind up the sad sack with no job or a shitty job or (worse still) a high school job. My students either believe that they are bright and dedicated enough to be one of the lucky ones or that the market will be better by the time they graduate.
Too a degree, the solution may be crowdsourced. After a while, people hear the horror stories and decide not to enroll, or perhaps most commonly, to drop out of programs. Some departments that stop making placements will have trouble attracting new grad students, or will convert to MA programs. This is happening on a very small scale, but nearly 8 years into the jobs crisis, it is surprising how little has been done to reduce oversupply, or even talk about it. The AHA is pushing the happy horseshit of "look into alternate career paths," which is fine, but there is no point wasting your time on a PhD if you plan to do a non-academic job. And the SCS is only pushing the "be nice to adjuncts" message rather than addressing the fact that its member institutions are pumping out far to many grad students for the current market to support.
@8:32
I'm sympathetic to what you and most of the immediately previous posters are saying. I'd like to ask you, genuinely and sympathetically, What do you suggest the SCS do? They've got people who read FV (horribile dictu!), so if you suggest something it just might happen.
Yes, and the "alternate career paths" message is just disheartening and unhelpful for those who love this field and are passionate enough about the material to have dedicated untold hours and dollars to their PhD. Few if any of us have been in it to make the big $$$$.
Track and prominently publish /actual/ attrition and placement records? A lot of what is going on is not just undergraduate idiocy, although there is a fair amount of that (10-year-ago-me is guilty as charged! As are we all here). Programs mislead people about placement, and it isn't rare as far as I can tell.
The above comment meant to be a response to 8:50 about what the SCS might do.
A tracking of placement and attrition would be an enormous service, if the SCS has the clout to organize such an endeavor. I am surprised by how much placement information is anecdotal, with programs cherry-picking good placement years to sell the program to gullible prospects. It has been noted above that Ohio State had an exceptional year this year. I imagine that even if Ohio state places no one next year, prospects will be told about 2015-16 as if it was the standard. I know this is how placement worked at everywhere I toured as a prospect, and the institution I eventually attended.
Instead of spending collected funds (such as membership fees) on hosting yet another conference, starting yet another (increasingly specialist) journal, sponsoring a few graduate students to undertake some 3-week summer program, or waiving the Placement Service fee (or some other, ultimately meaningless in the grand scheme of things, "gift"), why not spend a good chunk of the cash on establishing a body set up for the specific purpose of helping recent PhDs transition into the non-academic job market? For instance, a body made up of senior and junior faculty in Classics and a number of folks who have successfully transitioned into a non-academic career, to help recent graduates with being on the non-academic job market, with advertising one's skills, moulding one's non-academic C.V., and so forth? That would seem to be a logical service for those who pour years and years of their energy, service, and money into the field? As an organization that purports to be there for its members, this would seem to be a worthwhile and ethically responsible service to offer. What is more, it would be beneficial for the field and possibly also for its perceived utility: if students know that the SCS will at least *help* them transition, should they wish to or have to leave the field, it may encourage them to enter the field instead of preemptively saying no thank you! (which is the response that any rational mind should have, if placement numbers were presented honestly to them at the time of application to grad programs).
I don't think most career academics will be very valuable resources for people who want to transition outside of academia. Experience in academia really, really does not translate to anything outside it (speaking as someone who has been out for years now). So I'd say any advisory body for people making the transition out of academia should use as few faculty and as many former academics as possible.
I don't think it would be that hard to track attrition and placement. All you would have to do for attrition is look at graduate students on department websites. Then you could say, Cohort 2004 had six students year one, three students year four etc. The wiki tracks placement, and that information would just have to be organized ("Cohort 2004: no nationally-advertised tenure track placements"). It is too late to record the demographic disaster of our generation, but this could start now and offer future prospective students much more truthful information than we ever had.
"It is too late to record the demographic disaster of our generation" -- surely we all know how many people entered in our cohort, how many got the PhD, and how many now have some kind of job?
Entirely agree with both 9:52 and 11:11 ---> the initiative proposed by 9:52 is an excellent idea, but the body, as 11:11 suggests, should consist of those who have transitioned, not those who haven't
11:22: Yes, if people are willing to share it. My own cohort data is so disastrous that I think I might be recognized. I will tell you how many people got "real" jobs with normal searches: none. All subsequent years: one, and in circumstances that rendered the vast majority of candidates ineligible.
Data on my cohort would also potentially indicate to anyone who knows what institution I am from and what year. But I can also say that out of my cohort as of right now exactly zero have tenure-track jobs.
What if we set up a wiki for the data? Those who know, whether they went to that institution or not, would update the wiki completely anonymously. If any data are wrong, other wiki users would correct it. Then we would have a place to send would-be graduate students when they are trying to choose between departments.
The format could be like the job market wiki with a list of all PhD-granting institutions. Underneath could be the year of the cohort and a list of outcomes. Like this:
Someplace University
-cohort 2005 (5 matriculated): 2 ABD, 2 TT, 1 alt-ac
-cohort 2006 (4 matriculated): 1 TT, 1 high school, 1 adjunct, 1 drop out before degree
-cohort 2007 (4 matriculated): 1 VAP, 2 high school, 1 adjunct, 1 ABD
This would obviously be updated as peoples' outcomes changed (e.g., VAPs becoming TT in the next job cycle).
