@2/23, 12:01: Sorry, no dice. I'm not a man, not part of the demographic you're attacking, not part of the power structure. Nor am I engaging in ageist conduct, as you are, which is illegal btw.
Can we please give the phrase "fake news" a rest, at least for a day or two? On FV it's become meaningless and infantile, whether used by the right or left, whether as a serious accusation, an ironic comment, or even a witty remark.
I disagree with most of what I read on Eidolon, and at this point only go there when there is clearly a piece I need to read just to know what others are talking about, and I am quite far from the Eidolon editors and writers on the political spectrum, but I would NEVER use such an absurd term as "fake news" for them.
Seriously, let's all see if we can make it until next Thursday without anyone writing the words "fake news."
I like some of what Eidolon does. I liked the piece on female military historians, for example. But I agree there's a unhealthy appetite for shaming and out-righteousing others that characterizes the left generally these days, and isn't doing us any favors.
Can we please stop debasing language by speaking of "the left" when referring to cultural and socio-economic circles consisting of Ivy Leaguers and relatives of billionaires?
Honestly, most of the people you find in academia are run-of-the-mill liberals and neoliberals, actual leftists, i.e. socialists, communists, and anarchists are few and far between. This is one of the reasons that I find all the screeching about "leftists" taking over academia to be such an eyeroll inducing idea, because the the conflation of liberal with leftist is a phenomenon of American politics having been dragged to right by wingnuts and as a result being totally out of step with the rest of the world.
Careful when you speak of billionaires in reference to Facebook and their kin, lest you be accused on Eidolon of antisemitism. I have to say, that was the straw that broke Eidolon for me. Sure, there are plenty of antisemitic alt-righters out there, but when they only make reference to your wealth that is not automatically antisemitism.
I too used to like their stuff, especially their class-issues/adjunct work, before they became full on Classics SJW apologists. Perhaps that was the ultimate reason for the Eidolon/Paideia schism.
"Can we please stop debasing language by speaking of "the left" when referring to cultural and socio-economic circles consisting of Ivy Leaguers and relatives of billionaires?"
If this is your understanding of the term "the left" then your understanding of American politics is so sparse that I beg you to run -- don't walk -- to your town hall or urban equivalent and remove yourself from the voter rolls.
Unless this was meant as a subtle joke, in which case I would recommend that you use about 20% less subtlety on all future attempts at subtle jokes.
Paideia is also great-books-y and Western civ-y (I am a fellow traveler, so these are not criticisms). So there is a tension there between what they claim to do, and what Eidolon thinks its job is, and since there is (now) ZERO TOLERANCE for Western civ-y-ness at Eidolon (WHITE SUPREMACISM), it would make sense for a schism to occur and heretics to be anathematized, etc. Palo Alto is the new Chalcedon!
"I like some of what Eidolon does. I liked the piece on female military historians, for example. But I agree there's a unhealthy appetite for shaming and out-righteousing others that characterizes the left generally these days, and isn't doing us any favors."
I had a bit of a problem with that piece, since it essentially redefined "military history" to make its argument in a way that I consider misleading at worst, and poorly explained at best. Traditional military history is about tactics, logistics, strategy, composition of forces, generals, soldiers, heroic deeds on the battlefield, battlefield topography, etc., and the writer didn't provide much evidence for female historians writing on such topics. Instead, she discusses what apparently is called "New Military History," which is really just social history with a focus on wartime, and not a study of the military arts. Now, that's an important and fascinating area, and I have read a number of books on the topic, including an excellent one by a woman (about a non-ancient battle) that's one of my favorites. But there's a bit of apples and oranges here, and it's hardly news that women are actively making important contributions in the area of ancient social history.
Instead, I think that the writer should have addressed the question of women engaging in TRADITIONAL military history (TMH) as well as "new" military history (NMH), instead of acting as if they are the same thing, when they most certainly are not. Missing from the piece are such questions as: Are men sticking to TMH while women write NMH? Or, are there a comparable number of male scholars producing NMH as there are female scholars? Are there women trying to be active in TMH who are being excluded by the male historians already established in that area? If that's happening, is that why the women are sticking to NMH? Or are there plenty of women in TMH, but the author didn't include them? The reader is given no sense of this, and it is rather important to the subject.
Therefore, like so many Eidolon pieces, an interesting and important topic is discussed, but ends up having a serious flaw that undermines its value, and ultimately makes me regret having taken the time to read it. And since Eidolon doesn't exactly enforce a standard of "short and to the point," that often means 5- and 10-minute chunks of my life gone.
It is really remarkable that incisive, charitable critiques of Eidolon articles are offered FOR FREE on FV. I salute you, sir or madame, whoever you are!
On the topic of journal submissions: I had an article accepted in May, and sent the final version of the piece in June; I've heard nothing since (no contract, proofs, &c). Is that normal, or should I contact them?
Good luck with the request for information. Perhaps this might give you some perspective on my ongoing submission; I sent a paper to the AJA a year ago and I'm still awaiting an official response. Reviewers reports were received back after three months according to their online system. Sent an request for update email at 6, 8, and 10 months and just get replies from the editorial assistant that they will forward the request to the Editor. Easily the most frustrating publishing process I've ever had. In contrast, after this I submitted a monograph text to CUP and it was reviewed and contract offered within six months - not necessarily comparable, but gives a sense of how challenging it is to get something through a decent journal in a reasonable timeframe.
AJA does take a very long time. They tend to have a pretty short acceptance to publication though. As a rule of thumb, submission to publication tends to take about 18 months to two years.
I also had a bad experience recently with the AJA. I would strongly recommend not submitting there, at least while Jane Carter is still the editor. Many other equally prestigious journals are run in a vastly more professional manner; I guess being able to hire a full-time EIC doesn't equal caring about the quality of the editorial process.
5:28, if your piece was accepted you can be pretty sure they haven't forgotten about you or anything. It's coming up on the docket. But there's no reason whatsoever not to ask for a status update!
This goes for the initial question as well. Four months is about the outside of how long the review process should take for the first two reports. But referees often slack off and the people running journals don't normally get on their backs until the author contacts the editor about the MS's status. I think after three months it's fine to start asking for updates every now and then; just don't be annoying about it.
I would strongly say do not ask an editor for an update WITHIN their estimated time to review. If they say the process takes up to four months, don't send a nagging note at three months.
My policy: take their estimated turn around time, and add two more weeks. Then send a polite note. That way you don't seem like you're jumping the gun.
^ yes, yes, of course. If they say x months, don't email before x months. Common sense. Most journals don't seem to post estimate turnaround time, unless I'm mistaken, and then I think 3 months is an acceptable amount of time to elapse before asking for an update. I would say that there is an attitude that you can't email editors to ask for an update before waiting a year and a day and praying to Jupiter for good omen, but there's a difference between nagging and writing a polite, succinct, professional note. If they're annoyed, well--academics are good at deleting emails.
I too have heard horror stories about AJA of late--it's a real shame; some of us (i.e. most of us) don't have a year to wait for a rejection.
In the literary sphere, HSCP seems to be very professional-- they exhort you to get in touch with them if you haven't heard from them after 5 months and are very clear about when you might expect to see publication (i.e. which future volumes are already filled).
But let me tell you, as an editor of a volume, it is one hell of a task to get people to be a peer reviewer, and then, if they agree, to do so in a timely manner... it's often the last thing on everyone's list.
Returning to a previous topic, we all should tell minorities to run away, not walk, from classics. The conservatives among us prefer it remain an area/cultural study for those of European descent, so no problem. Liberals on the other hand, if they are as compassionate as they say they are, shouldn't doom minorities to careers that consistently have them at a disadvantage. To what end? To assuage white guilt? To heroically sacrifice themselves in a manner very few Neolibs actually practice themselves? No, tell them to run to careers where they can actually get ahead on a playing field that isn't so drastically tilted against them.
I...really can't disagree with you, @7:27. I suppose it supports the notion that classics should just fade away into obscurity like its kin, Oriental Studies.
October. It's been since October since the last T-T ancient history job posted.
As one who checks both SCS and the 3-4 history job boards I see about 20 T-T jobs a week post for History Departments. Zero for ancient since October when Univ. North Alabama posted.
African, Asian, U.S., Environmental (whatever the fuck that is!), and African-American T-T jobs post constantly, while ancient is dead. It doesn't seem any better for us ancient historians in Classics Departments either, as the Classics season is VERY short and long since expired for this season for T-T. Add that the fact that only 5 T-T history jobs came out for Classics this year at phenomenal schools, which eliminates hope for anyone whose CV doesn't look like Walter Scheidel's. (Chicago, Princeton, Colgate, Holy Cross, and Carleton).
I can't believe how absolutely horrible the job prospects are. I mean, it was bad when I chose to begin the PhD some years back, but each and every year less and less T-T jobs appear and (seemingly) the applicant pool is getting far too competitive and in order to be the one to land a job you need to have 15+ articles, a few monographs, top-5 pedigree, etc...
I know things are bad for all of us, and I don't mean to complain, I mean, I chose this path, but is there any other field where one can spend 4 years for a BA, 2 years for an MA, and 6 years for a PhD, have built up a pile of debt and post-poned many aspects of life (starting a family, etc..) and, at the end of the day when you have degree in hand and have done all of the things advisors tell you to only to find no job? And not only that, but the only outlet for work happens in a 2-3 month season where 200+ folks are putting in for the same 5-7 jobs?
I've wasted 13 years of my life in school and now 2 on the job market... 15 years and nothing to show for it but a pile of debt, an empty inbox, and a piece of fucking paper to certify how I've fucked myself.
It's crazy to think that my current *best case scenario* is to get a adjunct gig somewhere for a few grand a class--just enough to keep my power on and my cell phone turned active so that I can get all the loan collections calls while eating a cheap frozen dinner. But I have a PhD from a top-10 school and lesser ones from Ivies, as well a full CV, so all's ok, right? (dripping with sarcasm)..
On journal turnaround times: maybe some generous soul will volunteer to get the Classics section of http://humanitiesjournals.wikia.com/wiki/Humanities_Journals_Wiki off the ground?
Yeah, anyone who encourages students to walk a traditional classics academic path should minimally have their head examined or at worst taken out Old Yeller style. If the study of the classical world survives in any form in the near future, it will manifest itself through severely adapted scholars in innovative departments such as environmental studies. Alas, the discipline has little desire or ability to produce such scholars so it looks grim.
Why don't you just go and do something else? Just leave the academy behind and get a job in consulting or as an editor at some periodical. I have trouble feeling bad for people who constantly whinge and do nothing for themselves. Classics and the Humanities are dying, poisoned by leftists and post-modernists. I think we deserve it honestly.
March 2, 2018 at 8:50 PM "I know things are bad for all of us, and I don't mean to complain, I mean, I chose this path, but is there any other field where one can spend 4 years for a BA, 2 years for an MA, and 6 years for a PhD, have built up a pile of debt and post-poned many aspects of life (starting a family, etc..) and, at the end of the day when you have degree in hand and have done all of the things advisors tell you to only to find no job? And not only that, but the only outlet for work happens in a 2-3 month season where 200+ folks are putting in for the same 5-7 jobs?"
Leave the field. You admit that you were well apprised of how bad the job market was when you started the PhD, but decided to pursue it nevertheless. It has been pointed out here before that the Ancient History track is probably even trickier than most specialities in Classics since you have to make yourself appear to be a fit for positions in both Classics departments and history departments. Moreover, nobody here ever claimed that a top-ten PhD plus lower degrees from assorted Ivies guaranteed employment in the field, simply that one's chances become greater if this is the case, combined with an advisor who actually does their job.
March 2, 2018 at 9:34 PM "Classics and the Humanities are dying, poisoned by leftists and post-modernists. I think we deserve it honestly."
Why didn't you include a nice quote from Enoch Powell? I imagine that you have a few favorites.
@8.50 I no longer have skin in the game, and read FV as a concerned former-Classicist, having made the decision to stop job-hunting a few months back. I won’t reel off my achievements in an attempt to make it look like a great loss for Classics - we all know great candidates who are languishing - but will say that lining up other work and moving on from the rat race has been extemely cathartic. Life is much less toxic now, and the mental stress has evaporated. It’s joy-inducing. The only issue is that those friends/colleagues who remain in the game somehow view this as betrayal, as though disparaging their decision to hang on. However, if you’ve got a good circle of friends outside of Classics, you’ll find much sympathy there. My non-Classics friends surprised me by cheering when I broke the news - they’d seen and heard too many horror stories, the likes of which they’ve never had to live... So good luck with converting all your considerable intellectual capital in a new field, if you decide to cut your losses.
People, can't we have a little empathy? Many, many of us are in this boat. There is nothing wrong with grieving when you lose the life path that your career hopes, identity, relationships, and substantial financial and personal sacrifices over the first decade of adult life have been dictated by. None of us were aware of how bad it would be in 2018. Those in the best position to foresee this were the tenured faculty, i.e. the people who largely continue to lure in 22 year olds to teach their myth classes so they don't have to. If you're not into "whinging," don't come here.
I agree. There was no way of knowing when 8:50 began his PhD (8 years ago it seems) that things would get to the horrible state they’re in now. 2010 to 2018 has seen an insane decline in jobs each and every year. I can’t understand the dickish responses by a few here of “leave the field; your naive for thinking you’d get a job,” etc
Ancient history is tough for 2 reasons:
1.) 90% of dedicated ancient history programs are in History Depts., so you’ll get a PhD in “History”, never having the chance to teach Latin or Greek. Those 90% are not Ivies. No Ivies offer an ancient history program; some (Penn) only a focused philology degree, but your training (as I’ve been told by friends at Penn) is just philological emphasis on historical sources, no concern to ever delve into anything deeper than the texts themselves.
This is a problem since all those who are trained historians have their PhD from schools never in top 7-8.
What does this mean? Wel... if a History Dept (who often sees ancient folks as all being odd and the same, whether philology, history, archaeology) is looking for an ancient historian, they often are seduced by an Ivy pedigree. Which means that the ‘philologist whose done a great deal of textual criticism of Tacitus’ is their new “historian.”
**to be clear: all top History PhDs in Ancient HAVE to be able to demonstrate graduate-level competency in Latin and Greek, just like an historian of Napoleonic France needs to demonstrate grdauate-level competency in French. So, save me the bullshit that history PhDs don’t know their languages**
2.) While history depts are easily seduced by a pretty name (even if the person lacks the historical training), Classics Depts won’t even consider you. Period. Since Classics Depts are so deep in an 18th century world view, they often want everyone to teach everything. This is a MAJOR reason for the decline of Classics—the failure to adapt to a specialized world. Classics should be specialized: Latin philologists teach Latin; Greek philologists teach Greek; classical archaeologists teach archaeology; historians teach civ and history courses. To expect that everyone should teach Latin/Greek is insane.
An historian of 17th C. France might be 100% fluent in French, or a Chinese historian 100% fluent in Mandarin, but NOBODY would ever expect them to teach French 101 or Into to Mandarin.
Classics isn’t dying, my friends. It is dead. It has been out-dated and expired for some time now. Sure, a few folks will still land a T-T job here or there, but while each and every other field has numerous T-T jobs still being posted every day (many even growing), Classics is rapidly imploding and spiraling the drain.
Classics’ view that everyone in a department should be a philologist first is not just antiquated but asinine. It’s holding on to Victorian Era style higher education all while bemoaning the drop in enrollment, lack of divrsity, and budget cuts from admin. For a discipline full of very intelligent and Ivy-trained people, most are staggeringly dumb and near-sighted.
If your approach to teaching and running a dept is fully compatible with what was happening when the steam engine and typewriters were the newest inventions, it’s time to either close your doors or drastically change and join the rest of modernized academia.
Wherever there is severe competition for jobs with an overabundance of white male candidates, minorities, women, and the less affluent (in that order) are screwed. White dudes are more likely to be given these opportunities in the first place and are then put under much less scrutiny. We see this in classics with the monsters created at Columbia, Cincinnati, etc. that have finally been brought to justice. How many more are there? I can think of four off the top of my head. And we wonder how these monsters are created?
Classics is between a rock and a hard place. It will unfortunately remain the poster child of white privilege despite some necessary, but failed, attempts to change the status quo, which in turn has alienated the elite class that has traditionally, and artificially, raised its stature in the academy. Everyone should run from classics. It has no chance when even the progressives maintain its hopelessly outdated outlook and structure.
"Wherever there is severe competition for jobs with an overabundance of white male candidates, minorities, women, and the less affluent (in that order) are screwed. White dudes are more likely to be given these opportunities in the first place and are then put under much less scrutiny. We see this in classics with the monsters created at Columbia, Cincinnati, etc. that have finally been brought to justice. How many more are there? I can think of four off the top of my head. And we wonder how these monsters are created?"
