Claim: College fills open faculty position through cynical job posting.
TRUE
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 1990]
SOUTHEAST MISSOURI STATE UNIVERSITY
Cape Girardeau, Missouri 63701
Enclosed is an announcement of a tenure-track position in philosophy at the rank of assistant professor. We hope to fill this position rapidly; the target date for our final decision is
There are a few good students, however, and we are proud to say that our current graduating major, William Knorpp, won the 1985 Analysis competition and will be undertaking graduate study in philosophy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill next year.
The academic environment at SEMO is distinctly
Origins: Generally job postings are phrased in such a way as to make the positions offered sound as attractive as possible to prospective applicants (just as applicants craft their resumes to make their qualifications sound as attractive as possible to prospective employers). Occasionally, though, an employer admits up front that the advertised position may be less than ideal in some aspects in order to avoid wasting time interviewing a stream of applicants who immediately become disenchanted upon learning the details of the job, or to head off hiring employees who soon quit after finding out the job wasn't quite what they were
expecting.
The job posting quoted above, for the position of assistant professor of philosophy at Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), went a bit beyond the pale of truth in advertising with its frank admissions that the school's students were "poorly prepared for college level work, intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally provincial in the extreme," and could not be assumed to have "innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or independence of moral and political thought," while the philosophy department did "not usually have more than two students officially declared as majors at any given time" and offered the prospective candidate "virtually no opportunity to teach upper-division seminars."
Although the job market for tenure-track positions in academia is so tight that even this brutally honest job posting would probably draw plenty of applicants, it wasn't intended as a genuine advertisement. The text was written in a fit of frustration by SEMO's
Maybe there's a better way to break the bad news: honest job postings. This April, for example an unusually frank search announcement popped up on the Internet. The posting was so frank, in fact, that many net-browsers assumed it was a hoax. Well, it's no hoax — but the position's already been filled, thank you. In fact, it was filled nine years ago. Hamner Hill, who was then a doctoral student in philosophy at Washington University, So how's it been working with Southeast Missouri's "intellectually passive students"? Don't feel sorry for Hill: He's now the chair of the department, and says he's built the program into "one of the prides of the school." In fact, he boasts, "we now have about twenty-five philosophy majors a year." (One wonders how many are contemplating grad school.)
Graduate school Deans regularly wring their hands over the miserable job market for new PhD's. And just as regularly they earnestly resolve to disclose the delicate fact that even if their students do get a job, it may well be at an obscure institution that bears little resemblance to a distinguished research university.
In 1995 this ad was resurrected when someone posted it to a philosophy discussion group; from there it spread across the Internet and, even though SEMO had no such position open, again proved an effective advertisement.
Last updated: 15 August 2013