A wiki as this would be useful, although some people might have privacy concerns with their career being tracked on the internet. There is no excuse for departments not doing this.
Someplace U
Cohort 1995: (6 matriculated): 5 TT, 1 serving life sentence for child pornography
Cohort 2002 (6 matriculated: 5 TT, 3 jerks on search committees, 1 online troll on FV
Cohort 2009 (5 matriculated): 1 drop out before degree, 2 VAP, 1 suicide
Cohort 2010: (5 matriculated): 5 VAP
Cohort 2011: (5 matriculated): 2 VAP, 2 High School, 1 froze to death in a gutter
Cohort 2015: (6 matriculated): 6 VAP, 0 hope.
I think this sounds like a great idea. Would the cohort year correspond to entry to graduate program or to post-MA study?
Be real, 4:55pm. In the years since 2008 there would surely be fewer VAPs and more freezing in gutters.
DNFTT
I would say it should be as basic as possible: matriculated, completed PhDs, and tenure-track jobs.
4:00 here. Yeah, 8:21, I see that keeping it simple would probably be better than trying to actually keep track of all these people's careers. So something like:
Someplace University
-cohort 2005 (5 matriculated): 5 PhD, 3 TT
-cohort 2006 (4 matriculated): 3 PhD, 2 TT
-cohort 2007 (4 matriculated): 3 PhD, 0 TT
To answer 5:02, I think it might depend on the department. For most it will be when they matriculated to start their PhD work, BUT if it is one of these places that does an "on the way" MA after which you have the option to stay on for the PhD or move on to something else, you might want to do something like this to indicate some students left after receiving the MA:
Someplace University
-cohort 2005 (5 matriculated): 1 MA, 4 PhD, 3 TT
-cohort 2006 (4 matriculated): 1 MA, 3 PhD, 2 TT
-cohort 2007 (4 matriculated): 3 PhD, 0 TT
Thoughts?
If someone makes it, I'll enter the information that I know. But I really think this is something that departments, or the SCS, or the SCS via moral pressure on departments, should be keeping track of. Deliberate ignorance should not be considered ethical or professional. Especially given that most of its victims, if are anything like me when I was 22, have no clue that they should see professors as anything but benevolent, all-knowing, truth-telling gods.
When I was 22, I did take placement into account when I was accepted into two different programs. But the information I had was largely anecdotal (and also based on the pre-recession job market, when things didn't seem too bad. It would have been nice to have more concrete statistics--because even at 22 I knew this was important, although again this was choosing between two programs, not choosing between graduate school and less ruinous life-choices, such as becoming a heroin addict.
Ironically, this year, the school I rejected had better placement than the school I ultimately attended.
Maybe if the wiki is created and starts to get populated with data, it will come to the attention of the SCS who will realize that they should make something like this. The problem is that they would have to get departments to voluntarily submit the information. I'm not sure it's easily available in any public way.
I do NOT believe that any department would of its own accord admit to a terrible placement record. People don't just work against themselves that way. And there are pressures from the department's university to keep up the appearance of bustling activity and success.
Once a wiki gets off the ground, prospective grad students could be advised not only to consult it for themselves but to judge departments based on whether they refer students to it or not. Even if no dept will actively undermine their own interest in recruiting, I could see acknowledging the wiki or not as a good way to judge the ethics of a department regarding placement.
How about this idea for the SCS:
A workshop for TT faculty on how to advocate for their department to the administration. Advocating, that is, for adding a new tenure line instead of annual searches for VAPs (think of how much money is wasted every year on this, especially at the schools that have campus visits for VAPs!), advocating for their adjuncts to get upgraded to lecturer status, demonstrating to the administration that classics is important to the university as a whole, and so on.
Most TT faculty have had no training in working with administrators, and so don't even bother to try, or aren't even aware that trying is an option.
A publicly editable wiki will just be altered by those with vested interests in particular departments to make those departments look better.
What if, like on the wiki, the identity of successful placements were included?
Someplace U
Cohort 2005 (six matriculated): 1 PhD (John Doe, 2012), 1 tenure-track placement (John Doe)
Or, more likely, simply leave it at "1PhD (John Doe, 2012)" and let the lack of tenure-track placement speak for itself. In a field this size, nobody is going to be able to claim false placements.
"Most TT faculty have had no training in working with administrators, and so don't even bother to try, or aren't even aware that trying is an option."
Do you really think that it hasn't occurred to tenured faculty that more tenure lines are better than VAPs and adjuncts? That they don't ask the administration for them with whatever data they have? That if they just asked more nicely, things would get done? This seems absurd.
By all means let's discuss how departments can advocate for themselves, but the idea that departments in this day and age don't even try to do so already is downright laughable.
The idea of a placement wiki with names attached makes me uncomfortable, and seems unnecessary. The basic information in an anonymized wiki (institution, matriculation year, type of placement) would be enough fodder for a google search to discredit a false claim of a TT placement, the type of claim most likely to be made spuriously.
