In reply to 2:27, the amount of deadwood in the field seems to indicate that SCs' instincts about such matters are not as good as they believe they are...
Beyond all of these "merit" based criteria, there is, of course, the ambiguous issue of "fit." Sometimes it comes down to a personality issue for the SC (for better or worse --- no endorsement of the system on my part). Once the sifting of applicants gets down to the short list, these somewhat uncontrollable factors are at times as decisive as another solid article on the c.v.
2:27 here to 2:46 - you're right, so let me clarify a bit further. The faculty member in question expressed this opinion as a kind of lament about quantity over quality, but also in a spirit of capitulation...capitulation to the fact that the norms of the field and of the university are out of the control of the faculty of any given department, whose aim is to survive in a relatively harsh climate. So it isn't a case where the SCs aren't good, but what they are good at is not necessarily a good thing, and some of them perhaps even know that, but cannot do anything about it. We can't settle on what makes a contribution significant and original (hence why some people think Ramus is great and GRBS shit, or CP brilliant and Arethusa unserious...btw these are randomly chosen and do not reflect my views). But we can decide that productivity is good because that requires no judgment, just the ability to count beans; and so we look for productivity in a fairly restricted and narrow sense. I guess that means Classics as a field is shaped by the norms and demands of late stage capitalism no less than a field like finance (and not just Classics but academia as a whole: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species)
And then there are SC chairs who know or believe that HR is looking at the % of "minority" (whatever that means in a given context--HR refused to elaborate in this instance) interviewees vs. the percentage of "minority" (as self-identified) applicants and so intentionally stack the short list based on what Google searches and stereotypes about names can tell them about the identities of applicants. So if your name seems "white," then you may be at a distinct disadvantage for that reason and that reason alone.
Does that sound unlikely? I saw it in a search this year. I even complained to the dean with concrete evidence (screen shots, etc.). Does that sound like something HR would freak about? Turns out, as long as there's no permanent record that could get the university sued, HR is cool with absolutely anything the SC does. Hmm....
Who knows what makes a decision? Who knows, indeed.
PhD dissertations maybe don't expire, but they definitely get old. there's new bibliography every year that sometimes can cause a whole lot of revisions, that is if you want to publish it as a book.
Yet many of us have seen examples of TT hires made on "promise" who do not get tenure because while they wrote a good diss., they did not know what to do afterwards. Sometimes they are crippled by perfectionism, and refuse to put their stuff out. Maybe the drink too much or simply burn out. One reason to look at people who have been out for several years is a) there are a lot of them and b) they have a longer track record. More years of proving they can publish, show up to class on time, conform to professional norms, and interact properly with students. These are all unknowns with even the most promising ABDs.
These are all good points, but I don’t think the very top programs care. If someone is a total mess, they deny them promotion. If someone can do the job but doesn’t make the cut, they deny them tenure. Rinse and repeat...find a new promising, shiny ABD.
I agree the very top programs probably are willing to take the bet. They might win big, and, if they don't, it's okay.
What doesn't make sense is that many lower-down programs (and even some places just looking for VAPs?) often prefer unproven candidates to proven ones.
It seems that fewer names are being put to filled positions this year than last year. Are people more cagey this year about posting their success on the job market, or do we think fewer people are using the wiki?
I do think in this environment people are keeping things closer to their vest. The lucky candidates all of a sudden finds an enormous gulf has grown between themselves, about to start on an indulgent life on the TT, complete with health insurance, retirement accounts, research funding and fiscal stability, and most of their friends, who stare into the abyss of adjuncting, and may soon rely on public assistance to make ends meet. They know that some friends from grad school will never make the transition to full colleagues, but at after years on the precariat track will simply be the hired help.
As someone in Adjunct hell, I will confess that I had to stop following several more fortunate friends on facebook as they kept posting about the signing their TT contracts, starting their courses, being invited to conferences by virtue of their position, and buying a house. This was a bitter reminder of everything I lacked as an adjunct, despite the fact that we all had the same pedigree and qualifications.
This was perhaps petty of me, but the stakes between the winners (TT) and losers (adjuncts) is now quite high in our field. And it is something that can strain friendships that become separated by this gulf.
What 12:34 said. What's particularly difficult is watching the joys of teaching, of planning lessons and the delights in what students write, of taking students on study abroad trips, and even, dare I say, the complaints about the hell of grading.
I'm one of those who got a position that is still nameless on the wiki. I have told friends, and haven't sworn them to secrecy, so I assume most people in my more immediate circle know, but I've put nothing on Facebook. I lived long enough in adjunct hell that I know any kind of public "announcement" is painful to the many, many equally qualified people who have no similar announcement to make. Anyone who is curious enough will figure it out eventually when I turn up on the faculty bio page.
Congratulations, 3.56! Enjoy it all, and don't worry about hiding your light. I hope you found a fit in a friendly and supportive department, and have many productive years ahead of you. Well done!
12:34 here. First, congrats 3:56. It is good to hear of a job going to an adjunct rather than an ABD. Hope that the rest of us might be harrowed out of adjunct hell.
Personally, I like it when people update the wiki. I would like to make it in this field, and part of making it is knowing the professional topography (or prosopography?) of the field, and the wiki is a good way to do that. Secondly, the things that pain me are less knowing that x or y got a job, than seeing indulgent selfies in their new office, or the photos from the fully funded conference on Malta. And it is well known that facebook and other social media is an unhappiness generating machine, as you see only others' happiness but never their disappointments. But the wiki is not a social networking site, but rather a clearance house of professional information, so it is not indulgent to update the search status, or allow someone else to update the wiki for you.
It's disturbing to see that unsuccessful candidates would begrudge their peers their success, or at least their posting of any sign of it on social media. If your 'friends' can't bear to see your new office, or hear of your conference trips, then they were never friends at all. That kind of relationship is simply toxic, or the embittered party is just rather immature. So, as a failed candidate myself, to hell with those sour grapes, and let's raise a glass of the good stuff to the ones who make it. Cheers, folks! Onwards!
Sour grapes is an uncharitable way of putting it. People have been trying to do this thing for the last decade or more of their lives and now see it all falling apart. They have to pick up the pieces but there's no magical new way to arrange them that gives them a livelihood and a future. It's starting life all over again at the onset of middle age. It being painful to hear about others' success is the most natural thing in the world, and does not in any way imply resentment. Good for the people who got jobs. They deserve them. I just wish the other people who deserve them could get them, too.
The wiki doesn't exactly tell us how many jobs went to ABDs, but I did count how many people had some kind of employment as represented by a second affiliation. As it stands now:
Tenure-track not previously employed 4 previously employed 30
Non-TT not previously employed 5 previously employed 14
That is a useful statistic in the ongoing debate about should ABDs be hired. It does seem to suggest that on the TT and non-TT most employers seem to prefer people with experience. Perhaps the "shiny ABD" is a myth, although one can point to several high profile ABD hires (USC, Williams). It may be that most ABDs this year are getting hired as lecturers by their own departments with non-announced jobs, since certainly more than 9 ABDs must have gotten something.
Servius here, reminding everyone that departments and their hiring practices are fair game, individual scholars are not. It can seem like a fine distinction, but please be mindful of it.
It should be noted that one of the scholars above was an ABD who had held several post-docs. Arguably anyone who has held post-docs fits better into the ‘had a job’ category than the ‘ABD’ category (since we tend to think of these as mutually exclusive), If we are counting, and is at best in a grey area. That case should NOT give hope to those of us (myself included) who are ABDs on home institution stipends or adjuncting.