Are you willfully obtuse, or just parrot what the current liberal orthodoxy preaches? Minorities and women have a far easier time on the current job market than white men.
And after Johnson was fired from that internship for making up quotes, he would not have been given a job with the Telegraph’s leader-writing team. First of all, because black women are not generally indulged with second chances like that. Their successes are understood individually (“she’s one of a kind”) but their failures are misunderstood collectively (“they’re just not up to it”). A transgression of that nature would be followed by much handwringing about affirmative action and “politically correct appointments”.
@11:36, what are you smoking? According to the wiki 8 white men and 6 white women have accepted positions, and I bet it will be much more in favor of the former once the dust settles. So is this just heroic white men overcoming the odds? Give me a fucking break.
I think what 11:36 is trying to say is how difficult it is for white dudes now that they only land 60% of the classics jobs rather than the traditional 90%. Or perhaps he's thinking along the lines that classics is the study of western exceptionalism and the rightful domain of white dudes with the occasional white vagina thrown in for diversity?
Wealthy libs should put their money where their mouth is if they truly want to save classics. Start a Save Classics for the World foundation and only fund research that focuses on topics outside the white, male, elitist literary canon. I would fund white dudes who advance this cause just as I would eschew funding POC who research your standard, overstudied classics topic. Let Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. keep churning these out. I would also scour the less than elite programs for interesting undergrads and postgraduates as these programs are more accessible to diverse students and also more likely to encourage research outside the same ole.
While I agree with the substance of what you're saying about ancient history, I think a quick footnote or two is in order. When you say that no Ivies offer an ancient history program, that's just inaccurate. Both Brown (https://www.brown.edu/academics/classics/graduate-program/phd-program/phd-ancient-history/phd-ancient-history) and Yale (https://classics.yale.edu/graduate/graduate-programs/combined-program-classics-and-history-yale) offer Ph.D. programs in Ancient History as such. You rightly highlight UPenn for its 'philology with history' program, which a prima facie look at Cornell's version seems to be. Columbia houses its historians in the History Department, and Harvard has programs in both Classics and History (as Yale did until two years ago). Goodness knows what Dartmouth is going. From what I've heard about internal struggles from colleagues at both Brown and Yale, even the historians guiding these programs face an almost daily struggle with their colleagues about the goals and nature of the pedagogy.
To your second point, it doesn't show up in the wiki, but ABD students from those two programs received a fair number of nibbles on the market this year but no bites. But hopefully they'll reverse the trend you rightly observe and decry. Who knows what that means for the rest of us in ancient history.
Yikes. I step away from FV for a week and it turns into a massive race debate. ...fun
I have no interest in hearing about diversity or how we’re too white. Since this is an anon forum, we can all speak candidly, which is a good thing. I play along in academia like I care about it, but I really don’t. I don’t give a shit what color anyone is or whether they’re a man, woman, or want us all to pretend that they’re “non-binary” or some other mental delusion I haven’t heard about yet. If you’re a decent person and have something to offer the discipline then that’s all I care about. All this hyper focusing on everyone’s melanin count or genitalia is asinine.
Call out racism, sexism, etc.. when you see it, but don’t go looking for it, because as we all know you can find anything anywhere if you’re looking for it.
Not every job nor every discipline in academia will be 100% representational of society’s race/gender breakdown.
Asian and Indian students disproportionately focus on STEM, women disproportionately (90%+) make up all nurses, etc.. yes, there are always reasons to explain each case of disproportion, but what does it really matter?
(OP here) I appreciate your insight and footnotes. Fair enough that some Ivies donhave some form of interdisciplinary program, but I don’t think they’ve had too many grads just yet, as they’re all still fairly new. Most, in fact, weren’t there when I was applying to PhD programs back in ~2009. All that existed then for really good AH programs were 3: Berkeley’s AHMA (which is a disastrous program notorious for dropping funding for students year-by-year), UNC-Chapel Hill, and Michigan’s IPGRH (which is where I applied).
It doesn’t matter how great Berkeley, UNC, and Michigan may be, for too many it’s still not good enough since there all still “just a state school.” We see, every year, our superior PhDs get pased over for Ivy folks with blank CVs. :/
C'mon, no one thinks Berkeley, UNC, and Michigan are just state schools. Look at their placement rates as well. They are just as successful as "Ivy folks with blank CVs" that you're decrying. So you didn't get a TT job as a "state school" Michigan grad so it must be the underserving Ivy bastards? Give me a friggin' break. Blame the shitty market all you want but it's not your degree, dude. I can guarantee whatever warts you possess are playing a larger role than your Michigan degree.
Just an FYI, but the under-supported/alienated Ancient History Ph.D. is a specifically American problem. The British system still strongly associates Ancient History with Classics.
Berkeley had a good record until around 2015, at least as a search of their alumni page seems to show.
You're also forgetting Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard--all have had fair records of placement in recent years. Princeton actually seems to have struggled in recent years for their PAW people, while Chicago... I can't think of any in AH (Classics: yes).
@2:26 I have heard that there are virtually no AH grads in Columbia's History Dept. At least not Greco-Roman ones. They're all in Classics or Classical Studies.
In general, ancient Greek and Roman history programs in History departments, as opposed to Classics or interdepartmental ones, seem to be a dying species.
@4:12. "if a department is almost entirely still stocked with boomers, it's guaranteed to be self important and dysfunctional." As opposed to those stocked with …?
The boomer generation ended somewhere around 1965 (?), so I suppose a dept could be stocked with plenty of Gen ‘X’ ers; those in their later 40s and 50s. Far too many depts have folks hovering around 70. My undergrad still has a prof who’s a WWII vet in the History Dept. only a few years ago did that same dept see two profs who got their PhD in 1955 and 1957 retire. They were both in the late 80s and still teaching full time.
It’s not age discrimination to point out that far too many academics plan to leave their jobs ‘feet first.’ Their refusal to leave before 65-70 is not a virtue but an act of selfishness.
Coming late to this latest set of posts, but I've got to comment on this one. Apologies if it attracted interest, as I haven't read past it yet.
People, can't we have a little empathy? Many, many of us are in this boat
No. It seems to me that the reason there's such a lack of empathy is that empathy requires -- by definition -- putting oneself in the position of others. Empathy on the job market means imagining oneself as ultimately a "failure" like all those others who just "weren't good enough" (as our Boomer advisors say with their ever-so-meaningful side glances). Empathy on the job market means acknowledging the possibility of "me too."
(Oh! Did I just make an impolitic comparison between the job market and non-consensual assault? Hm. Perhaps I did. One is immediate; the other is not. Both are perpetrated by deceptions of those in power, are psychologically and physically devastating, and include massive amount of victim-blaming by on-lookers. No. No similarities all. Cue the faux-outrage and faux-news.)
I'm an old Millennial (or perhaps a young Xer) in a TT job who benefited from a predecessor taken out "feet first" (so I preemptively accept hate from all sides), but when will we talk about what it means for classics that we've obliterated the discipline's representation of Xers? The Silent Generation pretty much retired in their 60s and promised Xers twenty years ago that a raft of retirements was upcoming when Boomers hit their 60s as well. With Boomers working well into their 70s and 80s (I'm not taking sides here) and the lower number of Xers as it is, it can't be good that our scholarship and departments are dominated by those >60 and <40. Does it matter and do we even care? My intuition says it can't be good for scholarship and I see how dysfunctional my own department is with those at the top, yes, lending academic cred, but also creaking into work while those at the bottom take up an inordinate amount of the day-to-day slack. We sure could benefit from a couple 40 or 50 somethings on a departmental level and I'm guessing the state of affairs is not good for classics overall.
I have no problems with productive academics working into their 70s and beyond. Taking stock of the 50 or so boomers I know well, the problem I see is that the best among them in terms of both scholarship and collegiality are the ones that retired in their 60s and it's the worst among them hanging on to the bitter end.
Thanks to a reference by SA, I found this prescient FV gem from 2008!
Anonymous RIP said... I think I'm finally in the camp that believes that classics is dead (and I disagree with most of WKH?). We have all these boomers clinging on to their jobs until they literally keel over and die. In the meantime, we'll have a bunch of young Ph.D.s leaving. What's going to happen in 5-10 years when these geezers are finally 6 feet under? There will be much fewer qualified people to take their spots and it's even more likely that they won't be replaced. Yeah, we'll still have classicists here and there, but they will be the oddballs in language, art history, and history departments. Thanks a lot, boomers, for everything, including the national debt.
Wow, and another one. This is fucking amazballs...from one FV generation to another.
Anonymous Anonymous said... That's my entire point. It's not about one person, but about their generation as a whole. If the boomer's barely hanging on to life had retired gradually over years, like most other disciplines, classics would likely be more productive and less expensive now. Wouldn't this go a long way toward making it more attractive to deans who are now questioning our very existence? It would have also guaranteed the discipline's future by having junior faculty in place before the questioning got more intense and the economy got worse. As it stands, the last of the echo boomers are coming on the market now to find almost all the seats still taken. Combined with the fact that the echo boomers did not enter the humanities in nearly as many numbers - and will now leave academia in increasing numbers - this might spell the coup de grâce for the discipline in 10 years. Surely there wouldn't be enough qualified people if all the boomers retired now. What will it look like in 10 years - fuglier. I doubt the echo boomers will have hung around in VAPs for 10 years.
Yeah, that ship sailed around the recession when admins did their math. Classics has been written out of the 21st century curriculum. Not sure if a less expensive and more vibrant/representative faculty would have helped, but it sure couldn't have hurt. RIP, indeed.
So basically the best rationale is that the boomers deserve a twenty year golden parachute of pulling in six figures while doing less work than a adjunct so the department can bask in their faded (at best) glory? What fucking horseshit. Last time I checked, they weren't the ones storming Normandy and freezing in the Chosin Reservoir. Pray tell what heroic deeds were they doing other than pushing these very forebearers off a cliff themselves but now having the nerve to call us opportunistic vultures for looking for gainful employment ourselves.
This is my first time posting on FV. I'm stuck in the middle of job market hell like many of the rest of you, and I'm also frustrated and scared. But I'm disgusted with the insulting of an entire generation, as if this is a Buzzfeed column about why MILLENNIALS REALLY RULE while BOOMERS REALLY DROOL, take that, random Washington Post columnist! Stop buying into bullshit about everyone of a generation being the same. Many boomer professors have retired at 65, and many have had different career paths that don't involve sitting on top of a treasure hoard eating caviar. Some are wonderful human beings, some aren't. Venting is important (and as a lurker, entertaining), but can people stop constantly acting like such shitty humans on this blog?
How is it acceptable to say "I hope that when [x] dies, we will never have to talk about [entire period/field of study] again"? This was not deleted, either.
Well, I recall that a few years back there was plenty of discussion of a certain Daddy Cruel at Cincinnati--no actual names but of course we all knew who we were talking about...
Imagine if someone had written I hope that once [PoC or woman scholar] dies, [entire period/field of study] will die as well. I suspect it would have been deleted as borderline hate speech.
I'm ok with both your statement and the hypothetical statement. I am concerned about the double standards and protection of certain people and not of others. Or maybe we need to set a list of basic ways in which we are allowed or not allowed to criticize senior people (intellectual stuff, but not personal? their writings, but not their behavior as advisors?).
5:32pm "You're seriously comparing a child pornographer with someone who just happens to have stayed on the job a few years longer than you would have liked?"
Well to be fair they each screwed a younger generation in their own way so...
Frankly, I think criticism of senior scholars should be permissible in this forum, whether by name or anonymously. There is literally no other forum for this, and that kind of information can be helpful to this population. I for example really appreciated the comment about the Georgetown senior scholar's behavior during an interview; at least I know that if this happens to me someday I'm not alone. This is really the only place for honest debate about what's happening in Classics these days--it can be hard to express opinions about these issues even to close friends, as one never knows what might get back to whom and how that might affect one's future job prospects.
My first time checking in here today, and there are all these now-deleted posts, which makes me realize that FV has its own form of Murphy's Law: if I am checking FV regularly then Servius takes far too long to delete posts that break the rules and need to be removed post-haste, but if I don't check FV then Servius deletes such posts before I get a chance to see them.
I always find the "avoid department x like the plague, it's toxic!" comments amusing. Let's not oretend that most people here wouldn't agree to be chained to a radiator in the Classics department each evening if it meant that they could have *any* tenure track job, let alone one at a place like Johns Hopkins
That's the problem. I know many good 'uns that left the field and even TT jobs rather than deal with the systemic bs. We're just upping the chances of future #metoo-type incidents and zombie profs in whatever positions are left.
Agree, and hence we are all turning on the senior people, ὥς τε λέων...μεγάλῳ ἐπὶ σώματι κύρσας | εὑρὼν ἢ ἔλαφον κεραὸν ἢ ἄγριον αἶγα | πεινάων. But I do think this is an important question, that shouldn't be silenced as "speaking ill of the dead" -- to what extent is it ethical to remain in a job into your upper 70's when so many junior scholars are leaving the field--and the field is losing their ideas, their scholarship, their teaching?
There was one back in the day - something like 70 - that forced the Silent Generation out and then was repealed just in time for the first boomers.
If you want to make sense of all the law changes over the past 50 years, follow the boomers and their greed. They don't need college educations anymore? Get rid of state funding and make sure college loans can't be written off in any form. Let's treat unis like corporations! What? They don't need houses anymore? Cut the mortgage credit.
It's disgusting. Yeah, there are plenty of good boomers, but how can any say that they've been good stewards as a generation? The right trots out greedy Trump so the left trots out neo-lib, Nixonian, greedy Clinton as a counter? WTF...just wtf.
I've taught in more programs than most of you. I have indeed seen some old and very senior sorts who were burned out and not doing their jobs. I have also seen some old and very senior sorts who were outstanding, both before and after reaching 70, and whose retirement, forced or optional, would have left a big hole (and has done so, in the case of those who have since retired, or passed away). I have also had several terrible colleagues who were in their 40's and 50's, and for the most part were associate professors. Thinking back, I've had more bad colleagues from this group than the former. And I'm drawing on a much larger sampling than I would have liked -- consider it a silver lining in my unstable career!
Here, let me take you down memory lane: Job #1: Small department, nothing wrong with anyone. Full professors not past 50. Job #2: A SLAC with two people close to retirement, but both teaching as if they were 20 years younger. No weaknesses. Job #3: A senior guy who was only into literary theory and cared about no one -- colleague or student -- who wasn't. Two junior colleagues within reach of tenure or just past it (I can't remember) were clones. No other holes in that large department. Job #4: A large program where the worst colleagues deserved to be no higher than associate, though due to lax standards and corruption they were both elevated to full professor. The place also had two senior people close to retirement, one of whom was still great in the classroom (someone you would know), while the other probably had never been any good. Job #5: A prominent PhD program with one bad colleague who was on the verge of tenure, who since getting it and becoming an associate has become an enormous source of trouble in the department. Everyone else was great, except a senior Big Name who I believe had never been much good in the classroom, so his age was irrelevant. Job #6: A small program with an associate professor doing a rather bad job, while still 15 or so years from retirement. Job #7: Senior people close to retirement, including two whose names you should recognize, were absolutely "getting it done," and nothing was wrong with anyone there. Job #8: Another smallish program, with the only problem someone who is still 5-10 years from retirement age. Job #9: A top-15 PhD program, with several faculty members close to retirement, and several more in their 50's, in their 40's, and in their 30's, and not one of them phoning it in. The seniormost faculty collectively should be Exhibit A in the case against mandatory retirement.
I am not unsympathetic to the desire out there for more openings to appear, but if someone is still doing their job well and wishes to continue, and their presence benefits students and colleagues alike, I hope they keep going. And I write this as someone who, as you can see, has certainly been affected by people staying in their jobs.
The youngest boomers are around 60? Give it another ten years and mandatory retirements will magically reappear once the now-retired boomers don't want to pay for expensive senior Xers and Yers. It's how they roll...
i want to tell you about my process, but i won't give you all the details or my background info (is it telling that i learned about this site a few years ago but never paid it much attention until i got curious about job stats and placement for this year? also, that i don't have facebook??)
1) i'm very fortunate to be in a multi-year but temporary position right now, so i only applied to places where there was a clear fit. sometimes i learned about fit from word of mouth, mostly from the ads though: i never applied where my skills were irrelevant, mostly because it was a waste of time for my referees.
