@9:18, one of my family members owned a series of apartment complexes in the 1980s. It was an unwritten rule that they would never rent to someone who was gay or a POC. Whether this was legal or not, in the 80s, the internet, craigslist, and these discussions simply didn't exist. No one could take them to task because they had no proof of racism.
It's foolish to turn down a T-T offer. If you want to treat it like a VAP and continue applying to jobs in more desirable locales or at better schools, then do that; but don't turn it down!
@9:33 i have a friend who *quit* a TT at a third-tier SLAC for a prestigious, multi-year East Coast (non Ivy) VAP. He had a family to consider, too. It was pretty stressful for him in the last year or two (three year postdoc, i believe), but after authoring and editing a couple books during that period he did in fact land another TT at a major public R1. Not sure if he'd risk everything again, though i imagine for research connections + publishing it ended up being worth it..
@9:33 This just issue was just the subject of a response in the "The Professor is In" on the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Professor-Is-In-Should-I/242924?cid=wcontentgrid_hp_9
You'd think that for a group of people who spend a lot of their time working with languages and their minutiae, FVers could figure out that words have specific definitions.
White people in the United States cannot be victims of racism. Racism is inherently tied to structural power differentials that exist between white people and everyone else. These power differentials are ensconced in the political, legal, and social institutions of the country. Whether you are dirt poor, middle class, or wealthy, if you are white you are, from the outset, provided the advantages of an unequal power structure that no person of color would benefit from were they to swap places with you.
Now, people of color can certainly be bigoted toward white people or discriminate against them. But in such instances there is no pre-existing, overarching, pervasive power structure on which that person of color is drawing from in such an instance to lend weight to whatever animus they harbor.
A lot people here pay lip service to interdisciplinarity but it seems that many could use a crash course in subjects like anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory.
Break out of the myopia if you want to "Make Classics Great."
Re: Colgate. Glad to see the chair step in but it feels weird knowing that he had the time and courtesy to do that, but that he did not have the time or courtesy to notify other candidates that they didn't advance after first round interviews.
We've been very uncomfortable with our position as moderators in the course of the recent conversation, and wanted to share some of these concerns with the community. On the one hand, as totally unaccountable moderators, we hesitate to delete content here unless it crosses explicit lines. On the other hand, we find it unconscionable that our colleagues are the subject of thinly veiled attacks with such regularity.
We've been having internal conversations for the past few weeks about what we can do to make FV a more healthy ecosystem. We're looking for ways to bring more voices into these conversations, as we feel strongly that this should be a community discussion. More on that in the next few days or weeks.
In the meantime, we'd like to direct people to the commenting policy at a major philosophy blog, the DailyNous: http://dailynous.com/comments-policy/, and ask that you please follow the spirit of guidelines laid out there.
@5:33. With regard to this sort of issue, I was the grad rep on a search committee recently and I learned that our HR department does not allow formal rejection of other interviewed candidates until after the hire is officially completed. I guess sometimes all three campus invites fall through--because the committee can't agree, all candidates get jobs elsewhere, whatever--and they want to be able to move on and bring their fourth, fifth and sixth ranked candidates to campus. Don't know if this is the case with Colgate, but sometimes it really is out of the SCs hands.
To contribute to what two other commenters have said, I’ll add a third thing that just doesn’t sit well about the Chair of Classics popping in: this means that either A.) he is a regular viewer of FV or that B.) someone went crying to him about the post.
Now, it’s likely not the former, since the post commenting on Colgate and his reply were separated by ~10 hours and at least 30 posts, many quite long, and all deals with race.
If it’s the latter, that means that someone saw it who actually knew the truth and reached out to the Chair. There would be an extremely limited number of people who would know the truth (e.g., SC member, Dean or admin, or the hired candidate). A such, I cannot shake the scenario that whoever it was saw the post and went crying to the Chair because someone online said something they didn’t like and they want the Chair to make the mean people on FV stop.
It’s in very bad taste and makes the Chair of Colgate seem not too dissimilar to Trump, getting directly involved in a blog discussion because someone said something they don’t like. ...Just post a congrats message on your Dept webpage if you have the time to scour FV and take the high road.
8:13: sure, I get it. There are administrative policies. But ghosting completely is rude. There are ways to be courteous, e.g. something along the lines of "Just a note that you haven't advanced to the final stage for now but we'll keep your dossier on file for further consideration if the opportunity arises..." Simple and not committal. I interviewed with 4 places and they were the only one not to keep in touch at all.
8:13 here. 8:47 and 8:58, I totally see and agree with your points. I hadn't thought it through fully, and I recall that my department actually did send the sort of note that 8:58 describes.
I agree with everyone’s criticisms of the Colgate Chair. If you have time to visit a blog to scold us, you have time to send an email to those of us waiting to hear final word AND you have time to, as has been mentioned twice now, post something official on your Dept webpage congratulating the new hire.
..must be nice to have a 1:1 teaching load, get paid $120,000+ and have plenty of free time to read and comment on blogs online.
Oh please, stop with the Colgate nonsense. Someone came here anonymously and spread misinformation, and the person with the most authority to speak to the issue set it straight. I really don't see why some of you have a problem with having correct information straight from a reliable, named source. And if you think someone went "crying" to him about "mean people" then you've let your imagination run away from you.
...As a way to help alleviate the current issues going on here re:Colgate, I just called the Classics Department at Colgate.
This was the conversation:
Col: Hello, Department of Classics
Me: Yes, good morning. I'm just calling because I see that Roman History is being offered in the Fall, but it only states "STAFF" as the instructor; can you tell me which professor is teaching this course? I imagine that it is the new hire that I heard about.
Col: It will be the new hire, but they are not confirmed yet.
Me: Oh, they are not confirmed yet?
Col: That's correct.
Me: Ok, thank you very much for your time.
Col: You're welcome.
...So, it sounds as if an offer has been made, but it also seems as if something is not finalized yet. I really don't know how to interpret "they are not confirmed yet." My best guess is that an offer was made, verbally accepted, but the paperwork has either not been handing in or has not been completely processed at higher levels.
But, it does seem as if the Chair was being truthful--they have a new hire and it was approved. But, the 'confirmation' stage has not yet happened; so that could explain why so many people are still waiting to have official word back from Colgate.
@9:15 and 9:18. 5:33 here. As you can see from my post I agree wholeheartedly with what the chair did. Good to clarify false information. All for it. But that doesn't negate my sentiments about his ghosting on other candidates.
I think these criticisms are for the most part bizarre, since the main reason for posting would be to protect the reputation of the candidate in question. Nobody wants to come on this website with their name, partially because of the absurdity of comments like 8:47 and 9:09. Would a note have been nice? Probably. Does Colgate's HR policy allow it? I surely don't know.
Yes, we just need the official written response to the official written contract, which was just mailed this week. While the candidate has verbally accepted, we can't force that person's hand by releasing their name until everything is signed, sealed, and delivered.
I'm really sorry that we haven't been able to send word yet to other applicants. Administration tells us we have to wait until the search is formally closed.
This is m first year on FV, but I can say from my limited experience that they takeaway I have regarding SC members getting involved is: don't do it.
You set yourself for an exceptional amount of criticism (some deserved, most not). This was the case for the Georgetown Chair (who had a very arrogant and condescending tone, I'd admit) and for the Colgate Chair.
..It seems best for these guys to remain outside of FV, as much as we'd like to have their input, the FV community as a whole will rip them apart whenever they show up.
I know that the lag time between an interview and a rejection can be very frustrating (I've experienced it myself for 3 cycles now), but you just have to deal with it. There are too many unseen factors outside of your control or knowledge. If 3+ weeks (or whatever time frame they gave you at the end of the interview) have gone by with no word, you just have to assume that they are not inviting you out to campus. Maybe their top 3 candidates will fall through and they actually will invite you! Probably not!
If you have another invitation/offer in play but you'd prefer the job you haven't heard from, by all means contact them and see if they can give you any information that could help you make a decision one way or another. Otherwise just move on and send out more applications. I find that the rejections are easier to take when I have already mentally and emotionally moved on. I'm getting rejections now for jobs that I don't even remember applying to.
@9:30. Thank you. That's all one needs. A simple update like the response you just offered -- discreet yet clarificatory -- would have been polite 2 months ago.
thanks 11:59. That article was informative and helpful. Though, it tended to sway me to think that a nice 1-yr Ivy postdoc is a better alternative than a R2 in a shitty part of the country more than 2,000 miles from family/friends and at least 2.5 hrs to the nearest city of more than 10,000 people.
Personally I'd rather they do pop in and set the record straight. Rather than telling them to stay away, we could do a better job of showing appreciation for the information they provide and try to balance out those with sore feelings who will find anything to complain about.
It seems that almost all of the T-T jobs that have come out post-SCS have been in horrible locations and at lower-tiered schools. But tenure even at at community college is tenure. In a day and age where T-T jobs are diminishing and the number of ultra-qualified PhDs is rapidly increasing, can anyone really afford to turn down a less than desirable T-T job?
I interviewed for 2 T-T jobs this year, and they both were at 'embarrassing' schools (U North Alabama, CUNY-Queensborough), but I'm not too sure if I'm looking at it with a 1990s viewpoint, that sees abundance of jobs and endless possibilities.
I understand the impulse to reject a school that's never going to make you proud to say is where you teach, but isn't that a better alternative than being a perpetual adjunct?
^^^ the most peculiar question I was asked in my North Alabama interview:
"So, UNA is a small school in a small community, and many of the faculty are recognized in town wherever we go by current and former students. How do you think your public presence will be interpreted and in what way will you try to present your image to the local community?"
I cannot even imagine what U N Alabama is like but I am curious... Did you have a good impression of the social/intellectual life there after your interviews?
They were all very nice and it seemed as if the interview went well, but aside from that very odd question ^^ , I was asked 5 different times in 5 different ways if I'd ever leave UNA. I have a very developed CV and it's research heavy. I think they were very nervous about taking on someone whose direction is geared towards research and publication and not about teaching a 4:4 load to less-than-stellar Alabamans.
I only Skyped, I was not asked to come to campus, so I can't really comment on the feel of the place. But, it's a very, very small town in a VERY isolated part of Alabama, so I imagine that so long as you fit the demographic of what that's all about, you'd be ok.
Speaking of new T-T jobs, the Mississippi State job *seems* to be a job to take over for Robert Earl Wolverton, who, according to the UNC-CH Classics alumni page, received his PhD in 1954. ...1954 !!!
That means: minus 6 years for PhD, 2 years for his terminal MA, 4 years for his BA, and 18 years for his HS graduation age, and he was born ca. 1924 and is still teaching. He's in his early-mid 90s and still teaching !
I think that many FV'ers are doing themselves and the discipline as a whole no favors by buying into the tyranny of publications. You need some pubs to prove to the SC you're in the field, but after that, each one is diminishing returns. I don't believe the person upthread who said "they told me I had 5 and the other person had 8, so they hired the other person." I don't think it works that way, and if they did say that, I think they only did because people in this hateful job market demand quantifiable reasons.
And I think this desperation for quantifiability is eating our lunch.
A person I know recently got tenure at a prestigious university with relatively fewer publications and of relatively less prestige than one would expect. But this person has a near universal reputation for being the most engaged and insightful participant in the department seminar and at conferences and treats first year undergrads with the same attention as big international stars. They just doesn't really like to write that much. But I still think the tenure committee would have been very short-sighted to boot them for lack of pubs when the person draws undergrads and grads to the program like flies to milk.
Is there no space left for anyone who isn't one of the proverbial thousand monkeys at a thousand type writers? And before you flay me alive (well, it being FV, so I'm sure I'll get flayed), but, no, I'm not talking about myself! I'm junior TT at a place that the flyover states consider a flyover state, furiously publishing like mad to get out.
I was told that explicitly. I knew one of the SC members from years past, and though I did not contact him during the entire process, I did once the Wiki was updated with the chosen candidate. I then reached out to the SC member, and he told me rather candidly what sort of things that particular SC was concerned about for who would get the job offer. At the end of the day, I was told, it was a very close call between myself and a few other candidates, and they opted to see who has done the most to be the decision breaker.
Think of it like applying to grad school, and all else is equal, but one candidate has a perfect GRE score, the rest only near-perfect.
It's unfair, and I'm very heartbroken by this, but I won't let myself be mad at him or the rest of the SC, since they had to make a tough decision, and I don't envy being in their shoes at all. The choice to not take me was not personal, but with so many insanely-qualified PhDs out there (many of which have better CVs than 80% of SC members reviewing them), one has to accept that the T-T market is brutal and that not everyone will win. There is less than a 1% chance that any of us will land a T-T job. That's just the math: more than 100 applicants for each job, in some cases well over 200.
...No doubt, Starbucks is going to have an unreal amount of Classical scholars making peoples' cappuccinos for the next generation.
Everybody knows that the journal's loaded Everyone submits with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the hiring's over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the search was fixed The adjuncts stay poor, the tenured get rich That's how it goes Everybody knows
Everybody knows the tenure lines are leaking Everybody knows that the provost lied Everybody got this broken feeling Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets Everybody wants a box of Ivy chocolates And with long CV rows Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby Everybody knows that you really do Everybody knows that you've been faithful Ah give or take a well known prof or two Everybody knows you've been discreet But there were so many famous scholars you just had to meet Without your clothes And everybody knows
And everybody knows that it's now or never Everybody knows that it's me or you And everybody knows that your job's forever Ah when you've won a tenured job or two Everybody knows the deal is rotten Old Black Janitor's still "picking cotton" For your Vergilian echoes And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming Everybody knows that it's moving fast Everybody knows the tenured man and woman Are just a shining artifact of the past Everybody knows the classics scene is dead But there's gonna be a meter on your bed That will disclose What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble Everybody knows what you've been through From the sadist junior profs who hate you To the failed SCS interview Everybody knows it's coming apart Take one last look at this Grecian art Before it blows And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows That's how it goes Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows That's how it goes Everybody knows
March 30, 2018 at 10:11 AM "Speaking of new T-T jobs, the Mississippi State job *seems* to be a job to take over for Robert Earl Wolverton, who, according to the UNC-CH Classics alumni page, received his PhD in 1954. ...1954 !!!
That means: minus 6 years for PhD, 2 years for his terminal MA, 4 years for his BA, and 18 years for his HS graduation age, and he was born ca. 1924 and is still teaching. He's in his early-mid 90s and still teaching !
Just thought that I'd share that."
I'm not entirely surprised.
A friend who was in the same MA program as me ~6 years ago took classes with Peter Green, who's nearing his mid-90s now (and just put out a new translation of the Odyssey a couple days ago, btw) and would have been well into his 80s when my friend was his student. Moreover, one of my now deceased undergraduate professors was also a student of Peter Green at UT Austin way back when. There's more than handful of scholars out there who are 80+ that I can think of who are still working, whether teaching or producing scholarship.