I hope that is sufficiently respectful of people’s privacy while making a point that should be made.
Another instance (perhaps more common) of ‘non-ABD ABD’ would be someone with a Ph.D. from, say, France or Italy who did a second Ph.D. (in the same or a closely related) subject in the US. If a university hired them as a TT professor, we would have to acknowledge that they were in a kind of grey area. ABD but has a (European) Ph.D. or ABD but has held several post-docs is not what we usually mean by ABD, and manages (in each cases) to check several relevant boxes that 99% of ABDs cannot.
No criticism here, just clarification that ABD, for most of us, implies ‘does not yet hold a Ph.D. in field, from any institution’ and ‘has not held a post-doc or TT job.’
"And, and I can just say, we're gonna have more jobs. As SCS President, I am focused on jobs. And-and I always say- and quite frankly, we're going to have great healthcare, great healthcare for adjuncts. The forgotten people of this profession will be forgotten no longer. We're going to- and I mean we're always saying, just because- and we're going to- quite frankly, we're going to have an amazing new healthcare system for Adjuncts, and- and I always say this- the R1's are going to pay for it."
Updated count after the SCS info (I did track down affiliations for those not listed on the wiki; also did not count one non-classicist who filled a humanities job for which classicists were eligible):
It does seem most of the previously employed had temporary positions. These figures do suggest that ABDs are not as successful on the market as fama might suggest, despite some high profile ABD hires.
yeah, it may not be all that significant a classification as research gets fetishized (and the uber-elite LACs may in fact have higher standards for research in hiring than lower-tier R1s). but what institutions are R1 is not up for debate.
Note that for Carnegie the classification requires the institution to have a doctoral program. So an elite LAC simply wouldn't fall into the category because it is not pumping out PhDs.
no one is saying that ‘R1’ = good school, and i think that is where a lot of the confusion arises. elite LACs are not universities, and hence are not research universities. you might think that the mission of an elite LAC would lead it to emphasize teaching ability and commitment more than R1s do and to emphasize research (quantity, if not quality) less than R1s do. that may be the case (i don’t know -- how much do younger faculty at swarthmore/williams/amherst publish compared to R1 people? do the most research-heavy people leave for R1 schools?) or it may not, but research expectations were traditionally part of the R1/non-R1 distinction.
now, though, no one can get a job, so all bets are off. still, i would imagine bad personality/bad teaching would blackball you at an elite LAC in a way that they might not at an R1, if not in hiring at least for tenure.
Spousal hire at a private Ivy League institution is bad enough, but how much worse is it at a publicly-funded university, and done with great ineptitude? Across the pond, Trinity College Dublin has lost the run of its government-funded self.
As I recall TCD created a permanent job some years ago and simply give it to a short-termer, without advertising/interviewing etc. If it's the same crowd, it seems they have form.
And a steak you could rock on a plate? But of course! Seriously though, a stale sandwich and cup of ersatz coffee would trump having to fend for yourself for 4 hours between presentation and interview. That's saying nothing of having to stand in a corridor waiting to be called in to the interview. Bad. So bad.
Incidentally, @10.01: I think the tenure criteria are different (3 years?). If so, that situation wasn't necessarily the creation of a new permanent job - just granting tenure, whereas they'd withheld it from the previous incumbents of the TCD short-term lectureship. But the cumulative optics are unfortunate for Trinity, to say the least.
By my count there are roughly 60 completed searches, 10 of which went to insiders, assuming texas tech. More might surface as names get filled in. There can be good reasons to hire insiders, even occasionally spouses, but these numbers alone do not suggest that the search process is unbiased.
TCD in its hiring is as self-indulgent as an Ivy League college, but as research-focussed as a LIberal Arts College (not meaning to dismiss LACs, but TCD puffs itself up as more than a teaching hotspot).There are now so few openings in Ireland that the School can'no longer assume candidates will simply keep schtum in hopes of being the lucky ones the next time around. There is generally no 'next time around', so there's nothing to lose in drawing the authorities' attention to hiring malpractices.
@10.48, TCD being 'broke' makes the creation of a job for a spouse all the more reprehensible. What little money they have comes from tax-payers who've had to bail out rotten banks since 2008 - said tax-payers won't stomach the chicaneries of a bunch of classicists.
So of the 45 jobs that have been posted, 28 have gone to female candidates, and 17 to male (if my count is correct). So 62% of successful candidates were women. I am in no way suggesting that any successful candidate did not deserve the job. But the imbalance seems to suggest that women have a not negligible advantage on the current job market over their male counterparts.
Two thoughts:
1) This is perhaps an entirely appropriate ratio, given the fact that many departments remain male dominated, owing to discriminatory hiring practices that persisted into the 2000s and still linger in some retrograde departments. Rebalancing is necessary to get the field out of the Mad Men era.
2) At the same time, it does seem that male candidates are moderately to significantly disadvantaged on the current market. According to the SCS, men form 60% of the applicant pool. So far, they have gotten 38% of the jobs. Today's men are paying for the gender discrimination of past generations.
One caveat: Not all the jobs have posted, so it is possible the imbalance is not quite so skewed, or even more so. I am not trying to sound like a Trumpist screed on AM radio. But with so few jobs, it is worth discussing the extent that gender should play a role in hiring.
In response to July 10, 2017 at 4:24 PM - there's also a possibility that, as has been the case in my experience, there are proportionately more female candidates. I saw this with my PhD cohort, and when I was on the job market, and now having participated two searches. Of course, with the searches my assumption about gender (binary?) was based entirely on name, so it may be of little value. But we did end up first-round interviewing "female" and "male" candidates at a ratio of 3:2 in both cases. I don't have specifics on applicant demographics, but this ratio seemed to reflect the applicant pool.
I think 4:24's point is that according to the SCS, men are actually a significantly larger proportion of job-seekers. But different specialties may have different gender balances.
I think most of the cis-gender, straight, partnered, child-having women will probably be equally or more disadvantaged down the line, when children arrive and the family balance goes out of whack, but, as one of those women, I can see how those proportions might be disheartening to a male candidate.
I don't know much (or care) about the Chicago search that apparently failed, but the fact is that the school is indeed going through difficult budgetary times. I get this from a very senior member of an unrelated department. It is therefore quite likely that if the department failed to land whoever was the target of the allegedly fixed search it then would not have been allowed to make an offer to anyone else.
4:24 Are you sure about that 60/40 break-down of the overall pool? That was the distribution 15 years ago, and given both general trends and my own subsequent experience (which is like that of 6:27) I'd be surprised if that were still true.
I'm not 4:24, but here's a sample of the placement service data from this year:
Of the 639 people on the job market, 338 filled out candidate profiles on our website. All percentages are based on the number people who answered a question rather than how many of the 338 could have answered. Judging by the most common attributes in each category, the average Placement Service candidate is a married (57%), white (88%), male (58%), US citizen (72%) with his Ph.D. from Princeton (5%). He is currently a graduate student (36%) researching Latin literature (25%), and is using the Placement Service for the first time (52%) to apply to 1-5 jobs (43%). He has published 1-2 articles (34%) but has not yet published a book (70%). The gender distribution in the Placement Service mirrors almost exactly that of the SCS membership as a whole (ca. 60% men, 40% women). 17% of the candidates have used the Placement Service for four or more years. The next-most popular research category after Latin Literature is Greek Literature (also 25%). The least popular is Comparative Literature (1%). Full-time non-TT and part-time adjunct faculty together make up 33% of the job market.