2) i had letters personalized about me + research/publications, secondarily for institution. i gave letter-writers 4+ weeks advance notice, included full text of job ads with the emails requesting letters, and told them why i wanted each job. (i applied for 6 this year).
3) after i heard about interview requests, i *always* sent additional information to the SC or the contact person, not immediately but about a week before the scheduled interview. This was carefully formatted in a PDF as one doc, with a TOC at beginning, with *info not requested from the ad/original application* -- review letters from teaching, a recent publication, syllabi they'd be interested in judging from the ad, etc.
4) conference interviews are insane / unethical. climate issues with boston and northern climes made it worse this year. i pretty quickly chose not to attend AIA/SCS this year after my flights were canceled: i opted to reschedule interviews for skype because i figured that the SC wouldn't all make it. this was true, as it turned out. i've prefered skype interviews (6?) because it's easier to control the environment. also, as others have noted, being crowded into a hotel room is no fun and at least for me, AIA/SCS was much less beneficial than smaller workshops here and there. making big conf interviews seem mandatory for applicants is, again, totally unethical in current climate.
5) i sent follow-ups after the interviews: just be personable!!!
6) campus visits are very different wherever you go: i've had 3. i've prepared by making a big word doc with all the info about the uni, their program and faculty + research interests, local resources, etc. i printed this and took it with me each time, sometimes looking at it in the bathroom between appointments. know about the people + place you want to work!!!! i also printed out my publications + syllabi + cvs and pulled them out to give away whenever relevant issues came up during discussions.
that's all i've got for now! best of luck to everyone, it's brutal out there!
i want to tell you about my process, but i won't give you all the details or my background info (is it telling that i learned about this site a few years ago but never paid it much attention until i got curious about job stats and placement for this year? also, that i don't have facebook??)
1) i'm very fortunate to be in a multi-year but temporary position right now, so i only applied to places where there was a clear fit. sometimes i learned about fit from word of mouth, mostly from the ads though: did not apply where my skills were irrelevant.
2) i had letters personalized about me + research/publications, secondarily for institution. i gave letter-writers 4+ weeks advance notice, included full text of job ads with the emails requesting letters, and told them why i wanted each job.
3) after i heard about interview requests, i *always* sent additional information to the SC or the contact person, not immediately but about a week before the scheduled interview. This was carefully formatted in a PDF as one doc, with a TOC at beginning, with *info not requested from the ad/original application* -- review letters from teaching, a recent publication, syllabi they'd be interested in judging from the ad, etc.
4) conference interviews are insane / unethical. climate issues with boston and northern climes made it worse this year. i pretty quickly chose not to attend AIA/SCS this year after my flights were canceled: i opted to reschedule interviews for skype because i figured that the SC wouldn't all make it. this was true, as it turned out. i've prefered skype interviews (6?) because it's easier to control the environment. also, as others have noted, being crowded into a hotel room is no fun and at least for me, AIA/SCS was much less beneficial than smaller workshops here and there. making big conf interviews seem mandatory for applicants is, again, totally unethical in current climate.
5) i sent follow-ups after the interviews: just be personable!!!
6) campus visits are very different wherever you go: i've had 3. i've prepared by making a big word doc with all the info about the uni, their program and faculty + research interests, local resources, etc. i printed this and took it with me each time, sometimes looking at it in the bathroom between appointments. know about the people + place you want to work!!!! i also printed out my publications + syllabi + cvs and pulled them out to give away whenever relevant issues came up during discussions.
that's all i've got for now! best of luck to everyone, it's brutal out there!
servius here: we would like to briefly weigh in on the comments over the weekend, and let you know that we're having some internal discussions and will get back with more detail in the near future.
But, for now, a reminder that critiques of individuals on the basis of actual or perceived personal characteristics is banned. Age is most certainly a personal characteristic. Critique of scholarship is more of a grey area for us, but anything deemed to be cruelly bad taste will also be deleted. We would also like to point out that when FV goes into ugly territory, it is often actually people seeking to act as defenders who bring out inappropriate identifying details or take an argument from a general level to that of specific individuals-- so please take care.
Unfortunately, the Servii are volunteers with day jobs and are not omniscient, nor omnipotent, and we cannot be here every minute. We remove inappropriate posts asap, and will continue to do so.
It's super considerate of you to have typed all this information out to help others in the market. But posts like this tend to make people think that this a process they can control, when it isn't. Publishing and teaching and having a great network helps and will get you on the shortlist. But the interview process itself is - in my experience, and for what it is worth - based not so much on performance as it is on fit. If you're not the candidate for the job, sending extra information not requested by the SC or a personalized note post campus visit won't make any difference.
I was on the market for several years before I recently landed a T-T position in a top dept very (top 10 or 15 or whatever according to the recent discussions here), and did none of what you suggest when it finally happened for me. In fact, I had so many interviews that year that I didn't prepare at all for the one that eventually worked out, and went on campus knowing much less about the department than I felt comfortable doing. I had been conditioned to think that knowing all about every single one of the faculty members and the program itself would somehow help me, but it didn't at all. I was just the best fit, and it worked.
^^Agree, having seen a number of similar posts in the past and had discussions with colleagues who have gotten jobs. Almost all say different things about their strategies. Some people have said "apply to every job you're remotely qualified for!", while others say "only apply to jobs you're a good fit for!" etc. This year has seen an Apuleius scholar hired for a Republican/Augustan poetry job (Rutgers), so "only applying to places where one is a clear fit" may not be good advice. Personally, I think it's best to apply to as many jobs as you have time/energy/emotional resources for--some years that may be more, and some years that may be fewer. A lot also depends on the nature of the offerings--sometimes there may be few postings in your area and you may have to stretch yourself to "fit" other job descriptions.
Also, for what it's worth, I heard SC members of one department hiring this year complain about candidates sending more materials than are asked for. This probably depends a lot on individual preferences, which is something we can never know. It's probably best to do what feels comfortable to you, rather than following a script based on another person's success story.
Congrats to 2:23! But I've also gotten such terribly conflicting advice that I have long since given up on there being any kind of recipe for success. Extra materials will definitely piss off some SCs, even if they impress others. I was even advised once, by someone on a SC at a very prestigious institution, that it was better if job seekers didn't have more than two questions about the position -- because too many questions make you look suspicious! SCs are just random conglomerations of flawed human beings, there's no magic trick to impressing them.
That said, I will also echo the general sentiment, namely that there is no one scheme to follow to land a t-t position.
These things help/are required (in no particular order):
1) Not being a total dolt or socially oblivious, or at least being able to pretend that you're neither of these things if you actually are. This is the one that always gets me. It never fails to surprise me that book smart people often have no fucking common sense or any notion of politesse. The ability to schmooze, be likable, and convince people that you're someone worth helping is a major key to success.
2) Pedigree
3) Advisor influence and their willingness to use it
4) Publications, presentations, etc.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I said that these are in no particular order, but honestly having publications and the like isn't going to do you any good if you haven't got 1-3 lined up. Again, I don't espouse the view that one can control the process, however I think there are things that obvious tilt things in one's favor and help mitigate some of the randomness.
"Willingness to use it" is what you'd imagine. Calling in favors to those who owe them, calling/writing behind the scenes to any friends at a given department, agreeing to fast-track grants or projects if the advisor sits on some board or another. Barring any of these, implying that the proverbial shiv will be used if the advisor is powerful enough. What people refer to now as backroom dealing. Some see it as a negative, I say that if in this environment your advisor isn't willing to apply the carrot, or if necessary, the stick to get their students jobs then they aren't worth their salt.
@10:15, various faculty in my department assume I am quite naive, as they keep assuring me "that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore." And yet I know it was just this that happened a few years ago when a person from our program mysteriously got a position that had not been advertised anywhere. On the other hand, I don't think it would ever occur to my adviser in particular to try something like this. Seems to think writing a letter is sufficient.
was the situation the following? a prof left your home dept (A) to go to peer institution (B), but needed a leave or sth, and so a phd student from (A) magically appeared as a lecturer at (B) for a year to teach those courses? both (A) and (B) being FANCY places.
One of the easiest ways to see the backroom dealing is to look at the background of newish faculty at any given university. The connections aren't always obvious, but if you trace a person's career back to their undergrad years, you can usually pin them down.
Just one example off the top of my head that is fairly obvious. A recent hire in ancient Greek art (2 years ago?) has a nice t-t job at a top school in a BIG midwestern city. Hired ABD as far as I can tell, thin CV, from an another top PhD (west coast). The connection? Another grad of the same program has a nice, cushy position in the hiring department, and the two even had the same advisor.
This is just one very obvious example. There are plenty more that are less obvious.
Sorry 11:39/11:42, that wasn't the situation. But it's good to know of another story confirming that this sort of thing does still happen on occasion. Does anyone else have a similar story?
I appreciate the account shared by 2:23 (congratulations!), but I just want to second 8:14's comments on fit and fortuna as determinative- and not one's superior or careful preparation. I got a t-t job in my 4th year on the market, and can really see no rhyme or reason as to why I was rejected from so many places or hired at the one. My best campus visit- in which my advisor had serious connections with the department and multiple professors contacted him to say how well the visit went- resulted in ghosting and a rejection; my eventual success was in a department with no connections and a campus visit in which I was horribly sick and exhausted from caring for my newborn. Just another bit of anecdata.
I second 1:14. I got my job after four desperate years on the market, and circumstances were random. My best campus visit, where I felt like I really "clicked" with the whole faculty and where my job talk was truly stellar, resulted in nothing but a anguished rejection letter from the chair. In a different job talk I also had faculty members calling my advisor afterwards to say how much they liked it: but no job. And the campus visit where I got my job I was exhausted and jet lagged, reeling from a delayed flight, and gave my least polished and prepared job talk of any of my campus visits before almost falling asleep at the dinner afterwards. My weakest showing by far, but it resulted in the job.
You can do many things to try and make yourself a stronger candidate (teach, publish, etc.), but tyche in the end rules us all. I don't think for a minute I "earned" my job. I just lucked out before my time ran out.
reread 1:14pm and 1:55pm, they've retold my story - my favorite part is the bit where I had a phenomenal campus visit, hanging out with prospective colleagues for hours after the formalities had ended discussing all sorts of topics related to the job and the city and so on. And then literally four months of complete and utter radio silence. I landed a 2-year gig in the interim, but out of sheer stupid curiosity eventually emailed the search chair to see wtf had happened. Eventually they replied that the search had been cancelled, but that mine had been the best campus interview they'd had. Thanks.for.nothing. They never re-listed that (or any other) position, but if they do the classics wiki will be the first to get the warning. In the meantime, tyche scored me a T-T job just when all hope seemed lost, in a position that was anything but a "best fit" for me, and a bit like 1:14 just a few months into learning what it is to have a newborn. Apparently the glazed-over-from-complete-exhaustion look is impressive to some SCs...and maybe we all look like we just don't give a fork by that stage, which is surely attractive to the hiring committees - "this person is so confident that they're not even trying! We must hire them immediately!"
Morale of the story courtesy of 1:14 & 1:55 —> it’s very hard to evaluate yourself. When you think you’re a “perfect fit” or did a great job at interview/visit, don’t let yourself think that. We’re our own hardest critics when it’s unwarranted and too quick to self-congratulate for mediocrity.
...I guess we can take a lesson from George Constanza (a fictional Seinfeld character, so don’t get too happy, Servius; no need to haphazardly delete this as well!), in trusting in the “opposite.”
Ha, morale. Congratulating mediocrity indeed. "Reading fv fills us all with low morals." Some of us NEVER self-congratulate; we can't begin to imagine what that would even mean. But seriously, I kid, and now I'm going to re-watch all of Seinfeld, because Cantstanzya!
Yup. Got a TT job this year after deciding that this was my last year on the market before leaving academia. Got 0 TT bites last year when I felt my CV was in some ways stronger than it is now. There is something to be said for lacking the air of desperation that probably characterized my earlier visits/interviews.
NEVER, EVER send SCs materials that they did not request. SCs are overwhelmed by the materials they have already asked for, and the last thing they want is an eager beaver sending them stuff they do not want.
I agree, on my SC we were completely swamped under what we did ask for, so I can't imagine trying to go through anything extra (unsolicited), and I think at least some of us would have found this to be a bit annoying (it may even be illegal in some places to go through such materials, but I don't know about such things). As a rule, I'd advise against sending additional unsolicited materials...unless, of course, that is *exactly* what one particular SC likes to see. The only rule in all of this is that there are no rules. There's gotta be a William Lawson's commercial in here somewhere...
That's great- so for these past few posters, at least, landing a job is like landing a woman. Once you no longer give a crap and you're not even really looking or trying, you suddenly become irresistibly attractive. "HIRE THIS MAN!"
I'm loving all the Seinfeld references here today. Too bad that after an SCS interview we cant just leave behind a sable hat, sing our last name to the tune of the jingle "by Mennen," and all the sudden be the object of their desire.
George: Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise. I was personable, I was bright. Oh, maybe not academically speaking, but ... I was perceptive. I always know when someone's uncomfortable at a party. It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every of life, be it something to wear, something to eat ... It's all been wrong.
**A waitress comes up to George**
Waitress: Tuna on toast, coleslaw, cup of coffee.
George: Yeah. No, no, no, wait a minute, I always have tuna on toast. Nothing's ever worked out for me with tuna on toast. I want the complete opposite of on toast. Chicken salad, on rye, untoasted ... and a cup of tea!
Hello, I haven't been on FV for several years, and I'm a bit out of touch with the current feelings of those on the market (other than it's terrible, etc.) Next year I'll be the chair of a search committee for the first time. The last hire my department made was me. Although it's a while, I distinctly remember my years on the market after the 2008 crash, and I'd like to make the process as decent for candidates as possible. My school requires a detailed plan for searches many months before the job is even advertised, so I'm plotting it out now. I'd appreciate any suggestions on particular things done by SCs in recent years that you found helpful. Thanks.
@8:50 Application stage: The most helpful thing (I've noticed this more this year than in the past) has been restraining the number of documents in the first round to CV, cover letter, and rec letters, and asking for other materials for longlisted/ shortlisted candidates. Easier on search committees too not to be buried in documents.
Interview stage: Consider giving candidates the option of a Skype interview. This also has become more common, and I think it's great for people to have the option of not traveling all the way to the meeting.
Post-interview: Letting people know in a timely manner where they stand is so, so helpful.
1.) Ask only for contact info for three references, not for actual letters up front. It's an unnecessary burden for well over 100 applicants who won't get an interview as well for their letter writers, whose time would be better spent preparing a thoughtful letter for a SC that is considering their candidate.
2.) Never leave the majority in the dark. So, when you have a select group (usually 8-12) that you would like to interview, send out an email (a generic one is perfectly fine) to those you will not be interviewing as well. Send out the emails all on the same day. Then, when you know who from the interview group you'd like to move forward to round two and have for campus visits, let the other 6-10 interviewed candidates know as well. Now, you can say to them either that they aren't being considered any longer or that they are placed on a waitlist; either is ok.
The fact is, we ALL know the instant that people are asked to interview or invited to campus visits, so to be left in the dark just further adds to our own feelings of worthlessness. Nobody will be offended to be told that they were interviewed but waitlisted, and then invited later on--truth be told, if anyone is frail enough to be bothered by that you wouldn't want them as a colleague anyway.
3.) Send out a list of interview questions in advance. It's better for all parties involved to have as well-informed and high quality of an interaction as possible. I think that it says far more about a candidate to see how a given candidate 'prepares' for a question compared to his peers; is it rigid? is it dry? is he personable in delivery and mood?
@8:50: it is wonderful, delightful, and other -ful words for you to pose this question to this community--thank you!
One thing that I really like to see in applications: please make it possible to submit more than three letters of recommendation! As time goes by, I've built up more people willing to write for me and whose letters can showcase different aspects of my candidacy (service, teaching, research). It's so frustrating to have to pick and choose, especially since I can't always be 100% sure which are the best letters. Five is a much better number.
Also, I know sometimes there are mandates from on high, but asking for tailored statements of X (e.g. "detailed statement of teaching philosophy describing how you would contribute to X initiative at our school or proposing X number of new courses for our program) is. just. evil. Most candidates are desperately trying to make time for job applications on top of writing and teaching very high course loads. Asking for additional specialized documents at the initial stage of the process is cruel and inhuman. If they are really important, perhaps they can be solicited at the pre-interview stage?
Finally, a comment for the interview stage: please take a moment to glance over your candidates' letter/CV before the interview. There is nothing more frustrating to me--and it has happened multiple times--than to go into an interview after spending days prepping to realize that the committee members have no idea who I am, don't know where I did my graduate work, don't know my current VAP institution, don't have even the most general sense of my research or teaching history, and then ask questions that would be better posed of my CV, as in "how many articles have you published?" or "have you taught Greek?" This is such a waste of everyone's time and is also pretty insulting.