Some departments are clueless, but in this Darwinian world of higher ed, those will not be around for a while. Humanities departments that cannot maintain their enrollment are being eliminated altogether, and Classics is the sort of small, obscure department that is on the chopping block. Even Departments chaired by drooling imbeciles know that they need to fight tooth and nail for more tenure lines, given that undergraduates tend to prefer professors with positive reputations, rather than the latest VAP/adjunct passing through. This is not to say VAPs and adjuncts don't do good jobs, but by the time they can accrue a positive reputation, they have moved on to someplace else.
But in these Darwinian times, Departments know they need graduate students they have no hope of placing to serve as cheap TAs, and in some places, even paying tuition. In a cruel irony, the presence of graduate students can be a selling point for recruiting and retaining those precious TT lines, saying "we are a serious PhD granting institution," even if its PhDs go on to little more than a short professional life of poverty, misery and squalor.
In a cruel irony, the presence of graduate students can be a selling point for recruiting and retaining those precious TT lines, saying "we are a serious PhD granting institution," even if its PhDs go on to little more than a short professional life of poverty, misery and squalor.
Yes, this. This is the problem. Even if faculty know that they are and are sad about overpopulating the world with useless PhDs and are willing to solve the whole TA issue (which I believe could be solved with the right application of force and money if we--and I include the SCS as a body--really put our minds and resources behind our efforts), they can't fight this.
Going back here to a variety of older topics.
It seems to me that with the path to TT getting extended (perhaps some adjuncting before and after the PhD, followed by a VAP position or maybe more than one, then possibly TT if things turn out well) that it would in theory be in one's interest to try to get first to the level of "inside candidate." Newly exiting PhDs and working VAPs can all be potentially valuable TT faculty members, but the VAPs who have inside candidate status at least have a shot at being considered on the basis of longer and deeper acquaintance. The essential problem that remains is that it's often (almost always? always?) impossible to tell which VAP positions are at institutions that might be hiring TT in the near future.
The VAP balance is a very hard one. VAPs have the advantage in a TT search over new PhDs in that they've been in the trenches, generally at higher-than-TT loads, and they know the ropes in a way that graduate students soon will, but do not yet. At the same time, however, VAPs often cannot publish as quickly, and too much teaching can slow down a research trajectory to the point where it can look like tenure is going to be a difficult bid.
I don't have any answers. But I do warn students who are already on the PhD trail that there is likely a long, underpaid apprenticeship awaiting ahead of any even remotely possible TT job.
The main problem is few get to "choose" their VAP. Most temporary positions this year have had 90-130 applicants, owing the surplus of PhDs. You apply, and you accept if offered. If you are lucky, it is a VAP covering a spot that will soon have a TT search, and if you prove yourself, you may have a serious advantage. If you are unlucky, you get a sabbatical fill, and they definitely will want you gone in a year.
Few candidates have the luxury of picking and choosing, given that if they fail to obtain a short term position they will be without affiliation, and basically out of the field for good.
That's quite true. I think the most I can say is that I've seen more success from those who are willing/able to forego most geographic restrictions in these kinds of searches, but that's probably on some level just simple math. I would think that most folks have built-in deal-breakers (academic, personal, familial, political, climate-al) in terms of academic geography, and that's quite legitimate in my book. I know I did, and do.
Yikes. Do we really feel that anyone who spends a year without a job/institutional affiliation is "out of the field for good"? That is seriously bad news for almost my entire cohort, and lots and lots of other recent grads. Are there no stories of people who independent scholared it up for a year or so and got a job the next season (armed with PhD-in-hand status and perhaps an article or two)?
Offhand I can think of two people who had an "unaffiliated" year (not even an unpaid research associate position) who went on to get VAPs and ultimately permanent positions - one last year, one the year before. But neither of the permanent positions were in the US. So it does happen, but it's exceptional.
To any who are fortunate enough to have a choice of VAPs, the advice above about trying to be an internal candidate is sound, though with the caveat that being an internal candidate does not guarantee landing a job, as we know.
Better than being an internal candidate, I think is landing a VAP or lectureship that is multi-year. Having the time and energy that would otherwise go into relocating and reacclimating to put into research and teaching can only improve one's profile.
What's more, if you are on a one year VAP in a department that's running a TT search, you will only have been in that department for a month or two before they start reading applications. Not much better than a stranger, and maybe even worse than one, because now you are no longer exciting and new.
I don't think temporary unaffiliation is necessarily a guaranteed path out of academia, but if I were giving advice to someone looking at that possibility, I'd suggest that they try hard to adjunct--and to adjunct for courses that will make their efforts look interesting and pay longer-term dividends, if they possibly can. That means maybe doing myth (because everyone needs myth!), upper-level language/lit, or perhaps something freshly designed. My department invites our continuing adjuncts to design new courses about half of their time, while fully respecting that they may want to repeat instead in order to save effort and energy. We also give them a decent (shared) office, a warm welcome, and invitations to everything except faculty meetings (to which they really could come if they wanted, but who wants to come to faculty meetings?). It's not much, but we're at least their pied-a-terre, their library card, their letterhead, and in some cases their recommenders for a future upgrade to full-time or TT.
