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Demographics:[]

How many applications have you sent out this year?:
0:
1-10: 9
10-20: 8
21-30: 4
31-40: 2
41-50: 2
50+: 3

How many MLA interviews (or other prelim if they are leading to campus visits)?:

12+: 3
8+: 5
4+: 7
2+: 6
1+:7
0 (with 15+ applications sent): 1 fml

Are you a (an)...?
Assistant Professor: 6
Associate Professor:
Full Professor:
ABD (will finish this academic year): 13
ABD and currently in a one-year, VAP, visiting instructor, lecturer or adjunct position: 1
Ph.D. in hand (one-year, VAP, Lecturer, post-doc, adjunct): 4
Ph.D. in hand (unable to find academic employment at the moment):

==When should we assume we have been definitively rejected? Do all institutions send rejection emails/letters?==

If you do not recieve an invitation to MLA/phone interview by the time of the MLA, then it's a safe bet you're out of the running (but remember: sometimes interview invitations arrive just a few days before the MLA). Not all institutions send rejections (and some only send them to you if you were interviewed or had a campus visit). 

Questionable Recent Hires at Elite Institutions:[]

Can we return to this rich discussion that has been removed, at least in part? I think taking out the references to obvious affiliations and names should do it. "The experient quotient" is a huge topic in hiring and the platitudes that the US academy puts out about it are interesting. Should we start here:

1) Can someone be an “expert” in a culture without experience in that culture?

In the other string, the (probably US-based) "yes" responses to this question were pretty tepid. 


you should consider signing your posts...


Please do point to the "platitudes" to which you refer. 1. Tepid: I don't think my response was tepid last time around; but why not? I'll go again--I find this topic terrifically entertaining. 2. US-based: I dare say nearly everyone here is US-based (meaning graduate students or PhDs in US institutions). But that isn't what you mean by "based" I suspect. Rather, my sense is that you are making a vulgar identarian claim that "experience" is a necessary condition to being an "expert" in a "culture". Most of the scholarly positions (that would attract me, at least) likely do not require one to have been an expert in a culture (whatever that means), but rather to produce articles and books on topics in a given field and to teach graduate courses on those topics and undergraduate courses of a more generalist nature. If fieldwork is required to produce the kind of work in which a given scholar is interested in doing, then one must also have pursued fieldwork, naturally. I think the anti-intellectual model you keep on offering is a bit sad and tedious (if, as I said, entertaining). We would also, as scholars, have to reflect on experience as well to properly respond to your question: what is experience? how does one know if their encounter constitutes experience?  Finally, let's go along with you, because I think you're attacking a figure that does not exist, this untrained non-expert. I think everyone I know in Hispanic Studies has spent extended periods in Latin America and Spain (whether for school, work, research, or because they grew up there). Phantomlord (talk) 01:25, December 5, 2012 (UTC) (x2).

The defensiveness/snarkyness in both the above posts detracts a bit from them. “You are making a vulgar identidarian claim that "experience" is a necessary condition to being an "expert" in a "culture"” Well, the above post could be understood as a colonial identidarian claim that one can be an expert without experience in a culture. Let’s just respond to the string without emotion. Doing that will make your case stronger, anyway.

The other string outlined experience, culture, and expert as:

Expert = hired
Experience = 5+ years
Culture = the area-study mentioned in ad (interpret it how you wish, or go ask the SC)

I liked this one from the other string: “Culture” is a more difficult idea, I’d call it’ something along the lines of the uniqueness of the human experience which that community enjoys (no, I don't know how to define "community" in that phrase).

how does one know if their encounter constitutes experience? Nice. The experience table of 5+ years, I suppose, is extensive/long enough that it would necessarily expose a person to the salient dimensions of “culture”: language, food, drink, festivals, ceremonies, sex, holidays, weddings, funerals, and so on. After 5+ years, the culture would no longer be an “exotic” one, which is the purpose of having experience in the culture in the first place. Some hiring ads have the language: “extensive experience” in [insert language here]-speaking nations. (A serious weakness to the “experience” measure is that the US is at once Caribbean and Mexican and, well, just about everything Spanish-speaking other than peninsular.) A real concern here is: does/should a US PhD replace 5+ years experience in this sense? (As it’s nearly impossible to have 5+ years somewhere, when one is not a native of that place.) And maybe departments want people who still understand the place of their study as exotically alluring (that is, some experience but not … ) – which could be an impulse for him/her to write more on it, and to be more dynamic in the classroom. Scholars from the US who studied in Latin America might weigh in here (if there are any reading): did years residence in the place nuance your “knowledge” and “experience value” of the culture?

At any rate, I don't think SC are looking exclusively for "expertise" in "culture" as they are defined above. The hiring trends make that very clear. 

----

The post above does something interesting: it promises to be the last post. Recognizing my "emotional" investment (when those struggling against "experiece" had already been accused of a tepid defense), poster (173.245.64.13) asks me to respond without emotion before attacking mine as the "colonial identarian" position. I am not sure what that means, but in our field almost nothing is worse than being colonial. Fighting words, those. 