So off topic, but I was offered a TT position at an asian outpost of a reputable US university. It's in a "global literatures" department and I'll be a sort of token classicist. The terms are good, but I fear that if I accept, this would be a kind of academic suicide as a classicist. Will embarking on an unconventional path and being so far away from "where it all happens" put me at a disadvantage, not to mention not having classics colleagues present on a daily basis? Do you know anyone else who has done such a thing, whether in Asia or some other location that doesn't have a traditionally strong liberal arts/classics history?
Someone upthread mentioned the coming of our grimly efficient Asiatic overlords, so you might as well ingratiate yourself to them now while you have the chance.
If there are humanities grad students who are moonlighting as baristas that just underscores the fact that grad programs shouldn't exist if they can't adequately fund their students.
@ 11:47, I worked in a similar low-status customer service position through grad school. No privilege to check. Just sadness at my lost health care benefits.
12:30, Maybe they LIKE being baristas, and do it even if getting a generous graduate stipend. When I was in grad school there was a first-year grad who, despite our school's sufficiently generous funding, decided that she needed an outside job, and apparently the first place she thought of going to for potential employment was the local X-rated videos store. (Some of you may be too young to know what those were. Ask your father.) I felt that my stipend, augmented by a smallish loan, was enough that I did not have the need to go there, or elsewhere, for employment (or for videos).
I guess some people just like having jobs that let them meet all sorts of interesting customers.
My PhD program offered a 30k stipend plus I did some ongoing research work on a project and was paid for that, so it ended up being something like 34k per year before taxes. Health insurance was provided, and funds for conference travel and summer research travel were generally easy to obtain from my department. It was still barely sufficient. I did my PhD in one of those college towns that's full of hipsters and foodies who think the place is NYC or something, so everything was obscenely overpriced. Most programs offer much less than what I got so I have no clue how people live off of it.
I did not have a family to take care of at the time, thankfully. I couldn't imagine having to support a child or two on that PhD stipend unless I had a spouse with an income that was at least as much or more than what I was getting.
I know cost of living is important but some of the programs that offer around 22/24k...I feel really bad for those students.
It sounds like you're describing Boston. I was the poster above who said I made 24k / year there, and I did fine... If you had 34 with no family to take care of and health insurance covered, I think that's not bad at all for a grad student (roughly speaking)
I know several departments that are in the 22-24 range, off the top of my head UVA and Cincinnati. I imagine cost of living isn't bad in Cincinnati, but Charlottesville is expensive.
In my first year of grad school (2005), my stipend was $15k (for an MA program), and my final grad as a grad student (2014), it was $20k. A couple of years during my PhD I made more than $20k, owing to either generous fellowships or generous faculty paying for labor.
My stipend (when I had one) was similar to the range @2:49 describes, and it wasn't a particularly cheap place to live. I worked several campus jobs throughout my 6 years, plus cat/house sitting or whatever else I could find.
Grad school: started at 28k, with summer funding usually obtainable (typically in the 3-4k-range) and some conference funding (up to 500/ year at ABD stage). Last couple years were a bit higher due to teaching, about 30k. This was an expensive area, but I had nobody to support other than myself, and I knew it to be a generous stipend relative to most grad programs, so it felt ample to me. Post-PhD, the difficulty is not so much the salary as the uncertainty of never knowing if I will be employed in the following year.
@11:53 i would do it in a heartbeat [have you spent much time in asia already?]. classics / history in asia is a huge area for potential growth in our field, both for straight teaching and for comparative research [re: Scheidel on Rome vs China]. by living over there, if you learn the language and integrate in the community, the possibilities are unlimited on the comparative front: you'd be instantly at the forefront of an emerging subfield.
i've looked at a lot of those ads myself: the salary range vs cost of living can be substantial, depending on city and institution + you'd have the challenge of trying to build a new research library collection / fight for resources + maintaining connections with people in europe or north america or australia..
taking a TT job in asia would be challenging, but if you're courageous (and who isn't, in a field like classics?) and down for some adventure, without an opportunity closer to home (if you care about that sort of thing), i'd go for that in a heartbeat. frankly, i'm jealous. :-]
Yep. It's pretty simple public vs private issue because of declining state support even in the best systems. Few public schools have been able to keep pace with rising stipends at private schools since the recession started. Ten years ago, places like Michigan and Berkeley and Yale and Princeton, etc., all offered their most-favored students similar funding packages (in broad outline) but they have diverged enormously since, so that the difference is now often as much as $10k.
The cost of living in Ann Arbor @ UMich has skyrocketed in the last decade, way outpacing (the already high costs at Berkeley or Yale or Pton) -- has that stipend kept up?? How does Penn compare, btw?
^^^ Philly is extremely expensive. Add to this that you never want to venture more than 2 blocks from the campus at UPenn unless you want to buy crack or join the Crips. It's in a horrible part of Philly, not as bad as the neighborhood of Temple (which is literally in the ghetto), but it's bad. The only OK places to live in Philly are within the thin perimeter around UPenn, or down in Old City, which is where the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall is located.
Many UPenn grads live just over the border in NJ. Not in the most immediate city, Camden (which is consistently rated as the most dangerous city in the US), but the city just after that, Cherry Hill. Or, if you can swing the 25 minute commute, Haddonfield, NJ.
In short, North, South, East, and West Philly are shit neighborhoods riddled with crime. There are a few pockets of niceness (UPenn area, parts of Center City, and Old City), but that's it.
The commute from NJ in to Philly really isn't that bad, and that's what most of us tend to do.
7:59, holy shit. Your comment implies you are a Penn student, but your tone makes me wonder: Have you actually been to Philly in the past 25 years? Yes, it's a city, so there is some crime, but... wow. Most Penn grad students live in west philly, which is awesome and remains much cheaper than Princeton, NYC, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Palo Alto, or LA (although rapidly getting up there).
Is Philadelphia really that bad, or is this just more of the "every big city is a crime-ridden hellhole full of violent coloreds out to mug white people, make them shoot up, or kill them while also killing each other" rhetoric that gets tossed around? I ask because that narrative is the same when people trot out the Chicago dogwhistle, as if the whole city except for a pocket or two is a a flaming wasteland where you get shot as soon as you walk outside.
Anywho, I find it disheartening that so many great public universities are in places controlled by the party that hates education, and so are open to attacks on their funding and very existence.
Huh, as a fellow (?) Penn grad from the recent-ish past, I wonder if I know 7.59? Except apparently not, because he or she lives in Cherry Hill-- A place I only rode through on my way out of town occasionally during my long years in Philly. That representation of Philly and of the grad school life of Penn does not reflect my experience there. Most of the grad students I knew (not just in Classics) lived in West Philly, with smaller contingents in Center City (generally expensive, though), Powelton, South Philly, Northern Liberties, and then the suburbs. The city, meanwhile, has some deep and endemic problems, but is not anywhere as bleak as the picture painted in that comment. Also, I agree with 8.01, that the stipend is not anything particularly special, but the city is actually a lot of fun. Caveat: if you have school-aged children, the situation in Philly is a lot harder, because the city schools are an underfunded disaster.
That description of the Penn area is quite accurate for the the campus's neighborhood during the Clinton years. There's a reason we were advised not to walk about at night once we were a few blocks from campus (especially when heading westward), and always to use the safe-rides van after 9:00 p.m. I haven't been back in quite a few years, though, so I hope the area has improved. But if it has not, then the charge of racism -- there's that word again! -- against 7:59 would certainly be unfair.
Well, unless I'm a racist, too. I didn't consider THAT possibility, now did I?
8.40 here: So, 7.59, we would know each other then. I was there broadly in the 2000s. Your representation, nevertheless, does not reflect my experience.
The Classics building was in Logan Hall at the time, which, I believe was renamed just after I left to Cohen (after an endowee's ex-wife--he named quite a few buildings for various wives at Penn!).
Anyways, two different people often will see two different things. I can also confirm what 8:42 has said; there were constant warnings from faculty, older grad students, and nearly everyone on campus. I'm not saying that 8:40 and myself were in different Phillys, but I think we internalized our experiences differently and that we gave different degrees of attention to the warnings of older folk on campus.
...I've not been back to Philly since 2010, aside from driving through or (briefly) stopping by Geno's while trekking up/down 95.
I've visited Philly repeatedly over the last few years and enjoyed it quite a lot. I'm a young woman and I walked all over by myself, took public transportation, etc. It didn't feel any less safe than any other major city I've visited.
7.59, I think that sounds like a logical way of looking at things. I also had a partner for most of my time there who was a student in a different grad program at Penn. So I spent a lot of time with grad students outside of Classics, which probably shaped my experiences of the city.
I've been back quite often since graduating, and would say that it is really a fast-changing landscape. So, no on should take our kind of dated perceptions too seriously.
LOL @ most UPenn grad students live in Cherry Hill NJ -- we sure as hell do not. We live in West or South Philly, which are both great areas for young people/families. Undergrads are advised not to wander far from campus, but that's because UPenn is invested in real estate development in the blocks closest by, so making people scared is money in their pocket for high rents.
A $25-30k stipend in Philly goes a long way. I lived like a king there until i got my phd a couple years back. Miss it every day.
This was all clarified above. Numerous former UPenn grads (in the 90s and 2000s) confirmed that Philly used to be a very different animal. Most of you millennial a here will never know how bad certain cities used to be. Times Square in the 1970s and 80s was a truly terrifying place to go. Now it’s Disneyworld.
Maybe some parts of Philly have gotten better, but how’s Kensington these days, hmm? How many of you white privileged hipsters would wander around up there ? Have fun with that.
I'm the one who was at Penn during the Clinton years. Some of the (rather dumb) comments above got me to do some Googling regarding crime in the Penn area, and I found this article from the campus paper that backs up my own recollections of the area back in the day: http://www.thedp.com/article/2014/04/90s-high-crime-shaped-campus-today
As you can see, the area WAS dangerous back in the 1990's, and if students were warned about wandering too far from campus, especially at night, it was out of a reasonable concern for our safety.
If you read a few paragraphs down you will see the mention of a student being killed at the 4300 block of Larchwood. That's about three blocks over from where I lived when I was studying there.
The article indicates that things are much better now, which is great news, but there most certainly was a time when students were well advised to stick close to campus. Not because of racism, but because of reality.
I agree. As a POC originally from Brooklyn let me be rather clear in stating that those of us in traditionally black urban neighborhoods truly despise seeing rich hipsters come in and attempt to act worldly and colorblind while setting up a new Starbucks or Bikram Yoga studio in our neighborhoods. ...you think that you’re building bridges and making our communities connected, but you’re not; you’re forcing our families wholesale and killing what little sense of regional identity we’ve managed to carve out for ourselves.
Every time I get a chance to get back to my old neighborhood, I recognized it less and less. All I see is white guys with dreadlocks and pants too tight with their bottoms rolled up longing outside with a smug and self-satisfied look on their face.
Many of you have no idea how you’re the ones doing the most harm to black urban communities. You act as if you’re doing us all a favor by ‘sanitizing’ it all. Don’t kid yourselves, you’re only interested in the real estate so some privileged Ivy kids can have better rent.
"People are talking about urban neighborhoods? This is the perfect opportunity for me to get on my soapbox and rant about gentrification and how it's all the fault of Classics PhD students!"
“Someone just made me feel bad because I’m a small part of a larger problem and maybe I’m a hipster douchebag who wears my pants like that, has a man-bun and loves being ironic. I’m going to argue that the since my very narrow demographic can’t be to blame for everything in its entirety then we’re have no blame at all. Yeah, that’ll show that mouthy black guy who made me feel shitty!”
For what it’s worth, Missouri has an incredibly low cost of living. The stipend is $18k, plus more money for teaching in the summers, with money every year for conference travel. Dollar for dollar, Mizzou grad students are quite well off compared to students at more prestigious schools. There are fewer opportunities post-graduation, sure, but quality of life is great throughout the experience.
My grad stipend at an Ivy is a little over $30k plus conference funding, and it is pretty generous for the CoL. I came to America for grad school, and this is more money than I've ever seen before.
One thing that confuses me about comments on FV is the impression that those who graduate from an Ivy are privileged and named Preston or Tad. This might be true of some undergrads, but that's not really my impression of most grad students, many of whom went to state schools. I didn't go to a private school before, and there's no way I could afford my education now if it weren't funded. I was just very lucky that my advisor was taking students at the time I applied.
man-bunned hipsters overrunning neighborhoods - trust me the problem is not classicists. have you been to a party full of sociologists/anthropologists/art historians?
UCLA update for Roman Archaeology position: first choice took an offer elsewhere. offer extended to second choice candidate, who might also take an offer elsewhere.
Is this year unusual in so many top schools (Stanford, UCLA) not getting their first choice (or second choice) candidate, or does this happen often?
“Someone just made me feel bad because I’m a small part of a larger problem and maybe I’m a hipster douchebag who wears my pants like that, has a man-bun and loves being ironic. I’m going to argue that the since my very narrow demographic can’t be to blame for everything in its entirety then we’re have no blame at all. Yeah, that’ll show that mouthy black guy who made me feel shitty!”
What kind of classics PhD students are you interacting with? Because this describes approximately zero of the dozens that I know. As 9:42am pointed out, this description fits anthro, sociology, and art history graduate students much more than classics. If you want pseudo-woke, Whole Foods-buying, craft brew-drinking, people who think voting Democrat makes them a radical leftist, you'll find them among the students of those other disciplines.
I'm sure there were lots of qualified applicants, but maybe the top choices are superstars who are in high demand. Any idea where the UCLA first choice accepted instead?
"One thing that confuses me about comments on FV is the impression that those who graduate from an Ivy are privileged and named Preston or Tad. This might be true of some undergrads, but that's not really my impression of most grad students, many of whom went to state schools. I didn't go to a private school before, and there's no way I could afford my education now if it weren't funded. I was just very lucky that my advisor was taking students at the time I applied."
Your mileage may vary with this but you can look through the lists of students in Ivy programs and find the trends quite easily. They've usually done their undergrad at 1) another Ivy 2) elite private schools like Chicago/Stanford/NYU/WUSTL/Northwestern 3) Some top public flagship like Berkeley/Michigan/Chapel Hill/Virginia 3) an elite SLAC
Sure, you have a handful of people who went to smaller lesser-known private schools or big state schools, but the trend is pretty clear.
"I've been looking for the privilege but can's seem to find it anywhere around here. So, who hid the the privilege? I don't have it. Do you have it? Maybe someone over in anthro has it. Yeah, it's definitely elsewhere...!"
First time on the market here, and I also have been wondering if it is common that tenure track jobs like Stanford or UCLA or wherever else have to make offers to second or third choice candidates. Is it how the market works?
NYU (and UCLA's) top choice candidate was the second choice candidate at Penn. I do not know the answer as to how common this is, but it seems as though the top programs all decide upon the same top one or two candidates, and its these lucky few who have choice in where they end up.
The gentrification of ethnic working class neighborhoods in metropolises like NYC is a global phenomenon and it might make you feel better to blame it on white hipsters but I suspect you know that this stereotype is silly and that the reality is far more complex. I grew up in Brooklyn, but in an Irish neighborhood. I and most of my childhood friends know that we will never be able to afford to live there. It's no longer the same neighborhood I grew up in and that was already no longer the neighborhood my parents knew as children. But for every hipster with a trust fund that moves in there are a dozen professional couples. I suspect nearly all are members of the 1 percent as measured by household income nationally (or top 5 percent in NYC), but ethnically they are remarkably diverse and it is a fact that gentrification has made my parents' neighborhood overwhelmingly less white.