Again, thank you for asking! I'm sure there will be other good points I've forgotten.
"With Boomers working well into their 70s and 80s"
Uh ... Exact definitions vary, but the first "baby boomers" were born in the early or mid-1940s. Anyone who's 80 today was born in 1938. So while it may eventually turn out that some baby-boomers will keep working into their 80s, they haven't done so yet, and any 80-plus prof. still working today isn't a baby boomer.
I had an interview at North Alabama about a month ago and I haven't heard any updates. That said, I have no clue if the other interviewees check/update this or the Euro history wiki, so they may have already made an offer but are staying quiet until it's all finalized. Who knows...
(1) Try to keep the first-round requirements to the bare minimum.
(2) If you TRULY are not going to consider ABD's, Ph.D.'s in fields other than Classics, people who work on x topic, please say that. Mean what you say and say what you mean. We will all be happier. It is shitty to say 'ABD or Ph.D.' and then throw ABD apps. in the trash. It is also shitty to say 'Ph.D. in hand required' and hire an ABD.
and before anyone starts to quibble about ABD status, substitute your favorite requirement that turns out not to be a requirement for 'special' people.
"Mean what you say and say what you mean." Yes. Please. (Of course before they can do this, the SC needs to be able to agree within itself about what they want.)
Also, please request 3-5 letters. Some of us need to use all of our original letter-writers for various reasons, but also need a current colleague to write for us.
And NO extra-special writing assignments or syllabi written just for you at the initial stage. That's just barbaric.
As we saw with the highly immoral FSU VAP, do not require tailored materials. Just CV, boilerplate cover letter and a writing sample. SCs sometimes think that since they have one of the 50 precious jobs in the field that we will all want to intricately tailor our materials in the first round, but this is an enormous waste of junior scholar's time. Some people will do this (2:23), but this should not be a professional standard. The first round of applications is like speed dating, and both candidate and program should reserve questions of fit for the second round, or preferably the campus visit.
I always felt that one could tell the quality of the job and university by the inverse of the materials required. The best jobs tend to only require a CV, cover letter and writing sample.
I'm not a candidate but a past search committee chair. One thing I'd advise you to do if your university uses a software system for applications is to make sure that you *personally* go through the application system to see what it is like before it goes live. The first time I chaired a search, the standard practice was for HR and our department administrator to handle all of that; our administrator is great, but she has never applied for an academic job, so she didn't recognize a key problem in the way the search was set up in the system. (You'd think a university HR office would have this down, but keep in mind that different fields do things differently, and the default set-up could, for instance, include asking for supporting documentation that is irrelevant to Classics or else not having a way to upload something that is important to a Classics search committee.)
"I'm not a candidate but a past search committee chair. One thing I'd advise you to do if your university uses a software system for applications is to make sure that you *personally* go through the application system to see what it is like before it goes live."
YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Truer words have never been written here. It is astounding how often there is something messed up about an online system, or how often the ad gives insufficient or misleading information about what is required for the application. Everyone who runs a search should make sure that the job posting matches what the candidates will encounter, and that candidates will not encounter something that should not be.
To give just one example, it is too common for an ad to say we must provide letter+c.v.+X, and then the H.R.'s one-size-fits-all website gives us options for additional materials, forcing us to decide whether to stick to what was asked for or add more, and whether adding more when it's not asked for might put us at a disadvantage. Basically, H.R. departments cannot be trusted, and must be checked on.
Oh, one more thought, for my post with the elongated "YES!" Some places want reference letters, others want a list of references who can be contacted, and too often ads do not make clear which is which. I've had the experience of having colleagues provide tailored letters for me based on what an ad said, only to find out from the website that I was supposed to provide names and contact info. Search committees should ensure that this never happens.
(While on this topic, can anyone explain why so many places want a list of references to be uploaded as a separate PDF file, when our C.V.'s list references? It's so odd to require this seemingly superfluous step.)
Might I put forth the radical suggestion that you do what is done at certain major schools in the UK: require that at least two members of the search committee are faculty outside the field of classics. This helps to keep the search honest, in my opinion, and to help eliminate classics group-think and unconscious nepotism.
@3:28PM: A job seeker here--I don't like this suggestion, which I think you've rightly characterized as radical. I don't know why you and some others on here think having SC members outside the field is going to improve fairness. If anything, people outside our field will have no idea of what a Classics department really needs in terms of teaching, and they won't know the research well either. I think this would lead to a skewed favoring of candidates who seem "interdisciplinary," harming the vast majority of candidates who have received a training as "mere" Classicists. We should be hired by people who actually have the ability to judge us for what the job entails: being a Classicist. As for unconscious nepotism, I think the (academic) nepotism you're decrying is actually pretty conscious in the case of those who practice it! Fortunately, not everyone does.
@3:28 also a job seeker here and I love that idea. 3:44's response sounds like they're scared of others can do just what they can plus more. I think in this climate the more we involve other people from other disciplines the better chance we have to maintain classics in university.
If they want a historian, bring in the historians, if they want a philosopher, bring in the philosophers, if they want a lit person, bring in the lit people. White Studies deserves nothing less than a chance to interact with the *disciplines* it claims to embrace...
I'm surprised at the implication that most SCs don't already include "outside members." Here at my SLAC, every search is required to have an outside member. I've served as the outside member several times, including on a chemistry search. And even back in the 90s and early 00s, when I spent (way too many) years on the market, most search committees that interviewed me included outside members, often from an English or History dept. The committee that hired me here included a scientist. Is this not the norm?
In my experience as a SC member (for Classics), most people who invoke "interdisciplinarity" are quite willing to tell Classics what Classics should be doing, but would never tolerate Classics telling their discipline/department what to do.
One assumes that in any system by which 'outsiders' are appointed to search committees, Classics will both be a receiver and a sender. Who is the net gainer? That, I would suggest, depends on the individuals involved.
Well, Area Studies departments generally draw from real disciplines (and can't place their graduates in real disciplines) and don't tell them what to do. Classics is Old White Area Studies. But the Area Studies part is the relevant part. I would imagine this holds true for Middle East Studies or Oriental Studies or East Asian Studies or Latin American Studies. They don't get to tell a real dept (philosophy, anthro, sociology, history) what to do.
In other words, Anthro is a discipline, not a flavour of Area Studies. Classics has more in common with Latin American Studies than either does with, say, History.
This "old white area studies" person is trolling while using commonwealth spelling. A disgruntled Canadian? In any case, tendentious categorization of Classics is tedious.
I just wish Old White [Male] Area Studies person would tell us what we should be doing, because I still haven't figured that one out. Is this our generation's F.O.D. moment? Should we abandon so-called Old White Studies because this field offers nothing to contemporary humanity? If so, may I recommend leaving the "racist misogynists" to their confused, outmoded, irrelevant ramblings on FV and advancing humanity in some other way?
Meanwhile, back in the SC outsider conversation, I've been interviewed by teams that included an outsider and teams that didn't. I've also been on an SC with an outsider and on an SC without an outsider. Seems to be institutionally-determined, in my experience. If I had to make up a broad generalisation, I'd say SLAC committees are more likely to include an outsider, and researchy-type places are less likely to do so. This could be down to simple problems like the number of available department members or Tradition.
One first suggestion from a skeptic: cut back on the Virgil/Ovid/Euripides/Homer dissertations. TRY SOMETHING NEW, perhaps even historically interesting or interesting to those outside of Classics. These are wonderful, rich works that should be taught at the undergrad level as part of the Old White Cultural Heritage, but other authors, periods, genres, and methods should be explored.
Put it this way: is there any point at which you would say, 'we've had enough Euripides?' If the answer is 'no,' then you are probably not in favor of Classics as a historical, research discipline.
Years ago a distinguished, now very distinguished, practitioner of our craft adverted waggishly to me that the easy way to triage the talent seeking a classics job was to begin by excluding all the people with dissertations on Propertius or Euripides. Fashions have shifted a little: Euripides still has his throng of votaries, but Propertius' day was the day of the New Critic, and neodule fashion requires a more ambiguous favorite, so Ovid has come to the head of the pack. It does seem excessive that there are six dissertations under way on Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica and none on Ennodius, but perhaps there I betray a prejudice.
Even as a joke it seems sort of silly to link talent with centrality to the canon. Rather, it is easier to write a dissertation on a "marginal" or "underexplored" topic than on one that has been the focus of hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Indeed, if anything, I would say that in the American tradition of the liberal arts where originality and scholarly creativity are valued, rather than definitive agglomerations of evidence, a Homerist or Vergil scholar who has written something really interesting and new is much more impressive than someone who has diligently compiled a catalogue or testimonia and written something original on a neglected subject.
Addendum: That is of course a separate question from being interesting to scholars in other fields. A dissertation on Neophron would be new, but likely no more (if anything, less) interesting to scholars in other fields than yet another on Euripides' Medea.
"a Homerist or Vergil scholar who has written something really interesting and new is much more impressive than someone who has diligently compiled a catalogue or testimonia and written something original on a neglected subject."
I agree that the person may be more impressive, but I disagree that the work is more important, or represents the kind of scholarship the field needs. Is doing something "interesting" on a certain book of the Aeneid advancing human knowledge more than writing something original on a neglected subject? Clearly not, so other factors are at play. Factors that have to do with canon, class, race, fetishization of 'classical' periods.
My own opinions aside, I think this statement can serve as a useful subject of debate. For or against, FV? Sort of true, sort of false?
Uhhh, should it matter? If someone has found an interesting new way of reading Euripides -- OR Arrian, OR Oppian, OR Apollonius, aren't all of those good? @7:23, you seem to imply that the way forward for something that isn't well-researched is compiling a catalogue, but isn't it such studies that condemn those same works to being understudied? If someone writes a lousy book on Ovid in 2018, it doesn't change anyone's mind about him. But if someone tries to convince you that Nemesianus was a genius -- and they actually do! -- that's worthwhile. Granted, that person might still not find a job, since departments are much more likely to want someone that can offer classes on Homer than on e.g. Quintus.
IMHO, very generation is called to return to the greats--Homer, Vergil, Euripides, etc--and to renew them for their own present day. While the texts do not change, its readers do, and so each new age of scholars has an opportunity to let the texts speak anew.
7:23/25 again. 8:42, absolutely! Another addendum might be: what I am most impressed by is work that changes the boundaries of what we consider important. I was specifically responding to the suggestion above that we should do something new just to be doing something new; which seems closely related to the silly idea we all routinely encounter that "everything has been said" about Homer or Shakespeare or the middle ages or Roman imperialism or Dante or whatever. I agree that many aspects of antiquity have been criminally neglected in favor of endless studies of the canon, and strongly believe that we should try to remedy that. But I also believe that central topics are widely understood in stupid ways and that there are neglected niches within those central topics and that even if recent literature on a topic is brilliant there's always more that can be said---and we should try to remedy all that, too!
"IMHO, very generation is called to return to the greats--Homer, Vergil, Euripides, etc--and to renew them for their own present day." This is the key - every generation of HUMAN BEINGS? It doesn't seem that way. Every generation of post-Renaissance people raised in Western Europe/countries that emerged from Western European settler colonialism....something to ponder.
If you want to be useful then go and learn Arabic and edit+translate Arabic versions of (often lost) works of Greek literature, and work on Arabic papyri. The field needs that more than another Homer dissertation. If you don't have the language chops to tackle Arabic as well -- not saying I do -- then work on literary papyri or else Greek and/or Latin poetry on stone. That's where one can more easily find new things to say.
Although if you're reading this you presumably already have a dissertation topic picked out...
But the Arabic stuff is apparently mostly philosophy and medicine. No Euripides or tragedy of any other kind for that......Borges has a story about it. So if you want to read bad translations of Galen and people commenting on Galen all day or Aristotle, go for it. Not sure how that would fit into Classics as Classicists understand it. Maybe better for an Oriental Studies department or Middle East studies?
"But the Arabic stuff is apparently mostly philosophy and medicine. No Euripides or tragedy of any other kind for that......Borges has a story about it. So if you want to read bad translations of Galen and people commenting on Galen all day or Aristotle, go for it. Not sure how that would fit into Classics as Classicists understand it. Maybe better for an Oriental Studies department or Middle East studies?"
Sure, it's mostly philosophy and medicine. But any time one recovers a lost Greek work, I'd argue, that's more important than yet another study of Pindar. Obviously, it won't appeal to everyone, but how many people in grad school are even made aware that it's an option?
@12:12, @12:22 and @others sympathetic to their arguments:
If you want to be internally consistent and not hypocrites, then by your own lights you have two options: yourselves work on Arabic, papyri, stone fragments and empirically observe the outcomes of your theories, or remove yourself from the field. By either method you will cease to contribute to useless detritus and will improve Classics.
tl;dr: put your money where your mouth is. If you're already doing this without success, then maybe, just maybe you bet on the wrong horse.
@6:44 I have a fundamental disagreement with this way of thinking. To my mind, the reason why the Classics are important and will never go away is precisely because of authors like Euripides, and the other canonical greats. I love it, and these authors have wisdom for all nations, but especially for Western nations like our own. And whether they were technically white or not is a red herring. What matters is that these are among the best books/plays/poems/speeches etc. ever written. Encouraging more research and classes on non-canonical no-names who never influenced anything is not the way to keep Classics "relevant" or make the case to an increasingly right-wing and skeptical public that they should fund Classics in universities! MAKE CLASSICS GREAT AGAIN sorry I couldn't resist triggering all ye Eidelers (add me to the list plz SententiaeAntiquae- apart from the PC nonsense about how women are all still oppressed in the field despite 60-40 majorities in hiring year after year, I really liked your article and agree that famae is necessary as an outlet for honest discussion about the field.)
@7:23 PM Bingo, very much agree. But if someone isn't capable of doing this, I don't think they should be faulted for writing a dissertation on a non-canonical author. If they go on to promote the basic values of our Civilization (now moribund, but we can at least try to save it) through teaching of the Greats, that's what's really important about our field.
4,546 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 2001 – 2200 of 4546 Newer› Newest»One man's irrelevance is another man's politicization/fake news.
*relevance. Need more coffee...
@2/23, 12:01: Sorry, no dice. I'm not a man, not part of the demographic you're attacking, not part of the power structure. Nor am I engaging in ageist conduct, as you are, which is illegal btw.
Can we please give the phrase "fake news" a rest, at least for a day or two? On FV it's become meaningless and infantile, whether used by the right or left, whether as a serious accusation, an ironic comment, or even a witty remark.
I disagree with most of what I read on Eidolon, and at this point only go there when there is clearly a piece I need to read just to know what others are talking about, and I am quite far from the Eidolon editors and writers on the political spectrum, but I would NEVER use such an absurd term as "fake news" for them.
Seriously, let's all see if we can make it until next Thursday without anyone writing the words "fake news."
Now you're just inviting it!
I like some of what Eidolon does. I liked the piece on female military historians, for example. But I agree there's a unhealthy appetite for shaming and out-righteousing others that characterizes the left generally these days, and isn't doing us any favors.
Can we please stop debasing language by speaking of "the left" when referring to cultural and socio-economic circles consisting of Ivy Leaguers and relatives of billionaires?
Honestly, most of the people you find in academia are run-of-the-mill liberals and neoliberals, actual leftists, i.e. socialists, communists, and anarchists are few and far between. This is one of the reasons that I find all the screeching about "leftists" taking over academia to be such an eyeroll inducing idea, because the the conflation of liberal with leftist is a phenomenon of American politics having been dragged to right by wingnuts and as a result being totally out of step with the rest of the world.
Careful when you speak of billionaires in reference to Facebook and their kin, lest you be accused on Eidolon of antisemitism. I have to say, that was the straw that broke Eidolon for me. Sure, there are plenty of antisemitic alt-righters out there, but when they only make reference to your wealth that is not automatically antisemitism.
I too used to like their stuff, especially their class-issues/adjunct work, before they became full on Classics SJW apologists. Perhaps that was the ultimate reason for the Eidolon/Paideia schism.
"Can we please stop debasing language by speaking of "the left" when referring to cultural and socio-economic circles consisting of Ivy Leaguers and relatives of billionaires?"
If this is your understanding of the term "the left" then your understanding of American politics is so sparse that I beg you to run -- don't walk -- to your town hall or urban equivalent and remove yourself from the voter rolls.
Unless this was meant as a subtle joke, in which case I would recommend that you use about 20% less subtlety on all future attempts at subtle jokes.
