Dear APA,
The main programs at the conferences have been getting pretty weak. The JFP is a clunky artifact. The "placement service" is a useless complication. The smoker plays an inappropriate role in the hiring process. The interview room is a terrible place to conduct an interview. Your website sucks. You need to rethink the conference calendar and the internal structure of the organization as a whole. And so on.
Everything you do with respect to the job market - from advertising the openings to organizing the interviews - can be done better and more efficiently via online channels. Concentrate simply on organizing good conferences. Please remove yourself from the job market process altogether.
Sincerely,
Spiros
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16 comments:
Spiros, we live in a world that has assholes, and those assholes have to be guarded by an organization with censuring power. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Spiros? The APA has a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for the grad students, and you curse the placement service. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what the APA knows. That burden on grad students, while tragic, probably saved lives. And the APA's existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at department meetings, you want the APA involved in the hiring process , you need the APA involved in the hiring process. We use words like interview, smoker, and membership dues. The APA use these words as the backbone of a career spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. The APA has neither the time nor the inclination to explain itself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very placement service that it provides and then questions the manner in which it provides it. The APA would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, the APA suggests you pick up a JFP and read a post. Either way, the APA doesn't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
I thought the program was pretty good.
Anyway, the people who organize the program are completely different from the people who run the job stuff, online stuff, etc. The program is organized by philosophers.
Dear Sir:
Thank you for your input. The APA welcomes feedback from it's members.
Yours Sincerely,
The American Philosophical Asociation
Killjoy:
You can't handle the truth -- but maybe if you read Dummett?
You see, Glaucon, I can deal with the irrealism, and the nominalism, and the idealism. I don't want tables, and I don't want numbers. What I do want is for you to stand there in that raggedy corduroy blazer and with your Oxford mouth extend me some fucking courtesy. You gotta ask me nicely.
I'm gonna rip the eyes out of your head, and piss in your dead skull. You fucked with the wrong metaphysican...
Dear Philosophy Departments,
Nothing you do with respect to the job market -- from advertising your job openings to conducting your interviews -- needs to be done with the APA. There are plenty of alternative places to publish job announcements. The videophones of science fiction past are today's commonplace technology, and you can do perfectly good interviews with them. The APA has no power over your hiring process. Please remove the APA from your job searches altogether.
Sincerely,
Frobbil
Spiros,
Why not just quit the APA? It's a piece of shit, as you continue to point out. It does nothing worthwhile. Just pull out and go around it. Seriously. Why not?
best comment thread ever.
Although I'm a "professional philosopher" in the sense that I earn my living teaching philosophy at a four-year university I haven't been a member of the APA for over ten years now. I didn't obtain my current teaching position or any previous one through it's irrelevant "placement service." Nor do I attend its meetings in the most expensive hotels smack in the middle of the most expensive cities in the country. Waste of time, waste of money. It wouldn't bother me in the slightest if the APA went out of existence altogether.
Glaucons comment is great. now im thinking about one of my reserved professors who studied metaphysics saying that online.
@ anon 5:24
I'm pretty sure Glaucon is one of your metaphysics professors.
The hiring meeting should be
a) A week later so that it doesn't cut into time with families over the holidays.
b) Moved around--let it be in the middle of the US one year, the west coast the next, and the east coast the next, etc.
c) Never held someplace that gets lots of snow in the winter (New England, NY, Chicago).
I think the philosophical content at the meetings I've attended in the last 10 years has been quite good.
I am deeply troubled by the financial toll the job market takes on graduate students. I'm not sure what to do about this, but this can't continue.
a) If held a week later it will be even more expensive.
b) Good idea.
c) Moving the meeting away from snowy cities is also going to make it more expensive for graduate students, since graduate students are disproportionately grouped around snowy cities. (For instance, Houston would be a good alternative to Chicago -- big hotels, air traffic hub -- but there are hundreds of philosophy grad students within a couple of hours drive of Chicago and only a handful within a couple of hours drive of Houston.)
The only real long-term solution is to stop the pointless and expensive practice of interviewing at the convention.
So this is what it's like, backstage at the Vatican.
Almost makes me wish I'd gone into sociology.
People always complain about the bad features of having the APA and job searches connected. Just curious -- are there any good reasons to have the APA in charge of this job search process?
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