From the APA:
The National Office has not received a sufficient number of employment ads to warrant publishing a May 2009 issue of Jobs for Philosophers, No. 182. Therefore, there will not be a JFP print issue published in May. Web only ads (if any) will continue to be published on-line from May through the summer months.
But on the bright side, the APA will be taking proactive measures to help the graduate-student membership identify and explore the possibilities for non-academic employment, employment in pre-college educational institutions, and post-docs in cognate fields which philosophers might not be accustomed to noticing. Three special sessions at the Eastern meeting will be devoted to workshops aimed at helping newly-minted PhDs and other job-seekers to survive these hard economic times. In July, results will be mader available of the APA's comprehensive analysis of the impact on the job prospects of the increasing reliance on adjunct instructors at state colleges and universities.
Sorry, I made all of the "bright side" shit up. There is no bright side.
And the APA website still fucking sucks.
7 comments:
Excellent! Glad my APA dues have been used for better purposes, like having every issue of every volume of the proceedings and addresses printed, bound, and mailed to me since I've been a member. It's clearly more important to update and mail out the bound and updated members list to every member every year than to look out for the welfare of students.
Oh, and if there's not going to be a late spring JFP, then I want my dues pro-rated for the savings the APA will have for not having to print and mail it. Nah, on second thought, they can keep it so the Eastern program can have a *glossy* cover next year!
I like how the phrase 'No May JFP' is true whether you use 'JFP' or mention it.
What does it suck?
At the Pacific meetings in Vancouver, there were several sessions related to employment. These were organized in summer/early fall 2008, before most of us understood the magnitude of the economic problems that would impact hiring:
(1) Getting Philosophy into the High School Curriculum-Sponsored by the APA Committee on Pre-College Instruction in Philosophy
(2) Doing Placement Well: Suggestions for Job Seekers and for Departments-Sponsored by the APA Committee on Academic Career Opportunities and Placement
(3) Mid-career Professional Survival, Success, and Change-Sponsored by the APA Committee on the Status of Women
(4) The Promise and Peril of Online Teaching-Sponsored by the APA Committee on Philosophy in Two-Year Colleges
The standing committees will be submitting their programs for APA-Eastern by a 5/31/09 deadline. They generally take a leadership role in offering the sorts of special-interest programs you suggest.
If you'd like to pass along suggestions, you could contact the committee chairs (listed on the APA web site) or even volunteer to serve on one of these committees next year and assist in organizing such sessions.
It's still a mystery why people don't find the web ads adequate for meeting recruitment needs. JFP has often included one-year sabbatical replacement jobs, but rarely the part-time jobs. Campuses that require print publication can always use the Chronicle, and many do.
The print APA Newsletters were eliminated a couple of years ago to save money and almost all are now available on-line, open to the public. I don't recall hearing complaints about that.
Okay, so here's something I've only recently learned regarding why, despite all the great reasons *not* to continue them, hard copy printed job ads are still needed. Some institutions, like my own, are required to have physical hard copies of job ads. This requirement from human resources has to do with two things: 1) an antiquated rule that really ought to be changed and 2) the US Department of Immigration and Naturalization, which also seems to need an overhaul regarding this.
This situation only became salient to me when an unlucky department at my institution made an international hire. Their professional association recently moved to 100% online job ad services. Our HR, which placed the ad on the department's behalf, was unaware that the ad was only going to be online. Things proceeded as normal, the department made a hire, and the highly qualified applicant they hired was from another country. Little did the department realize that once the new hire began dealing with US immigration, a *hard copy* of the job ad was absolutely necessary for the application materials. The online ad was not acceptable. No amount of rational negotiation could change this--and as a consequence another job search had to be conducted. The department had to use not only the professional association job postings, but also a printed edition elsewhere.
Until I witnessed this happen, I had no idea about these requirements and how they work. If the APA did move to only online job ads, I strongly recommend that every hiring committee fully investigate their institutional HR rules and be very aware that International hiring is complicated by the lack of hard copies of job ads. I am in no way defending the hard copy requirements, but only passing along some information about how printed job ads are still *assumed* to be the norm in hires, and that a change in APA production of print ads can potentially complicate hires.
My "minor" in philosophy helped me get my current non-academic job. They were looking in part for someone who devote some philosophical rigor to deciding which items in online catalogs would be germane to certain internet search terms. Really.
That's one I owe Spiros.
I am a tenured philosopher with no intention of moving to another school anytime soon. Can someone please tell me WHY THE FUCK I still pay my APA dues? They never did anything for me when I was an adjunct slave working for pathetic wages, they made sure that the papers I gave at the conferences weren't "prestigious enough" to count since I wasn't part of the main program, and they will only give me a mail list to advertise events to my colleagues in the field if I pay for it.
Paying APA dues: finally proof that people do things without any self-interest (or intelligence) at all.
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