Last year there on the wiki was a person who moved from a job teaching private high school to a multi-year VAP. So it can happen, although in this instance the individual was teaching Latin during their unaffiliated year, and then moved to a VAP that required a Latin teacher. Such a gap year might work for a Latin literature person (and boy was this a rough year for them), but would work less well for Greek lit, history, archaeology or any other specialty that does not have much high school/college crossover.
While leaving the field is still mostly a professional death sentence, I do think we will see a trickle of people reenter after short periods outside of academia, if only because there are currently not enough temporary positions to absorb the collapse of the TT market, and the high quality of the people leaving the field will make it more plausible that some will manage to, against all odds, to get back in.
Such a daunting prospect would be easier for those with independent wealth, or a spouse that can support them while they publish as an independent scholar.
Here's a long-term solution to the job market woes. It will never be adopted, but why not dream?
As we all know, there are too many people getting PhDs for the number of jobs available, but large departments are reluctant to decrease the number of graduate students because they provide cheap teaching assistant labor, and so they keep glutting the market even further. Well, why not just hire recent PhDs for that cheap teaching assistant labor? After all, if we lived on TA wages for 5-7 years, we can probably keep living on them, and wouldn't that be better than unemployment (or worse, non-academic employment!)? The quality of the TAs would rise, the amount of time instructors have to spend training and supervising them would decrease, and the recent PhDs now TAing would have plenty of time to focus on research. Perhaps best of all, it would allow those recent PhDs to keep dreaming of eventually securing real adult academic employment someday, and it will probably happen just often enough to make that dream not entirely insane. Sure, maybe you need to pay PhDs a little more to TA, but surely enough of them are desperate enough that costs can be kept down (I mean, if people will adjunct for less than $7000 a semester, then surely they can be bought for less to do much less). Then, in 15 years, the number of jobs and candidates will have balanced out to something remotely tolerable again. What's not to love?
See April 21, 2016 at 5:04 PM. That ruins your plan.
Anyone know anything about Knox College? It's so late in the season, and they advertised the exact same part-time job in the Fall. Now an anthropologist is chairing the SC? Sounds fishy.
In response to fixing the TT market, I am not sure there is a fix. I think we can look to Continental Europe to see what the endgame looks like. The only way to divvy up fewer TT jobs among more people is to make everyone's career in the professorship shorter. The European model currently has people obtaining professorships at around 40. In the glory days of the US model you had a TT job at 27, tenure at 33 and were a full professor by 40. It still happens, prodigies and golden children and the like. But most of us have to wait, even if well qualified. Already the time to PhD is pushing 10 years. Then add another two-four years of VAPing. This time lag is likely to increase. At least one successful candidate on the wiki had 6 years as a VAP before getting first TT job--essentially a second PhD period of non TT academic purgatory. Thus even people in today's generation who get TT jobs will hold them for shorter period of time. This also represents a profound pay-cut, as less time in TT jobs means lower life time earnings. None of us are in it for the money, but this pay cut will affect our chances at basic financial stability.
RE: Knox College, I suspect the job is a replacement for someone who took a TT job elsewhere (it's on the wiki)
@9:42 one key difference in Europe is that Europeans actually have to retire. This shortens their careers, but it means that you don't have people staying in jobs until they keel over dead or lose their marbles. It also makes job openings relatively predictable.
Switching to something like the European model would not counter certain issues that affect the job market, unfortunately. I know that at my institution the line of a retiring professor is more likely to be shifted to a department considered more of a priority by the administration or cut altogether rather than given back to the home department for a new hire. We battle to the point of exhaustion to maintain those lines and justify why we need more bodies in place, but administrators have certain priorities and they rarely include the humanities. Perhaps this is different at other institutions, but T-T lines here are associated with the faculty and not the department and can be shifted by deans and provosts where they want them. I know many who are on the outside looking in who express their frustration at what seems to be lethargic departments with faculty doing little advocation for hires and new lines. I think that is the exception to the rule and that all departments, particularly those in the humanities, spend a great deal of time trying to justify their positions to upper administration. Perhaps some training, as was mentioned above, would be beneficial, but in my experience the only argument that seems to work well is showing that your department is revenue-generating or the recipient of large donations. By revenue-generating, I do not just mean teaching large service courses that bring in tuition money since that would exist for the university anyways. I mean finding some method where the university does not have to supply much capital that regularly brings money into the institution. Patents shared by a researcher and the institution would be an example. This is tricky for humanities departments to do, even when the university increasingly demands that we be "entrepreneurial".
This relates to an older discussion (just catching up on the past few weeks of comments), but I am surprised that no one mentioned Helios as a top Classics journal (particularly excellent in its openness to modern critical approaches). Or Eugesta--still very recent, but absolutely top-notch so far, and I think it's fantastic that it is open-source.
I'd never heard of Eugesta before, but those are some very impressive names in the opening issues. Thanks for the post!
You'd think Eugesta would have the common sense to remove Daddy Cruel from the editorial board.
If we are going to claim that Eugesta is a "top-notch" journal or that "the very impressive names in the opening issues" are evidence of such, it seems only reasonable to point out that a ridiculously high percentage of those same names are also those belonging to the publication's editors or members of its "scientific committee". You can draw your own conclusions about what Eugesta actually is, but I fail to see how it meets even the most basic criteria needed to qualify as an academic journal.
