Academic Job Market Research Articles

Cerebral Microhemorrhages Detected by Susceptibility-Weighted Imaging in Amateur Boxers

SWI is a new technique for evaluating diffuse axonal injury associated with punctate hemorrhages. The aim of our study was to determine the prevalence of cerebral microhemorrhages in amateur boxers compared with nonboxers by using SWI and to evaluate the sensitivity of SWI compared with T2 FSE and T2*GE sequences. We performed cranial MR imaging with a 1.5T scanner in 21 amateur boxers and 21 control subjects. The study protocol included conventional MR images, T2 FSE, T2*GE, and SWI sequences. The proportions of boxers and controls having CSP, DPVS, cerebral atrophy, cerebellar atrophy, ventricular dilation, PSWMD, and microhemorrhages were computed and were compared by using the χ(2) test of proportions. The relationship between microhemorrhages and boxing-related covariates was assessed by using the Wilcoxon rank sum test. The association between the categories was tested by using the Fisher exact test. Using SWI, microhemorrhages were found in 2 (9.52%) of 21 boxers. The microhemorrhages were not visible on T2 FSE or T2*GE images. The proportion of subjects with microhemorrhages did not differ significantly between the boxers and control subjects (χ(2) = 0.525, df = 1, P = .4688). The prevalence of CSP and DPVS was significantly higher in the boxers than in the control subjects. More microhemorrhages were detected in amateur boxers than in controls, but this difference was not statistically significant.

Public History, Grim News, and Historical Views

This issue of The Public Historian comes to you as scholarly documents of another sort are delivered to hundreds of other historians, nearly as many as will receive this journal. Those other documents are doctoral diplomas, around eight hundred of them in the U.S. alone this spring. Their conferral might give heart to us all that the profession continues to attract and train bright new recruits, if not for the plunge in the number of jobs in higher education that awaits their recipients. The recent issue of the AHA’s Perspectives on History reports that the past year brought a sharp drop in academic jobs. The AHA anticipates more of the same this year, as the number of those completing Ph.D.s in history rises (Robert Townsend, “GrimYear on the Academic Job Market for Historians,” Perspectives, January 2010). Those trends will sound familiar to the generation of you who remember a similar job crisis in the 1970s–80s. Even thosewho didn’t live through that period know a bit about its significance to our field: it was amid the difficulties of that moment thirty years ago that “public history” came to be. The exact nature of the relationship between the job crisis and the establishment of the new field is subject to different views. For some founders of the field, the correlation of crisis and reinvention of the profession was strong; for others, a different set of motives inspired “going public.” Whatever the relative contribution at the time, the association of public history with crisis employment seems to have stuck, carrying through to this day. If higher edu-

Political Theory Today: Results of a National Survey

AbstractThis article reports the results of a 2008 national survey of political theorists. The results, based on 1,086 responses from professors at accredited, four-year colleges and universities in the United States, provide information about the demographic characteristics of political theorists, opinion data on the place of political theory within political science, the proportion of political theorists in political science departments, teaching loads, expectations for tenure, the experience of political theorists on the academic job market, and, finally, rankings of theorists, journals, publishers, professional organizations, and Ph.D. programs.

Through the eyes of farmers' daughters: Academics working on marginal land

Synopsis In this article we provide a reflective analysis of our experiences as marginalized academics and explore the complex, intersecting factors that combine to make the achievement of tenure track positions extremely difficult. The emergence of the entrepreneurial university, combined with dire economic times, has resulted in the trend of hiring contract faculty over tenure track hires. Women contract faculty have fewer opportunities for advancement, and family responsibilities further complicate attempts to attain secure academic employment. Within these contexts, we examine the importance of access to social capital during graduate programs and show how we prioritized particular institutional requirements and professional practices, to our detriment. We focused on completing the Ph.D.s, establishing records of teaching excellence, and presenting at conferences. We now believe that obtaining scholarships, landing research grants, securing publications in refereed academic journals, and privileging research over teaching would have better prepared us to compete in the academic job market.

Letter to the Editors: In The Academic Job Market, Will You Be Competitive? A Case Study in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Over the last several decades, the percentage of permanent faculty positions at universities has declined significantly. Increasingly, courses are taught by adjunct instructors, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows rather than by permanent faculty members. This creates intense competition for permanent positions. Data summarizing the general qualifications of newly hired first-time professors in permanent jobs are valuable for students contemplating graduate school and academic careers. These data should also help graduate students and postdoctoral fellows set goals that will enable them to be competitive for permanent academic jobs. Here we present data collected in a survey from 181 newly hired faculty members in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology from around the world. We report the average number of publications, courses taught, years as postdoctoral fellows, and research grants received for successful job applicants. Our results indicate an extremely competitive environment for permanent academic jobs in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology.

