Academe has always been a walled garden. To be honest, I have more sympathy for the idea of constricting the amount of inbound traffic than I do for the implied disinterest in considering fresh, relevant talent for these jobs. B schools are grappling with this dilemma now, realizing that some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world don’t happen to have a terminal degree and are thus not worthy to teach what they know.

Anyway, good luck. My first comment on your blog, long overdue. Your work has been a huge influence on me since I heard you speak on the CBC in 1996!

in my experience, academic postings have already been filled by the time they are posted, and in my case I was asked to write my own posting when my contract came up for renewal! They go through the motions as required by the rules of protocol, but like any sensible person, they try their damnedest to subvert the rules to get what they want.

Your best strategy is to become personally known to the people in the department that interests you, or at least become known to people well known by them. Say what you will about hobknobbing and schmoozing, it works.

Well, it sounds a bit like the idea of ‘gate-keepers’ in academia. It (the academic system) is fraught with barriers, its not at all an ‘open’ architecture. The very knowledge-scape it ‘protects’ relies upon this socio-political screening to preserve its status quo so we shouldn’t be surprised.

Some knowledge is opening up, witness MIT’s efforts, etc. but mostly faculty still reside in the ivory towers. After all, the social construction is just that, nothing more than consensus-led ganging up by those within the traditional power bases.

So, to sum things are slowly changing Doug but its going to be a long battle. As I’m sure you realise you’ll be sacrificing a lot of what you hold dear in order to gain the security you now desire. This is the Social Contract epitomised.

Good luck with finding a suitable position. Do let us know where you end up. I’m sure you’ll find something eventually.

Cheers,

Tim

Isn’t this just a filtering technique?

For instance, in most cases, Microsoft uses staffing services to fill positions instead of hiring directly. It usually takes a year of working through the staffing service before one is even offered a full-time position with Microsoft directly. This practice filters out potential “bad eggs.”

Isn’t NYU’s hedging their list of openings just a version of this filtering?

hey Douglas, quite interesting. Like trying to buy a house in Greenwich. Seems the “clubhouse” mentality is in full swing at faculty level. Let’s say someone was fortunate enough to have you on staff, could you actually stomach the protocol? I actually thought your post was quite shocking that there are no faculty positions on the site considering where we are in this technology and communications age – is this the case with schools like Berkeley and Stanford etc..? Hope you find a good match.

I imagine that NYU’s response would be that positions are advertised in the venues that they can expect interested and qualified people to read. Similarly, media jobs in London are advertised in the Guardian: this isn’t a conspiracy to deprive readers of the Daily Telegraph of this information.

As a more general point: although of course I wish you luck, you are aware that full-time faculty posts in US universities (as in the UK, where I am) are rare, and subject to intense competition? Most people looking for such jobs have discipline-specific PhDs and peer-reviewed publications, and don’t confine their search to any one place: they have to be willing to move to wherever there’s a job. If you apply for a faculty post at NYU, you’ll be competing with – most likely – some hundreds of skilled and highly-qualified experts in whatever particular field they’re advertising for. Many of them will also be desparate, having failed to get any work on the back of their expensive degrees for the last year or more.

I’m sorry if this is obvious to you, or seems condescending, it’s just that your story of fancying an academic job and wandering over to see what NYU might be able to offer you sat rather uneasily with my and my friends’ experience of academic job search.

Don’t turn to the dark side! You’re on my dwindling list pubic intellectuals — I’d hate to have to put you in the “academic” column.

What’s troubling about this hurdle is less that it creates knowledge barriers to “outsiders” than it reinforces boundaries between academic departments. By separating out departmental job listings, NYU is ensuring that only the thinkers that belong to a single information flow and its correlative resources are even aware of the opportunities to join their faculty.

Innovators/intellectuals/scholars with different but perhaps complimentary knowledges are implicitly discouraged from “cross-pollinating,” thus keeping academia at its core conservative, slow-moving and unimaginative.

It’s just the first of many barriers to the Generalist in higher education.

As a young admirer of your work– I totally object to this, but wish you good luck in your pursuits nevertheless!

-R

Right. And, in this sense, it favors *me*. I can get lunch with the various chairs and play that insider’s game.

But I don’t like it, and it strikes me as an extension of old boys network insider favoritism.

It’s old fashioned. There was a time when you could expect everyone at a certain level in a given discipline to be reading certain journals – Journal of Philosophy, say, for philosophers – and to already be in academia and reading the relevant publications (in Canada, CAUT Bulletin). But that was a long time ago, before alternative career tracks and alternative media existed. Some universities, apparently, have not adapted.

Yeah, old fashioned, but you open the same can of worms: “Why haven’t they ‘adapted?’”

It is not only old fashioned, it is a broad practice. A lot of operations look inside first. And what better way to do it than not adapting or creating blinds to the inside.

Now, with the same operations – Let’s say there is no one “they” want on the inside? Adjust the blinds. Let’s say the undesirable insider get’s an interview? Assemble a “favourable” panel. It goes on and on. And that’s just with hiring….

My guess is that NYU either genuinely likes you and/or is genuinely complacent with having not “adapted.” Either way, as my asshole father says, “Don’t kick against the pricks.”

I guess i’d agree adding only “…too much.” OTOH one never knows what one may be dropping in one’s karma….

”Cause there’s a knock on wood that says, ‘It might’ Then there’s the long, long arm of the law that says ‘It’s right.’ And it’s a tricky balancing act between the two because both are equally true. And anything can happen que sera, sera. ‘Cause might makes right. Am i right?”

