On Monday, June 11, 2012 at 10:44 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> the worst part is that, for a lot of profs I knew, they'd take positions
> like that and do it for five years. by the time tenure track opened up
> somewhere, they'd been on the market for five years. As a consequence, a
> lot of places wouldn't even look at their application on accounta the
> belief that, if no one wanted them in that five years, then they must suck
> so why bother. (same thing happens in regular job market, even when the
> lack of job is due to structural changes in the economy/recession.
> employers thinK: what's wrong with this guy he couldn't get a job in the
> last 5 years.
>
>
This runs quite parallel to my experience, though I had the added burden of having resigned from a tenure stream position at a Research I institution in the face of a sure loser of a tenure case… the unbelievable, and I mean utterly unbelievable, luck of having the ABD wife of a colleague teaching at a nearby R2 university hear about what was happening to me from a professor in another department at my then-present university and decide to both tell me about an open full-time temp position where she was teaching as a temp AND tell the chair there that they'd be fools not to hire me (and not because I could teach the courses the just-retired husband of the chair was teaching), couldn't have been more fortuitous. That the department I was hired into as a temp got the tenure line back and wrote the job description in a way that fit me (and another full-time temp who'd been there less time) really well was also remarkably lucky given the U's fiscal straights, however much it had to do with my qualifications and performance. I cannot imagine that my applications to a wide variety of colleges and universities over the last six years were chucked on the scrap heap for all the asociological reasons Shag lists and implies… damaged goods no matter what other qualifications and capabilities I'd developed.