Yes, beautiful tenure track job just leaked out onto the job sites in mid April. I'd given up. I'd put the big envelopes away. I figured I was stuck one more year in adjunct hell.But this job. Man, it was sexy. It was cool. I was giddy.
They had a deadline of May 1st. I got my shit together
. I mean, I got my SHIT together. Letter, vita. Official trannys which cost me $5, $10 and zero dollars respectively. I needed three referees to send fresh job letters to the Dean. They wouldn't allow the standard dossier letters (also confidential). I had to make those letter requests just DAYS before their deadline. My referees all complied.I had to send in student evaluations from the past three years. Cobbled that shit together. Wicked. Priority Mail. White envelope. I dotted the Ts and crossed my eyes. I did what I was asked.
Then, I got a rejection
on May 4th. Not a rejection like you didn't make the cut, but a rejection that said they had HIRED someone.Fan-fucking-tastic.They twicked me, right? They didn't really want to hire someone else, right? There's some shitheel already doing the job they hired instead, right?
I mean, what a cwock of shit!
Imagine if an adjuncting gig required the same process. And the transcripts were about double that price. And when you dared complain to someone, they told you to suck it up...that's what you need to do for the job.
ReplyDeleteI wanna know WHY they require all of this up-front work and expensive transcripts and postage when it's all just a big scam to begin with?
Marc Bousquet has it right...it's the PhD lottery. And we all gut to buy-in for a spin! Wheeeeee!!!
My department did almost the exact thing last year, and although three of us in the department went to the Dean's office to complain about it - the heir to the job was not universally liked, and some of us were eager to bring in someone new - we were told, "Oh, this is all above board."
ReplyDeleteThat was a lie.
It's called "complying with the law" by the letter. Just not the spirit.
ReplyDeleteThe idea of laws requiring nationwide searches is to avoid nepotism. Now, instead of avoiding nepotism it just brings more people into the hurt and pain of nepotism.
But can we NOT call transcripts "trannys"? It's a problem on about 50 levels.
Ugh. I'm sorry.
ReplyDeleteIf there was ever a situation in which a chair should just "forget" to do some of the things university regulations require -- or invoke a professional association (I'm pretty sure MLA/ADE guidelines discourage several of the practices above, including the requirement for official transcripts before an offer is extended) -- then this was it.
Either that, or add "this is a pro forma search to satisfy a university requirement; time and money spent on satisfying application requirements will be wasted" at the bottom of the ad. There's probably no explicit regulation against that (yet).
How about being good enough to be hired last-minute as an adjunct, get the crappiest of schedules, offer to teach all the shittiest classes that none of the silverbacks want, participate in departmental crap like a full-timer, get great reviews...
ReplyDeleteAnd when there was an opening for a full-time position, I'm not even good enough to be granted an interview. Hell, I'm not even good enough to get a personal rejection. Nope, just a canned email from HR, "You have not been selected as a candidate."
Fuckwads.
Warren, I'm sorry.
ReplyDeleteYou might consider a note to your professional association: many of them keep tabs on misbehavior by hiring departments; some even publicize consistently bad ones.
I'm sorry for your pain, Warren, and Academic Monkey is completely correct. Every time we get stiffed by someone we hire, there is new paperwork we have to require or rules to be followed.
ReplyDeleteNow we need external members of search committees, but we are not allowed to pay them. The line of people willing to do this is quite short, and for each one I call in I end up having to strong-arm one of my professors to return the favor.
We also need comparative recommendations - since we had one guy hand in recommendations from different people that were identical. No idea how that is supposed to work.
But there's a clue: If we are only giving you two weeks to prepare your application, we have a candidate in mind. This might be an adjunct whom we would like to keep for some reason, but we are afraid that in a nationwide-search s/he might not come out on top.
If your sister is a lawyer you might check if you can sue, but believe me, that will not make you the most popular professor on campus.
We need to convince our administrations to spend less money on sports and stuff and more on professors and books and rooms. The price of college is already far too much for many individuals.
We need to close down the degree mills, keep the admissions standards high, and teach those that get in to be the very best they can be.
Even a dean can dream, can't she?
Not to blame the victim, because it is fucked up to feel jerked around like that, but a TT job ad with a deadline of May 1st can only mean one thing: the outcome is already determined. It is a universally recognized code in academic job ads. They do it so that only the few, the uninformed, the delusional, will bother applying.
ReplyDeleteTo paraphrase Biggie, if you don't know, now you know, sucka.
@Frankity: That is, indeed, the other, equally nasty, side of the coin. There was a round of blogged "advice to adjuncts" a month or so ago. Various of the suggestions raised controversy (and might be good for generating discussion here sometime when things are slow) but there was one which pretty much everybody agreed on: the suggestion that a temporary position can be a "foot in the door," whether it comes from the hiring department, an advisor, or anyone else, is nearly always wrong. If anything, the not-yet-known candidate will always seem more alluring.
ReplyDelete@Suzy: understood, and mostly agreed (especially those last three somewhat off-topic but impassioned paragraphs -- how, oh how, do we get there?) I'd still argue that chairs should engage in a bit of candidate-protective civil disobedience (and/or extreme insistence on compliance with professional-association guidelines) if they can possibly get away with it in this case (another tactic that occurs to me is making sure that the advertisement runs for 24 hours, at most, before the deadline; two weeks is just long enough to set people scrambling).
@Archie: interesting, and useful; thanks. I knew that May 1 was the traditional deadline for TT profs to resign (thanks to an unfortunate mass exodus in my graduate department just after I passed my field exams), and I suspect I'd be suspicious of a short, late, deadline for a TT search, but perhaps not suspicious enough. If I really wanted the job, I would have applied. Actually, if it were the ideal job for me, I still might apply, just in case the department didn't know the code, either (but maybe citing the short deadline as a reason for sending unofficial transcripts and dossier letters, with the promise that both will be replaced if the department is interested in pursuing my candidacy. Dangerous if the job is on the up-and-up, I know, but perhaps a reasonable gamble in this case.)
Bottom line: the job search process is a real headache for everyone, and only becoming more so. But the most vulnerable are definitely the job candidates, who can't afford not to apply for any job which looks remotely suitable, even if they also can't afford *to* apply. Those who hold more power (even incremental amounts of power that mostly result in headaches for the holder) need to do whatever they can to protect the most vulnerable.
@Archie: It could also be that the place had a candidate who backed out, and they were trying not to fail a search (as someone who was on a hiring committee this year, I can tell you we gave our top candidate until late April to decide. He backed out, and we made a late offer to another candidate). Though I suppose with the May 4th rejection letter, this probably wasn't the case..
ReplyDelete