Just pulled it up, and to be fair Eugesta's editorial page lists Daddy Cruel as "suspended." At least they are acknowledging the issue rather than trying to whitewash or ignore it (as merely erasing his name and pretending it was never there would suggest).
"Suspended" makes it sound like some grade school or high school slap on the wrist.
Euguesta does look like the European "Node" version of the old house journals run out of departments (HSCP, CA), which may mean don't bother submitting unless you are on the advisory committee or know somebody who is.
To be fair re: CD, he may be suspended pending the resolution of the case: until he confesses in open court, is found guilty by a jury or is acquitted. It seems that they have him, but we do live in a society where innocent until proven guilty, and so suspension is appropriate until the issue has been formally resolved.
After these high minded sentiments, I would say that the evidence presented so far suggests the guy is guilty, and Eugesta is yet another sex/gender institution tarnished by association with CD.
tarnished by association with CD
If you're going to make that argument, at least be intellectually consistent enough to apply it to Classics as a whole, Humanities as a whole, and all university professors. If you can't do that, then you're just another bigot.
Actually, the poster has a point. Eugesta is a perfect example of the subculture in Classics that turned Cruel Daddy into a major figure, praised and honored as a great scholar, when in fact his work is mediocre and he was only considered great because he worked on "edgy", "sexy" subjects.
OK then. Bigots all the way down.
I don't work on anything related (except tangentially) to sex/gender, so I'm not familiar with much of Daddy Cruel's work, but I think it's ludicrous to suggest that anyone is "tarnished by association" with him.
Possession of child pornography is one of the most common sex offenses in the United States. The likelihood, chilling as it is, is that all of us probably know one or more people who are guilty of it. These people are skilled at blending in and deflecting suspicion. Like many predators, they go undetected for years because they are expert at aping normal social behavior. They hide their deviance even from their closest family and friends (as indeed DC seems to have hidden it from his wife). I think a certain amount of soul-searching is appropriate under these circumstances, and many of the people who knew DC must be asking themselves if there were signs that they missed and wondering how they could have been friends/colleagues with a person like this. But these people fly under the radar every day. It is absurd to tar all of his colleagues with the same brush and consider all the (many many) people who were professionally associated with him as "tarnished." That number includes many people who have worked to bring to light ancient sexual exploitation, and some of whom have done good work against contemporary sexual exploitation as well.
Again, consult the piece in Eidolon for a nuanced, honest assessment of how CD's actions interact with his scholarship.
BIIIIGGGGGOOOOOOTTTTTSSSS!!!!!!!
BAAAAAGGGGGEEEEEELLLLLSSSS!!!!!!!
To the poster above: stay away from Knox College like the plague that it is! One of the most toxic, unprofessional departments in the field.
Can't be worst than South Florida. I feel sorry for their new hire.
11:53, in what way is Knox especially toxic? As for USF, look at the new hire's current institution. Yes, we should feel sorry for him.
Also, 11:53, your comment about Knox sounds angry. Is it personal? I know someone who was a visitor at Knox who loved it there. For those of us who have not completely given up on finding a job in classics, even in this miserable market, perhaps it is worth considering that Knox or USF might not seem toxic to everyone who has ever worked in these departments.
One of you wrote: "I don't work on anything related (except tangentially) to sex/gender, so I'm not familiar with much of Daddy Cruel's work, but I think it's ludicrous to suggest that anyone is "tarnished by association" with him."
I would normally agree, but this is not the case here. I have heard from the specific department. His students are devastated at how his arrest and upcoming conviction (after all, he did confess to the FBI if you read the complaint) will impact their program and subsequent career. I'm sure prospective employers won't blame the students, of course, but they did lose their mentor and a previously well-connected one at that.
So you agree that "tarnished by association" is nonsense and a fallacy unbecoming of those with pretensions to intellect. Good.
I am actually not presumptuous to believe I can judge people from an anonymous post. Hell, I couldn't even possibly judge them by a statement they might make even if they weren't anonymous. I am more of the Albert Ellis persuasion, whose books on emotional disturbance I would recommend to everyone. Unless CD's colleagues defend his actions, given his confession of course and after his trial and probably conviction, no they are not tainted by association. Nevertheless, there are colleagues that I have heard pity his students, and I know for a fact his students are distressed and afraid about the future.
Myself I am troubled by something else: the number of Classicists who have already been arrested for activities similar to or worse than CD's, or who defend pedophilia (yes, I have actually heard some Classicists do that), or accuse those that abhor it as bigots (unless the above post was a joke). Last, but not least, I don't know how many of you actually remember, but this is the third such arrest in Cincinnati. There were two more Classicists who were arrested in the early 1990s. One was a librarian from the main library, and I think he got 175 to life or something like that, and one from a different university in the area. I am not sure what happened to the latter any more. It may be a coincidence, but it is troubling nevertheless.
Daddy Cruel didn't have any students and certainly wasn't anyone's "mentor". As far as I know, he was (nominal?) supervisor on one dissertation, the author of which now has tenure.