It's a small world, especially among the "elite" circles. So for top R1s they are often competing for the same small pool of candidates. I know several colleagues at my "elite" R1 were second or even third choice in their search and simply lucked out (they also had no other offer!) because the top candidates were in high demand and/or other circumstances played a role. A certain "buzz" sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly (I've seem many potential "stars" burn briefly only to be denied tenure), precedes these candidates during the TT season.
Places this year where there seem to have been a few highly sought after candidates (some with multiple offers, some with multiple campus visits):
NYU UCLA Penn Stanford Columbia Chicago Princeton FSU? Bard?
Some are just multiple campus visits--not multiple offers. I should have clarified. At least two Princeton finalists were finalists at other top schools, but weren't the top choice at Princeton, as far as I know. But it does illustrate how the multiple-offer situation can arise. So far this year we just have competition between UCLA-Stanford, UCLA-NYU, Chicago-Columbia. Anywhere else?
This happens outside of the top schools as well. I heard that the successful candidate at UNCG also received the initial offer from Clemson. Some people have research that is in demand, or they interview/visit well, or are otherwise compelling and get multiple visits/offers. It's hard not to be jealous, but since they can't take more than one job it doesn't mean that they are eating anyone else's lunch.
It's great to see so many female POC hires this year! I wonder if anyone has an opinion on whether this is the market exerting itself, or the market correcting itself?
UCLA's top choice candidate did indeed take a job elsewhere. One issue was the long time that UCLA took to extend the offer to their top choice. This is the narrative known to all in the dept. where the candidate DID accept the position, as well as to colleagues.
Race doesn’t matter. Let’s stop looking at how many blacks got a job or how many women, and just see them all as people. The more we continue to think of the black hires as “black” hires, the longer we continue to marginalize under-represented folks.
if the trolls could redirect their race / gender obsessions towards something we all agree on, perhaps talking shit about late antique / byzantine people, that would be great, thanks.
Amen to that. If I never have to look at any ugly Late Antique or Byzantine art again and pretend that it isn't hideous so as not to offend people who are into that stuff, it'll be too soon! I'm also getting tired of not being able to just openly talk about the Dark Ages anymore without people acting like I pissed in their cornflakes.
I think 3:24’s point isn’t that POC don’t matter, nor is that black lives don’t matter. But, instead, that seeing a black candidate only as a “black candidate” is a problem. That we should try to ignore someone’s race and see them for who they are. That,literally, is the dream of MLK, so let’s not act like those living it and advocating it are racist.
Last year I visited the Byzantine museum in Athens. I thought, "Wow, what an excellent museum! The Greeks have put a lot of time, effort, and money into this. Too bad it's wasted on all these icons and assorted images of freakish child Jesus, dead-eyed Mary, and vengeful, angry grown-up Jesus."
There's no accounting for taste, so I'm sure that there are people who legitimately like this stuff. I'd just rather not have to pretend to hold it in the same esteem as traditional Greco-Roman art and to pretend that that it's interesting or attractive.
So much bravery and wisdom in this thread today, on every front. The clear-sighted, unselfish commentary is very inspiring. I can only help everyone brings the same level of humane insight to their scholarship.
In general, what's going on with Greek archaeology? There's seem to be more Roman archaeology jobs over the past few years, whereas the Greek side of things is quiet or they have to fit into Mediterranean/ Near Eastern archaeology positions. On the contrast, Greek lit and history seem to be doing better than archaeology. Is it a question of who hasn't retired? Are there more jobs for Romanists? Is it cyclical and the Roman archaeology jobs will dry out soon? In a nutshell, what is the state of the field?
Every year is different. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this in any form. But, generally speaking I would cautiously say that the pendulum this year was towards RA, but yeah, things seem to come in spurts.
There were a lot of GA hires over the last few years. A lot. So, it may be a while before a good number of openings pop up.
Maybe this is a false opposition, but can you differentiate between the truly intellectual types and the smart but "more social/relevant" types in Classics? Does it usually fall along the lines of text-philology and history-material culture-archaeology? Do you think the field generally speaking values one "type" of thinker over others?
@3:45 Way to shit on everyone who isn't a philologist! Didn't think it could be done, but you really managed to eke that out at the bottom of the 9th, didn't you?
So, some vocal FV'ers think "traditional Greco-Roman art" or literature is "beautiful", and Late Antique / Byzantine art or literature is "ugly". And therefore that the former is more worthy of study.
I'm soooo impressed by your critical historical chops: you think that historical societies are only worth studying because they produce things that you personally find beautiful, instead of assessing why and how historical societies and their productions change in context?
@6:26 Isn't it possible to find something both worth studying (Late Antique) but personally uninteresting? I certainly find my own work both interesting and worth studying but I also understand that not everyone will be intrigued by it.
Also @3:45 that is a bit of a weird question. Are you suggesting that historians are not as intellectual as philologists? I'm a historian and always thought our work was actually the most intellectually challenging because it required the synthesis of different branches of our field (language/literature + material).
This debate also reminds me of one of the most ridiculous aspects of our field. Historians and archaeologists are constantly challenged in job searches with 'Well can you teach one or both of the languages?' (Answer: Duh) while I have yet to hear of a philologist being asked 'Can you teach a course on archaeological methods?' If any philologists have experienced this I would actually love to hear more about it and how you reacted to and answered this question.
Some programs only offer something like archaeological methods once every other year (if that) but they all offer multiple language classes constantly. If they're looking for someone who can teach archaeology then they aren't even going to bother interviewing a philologist, but they're going to need to make sure that archaeologist can also teach languages.
People with primary training in history/archaeology have admitted on here that they aren't confident in one or both of the languages that are necessary for most classics departments.
During graduate orientetonnfor the terminal MA program at U Arizona, the Chair of Classics at the time, Cynthia White, said that she was so happy to see that the program now includes an ancient history focus as well as Greek/Roman archaeological focus because “even though you all don’t have what it takes to be a philologist, you chose to stick with matters of Classics as best you can. And those of us *in* Classics always can benefit from the observations of historians and the discovery of even more pottery shards from archaeologists. Let me just say on behalf of us in philology, that we’re happy to have you all here.”
...yeah. The rest of the faculty nearly fell out of their seats when she said this to us all. For weeks after that, all the profs apologized to us all for what she said.
...a month or so later, the archeologists left the Classics Dept and joined Anthro. The next fall, the historians joined the History Dept.
Ah, Arizona and its legendary rancor. I too did my MA there. Some of my favorite events in the storied history of that department:
The time one of the Hellenists who was forced to retire a few years ago got wind of an at the time retired, now deceased professor talking trash about her via email. She steps out of her office and proceeds to scream down the hallway in the direction of the office of one of the above mentioned tyrannical Latin professors that if said retried professor "had something to say, tell him to say it to my f*cking face." The graduate administrator was so appalled by the display that she came out of her office and apologized to a graduate student who witnessed the exchange, aghast that they had to see such unprofessional behavior.
Or, the rotating Department Heads when the department went into receivership. Ineffective German professor, arrogant Frenchman, slightly senile Professor Emeritus who was brought out of retirement.
Then, the abuse of three junior faculty who all came from a school on the East Coast and were hated by the Two Tyrannical Latin Professors. Picked off one by one. The last one standing was going to have his tenure torpedoed, but the ancient historians in the History department saved the day and now his appointment is primarily over there. The Latinists were Livid that their plan failed.
Or the time soon after the archaeologists went to anthro, somebody convened a meeting of all the faculty, maybe a dean or something, and this person asked if everyone was happy. One of the Latinists stood up and exclaimed, "I don't care if anyone is happy, I care about academic excellence!" I also witnessed this Latinists verbally abuse one of the department staff. I'd come in early one morning to edit a paper, and no one was around yet. I saw this staff person come in, and soon after the Latinist, all flustered. The Latinist accosted the staff person and started talking about how she'd tried to get into the department on the weekend but her ID card didn't work in the swipe. The staff person told her she should call the number beside the swipe and have the ID office check to see what's wrong with her card. This Latinist, who speaks in an affected whisper most of the time, dropped the act and angrily told this staff person that "It's not my job to do that," and that she "needs to figure out what's wrong since you don't do anything else around here." Classy.
Or the time they were trying to decide who should teach the classics methods course that all incoming students have to take. One of the Greek archaeologists (who is Greek herself) was suggested. One of the now retired Latinists (somebody who is very famous for their work on elegy) asserted that the Greek archaeologist couldn't teach the course because she wasn't a native English speaker and so students wouldn't be able to understand her. As you can imagine, that did not go over well.
Then there was the time one of the Latinists, a former alcoholic who's now exchanged drink for food these days, was f*cking one of his students. He was caught and brought before some committee. He told them that they couldn't prove anything. This professor, at the height of his alcoholism, also had a seizure one day in class, traumatizing his TA.
My favorite, though, was the only time I have ever witnessed a professor verbally attack a student in class. Somebody gave a presentation. The professor (Latinist) proceeded to berate the student for his interpretation, to the point of it being openly hostile. This student had maintained that the professor had hated him from the beginning, but none of us believed him. Until we witnessed it. In class. It was a shocking thing to witness.
I'm sure there's many more. Honestly those of us who did the MA at Arizona probably need a support group, I imagine there's some of us who are emotionally scarred.
12:18 a.m., I was at Arizona around that time, too. Your comment "a former alcoholic who's now exchanged drink for food these days" had me laughing out loud, since over the years I have come up with so many ways to describe this individual, but none is as pithily perfect.
I could easily match you anecdote for anecdote, but it is getting late, and I need to finish preparing for tomorrow morning's class. But one of them that fits in with what you posted, especially the part about berating the highly competent administrative assistant, was the time the Latinist to whom you refer was so critical of the undergraduate work-study student answering phones and doing light tasks up front that she was reduced to tears. Who has ever heard of a department chair making a student employee cry?!?
I have to ask, was the student with the non-drinking eater a grad or undergrad? And now that society -- and university administrations that can read the New York Times about Columbia, etc. -- has a greater awareness of things in this #MeToo moment do you think she might bring a complaint? (Also, a few months ago someone, perhaps you, posted a similar claim, but made it seem like more than one female student was involved. Though perhaps I misremember.)
I'm glad that I could bring some amusement out of a discussion of such toxic people, ha.
The student with whom the Latinist had the affair was, from what I understand, a married undergraduate. The Latinist was able to tell the disciplinary committee that they couldn't prove anything because the student was unwilling to admit that anything had happened. I may be fuzzy on the details but I believe this married undergraduate's husband found out and that's where the complaint came from, but since the student herself was unwilling to cooperate, the Latinist seems to have escaped unscathed. If I've got any details wrong any other Arizona people are welcome to correct me.
This happened a bit before my time at Arizona, but I never heard that the relationship was non-consensual. That said, it is clearly highly unethical to engage in such behavior as a professor regardless of whether or not there is consent, mainly because of the power differential and the protection afforded by tenure.
12:18 again. To the question about there having been multiple female students, this is not something I'd heard. with the #MeToo movement we've seen that these sorts of things are usually not isolated incidents, though, so who knows.
1:08 a.m. here again. Your assessment of the "arrogant Frenchman" is dead on: that guy had a chance to make a difference from his superior administrative position, but instead he quickly became a collaborator, siding with the two toxic senior faculty. Everyone knows that some of the Nazis fled to South America, but it is not so well known that at least one of the Vichy French fled to Tucson.
12:18 again. We students got that vibe and actually nicknamed the Frenchman "General Petain." He was an asshole all-around. At one point he threatened to take away printing privileges from us MA students because according to some arbitrary metric he pulled out of his ass we were printing too much, even though we did a lot of the printing for the classes we TA'd ourselves so that was part of the count.
A friend who was ahead of me in grad school got a job offer from Arizona (not sure if VAP or TT). It was, at that point, their only offer. I was shocked when our department, which is usually a bit too placid in support of its students, started truly scrambling to find some sort of paying position for my friend so s/he "wouldn't have to go to Arizona!" (said in the same tones as we would use of someone going to war or hell.) This impressed upon me that I really never wanted to work there, but the reasons for the horror were ambiguous until now. Wow. Thanks for sharing.
8:36, that your department was willing to do that says a lot about it. Arizona 5+ years ago was a truly deadly place for junior faculty: either those two senior faculty members would actively attempt to destroy their careers (which they tried to do not only to the three from the East Coast school mentioned above, but at least two others, and that's not counting archaeologists), or if one somehow could dodge that peril there would have been the difficulty of finding a job elsewhere without being able to use references from those two (who were the only senior faculty left in classics, and therefore in a better world the two who should have been writing). Today it might be a bit safer to take a job there, as the isotopes that made the place radioactive continue to decay, but I have good reason to believe that, in violation of the clear rules that were set down when the department was folded into Religion, one of the two full professors has continued to meddle. So even now, with the two problem-causers supposedly under quarantine and the program better management, no one should take a job in Arizona's Classics program if there is an alternative, simply because of the risk involved.
Didn’t a similar thing happen at Harvard Classics and then they moved to Princeton? I didn’t hear anything nearly as nasty as this, but suffice to say rules were broken...
Why are people in Classics and related fields like Egyptology so prone to engaging in abusive or unethical behavior? You'd think that such people would be grateful to have a permanent academic job at all in rapidly contracting fields and that they would behave accordingly.
Is it a lost cause for an ancient historian (PhD in history, yet BA, MA in Classics) with no teaching or TA experience in Latin and Greek to ever get a VAP in a Classics dept whose job ad says the boilerplate "teach Latin and Greek at all levels" ?
I've had 4 T-T interviews and 1 VAP interview thus far, and never once has a single Classics Department (regardless of how 'low-tier' they may be) given my application a second glance.
Yes, because if you don't have a phd in classics AND have never taught either language at all, why would they? Why would you think you are professionally qualified for that role? Apply to everything anyway--you never know--but the outcome you describe isn't surprising for VAPs especially.
...how do you thinking using initials disguises anything? You're participating in spreading pretty damning information -- true or not, we don't know -- about a junior faculty member. Whatever you think of her, this is not the appropriate forum. It's very helpful to hear about problems with a department (and, indeed, it sounds like it's a departmental problem, not just an individual problem) and I think it's OK to include the anecdotes, but please leave them anonymous.
Also, trained medical professionals should know that you CANNOT "diagnose" someone outside of a clinical context, and it's suuuuper inappropriate to share pseudo-diagnoses about any individuals, named (in this case) or unnamed, on this forum. It is harmful to the individual and to anyone with mental health issues of their own. Did I say suuuuuper inappropriate? Times a thousand.