So I will have to respond in kind: I asked a series of questions to which there is no answer hoping to expose this section as nothing more than the understandable but also vague resentment of people who don't have the job they feel they deserve. And yet the poster answered my questions unproblematically (but I hope at least politically: I hope this rigid proposal for the biolpolitical management of the search is at least beneficial to you!). That said, I once more go along with this position, which I think is a fake: maybe there are some people around who don't have five years of experience drinking, eating, festivaling etc in their "target land"--I would add working and studying, too, since your list sounds mostly like a holiday (and a five year one at that!). And hopefully their work is not comparative or hemispheric or based in any period before say the mid-century! In any case: is this a bigger problem (fewer than five years' experience in a culture) than, say, having simplistic ideas? not reading enough? wasting too much time here on the wiki? Phantomlord (talk) 16:13, December 5, 2012 (UTC)

The language of many ads includes terms that Phantomlord attempts to expose as fraudulent. The purpose of this string is quite a relevant one: how to interpret what ads request. Phantom is really out to make the personal attacks on people he/she feels are subordinate to whatever supposed authority he/she feels she/he wields. The above post wreaks of insecurity from someone who wants to believe in his/her place in the hierarchy is deserved, while obviously scared that the points outlined above and in the other string make a clear case that the measures the field uses to judge candidates are broken. It's no secret about Humanistic evaluation being broken. An ad may ask for things like "experience" in "cultures" and then contracts per elite affiliation instead. I very much agree that SC are not looking for "expertise" in "cultures" in any sense of their definition. So, yes, Phantom, your conservative and elitist bent is as circular as you intend, and goes nowhere. It does little more than to underscore your colonial preferences for you and your cohort. "I'm the best because I studied (insert culture here) at (insert institution far from said culture)." Preference for that circumstance is why Humanistic evaluation is broken.     

Tienes que ser un experto, pero un experto en hispanismo, latinoamericanismo, peninsualrismo, como sea que sea llamado. Eso no implica una experiencia directa en los lugares físicos, ni mucho menos que seas realmente un experto en una cultura. Eres un experto en enseñar aquello que se espera sea enseñado en la academia de los EEUU, y que ha sido llamado hispanismo, latinoamericanismo, peninsularismo, etc.

Como se sabe, hay expertos que no conocen de verdad el lugar físico. Y también alguien puede conocer de primera mano la cultura y no saber un soberano pepino de lo que se tratan las clases de cultura hispana.  Al final hay que quitarse la venda de los ojos: lo que ofrecemos es una línea de productos dentro del mercado académico. Esa línea ha sida creada teniendo en cuenta expectativas concretas de tal mercado. No necesita ser corroborada por la realidad. Puede darse el caso simple de que un experto escriba sobre una "cultura" que solo existe en los libritos de texto de Hispanic Culture, y que la experiencia directa de la realidad no confirme ni por asomo. O peor, expertos que primero deciden en su gabinete lo que quieren encontrar, van al lugar y no cejan hasta encontrarlo, copiarlo y pegarlo en sus papers.

No complicarse la vida. Esto es solo un modus vivendi, una chamba más. El que crea que hace algo más, urgente visitar al analista. Frat. I'm completely annoyed by this banter. Even more so by the need to use rediculous "scholarly" vocabulary. This is quite obvously a sign of insecurity. We are all in the same boat and this service is to provide answers, not cut each other to threads. This is the type of attitude that gives those in our profession a bad rap. Stop gumming up the works.




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The purpose of this site is for those on the academic job market to share information about the progress of various searches. It is also a place where information and critiques may be shared about the *general* practices of universities and departments. However, it is *not* a staging area for launching personal attacks on identifiable individuals. The remarks removed from this page cross the line into "abusive" content (including the use of what might be considered "ethnic slurs"). I apologize that some comments with legtimate intellectual merit may have been deleted here, but they could not be untangled from the abusive content. General discussion of the *academic* or intellectual issues raised previously may be taken up again -- but without resort to specific attacks on or critiques of a particular individual. I hope this policy is clear. Future abusive, harrassing or threatening remarks will be deleted and users may be blocked. Thanks. Una74 (talk) 00:39, November 19, 2012 (UTC)

Should we split the job wiki into Postings September through December and Postings January through July?[]

Both CHE and Insidehighered had an article in the past several days pointing out that almost half the positions on the Job Information List post after January 1. Should we also reflect that trend on the Job Wiki by perhaps labeling on section "Postings September through December" and another section "Postings January through July"? Thoughts/opinions on this?

It might make it a little less unwieldy for those of us still looking if we didn't have to slog through 9-month-old job information. I know people are supposed to put new information at the tops to avoid this kind of thing but I think some of the lists are kind of muddled. But are people still updating?50.140.147.54 20:24, April 17, 2013 (UTC)mys

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