Comments on: Academic job ads, translated

By: Z

Sun, 30 Sep 2012 05:51:06 +0000

I love this one:

“The Department of American Studies at the University of Virginia invites qualified professionals to apply for the newly-created Phillip Morris Chair in Jeffersonian Hagiography. This position has a light teaching load (1/0) but requires the chair to publish two or more peer-reviewed articles per year furthering the scholarly understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s magnificence and grace. The Chair is also expected to serve and personally consume Virginia wines, and to take the lead in capital campaigns designed (in alternating years) to preserve the University’s historic 1820’s architectural heart, and to bury that heart ever deeper within vast and glittering research parks doing God-knows-what.”

By: recent Ph.D.

recent Ph.D. — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 15:11:38 +0000

Indyanna, I really appreciate the way you put this: “the academy has done a remarkable job of fragmenting knowledge about its own largely self-inflicted dysfunctional history with respect to placement. To the extent that in the categorical terms that historians tend to deal, there never really *was* a structural crisis at all. Just an incredibly improbable series of very bad years, one after the other.”

This explains a lot about the way I experienced the “crisis.” Part of what I think helped to change my perception from my naive early grad school years to the cynical later ones (I started in 2001 and finished in 2010) has been social media. Blogs and other forms allowed me to communicate with a lot more people outside my cohort than I otherwise would have, increasingly as the time went by, which made me realize that the years I went on the market weren’t, as I was still hearing from well-meaning people in my department, just two more “bad” years. It was a poewrful counter narrative to the academy’s and much more persuasive for me than anything Thomas H. Benton wrote for the Chronicle because it came from so many different directions and diverse voices.

Ultimately, it was the evidence of firsthand experience from many, many people — and the satire and the parodies built on it — that persuaded me to leave academia sooner than I otherwise might have. And a year and a half and two nonacademic jobs later, I’m happy to report that — as conflicted and frustrated and angry as I was at the time — leaving when I did was a good decision.

So, yay Tumblr for this one!

By: truffula

truffula — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 18:33:46 +0000

When I was on the market for my first job, I was part of a small cohort of folks with the same area of research specialization who all ended up with interviews for the same positions. It was like we were a road show. We all have jobs we like now, though not all in academia and not all at places that advertised for our specialization (me, for example). In any case, we were all happy–not resentful–when somebody landed a job. It was nice to see people being hired in my area at all. Those were nervous times, for sure, but I’ve made the most of where I landed.

By: Indyanna

Indyanna — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:50:48 +0000

You know, though, I mentioned this matter of the seriously anciency of the job crisis (without all of this anthropomorphic terminology) to a dissertator just the other day and ze was literally disbelieving. Ze specifically said that ze “just assumed it was about five years old,” or barely ready for kindergarten. So I take from this that the academy has done a remarkable job of fragmenting knowledge about its own largely self-inflicted dysfunctional history with respect to placement. To the extent that in the categorical terms that historians tend to deal, there never really *was* a structural crisis at all. Just an incredibly improbable series of very bad years, one after the other. Talk about a usable past for a useless subject matter!

By: Lady Historian

Lady Historian — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:20:55 +0000

menopausal job crisis!! bwahahahaha — that one made my day.

By: Historiann

Historiann — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 14:39:40 +0000

Yeah, the “job crisis” in History is now about 42 years old. The job crisis has to take statins to keep its cholesterol down! The job crisis is nearly menopausal!

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:57:14 +0000

I am very glad that the same type of leftists who supported denying people like me even getting an interview are now finding themselves unemployed.

I agree, particularly since all the “type of leftist” who is clearly involved with a tumblr like this one was probably in high school or college when you were on the job market, and is directly responsible for everything that made it difficult for you to get a job in the US, including neoliberal policy decisions that dramatically shrunk the number of jobs available.

Rotten b@st@rds. I hope they rot in hell.

By: J. Otto Pohl

J. Otto Pohl — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 10:10:00 +0000

You know I find this funny that all the sudden leftists are complaining about these things. I was denied even an interview for even adjunct positions in the US despite having a couple of books published and a number of journal articles. My PhD from SOAS (University of London) and all my publications proved to be absolutely worthless in the US market. I applied to over 300 jobs and did not get a single interview. The few places that did bother to send me rejection letters made it clear that they did not value publications at all and that all they were interested in was teaching experience. Lots of people who were only ABD and had no publications from institutions like UNM and UO got jobs that would not even interview me. I am very glad that the same type of leftists who supported denying people like me even getting an interview are now finding themselves unemployed. The US university system deserves to collapse.

By: Sarah

Sarah — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 03:02:51 +0000

I would be laughing even harder if it weren’t all so painfully true! Yes, a history version is needed.

By: Tenured Radical

Tenured Radical — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 01:12:46 +0000

I demand a history version of this tumblr.