@8:31, 4TTs and one VAP interview this season? That's quite impressive -- seems to indicate that you are competitive for these positions, even if you're not advancing. Making the long list is something of an achievement, even though it doesn't get you anything
9:02: There can be significant differences. PhDs from History departments also had to take courses in non-ancient history, some had to do qualifying secondary and tertiary fields in them, which qualifies them to teach non-ancient courses, especially in smaller history departments. Many also rarely have teaching experience in languages, which can be an issue when applying to smaller schools. At my VAP institution I teach with a tenured ancient historian who also did an MA in Latin. He has a dual appointment to teach Latin when our very tiny Classics department needs it, and he also teaches a few non-ancient history courses in the history department when they need it.
In the UK many many ancient historians come from Classics departments. It's interesting to look at US institutions that see such a clear divide, whereas abroad your degree title just depends on the subject of your thesis. If you write a thesis on Thucydides, for example, you get a degree in Ancient History, but you certainly aren't looked at as a 'non-classicist.' That's just my experience though.
Ancient history is not a coherent discipline. It is an area of interest. A literary study of Thucydides and an empire-wide, network analysis of prosopography in second-century Roman legions might both qualify their authors to be considered ancient historians by some in the profession, but you can hardly say they do the same thing. The former is more likely to come from and go to a classics department, the latter, history; but there are so many exceptions I doubt generalization beyond 9:41 would be sound. For my money, a dissertation on Thucydides may or may not be "ancient history" depending on the methods, goals, and evidence drawn on and what argument is being mounted. You do see this in the way philologists who are interested in the historians increasingly talk about what they do as "historiography" rather than history, although this introduces another set of complications.
In the US, someone with a History Dept PhD in ancient history, though they almost always (at least the better programs) have to demonstrate doctoral level capability and command of Greek and Latin are seen as 'only' historians, and incapable of teaching the languages.
On the reverse, a Latin philologist from a top school with no historical training whatsoever, let alone anything nearing graduate level understanding, can easily land a T-T job in a History Dept as their "ancient historian."
...the takeaway? Classics PhDs are seen (erroneously) as a one-size-fits-all scholar of antiquity. Ancient historians are seen in an odd light here in the US: fit only for History Depts, but they have to fight against philologists for the few History Dept jobs that may arise.
As bad as things are for Classics, they're far worse for ancient historians.
There certainly is a difference between History and Classics, and can affect job prospects significantly. Not surprising, historians out of History departments tend to be more competitive at for jobs in History Departments, and those out of Classics tend to do better in Classics departments.
History PhDs at many programs are often required to take courses outside of their subfield, and also can be assigned teaching out of their subfield. This is useless at Classics Departments, which by definition only care about the ancient world. But this can be valued at History departments, especially since a History Dept. might assign a junior prof. to teach Western Civ or World History.
Also, and this is a downside, History departments tend to privilege Late Antiquity. Remember, at a history department, unless it is very large, a Medievalist will usually be assigned to chair the search, since by definition there is no ancient person. And other Medievalists will no doubt be on the committee. And they tend to favor Late Antiquity folks who can teach the ancient sequence, but still work on things Medievalists like, like bishops and heresy.
Classics, meanwhile, just cares about language. Ancient history is to most classics department service teaching that needs to be done to fill enough seats to average out the two people who signed up for Intermediate Greek. Now, no other field of history expects you to also have the capacity to teach a foreign language at the collegiate level. But Classics does, and PhDs from Classics departments have most of their teaching assignments in the ancient languages, and so are up to snuff on dead-language pedagogy.
So, lesson is, if you are an Ancient History PhD, try by hook or crook to do as much ancient language teaching as you can, at least Latin 1 and some intermediate reading courses. And go into interviews with an answer to what language courses you would like to teach: I'm just dying to teach Propertius! This will leave a glimmer of hope at Classics departments.
And if you are a Classics PhD, make sure you know a thing or to about the Middle Ages and Reformation; maybe even see if you can TA for the World History or Western Civ course.
@10:11 it's always solid advice to be as rounded as possible between your research and teaching, and that can't be overstated. Interesting point about service teaching. Am I the only one that finds it odd that the languages are so revered yet it is actually the courses in translation that bring enrollment numbers to the department?
This probably goes to a much larger question about the direction of our discipline and the eternal question of 'What is the importance of Classics?'
I went my first year on the market with three Skype interviews and 0 campus visits
My second year, three Skype/conference and 1 campus visit
My third year, four Skype and 1 campus visit.
My fourth year, 3 Skype/conference and 1 campus visit--and a job offer.
It was pretty grim on the market, but the fact that I was getting interviews and even the odd campus visit was enough to make me decide to persist until the odds finally fell in my favor (every job has 10-12 first round interviewees and 3-4 campus visits, so you need about 10-12 first round interviews to get the 3-4 campus visits to have an odds on chance of getting a job. In my instance, my offer came after 13 first round interviews and three campus visits.
To be blunt, if someone has gone two to three job cycles without a single first round interview, they should seriously consider leaving the field sooner than later. I don't know if I would read the same into a single bad year, that could just be bad luck in a hard luck market.
11:41, According to wikipedia, they do: "Alongside her career as an Egyptologist, Darnell also has shown an interest in vintage fashion particularly that of the 1920s. She along with her husband wear this clothing on a daily basis including during archaeological digs. Since January of 2017 she has been displaying this on an instagram account by the name of @vintage_egyptologist which as of February of 2018 has over 14,000 followers."
I do hope Servius will quickly expunge those disgusting posts attacking -- practically by name -- a JUNIOR Latinist who was at Arizona for just a short time, and who was NOT in any way one of the reasons that department imploded, regardless of what may have happened involving one graduate student. It is useful for people in the field to know about the reasons for the problems at Arizona that began to go supernova a decade ago, and some of the posts above do that, but attacking (and attempting a diagnosis!!!) of someone who isn't there any longer is just petty and pathetic. (And the fact that he/she has a tenure-track position at a good school is not a reason for the personal attack, either.)
To the question a ways back about taking a job in another country: be the brain drain. Embrace it. The US is likely to reward you, at best, with a tenure track job that pays less than you can make abroad in a crappy nowhere town. Give that a big "f you." Have an adventure, make money, reject the system that only wants to exploit you.
Hi everyone. As an undergraduate, this is all quite exciting, informative, and extremely scary. Does anyone know where I can go to get advice on graduate school classics admissions?
Please pardon my intrusion into the otherwise vivid conversation at hand.
2:04 a.m., First, as you can probably see from various posts around here, there are a lot of people who do not yet have permanent jobs who are incredibly down on the field. This is not without reason, as there are more PhD's being produced than there are jobs, and some of us have proven to be the excess. Certain personality types don't handle that well and take advantage of internet anonymity to vent, and as soon as they see your post they will respond rather harshly, I fear. So take anything they write with a huge grain of salt. (But with that said, it would not be incorrect to warn you that if you get into a PhD program you might not find a job at the other end.)
I write this in order to inoculate you somewhat against the bile that is likely to come your way when the rest of the classics world wakes up tomorrow morning and sees your post. But as for your question, do you not have professors (or perhaps even graduate students) at your school whom you can consult?
Servius, please do take down the posts discussing the junior scholar. This sort of content is not at all appropriate for this forum. Classics has enough problems without eating our own on such a semi-public forum.
"So take anything they write with a huge grain of salt. (But with that said, it would not be incorrect to warn you that if you get into a PhD program you might not find a job at the other end.)" This is what's going to attract the ire, dear undergraduate, not your query. These are the words of the hopelessly naive, not having faced the job market yet, or, more likely, someone who got a job back when the getting was better.
The truth is that even if you finish your program, you are very unlikely to find permanent employment unless the job market changes radically over the next seven years. But don't take my word for it. When you are picking a program: ask them for the attrition and placement data of the cohorts who entered 8-12 years ago. How many started, how many completed their PhDs, and how many of those PhDs are today on the tenure track? Let the numbers guide your choice. To inoculate you against some of the tricks: VAP positions or "teaching at X school" doesn't count. And don't be distracted by the anecdote about their one student who now has a great job. You need data, not a story.
2:40 a.m., 2:30 a.m. here. Your assumption about me and my experience could not be farther from the truth. I sure hope you do not do literary analysis as your main research area, if that is what you came up with.
Here are some links that give an overview of the process of applying to graduate programs. The CAMWS website has a good overview of programs in the different specialties. If our bitterness and vitriol hasn't scared you off, then the best advice I ever got was to get in contact with potential advisors and see how they treat you as a potential future student/colleague. Are you intellectually compatible? Do they have time to take on more students? Will you work well together? Apply to a mix of schools (top and middle) and if you get in, pick the best possible program for your subfield, in a place that you would actually want to live, with an advisor/mentors who will support you and be crucial advocates over the next 10+ years. If this sounds daunting, consider a post-bac or an MA before committing to a PhD program with high rates of attrition, serious feelings of isolation, anxiety and depression, as well as low rates of job placement at the end.
Apply to the best schools which have at least two faculty you could see working with. Apply only to schools that will fund you, and fund you well. Look at where their students have jobs - both within the academy and outside of it (the latter should be followed by looking into how supportive and active the dept is in alt-ac matters). Go to the school with the best placement rate combined with the best "feel" for the fit.
@2:04, know that even if everyone waxes poetic about "alt-ac," it is a myth that you can just as easily get a job outside of Classics if the job market thing doesn't work out. And it probably (95%) won't work out. So from the beginning, prepare yourself for an alternative career. Don't believe for a second that a Classics PhD will make you attractive to outside employers without any kind of other work experience.
I do think its very important to stop and think if an academic career is for you. Right now, I am guessing you are in your early 20s. The notion of hanging out and talking about books and language and history sounds pretty good. You don't mind being relatively poor, having roommates, etc. But a PhD will take you into your early thirties, and it may take another four-five years to find a TT job, if you find one at all.
You may find by your thirties, your priorities will be very different: you may want a family, a house, a middle class life style. You will not have a middle class lifestyle while you are in graduate school, and you certainly will not have one if you work as an adjunct afterwards, as most PhDs do. Again, you may not care about that now, but many of us on this forum are lamenting as our classmates from high school and college pass us by in life goals, while we trudge through another brutal job season and then move to a new city to seek short term employment as academic precariat.
I don't want to sound materialistic: no one goes into academia for the money. But right now conditions are so bad that you may be singing up for real poverty. The stories of adjuncts living out of vans, drawing on food stamps and even in one instance working as prostitutes to get by may sound extreme, but such dire straits may be as common as the lucky few who land TT jobs (note departments only remember the person who got a TT job, not the person who adjuncted on food stamps).
So be warned. People are bitter, but mostly its because people are hurting, and the professional goals we had at your age have turned to bitter disappointment.
I think the MA track is not a terrible idea. Colorado and FSU both have strong programs. Be sure you get funding, but these programs can help you decide if you really want to take the plunge, or if you just wanted a few more years of classics before you move forward with your life and career.
Undergraduate: I'll add that all of these dire views of your likely future as a Classics PhD (which are not exaggerated in the least) are much less applicable for those who are willing to teach high school at the end of it all. The high school teachers I know who have PhDs make more money than I do (teaching at the college level) and they don't have to worry about publishing. You can quit after the MA or without undertaking/finishing the dissertation and still find a good teaching job at the high school level. You'd also have more choice over where you live.
If you're open to this outcome, try to choose a program that gives you plenty of teaching opportunities and that cares about pedagogy (or, if the department doesn't seem to care, see if the university has a Center for Teaching and Learning or something similar). If you know that you're not at all open to this outcome...think long and hard about where you want to be 8-10 years from now, and how realistic that outcome is if you go down this path.
4,546 comments:
«Oldest ‹Older 2801 – 3000 of 4546 Newer› Newest»@9:18, one of my family members owned a series of apartment complexes in the 1980s. It was an unwritten rule that they would never rent to someone who was gay or a POC. Whether this was legal or not, in the 80s, the internet, craigslist, and these discussions simply didn't exist. No one could take them to task because they had no proof of racism.
Structural racism is a real thing.
It's foolish to turn down a T-T offer. If you want to treat it like a VAP and continue applying to jobs in more desirable locales or at better schools, then do that; but don't turn it down!
Wouldn’t it look bad to apply for T-T jobs this fall when you’re only 2-3 months into a T-T job ?
Sure, to some people. So what?
Hamilton faculty give great advice about how to negotiate getting hired!
But in reality, the trick to getting hired at Hamilton is simple:
Be Their VAP.
MCGA!
@9:33 i have a friend who *quit* a TT at a third-tier SLAC for a prestigious, multi-year East Coast (non Ivy) VAP. He had a family to consider, too. It was pretty stressful for him in the last year or two (three year postdoc, i believe), but after authoring and editing a couple books during that period he did in fact land another TT at a major public R1. Not sure if he'd risk everything again, though i imagine for research connections + publishing it ended up being worth it..
@9:33
This just issue was just the subject of a response in the "The Professor is In" on the Chronicle: https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Professor-Is-In-Should-I/242924?cid=wcontentgrid_hp_9
You'd think that for a group of people who spend a lot of their time working with languages and their minutiae, FVers could figure out that words have specific definitions.
White people in the United States cannot be victims of racism. Racism is inherently tied to structural power differentials that exist between white people and everyone else. These power differentials are ensconced in the political, legal, and social institutions of the country. Whether you are dirt poor, middle class, or wealthy, if you are white you are, from the outset, provided the advantages of an unequal power structure that no person of color would benefit from were they to swap places with you.
Now, people of color can certainly be bigoted toward white people or discriminate against them. But in such instances there is no pre-existing, overarching, pervasive power structure on which that person of color is drawing from in such an instance to lend weight to whatever animus they harbor.
A lot people here pay lip service to interdisciplinarity but it seems that many could use a crash course in subjects like anthropology, sociology, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory.
Break out of the myopia if you want to "Make Classics Great."
Re: Colgate. Glad to see the chair step in but it feels weird knowing that he had the time and courtesy to do that, but that he did not have the time or courtesy to notify other candidates that they didn't advance after first round interviews.
Servii here:
We've been very uncomfortable with our position as moderators in the course of the recent conversation, and wanted to share some of these concerns with the community. On the one hand, as totally unaccountable moderators, we hesitate to delete content here unless it crosses explicit lines. On the other hand, we find it unconscionable that our colleagues are the subject of thinly veiled attacks with such regularity.
We've been having internal conversations for the past few weeks about what we can do to make FV a more healthy ecosystem. We're looking for ways to bring more voices into these conversations, as we feel strongly that this should be a community discussion. More on that in the next few days or weeks.
In the meantime, we'd like to direct people to the commenting policy at a major philosophy blog, the DailyNous: http://dailynous.com/comments-policy/, and ask that you please follow the spirit of guidelines laid out there.
@5:33. With regard to this sort of issue, I was the grad rep on a search committee recently and I learned that our HR department does not allow formal rejection of other interviewed candidates until after the hire is officially completed. I guess sometimes all three campus invites fall through--because the committee can't agree, all candidates get jobs elsewhere, whatever--and they want to be able to move on and bring their fourth, fifth and sixth ranked candidates to campus. Don't know if this is the case with Colgate, but sometimes it really is out of the SCs hands.
re: Colgate
To contribute to what two other commenters have said, I’ll add a third thing that just doesn’t sit well about the Chair of Classics popping in: this means that either A.) he is a regular viewer of FV or that B.) someone went crying to him about the post.