1:47PM again: I see now that the person writing @ 12:26 AM meant "people who take classes with X", not "people who write a dissertation under the direction of X". DC had students in the first sense (of course), but not in the second.
12:05 PM,
If you re-read, you'll see that the "bigots" post was directed at those who think that a scholar/person is tarnished just by having worked on sexuality or collaborated with HP or belonged to an organization in which HP was prominent. There is no indication that abhorring pedophilia makes one a bigot.
I dunno, anyone who collaborates with Hewlett-Packard is pretty suspicious in my book.
Is that Hewlett-Packard comment a subtle Ted Cruz joke? Because if not, it should be.
I'm pretty sure it is, Aristophanes...
Anonymous 1:47, we seem to have different information. I am not affiliated with the specific department and only repeat what I have heard from colleagues, i.e. that there are students who are upset. Regarding the comment of Anonymous 2:12, I put a disclaimer. The whole Cincinnati incident is deplorable, of course, and I hope the field becomes concerned about several similar incidents of the last couple of decades.
@ Anon 8:21: Sorry if my previous post was a bit curt. I'm sure students in classes there now are very upset about the whole thing. But DC was in the dept a long time and, thankfully, with one or two nominal exceptions, never had any of his own advisees. Maybe somebody had the bad luck to sign on with him recently that I'm unaware of, but I doubt it.
No, your post was not curt at all. It is possible my information is inaccurate as it is not first-hand but rather something a non-Cincinnati colleague told me. That said, I checked the list of PhD graduates from Cincinnati on the department's website, and you are right that DC does not appear to have had many students, judging from the title list. On the other hand, I suspect he sat in several committees as a reader, again if the titles are any guide.
I would have thought he would have his own students; I wonder if they got a weird vibe from him. Those who took a class or two from him or even had him as a second reader are not particularly close to the disaster and won't see their careers seriously impacted, although I'm sure they are upset.
Personally I am getting bad vibes from several colleagues who appear to support a pedophile agenda and hope the FBI is aware of that. As for Cincinnati, it used to be dealing with severe internal issues that did not allow it to function well for many years. There were also areas that produced almost no PhDs at all. Ancient History used to be one, Greek another. A well-known Latinist there produced only one PhD student in their entire career. In all cases I understand it was the personality of the people who didn't care about their students. On the other hand, Cincinnati produced several archaeologists. I believe the younger generation of professors is excellent, however, and it is all a matter of when the last person of the "old guard" will mercifully retire, since the administration never cared to clean up the mess twenty years or so ago.
In the case of DC, I am not so much wondering whether the students were getting the vibes, but rather his wife of more than two decades.
Sometimes this forum makes me so glad that I have my advisors rather than the uncaring or crazy people who are apparently out there...
Wow, @11:51, way to infer the wife's complicity without any evidence and for no apparent reason!
See April 24, 1:18 above--as that person points out, these people are sociopaths who are experts at deception. Family/friends/colleagues seldom have any inkling. That's the really scary thing--you probably know someone with these impulses, or other horrific predilections. They don't go around wearing "pedophile" signs. Think of Ted Bundy, apparently a really charming and normal-seeming guy. People who give off bad vibes are exposed early on. It's the ones who seem normal that fly under the radar for years, as CD did.
If you read my post again, I said that I WONDER, not that I know. I agree that perverts are masters of deception, however there are always signs. There are also studies that suggest that spouses often know. Whether the specific spouse did know or not, I don't know. However, I wonder.
Or spouses choose to overlook. Or not to know.
Wow. The tarnish-wagon is full of genuinely creepy people. Do y'all also believe the sins of the father are visited upon the sons and grandsons?
This bickering is unbelievable! As is the lack of understanding of basic reading comprehension. Who talked about sins of the father passing to descendants? Did anyone talk about descendants? And who has been tarnished? The use of the verb wonder entails not actually knowing. On the other hand, there are those studies. And revisiting this person's publications I would argue offers several clues, in hindsight, of course.
At any rate, what this person really knew or did not is only known to herself.
@11:19
You know, self-caricature is not a form of wit. You can look to the Emperor Julian for how well that worked out.
When I read 5:39 PM my first thought was "But charm is inherently superficial, right? Maybe it will help you stand out in a high-stakes interview, but it won't go far in any real relationship, spousal or not, will it?" And then it hit me. Maybe this is why so many classicists are weirdos: we are actively screening *for* sociopaths!!
I HAVE A BEARD! YOU HATE ME!!!!!!
Don't take it personally, I hate everyone with beards.
So if you didn't get a job this year, you can rest assured that it's just because you're not a psychopath. Work on that for next fall.
Good news: I grow more warped by the year!
Interestingly, this year's thread of this nature has over 400 more posts on it than last year's (and we're still not down yet). I'm wondering: why?
I think this our first year to have at least one full-time troll; that adds quite a bit to comment volume. Also, each year increases the number of people on the market.
It's a statistical aberration. The reports of a troll have been greatly exaggerated.
My impression is that there are now many more senior people here, too.
Here is a horror story from the other end of the career spectrum.
Earlier this year, I decided to take early retirement at the end of next year. During all my negotiations with the Dean of Faculty, the working assumption of us both was that my position would be retained in Classics and would be filled; my colleagues would run a t-t search next year (this is why I agreed to retire at the end of NEXT year, not this year, to give them time to do a search).