-laurie anderson

http://www.jimdavies.org/laurie-anderson/lyrics/UnitedStates.txt

- mason

Pardon the re visitation, but i had a jawdropper after posting the above.

“What if” i thought “NYU’s motives for leaving the marketplace to the ‘appropriate school or department’ is merely an attempt to preserve and protect academic freedom?”

That lead me to one of my favourite pages of Derrida: Page 33 of Otobiographies. Jaw dropper

etc

called perversion of the text? The Fifth Lecture tells us that there must be something unheimlich—uncanny—about the enforced repression [Unterdruckung] of the least degenerate needs. Why “unheimlich”? This is another form of the same question.
The ear is uncanny. Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become; large or small is what it can make or let happen (as in laisser-faire, since the ear is the most tendered and most open organ, the one that, as Freud reminds us, the infant cannot close); large or small as well the manner in which one may offer or lend an ear. It is to her—this ear—that I myself will feign to ad¬dress myself now in conclusion by speaking still more words in your ear, as promised, about your and my “academic freedom.”
When the lectures appear to recommend linguistic discipline as a counter to the kind of “academic freedom” that leaves students and teachers free to their own thoughts or programs, it is not in order to set constraint over against freedom. Behind “academic freedom” one can discern the silhouette of a con¬straint which is all the more ferocious and implacable because it conceals and disguises itself in the form of laisser-faire. Through the said “academic freedom,” it is the State that controls everything. The State: here we have the main defendant indicted in this trial. And Hegel, who is the thinker of the State, is also one of the principal proper names given to this guilty party. In fact, the autonomy of the university, as well as of its student and professor inhabitants, is a ruse of the State, “the most perfect ethical organism” (this is Nietzsche quoting He¬gel). The State wants to attract docile and unquestioning functionaries to itself. It does so by means of strict controls and rigorous constraints which these functionaries believe they apply to themselves in an act of total auto-nomy. The lectures can thus be read as a modern critique of the cultural machinery of State and of the educational system that was, even in yesterday’s industrial society, a fundamental part of the State appara¬tus. If today such an apparatus is on its way to being in part replaced by the media and in part associated with them, this only makes Nietzsche’s critique of journalism—which he never

etc

Right, insider favoritism has always been the meat slicer for raw talent and makes a nice Carpaccio out of it, enticing the talent to cannibalize itself. Check out the film Mephisto if you need any further validation for your healthy outrage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mephisto_%281981_film%29

-
I ran into a strange employment opportunity from the performing arts department at San Francisco State University. I received a letter from them asking if I was interested in a teaching position. Being a self-employed actress/acting coach I thought what the heck, a steady paycheck, why not!
After a few Catch-22 phone calls to set up an interview I got the funny feeling that the invite was bogus, which indeed it was. I learned from a friend who worked there that the state requires them to demonstrate that they have advertised open positions to the general public even though they had already filled it with an insider.
-
Talk about hurdles and hoarding… be glad you’re not an actor. According to the Screen Actors Guild there are 52,000 roles annually for about one million actors in LA. The job openings are released daily to agents and managers who have an oath of honor (yes, honor in Hollywood, can you believe it!) not to let actors see the list.

I’ve often wondered which part of the sky would fall first if actors had easy access to job openings? Would actor fatigue resulting from waiting in the inevitable cattle call lines separate the chaff from the wheat organically thus eliminating the need for the agents and managers to do it?
One can only wonder.

Good luck!

I feel like this job listing thing is just an extension of the self-insulation that occurs at a lot of these universities. I’m a graduate student in communication studies (if ever there were a program ripe for cross-disciplinary study this is it), and I’ve been repeatedly pressured into declaring a very very narrow academic specialty. Even our introductory Master’s textbook is divided into communication “traditions” that the authors don’t seem to realize are connected in any way. You’re either a critical scholar, a cybernetic scholar, a sociocultural scholar etc. There’s no recognition that these traditions are all intimately related to one another. Doug, your generalist, big idea approach is sorely sorely needed in academia.

I actually had a professor encourage me to think of myself as CEO of my own corporation. Talk about Life Incorporated!

Yeah. Thing is, I have a feeling if I *were* to get a job at a university, it would be through the back door. Some teacher who likes my stuff would get me a position. Then they’d do the fake “search” for a candidate by posting the job in some publication, do a few interviews with the most racially diverse subset of applicants, and just give me the post with a wink and a nod.

If I attempted to do the public application process, on the other hand, I’d be rejected in the first round.

And who wants to start a career that way? By accepting the benefits of corruption? Doesn’t seem like a good foundation.

And I hear you on the risk to my “public intellectual” status. Though I look at a guy like Stuart Ewen and see that you don’t have to give one up to get the other. He’s at City College in NY, and loving it. Then again, he publicly attacks the president of the school, and says academia is extremely political.

[...] am I the only one who finds this ironic? http://rushkoff.com/2009/09/25/equal-opportunity-evades-nyu/ [...]

Many schools and university departments understand trans and interdisciplinary studies are threatening, but also highly desired by some of the brighter students. The trick is to seem or actually be a renegade institution without diminishing one’s reputation in the “straight world.” When a universi-ty actually shapes itself or behaves like progressive or progressed conceptions of the universe this can be unsettling to the state and the populace. I dare say a rushkoff book about *it’s* origins would be exciting or at least very revealing. My guess is it should be written before the healthcare issue has the final nail driven. Then we are likely to meander over to education – that is if the war and wall street don’t suck up all the oxygen.

Take Care and Good Luck Doug!

-mason