Accounting Faculty Job Search in a Seller's Market

ABSTRACT: This research examines accounting faculty job search and selection in the tightening academic job market. Surveys were sent to all new accounting Ph.D.s and to faculty who relocated from 2002 to 2004. The survey included 37 factors of importance (e.g., salary, geographical location) to new Ph.D.s in selecting their initial faculty position and to relocating faculty. Overall, faculty appear to be very concerned with their teaching load, criteria used for promotion and tenure decisions, and compatibility with other faculty. Most faculty viewed likelihood of getting tenure as very important. We note that new faculty going to doctoral schools view this item as much less important than others. The opportunity to teach desired courses was much more important for those going to non-Ph.D.-granting schools. Most faculty viewed salary as being relatively important, but those going to nondoctoral institutions viewed salary as somewhat less important than geographic location. Examination of other factors suggested significant differences between different faculty groups. The study's results provide important implications for universities seeking to hire or retain qualified faculty in a challenging job market, and for faculty wishing to obtain the most rewarding position.

Adaptation or Paradigm Shift?

Even scholars who have no interest in economics may find the debate about behavioral economics (beh.ec.) of great interest because it points to a major meta-theoretical, empirical, and normative divide in the social sciences. While social science textbooks, professional associations, and the academic job market are still largely organized by the oldfashioned division among disciplines, social sciences are often conducted in terms of one of two paradigms that cut across these disciplines. On one side are those who hold that all behavior can be studied in neoclassical terms, as mainstream economics does—on the other, those who hold that behavior should be studied as if the actors were homo sapiens, not homo economicus. One paradigm assumes that actors are rational individuals, seeking to maximize their self interests whether they buy, sell, vote, pray or love. The other paradigm, adopted by other members of the same disciplines, draws on a variety of conceptions that focus on cultural, historical, and structural forces, and assumes that people often act non-rationally and heed complex motives. Behavioral economics is an excellent place to compare these two paradigms and to explore where the social sciences are headed. Beh.ec. took off in the late 1970s. Its first major stars are widely recognized as the psychologists, Daniel Kahneman (winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics) and the late Amos Tversky. Previous work along similar lines had been carried out by Herbert Simon and long before that, by Adam Smith (Theory of Moral Sentiments), among others, but Kahneman and Tversky were the first to provide beh.ec. with a strong empirical backing. Scores of other scholars have since contributed to beh.ec., including some whose work has captured the public imagination, topping best-seller lists (e.g., Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, and Irrational Exuberance by Robert Shiller). Three recent contributions to this field further strengthen the case that people do not and cannot behave the way the neoclassical paradigm assumes. In reviewing these works, the key question is whether the neoclassical paradigm can be corrected, and whether the mixed bag of conceptions associated with the homo sapien model can be consolidated to provide a better paradigm. To put it starkly, if the first approach is wrong (or at least deeply flawed), and the second provides none but myriad answers—where do we go from here? Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational employs original studies and anecdotes to show that people are congenitally unable to process information and make the calculations that utility maximization and otherwise rational conduct requires. His results are very much in line with previous findings of beh.ec., and thus add to their robustness. Many of Ariely’s findings, and those of beh.ec. in general, are centered around three axes:

Why do I have to dance like that? accute and the Performance of Optimism

Dancing with Myself IT IS CLEAR TO ME that the most relevant thing to say in an article about the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English at this particular historical moment is that we dance. For those of you not in the know, brief update: in May 2007, fueled by University of Saskatchewan bar that remained open for business and playlist engineered by then-ACCUTE president Steven Bruhm, the first annual ACCUTE dance party was successfully inaugurated with much shaking and shimmying. Since 2007, the dance party has become the social anchor of the annual ACCUTE conference and, while it serves the important function of making us English-teaching folk more interesting than those wine-and-cheese-hosting learned societies, I've come to think that it also functions as site where prominent contemporary structure of feeling is performed en masse and writ large. Paradise by the Dashboard Lights In the context of the current academic job market (or lack thereof), it strikes me that the ACCUTE conference as whole--and the dance party expressly so--is collective performance of what Lauren Berlant has identified as optimism. In Berlant's terms, cruel optimism is a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. She goes on to specify that what is about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world (33). Thus, for example, the relation of attachment to tenure-track job, which is ultimately relation of attachment to middle-class income, stable employment, health and retirement benefits, and time to do one's own work, at this point might be understood to be sheer fantasy and even toxic since the pursuit of this attachment can happen at the expense of other careers or, even more cruel, at the risk of driving one's self mad with the perpetual fantasy-disappointment cycle of the job application process. However, continued participation in the ACCUTE conference--which might be understood as the object/scene of desire (34) because it functions as gathering of possibility: of making connections, of showing off one's good work--demonstrates refusal to give up hope, even in the face of diminishing employment odds in the humanities, specifically, and the troubling corporatization of universities, more generally. I Will Survive Participation in the ACCUTE conference, and in particular the dance party, performs an optimistic practice (even if one does not feel optimistic) of what Berlant calls keep[ing] one in proximity to the scene of desire/ attrition (34). …