Ctd. Out of the 639 registered as placement candidates, 189 (30%) received interviews at the meeting Of the candidates chosen for interviews, the majority (58%) were women A number of interviewees (31%) interviewed for more than one job, with five being the highest number of interviews for one person
I think this is updated, as well, although of course not including this year. It remains dismal: https://classicalstudies.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/PlacementStats2013-15.pdf
So it does seem that there is a gender skew in the job process: 58 percent of candidates are male, but 58% of first round interviewees are female, and approximately 60% of TT jobs this year went to women.
It has been correctly noted, of course, that gender bias exists in other parts of the graduate school experience that disadvantage female graduate students: the timeline of graduate school is abysmally cruel to women who want to have children, and also ingrained cultural biases make it more likely that a woman will have a "one body problem" of a male partner whose career is given priority. And then there is sexual harassment, still prevalent even in supposedly enlightened places, and good old fashioned misogyny.
Because of these hazards to women in graduate school, it is also possible that what we are seeing is not gender bias, but rather natural selection. It may be that the women who finish despite the hurdles PhD programs throw up for women are stronger candidates, whereas weaker males are more likely to scape through programs because they face fewer obstacles. So it may be that out of any PhD cohort, about 50-50 men/women will end up with TT jobs, with men more likely to earn the PhD, and women who get PhDs being more successful candidates on the job market.
This is where we would wish for more data, including tracking graduate cohorts from enrollment to graduation. The placement tracker is a good place to start, but this is something the SCS should be doing.
To add to 12:07's salient comment, I'dl note that so far the discussion has focused on the candidate-end and not on the search committee end.
It's also possible that the gender skew is caused or at least influenced by search committees stacking the deck to appease the HR diversity drones. Assume you've got 12 first round interviews and five candidates that everyone is REALLY interested in (the same five or so getting multiple interviews elsewhere) and then 15 candidates more that some portions of the committee are interested in. Assume you've gotten a mandate from HR that the diversity of the first round interview pool should match or exceed the diversity of the applicant pool. (This is normal, by the way.) Then it makes sense for an unscrupulous search committee to "stack" the remaining seven spots in the first round interview with candidates whom they suspect to qualify as "diverse" from HR's perspective. The same applies to the on-campus interview. This will skew the percentages pretty quickly.
It doesn't mean that any of the short list candidates are undeserving. On the contrary, they were picked only from the "deserving" pile, however each search committee defines "deserving." It does mean that some candidates have unfair advantages/privileges that others do not at certain points in the process.
These are really interesting points, especially 12:07. With regard to 2:09, though, I would think that if HCs were stacking the deck with women to fulfill HR requirements while really preferring men, the ultimate job offers would go more proportionally to men, wouldn't they? Women would get more interviews, but men more offers. As it is, the jobs themselves seem to go rather disproportionately to women (of course with the caveats listed above about how we define gender). If anyone cares to dig into previous years, we could see if this is a fluke year or a pattern.
Having been on the SC with a pretty fierce set of HR policies, I can say that our committee, at least, was interested only in interviewing the people we thought were the best candidates for the job. With finances and the market the way they are, we did not want to take any unnecessary risks like those suggested by 2:09pm above - "stacking" the interview pack in any way that would reduce our chances of getting the best available person for our position would have been regarded as insane. But we're not exactly the most highly sought after institution, so we may be slightly anomalous in that we're aware of the very real possibility that our top candidates are also other places' top candidates, and we're not particularly likely to win in a shootout. Echoing a couple previous posts, our applicant pool and interview lists both skewed somewhere close to the 60/40 "female"/"male" ratio, despite an apparent inverted proportion for the market as a whole. Maybe our position or particular wording or research subfield skewed us so heavily against the grain?
@5:27 -- I can only wish I were in a department as ethical as yours. My place is certainly not highly sought after (quite the opposite), and my last experience on an SC was rife with many of the stereotypical bad behaviors, including stacking the deck. Disregard that as you will.
Shouldn't the Yale administration look into that department's hiring and tenuring decisions? It's bad enough that there are so few tenure lines in Classics. Yet when I hear about such hiring practices I'm shocked that the university grants them any tenure lines.
is yale really that bad on diversity? they have people from various countries and backgrounds. obviously not a dept that looks like america, but is there any ivy league classics dept of which that can be said?
Perhaps they have a strong international representation, but apart from the chair, the entire faculty is white (well, one person appears to be a gold Medusa; not sure what that means).
Given how few minority classicists there are, I wouldn't blame one university specifically, but rather us as a whole field, for the lack of diversity in any given department. On hiring, that's an issue specifically here.
So here's a question I have long wondered about: how do committees know whether or not they have put together a diverse group of first-round candidates? When we apply, we get that series of questions about gender, ethnicity, veteran status, etc., but it is clearly marked optional, and often is (supposedly) anonymous, and even when not anonymous we are told that it is only for H.R. So is this all a lie, and that information does get shared with search committees, or are search committees supposed to know our genders (usually simple enough from the name, or else the pronouns used in reference letters) and our skin pigmentation on their own? Can anyone provide some illumination here?
The HR surveys are anonymous, but many hints exist in cover letters. Names usually describe gender, so this is the easiest category where the SC has basic information. Race is harder, although again names often provide a clue, not fool proof to be sure (especially as traditionally ethnic names go mainstream), but one gets a sense of the race of someone named Tyrone vs. someone named Theodore, Maria vs. Martha, etc. Saying something like "I am passionate about working with students of color" or "I connect well with student veterans" are ways in which an applicant can hint which box they checked on the secret survey. It is not hard to stack the deck as the SC sees fit, whether with good or (in Yale's case) dubious intent.
5:48, I should know better than to engage with an internet troll, but you've got me curious about how professors who are emeritus, as the Classics Department's only Sterling Professors appear to be, can be considered "rot," let alone even worth commenting on in the context of how the department currently operates. Is this just a cheap shot because of politics?
I've already seen ads for positions at Brown and St. Olaf, so an argument can be made for starting a new page at any time. Not that I'm eager to begin the horror anew.
[Sterling Professor 1’s] juvenile attempt to impress his friend [Sterling Professor 2] by surprising Plaintiff with a kiss on the mouth in front of [Sterling Professor 2] and hundreds of other colleagues during a party held for [Yale mucky-mucky] on May 13, 2014
New FVs have always been put up in August or September and there seems little reason to change that. But do we already need a new wiki? Are jobs starting Fall 2018 really already being advertised?
11:07 a.m. here, since I forgot to apologize for calling one of you a troll. I thought it was a rather unprofessional dig at one or two Yale emeriti, which it was not. I will admit to not knowing anything about their English Department, which in my view is not "too well known" enough. Perhaps someone might share it, or provide a link?
"[Sterling Professor 1’s] juvenile attempt to impress his friend [Sterling Professor 2] by surprising Plaintiff with a kiss on the mouth in front of [Sterling Professor 2] and hundreds of other colleagues during a party held for [Yale mucky-mucky]."
[Yale mucky-mucky] is in reality ANOTHER Sterling Professor and a former dean who seems to have inappropriately informed Sterling Professor 1 about the source and nature of sexual harassment claims against him, see points 45-47 of the complaint. Clean house, then burn the house down.
Wait, there are actually FOUR sterling profs involved. Prof. 1 above, Prof. 2 his buddy above, and Prof. 3 (mucky-mucky), who actually informed Prof. 4 (also Sterling) about those issues in 45-7. AMAZING! Sterling quality.