Paideia is also great-books-y and Western civ-y (I am a fellow traveler, so these are not criticisms). So there is a tension there between what they claim to do, and what Eidolon thinks its job is, and since there is (now) ZERO TOLERANCE for Western civ-y-ness at Eidolon (WHITE SUPREMACISM), it would make sense for a schism to occur and heretics to be anathematized, etc. Palo Alto is the new Chalcedon!
Re: Eidolon shade
Invidentes invidebunt...it’s all part of doing something important.
"Something important"
Their top story right now is "How to Decide on a Classics PhD Program."
NO!!! DO NOT GO!!!
FV Eidolon trolls are fragile af
"I like some of what Eidolon does. I liked the piece on female military historians, for example. But I agree there's a unhealthy appetite for shaming and out-righteousing others that characterizes the left generally these days, and isn't doing us any favors."
I had a bit of a problem with that piece, since it essentially redefined "military history" to make its argument in a way that I consider misleading at worst, and poorly explained at best. Traditional military history is about tactics, logistics, strategy, composition of forces, generals, soldiers, heroic deeds on the battlefield, battlefield topography, etc., and the writer didn't provide much evidence for female historians writing on such topics. Instead, she discusses what apparently is called "New Military History," which is really just social history with a focus on wartime, and not a study of the military arts. Now, that's an important and fascinating area, and I have read a number of books on the topic, including an excellent one by a woman (about a non-ancient battle) that's one of my favorites. But there's a bit of apples and oranges here, and it's hardly news that women are actively making important contributions in the area of ancient social history.
Instead, I think that the writer should have addressed the question of women engaging in TRADITIONAL military history (TMH) as well as "new" military history (NMH), instead of acting as if they are the same thing, when they most certainly are not. Missing from the piece are such questions as: Are men sticking to TMH while women write NMH? Or, are there a comparable number of male scholars producing NMH as there are female scholars? Are there women trying to be active in TMH who are being excluded by the male historians already established in that area? If that's happening, is that why the women are sticking to NMH? Or are there plenty of women in TMH, but the author didn't include them? The reader is given no sense of this, and it is rather important to the subject.
Therefore, like so many Eidolon pieces, an interesting and important topic is discussed, but ends up having a serious flaw that undermines its value, and ultimately makes me regret having taken the time to read it. And since Eidolon doesn't exactly enforce a standard of "short and to the point," that often means 5- and 10-minute chunks of my life gone.
It is really remarkable that incisive, charitable critiques of Eidolon articles are offered FOR FREE on FV. I salute you, sir or madame, whoever you are!
How long after submitting do you wait before reaching out to a journal?
Depends a bit on the journal, but 4 months is quite reasonable, I think.
^however, they may not respond, no matter how long it's been.
On the topic of journal submissions: I had an article accepted in May, and sent the final version of the piece in June; I've heard nothing since (no contract, proofs, &c). Is that normal, or should I contact them?
5:28: send a nice email to check in and ask for a status update. You should have heard by now. It is a reasonable perfectly reasonable request.
Good luck with the request for information. Perhaps this might give you some perspective on my ongoing submission; I sent a paper to the AJA a year ago and I'm still awaiting an official response. Reviewers reports were received back after three months according to their online system. Sent an request for update email at 6, 8, and 10 months and just get replies from the editorial assistant that they will forward the request to the Editor. Easily the most frustrating publishing process I've ever had. In contrast, after this I submitted a monograph text to CUP and it was reviewed and contract offered within six months - not necessarily comparable, but gives a sense of how challenging it is to get something through a decent journal in a reasonable timeframe.
AJA does take a very long time. They tend to have a pretty short acceptance to publication though. As a rule of thumb, submission to publication tends to take about 18 months to two years.
I also had a bad experience recently with the AJA. I would strongly recommend not submitting there, at least while Jane Carter is still the editor. Many other equally prestigious journals are run in a vastly more professional manner; I guess being able to hire a full-time EIC doesn't equal caring about the quality of the editorial process.
5:28, if your piece was accepted you can be pretty sure they haven't forgotten about you or anything. It's coming up on the docket. But there's no reason whatsoever not to ask for a status update!
This goes for the initial question as well. Four months is about the outside of how long the review process should take for the first two reports. But referees often slack off and the people running journals don't normally get on their backs until the author contacts the editor about the MS's status. I think after three months it's fine to start asking for updates every now and then; just don't be annoying about it.
I would strongly say do not ask an editor for an update WITHIN their estimated time to review. If they say the process takes up to four months, don't send a nagging note at three months.
My policy: take their estimated turn around time, and add two more weeks. Then send a polite note. That way you don't seem like you're jumping the gun.
^ yes, yes, of course. If they say x months, don't email before x months. Common sense. Most journals don't seem to post estimate turnaround time, unless I'm mistaken, and then I think 3 months is an acceptable amount of time to elapse before asking for an update. I would say that there is an attitude that you can't email editors to ask for an update before waiting a year and a day and praying to Jupiter for good omen, but there's a difference between nagging and writing a polite, succinct, professional note. If they're annoyed, well--academics are good at deleting emails.
Any news on the UCLA job?
I too have heard horror stories about AJA of late--it's a real shame; some of us (i.e. most of us) don't have a year to wait for a rejection.
In the literary sphere, HSCP seems to be very professional-- they exhort you to get in touch with them if you haven't heard from them after 5 months and are very clear about when you might expect to see publication (i.e. which future volumes are already filled).
But let me tell you, as an editor of a volume, it is one hell of a task to get people to be a peer reviewer, and then, if they agree, to do so in a timely manner... it's often the last thing on everyone's list.
Returning to a previous topic, we all should tell minorities to run away, not walk, from classics. The conservatives among us prefer it remain an area/cultural study for those of European descent, so no problem. Liberals on the other hand, if they are as compassionate as they say they are, shouldn't doom minorities to careers that consistently have them at a disadvantage. To what end? To assuage white guilt? To heroically sacrifice themselves in a manner very few Neolibs actually practice themselves? No, tell them to run to careers where they can actually get ahead on a playing field that isn't so drastically tilted against them.
I...really can't disagree with you, @7:27. I suppose it supports the notion that classics should just fade away into obscurity like its kin, Oriental Studies.
October. It's been since October since the last T-T ancient history job posted.
As one who checks both SCS and the 3-4 history job boards I see about 20 T-T jobs a week post for History Departments. Zero for ancient since October when Univ. North Alabama posted.
African, Asian, U.S., Environmental (whatever the fuck that is!), and African-American T-T jobs post constantly, while ancient is dead. It doesn't seem any better for us ancient historians in Classics Departments either, as the Classics season is VERY short and long since expired for this season for T-T. Add that the fact that only 5 T-T history jobs came out for Classics this year at phenomenal schools, which eliminates hope for anyone whose CV doesn't look like Walter Scheidel's. (Chicago, Princeton, Colgate, Holy Cross, and Carleton).
I can't believe how absolutely horrible the job prospects are. I mean, it was bad when I chose to begin the PhD some years back, but each and every year less and less T-T jobs appear and (seemingly) the applicant pool is getting far too competitive and in order to be the one to land a job you need to have 15+ articles, a few monographs, top-5 pedigree, etc...
I know things are bad for all of us, and I don't mean to complain, I mean, I chose this path, but is there any other field where one can spend 4 years for a BA, 2 years for an MA, and 6 years for a PhD, have built up a pile of debt and post-poned many aspects of life (starting a family, etc..) and, at the end of the day when you have degree in hand and have done all of the things advisors tell you to only to find no job? And not only that, but the only outlet for work happens in a 2-3 month season where 200+ folks are putting in for the same 5-7 jobs?
I've wasted 13 years of my life in school and now 2 on the job market... 15 years and nothing to show for it but a pile of debt, an empty inbox, and a piece of fucking paper to certify how I've fucked myself.
It's crazy to think that my current *best case scenario* is to get a adjunct gig somewhere for a few grand a class--just enough to keep my power on and my cell phone turned active so that I can get all the loan collections calls while eating a cheap frozen dinner. But I have a PhD from a top-10 school and lesser ones from Ivies, as well a full CV, so all's ok, right? (dripping with sarcasm)..
On journal turnaround times: maybe some generous soul will volunteer to get the Classics section of http://humanitiesjournals.wikia.com/wiki/Humanities_Journals_Wiki off the ground?
Yeah, anyone who encourages students to walk a traditional classics academic path should minimally have their head examined or at worst taken out Old Yeller style. If the study of the classical world survives in any form in the near future, it will manifest itself through severely adapted scholars in innovative departments such as environmental studies. Alas, the discipline has little desire or ability to produce such scholars so it looks grim.
@ 8:50 PM
Why don't you just go and do something else? Just leave the academy behind and get a job in consulting or as an editor at some periodical. I have trouble feeling bad for people who constantly whinge and do nothing for themselves. Classics and the Humanities are dying, poisoned by leftists and post-modernists. I think we deserve it honestly.
Who killed Homer? The Eidolon staff in the stoa with a groma...
March 2, 2018 at 8:50 PM
"I know things are bad for all of us, and I don't mean to complain, I mean, I chose this path, but is there any other field where one can spend 4 years for a BA, 2 years for an MA, and 6 years for a PhD, have built up a pile of debt and post-poned many aspects of life (starting a family, etc..) and, at the end of the day when you have degree in hand and have done all of the things advisors tell you to only to find no job? And not only that, but the only outlet for work happens in a 2-3 month season where 200+ folks are putting in for the same 5-7 jobs?"
Leave the field. You admit that you were well apprised of how bad the job market was when you started the PhD, but decided to pursue it nevertheless. It has been pointed out here before that the Ancient History track is probably even trickier than most specialities in Classics since you have to make yourself appear to be a fit for positions in both Classics departments and history departments. Moreover, nobody here ever claimed that a top-ten PhD plus lower degrees from assorted Ivies guaranteed employment in the field, simply that one's chances become greater if this is the case, combined with an advisor who actually does their job.
March 2, 2018 at 9:34 PM
"Classics and the Humanities are dying, poisoned by leftists and post-modernists. I think we deserve it honestly."
Why didn't you include a nice quote from Enoch Powell? I imagine that you have a few favorites.
@8.50 I no longer have skin in the game, and read FV as a concerned former-Classicist, having made the decision to stop job-hunting a few months back. I won’t reel off my achievements in an attempt to make it look like a great loss for Classics - we all know great candidates who are languishing - but will say that lining up other work and moving on from the rat race has been extemely cathartic. Life is much less toxic now, and the mental stress has evaporated. It’s joy-inducing. The only issue is that those friends/colleagues who remain in the game somehow view this as betrayal, as though disparaging their decision to hang on. However, if you’ve got a good circle of friends outside of Classics, you’ll find much sympathy there. My non-Classics friends surprised me by cheering when I broke the news - they’d seen and heard too many horror stories, the likes of which they’ve never had to live... So good luck with converting all your considerable intellectual capital in a new field, if you decide to cut your losses.
People, can't we have a little empathy? Many, many of us are in this boat. There is nothing wrong with grieving when you lose the life path that your career hopes, identity, relationships, and substantial financial and personal sacrifices over the first decade of adult life have been dictated by. None of us were aware of how bad it would be in 2018. Those in the best position to foresee this were the tenured faculty, i.e. the people who largely continue to lure in 22 year olds to teach their myth classes so they don't have to. If you're not into "whinging," don't come here.
I agree. There was no way of knowing when 8:50 began his PhD (8 years ago it seems) that things would get to the horrible state they’re in now. 2010 to 2018 has seen an insane decline in jobs each and every year. I can’t understand the dickish responses by a few here of “leave the field; your naive for thinking you’d get a job,” etc
Ancient history is tough for 2 reasons:
1.) 90% of dedicated ancient history programs are in History Depts., so you’ll get a PhD in “History”, never having the chance to teach Latin or Greek. Those 90% are not Ivies. No Ivies offer an ancient history program; some (Penn) only a focused philology degree, but your training (as I’ve been told by friends at Penn) is just philological emphasis on historical sources, no concern to ever delve into anything deeper than the texts themselves.
This is a problem since all those who are trained historians have their PhD from schools never in top 7-8.
What does this mean? Wel... if a History Dept (who often sees ancient folks as all being odd and the same, whether philology, history, archaeology) is looking for an ancient historian, they often are seduced by an Ivy pedigree. Which means that the ‘philologist whose done a great deal of textual criticism of Tacitus’ is their new “historian.”
**to be clear: all top History PhDs in Ancient HAVE to be able to demonstrate graduate-level competency in Latin and Greek, just like an historian of Napoleonic France needs to demonstrate grdauate-level competency in French. So, save me the bullshit that history PhDs don’t know their languages**
2.) While history depts are easily seduced by a pretty name (even if the person lacks the historical training), Classics Depts won’t even consider you. Period. Since Classics Depts are so deep in an 18th century world view, they often want everyone to teach everything. This is a MAJOR reason for the decline of Classics—the failure to adapt to a specialized world. Classics should be specialized: Latin philologists teach Latin; Greek philologists teach Greek; classical archaeologists teach archaeology; historians teach civ and history courses. To expect that everyone should teach Latin/Greek is insane.
An historian of 17th C. France might be 100% fluent in French, or a Chinese historian 100% fluent in Mandarin, but NOBODY would ever expect them to teach French 101 or Into to Mandarin.
Classics isn’t dying, my friends. It is dead. It has been out-dated and expired for some time now. Sure, a few folks will still land a T-T job here or there, but while each and every other field has numerous T-T jobs still being posted every day (many even growing), Classics is rapidly imploding and spiraling the drain.
@7:54,
I agree.
Classics’ view that everyone in a department should be a philologist first is not just antiquated but asinine. It’s holding on to Victorian Era style higher education all while bemoaning the drop in enrollment, lack of divrsity, and budget cuts from admin. For a discipline full of very intelligent and Ivy-trained people, most are staggeringly dumb and near-sighted.
If your approach to teaching and running a dept is fully compatible with what was happening when the steam engine and typewriters were the newest inventions, it’s time to either close your doors or drastically change and join the rest of modernized academia.
Wherever there is severe competition for jobs with an overabundance of white male candidates, minorities, women, and the less affluent (in that order) are screwed. White dudes are more likely to be given these opportunities in the first place and are then put under much less scrutiny. We see this in classics with the monsters created at Columbia, Cincinnati, etc. that have finally been brought to justice. How many more are there? I can think of four off the top of my head. And we wonder how these monsters are created?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/02/boris-johnson-white-privilege-black-woman
Classics is between a rock and a hard place. It will unfortunately remain the poster child of white privilege despite some necessary, but failed, attempts to change the status quo, which in turn has alienated the elite class that has traditionally, and artificially, raised its stature in the academy. Everyone should run from classics. It has no chance when even the progressives maintain its hopelessly outdated outlook and structure.
"Wherever there is severe competition for jobs with an overabundance of white male candidates, minorities, women, and the less affluent (in that order) are screwed. White dudes are more likely to be given these opportunities in the first place and are then put under much less scrutiny. We see this in classics with the monsters created at Columbia, Cincinnati, etc. that have finally been brought to justice. How many more are there? I can think of four off the top of my head. And we wonder how these monsters are created?"
Are you willfully obtuse, or just parrot what the current liberal orthodoxy preaches? Minorities and women have a far easier time on the current job market than white men.
And after Johnson was fired from that internship for making up quotes, he would not have been given a job with the Telegraph’s leader-writing team. First of all, because black women are not generally indulged with second chances like that. Their successes are understood individually (“she’s one of a kind”) but their failures are misunderstood collectively (“they’re just not up to it”). A transgression of that nature would be followed by much handwringing about affirmative action and “politically correct appointments”.
@11:36, what are you smoking? According to the wiki 8 white men and 6 white women have accepted positions, and I bet it will be much more in favor of the former once the dust settles. So is this just heroic white men overcoming the odds? Give me a fucking break.
I think what 11:36 is trying to say is how difficult it is for white dudes now that they only land 60% of the classics jobs rather than the traditional 90%. Or perhaps he's thinking along the lines that classics is the study of western exceptionalism and the rightful domain of white dudes with the occasional white vagina thrown in for diversity?
Wealthy libs should put their money where their mouth is if they truly want to save classics. Start a Save Classics for the World foundation and only fund research that focuses on topics outside the white, male, elitist literary canon. I would fund white dudes who advance this cause just as I would eschew funding POC who research your standard, overstudied classics topic. Let Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc. keep churning these out. I would also scour the less than elite programs for interesting undergrads and postgraduates as these programs are more accessible to diverse students and also more likely to encourage research outside the same ole.
That would wipe out 90% of current research. Bad idea.
