The academic blogosphere is abuzz with the news about the job posting from Colorado State University which specifies that the department is looking for a candidate with a PhD “awarded between 2010 and time of appointment“. This sounds very offensive to people who graduated in 2007-9 and haven’t been able to find a tenure-track position because of the recession.
However, after being on a few job search committees, I suspect that this job listing doesn’t aim to exclude people just because they happened to get their PhD in 2009 rather than in 2010. Rather, this might be an attempt to avoid being inundated with applications from housewives who left their careers 10-15 years ago because they had deluded themselves into thinking that their husbands’ success and money had anything to do with them. After those husbands dump them, housewives often try to revive their careers and start applying for positions. However, the years they spent out of work make them incapable of behaving themselves with any degree of propriety. After reading cover letters by housewives narrating in detail the story of their divorce and heaping abuse on the “bastard” of a husband (once again, this is an application for a job in academia) and leafing through letters of recommendation from women who recommended the applicant for a professorial position on the basis of giving birth at the same time as she did and knowing her as a very good person and a nice neighbor, I think any method is good enough to prevent them from applying altogether.
And then there is always that mentally unstable person that each department has as a follower and who applies with mile-long cover letters for absolutely any position offered at this department (from the secretary to the departmental chair.) Our department has a long-distance stalker of this kind.
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