There are 43 current Sterling Professors at Yale. Five have been mentioned in this thread in connection to serious misconduct, and some, I assume, are good people.
Servius: we time the wiki and FV according to the US academic calendar because that corresponds best with most, although not all, job searches. While there are indeed a couple of very early advertisements for jobs beginning AY 2018-19, their deadlines appear to be perfectly normal, Oct.-Nov. 2017. They'll appear on the next wiki in due course. Jobs that are still being advertised for the coming academic year (2017-18) of course belong on this year's wiki, not the next. The timing of the Placement Service's annual break is (by design) not relevant to most job seekers or searches.
Actually, that would be the way to get the admin's attention.... That job was open specialty and rank, right? They could easily have had hundreds and hundreds of applications. If they advertise it again, and get four? Eyebrows will go up. I don't think this is going to happen, but I like the thought.
I don't know if this is the right place and I don't know if the link will work or just tell you who I am (hi!)), but here's the brown link: http://apply.interfolio.com/42728
And here's UC Riverside's lecturer link: https://aprecruit.ucr.edu/apply/JPF00772
St. Olaf is hiding from me somewhere, sorry. Someone else will help, or maybe someone already did on the wiki or the job ad page.
The search committee does not and legally cannot see any of the demographic information on candidates' race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Only our institution's Human Resources office can see that. After we, the search committee, pick our top ten/twelve/etc candidates and submit the names to our institution, HR sometimes (but not usually) contacts us to tell us to add another (specific) candidate to the short list. HR intervenes if and only if our short-list is less diverse than our pool of applicants. I do not know if they do statistical analyses to see if the difference is statistically significant (this might be hard, given that the short-list is such a small sample size). HR does not remove anyone from our short-list, only add, and they do not tell us why (e.g., whether the applicant is a person of color, or a veteran, or Native American, etc). On the one occasion that this happened to us, the person whom HR added back in was an excellent candidate who almost made our short list anyway.
To follow up on August 3, 2017 at 11:07 AM's comment:
HR at my university provides a statistical summary of the of the applicant pool to the search committee whenever asked. The way this worked in the last search I was on: our diversity rep (one of the SC members) asked HR for the rundown at each step and whether HR would accept the choices we had made. HR gave us summary information (# of men, # of women, # of "diverse" persons) but did not identify individuals and did not define "diverse" for us. Our percentages shrank at each step, enough that HR commented on it, but not so much that HR felt the need to intervene.
Those of you who have sought therapy for (un)employment-related stress - how do you find someone who can remotely relate? I've recently admitted that I'm deeply depressed about my future in this field, among other things. I've had some short therapy meet-n-greets, then a longer stint with someone who quite frankly did nothing to help. How do you find someone effective at managing both long- and short-term problem behaviors and emotions? At the risk of sounding arrogant, I'd like to talk to someone on a particular moral and philosophical level about life. The people I've seen so far were not capable of or tuned into this. They wanted to dismiss my fears and faults, which are all very real.
Anyone else get c.10 emails from the placement service today about the job at Haverford? Talk about hopes raised + dashed!
Also @9:09AM I feel you. I have similar anxieties caused by the crazy market and this crazy profession. I haven't sought professional help although I have considered it. What has stopped me is the disconnect I feel when discussing my situation with basically anyone besides people who are in my same shoes. Mentors + colleagues want to understand, as do family and friends, but none really do, I find. Maybe that's why many of us end up here doing puzzles to prove we're not robots!
Yes, in my experience even academics from different generations can't empathize. My own program spent many years agonizing over what was "wrong" with individual graduates that was preventing them from being hired, rather than seeing the larger pattern that NOBODY was getting a TT job because the candidate/job ratio is so out of balance. While there is a bit more awareness among senior scholars now, this type of speculation about the flaws of our graduates and why they don't get hired still happens. And these are professionals in our own field. Nobody else will understand even that well. Thus, FV. Good luck, 9:09, it is hard but you're not alone.
Any ideas about the SUNY Albany "Roman History" job? The title on the SCS Placement service says "Roman History", but the ad itself says "Hellenistic"-- of course there is overlap, but it could be interpreted in varying ways...
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«Oldest ‹Older 1001 – 1146 of 1146In reply to 2:27, the amount of deadwood in the field seems to indicate that SCs' instincts about such matters are not as good as they believe they are...
Beyond all of these "merit" based criteria, there is, of course, the ambiguous issue of "fit." Sometimes it comes down to a personality issue for the SC (for better or worse --- no endorsement of the system on my part). Once the sifting of applicants gets down to the short list, these somewhat uncontrollable factors are at times as decisive as another solid article on the c.v.
2:27 here to 2:46 - you're right, so let me clarify a bit further. The faculty member in question expressed this opinion as a kind of lament about quantity over quality, but also in a spirit of capitulation...capitulation to the fact that the norms of the field and of the university are out of the control of the faculty of any given department, whose aim is to survive in a relatively harsh climate. So it isn't a case where the SCs aren't good, but what they are good at is not necessarily a good thing, and some of them perhaps even know that, but cannot do anything about it. We can't settle on what makes a contribution significant and original (hence why some people think Ramus is great and GRBS shit, or CP brilliant and Arethusa unserious...btw these are randomly chosen and do not reflect my views). But we can decide that productivity is good because that requires no judgment, just the ability to count beans; and so we look for productivity in a fairly restricted and narrow sense. I guess that means Classics as a field is shaped by the norms and demands of late stage capitalism no less than a field like finance (and not just Classics but academia as a whole: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/04/the-dangerous-academic-is-an-extinct-species)
And then there are SC chairs who know or believe that HR is looking at the % of "minority" (whatever that means in a given context--HR refused to elaborate in this instance) interviewees vs. the percentage of "minority" (as self-identified) applicants and so intentionally stack the short list based on what Google searches and stereotypes about names can tell them about the identities of applicants. So if your name seems "white," then you may be at a distinct disadvantage for that reason and that reason alone.
Does that sound unlikely? I saw it in a search this year. I even complained to the dean with concrete evidence (screen shots, etc.). Does that sound like something HR would freak about? Turns out, as long as there's no permanent record that could get the university sued, HR is cool with absolutely anything the SC does. Hmm....
Who knows what makes a decision? Who knows, indeed.
PhD dissertations maybe don't expire, but they definitely get old. there's new bibliography every year that sometimes can cause a whole lot of revisions, that is if you want to publish it as a book.
Yet many of us have seen examples of TT hires made on "promise" who do not get tenure because while they wrote a good diss., they did not know what to do afterwards. Sometimes they are crippled by perfectionism, and refuse to put their stuff out. Maybe the drink too much or simply burn out. One reason to look at people who have been out for several years is a) there are a lot of them and b) they have a longer track record. More years of proving they can publish, show up to class on time, conform to professional norms, and interact properly with students. These are all unknowns with even the most promising ABDs.
These are all good points, but I don’t think the very top programs care. If someone is a total mess, they deny them promotion. If someone can do the job but doesn’t make the cut, they deny them tenure. Rinse and repeat...find a new promising, shiny ABD.
I agree the very top programs probably are willing to take the bet. They might win big, and, if they don't, it's okay.
What doesn't make sense is that many lower-down programs (and even some places just looking for VAPs?) often prefer unproven candidates to proven ones.