90% of current research is a bad idea (in that it's a waste of time and resources that helps no one).
@7:54
While I agree with the substance of what you're saying about ancient history, I think a quick footnote or two is in order. When you say that no Ivies offer an ancient history program, that's just inaccurate. Both Brown (https://www.brown.edu/academics/classics/graduate-program/phd-program/phd-ancient-history/phd-ancient-history) and Yale (https://classics.yale.edu/graduate/graduate-programs/combined-program-classics-and-history-yale) offer Ph.D. programs in Ancient History as such. You rightly highlight UPenn for its 'philology with history' program, which a prima facie look at Cornell's version seems to be. Columbia houses its historians in the History Department, and Harvard has programs in both Classics and History (as Yale did until two years ago). Goodness knows what Dartmouth is going. From what I've heard about internal struggles from colleagues at both Brown and Yale, even the historians guiding these programs face an almost daily struggle with their colleagues about the goals and nature of the pedagogy.
To your second point, it doesn't show up in the wiki, but ABD students from those two programs received a fair number of nibbles on the market this year but no bites. But hopefully they'll reverse the trend you rightly observe and decry. Who knows what that means for the rest of us in ancient history.
Yikes. I step away from FV for a week and it turns into a massive race debate. ...fun
I have no interest in hearing about diversity or how we’re too white. Since this is an anon forum, we can all speak candidly, which is a good thing. I play along in academia like I care about it, but I really don’t. I don’t give a shit what color anyone is or whether they’re a man, woman, or want us all to pretend that they’re “non-binary” or some other mental delusion I haven’t heard about yet. If you’re a decent person and have something to offer the discipline then that’s all I care about. All this hyper focusing on everyone’s melanin count or genitalia is asinine.
Call out racism, sexism, etc.. when you see it, but don’t go looking for it, because as we all know you can find anything anywhere if you’re looking for it.
Not every job nor every discipline in academia will be 100% representational of society’s race/gender breakdown.
Asian and Indian students disproportionately focus on STEM, women disproportionately (90%+) make up all nurses, etc.. yes, there are always reasons to explain each case of disproportion, but what does it really matter?
@2:26,
(OP here)
I appreciate your insight and footnotes. Fair enough that some Ivies donhave some form of interdisciplinary program, but I don’t think they’ve had too many grads just yet, as they’re all still fairly new. Most, in fact, weren’t there when I was applying to PhD programs back in ~2009. All that existed then for really good AH programs were 3: Berkeley’s AHMA (which is a disastrous program notorious for dropping funding for students year-by-year), UNC-Chapel Hill, and Michigan’s IPGRH (which is where I applied).
It doesn’t matter how great Berkeley, UNC, and Michigan may be, for too many it’s still not good enough since there all still “just a state school.” We see, every year, our superior PhDs get pased over for Ivy folks with blank CVs. :/
The vast majority of our undergrads don't care one iota about the stuff Eidolon's editors think we should all be focusing on.
C'mon, no one thinks Berkeley, UNC, and Michigan are just state schools. Look at their placement rates as well. They are just as successful as "Ivy folks with blank CVs" that you're decrying. So you didn't get a TT job as a "state school" Michigan grad so it must be the underserving Ivy bastards? Give me a friggin' break. Blame the shitty market all you want but it's not your degree, dude. I can guarantee whatever warts you possess are playing a larger role than your Michigan degree.
2:39, your musings are Exhibit A why classics should and will go away.
Yep, if a department is almost entirely still stocked with boomers, it's guaranteed to be self important and dysfunctional.
Just an FYI, but the under-supported/alienated Ancient History Ph.D. is a specifically American problem. The British system still strongly associates Ancient History with Classics.
@4:03 FYI Gruen retired ages ago....
Berkeley had a good record until around 2015, at least as a search of their alumni page seems to show.
You're also forgetting Brown, Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard--all have had fair records of placement in recent years. Princeton actually seems to have struggled in recent years for their PAW people, while Chicago... I can't think of any in AH (Classics: yes).
@2:26 I have heard that there are virtually no AH grads in Columbia's History Dept. At least not Greco-Roman ones. They're all in Classics or Classical Studies.
In general, ancient Greek and Roman history programs in History departments, as opposed to Classics or interdepartmental ones, seem to be a dying species.
@4:12. "if a department is almost entirely still stocked with boomers, it's guaranteed to be self important and dysfunctional." As opposed to those stocked with …?
@6:23,
The boomer generation ended somewhere around 1965 (?), so I suppose a dept could be stocked with plenty of Gen ‘X’ ers; those in their later 40s and 50s. Far too many depts have folks hovering around 70. My undergrad still has a prof who’s a WWII vet in the History Dept. only a few years ago did that same dept see two profs who got their PhD in 1955 and 1957 retire. They were both in the late 80s and still teaching full time.
Fifth time today I began a response to one of the posts here and then deleted it, since the world does not need more FV posts. You are welcome.
Age discrimination has always been alive and well at FV.
It's not ageism as much as doyourfuckingjobism.
It’s not age discrimination to point out that far too many academics plan to leave their jobs ‘feet first.’ Their refusal to leave before 65-70 is not a virtue but an act of selfishness.
What was that comment about?
Coming late to this latest set of posts, but I've got to comment on this one. Apologies if it attracted interest, as I haven't read past it yet.
People, can't we have a little empathy? Many, many of us are in this boat
No. It seems to me that the reason there's such a lack of empathy is that empathy requires -- by definition -- putting oneself in the position of others. Empathy on the job market means imagining oneself as ultimately a "failure" like all those others who just "weren't good enough" (as our Boomer advisors say with their ever-so-meaningful side glances). Empathy on the job market means acknowledging the possibility of "me too."
(Oh! Did I just make an impolitic comparison between the job market and non-consensual assault? Hm. Perhaps I did. One is immediate; the other is not. Both are perpetrated by deceptions of those in power, are psychologically and physically devastating, and include massive amount of victim-blaming by on-lookers. No. No similarities all. Cue the faux-outrage and faux-news.)
I'm an old Millennial (or perhaps a young Xer) in a TT job who benefited from a predecessor taken out "feet first" (so I preemptively accept hate from all sides), but when will we talk about what it means for classics that we've obliterated the discipline's representation of Xers? The Silent Generation pretty much retired in their 60s and promised Xers twenty years ago that a raft of retirements was upcoming when Boomers hit their 60s as well. With Boomers working well into their 70s and 80s (I'm not taking sides here) and the lower number of Xers as it is, it can't be good that our scholarship and departments are dominated by those >60 and <40. Does it matter and do we even care? My intuition says it can't be good for scholarship and I see how dysfunctional my own department is with those at the top, yes, lending academic cred, but also creaking into work while those at the bottom take up an inordinate amount of the day-to-day slack. We sure could benefit from a couple 40 or 50 somethings on a departmental level and I'm guessing the state of affairs is not good for classics overall.
I have no problems with productive academics working into their 70s and beyond. Taking stock of the 50 or so boomers I know well, the problem I see is that the best among them in terms of both scholarship and collegiality are the ones that retired in their 60s and it's the worst among them hanging on to the bitter end.
^Truth
https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/03/04/famae-volent-a-personal-history/
Thanks to a reference by SA, I found this prescient FV gem from 2008!
Anonymous RIP said...
I think I'm finally in the camp that believes that classics is dead (and I disagree with most of WKH?). We have all these boomers clinging on to their jobs until they literally keel over and die. In the meantime, we'll have a bunch of young Ph.D.s leaving. What's going to happen in 5-10 years when these geezers are finally 6 feet under? There will be much fewer qualified people to take their spots and it's even more likely that they won't be replaced. Yeah, we'll still have classicists here and there, but they will be the oddballs in language, art history, and history departments. Thanks a lot, boomers, for everything, including the national debt.
November 18, 2008 at 3:12 PM
Wow, and another one. This is fucking amazballs...from one FV generation to another.
Anonymous Anonymous said...
That's my entire point. It's not about one person, but about their generation as a whole. If the boomer's barely hanging on to life had retired gradually over years, like most other disciplines, classics would likely be more productive and less expensive now. Wouldn't this go a long way toward making it more attractive to deans who are now questioning our very existence? It would have also guaranteed the discipline's future by having junior faculty in place before the questioning got more intense and the economy got worse. As it stands, the last of the echo boomers are coming on the market now to find almost all the seats still taken. Combined with the fact that the echo boomers did not enter the humanities in nearly as many numbers - and will now leave academia in increasing numbers - this might spell the coup de grâce for the discipline in 10 years. Surely there wouldn't be enough qualified people if all the boomers retired now. What will it look like in 10 years - fuglier. I doubt the echo boomers will have hung around in VAPs for 10 years.
November 18, 2008 at 6:02 PM
Yeah, that ship sailed around the recession when admins did their math. Classics has been written out of the 21st century curriculum. Not sure if a less expensive and more vibrant/representative faculty would have helped, but it sure couldn't have hurt. RIP, indeed.
So basically the best rationale is that the boomers deserve a twenty year golden parachute of pulling in six figures while doing less work than a adjunct so the department can bask in their faded (at best) glory? What fucking horseshit. Last time I checked, they weren't the ones storming Normandy and freezing in the Chosin Reservoir. Pray tell what heroic deeds were they doing other than pushing these very forebearers off a cliff themselves but now having the nerve to call us opportunistic vultures for looking for gainful employment ourselves.
This is my first time posting on FV. I'm stuck in the middle of job market hell like many of the rest of you, and I'm also frustrated and scared. But I'm disgusted with the insulting of an entire generation, as if this is a Buzzfeed column about why MILLENNIALS REALLY RULE while BOOMERS REALLY DROOL, take that, random Washington Post columnist! Stop buying into bullshit about everyone of a generation being the same. Many boomer professors have retired at 65, and many have had different career paths that don't involve sitting on top of a treasure hoard eating caviar. Some are wonderful human beings, some aren't. Venting is important (and as a lurker, entertaining), but can people stop constantly acting like such shitty humans on this blog?
Any news on the Chicago History job?
Whatever happened to this:
"Do not list names on this site. .... Any comments which reveal names, directly or indirectly by posting TMI will be deleted post-haste."
How is it allowed that people can refer to someone who just died, and name at what age they died, and then be specifically critical of them?
How is it acceptable to say "I hope that when [x] dies, we will never have to talk about [entire period/field of study] again"? This was not deleted, either.
Well, I recall that a few years back there was plenty of discussion of a certain Daddy Cruel at Cincinnati--no actual names but of course we all knew who we were talking about...
You're seriously comparing a child pornographer with someone who just happens to have stayed on the job a few years longer than you would have liked?
Imagine if someone had written I hope that once [PoC or woman scholar] dies, [entire period/field of study] will die as well. I suspect it would have been deleted as borderline hate speech.
I'm ok with both your statement and the hypothetical statement. I am concerned about the double standards and protection of certain people and not of others. Or maybe we need to set a list of basic ways in which we are allowed or not allowed to criticize senior people (intellectual stuff, but not personal? their writings, but not their behavior as advisors?).
5:32pm
"You're seriously comparing a child pornographer with someone who just happens to have stayed on the job a few years longer than you would have liked?"
Well to be fair they each screwed a younger generation in their own way so...
This has got to be a new low for FV.
Alright, back to rumors. What's up at Hopkins?
Frankly, I think criticism of senior scholars should be permissible in this forum, whether by name or anonymously. There is literally no other forum for this, and that kind of information can be helpful to this population. I for example really appreciated the comment about the Georgetown senior scholar's behavior during an interview; at least I know that if this happens to me someday I'm not alone. This is really the only place for honest debate about what's happening in Classics these days--it can be hard to express opinions about these issues even to close friends, as one never knows what might get back to whom and how that might affect one's future job prospects.
@6:06, the best thing you can do is run, don't walk, away from Hopkins.
My first time checking in here today, and there are all these now-deleted posts, which makes me realize that FV has its own form of Murphy's Law: if I am checking FV regularly then Servius takes far too long to delete posts that break the rules and need to be removed post-haste, but if I don't check FV then Servius deletes such posts before I get a chance to see them.
What's wrong with Hopkins? It's a smallish program, but I've not heard bad things.
I always find the "avoid department x like the plague, it's toxic!" comments amusing. Let's not oretend that most people here wouldn't agree to be chained to a radiator in the Classics department each evening if it meant that they could have *any* tenure track job, let alone one at a place like Johns Hopkins
That's the problem. I know many good 'uns that left the field and even TT jobs rather than deal with the systemic bs. We're just upping the chances of future #metoo-type incidents and zombie profs in whatever positions are left.
Agree, and hence we are all turning on the senior people, ὥς τε λέων...μεγάλῳ ἐπὶ σώματι κύρσας | εὑρὼν ἢ ἔλαφον κεραὸν ἢ ἄγριον αἶγα | πεινάων. But I do think this is an important question, that shouldn't be silenced as "speaking ill of the dead" -- to what extent is it ethical to remain in a job into your upper 70's when so many junior scholars are leaving the field--and the field is losing their ideas, their scholarship, their teaching?
public universities should set mandatory retirement ages a la canada and the uk
There was one back in the day - something like 70 - that forced the Silent Generation out and then was repealed just in time for the first boomers.
If you want to make sense of all the law changes over the past 50 years, follow the boomers and their greed. They don't need college educations anymore? Get rid of state funding and make sure college loans can't be written off in any form. Let's treat unis like corporations! What? They don't need houses anymore? Cut the mortgage credit.
It's disgusting. Yeah, there are plenty of good boomers, but how can any say that they've been good stewards as a generation? The right trots out greedy Trump so the left trots out neo-lib, Nixonian, greedy Clinton as a counter? WTF...just wtf.
Zombie profs...lol.
I've taught in more programs than most of you. I have indeed seen some old and very senior sorts who were burned out and not doing their jobs. I have also seen some old and very senior sorts who were outstanding, both before and after reaching 70, and whose retirement, forced or optional, would have left a big hole (and has done so, in the case of those who have since retired, or passed away). I have also had several terrible colleagues who were in their 40's and 50's, and for the most part were associate professors. Thinking back, I've had more bad colleagues from this group than the former. And I'm drawing on a much larger sampling than I would have liked -- consider it a silver lining in my unstable career!
Here, let me take you down memory lane:
Job #1: Small department, nothing wrong with anyone. Full professors not past 50.
Job #2: A SLAC with two people close to retirement, but both teaching as if they were 20 years younger. No weaknesses.
Job #3: A senior guy who was only into literary theory and cared about no one -- colleague or student -- who wasn't. Two junior colleagues within reach of tenure or just past it (I can't remember) were clones. No other holes in that large department.
Job #4: A large program where the worst colleagues deserved to be no higher than associate, though due to lax standards and corruption they were both elevated to full professor. The place also had two senior people close to retirement, one of whom was still great in the classroom (someone you would know), while the other probably had never been any good.
Job #5: A prominent PhD program with one bad colleague who was on the verge of tenure, who since getting it and becoming an associate has become an enormous source of trouble in the department. Everyone else was great, except a senior Big Name who I believe had never been much good in the classroom, so his age was irrelevant.
Job #6: A small program with an associate professor doing a rather bad job, while still 15 or so years from retirement.
Job #7: Senior people close to retirement, including two whose names you should recognize, were absolutely "getting it done," and nothing was wrong with anyone there.
Job #8: Another smallish program, with the only problem someone who is still 5-10 years from retirement age.
Job #9: A top-15 PhD program, with several faculty members close to retirement, and several more in their 50's, in their 40's, and in their 30's, and not one of them phoning it in. The seniormost faculty collectively should be Exhibit A in the case against mandatory retirement.
I am not unsympathetic to the desire out there for more openings to appear, but if someone is still doing their job well and wishes to continue, and their presence benefits students and colleagues alike, I hope they keep going. And I write this as someone who, as you can see, has certainly been affected by people staying in their jobs.
The B movie would be The Return of Zombie Daddy Cruel.
R.I.P. classics and #thelostgeneration. Though we are few, we will always remember.
Canada doesn't have mandatory retirement anymore: https://www.chrc-ccdp.gc.ca/eng/content/government-canada-strikes-down-mandatory-retirement
The youngest boomers are around 60? Give it another ten years and mandatory retirements will magically reappear once the now-retired boomers don't want to pay for expensive senior Xers and Yers. It's how they roll...
The Canadian in me would laugh but it's so true that only tears would come out...
i just got jobbed.
i want to tell you about my process, but i won't give you all the details or my background info (is it telling that i learned about this site a few years ago but never paid it much attention until i got curious about job stats and placement for this year? also, that i don't have facebook??)