Now, it’s likely not the former, since the post commenting on Colgate and his reply were separated by ~10 hours and at least 30 posts, many quite long, and all deals with race.
If it’s the latter, that means that someone saw it who actually knew the truth and reached out to the Chair. There would be an extremely limited number of people who would know the truth (e.g., SC member, Dean or admin, or the hired candidate). A such, I cannot shake the scenario that whoever it was saw the post and went crying to the Chair because someone online said something they didn’t like and they want the Chair to make the mean people on FV stop.
It’s in very bad taste and makes the Chair of Colgate seem not too dissimilar to Trump, getting directly involved in a blog discussion because someone said something they don’t like. ...Just post a congrats message on your Dept webpage if you have the time to scour FV and take the high road.
8:13: sure, I get it. There are administrative policies. But ghosting completely is rude. There are ways to be courteous, e.g. something along the lines of "Just a note that you haven't advanced to the final stage for now but we'll keep your dossier on file for further consideration if the opportunity arises..." Simple and not committal. I interviewed with 4 places and they were the only one not to keep in touch at all.
8:13 here. 8:47 and 8:58, I totally see and agree with your points. I hadn't thought it through fully, and I recall that my department actually did send the sort of note that 8:58 describes.
I agree with everyone’s criticisms of the Colgate Chair. If you have time to visit a blog to scold us, you have time to send an email to those of us waiting to hear final word AND you have time to, as has been mentioned twice now, post something official on your Dept webpage congratulating the new hire.
..must be nice to have a 1:1 teaching load, get paid $120,000+ and have plenty of free time to read and comment on blogs online.
Oh please, stop with the Colgate nonsense. Someone came here anonymously and spread misinformation, and the person with the most authority to speak to the issue set it straight. I really don't see why some of you have a problem with having correct information straight from a reliable, named source. And if you think someone went "crying" to him about "mean people" then you've let your imagination run away from you.
@ 9.15: I agree. This is exactly when we want a non-anonymous person to step in, it seems to me.
...As a way to help alleviate the current issues going on here re:Colgate, I just called the Classics Department at Colgate.
This was the conversation:
Col: Hello, Department of Classics
Me: Yes, good morning. I'm just calling because I see that Roman History is being offered in the Fall, but it only states "STAFF" as the instructor; can you tell me which professor is teaching this course? I imagine that it is the new hire that I heard about.
Col: It will be the new hire, but they are not confirmed yet.
Me: Oh, they are not confirmed yet?
Col: That's correct.
Me: Ok, thank you very much for your time.
Col: You're welcome.
...So, it sounds as if an offer has been made, but it also seems as if something is not finalized yet. I really don't know how to interpret "they are not confirmed yet." My best guess is that an offer was made, verbally accepted, but the paperwork has either not been handing in or has not been completely processed at higher levels.
But, it does seem as if the Chair was being truthful--they have a new hire and it was approved. But, the 'confirmation' stage has not yet happened; so that could explain why so many people are still waiting to have official word back from Colgate.
@9:15 and 9:18. 5:33 here. As you can see from my post I agree wholeheartedly with what the chair did. Good to clarify false information. All for it. But that doesn't negate my sentiments about his ghosting on other candidates.
I think these criticisms are for the most part bizarre, since the main reason for posting would be to protect the reputation of the candidate in question. Nobody wants to come on this website with their name, partially because of the absurdity of comments like 8:47 and 9:09. Would a note have been nice? Probably. Does Colgate's HR policy allow it? I surely don't know.
@9:15 it's because they want to feel both important and swaddled.
Yes, we just need the official written response to the official written contract, which was just mailed this week. While the candidate has verbally accepted, we can't force that person's hand by releasing their name until everything is signed, sealed, and delivered.
I'm really sorry that we haven't been able to send word yet to other applicants. Administration tells us we have to wait until the search is formally closed.
This is m first year on FV, but I can say from my limited experience that they takeaway I have regarding SC members getting involved is: don't do it.
You set yourself for an exceptional amount of criticism (some deserved, most not). This was the case for the Georgetown Chair (who had a very arrogant and condescending tone, I'd admit) and for the Colgate Chair.
..It seems best for these guys to remain outside of FV, as much as we'd like to have their input, the FV community as a whole will rip them apart whenever they show up.
@ 9:30.
Thank you.
I know that the lag time between an interview and a rejection can be very frustrating (I've experienced it myself for 3 cycles now), but you just have to deal with it. There are too many unseen factors outside of your control or knowledge. If 3+ weeks (or whatever time frame they gave you at the end of the interview) have gone by with no word, you just have to assume that they are not inviting you out to campus. Maybe their top 3 candidates will fall through and they actually will invite you! Probably not!
If you have another invitation/offer in play but you'd prefer the job you haven't heard from, by all means contact them and see if they can give you any information that could help you make a decision one way or another. Otherwise just move on and send out more applications. I find that the rejections are easier to take when I have already mentally and emotionally moved on. I'm getting rejections now for jobs that I don't even remember applying to.
@9:30. Thank you. That's all one needs. A simple update like the response you just offered -- discreet yet clarificatory -- would have been polite 2 months ago.
OP here,
thanks 11:59. That article was informative and helpful. Though, it tended to sway me to think that a nice 1-yr Ivy postdoc is a better alternative than a R2 in a shitty part of the country more than 2,000 miles from family/friends and at least 2.5 hrs to the nearest city of more than 10,000 people.
@9:31
Personally I'd rather they do pop in and set the record straight. Rather than telling them to stay away, we could do a better job of showing appreciation for the information they provide and try to balance out those with sore feelings who will find anything to complain about.
@ 9:42,
It seems that almost all of the T-T jobs that have come out post-SCS have been in horrible locations and at lower-tiered schools. But tenure even at at community college is tenure. In a day and age where T-T jobs are diminishing and the number of ultra-qualified PhDs is rapidly increasing, can anyone really afford to turn down a less than desirable T-T job?
I interviewed for 2 T-T jobs this year, and they both were at 'embarrassing' schools (U North Alabama, CUNY-Queensborough), but I'm not too sure if I'm looking at it with a 1990s viewpoint, that sees abundance of jobs and endless possibilities.
I understand the impulse to reject a school that's never going to make you proud to say is where you teach, but isn't that a better alternative than being a perpetual adjunct?
Compare 9:39 with 9:40 for an example of how background knowledge about hiring processes can make you less of a grouch.
^^^ the most peculiar question I was asked in my North Alabama interview:
"So, UNA is a small school in a small community, and many of the faculty are recognized in town wherever we go by current and former students. How do you think your public presence will be interpreted and in what way will you try to present your image to the local community?"
I cannot even imagine what U N Alabama is like but I am curious... Did you have a good impression of the social/intellectual life there after your interviews?
9:57 here..
They were all very nice and it seemed as if the interview went well, but aside from that very odd question ^^ , I was asked 5 different times in 5 different ways if I'd ever leave UNA. I have a very developed CV and it's research heavy. I think they were very nervous about taking on someone whose direction is geared towards research and publication and not about teaching a 4:4 load to less-than-stellar Alabamans.
I only Skyped, I was not asked to come to campus, so I can't really comment on the feel of the place. But, it's a very, very small town in a VERY isolated part of Alabama, so I imagine that so long as you fit the demographic of what that's all about, you'd be ok.
Speaking of new T-T jobs, the Mississippi State job *seems* to be a job to take over for Robert Earl Wolverton, who, according to the UNC-CH Classics alumni page, received his PhD in 1954. ...1954 !!!
That means: minus 6 years for PhD, 2 years for his terminal MA, 4 years for his BA, and 18 years for his HS graduation age, and he was born ca. 1924 and is still teaching. He's in his early-mid 90s and still teaching !
Just thought that I'd share that.
^^^
https://classics.unc.edu/people-3/alumni-2/#W
@10:05: "so I imagine that so long as you fit the demographic of what that's all about, you'd be ok." Hence, the all white faculty in the department.
@8:47: Wow, a new kind of argument! Reductio ad Trumpium! Hilarious. This will henceforth take the place of the argumentum reductio ad Hitlerum.
I think that many FV'ers are doing themselves and the discipline as a whole no favors by buying into the tyranny of publications. You need some pubs to prove to the SC you're in the field, but after that, each one is diminishing returns. I don't believe the person upthread who said "they told me I had 5 and the other person had 8, so they hired the other person." I don't think it works that way, and if they did say that, I think they only did because people in this hateful job market demand quantifiable reasons.
And I think this desperation for quantifiability is eating our lunch.
A person I know recently got tenure at a prestigious university with relatively fewer publications and of relatively less prestige than one would expect. But this person has a near universal reputation for being the most engaged and insightful participant in the department seminar and at conferences and treats first year undergrads with the same attention as big international stars. They just doesn't really like to write that much. But I still think the tenure committee would have been very short-sighted to boot them for lack of pubs when the person draws undergrads and grads to the program like flies to milk.
Is there no space left for anyone who isn't one of the proverbial thousand monkeys at a thousand type writers? And before you flay me alive (well, it being FV, so I'm sure I'll get flayed), but, no, I'm not talking about myself! I'm junior TT at a place that the flyover states consider a flyover state, furiously publishing like mad to get out.
@ 10:48,
I was told that explicitly. I knew one of the SC members from years past, and though I did not contact him during the entire process, I did once the Wiki was updated with the chosen candidate. I then reached out to the SC member, and he told me rather candidly what sort of things that particular SC was concerned about for who would get the job offer. At the end of the day, I was told, it was a very close call between myself and a few other candidates, and they opted to see who has done the most to be the decision breaker.
Think of it like applying to grad school, and all else is equal, but one candidate has a perfect GRE score, the rest only near-perfect.
It's unfair, and I'm very heartbroken by this, but I won't let myself be mad at him or the rest of the SC, since they had to make a tough decision, and I don't envy being in their shoes at all. The choice to not take me was not personal, but with so many insanely-qualified PhDs out there (many of which have better CVs than 80% of SC members reviewing them), one has to accept that the T-T market is brutal and that not everyone will win. There is less than a 1% chance that any of us will land a T-T job. That's just the math: more than 100 applicants for each job, in some cases well over 200.
...No doubt, Starbucks is going to have an unreal amount of Classical scholars making peoples' cappuccinos for the next generation.
@ 11:29, Starbucks probably has better benefits and promotion policies than most universities. Not sure the baristas aren't better off.
Everybody knows that the journal's loaded
Everyone submits with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the hiring's over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the search was fixed
The adjuncts stay poor, the tenured get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows the tenure lines are leaking
Everybody knows that the provost lied
Everybody got this broken feeling
Like their father or their dog just died
Everybody talking to their pockets
Everybody wants a box of Ivy chocolates
And with long CV rows
Everybody knows
Everybody knows that you love me baby
Everybody knows that you really do
Everybody knows that you've been faithful
Ah give or take a well known prof or two
Everybody knows you've been discreet
But there were so many famous scholars you just had to meet
Without your clothes
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that it's now or never
Everybody knows that it's me or you
And everybody knows that your job's forever
Ah when you've won a tenured job or two
Everybody knows the deal is rotten
Old Black Janitor's still "picking cotton"
For your Vergilian echoes
And everybody knows
And everybody knows that the Plague is coming
Everybody knows that it's moving fast
Everybody knows the tenured man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the classics scene is dead
But there's gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows
And everybody knows that you're in trouble
Everybody knows what you've been through
From the sadist junior profs who hate you
To the failed SCS interview
Everybody knows it's coming apart
Take one last look at this Grecian art
Before it blows
And everybody knows
Everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Oh everybody knows, everybody knows
That's how it goes
Everybody knows
Everybody knows
Baristas are eating our lunch!
I can assure you that baristas at Starbucks ARE NOT better off than us. As dumb as it sounds, check your privilege, mate.
March 30, 2018 at 10:11 AM
"Speaking of new T-T jobs, the Mississippi State job *seems* to be a job to take over for Robert Earl Wolverton, who, according to the UNC-CH Classics alumni page, received his PhD in 1954. ...1954 !!!
That means: minus 6 years for PhD, 2 years for his terminal MA, 4 years for his BA, and 18 years for his HS graduation age, and he was born ca. 1924 and is still teaching. He's in his early-mid 90s and still teaching !
Just thought that I'd share that."
I'm not entirely surprised.
A friend who was in the same MA program as me ~6 years ago took classes with Peter Green, who's nearing his mid-90s now (and just put out a new translation of the Odyssey a couple days ago, btw) and would have been well into his 80s when my friend was his student. Moreover, one of my now deceased undergraduate professors was also a student of Peter Green at UT Austin way back when. There's more than handful of scholars out there who are 80+ that I can think of who are still working, whether teaching or producing scholarship.
I wouldn't be shocked if baristas are better of than most graduate students and some adjuncts.
So off topic, but I was offered a TT position at an asian outpost of a reputable US university. It's in a "global literatures" department and I'll be a sort of token classicist. The terms are good, but I fear that if I accept, this would be a kind of academic suicide as a classicist. Will embarking on an unconventional path and being so far away from "where it all happens" put me at a disadvantage, not to mention not having classics colleagues present on a daily basis? Do you know anyone else who has done such a thing, whether in Asia or some other location that doesn't have a traditionally strong liberal arts/classics history?
Someone upthread mentioned the coming of our grimly efficient Asiatic overlords, so you might as well ingratiate yourself to them now while you have the chance.
Sometimes the baristas ARE grad students, so...
@11:53, someone on the wiki is currently at a school in Beijing and just got a TT in Illinois. Might want to check with them.
If there are humanities grad students who are moonlighting as baristas that just underscores the fact that grad programs shouldn't exist if they can't adequately fund their students.
@ 11:47, I worked in a similar low-status customer service position through grad school. No privilege to check. Just sadness at my lost health care benefits.
12:30,
Maybe they LIKE being baristas, and do it even if getting a generous graduate stipend. When I was in grad school there was a first-year grad who, despite our school's sufficiently generous funding, decided that she needed an outside job, and apparently the first place she thought of going to for potential employment was the local X-rated videos store. (Some of you may be too young to know what those were. Ask your father.) I felt that my stipend, augmented by a smallish loan, was enough that I did not have the need to go there, or elsewhere, for employment (or for videos).
I guess some people just like having jobs that let them meet all sorts of interesting customers.
My PhD program offered a 30k stipend plus I did some ongoing research work on a project and was paid for that, so it ended up being something like 34k per year before taxes. Health insurance was provided, and funds for conference travel and summer research travel were generally easy to obtain from my department. It was still barely sufficient. I did my PhD in one of those college towns that's full of hipsters and foodies who think the place is NYC or something, so everything was obscenely overpriced. Most programs offer much less than what I got so I have no clue how people live off of it.
^did you have a family to take care of?
I did not have a family to take care of at the time, thankfully. I couldn't imagine having to support a child or two on that PhD stipend unless I had a spouse with an income that was at least as much or more than what I was getting.