It seems that fewer names are being put to filled positions this year than last year. Are people more cagey this year about posting their success on the job market, or do we think fewer people are using the wiki?
I do think in this environment people are keeping things closer to their vest. The lucky candidates all of a sudden finds an enormous gulf has grown between themselves, about to start on an indulgent life on the TT, complete with health insurance, retirement accounts, research funding and fiscal stability, and most of their friends, who stare into the abyss of adjuncting, and may soon rely on public assistance to make ends meet. They know that some friends from grad school will never make the transition to full colleagues, but at after years on the precariat track will simply be the hired help.
As someone in Adjunct hell, I will confess that I had to stop following several more fortunate friends on facebook as they kept posting about the signing their TT contracts, starting their courses, being invited to conferences by virtue of their position, and buying a house. This was a bitter reminder of everything I lacked as an adjunct, despite the fact that we all had the same pedigree and qualifications.
This was perhaps petty of me, but the stakes between the winners (TT) and losers (adjuncts) is now quite high in our field. And it is something that can strain friendships that become separated by this gulf.
What 12:34 said. What's particularly difficult is watching the joys of teaching, of planning lessons and the delights in what students write, of taking students on study abroad trips, and even, dare I say, the complaints about the hell of grading.
I'm one of those who got a position that is still nameless on the wiki. I have told friends, and haven't sworn them to secrecy, so I assume most people in my more immediate circle know, but I've put nothing on Facebook. I lived long enough in adjunct hell that I know any kind of public "announcement" is painful to the many, many equally qualified people who have no similar announcement to make. Anyone who is curious enough will figure it out eventually when I turn up on the faculty bio page.
Congratulations, 3.56! Enjoy it all, and don't worry about hiding your light. I hope you found a fit in a friendly and supportive department, and have many productive years ahead of you. Well done!
12:34 here. First, congrats 3:56. It is good to hear of a job going to an adjunct rather than an ABD. Hope that the rest of us might be harrowed out of adjunct hell.
Personally, I like it when people update the wiki. I would like to make it in this field, and part of making it is knowing the professional topography (or prosopography?) of the field, and the wiki is a good way to do that. Secondly, the things that pain me are less knowing that x or y got a job, than seeing indulgent selfies in their new office, or the photos from the fully funded conference on Malta. And it is well known that facebook and other social media is an unhappiness generating machine, as you see only others' happiness but never their disappointments. But the wiki is not a social networking site, but rather a clearance house of professional information, so it is not indulgent to update the search status, or allow someone else to update the wiki for you.
It's disturbing to see that unsuccessful candidates would begrudge their peers their success, or at least their posting of any sign of it on social media. If your 'friends' can't bear to see your new office, or hear of your conference trips, then they were never friends at all. That kind of relationship is simply toxic, or the embittered party is just rather immature. So, as a failed candidate myself, to hell with those sour grapes, and let's raise a glass of the good stuff to the ones who make it. Cheers, folks! Onwards!
Sour grapes is an uncharitable way of putting it. People have been trying to do this thing for the last decade or more of their lives and now see it all falling apart. They have to pick up the pieces but there's no magical new way to arrange them that gives them a livelihood and a future. It's starting life all over again at the onset of middle age. It being painful to hear about others' success is the most natural thing in the world, and does not in any way imply resentment. Good for the people who got jobs. They deserve them. I just wish the other people who deserve them could get them, too.
Thank you, 12:55 AM. You said it perfectly.
Any news about the job in Sydney?
FWIW
The wiki doesn't exactly tell us how many jobs went to ABDs, but I did count how many people had some kind of employment as represented by a second affiliation. As it stands now:
Tenure-track
not previously employed 4
previously employed 30
Non-TT
not previously employed 5
previously employed 14
That is a useful statistic in the ongoing debate about should ABDs be hired. It does seem to suggest that on the TT and non-TT most employers seem to prefer people with experience. Perhaps the "shiny ABD" is a myth, although one can point to several high profile ABD hires (USC, Williams). It may be that most ABDs this year are getting hired as lecturers by their own departments with non-announced jobs, since certainly more than 9 ABDs must have gotten something.
WHAT ARE U IMPLYING SIR
Sheesh. Do you children really need to be reminded that we do not discuss individual scholars, especially not junior ones?
Sincerely yours,
Not-Servius (but wishing I had Servius' powers of deletion)
Servius here, reminding everyone that departments and their hiring practices are fair game, individual scholars are not. It can seem like a fine distinction, but please be mindful of it.
It should be noted that one of the scholars above was an ABD who had held several post-docs. Arguably anyone who has held post-docs fits better into the ‘had a job’ category than the ‘ABD’ category (since we tend to think of these as mutually exclusive), If we are counting, and is at best in a grey area. That case should NOT give hope to those of us (myself included) who are ABDs on home institution stipends or adjuncting.
I hope that is sufficiently respectful of people’s privacy while making a point that should be made.
Another instance (perhaps more common) of ‘non-ABD ABD’ would be someone with a Ph.D. from, say, France or Italy who did a second Ph.D. (in the same or a closely related) subject in the US. If a university hired them as a TT professor, we would have to acknowledge that they were in a kind of grey area. ABD but has a (European) Ph.D. or ABD but has held several post-docs is not what we usually mean by ABD, and manages (in each cases) to check several relevant boxes that 99% of ABDs cannot.
No criticism here, just clarification that ABD, for most of us, implies ‘does not yet hold a Ph.D. in field, from any institution’ and ‘has not held a post-doc or TT job.’
Any updates on the USC full-time/part-time lecturer positions?
How many people would lose your health care if the ACA were repealed? This seems an important issue for the adjunct class.
I bet a lot of the adjunct class already don't have healthcare.
"And, and I can just say, we're gonna have more jobs. As SCS President, I am focused on jobs. And-and I always say- and quite frankly, we're going to have great healthcare, great healthcare for adjuncts. The forgotten people of this profession will be forgotten no longer. We're going to- and I mean we're always saying, just because- and we're going to- quite frankly, we're going to have an amazing new healthcare system for Adjuncts, and- and I always say this- the R1's are going to pay for it."
Time to learn how to apply for unemployment...
Who got the Yale history job? The Wiki is silent.
Yale was discussed a while back...rumor has it went to the current VAP.
Amazing that they are able to find and hire the best candidate a year before they even run a full TT search!
Anybody know what happened with the pair of texas tech jobs?
The Yale job did indeed go to the current VAP
Updated count after the SCS info (I did track down affiliations for those not listed on the wiki; also did not count one non-classicist who filled a humanities job for which classicists were eligible):
Tenured/Tenure-track (not including explicitly senior positions)
Previously employed: 38
Not: 5
Temporary
Previously employed: 24
Not: 5
Those are astonishing figures, really... Thanks for crunching the numbers.
So... pretty much the only way to get a job is to already have one?
It does seem most of the previously employed had temporary positions. These figures do suggest that ABDs are not as successful on the market as fama might suggest, despite some high profile ABD hires.
So there were 2 high-profile ABD hires, if by ‘ABD’ we mean ‘does not hold a Ph.D. in Classics and has not held a post-doc’?
I see Williams. That is 1 by that definition of ABD. Any R1 institutions make an ABD hire?
Add Duke, and BU, if you consider it "R1".
"R1" status is a matter of fact, not opinion: http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu
(Whether one thinks these classifications are significant or fair is, of course, an entirely different question.
yeah, it may not be all that significant a classification as research gets fetishized (and the uber-elite LACs may in fact have higher standards for research in hiring than lower-tier R1s). but what institutions are R1 is not up for debate.
