College fills open faculty position through cynical job posting.
Generally job postings are phrased in such a way as to make the positions offered sound as attractive as possible to prospective applicants (just as applicants craft their resumes to make their qualifications sound as attractive as possible to prospective employers). Occasionally, though, an employer admits up front that the advertised position may be less than ideal in some aspects in order to avoid wasting time interviewing a stream of applicants who immediately become disenchanted upon learning the details of the job, or to head off hiring employees who soon quit after finding out the job wasn't quite what they wereexpecting.The job posting quoted above, for the position of assistant professor of philosophy at Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), went a bit beyond the pale of truth in advertising with its frank admissions that the school's students were 'poorly prepared for college level work, intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally provincial in the extreme,' and could not be assumed to have 'innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or independence of moral and political thought,' while the philosophy department did 'not usually have more than two students officially declared as majors at any given time' and offered the prospective candidate 'virtually no opportunity to teach upper-division seminars.'Although the job market for tenure-track positions in academia is so tight that even this brutally honest job posting would probably draw plenty of applicants, it wasn't intended as a genuine advertisement. The text was written in a fit of frustration by SEMO's then-Chairman of the Department of Philosophy back in 1986 and posted to the Internet (without his permission) by someone else. Nonetheless, this cynically-worded advertisement accomplished its goal, as the academic magazine Lingua Franca reported several years later:Graduate school Deans regularly wring their hands over the miserable job market for new PhD's. And just as regularly they earnestly resolve to disclose the delicate fact that even if their students do get a job, it may well be at an obscure institution that bears little resemblance to a distinguished research university. Maybe there's a better way to break the bad news: honest job postings. This April, for example an unusually frank search announcement popped up on the Internet. The posting was so frank, in fact, that many net-browsers assumed it was a hoax. Well, it's no hoax - but the position's already been filled, thank you. In fact, it was filled nine years ago. Hamner Hill, who was then a doctoral student in philosophy at Washington University, St. Louis, spied the posting on his department's bulletin board, and Southeast Missouri State hired him soon after. 'I figured that whoever wrote this must be fun to work for,' he says. So how's it been working with Southeast Missouri's 'intellectually passive students'? Don't feel sorry for Hill: He's now the chair of the department, and says he's built the program into 'one of the prides of the school.' In fact, he boasts, 'we now have about twenty-five philosophy majors a year.' (One wonders how many are contemplating grad school.)In 1995 this ad was resurrected when someone posted it to a philosophy discussion group; from there it spread across the Internet and, even though SEMO had no such position open, again proved an effective advertisement. H. Hamner Hill, now the department chair at SEMO, reported that his department received 'dozens of calls' from interested applicants.
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