Today, we were informed that the President of our SLAC has chosen NOT to recommend to the Board of Trustees that our search be authorized. No search. No replacement. And the retirement agreement I signed says my decision is irrevocable. I can't change my mind now.
If you want to know why many professors in their 60s are not retiring, look no further than this. They are trying to protect their programs. I genuinely thought my administration was negotiating with me in good faith. I genuinely thought I was doing a good thing, for my department and for the profession as well as for myself. I thought I was opening a line for a young, energetic classicist by quitting before I hit total burn-out (which I can feel coming). Instead, I have damaged my department, probably irrevocably. I don't want to give details that could identify me, but we are a very small department and without my position, my colleagues will have to discontinue the major.
I am alternating between raging and weeping. I killed my program.
These are very grim times.
Man, I'm sorry. It is not your fault and you did not kill your program. The people who lied to you did.
Agreed. The bad faith of others is not your fault. And you are to be credited for trying to do right by your students, colleagues, and the field.
Heartfelt thanks to both of the above commenters (this is 11:24 PM). I really needed to hear these kind words this morning, and I'm grateful.
This is for 11:24 and 12:08 pm. I'd just like to third the comments above and say that this is not your fault.
I hope sympathetic faculty from other departments, and perhaps even from peer-institutions, exert some pressure on your administration. An institution calling itself a SLAC without providing a Classics major is a preposterous scenario.
The discipline is going extinct. There will likely be a thousand fewer active classicists in 2020 than there were in 2005. Classics will likely be the first victim of STEM-mania.
Don't think STEM hasn't already claimed victims, 12:50. My SLAC no longer teaches German and has significantly downsized French. Thankfully, Classics still remains afloat thanks to colleagues that 1)are excellent teachers who attract and keep students and 2)are also masters of internal politics and diversifying what we do for the school. But, if the upper administration can't be trusted to keep their word, ubique naufragium est. I'm sorry that happened to you 11:24, to your students, and the department you clearly worked so hard to build and preserve. This may not be the place to do so, but a message out via CAMWS or SCS so that other departments might rally their support, for whatever that is worth, sounds warranted.
@11:24 unfortunately this will happen much more frequently at SLACs that are under-endowed (with endowments lower than say $250 million). If I were you I'd look to those SLACs with lower endowments whose classics programs are flourishing (e.g. Monmouth College, Cornell College, Beloit college), and do the things that they are doing, which often involves refocusing curriculum towards culture courses and big enrollment courses and away from language instruction.
What the heck happened at CUA? If there's any field where it should be impossible to fail a search, it's medieval Latin.
For any search to fail this season is a sign of grave incompetence on the part of the search committee, if not down right maliciousness. There are so many excellent candidates on the market that no search should fail.
The only justification (but a really frustrating one) for a failed search is if the university pulled the funding for the position after it was advertised. The department can only watch in dismay when that happens. If the search fails because the search committee does not feel that the candidates are adequate (e.g. Toronto for Ancient Philosophy), then that is a problem. There are far too many qualified candidates in every sub-field of Classics.
11:32
There are far too many qualified candidates in every sub-field of Classics.
Disclaimer: not a Medieval Latinist and not affiliated with CUA.
That actually might not be the case for Medieval Latin. It's not a sub-field commonly taught in Classics departments. It's not just about being able to read quia + subjunctive--it's a whole cultural context, a different set of literatures, philosophies, and theologies. CUA might also have religious requirements or preferences for candidates. I wouldn't be so quick to say that a failed search in THIS area is purely the search committee's fault. Maybe. Maybe not.
There are enough medievalists being trained in excellent programs (at, e.g., Notre Dame and Toronto) to make it unlikely that there really wasn't a suitably qualified candidate out there for the CUA job. CUA is a Catholic school, but it is not a school like Franciscan University or Christendom College that requires its faculty to take an oath of fidelity to the magisterium. Many medievalists are Catholic or at least comfortable enough with Catholicism to work at a place like CUA. No doubt there could be all sorts of factors that none of us could know about, and we shouldn't pretend to be in a position to reach any conclusions, but it seems to me unlikely that there simply was not a genuinely qualified candidate.
Much the same is true of the Toronto ancient philosophy search. You can identify the finalists for that position by looking at the departmental website and figuring out who was giving talks at the relevant time; my guess is that at least one of them was qualified for the job. Perhaps none of them were really suitable, but if so then the SC made a mistake in choosing them as finalists rather than any of the very many other people who applied. Besides, given that they've already turned around and opened up a search at full professor (with a description that might seem oddly precise to those who know the field), it seems not unlikely that they never intended the assistant/associate search to succeed, but were just trying to put themselves in a position to demand to the administration that they be allowed to hire at full. Given that they recently lost two full professors who are leaders in the field, one can hardly blame them for wanting to hire at that level. But whatever their intention was, they wasted a whole lot of people's time. Aside from cases where the administration is to blame, it's hard to see how a search can fail in this market unless the department is just screwing things up.