I know cost of living is important but some of the programs that offer around 22/24k...I feel really bad for those students.
It sounds like you're describing Boston. I was the poster above who said I made 24k / year there, and I did fine... If you had 34 with no family to take care of and health insurance covered, I think that's not bad at all for a grad student (roughly speaking)
I know several departments that are in the 22-24 range, off the top of my head UVA and Cincinnati. I imagine cost of living isn't bad in Cincinnati, but Charlottesville is expensive.
In my first year of grad school (2005), my stipend was $15k (for an MA program), and my final grad as a grad student (2014), it was $20k. A couple of years during my PhD I made more than $20k, owing to either generous fellowships or generous faculty paying for labor.
My stipend (when I had one) was similar to the range @2:49 describes, and it wasn't a particularly cheap place to live. I worked several campus jobs throughout my 6 years, plus cat/house sitting or whatever else I could find.
UNC-CH gives a whopping 16,500
I started at $7k in my MA in a big state school and ended at $21k for a PhD at a wannabe Ivy.
NYU’s ISAW pays around 36,000. But, it’s all relative because that’s to live in Greenwich Village. They’re still just as broke as the rest of us.
Grad school: started at 28k, with summer funding usually obtainable (typically in the 3-4k-range) and some conference funding (up to 500/ year at ABD stage). Last couple years were a bit higher due to teaching, about 30k. This was an expensive area, but I had nobody to support other than myself, and I knew it to be a generous stipend relative to most grad programs, so it felt ample to me. Post-PhD, the difficulty is not so much the salary as the uncertainty of never knowing if I will be employed in the following year.
Any ideas why Chapel Hill's stipend is so low? That's at least 6k less than other top non-Ivy programs from what I can tell.
@ 5:58 PM: For what it's worth, UNC's stipend is about the same as UT Austin's.
@11:53 i would do it in a heartbeat [have you spent much time in asia already?]. classics / history in asia is a huge area for potential growth in our field, both for straight teaching and for comparative research [re: Scheidel on Rome vs China]. by living over there, if you learn the language and integrate in the community, the possibilities are unlimited on the comparative front: you'd be instantly at the forefront of an emerging subfield.
i've looked at a lot of those ads myself: the salary range vs cost of living can be substantial, depending on city and institution + you'd have the challenge of trying to build a new research library collection / fight for resources + maintaining connections with people in europe or north america or australia..
taking a TT job in asia would be challenging, but if you're courageous (and who isn't, in a field like classics?) and down for some adventure, without an opportunity closer to home (if you care about that sort of thing), i'd go for that in a heartbeat. frankly, i'm jealous. :-]
Why is UNC so low? Red state that had big cuts to education.
Cost of living is very, very high in Chapel Hill.
Many of us have no choice but to take out student loans to break above poverty level.
Yep. It's pretty simple public vs private issue because of declining state support even in the best systems. Few public schools have been able to keep pace with rising stipends at private schools since the recession started. Ten years ago, places like Michigan and Berkeley and Yale and Princeton, etc., all offered their most-favored students similar funding packages (in broad outline) but they have diverged enormously since, so that the difference is now often as much as $10k.
The cost of living in Ann Arbor @ UMich has skyrocketed in the last decade, way outpacing (the already high costs at Berkeley or Yale or Pton) -- has that stipend kept up?? How does Penn compare, btw?
^^^ Philly is extremely expensive. Add to this that you never want to venture more than 2 blocks from the campus at UPenn unless you want to buy crack or join the Crips. It's in a horrible part of Philly, not as bad as the neighborhood of Temple (which is literally in the ghetto), but it's bad. The only OK places to live in Philly are within the thin perimeter around UPenn, or down in Old City, which is where the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall is located.
Many UPenn grads live just over the border in NJ. Not in the most immediate city, Camden (which is consistently rated as the most dangerous city in the US), but the city just after that, Cherry Hill. Or, if you can swing the 25 minute commute, Haddonfield, NJ.
In short, North, South, East, and West Philly are shit neighborhoods riddled with crime. There are a few pockets of niceness (UPenn area, parts of Center City, and Old City), but that's it.
The commute from NJ in to Philly really isn't that bad, and that's what most of us tend to do.
^^ UPenn stipend is adequate, at best, to maintain yourself in the Philly area, but nothing to get excited about.
7:59, holy shit. Your comment implies you are a Penn student, but your tone makes me wonder: Have you actually been to Philly in the past 25 years? Yes, it's a city, so there is some crime, but... wow. Most Penn grad students live in west philly, which is awesome and remains much cheaper than Princeton, NYC, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Palo Alto, or LA (although rapidly getting up there).
Is Philadelphia really that bad, or is this just more of the "every big city is a crime-ridden hellhole full of violent coloreds out to mug white people, make them shoot up, or kill them while also killing each other" rhetoric that gets tossed around? I ask because that narrative is the same when people trot out the Chicago dogwhistle, as if the whole city except for a pocket or two is a a flaming wasteland where you get shot as soon as you walk outside.
Anywho, I find it disheartening that so many great public universities are in places controlled by the party that hates education, and so are open to attacks on their funding and very existence.
Philly is great. Yes, it has problems. 7:59 is living in some suburban fever dream concept of the city from the early 90s.
Huh, as a fellow (?) Penn grad from the recent-ish past, I wonder if I know 7.59? Except apparently not, because he or she lives in Cherry Hill-- A place I only rode through on my way out of town occasionally during my long years in Philly. That representation of Philly and of the grad school life of Penn does not reflect my experience there. Most of the grad students I knew (not just in Classics) lived in West Philly, with smaller contingents in Center City (generally expensive, though), Powelton, South Philly, Northern Liberties, and then the suburbs. The city, meanwhile, has some deep and endemic problems, but is not anywhere as bleak as the picture painted in that comment. Also, I agree with 8.01, that the stipend is not anything particularly special, but the city is actually a lot of fun. Caveat: if you have school-aged children, the situation in Philly is a lot harder, because the city schools are an underfunded disaster.
That description of the Penn area is quite accurate for the the campus's neighborhood during the Clinton years. There's a reason we were advised not to walk about at night once we were a few blocks from campus (especially when heading westward), and always to use the safe-rides van after 9:00 p.m. I haven't been back in quite a few years, though, so I hope the area has improved. But if it has not, then the charge of racism -- there's that word again! -- against 7:59 would certainly be unfair.
Well, unless I'm a racist, too. I didn't consider THAT possibility, now did I?
7:59 here,
I graduated from UPenn in 2010, so some things may have changed (though I doubt it).
I am from NYC, so I am not a suburbanite living some 'fever dream concept' but am rather used to living in a large city.
8.40 here: So, 7.59, we would know each other then. I was there broadly in the 2000s. Your representation, nevertheless, does not reflect my experience.
7:59 again,
I am sure that we do know one another then. :)
The Classics building was in Logan Hall at the time, which, I believe was renamed just after I left to Cohen (after an endowee's ex-wife--he named quite a few buildings for various wives at Penn!).
Anyways, two different people often will see two different things. I can also confirm what 8:42 has said; there were constant warnings from faculty, older grad students, and nearly everyone on campus. I'm not saying that 8:40 and myself were in different Phillys, but I think we internalized our experiences differently and that we gave different degrees of attention to the warnings of older folk on campus.
...I've not been back to Philly since 2010, aside from driving through or (briefly) stopping by Geno's while trekking up/down 95.
I've visited Philly repeatedly over the last few years and enjoyed it quite a lot. I'm a young woman and I walked all over by myself, took public transportation, etc. It didn't feel any less safe than any other major city I've visited.
8.40 again,
7.59, I think that sounds like a logical way of looking at things. I also had a partner for most of my time there who was a student in a different grad program at Penn. So I spent a lot of time with grad students outside of Classics, which probably shaped my experiences of the city.
I've been back quite often since graduating, and would say that it is really a fast-changing landscape. So, no on should take our kind of dated perceptions too seriously.
If you people think Philly's bad, try living in Baltimore!
I visited Baltimore once, I was shot several times and an urban thug made me smoke crack!
I guess by "bad place to live" most of you mean "doesn't have enough privilege for me".
Good luck with that.
LOL @ most UPenn grad students live in Cherry Hill NJ -- we sure as hell do not. We live in West or South Philly, which are both great areas for young people/families. Undergrads are advised not to wander far from campus, but that's because UPenn is invested in real estate development in the blocks closest by, so making people scared is money in their pocket for high rents.
A $25-30k stipend in Philly goes a long way. I lived like a king there until i got my phd a couple years back. Miss it every day.
"One time when I was at Penn doing my PhD, I strayed too far from campus and a black person tried to talk to me. I was traumatized for days."
--7:59pm, probably
This was all clarified above. Numerous former UPenn grads (in the 90s and 2000s) confirmed that Philly used to be a very different animal. Most of you millennial a here will never know how bad certain cities used to be. Times Square in the 1970s and 80s was a truly terrifying place to go. Now it’s Disneyworld.
Maybe some parts of Philly have gotten better, but how’s Kensington these days, hmm? How many of you white privileged hipsters would wander around up there ? Have fun with that.
I'm the one who was at Penn during the Clinton years. Some of the (rather dumb) comments above got me to do some Googling regarding crime in the Penn area, and I found this article from the campus paper that backs up my own recollections of the area back in the day:
http://www.thedp.com/article/2014/04/90s-high-crime-shaped-campus-today
As you can see, the area WAS dangerous back in the 1990's, and if students were warned about wandering too far from campus, especially at night, it was out of a reasonable concern for our safety.
If you read a few paragraphs down you will see the mention of a student being killed at the 4300 block of Larchwood. That's about three blocks over from where I lived when I was studying there.
The article indicates that things are much better now, which is great news, but there most certainly was a time when students were well advised to stick close to campus. Not because of racism, but because of reality.
@12:37,
I agree. As a POC originally from Brooklyn let me be rather clear in stating that those of us in traditionally black urban neighborhoods truly despise seeing rich hipsters come in and attempt to act worldly and colorblind while setting up a new Starbucks or Bikram Yoga studio in our neighborhoods. ...you think that you’re building bridges and making our communities connected, but you’re not; you’re forcing our families wholesale and killing what little sense of regional identity we’ve managed to carve out for ourselves.
Every time I get a chance to get back to my old neighborhood, I recognized it less and less. All I see is white guys with dreadlocks and pants too tight with their bottoms rolled up longing outside with a smug and self-satisfied look on their face.
Many of you have no idea how you’re the ones doing the most harm to black urban communities. You act as if you’re doing us all a favor by ‘sanitizing’ it all. Don’t kid yourselves, you’re only interested in the real estate so some privileged Ivy kids can have better rent.
You agree, and yet...tangent.
"People are talking about urban neighborhoods? This is the perfect opportunity for me to get on my soapbox and rant about gentrification and how it's all the fault of Classics PhD students!"
--12:53am, probably
“Someone just made me feel bad because I’m a small part of a larger problem and maybe I’m a hipster douchebag who wears my pants like that, has a man-bun and loves being ironic. I’m going to argue that the since my very narrow demographic can’t be to blame for everything in its entirety then we’re have no blame at all. Yeah, that’ll show that mouthy black guy who made me feel shitty!”
—6:52, definitely.
For what it’s worth, Missouri has an incredibly low cost of living. The stipend is $18k, plus more money for teaching in the summers, with money every year for conference travel. Dollar for dollar, Mizzou grad students are quite well off compared to students at more prestigious schools. There are fewer opportunities post-graduation, sure, but quality of life is great throughout the experience.
My grad stipend at an Ivy is a little over $30k plus conference funding, and it is pretty generous for the CoL. I came to America for grad school, and this is more money than I've ever seen before.
One thing that confuses me about comments on FV is the impression that those who graduate from an Ivy are privileged and named Preston or Tad. This might be true of some undergrads, but that's not really my impression of most grad students, many of whom went to state schools. I didn't go to a private school before, and there's no way I could afford my education now if it weren't funded. I was just very lucky that my advisor was taking students at the time I applied.
man-bunned hipsters overrunning neighborhoods - trust me the problem is not classicists. have you been to a party full of sociologists/anthropologists/art historians?
UCLA update for Roman Archaeology position: first choice took an offer elsewhere. offer extended to second choice candidate, who might also take an offer elsewhere.
Is this year unusual in so many top schools (Stanford, UCLA) not getting their first choice (or second choice) candidate, or does this happen often?
March 31, 2018 at 9:26 AM
“Someone just made me feel bad because I’m a small part of a larger problem and maybe I’m a hipster douchebag who wears my pants like that, has a man-bun and loves being ironic. I’m going to argue that the since my very narrow demographic can’t be to blame for everything in its entirety then we’re have no blame at all. Yeah, that’ll show that mouthy black guy who made me feel shitty!”
What kind of classics PhD students are you interacting with? Because this describes approximately zero of the dozens that I know. As 9:42am pointed out, this description fits anthro, sociology, and art history graduate students much more than classics. If you want pseudo-woke, Whole Foods-buying, craft brew-drinking, people who think voting Democrat makes them a radical leftist, you'll find them among the students of those other disciplines.
I'm sure there were lots of qualified applicants, but maybe the top choices are superstars who are in high demand. Any idea where the UCLA first choice accepted instead?
9:37am:
"One thing that confuses me about comments on FV is the impression that those who graduate from an Ivy are privileged and named Preston or Tad. This might be true of some undergrads, but that's not really my impression of most grad students, many of whom went to state schools. I didn't go to a private school before, and there's no way I could afford my education now if it weren't funded. I was just very lucky that my advisor was taking students at the time I applied."
Your mileage may vary with this but you can look through the lists of students in Ivy programs and find the trends quite easily. They've usually done their undergrad at 1) another Ivy 2) elite private schools like Chicago/Stanford/NYU/WUSTL/Northwestern 3) Some top public flagship like Berkeley/Michigan/Chapel Hill/Virginia 3) an elite SLAC
Sure, you have a handful of people who went to smaller lesser-known private schools or big state schools, but the trend is pretty clear.
"I've been looking for the privilege but can's seem to find it anywhere around here. So, who hid the the privilege? I don't have it. Do you have it? Maybe someone over in anthro has it. Yeah, it's definitely elsewhere...!"
LOL. It's like a hot potato.
"have you been to a party full of sociologists/anthropologists/art historians?"
Well, certainly not a party full of sociologists, because when with fellow academics I prefer to socialize with REAL scholars.
UCLA first choice instead chose NYU
with 11:38, 11:58:
First time on the market here, and I also have been wondering if it is common that tenure track jobs like Stanford or UCLA or wherever else have to make offers to second or third choice candidates. Is it how the market works?
NYU (and UCLA's) top choice candidate was the second choice candidate at Penn. I do not know the answer as to how common this is, but it seems as though the top programs all decide upon the same top one or two candidates, and its these lucky few who have choice in where they end up.