1) i'm very fortunate to be in a multi-year but temporary position right now, so i only applied to places where there was a clear fit. sometimes i learned about fit from word of mouth, mostly from the ads though: i never applied where my skills were irrelevant, mostly because it was a waste of time for my referees.
2) i had letters personalized about me + research/publications, secondarily for institution. i gave letter-writers 4+ weeks advance notice, included full text of job ads with the emails requesting letters, and told them why i wanted each job. (i applied for 6 this year).
3) after i heard about interview requests, i *always* sent additional information to the SC or the contact person, not immediately but about a week before the scheduled interview. This was carefully formatted in a PDF as one doc, with a TOC at beginning, with *info not requested from the ad/original application* -- review letters from teaching, a recent publication, syllabi they'd be interested in judging from the ad, etc.
4) conference interviews are insane / unethical. climate issues with boston and northern climes made it worse this year. i pretty quickly chose not to attend AIA/SCS this year after my flights were canceled: i opted to reschedule interviews for skype because i figured that the SC wouldn't all make it. this was true, as it turned out. i've prefered skype interviews (6?) because it's easier to control the environment. also, as others have noted, being crowded into a hotel room is no fun and at least for me, AIA/SCS was much less beneficial than smaller workshops here and there. making big conf interviews seem mandatory for applicants is, again, totally unethical in current climate.
5) i sent follow-ups after the interviews: just be personable!!!
6) campus visits are very different wherever you go: i've had 3. i've prepared by making a big word doc with all the info about the uni, their program and faculty + research interests, local resources, etc. i printed this and took it with me each time, sometimes looking at it in the bathroom between appointments. know about the people + place you want to work!!!! i also printed out my publications + syllabi + cvs and pulled them out to give away whenever relevant issues came up during discussions.
that's all i've got for now! best of luck to everyone, it's brutal out there!
i just got jobbed.
i want to tell you about my process, but i won't give you all the details or my background info (is it telling that i learned about this site a few years ago but never paid it much attention until i got curious about job stats and placement for this year? also, that i don't have facebook??)
1) i'm very fortunate to be in a multi-year but temporary position right now, so i only applied to places where there was a clear fit. sometimes i learned about fit from word of mouth, mostly from the ads though: did not apply where my skills were irrelevant.
2) i had letters personalized about me + research/publications, secondarily for institution. i gave letter-writers 4+ weeks advance notice, included full text of job ads with the emails requesting letters, and told them why i wanted each job.
3) after i heard about interview requests, i *always* sent additional information to the SC or the contact person, not immediately but about a week before the scheduled interview. This was carefully formatted in a PDF as one doc, with a TOC at beginning, with *info not requested from the ad/original application* -- review letters from teaching, a recent publication, syllabi they'd be interested in judging from the ad, etc.
4) conference interviews are insane / unethical. climate issues with boston and northern climes made it worse this year. i pretty quickly chose not to attend AIA/SCS this year after my flights were canceled: i opted to reschedule interviews for skype because i figured that the SC wouldn't all make it. this was true, as it turned out. i've prefered skype interviews (6?) because it's easier to control the environment. also, as others have noted, being crowded into a hotel room is no fun and at least for me, AIA/SCS was much less beneficial than smaller workshops here and there. making big conf interviews seem mandatory for applicants is, again, totally unethical in current climate.
5) i sent follow-ups after the interviews: just be personable!!!
6) campus visits are very different wherever you go: i've had 3. i've prepared by making a big word doc with all the info about the uni, their program and faculty + research interests, local resources, etc. i printed this and took it with me each time, sometimes looking at it in the bathroom between appointments. know about the people + place you want to work!!!! i also printed out my publications + syllabi + cvs and pulled them out to give away whenever relevant issues came up during discussions.
that's all i've got for now! best of luck to everyone, it's brutal out there!
servius here: we would like to briefly weigh in on the comments over the weekend, and let you know that we're having some internal discussions and will get back with more detail in the near future.
But, for now, a reminder that critiques of individuals on the basis of actual or perceived personal characteristics is banned. Age is most certainly a personal characteristic. Critique of scholarship is more of a grey area for us, but anything deemed to be cruelly bad taste will also be deleted. We would also like to point out that when FV goes into ugly territory, it is often actually people seeking to act as defenders who bring out inappropriate identifying details or take an argument from a general level to that of specific individuals-- so please take care.
Unfortunately, the Servii are volunteers with day jobs and are not omniscient, nor omnipotent, and we cannot be here every minute. We remove inappropriate posts asap, and will continue to do so.
@2:23 AM:
It's super considerate of you to have typed all this information out to help others in the market. But posts like this tend to make people think that this a process they can control, when it isn't. Publishing and teaching and having a great network helps and will get you on the shortlist. But the interview process itself is - in my experience, and for what it is worth - based not so much on performance as it is on fit. If you're not the candidate for the job, sending extra information not requested by the SC or a personalized note post campus visit won't make any difference.
I was on the market for several years before I recently landed a T-T position in a top dept very (top 10 or 15 or whatever according to the recent discussions here), and did none of what you suggest when it finally happened for me. In fact, I had so many interviews that year that I didn't prepare at all for the one that eventually worked out, and went on campus knowing much less about the department than I felt comfortable doing. I had been conditioned to think that knowing all about every single one of the faculty members and the program itself would somehow help me, but it didn't at all. I was just the best fit, and it worked.
^^Agree, having seen a number of similar posts in the past and had discussions with colleagues who have gotten jobs. Almost all say different things about their strategies. Some people have said "apply to every job you're remotely qualified for!", while others say "only apply to jobs you're a good fit for!" etc. This year has seen an Apuleius scholar hired for a Republican/Augustan poetry job (Rutgers), so "only applying to places where one is a clear fit" may not be good advice. Personally, I think it's best to apply to as many jobs as you have time/energy/emotional resources for--some years that may be more, and some years that may be fewer. A lot also depends on the nature of the offerings--sometimes there may be few postings in your area and you may have to stretch yourself to "fit" other job descriptions.
Also, for what it's worth, I heard SC members of one department hiring this year complain about candidates sending more materials than are asked for. This probably depends a lot on individual preferences, which is something we can never know. It's probably best to do what feels comfortable to you, rather than following a script based on another person's success story.
p.s. also, congrats to 2:23 am!
Congrats to 2:23! But I've also gotten such terribly conflicting advice that I have long since given up on there being any kind of recipe for success. Extra materials will definitely piss off some SCs, even if they impress others. I was even advised once, by someone on a SC at a very prestigious institution, that it was better if job seekers didn't have more than two questions about the position -- because too many questions make you look suspicious! SCs are just random conglomerations of flawed human beings, there's no magic trick to impressing them.
Again, congrats to 2:23!
That said, I will also echo the general sentiment, namely that there is no one scheme to follow to land a t-t position.
These things help/are required (in no particular order):
1) Not being a total dolt or socially oblivious, or at least being able to pretend that you're neither of these things if you actually are. This is the one that always gets me. It never fails to surprise me that book smart people often have no fucking common sense or any notion of politesse. The ability to schmooze, be likable, and convince people that you're someone worth helping is a major key to success.
2) Pedigree
3) Advisor influence and their willingness to use it
4) Publications, presentations, etc.
Of course, your mileage may vary. I said that these are in no particular order, but honestly having publications and the like isn't going to do you any good if you haven't got 1-3 lined up. Again, I don't espouse the view that one can control the process, however I think there are things that obvious tilt things in one's favor and help mitigate some of the randomness.
@9:37, please explain "willingness to use it".
9:37
"Willingness to use it" is what you'd imagine. Calling in favors to those who owe them, calling/writing behind the scenes to any friends at a given department, agreeing to fast-track grants or projects if the advisor sits on some board or another. Barring any of these, implying that the proverbial shiv will be used if the advisor is powerful enough. What people refer to now as backroom dealing. Some see it as a negative, I say that if in this environment your advisor isn't willing to apply the carrot, or if necessary, the stick to get their students jobs then they aren't worth their salt.
@10:15, various faculty in my department assume I am quite naive, as they keep assuring me "that sort of thing doesn't happen anymore." And yet I know it was just this that happened a few years ago when a person from our program mysteriously got a position that had not been advertised anywhere. On the other hand, I don't think it would ever occur to my adviser in particular to try something like this. Seems to think writing a letter is sufficient.
11:24, i think we are in the same dept.
was the situation the following? a prof left your home dept (A) to go to peer institution (B), but needed a leave or sth, and so a phd student from (A) magically appeared as a lecturer at (B) for a year to teach those courses? both (A) and (B) being FANCY places.
One of the easiest ways to see the backroom dealing is to look at the background of newish faculty at any given university. The connections aren't always obvious, but if you trace a person's career back to their undergrad years, you can usually pin them down.
Just one example off the top of my head that is fairly obvious. A recent hire in ancient Greek art (2 years ago?) has a nice t-t job at a top school in a BIG midwestern city. Hired ABD as far as I can tell, thin CV, from an another top PhD (west coast). The connection? Another grad of the same program has a nice, cushy position in the hiring department, and the two even had the same advisor.
This is just one very obvious example. There are plenty more that are less obvious.
Sorry 11:39/11:42, that wasn't the situation. But it's good to know of another story confirming that this sort of thing does still happen on occasion. Does anyone else have a similar story?
Any word on the Chicago Roman history job? And Princeton for that matter?
^ word on the block is that offers have been made
I appreciate the account shared by 2:23 (congratulations!), but I just want to second 8:14's comments on fit and fortuna as determinative- and not one's superior or careful preparation. I got a t-t job in my 4th year on the market, and can really see no rhyme or reason as to why I was rejected from so many places or hired at the one. My best campus visit- in which my advisor had serious connections with the department and multiple professors contacted him to say how well the visit went- resulted in ghosting and a rejection; my eventual success was in a department with no connections and a campus visit in which I was horribly sick and exhausted from caring for my newborn. Just another bit of anecdata.
I second 1:14. I got my job after four desperate years on the market, and circumstances were random. My best campus visit, where I felt like I really "clicked" with the whole faculty and where my job talk was truly stellar, resulted in nothing but a anguished rejection letter from the chair. In a different job talk I also had faculty members calling my advisor afterwards to say how much they liked it: but no job. And the campus visit where I got my job I was exhausted and jet lagged, reeling from a delayed flight, and gave my least polished and prepared job talk of any of my campus visits before almost falling asleep at the dinner afterwards. My weakest showing by far, but it resulted in the job.
You can do many things to try and make yourself a stronger candidate (teach, publish, etc.), but tyche in the end rules us all. I don't think for a minute I "earned" my job. I just lucked out before my time ran out.
reread 1:14pm and 1:55pm, they've retold my story - my favorite part is the bit where I had a phenomenal campus visit, hanging out with prospective colleagues for hours after the formalities had ended discussing all sorts of topics related to the job and the city and so on. And then literally four months of complete and utter radio silence. I landed a 2-year gig in the interim, but out of sheer stupid curiosity eventually emailed the search chair to see wtf had happened. Eventually they replied that the search had been cancelled, but that mine had been the best campus interview they'd had. Thanks.for.nothing. They never re-listed that (or any other) position, but if they do the classics wiki will be the first to get the warning. In the meantime, tyche scored me a T-T job just when all hope seemed lost, in a position that was anything but a "best fit" for me, and a bit like 1:14 just a few months into learning what it is to have a newborn. Apparently the glazed-over-from-complete-exhaustion look is impressive to some SCs...and maybe we all look like we just don't give a fork by that stage, which is surely attractive to the hiring committees - "this person is so confident that they're not even trying! We must hire them immediately!"
Morale of the story courtesy of 1:14 & 1:55 —> it’s very hard to evaluate yourself. When you think you’re a “perfect fit” or did a great job at interview/visit, don’t let yourself think that. We’re our own hardest critics when it’s unwarranted and too quick to self-congratulate for mediocrity.
...I guess we can take a lesson from George Constanza (a fictional Seinfeld character, so don’t get too happy, Servius; no need to haphazardly delete this as well!), in trusting in the “opposite.”
Ha, morale. Congratulating mediocrity indeed. "Reading fv fills us all with low morals." Some of us NEVER self-congratulate; we can't begin to imagine what that would even mean. But seriously, I kid, and now I'm going to re-watch all of Seinfeld, because Cantstanzya!
Yup. Got a TT job this year after deciding that this was my last year on the market before leaving academia. Got 0 TT bites last year when I felt my CV was in some ways stronger than it is now. There is something to be said for lacking the air of desperation that probably characterized my earlier visits/interviews.
One more critique of @2:23:
NEVER, EVER send SCs materials that they did not request. SCs are overwhelmed by the materials they have already asked for, and the last thing they want is an eager beaver sending them stuff they do not want.
I agree, on my SC we were completely swamped under what we did ask for, so I can't imagine trying to go through anything extra (unsolicited), and I think at least some of us would have found this to be a bit annoying (it may even be illegal in some places to go through such materials, but I don't know about such things). As a rule, I'd advise against sending additional unsolicited materials...unless, of course, that is *exactly* what one particular SC likes to see. The only rule in all of this is that there are no rules. There's gotta be a William Lawson's commercial in here somewhere...
@3:26. What do you feel made it so much stronger in the previous year?
That's great- so for these past few posters, at least, landing a job is like landing a woman. Once you no longer give a crap and you're not even really looking or trying, you suddenly become irresistibly attractive. "HIRE THIS MAN!"
I'm loving all the Seinfeld references here today. Too bad that after an SCS interview we cant just leave behind a sable hat, sing our last name to the tune of the jingle "by Mennen," and all the sudden be the object of their desire.
Relevant...
George: Why did it all turn out like this for me? I had so much promise. I was personable, I was bright. Oh, maybe not academically speaking, but ... I was perceptive. I always know when someone's uncomfortable at a party. It became very clear to me sitting out there today, that every decision I've ever made, in my entire life, has been wrong. My life is the opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have, in every of life, be it something to wear, something to eat ... It's all been wrong.
**A waitress comes up to George**
Waitress: Tuna on toast, coleslaw, cup of coffee.
George: Yeah. No, no, no, wait a minute, I always have tuna on toast. Nothing's ever worked out for me with tuna on toast. I want the complete opposite of on toast. Chicken salad, on rye, untoasted ... and a cup of tea!
Why chicken salad, isn't salmon the opposite of tuna?
George should ask for a bagel and lox, untoasted?
Hello,
I haven't been on FV for several years, and I'm a bit out of touch with the current feelings of those on the market (other than it's terrible, etc.) Next year I'll be the chair of a search committee for the first time. The last hire my department made was me. Although it's a while, I distinctly remember my years on the market after the 2008 crash, and I'd like to make the process as decent for candidates as possible. My school requires a detailed plan for searches many months before the job is even advertised, so I'm plotting it out now. I'd appreciate any suggestions on particular things done by SCs in recent years that you found helpful. Thanks.
@8:50
Application stage: The most helpful thing (I've noticed this more this year than in the past) has been restraining the number of documents in the first round to CV, cover letter, and rec letters, and asking for other materials for longlisted/ shortlisted candidates. Easier on search committees too not to be buried in documents.
Interview stage: Consider giving candidates the option of a Skype interview. This also has become more common, and I think it's great for people to have the option of not traveling all the way to the meeting.
Post-interview: Letting people know in a timely manner where they stand is so, so helpful.
Best of luck with the search.
@8:50,
1.) Ask only for contact info for three references, not for actual letters up front. It's an unnecessary burden for well over 100 applicants who won't get an interview as well for their letter writers, whose time would be better spent preparing a thoughtful letter for a SC that is considering their candidate.
2.) Never leave the majority in the dark. So, when you have a select group (usually 8-12) that you would like to interview, send out an email (a generic one is perfectly fine) to those you will not be interviewing as well. Send out the emails all on the same day. Then, when you know who from the interview group you'd like to move forward to round two and have for campus visits, let the other 6-10 interviewed candidates know as well. Now, you can say to them either that they aren't being considered any longer or that they are placed on a waitlist; either is ok.
The fact is, we ALL know the instant that people are asked to interview or invited to campus visits, so to be left in the dark just further adds to our own feelings of worthlessness. Nobody will be offended to be told that they were interviewed but waitlisted, and then invited later on--truth be told, if anyone is frail enough to be bothered by that you wouldn't want them as a colleague anyway.
3.) Send out a list of interview questions in advance. It's better for all parties involved to have as well-informed and high quality of an interaction as possible. I think that it says far more about a candidate to see how a given candidate 'prepares' for a question compared to his peers; is it rigid? is it dry? is he personable in delivery and mood?
@8:50: it is wonderful, delightful, and other -ful words for you to pose this question to this community--thank you!