Note that for Carnegie the classification requires the institution to have a doctoral program. So an elite LAC simply wouldn't fall into the category because it is not pumping out PhDs.
no one is saying that ‘R1’ = good school, and i think that is where a lot of the confusion arises. elite LACs are not universities, and hence are not research universities. you might think that the mission of an elite LAC would lead it to emphasize teaching ability and commitment more than R1s do and to emphasize research (quantity, if not quality) less than R1s do. that may be the case (i don’t know -- how much do younger faculty at swarthmore/williams/amherst publish compared to R1 people? do the most research-heavy people leave for R1 schools?) or it may not, but research expectations were traditionally part of the R1/non-R1 distinction.
now, though, no one can get a job, so all bets are off. still, i would imagine bad personality/bad teaching would blackball you at an elite LAC in a way that they might not at an R1, if not in hiring at least for tenure.
Spousal hire at a private Ivy League institution is bad enough, but how much worse is it at a publicly-funded university, and done with great ineptitude? Across the pond, Trinity College Dublin has lost the run of its government-funded self.
As I recall TCD created a permanent job some years ago and simply give it to a short-termer, without advertising/interviewing etc. If it's the same crowd, it seems they have form.
Where was egregious spousal hire?
So Inside hires:
Yale
UMBC
Rochester
Knox College
Am I missing any?
Attempted egregious spousal hire at Yale (the failed search).
Probably both of the Texas Tech jobs as well, though we don't know yet.
CSU Northridge
Durham
Bristol
chicago "ran out of money" after a failed fake search where the candidate went elsewhere. sad sad sad.
two tenure lanes, two fake searches. welcome to new haven, where even the sbarro’s pizza at union station is more authentic than the searches.
At least Yale gives good campus visit for its fake/biased searches. TCD doesn't even provide lunch for its camouflage candidates.
think they serve the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen?
And a steak you could rock on a plate? But of course! Seriously though, a stale sandwich and cup of ersatz coffee would trump having to fend for yourself for 4 hours between presentation and interview. That's saying nothing of having to stand in a corridor waiting to be called in to the interview. Bad. So bad.
Incidentally, @10.01: I think the tenure criteria are different (3 years?). If so, that situation wasn't necessarily the creation of a new permanent job - just granting tenure, whereas they'd withheld it from the previous incumbents of the TCD short-term lectureship. But the cumulative optics are unfortunate for Trinity, to say the least.
they should start handing out t-shirts. ‘here, you can tell people you went to yale.’
6.30 again. To clarify, withheld from *some* previous incumbents. One moved on before competing the contract anyway. Okay, I'll shut up now.
By my count there are roughly 60 completed searches, 10 of which went to insiders, assuming texas tech. More might surface as names get filled in. There can be good reasons to hire insiders, even occasionally spouses, but these numbers alone do not suggest that the search process is unbiased.
One of the Texas Tech jobs has definitely gone to an outsider. Not sure if they're even aware of the wiki...!
TCD is absurdly broke. In the immortal words of Micheal Ray Richardson, "The ship be sinking."
TCD in its hiring is as self-indulgent as an Ivy League college, but as research-focussed as a LIberal Arts College (not meaning to dismiss LACs, but TCD puffs itself up as more than a teaching hotspot).There are now so few openings in Ireland that the School can'no longer assume candidates will simply keep schtum in hopes of being the lucky ones the next time around. There is generally no 'next time around', so there's nothing to lose in drawing the authorities' attention to hiring malpractices.
@10.48, TCD being 'broke' makes the creation of a job for a spouse all the more reprehensible. What little money they have comes from tax-payers who've had to bail out rotten banks since 2008 - said tax-payers won't stomach the chicaneries of a bunch of classicists.
It seems that the Irish have joined us. Welcome to Famae, Ireland!!
Go raibh maith agaibh! We're learning much from you North Americans ;)
#GRMA
So of the 45 jobs that have been posted, 28 have gone to female candidates, and 17 to male (if my count is correct). So 62% of successful candidates were women. I am in no way suggesting that any successful candidate did not deserve the job. But the imbalance seems to suggest that women have a not negligible advantage on the current job market over their male counterparts.
Two thoughts:
1) This is perhaps an entirely appropriate ratio, given the fact that many departments remain male dominated, owing to discriminatory hiring practices that persisted into the 2000s and still linger in some retrograde departments. Rebalancing is necessary to get the field out of the Mad Men era.
2) At the same time, it does seem that male candidates are moderately to significantly disadvantaged on the current market. According to the SCS, men form 60% of the applicant pool. So far, they have gotten 38% of the jobs. Today's men are paying for the gender discrimination of past generations.
One caveat: Not all the jobs have posted, so it is possible the imbalance is not quite so skewed, or even more so. I am not trying to sound like a Trumpist screed on AM radio. But with so few jobs, it is worth discussing the extent that gender should play a role in hiring.
In response to July 10, 2017 at 4:24 PM - there's also a possibility that, as has been the case in my experience, there are proportionately more female candidates. I saw this with my PhD cohort, and when I was on the job market, and now having participated two searches. Of course, with the searches my assumption about gender (binary?) was based entirely on name, so it may be of little value. But we did end up first-round interviewing "female" and "male" candidates at a ratio of 3:2 in both cases. I don't have specifics on applicant demographics, but this ratio seemed to reflect the applicant pool.
I think 4:24's point is that according to the SCS, men are actually a significantly larger proportion of job-seekers. But different specialties may have different gender balances.
I think most of the cis-gender, straight, partnered, child-having women will probably be equally or more disadvantaged down the line, when children arrive and the family balance goes out of whack, but, as one of those women, I can see how those proportions might be disheartening to a male candidate.
I don't know much (or care) about the Chicago search that apparently failed, but the fact is that the school is indeed going through difficult budgetary times. I get this from a very senior member of an unrelated department. It is therefore quite likely that if the department failed to land whoever was the target of the allegedly fixed search it then would not have been allowed to make an offer to anyone else.
4:24
Are you sure about that 60/40 break-down of the overall pool? That was the distribution 15 years ago, and given both general trends and my own subsequent experience (which is like that of 6:27) I'd be surprised if that were still true.
I'm not 4:24, but here's a sample of the placement service data from this year:
Of the 639 people on the job market, 338 filled out candidate profiles on our website. All percentages are based on the number people who answered a question rather than how many of the 338 could have answered.
Judging by the most common attributes in each category, the average Placement Service candidate is a married (57%), white (88%), male (58%), US citizen (72%) with his Ph.D. from Princeton (5%). He is currently a graduate student (36%) researching Latin literature (25%), and is using the Placement Service for the first time (52%) to apply to 1-5 jobs (43%). He has published 1-2 articles (34%) but has not yet published a book (70%).
The gender distribution in the Placement Service mirrors almost exactly that of the SCS membership as a whole (ca. 60% men, 40% women).
17% of the candidates have used the Placement Service for four or more years.
The next-most popular research category after Latin Literature is Greek Literature (also 25%). The least popular is Comparative Literature (1%).
Full-time non-TT and part-time adjunct faculty together make up 33% of the job market.
Ctd.