An Exploratory Investigation of the Periodic Performance Evaluation Processes for Marketing Faculty

Whether a first entrant into the academic job market or a seasoned professional, career outcomes for marketing educators depend heavily on the evaluation process used at their institutions. This research explores the periodic performance evaluation process for marketing faculty members using data collected from a national sample of marketing department chairpersons. Several aspects of the evaluation and its potential outcomes are explored, including teaching and research expectations. The results indicate that regular and frequent performance evaluations are a routine part of life for marketing faculty, whatever their institutional affiliation. Furthermore, these evaluations tend to play a role in promotion, tenure, compensation, and retention decisions. Several interesting conclusions emerge when the results from doctoral-granting and non-doctoral-granting universities are compared, including that doctoral-granting universities tend to have a more restrictive view of what constitutes acceptable research. Additionally, teaching and service were found to play a more important role in the tenure decision at non-doctoral-granting universities, whereas research was found to play a larger role at doctoral-granting universities. These and other results offer a unique look at the policies and procedures used in the periodic performance evaluation of marketing faculty members.

A Primer on Applying to the Liberal Arts College

Being on the academic job market is one of the greatest horrors of scholarly life. An applicant submits dozens of applications and all too frequently receives no response at all from the majority of places to which she applies. The lack of feedback makes it impossible to know why one was not considered good enough for an interview, making it difficult to improve one's applications and job prospects in the future. A recent review of applications for a tenure-track job at a liberal arts college convinced me that many of the applicants lacked a basic understanding of how to market themselves to a search committee at a teaching college. A part of the problem is likely the many years of assimilation into the research culture of their graduate programs; a process that creates a greater intuitive understanding of the culture of major research institutions than of teaching institutions. Nevertheless many applicants do apply for jobs at liberal arts colleges, so a primer is needed for job seekers who want to maximize their chances of getting an interview for those jobs.

Disability and the Academic Job Market

No abstract available

Preparing the New Professoriate: What Courses Should They Be Ready to Teach?

We examined job advertisements published in the September and October 2006 issues of the APA Monitor and APS Observer for courses that psychology departments requested successful applicants for assistant professor openings to teach. We found that 4 courses accounted for 45% of all courses so listed: research methods, introductory psychology, developmental psychology, and statistics. We suggest that graduate students seeking academic positions acquire experience teaching these classes, in addition to courses in their specialty area, during their teaching training. Such experience would seem likely to offer them a competitive edge in the academic job market.

Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets; House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name (review)

Reviewed by: Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name Dana Polan (bio) Fox Film Noir: Laura, Call Northside 777, Panic in the Streets House of Bamboo, Nightmare Alley, The Street with No Name A recollection: when I went on the academic job market for the first time, in 1979, I would answer the inevitable interview question about [End Page 110] what I was working on with the reply "film noir," since I had plans to study the American forties through that genre of film. The problem was that a number of cinema jobs were in English departments, where, it seemed, few had ever heard of the genre. Certainly, it was then easy to bring out some hashed-over Borde and Chaumeton or Paul Schrader and explain that noir was a genre of 1940s crime-oriented films that revealed a cynicism about sexual relationships or about the American dream. Still, it was unnerving to have what one considered a compelling, ideologically important domain of critical investigation be simply unfamiliar to people who claimed to know culture. Today, of course, the situation is quite different. Noir has become part of common parlance to the point of cliché. And with that popular diffusion comes a predictable stretching of the term beyond its initial applications. To take just one example, there is Nature Noir, a 2006 book by a park ranger who describes all the terrible things he sees both natural creatures and humans do to each other and to themselves as he wanders around forest spaces quite removed from the mean streets glistening with rain that we're familiar with from classic film noir. More than ever, noir has become a marketable style that floats far beyond the films that honed its look and its meanings. And this dissemination, or dispersion even, of the idea of noir has both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand, it is no doubt salutary when a concept that seemed to belong to specialists and cultists moves out of its rarified confines to become accessible to a more general population. Noir in particular is a publicly important part of the history of U.S. culture insofar as it is so much about the promise and limits of the American dream. As anyone who has taught film noir has undoubtedly experienced, the topic is pedagogically attractive for its blend of ease (it is a genre that wears its stylistic traits and their connections to the times on its sleeve) and relevance (neo-noir is a reminder that we still live under many of the political, cultural, and psycho-social dynamics of the United States of the last half century). On the other hand, with the diffusion of noir comes also a diffuseness that brings with it a lack of critical rigor. Noir suddenly can seem to be everywhere, inherent in everything, and this means it loses its critical edge as either a cinematic or sociological concept. Think, for instance, of that vast and ever-growing array of coffee table books on film noir that treat it as little more than a fascinating look, a compelling style, a mere ambience, a fashion. Noir becomes noir-chic, one more retro commodity disconnected from everything the genre meant—and fundamentally continues to mean—as part of our contemporaneity. In this respect, the problem of noir parallels the problem of the DVD as a critical instrument in the study and analysis of films. Beyond its obvious function of materializing a film in a compact and fairly durable format that is amenable to ever more refined methods of restoration and visual/oral polishing, the DVD holds the promise of critical supplementation of the film through background material of a diverse sort: the commentary track but also all sorts of archival material that can be added as special features. Yet it is all too often the case that such DVD extras are inconsistent in quality and in richness and variety of source material, which limits their scholarly usefulness. Just as noir often appears in today's market as a mere hint of an idea without any solidity, so do...