Whoever is considering applying to a non-permanent position at KCL or any other UK institution without being an EU citizen is wasting time. Who knows what will happen after the June referendum but for now that's the situation at most British universities.
The Toronto dept is rotten to the core. Hires made out of the blue, failed searches, searches aimed at hiring partners of faculty members. A rotten place that thinks to be at the top and yet cannot place their students in decent and stable positions.
Yes, though I suspect that those of us who work in ancient philosophy hoped that perhaps the special nature of Toronto's program there would make a difference. Really, it makes sense for them, because if they don't hire at full their ancient philosophy program will be guaranteed to decline to mediocrity and obscurity (one outstanding scholar and one extremely aged formerly outstanding scholar alongside a full professor who barely publishes and some young classicist would not add up to a top 5 graduate program). Hiring at assistant or even associate would not save them. So if in fact they calculated all along to make that search fail in order to hire at full, they were at least acting in the self-interest of their interdepartmental graduate program in ancient philosophy. Despite this, virtually no hire they can make will enable them to remain as outstanding as they once were. People who want to work on ancient philosophy should go to Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, Chicago or even Pittsburgh before considering Toronto. Toronto, along with Cornell and Texas, is a thing of the past so far as that field is concerned, and it will remain so even after they hire someone away from Cornell.
To be fair, 8:08, most places "cannot place their students in decent and stable positions" anymore.
There is literally no program in the field that can reliably place its grads in decent, stable positions.
Programs that are or are considered second and third-tier programs (it would be good to have a list to advise people with) ought to closing up shop and reducing themselves to MAT/MA-only programs. I think it's disingenuous for departments, now almost entirely run by professors with an Ivy League-background, to pretend that their students have any hope of meaningful employment in the field.
What I see instead is departments encouraging their graduate students to give papers at every conference, forcing them to write glowing evaluations for faculty members so the latter can win campus awards, and so on. It's all meant to prove to the campus administration that the department is relevant. "X students gave conference papers at CAMWS this year. Professor Y is an innovative, inspiring teacher who receives high marks from all of his graduate students."
In re this year's batch of newly employed, it is remarkable that amid all these theories gender goes unmentioned. Really? No one noticed there's ca 14 Rachels for every Ronald? Tbc: a) this is terriffic; b) were I on sc this year, I would have put Rachel on top of pile, consciously or not; c) I'm not on market myself. Just laughing aloud (as the kids say) at the fact that, unless I've overlooked, no one here mentions--or celebrates--the most obvious factor in the mix.
6:41 I could not agree more. Close those third-tiers! There is zero advantage for anyone getting a cut-rate doctorate. What's more, there is little to no advantage in Awarding one! Yet many current programs produce cut-rate PhDs.
It is esp annoying because there's a clear economic argument for emphasizing MAs instead of doctorates: MA makes money for our administrative overlords. My local uni darn near publicizes as much, but refuses to entertain the notion of closing their shit PhD program.
This idea is also essential for the SCS. No, they do not have ultimate say on matter. But no matter: SCS role is to begin the conversation. To move the dialogue past treating-contingents-humanely.
I agree strongly that many doctorate programs should close, and even traditional "top" ones need to shrink their enrollment. Of course the calculation is not as easy as "all but first tier." Traditionally first tier schools feed into R1s, R1s feed into R2s and LACs, and third tiers might feed into CCs. While it briefly looked like "top" programs might dominate the whole market after 2008, that trend has reversed. The truth is, people produced at "top" programs do not necessarily fit the bill outside of a research university, and so people from "second tier" have proven very competitive on the SLAC/R2 market.
Note that the best placement this year was Ohio State, a solid but basically second tier program, with at least four TT placements. Many "top programs" (i.e. Berkeley, Penn, Cornell, if I read the wiki correctly) failing to place anyone TT at all.
So there must be some shrinkage, but it must be across the spectrum, with top programs reducing enrollment, combing grad programs, while second and third tier programs with dismal placement records should indeed shut down all together.
The tier system is largely meaningless in this post-apocalyptic world. There have always been absolute duds coming out of the top programs, and stars from less prestigious programs. If anything, it's probably easier now to get a good job from a less prestigious program, though harder overall because of the catastrophic market contraction.
We've certainly overproduced PhDs, but that's been true for a long time now, and the "top" programs have been the prime offenders there.
The lesser ranked places are also probably better at playing the placement game than the institutions that have just assumed anyone and everyone will embrace the golden child of the year. That game is long over.
7:14 is spot on here. With that said, everyone needs to reduce enrollments and many "third" tier places probably should push to close PhDs and go MA/T only. The rub of it is that, at least at most institutions I'm familiar with, the most common justification for retaining TT lines (or even the occasional addition of one) is the presence of a PhD program. (Note: having a "prestigious" MA program generally does not cut it when talking to admin types, EVEN if it is financially lucrative for the institution as a whole.) So, if we start cutting PhD programs, expect the number of jobs to decrease as well. Not that it can get much worse than it already is....
@ May 5, 2016 at 7:19 PM:
The situation at UK universities has been rotten to the core for a long time now. I can't believe that there are still folks from our side of the Atlantic bothering to apply! They only consider EU citizens with Oxbridge PhDs over there, and if you don't fit the bill, don't waste your time.
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