Out of the 639 registered as placement candidates, 189 (30%) received interviews at the meeting
Of the candidates chosen for interviews, the majority (58%) were women
A number of interviewees (31%) interviewed for more than one job, with five being the highest number of interviews for one person
I think this is updated, as well, although of course not including this year. It remains dismal: https://classicalstudies.org/ckfinder/userfiles/files/PlacementStats2013-15.pdf
So it does seem that there is a gender skew in the job process: 58 percent of candidates are male, but 58% of first round interviewees are female, and approximately 60% of TT jobs this year went to women.
It has been correctly noted, of course, that gender bias exists in other parts of the graduate school experience that disadvantage female graduate students: the timeline of graduate school is abysmally cruel to women who want to have children, and also ingrained cultural biases make it more likely that a woman will have a "one body problem" of a male partner whose career is given priority. And then there is sexual harassment, still prevalent even in supposedly enlightened places, and good old fashioned misogyny.
Because of these hazards to women in graduate school, it is also possible that what we are seeing is not gender bias, but rather natural selection. It may be that the women who finish despite the hurdles PhD programs throw up for women are stronger candidates, whereas weaker males are more likely to scape through programs because they face fewer obstacles. So it may be that out of any PhD cohort, about 50-50 men/women will end up with TT jobs, with men more likely to earn the PhD, and women who get PhDs being more successful candidates on the job market.
This is where we would wish for more data, including tracking graduate cohorts from enrollment to graduation. The placement tracker is a good place to start, but this is something the SCS should be doing.
To add to 12:07's salient comment, I'dl note that so far the discussion has focused on the candidate-end and not on the search committee end.
It's also possible that the gender skew is caused or at least influenced by search committees stacking the deck to appease the HR diversity drones. Assume you've got 12 first round interviews and five candidates that everyone is REALLY interested in (the same five or so getting multiple interviews elsewhere) and then 15 candidates more that some portions of the committee are interested in. Assume you've gotten a mandate from HR that the diversity of the first round interview pool should match or exceed the diversity of the applicant pool. (This is normal, by the way.) Then it makes sense for an unscrupulous search committee to "stack" the remaining seven spots in the first round interview with candidates whom they suspect to qualify as "diverse" from HR's perspective. The same applies to the on-campus interview. This will skew the percentages pretty quickly.
It doesn't mean that any of the short list candidates are undeserving. On the contrary, they were picked only from the "deserving" pile, however each search committee defines "deserving." It does mean that some candidates have unfair advantages/privileges that others do not at certain points in the process.
These are really interesting points, especially 12:07. With regard to 2:09, though, I would think that if HCs were stacking the deck with women to fulfill HR requirements while really preferring men, the ultimate job offers would go more proportionally to men, wouldn't they? Women would get more interviews, but men more offers. As it is, the jobs themselves seem to go rather disproportionately to women (of course with the caveats listed above about how we define gender). If anyone cares to dig into previous years, we could see if this is a fluke year or a pattern.
Having been on the SC with a pretty fierce set of HR policies, I can say that our committee, at least, was interested only in interviewing the people we thought were the best candidates for the job. With finances and the market the way they are, we did not want to take any unnecessary risks like those suggested by 2:09pm above - "stacking" the interview pack in any way that would reduce our chances of getting the best available person for our position would have been regarded as insane. But we're not exactly the most highly sought after institution, so we may be slightly anomalous in that we're aware of the very real possibility that our top candidates are also other places' top candidates, and we're not particularly likely to win in a shootout. Echoing a couple previous posts, our applicant pool and interview lists both skewed somewhere close to the 60/40 "female"/"male" ratio, despite an apparent inverted proportion for the market as a whole. Maybe our position or particular wording or research subfield skewed us so heavily against the grain?
2:09 here.
@5:27 -- I can only wish I were in a department as ethical as yours. My place is certainly not highly sought after (quite the opposite), and my last experience on an SC was rife with many of the stereotypical bad behaviors, including stacking the deck. Disregard that as you will.
"My place is certainly not highly sought after" -- you shouldn’t sell Yale short! :)
I wonder how Yale feels about having become jokey shorthand for corrupt hiring practices...
Shouldn't the Yale administration look into that department's hiring and tenuring decisions? It's bad enough that there are so few tenure lines in Classics. Yet when I hear about such hiring practices I'm shocked that the university grants them any tenure lines.
"should" maybe, but in the world we inhabit, it ain't gonna happen.
Yale has way bigger, uhh, pescado to fry:
http://ydn.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Byrne.pdf
Yale might also want to look at their diversity profile.
is yale really that bad on diversity? they have people from various countries and backgrounds. obviously not a dept that looks like america, but is there any ivy league classics dept of which that can be said?
Perhaps they have a strong international representation, but apart from the chair, the entire faculty is white (well, one person appears to be a gold Medusa; not sure what that means).
again is that worse than harvard?
You've a point. They *all* need to start looking very carefully at their diversity profiles. More than looking, in fact.
Given how few minority classicists there are, I wouldn't blame one university specifically, but rather us as a whole field, for the lack of diversity in any given department. On hiring, that's an issue specifically here.
It's a new year. Time for a new page?
So here's a question I have long wondered about: how do committees know whether or not they have put together a diverse group of first-round candidates? When we apply, we get that series of questions about gender, ethnicity, veteran status, etc., but it is clearly marked optional, and often is (supposedly) anonymous, and even when not anonymous we are told that it is only for H.R. So is this all a lie, and that information does get shared with search committees, or are search committees supposed to know our genders (usually simple enough from the name, or else the pronouns used in reference letters) and our skin pigmentation on their own? Can anyone provide some illumination here?
Sounds like the Sterling Professors at Yale need to be cleaned out; the rot is deep.
Haha, you mean Falstaff, Quixote, and Dante?
The Middle Eastern Studies program is apparently a real mess, too.
The HR surveys are anonymous, but many hints exist in cover letters. Names usually describe gender, so this is the easiest category where the SC has basic information. Race is harder, although again names often provide a clue, not fool proof to be sure (especially as traditionally ethnic names go mainstream), but one gets a sense of the race of someone named Tyrone vs. someone named Theodore, Maria vs. Martha, etc. Saying something like "I am passionate about working with students of color" or "I connect well with student veterans" are ways in which an applicant can hint which box they checked on the secret survey. It is not hard to stack the deck as the SC sees fit, whether with good or (in Yale's case) dubious intent.
The traditional ethnic name Maria seems to have gone mainstream to Italians :)
or maybe it is the italians who have gone mainstream
3:12, grasshopper, the year begins in early September, when the new job market comes alive.
5:48, I should know better than to engage with an internet troll, but you've got me curious about how professors who are emeritus, as the Classics Department's only Sterling Professors appear to be, can be considered "rot," let alone even worth commenting on in the context of how the department currently operates. Is this just a cheap shot because of politics?
I've already seen ads for positions at Brown and St. Olaf, so an argument can be made for starting a new page at any time. Not that I'm eager to begin the horror anew.
1:51, I am not 5:48, but I assume 5:48 was referring to the English and Spanish departments (given the link that was posted).
The link mentioned Spanish and Italian depts. and the English situation is too well known to need mentioning
Oh, right, the people in that link... I did read part of that earlier, but their rank as Sterlings didn't register. Sorry for the dumb question.
[Sterling Professor 1’s] juvenile attempt to impress his friend [Sterling Professor 2] by
surprising Plaintiff with a kiss on the mouth in front of [Sterling Professor 2] and hundreds
of other colleagues during a party held for [Yale mucky-mucky] on May 13, 2014
you cant make this stuff up!
@1:21 AM
The new year's Placement Service is up and running. New jobs have been posted for that year. Grasshopper has snatched the pebble from your hand.