The gentrification of ethnic working class neighborhoods in metropolises like NYC is a global phenomenon and it might make you feel better to blame it on white hipsters but I suspect you know that this stereotype is silly and that the reality is far more complex. I grew up in Brooklyn, but in an Irish neighborhood. I and most of my childhood friends know that we will never be able to afford to live there. It's no longer the same neighborhood I grew up in and that was already no longer the neighborhood my parents knew as children. But for every hipster with a trust fund that moves in there are a dozen professional couples. I suspect nearly all are members of the 1 percent as measured by household income nationally (or top 5 percent in NYC), but ethnically they are remarkably diverse and it is a fact that gentrification has made my parents' neighborhood overwhelmingly less white.
It's a small world, especially among the "elite" circles. So for top R1s they are often competing for the same small pool of candidates. I know several colleagues at my "elite" R1 were second or even third choice in their search and simply lucked out (they also had no other offer!) because the top candidates were in high demand and/or other circumstances played a role. A certain "buzz" sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly (I've seem many potential "stars" burn briefly only to be denied tenure), precedes these candidates during the TT season.
Places this year where there seem to have been a few highly sought after candidates (some with multiple offers, some with multiple campus visits):
NYU
UCLA
Penn
Stanford
Columbia
Chicago
Princeton
FSU?
Bard?
^Stanford did not make an offer to Bard's top choice.
Princeton-- How so? Surely Princeton gets their top pick.
Some are just multiple campus visits--not multiple offers. I should have clarified. At least two Princeton finalists were finalists at other top schools, but weren't the top choice at Princeton, as far as I know. But it does illustrate how the multiple-offer situation can arise. So far this year we just have competition between UCLA-Stanford, UCLA-NYU, Chicago-Columbia. Anywhere else?
Very common for R1's to offer to their second choice.
This happens outside of the top schools as well. I heard that the successful candidate at UNCG also received the initial offer from Clemson. Some people have research that is in demand, or they interview/visit well, or are otherwise compelling and get multiple visits/offers. It's hard not to be jealous, but since they can't take more than one job it doesn't mean that they are eating anyone else's lunch.
The posts at 11:38 and 12:39 about the UCLA position in Roman Material Culture are not accurate.
It's great to see so many female POC hires this year!
I wonder if anyone has an opinion on whether this is the market exerting itself, or the market correcting itself?
^^^ das racist
@2:35 pm: can you say more? Is UCLA still waiting to hear from their first choice?
UCLA's top choice candidate did indeed take a job elsewhere.
One issue was the long time that UCLA took to extend the offer to their top choice. This is the narrative known to all in the dept. where the candidate DID accept the position, as well as to colleagues.
@2:50,
Race doesn’t matter. Let’s stop looking at how many blacks got a job or how many women, and just see them all as people. The more we continue to think of the black hires as “black” hires, the longer we continue to marginalize under-represented folks.
Race... doesn't matter?
#BLM
if the trolls could redirect their race / gender obsessions towards something we all agree on, perhaps talking shit about late antique / byzantine people, that would be great, thanks.
Amen to that. If I never have to look at any ugly Late Antique or Byzantine art again and pretend that it isn't hideous so as not to offend people who are into that stuff, it'll be too soon! I'm also getting tired of not being able to just openly talk about the Dark Ages anymore without people acting like I pissed in their cornflakes.
I think 3:24’s point isn’t that POC don’t matter, nor is that black lives don’t matter. But, instead, that seeing a black candidate only as a “black candidate” is a problem. That we should try to ignore someone’s race and see them for who they are. That,literally, is the dream of MLK, so let’s not act like those living it and advocating it are racist.
Late Antique and Byzantine art *is* hideous, imo.
Late Antique and Byzantine art is excellent. You don't know what you're missing.
Last year I visited the Byzantine museum in Athens. I thought, "Wow, what an excellent museum! The Greeks have put a lot of time, effort, and money into this. Too bad it's wasted on all these icons and assorted images of freakish child Jesus, dead-eyed Mary, and vengeful, angry grown-up Jesus."
There's no accounting for taste, so I'm sure that there are people who legitimately like this stuff. I'd just rather not have to pretend to hold it in the same esteem as traditional Greco-Roman art and to pretend that that it's interesting or attractive.
So much bravery and wisdom in this thread today, on every front. The clear-sighted, unselfish commentary is very inspiring. I can only help everyone brings the same level of humane insight to their scholarship.
MCGA!
SO you all are saying UCLA material culture top candidate accepted elsewhere? NYU?
Was the UCLA top candidate from Rice...?
Also, did Rutgers go with their first choice or second? Re: Augustan poetry job.
Hamilton: did it go as expected? It has been red for many weeks now, it's totally fair for someone to update.
Rutgers went with their first choice. Word on the street is that another R1 was also fighting for the UCLA/Stanford candidate but not Rutgers.
In general, what's going on with Greek archaeology? There's seem to be more Roman archaeology jobs over the past few years, whereas the Greek side of things is quiet or they have to fit into Mediterranean/ Near Eastern archaeology positions. On the contrast, Greek lit and history seem to be doing better than archaeology. Is it a question of who hasn't retired? Are there more jobs for Romanists? Is it cyclical and the Roman archaeology jobs will dry out soon? In a nutshell, what is the state of the field?
@7:59,
Every year is different. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of this in any form. But, generally speaking I would cautiously say that the pendulum this year was towards RA, but yeah, things seem to come in spurts.
There were a lot of GA hires over the last few years. A lot. So, it may be a while before a good number of openings pop up.
Happy Easter, fellow FV-ers!
To celebrate Easter, everyone should spend the day looking at ugly Byzantine art!
Maybe this is a false opposition, but can you differentiate between the truly intellectual types and the smart but "more social/relevant" types in Classics? Does it usually fall along the lines of text-philology and history-material culture-archaeology? Do you think the field generally speaking values one "type" of thinker over others?
@3:45 Way to shit on everyone who isn't a philologist! Didn't think it could be done, but you really managed to eke that out at the bottom of the 9th, didn't you?
Hmmm!
So, some vocal FV'ers think "traditional Greco-Roman art" or literature is "beautiful", and Late Antique / Byzantine art or literature is "ugly". And therefore that the former is more worthy of study.
I'm soooo impressed by your critical historical chops: you think that historical societies are only worth studying because they produce things that you personally find beautiful, instead of assessing why and how historical societies and their productions change in context?
No wonder you don't have jobs!!
LETS HEIGHTEN THE CONTRADICTIONS!
MCGA!!!!
@6:26 Isn't it possible to find something both worth studying (Late Antique) but personally uninteresting? I certainly find my own work both interesting and worth studying but I also understand that not everyone will be intrigued by it.
Also @3:45 that is a bit of a weird question. Are you suggesting that historians are not as intellectual as philologists? I'm a historian and always thought our work was actually the most intellectually challenging because it required the synthesis of different branches of our field (language/literature + material).
This debate also reminds me of one of the most ridiculous aspects of our field. Historians and archaeologists are constantly challenged in job searches with 'Well can you teach one or both of the languages?' (Answer: Duh) while I have yet to hear of a philologist being asked 'Can you teach a course on archaeological methods?' If any philologists have experienced this I would actually love to hear more about it and how you reacted to and answered this question.
Some programs only offer something like archaeological methods once every other year (if that) but they all offer multiple language classes constantly. If they're looking for someone who can teach archaeology then they aren't even going to bother interviewing a philologist, but they're going to need to make sure that archaeologist can also teach languages.
People with primary training in history/archaeology have admitted on here that they aren't confident in one or both of the languages that are necessary for most classics departments.
During graduate orientetonnfor the terminal MA program at U Arizona, the Chair of Classics at the time, Cynthia White, said that she was so happy to see that the program now includes an ancient history focus as well as Greek/Roman archaeological focus because “even though you all don’t have what it takes to be a philologist, you chose to stick with matters of Classics as best you can. And those of us *in* Classics always can benefit from the observations of historians and the discovery of even more pottery shards from archaeologists. Let me just say on behalf of us in philology, that we’re happy to have you all here.”
...yeah. The rest of the faculty nearly fell out of their seats when she said this to us all. For weeks after that, all the profs apologized to us all for what she said.
...a month or so later, the archeologists left the Classics Dept and joined Anthro. The next fall, the historians joined the History Dept.
is that why the department got folded into religious studies?
Got more bites for TT jobs than during initial VAP season. What am I doing wrong? How are you all adjusting your letters? Etc?
Ah, Arizona and its legendary rancor. I too did my MA there. Some of my favorite events in the storied history of that department:
The time one of the Hellenists who was forced to retire a few years ago got wind of an at the time retired, now deceased professor talking trash about her via email. She steps out of her office and proceeds to scream down the hallway in the direction of the office of one of the above mentioned tyrannical Latin professors that if said retried professor "had something to say, tell him to say it to my f*cking face." The graduate administrator was so appalled by the display that she came out of her office and apologized to a graduate student who witnessed the exchange, aghast that they had to see such unprofessional behavior.
Or, the rotating Department Heads when the department went into receivership. Ineffective German professor, arrogant Frenchman, slightly senile Professor Emeritus who was brought out of retirement.
Then, the abuse of three junior faculty who all came from a school on the East Coast and were hated by the Two Tyrannical Latin Professors. Picked off one by one. The last one standing was going to have his tenure torpedoed, but the ancient historians in the History department saved the day and now his appointment is primarily over there. The Latinists were Livid that their plan failed.
Or the time soon after the archaeologists went to anthro, somebody convened a meeting of all the faculty, maybe a dean or something, and this person asked if everyone was happy. One of the Latinists stood up and exclaimed, "I don't care if anyone is happy, I care about academic excellence!" I also witnessed this Latinists verbally abuse one of the department staff. I'd come in early one morning to edit a paper, and no one was around yet. I saw this staff person come in, and soon after the Latinist, all flustered. The Latinist accosted the staff person and started talking about how she'd tried to get into the department on the weekend but her ID card didn't work in the swipe. The staff person told her she should call the number beside the swipe and have the ID office check to see what's wrong with her card. This Latinist, who speaks in an affected whisper most of the time, dropped the act and angrily told this staff person that "It's not my job to do that," and that she "needs to figure out what's wrong since you don't do anything else around here." Classy.
Or the time they were trying to decide who should teach the classics methods course that all incoming students have to take. One of the Greek archaeologists (who is Greek herself) was suggested. One of the now retired Latinists (somebody who is very famous for their work on elegy) asserted that the Greek archaeologist couldn't teach the course because she wasn't a native English speaker and so students wouldn't be able to understand her. As you can imagine, that did not go over well.
Then there was the time one of the Latinists, a former alcoholic who's now exchanged drink for food these days, was f*cking one of his students. He was caught and brought before some committee. He told them that they couldn't prove anything. This professor, at the height of his alcoholism, also had a seizure one day in class, traumatizing his TA.
My favorite, though, was the only time I have ever witnessed a professor verbally attack a student in class. Somebody gave a presentation. The professor (Latinist) proceeded to berate the student for his interpretation, to the point of it being openly hostile. This student had maintained that the professor had hated him from the beginning, but none of us believed him. Until we witnessed it. In class. It was a shocking thing to witness.
I'm sure there's many more. Honestly those of us who did the MA at Arizona probably need a support group, I imagine there's some of us who are emotionally scarred.
12:18 a.m.,
I was at Arizona around that time, too. Your comment "a former alcoholic who's now exchanged drink for food these days" had me laughing out loud, since over the years I have come up with so many ways to describe this individual, but none is as pithily perfect.
I could easily match you anecdote for anecdote, but it is getting late, and I need to finish preparing for tomorrow morning's class. But one of them that fits in with what you posted, especially the part about berating the highly competent administrative assistant, was the time the Latinist to whom you refer was so critical of the undergraduate work-study student answering phones and doing light tasks up front that she was reduced to tears. Who has ever heard of a department chair making a student employee cry?!?
I have to ask, was the student with the non-drinking eater a grad or undergrad? And now that society -- and university administrations that can read the New York Times about Columbia, etc. -- has a greater awareness of things in this #MeToo moment do you think she might bring a complaint? (Also, a few months ago someone, perhaps you, posted a similar claim, but made it seem like more than one female student was involved. Though perhaps I misremember.)
I'm glad that I could bring some amusement out of a discussion of such toxic people, ha.
The student with whom the Latinist had the affair was, from what I understand, a married undergraduate. The Latinist was able to tell the disciplinary committee that they couldn't prove anything because the student was unwilling to admit that anything had happened. I may be fuzzy on the details but I believe this married undergraduate's husband found out and that's where the complaint came from, but since the student herself was unwilling to cooperate, the Latinist seems to have escaped unscathed. If I've got any details wrong any other Arizona people are welcome to correct me.
This happened a bit before my time at Arizona, but I never heard that the relationship was non-consensual. That said, it is clearly highly unethical to engage in such behavior as a professor regardless of whether or not there is consent, mainly because of the power differential and the protection afforded by tenure.
12:18 again. To the question about there having been multiple female students, this is not something I'd heard. with the #MeToo movement we've seen that these sorts of things are usually not isolated incidents, though, so who knows.
Okay, so *this* is the quality scuttlebutt and shadow history that makes FV a resource worth revisiting. Keep it coming.
1:08 a.m. here again. Your assessment of the "arrogant Frenchman" is dead on: that guy had a chance to make a difference from his superior administrative position, but instead he quickly became a collaborator, siding with the two toxic senior faculty. Everyone knows that some of the Nazis fled to South America, but it is not so well known that at least one of the Vichy French fled to Tucson.
12:18 again. We students got that vibe and actually nicknamed the Frenchman "General Petain." He was an asshole all-around. At one point he threatened to take away printing privileges from us MA students because according to some arbitrary metric he pulled out of his ass we were printing too much, even though we did a lot of the printing for the classes we TA'd ourselves so that was part of the count.
A friend who was ahead of me in grad school got a job offer from Arizona (not sure if VAP or TT). It was, at that point, their only offer. I was shocked when our department, which is usually a bit too placid in support of its students, started truly scrambling to find some sort of paying position for my friend so s/he "wouldn't have to go to Arizona!" (said in the same tones as we would use of someone going to war or hell.) This impressed upon me that I really never wanted to work there, but the reasons for the horror were ambiguous until now. Wow. Thanks for sharing.
8:36, that your department was willing to do that says a lot about it. Arizona 5+ years ago was a truly deadly place for junior faculty: either those two senior faculty members would actively attempt to destroy their careers (which they tried to do not only to the three from the East Coast school mentioned above, but at least two others, and that's not counting archaeologists), or if one somehow could dodge that peril there would have been the difficulty of finding a job elsewhere without being able to use references from those two (who were the only senior faculty left in classics, and therefore in a better world the two who should have been writing). Today it might be a bit safer to take a job there, as the isotopes that made the place radioactive continue to decay, but I have good reason to believe that, in violation of the clear rules that were set down when the department was folded into Religion, one of the two full professors has continued to meddle. So even now, with the two problem-causers supposedly under quarantine and the program better management, no one should take a job in Arizona's Classics program if there is an alternative, simply because of the risk involved.
Does anybody how how many rounds of rejection they have at ISAW? I can't really see through their procedure.