One thing that I really like to see in applications: please make it possible to submit more than three letters of recommendation! As time goes by, I've built up more people willing to write for me and whose letters can showcase different aspects of my candidacy (service, teaching, research). It's so frustrating to have to pick and choose, especially since I can't always be 100% sure which are the best letters. Five is a much better number.
Also, I know sometimes there are mandates from on high, but asking for tailored statements of X (e.g. "detailed statement of teaching philosophy describing how you would contribute to X initiative at our school or proposing X number of new courses for our program) is. just. evil. Most candidates are desperately trying to make time for job applications on top of writing and teaching very high course loads. Asking for additional specialized documents at the initial stage of the process is cruel and inhuman. If they are really important, perhaps they can be solicited at the pre-interview stage?
Finally, a comment for the interview stage: please take a moment to glance over your candidates' letter/CV before the interview. There is nothing more frustrating to me--and it has happened multiple times--than to go into an interview after spending days prepping to realize that the committee members have no idea who I am, don't know where I did my graduate work, don't know my current VAP institution, don't have even the most general sense of my research or teaching history, and then ask questions that would be better posed of my CV, as in "how many articles have you published?" or "have you taught Greek?" This is such a waste of everyone's time and is also pretty insulting.
Again, thank you for asking! I'm sure there will be other good points I've forgotten.
Anyone know:
1.) what's up with North Alabama ?
2.) who got the Gettysburg VAP ?
"With Boomers working well into their 70s and 80s"
Uh ... Exact definitions vary, but the first "baby boomers" were born in the early or mid-1940s. Anyone who's 80 today was born in 1938. So while it may eventually turn out that some baby-boomers will keep working into their 80s, they haven't done so yet, and any 80-plus prof. still working today isn't a baby boomer.
I had an interview at North Alabama about a month ago and I haven't heard any updates. That said, I have no clue if the other interviewees check/update this or the Euro history wiki, so they may have already made an offer but are staying quiet until it's all finalized. Who knows...
Overall advice:
(1) Try to keep the first-round requirements to the bare minimum.
(2) If you TRULY are not going to consider ABD's, Ph.D.'s in fields other than Classics, people who work on x topic, please say that. Mean what you say and say what you mean. We will all be happier. It is shitty to say 'ABD or Ph.D.' and then throw ABD apps. in the trash. It is also shitty to say 'Ph.D. in hand required' and hire an ABD.
and before anyone starts to quibble about ABD status, substitute your favorite requirement that turns out not to be a requirement for 'special' people.
"Mean what you say and say what you mean." Yes. Please. (Of course before they can do this, the SC needs to be able to agree within itself about what they want.)
Also, please request 3-5 letters. Some of us need to use all of our original letter-writers for various reasons, but also need a current colleague to write for us.
And NO extra-special writing assignments or syllabi written just for you at the initial stage. That's just barbaric.
@8:25. The formula "no fewer than three letters" comes to mind.
As we saw with the highly immoral FSU VAP, do not require tailored materials. Just CV, boilerplate cover letter and a writing sample.
SCs sometimes think that since they have one of the 50 precious jobs in the field that we will all want to intricately tailor our materials in the first round, but this is an enormous waste of junior scholar's time. Some people will do this (2:23), but this should not be a professional standard. The first round of applications is like speed dating, and both candidate and program should reserve questions of fit for the second round, or preferably the campus visit.
I always felt that one could tell the quality of the job and university by the inverse of the materials required. The best jobs tend to only require a CV, cover letter and writing sample.
It's funny that you think your opinion of how a search should be run matters.
To the future SC chair looking for advice:
I'm not a candidate but a past search committee chair. One thing I'd advise you to do if your university uses a software system for applications is to make sure that you *personally* go through the application system to see what it is like before it goes live. The first time I chaired a search, the standard practice was for HR and our department administrator to handle all of that; our administrator is great, but she has never applied for an academic job, so she didn't recognize a key problem in the way the search was set up in the system. (You'd think a university HR office would have this down, but keep in mind that different fields do things differently, and the default set-up could, for instance, include asking for supporting documentation that is irrelevant to Classics or else not having a way to upload something that is important to a Classics search committee.)
Good luck with your search!
"I'm not a candidate but a past search committee chair. One thing I'd advise you to do if your university uses a software system for applications is to make sure that you *personally* go through the application system to see what it is like before it goes live."
YEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Truer words have never been written here. It is astounding how often there is something messed up about an online system, or how often the ad gives insufficient or misleading information about what is required for the application. Everyone who runs a search should make sure that the job posting matches what the candidates will encounter, and that candidates will not encounter something that should not be.
To give just one example, it is too common for an ad to say we must provide letter+c.v.+X, and then the H.R.'s one-size-fits-all website gives us options for additional materials, forcing us to decide whether to stick to what was asked for or add more, and whether adding more when it's not asked for might put us at a disadvantage. Basically, H.R. departments cannot be trusted, and must be checked on.
Oh, one more thought, for my post with the elongated "YES!" Some places want reference letters, others want a list of references who can be contacted, and too often ads do not make clear which is which. I've had the experience of having colleagues provide tailored letters for me based on what an ad said, only to find out from the website that I was supposed to provide names and contact info. Search committees should ensure that this never happens.
(While on this topic, can anyone explain why so many places want a list of references to be uploaded as a separate PDF file, when our C.V.'s list references? It's so odd to require this seemingly superfluous step.)
UCLA? What's the scoop?
@12:07,
Most CVs don’t contain references.
Most CVs have references. I've read 100s and 100s of them. It is annoying when they don't.
To the SC Chair:
Might I put forth the radical suggestion that you do what is done at certain major schools in the UK: require that at least two members of the search committee are faculty outside the field of classics. This helps to keep the search honest, in my opinion, and to help eliminate classics group-think and unconscious nepotism.
@3:28PM: A job seeker here--I don't like this suggestion, which I think you've rightly characterized as radical. I don't know why you and some others on here think having SC members outside the field is going to improve fairness. If anything, people outside our field will have no idea of what a Classics department really needs in terms of teaching, and they won't know the research well either. I think this would lead to a skewed favoring of candidates who seem "interdisciplinary," harming the vast majority of candidates who have received a training as "mere" Classicists. We should be hired by people who actually have the ability to judge us for what the job entails: being a Classicist. As for unconscious nepotism, I think the (academic) nepotism you're decrying is actually pretty conscious in the case of those who practice it! Fortunately, not everyone does.
@3:28 also a job seeker here and I love that idea. 3:44's response sounds like they're scared of others can do just what they can plus more. I think in this climate the more we involve other people from other disciplines the better chance we have to maintain classics in university.
If they want a historian, bring in the historians, if they want a philosopher, bring in the philosophers, if they want a lit person, bring in the lit people. White Studies deserves nothing less than a chance to interact with the *disciplines* it claims to embrace...
I'm surprised at the implication that most SCs don't already include "outside members." Here at my SLAC, every search is required to have an outside member. I've served as the outside member several times, including on a chemistry search. And even back in the 90s and early 00s, when I spent (way too many) years on the market, most search committees that interviewed me included outside members, often from an English or History dept. The committee that hired me here included a scientist. Is this not the norm?
In my experience as a SC member (for Classics), most people who invoke "interdisciplinarity" are quite willing to tell Classics what Classics should be doing, but would never tolerate Classics telling their discipline/department what to do.
Does Classics get to tell other disciplines what to do? Is it a discipline?
One assumes that in any system by which 'outsiders' are appointed to search committees, Classics will both be a receiver and a sender. Who is the net gainer? That, I would suggest, depends on the individuals involved.
Well, Area Studies departments generally draw from real disciplines (and can't place their graduates in real disciplines) and don't tell them what to do. Classics is Old White Area Studies. But the Area Studies part is the relevant part. I would imagine this holds true for Middle East Studies or Oriental Studies or East Asian Studies or Latin American Studies. They don't get to tell a real dept (philosophy, anthro, sociology, history) what to do.
In other words, Other Departments are eating our Lunch!
Any update on FSU Roman Archaeology job? Listed as offer extended, but not accepted.
Is Sociology a real department, or just a bad joke?
Anthropology?
LOL ANTHRO, which includes both physical and cultural anthro, is maybe a joke but at least it's not White Area Studies.
In other words, Anthro is a discipline, not a flavour of Area Studies. Classics has more in common with Latin American Studies than either does with, say, History.
This "old white area studies" person is trolling while using commonwealth spelling. A disgruntled Canadian? In any case, tendentious categorization of Classics is tedious.
I just wish Old White [Male] Area Studies person would tell us what we should be doing, because I still haven't figured that one out. Is this our generation's F.O.D. moment? Should we abandon so-called Old White Studies because this field offers nothing to contemporary humanity? If so, may I recommend leaving the "racist misogynists" to their confused, outmoded, irrelevant ramblings on FV and advancing humanity in some other way?
Meanwhile, back in the SC outsider conversation, I've been interviewed by teams that included an outsider and teams that didn't. I've also been on an SC with an outsider and on an SC without an outsider. Seems to be institutionally-determined, in my experience. If I had to make up a broad generalisation, I'd say SLAC committees are more likely to include an outsider, and researchy-type places are less likely to do so. This could be down to simple problems like the number of available department members or Tradition.
One first suggestion from a skeptic: cut back on the Virgil/Ovid/Euripides/Homer dissertations. TRY SOMETHING NEW, perhaps even historically interesting or interesting to those outside of Classics. These are wonderful, rich works that should be taught at the undergrad level as part of the Old White Cultural Heritage, but other authors, periods, genres, and methods should be explored.
Put it this way: is there any point at which you would say, 'we've had enough Euripides?' If the answer is 'no,' then you are probably not in favor of Classics as a historical, research discipline.
http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1990/01.02.19.html
Years ago a distinguished, now very distinguished, practitioner of our craft adverted waggishly to me that the easy way to triage the talent seeking a classics job was to begin by excluding all the people with dissertations on Propertius or Euripides. Fashions have shifted a little: Euripides still has his throng of votaries, but Propertius' day was the day of the New Critic, and neodule fashion requires a more ambiguous favorite, so Ovid has come to the head of the pack. It does seem excessive that there are six dissertations under way on Apollonius Rhodius' Argonautica and none on Ennodius, but perhaps there I betray a prejudice.
Even as a joke it seems sort of silly to link talent with centrality to the canon. Rather, it is easier to write a dissertation on a "marginal" or "underexplored" topic than on one that has been the focus of hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Indeed, if anything, I would say that in the American tradition of the liberal arts where originality and scholarly creativity are valued, rather than definitive agglomerations of evidence, a Homerist or Vergil scholar who has written something really interesting and new is much more impressive than someone who has diligently compiled a catalogue or testimonia and written something original on a neglected subject.
Addendum: That is of course a separate question from being interesting to scholars in other fields. A dissertation on Neophron would be new, but likely no more (if anything, less) interesting to scholars in other fields than yet another on Euripides' Medea.
This is very useful:
"a Homerist or Vergil scholar who has written something really interesting and new is much more impressive than someone who has diligently compiled a catalogue or testimonia and written something original on a neglected subject."
I agree that the person may be more impressive, but I disagree that the work is more important, or represents the kind of scholarship the field needs. Is doing something "interesting" on a certain book of the Aeneid advancing human knowledge more than writing something original on a neglected subject? Clearly not, so other factors are at play. Factors that have to do with canon, class, race, fetishization of 'classical' periods.
My own opinions aside, I think this statement can serve as a useful subject of debate. For or against, FV? Sort of true, sort of false?
Uhhh, should it matter? If someone has found an interesting new way of reading Euripides -- OR Arrian, OR Oppian, OR Apollonius, aren't all of those good? @7:23, you seem to imply that the way forward for something that isn't well-researched is compiling a catalogue, but isn't it such studies that condemn those same works to being understudied? If someone writes a lousy book on Ovid in 2018, it doesn't change anyone's mind about him. But if someone tries to convince you that Nemesianus was a genius -- and they actually do! -- that's worthwhile. Granted, that person might still not find a job, since departments are much more likely to want someone that can offer classes on Homer than on e.g. Quintus.
IMHO, very generation is called to return to the greats--Homer, Vergil, Euripides, etc--and to renew them for their own present day. While the texts do not change, its readers do, and so each new age of scholars has an opportunity to let the texts speak anew.
7:23/25 again. 8:42, absolutely! Another addendum might be: what I am most impressed by is work that changes the boundaries of what we consider important. I was specifically responding to the suggestion above that we should do something new just to be doing something new; which seems closely related to the silly idea we all routinely encounter that "everything has been said" about Homer or Shakespeare or the middle ages or Roman imperialism or Dante or whatever. I agree that many aspects of antiquity have been criminally neglected in favor of endless studies of the canon, and strongly believe that we should try to remedy that. But I also believe that central topics are widely understood in stupid ways and that there are neglected niches within those central topics and that even if recent literature on a topic is brilliant there's always more that can be said---and we should try to remedy all that, too!
"IMHO, very generation is called to return to the greats--Homer, Vergil, Euripides, etc--and to renew them for their own present day." This is the key - every generation of HUMAN BEINGS? It doesn't seem that way. Every generation of post-Renaissance people raised in Western Europe/countries that emerged from Western European settler colonialism....something to ponder.
If you want to be useful then go and learn Arabic and edit+translate Arabic versions of (often lost) works of Greek literature, and work on Arabic papyri. The field needs that more than another Homer dissertation. If you don't have the language chops to tackle Arabic as well -- not saying I do -- then work on literary papyri or else Greek and/or Latin poetry on stone. That's where one can more easily find new things to say.
Although if you're reading this you presumably already have a dissertation topic picked out...
But the Arabic stuff is apparently mostly philosophy and medicine. No Euripides or tragedy of any other kind for that......Borges has a story about it. So if you want to read bad translations of Galen and people commenting on Galen all day or Aristotle, go for it. Not sure how that would fit into Classics as Classicists understand it. Maybe better for an Oriental Studies department or Middle East studies?
I would support Assyrian philology as well as Arabic papyrology being integrated into Classics, though. Open up the borders!
This is an important, indeed necessary, read for everybody here now, and everybody who was once here:
https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2018/03/04/famae-volent-a-personal-history/
Eloquent, direct, and heartfelt.
Just read it.
And then wait a bit to comment.
"But the Arabic stuff is apparently mostly philosophy and medicine. No Euripides or tragedy of any other kind for that......Borges has a story about it. So if you want to read bad translations of Galen and people commenting on Galen all day or Aristotle, go for it. Not sure how that would fit into Classics as Classicists understand it. Maybe better for an Oriental Studies department or Middle East studies?"
Sure, it's mostly philosophy and medicine. But any time one recovers a lost Greek work, I'd argue, that's more important than yet another study of Pindar. Obviously, it won't appeal to everyone, but how many people in grad school are even made aware that it's an option?
It is a sign of the decadence of this field that someone feels the need to say (100% correctly, by my lights):
But any time one recovers a lost Greek work, I'd argue, that's more important than yet another study of Pindar.
In any real field this would be so obvious as not to need stating.
@12:12, @12:22 and @others sympathetic to their arguments:
If you want to be internally consistent and not hypocrites, then by your own lights you have two options: yourselves work on Arabic, papyri, stone fragments and empirically observe the outcomes of your theories, or remove yourself from the field. By either method you will cease to contribute to useless detritus and will improve Classics.
tl;dr: put your money where your mouth is. If you're already doing this without success, then maybe, just maybe you bet on the wrong horse.
@6:44 I have a fundamental disagreement with this way of thinking. To my mind, the reason why the Classics are important and will never go away is precisely because of authors like Euripides, and the other canonical greats. I love it, and these authors have wisdom for all nations, but especially for Western nations like our own. And whether they were technically white or not is a red herring. What matters is that these are among the best books/plays/poems/speeches etc. ever written. Encouraging more research and classes on non-canonical no-names who never influenced anything is not the way to keep Classics "relevant" or make the case to an increasingly right-wing and skeptical public that they should fund Classics in universities! MAKE CLASSICS GREAT AGAIN sorry I couldn't resist triggering all ye Eidelers (add me to the list plz SententiaeAntiquae- apart from the PC nonsense about how women are all still oppressed in the field despite 60-40 majorities in hiring year after year, I really liked your article and agree that famae is necessary as an outlet for honest discussion about the field.)
@7:23 PM Bingo, very much agree. But if someone isn't capable of doing this, I don't think they should be faulted for writing a dissertation on a non-canonical author. If they go on to promote the basic values of our Civilization (now moribund, but we can at least try to save it) through teaching of the Greats, that's what's really important about our field.
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