New FVs have always been put up in August or September and there seems little reason to change that. But do we already need a new wiki? Are jobs starting Fall 2018 really already being advertised?
11:07 a.m. here, since I forgot to apologize for calling one of you a troll. I thought it was a rather unprofessional dig at one or two Yale emeriti, which it was not. I will admit to not knowing anything about their English Department, which in my view is not "too well known" enough. Perhaps someone might share it, or provide a link?
Maybe they mean this: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/features/n_9932/
Re: 11:17
"[Sterling Professor 1’s] juvenile attempt to impress his friend [Sterling Professor 2] by
surprising Plaintiff with a kiss on the mouth in front of [Sterling Professor 2] and hundreds
of other colleagues during a party held for [Yale mucky-mucky]."
[Yale mucky-mucky] is in reality ANOTHER Sterling Professor and a former dean who seems to have inappropriately informed Sterling Professor 1 about the source and nature of sexual harassment claims against him, see points 45-47 of the complaint. Clean house, then burn the house down.
I love law prof inadvertently CC-ing stalkee about IP stalking in that thing. Is she a Sterling professor too?
Wait, there are actually FOUR sterling profs involved. Prof. 1 above, Prof. 2 his buddy above, and Prof. 3 (mucky-mucky), who actually informed Prof. 4 (also Sterling) about those issues in 45-7. AMAZING! Sterling quality.
omg what is WRONG with these people????
There are 43 current Sterling Professors at Yale. Five have been mentioned in this thread in connection to serious misconduct, and some, I assume, are good people.
@11:36 am
Yes, there are already jobs being advertised for Fall 2018.
I've gotten the following SCS Placement emails so far:
New Jobs for AY 18-19
Chicago, TT, Assistant Prof. Roman Historian (begins Fall 2018)
New jobs for AY 17-18
UC Riverside, Lecturer (AY 17-18)
UC Riverside, VAP (Winter and Spring quarters, 2018)
July 13 2:29 am mentioned new jobs at Brown and St. Olaf's.
Also, for AY 18-19:
Williams College TT in Greek Drama
Servius: we time the wiki and FV according to the US academic calendar because that corresponds best with most, although not all, job searches. While there are indeed a couple of very early advertisements for jobs beginning AY 2018-19, their deadlines appear to be perfectly normal, Oct.-Nov. 2017. They'll appear on the next wiki in due course. Jobs that are still being advertised for the coming academic year (2017-18) of course belong on this year's wiki, not the next. The timing of the Placement Service's annual break is (by design) not relevant to most job seekers or searches.
I'm not seeing the ad for the UC Riverside Lecturer position; anyone have a link?
@July 13, 2017 at 2:29am - Could you share the links to the Brown and Olaf jobs?
Hopefully Yale is running a search or two!
Would anyone bother applying?
Actually, that would be the way to get the admin's attention.... That job was open specialty and rank, right? They could easily have had hundreds and hundreds of applications. If they advertise it again, and get four? Eyebrows will go up. I don't think this is going to happen, but I like the thought.
Anyone else think Interfolio's new "free" account is a joke?
no one will ever boycott a yale job. a nice fantasy, but the only way to hurt them would be for finalists with other options to withdraw/decline.
I don't know if this is the right place and I don't know if the link will work or just tell you who I am (hi!)), but here's the brown link:
http://apply.interfolio.com/42728
And here's UC Riverside's lecturer link:
https://aprecruit.ucr.edu/apply/JPF00772
St. Olaf is hiding from me somewhere, sorry. Someone else will help, or maybe someone already did on the wiki or the job ad page.
Oops, here is St. Olaf's:
https://stolaf.hiretouch.com/faculty-postings
T-T job in Greek literature at The College of William and Mary (FYI: review begins pretty early, Oct 15) https://jobs.wm.edu/postings/28814.
Where was the St. Olaf job advertised? It doesn't seem to have been through the SCS Placement Service. Did they post it somewhere else? AIA, AHA, etc?
It's on the SCS Placement Service.
https://classicalstudies.org/placement-service/2017-2018/23797/assistant-professor-classics
I got St. Olaf from the Chronicle's vitae notification system:
https://chroniclevitae.com/jobs/0000375743-01
To July 12, 2017 at 4:25 PM:
The search committee does not and legally cannot see any of the demographic information on candidates' race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. Only our institution's Human Resources office can see that. After we, the search committee, pick our top ten/twelve/etc candidates and submit the names to our institution, HR sometimes (but not usually) contacts us to tell us to add another (specific) candidate to the short list. HR intervenes if and only if our short-list is less diverse than our pool of applicants. I do not know if they do statistical analyses to see if the difference is statistically significant (this might be hard, given that the short-list is such a small sample size). HR does not remove anyone from our short-list, only add, and they do not tell us why (e.g., whether the applicant is a person of color, or a veteran, or Native American, etc). On the one occasion that this happened to us, the person whom HR added back in was an excellent candidate who almost made our short list anyway.
To follow up on August 3, 2017 at 11:07 AM's comment:
HR at my university provides a statistical summary of the of the applicant pool to the search committee whenever asked. The way this worked in the last search I was on: our diversity rep (one of the SC members) asked HR for the rundown at each step and whether HR would accept the choices we had made. HR gave us summary information (# of men, # of women, # of "diverse" persons) but did not identify individuals and did not define "diverse" for us. Our percentages shrank at each step, enough that HR commented on it, but not so much that HR felt the need to intervene.
Those of you who have sought therapy for (un)employment-related stress - how do you find someone who can remotely relate? I've recently admitted that I'm deeply depressed about my future in this field, among other things. I've had some short therapy meet-n-greets, then a longer stint with someone who quite frankly did nothing to help. How do you find someone effective at managing both long- and short-term problem behaviors and emotions? At the risk of sounding arrogant, I'd like to talk to someone on a particular moral and philosophical level about life. The people I've seen so far were not capable of or tuned into this. They wanted to dismiss my fears and faults, which are all very real.
So how do you find the right person?
Anyone else get c.10 emails from the placement service today about the job at Haverford? Talk about hopes raised + dashed!
Also @9:09AM I feel you. I have similar anxieties caused by the crazy market and this crazy profession. I haven't sought professional help although I have considered it. What has stopped me is the disconnect I feel when discussing my situation with basically anyone besides people who are in my same shoes. Mentors + colleagues want to understand, as do family and friends, but none really do, I find. Maybe that's why many of us end up here doing puzzles to prove we're not robots!
Yes, in my experience even academics from different generations can't empathize. My own program spent many years agonizing over what was "wrong" with individual graduates that was preventing them from being hired, rather than seeing the larger pattern that NOBODY was getting a TT job because the candidate/job ratio is so out of balance. While there is a bit more awareness among senior scholars now, this type of speculation about the flaws of our graduates and why they don't get hired still happens. And these are professionals in our own field. Nobody else will understand even that well. Thus, FV. Good luck, 9:09, it is hard but you're not alone.
I didn't get the emails about Haverford - care to update me?
now that the new academic year is beginning, I hope we start seeing the placement tracker get updated
Servii? Can we have a new year on the tracker? Thanks!!!
servius here-- we're working on getting the sites for the new year up and running, with plans to have things finished in the next few days.
Thank you so much!
Any ideas about the SUNY Albany "Roman History" job? The title on the SCS Placement service says "Roman History", but the ad itself says "Hellenistic"-- of course there is overlap, but it could be interpreted in varying ways...
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