Equal Opportunity Evades NYU?

I’m looking for a teaching job. I mean a real one, a full-time faculty position with health insurance and everything. A place to do my work with a bit less attention to what the market might be willing to support at any given moment.

Having done some adjunct work at NYU, I figured I would check their job listings for what I might be good for. There’s a few dozen departments that list media studies courses. So I tried the “Job Listings” page to see who might be hiring.

Imagine my surprise when I learned there are no faculty positions listed on NYU’s jobs listings page. That’s the place for people who want to work in administration, building services, security, or food services. There are no teaching positions listed. Why not?

There is an FAQ that explains it:

How do I apply for faculty or research positions?

Academic positions (faculty and research scientists) are advertised in a variety of venues (e.g., The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, professional journals) by individual schools and/or academic departments within NYU. Therefore, all inquiries should be directed specifically to the appropriate school or department.

Is this an appropriate hurdle? Requiring prospective faculty to figure out which publications a department might choose to advertise in and then purchase them each week in order to see if there are any positions coming up?

Or does each of the hundreds of departments at NYU really want letters of inquiry from people asking to learn if there are positions opening, and where they will be advertised? Or is this a way of preventing “outsiders” from even finding out about positions?

What do you think? Is NYU being smart to keep its openings secret, or is it being exclusionary to a fault?

To me, the most interesting thing – the Clay Shirky style insight, if you will – is how the Internet exposes instances in which information is being intentionally hidden from public view. The bias of the medium is toward sharing data. When the data is not shared, it is because someone has decided the data should not be shared.

And then this leads to the obvious question: why not?