The New Way To Get a Job in Academia

Fifteen years ago, people who wanted a job in academia began by paying a fee to their professional organization so they could see a list of job openings. They then printed up a bunch of vitae (resumes to the outside world) and mailed them to the departments they were interested in. If a department was interested in them, the department would call the applicant and invite them to a large meeting of the professional organization, where they would be interviewed along with a few other likely candidates.

After this, two or three would be chosen to be flown in for on-campus interviews, after which a choice would be made and an offer extended.

What’s interesting is that new technology has changed everything mentioned in the first paragraph. No longer does one need to belong to a professional organization to get a list of job openings, because they are often mentioned on email lists. Vitae can be sent by email. And now one can skip the professional meeting by using Skype for an initial interview.

The winners in all these changes are poor people, and the losers are those elites who insist that professional organizations need to have power and that they need to cater to the wealthy. It costs money to join a professional organization. (I’ll admit that the American Philosophical Association adjusted the fees by one’s income, but not all professional organizations do that.) It costs money to photocopy one’s vitae (and other materials) and mail a bunch of job applications. It costs money to fly to a big conference and to stay in the fancy hotels where they are held. (And what do you do if you've only got one interview? Do you even bother going?) It costs money to eat at these hotels, which are usually located far from cheap restaurants.

All of this is welcome news for applicants who are poor. Let me add that none of these changes is the result of leftists in academia agitating to make life fairer for poor people. Instead, they are all the result of new technologies, and leftist academics had nothing to do with any of these changes. And they will resist changes. My wife’s department is doing a search, and she told me that when one of the other professors in her department – someone who comes from a wealthy family, let me add – heard that there were candidates who said they wanted to use Skype for an interview because they were too poor to go to the conference, she said they couldn’t be serious about wanting the job, because otherwise they would go to the conference.

Not only is it a new world in academia in terms of applying for a job, but I’m told there are new online journals popping up all the time. Running a journal used to require a lot of money, so starting a new one was beyond the means of the average academic department, but now it is very easy for an individual to start one. And once again, this is welcome news for poor people, but also once again, the left had nothing to do with it, and to some extent have resisted it.