Does anyone know if the Egyptology stuff at Yale (sounds like Arizona!) had any effect on Classical Studies there?
Pray, tell more about Yale Egyptology...!
https://yalealumnimagazine.com/blog_posts/1550-scandal-brings-new-punishments-br-for-egyptology-program
It seems the two have since married....judging by the wikipedia profile of one of the two.
Whoa the instagram!
https://www.instagram.com/vintage_egyptologist/
That can't be unseen.
LOL do they work on Ptolemaic stuff?
Didn’t a similar thing happen at Harvard Classics and then they moved to Princeton? I didn’t hear anything nearly as nasty as this, but suffice to say rules were broken...
Why are people in Classics and related fields like Egyptology so prone to engaging in abusive or unethical behavior? You'd think that such people would be grateful to have a permanent academic job at all in rapidly contracting fields and that they would behave accordingly.
Is it a lost cause for an ancient historian (PhD in history, yet BA, MA in Classics) with no teaching or TA experience in Latin and Greek to ever get a VAP in a Classics dept whose job ad says the boilerplate "teach Latin and Greek at all levels" ?
I've had 4 T-T interviews and 1 VAP interview thus far, and never once has a single Classics Department (regardless of how 'low-tier' they may be) given my application a second glance.
Yes, because if you don't have a phd in classics AND have never taught either language at all, why would they? Why would you think you are professionally qualified for that role? Apply to everything anyway--you never know--but the outcome you describe isn't surprising for VAPs especially.
@8:31, in a similar position, though I didn't get any interviews the year I applied, and pretty much gave up.
...how do you thinking using initials disguises anything? You're participating in spreading pretty damning information -- true or not, we don't know -- about a junior faculty member. Whatever you think of her, this is not the appropriate forum. It's very helpful to hear about problems with a department (and, indeed, it sounds like it's a departmental problem, not just an individual problem) and I think it's OK to include the anecdotes, but please leave them anonymous.
Also, trained medical professionals should know that you CANNOT "diagnose" someone outside of a clinical context, and it's suuuuper inappropriate to share pseudo-diagnoses about any individuals, named (in this case) or unnamed, on this forum. It is harmful to the individual and to anyone with mental health issues of their own. Did I say suuuuuper inappropriate? Times a thousand.
@8:31, 4TTs and one VAP interview this season? That's quite impressive -- seems to indicate that you are competitive for these positions, even if you're not advancing. Making the long list is something of an achievement, even though it doesn't get you anything
Do you all see any difference in Ancient History Ph.D.s that come out of Classics departments vs. History departments?
9:02: There can be significant differences. PhDs from History departments also had to take courses in non-ancient history, some had to do qualifying secondary and tertiary fields in them, which qualifies them to teach non-ancient courses, especially in smaller history departments. Many also rarely have teaching experience in languages, which can be an issue when applying to smaller schools. At my VAP institution I teach with a tenured ancient historian who also did an MA in Latin. He has a dual appointment to teach Latin when our very tiny Classics department needs it, and he also teaches a few non-ancient history courses in the history department when they need it.
In the UK many many ancient historians come from Classics departments. It's interesting to look at US institutions that see such a clear divide, whereas abroad your degree title just depends on the subject of your thesis. If you write a thesis on Thucydides, for example, you get a degree in Ancient History, but you certainly aren't looked at as a 'non-classicist.' That's just my experience though.
Ancient history is not a coherent discipline. It is an area of interest. A literary study of Thucydides and an empire-wide, network analysis of prosopography in second-century Roman legions might both qualify their authors to be considered ancient historians by some in the profession, but you can hardly say they do the same thing. The former is more likely to come from and go to a classics department, the latter, history; but there are so many exceptions I doubt generalization beyond 9:41 would be sound. For my money, a dissertation on Thucydides may or may not be "ancient history" depending on the methods, goals, and evidence drawn on and what argument is being mounted. You do see this in the way philologists who are interested in the historians increasingly talk about what they do as "historiography" rather than history, although this introduces another set of complications.
In the US, someone with a History Dept PhD in ancient history, though they almost always (at least the better programs) have to demonstrate doctoral level capability and command of Greek and Latin are seen as 'only' historians, and incapable of teaching the languages.
On the reverse, a Latin philologist from a top school with no historical training whatsoever, let alone anything nearing graduate level understanding, can easily land a T-T job in a History Dept as their "ancient historian."
...the takeaway? Classics PhDs are seen (erroneously) as a one-size-fits-all scholar of antiquity. Ancient historians are seen in an odd light here in the US: fit only for History Depts, but they have to fight against philologists for the few History Dept jobs that may arise.
As bad as things are for Classics, they're far worse for ancient historians.
There certainly is a difference between History and Classics, and can affect job prospects significantly. Not surprising, historians out of History departments tend to be more competitive at for jobs in History Departments, and those out of Classics tend to do better in Classics departments.
History PhDs at many programs are often required to take courses outside of their subfield, and also can be assigned teaching out of their subfield. This is useless at Classics Departments, which by definition only care about the ancient world. But this can be valued at History departments, especially since a History Dept. might assign a junior prof. to teach Western Civ or World History.
Also, and this is a downside, History departments tend to privilege Late Antiquity. Remember, at a history department, unless it is very large, a Medievalist will usually be assigned to chair the search, since by definition there is no ancient person. And other Medievalists will no doubt be on the committee. And they tend to favor Late Antiquity folks who can teach the ancient sequence, but still work on things Medievalists like, like bishops and heresy.
Classics, meanwhile, just cares about language. Ancient history is to most classics department service teaching that needs to be done to fill enough seats to average out the two people who signed up for Intermediate Greek. Now, no other field of history expects you to also have the capacity to teach a foreign language at the collegiate level. But Classics does, and PhDs from Classics departments have most of their teaching assignments in the ancient languages, and so are up to snuff on dead-language pedagogy.
So, lesson is, if you are an Ancient History PhD, try by hook or crook to do as much ancient language teaching as you can, at least Latin 1 and some intermediate reading courses. And go into interviews with an answer to what language courses you would like to teach: I'm just dying to teach Propertius! This will leave a glimmer of hope at Classics departments.
And if you are a Classics PhD, make sure you know a thing or to about the Middle Ages and Reformation; maybe even see if you can TA for the World History or Western Civ course.
@10:11 it's always solid advice to be as rounded as possible between your research and teaching, and that can't be overstated. Interesting point about service teaching. Am I the only one that finds it odd that the languages are so revered yet it is actually the courses in translation that bring enrollment numbers to the department?
This probably goes to a much larger question about the direction of our discipline and the eternal question of 'What is the importance of Classics?'
What would you say to someone who, after two or three years on the market, has had zero TT interviews? Is it time to give up hope?
Holy @%$# that Instagram!!!
I'm speechless.
I mean, I imagined that existed, but I never thought...
They don't really show up on site dressed Indiana Jones af, do they?
Hmmm, what level of interview?
I went my first year on the market with three Skype interviews and 0 campus visits
My second year, three Skype/conference and 1 campus visit
My third year, four Skype and 1 campus visit.
My fourth year, 3 Skype/conference and 1 campus visit--and a job offer.
It was pretty grim on the market, but the fact that I was getting interviews and even the odd campus visit was enough to make me decide to persist until the odds finally fell in my favor (every job has 10-12 first round interviewees and 3-4 campus visits, so you need about 10-12 first round interviews to get the 3-4 campus visits to have an odds on chance of getting a job. In my instance, my offer came after 13 first round interviews and three campus visits.
To be blunt, if someone has gone two to three job cycles without a single first round interview, they should seriously consider leaving the field sooner than later. I don't know if I would read the same into a single bad year, that could just be bad luck in a hard luck market.
Why did I click on the Yale Egyptologist's instagram linked above? Why?
11:41, According to wikipedia, they do:
"Alongside her career as an Egyptologist, Darnell also has shown an interest in vintage fashion particularly that of the 1920s. She along with her husband wear this clothing on a daily basis including during archaeological digs. Since January of 2017 she has been displaying this on an instagram account by the name of @vintage_egyptologist which as of February of 2018 has over 14,000 followers."
11:41PM/12:09 AM: Jesus, take the wheel!
Egyptologists are freaking us out...definitely not eating our lunches.
MAKE EGYPTOLOGY GREAT AGAIN!
I do hope Servius will quickly expunge those disgusting posts attacking -- practically by name -- a JUNIOR Latinist who was at Arizona for just a short time, and who was NOT in any way one of the reasons that department imploded, regardless of what may have happened involving one graduate student. It is useful for people in the field to know about the reasons for the problems at Arizona that began to go supernova a decade ago, and some of the posts above do that, but attacking (and attempting a diagnosis!!!) of someone who isn't there any longer is just petty and pathetic. (And the fact that he/she has a tenure-track position at a good school is not a reason for the personal attack, either.)
Yet another new type of low for F.V.
To the question a ways back about taking a job in another country: be the brain drain. Embrace it. The US is likely to reward you, at best, with a tenure track job that pays less than you can make abroad in a crappy nowhere town. Give that a big "f you." Have an adventure, make money, reject the system that only wants to exploit you.
Hi everyone. As an undergraduate, this is all quite exciting, informative, and extremely scary. Does anyone know where I can go to get advice on graduate school classics admissions?
Please pardon my intrusion into the otherwise vivid conversation at hand.
2:04 a.m.,
First, as you can probably see from various posts around here, there are a lot of people who do not yet have permanent jobs who are incredibly down on the field. This is not without reason, as there are more PhD's being produced than there are jobs, and some of us have proven to be the excess. Certain personality types don't handle that well and take advantage of internet anonymity to vent, and as soon as they see your post they will respond rather harshly, I fear. So take anything they write with a huge grain of salt. (But with that said, it would not be incorrect to warn you that if you get into a PhD program you might not find a job at the other end.)
I write this in order to inoculate you somewhat against the bile that is likely to come your way when the rest of the classics world wakes up tomorrow morning and sees your post. But as for your question, do you not have professors (or perhaps even graduate students) at your school whom you can consult?
Servius, please do take down the posts discussing the junior scholar. This sort of content is not at all appropriate for this forum. Classics has enough problems without eating our own on such a semi-public forum.
"So take anything they write with a huge grain of salt. (But with that said, it would not be incorrect to warn you that if you get into a PhD program you might not find a job at the other end.)" This is what's going to attract the ire, dear undergraduate, not your query. These are the words of the hopelessly naive, not having faced the job market yet, or, more likely, someone who got a job back when the getting was better.
The truth is that even if you finish your program, you are very unlikely to find permanent employment unless the job market changes radically over the next seven years. But don't take my word for it. When you are picking a program: ask them for the attrition and placement data of the cohorts who entered 8-12 years ago. How many started, how many completed their PhDs, and how many of those PhDs are today on the tenure track? Let the numbers guide your choice. To inoculate you against some of the tricks: VAP positions or "teaching at X school" doesn't count. And don't be distracted by the anecdote about their one student who now has a great job. You need data, not a story.
2:40 a.m., 2:30 a.m. here. Your assumption about me and my experience could not be farther from the truth. I sure hope you do not do literary analysis as your main research area, if that is what you came up with.
@2:04 undegraduate:
Here are some links that give an overview of the process of applying to graduate programs. The CAMWS website has a good overview of programs in the different specialties. If our bitterness and vitriol hasn't scared you off, then the best advice I ever got was to get in contact with potential advisors and see how they treat you as a potential future student/colleague. Are you intellectually compatible? Do they have time to take on more students? Will you work well together? Apply to a mix of schools (top and middle) and if you get in, pick the best possible program for your subfield, in a place that you would actually want to live, with an advisor/mentors who will support you and be crucial advocates over the next 10+ years. If this sounds daunting, consider a post-bac or an MA before committing to a PhD program with high rates of attrition, serious feelings of isolation, anxiety and depression, as well as low rates of job placement at the end.
https://camws.org/directories/study_classics_surveys.php
https://www.colorado.edu/classics/graduate/prospective-students/advice-applying-graduate-school
Here are some other good resources:
https://eidolon.pub/how-to-apply-to-classics-phd-programs-f4d44446f85d
https://eidolon.pub/how-to-decide-on-a-classics-phd-program-7e097cfcaeb3
Apply to the best schools which have at least two faculty you could see working with. Apply only to schools that will fund you, and fund you well. Look at where their students have jobs - both within the academy and outside of it (the latter should be followed by looking into how supportive and active the dept is in alt-ac matters). Go to the school with the best placement rate combined with the best "feel" for the fit.
@2:04, know that even if everyone waxes poetic about "alt-ac," it is a myth that you can just as easily get a job outside of Classics if the job market thing doesn't work out. And it probably (95%) won't work out. So from the beginning, prepare yourself for an alternative career. Don't believe for a second that a Classics PhD will make you attractive to outside employers without any kind of other work experience.
Dear undergraduate
I do think its very important to stop and think if an academic career is for you. Right now, I am guessing you are in your early 20s. The notion of hanging out and talking about books and language and history sounds pretty good. You don't mind being relatively poor, having roommates, etc. But a PhD will take you into your early thirties, and it may take another four-five years to find a TT job, if you find one at all.
You may find by your thirties, your priorities will be very different: you may want a family, a house, a middle class life style. You will not have a middle class lifestyle while you are in graduate school, and you certainly will not have one if you work as an adjunct afterwards, as most PhDs do. Again, you may not care about that now, but many of us on this forum are lamenting as our classmates from high school and college pass us by in life goals, while we trudge through another brutal job season and then move to a new city to seek short term employment as academic precariat.
I don't want to sound materialistic: no one goes into academia for the money. But right now conditions are so bad that you may be singing up for real poverty. The stories of adjuncts living out of vans, drawing on food stamps and even in one instance working as prostitutes to get by may sound extreme, but such dire straits may be as common as the lucky few who land TT jobs (note departments only remember the person who got a TT job, not the person who adjuncted on food stamps).
So be warned. People are bitter, but mostly its because people are hurting, and the professional goals we had at your age have turned to bitter disappointment.
I think the MA track is not a terrible idea. Colorado and FSU both have strong programs. Be sure you get funding, but these programs can help you decide if you really want to take the plunge, or if you just wanted a few more years of classics before you move forward with your life and career.
Post #3000 is as good an excuse as any to ask a question of the hive-mind:
What is the policy for including positions that you ultimately had to turn down on your CV (specifically prestigious postdocs)?
Undergraduate: I'll add that all of these dire views of your likely future as a Classics PhD (which are not exaggerated in the least) are much less applicable for those who are willing to teach high school at the end of it all. The high school teachers I know who have PhDs make more money than I do (teaching at the college level) and they don't have to worry about publishing. You can quit after the MA or without undertaking/finishing the dissertation and still find a good teaching job at the high school level. You'd also have more choice over where you live.
If you're open to this outcome, try to choose a program that gives you plenty of teaching opportunities and that cares about pedagogy (or, if the department doesn't seem to care, see if the university has a Center for Teaching and Learning or something similar). If you know that you're not at all open to this outcome...think long and hard about where you want to be 8-10 years from now, and how realistic that outcome is if you go down this path.
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