The Academic Job Market in Finance: A Rookie's Guide - 2006 Supplement

This note supplements our article, The Academic Job Market in Finance: A Rookie's Guide (Butler and Crack, 2005). Here we provide additional and updated job-seeking advice to rookies and lightly-seasoned academic job seekers in academic finance.

Initial Labor Market Conditions and Long-Term Outcomes for Economists

Each year, graduate students entering the academic job market worry that they will suffer due to uncontrollable macroeconomic risk. Given the importance of general human capital and the relative ease of publicly observing productivity in academia, one might expect that long-term labor market outcomes for students graduating in unfavorable climates will resemble long-term outcomes for those graduating in favorable climates. In this paper, I analyze the relationship between macroeconomic conditions at graduation, initial job placement, and long-term outcomes for Ph.D. economists from seven programs. Using macroeconomic conditions as an instrument for initial placement, I show that a quality and type of initial job have a causal effect on long-term job characteristics. I also show that better initial placement increases research productivity, which helps to limit the set of economic models that can explain the effect of initial placement on long-term jobs.

Perspectives on nontraditional research careers in clinical psychology

Building on a panel presentation titled "Career opportunities for behavioral scientists: Non-academic research settings," given at the November 2004 meeting of the Association for Advancement of Behavior Therapy, this article presents the experiences of three clinical psychologists who have careers in nontraditional research settings. These authors focus on three issues: (a) What nontraditional career did they pursue and why? (b) What, if anything, in their training prepared them for that career? (c) What advice would they give to students and young professionals who are considering pursuing a similar type of nontraditional career option? An introduction and concluding remarks that highlight recent trends in the academic job market and themes across each authors' experience are provided by the chair of the panel.

The Value of Limitations

By Lee Hardy was recently afforded an outsider's view of the Christian liberal arts college by the American author Wallace Stegner. In his novel Crossing to Safety, the narrator enters the academic job market but finds his initial efforts both meager and unpromising. A dozen letters had produced only a nibble, he writes. It came from a Lutheran college in Illinois, and I might have pursued even that possibility if they had not wanted me, before further discussion, to declare my belief in the Apostles' Creed, the Augsburg Confession, and the principles of higher Christian education.

A Kingpin of Academic Inclusive Fitness: The History and Contributions of Bruce Grant

ONE of the most difficult decisions facing postdocs on the academic job market is where they should apply for jobs. They seek the advice of their supervisors, but their supervisors' world view is colored by their own decisions and experiences. Because most postdocs are at research universities, their supervisors typically overtly or subtly encourage them to apply to similar schools. The implication is that, for scientists to have an impact on their discipline, they must be able to recruit top Ph.D. students and postdocs, which cannot be done as effectively at smaller institutions such as liberal arts colleges. Accepting a job at a smaller institution is often called the “kiss of death” because new faculty members supposedly will be overwhelmed with teaching responsibilities, their research record will suffer, and a later move to a research university will be far more difficult.

The Academic Job Market Is Bad for All of Us

The Academic Job Market Is Bad for All of Us

Academic Jobs in Political Science: A Review of Listings with the APSA Jobs Service

The academic job market for political scientists has been relatively strong in recent years, with job listings in the last several years outpacing those in the 1980s and 1990s. The number of jobs posted for academic year 2003 was the highest in over 20 years. Listings for last year, AY2004, dipped from these recent highs. But early numbers of listings in AY2005 seem to have rebounded and are greater than those for corresponding quarters in the last few years. In AY2004, 920 positions were listed with the association, compared with 1,123 the year before. The 2004 level still exceeded all openings posted annually during the 1990s. Total numbers of academic jobs listed with APSA are charted in Figure 1.