Heather D. Flowe thought she had her first tenure-track job nailed down after she received an e-mail message last December about an offer from the psychology department at California State University-Dominguez Hills. Over the following months, she and the dean of the College of Natural and Behavioral Sciences even agreed on how much she would be paid ($65,000 for her first academic year and $16,000 for the summer), and she started talking with the psychology department about her teaching schedule for the fall.
But this month, Ms. Flowe received an e-mail message from the dean, Charles F. Hohm, saying the university would not be able to hire her after all. It stands to lose $6-million as part of state budget cuts. So the campus has decided not to hire six new professors that it had been negotiating with, including Ms. Flowe.
Sam Wiley, interim provost for Dominguez Hills, says that technically Ms. Flowe never received an offer from the university. All job offers need his OK and must be made in writing, he says. An e-mail message in which Dean Hohm referred to the “offer” that the university had extended Ms. Flowe “was language the dean shouldn’t have used,” says Mr. Wiley. Mr. Hohm did not return telephone calls and e-mail messages seeking comment.
Meanwhile, Ms. Flowe — who spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow and one year as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at San Diego, where she earned her doctorate in 2005 — doesn’t know what she’ll do next. Two other campuses had asked her to interview for jobs this year, but she turned them down because she thought she had secured the CSU position. Now most faculty jobs for this coming fall have already been filled. Ms. Flowe is contemplating moving to Florida to live with her parents if she doesn’t find a position.
“I just canceled my dental appointment,” she says. “I can’t afford that anymore.”
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12 Responses to The Disappearing Job Offer
dailyreader - January 26, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Is this early experience the place where one would teach children (and some adults) to be quiet in libraries?
dailyreader - January 26, 2012 at 5:19 pm
Is this early experience the place where one would teach children (and some adults) to be quiet in libraries?
Brian Mathews - January 26, 2012 at 6:10 pm
Maybe teaching them about “quiet zones” but most academic libraries I’ve visited lately have high energy collaboration spaces. We want people to work together and talk.
mbelvadi - January 27, 2012 at 8:26 am
This “rambling thought” is very interesting, and I hope you do add more concrete examples to it in upcoming columns. I’m not sure the library building per se needs to be habit-forming. I’d rather see coming to the library’s web site instead of Google when starting research to be the habit students form, than having them decide on a favorite study carrel.
sgray17 - January 27, 2012 at 12:17 pm
I would argue that students love JSTOR not strictly out of habit, but due to the fact that JSTOR has marketed directly to faculty outside the library, and, as a result, professors, who are generally unaware of the lack of access to current journal issues in this product, recommend its use as a primary index to the literature. Students love JSTOR because it’s a tool that faculty have become familiar with and promote directly to students. The recommendations of instructors are more meaningful to students than those of librarians, who are marginalized at many institutions. I do agree that once an instructor introduces them to JSTOR, they believe that it is the swiss army knife of research and it’s hard to convince them otherwise.
mbelvadi - January 27, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Yes! Yes! Yes! Pressing “Like” just wasn’t strong enough! :-)
And it’s not just JSTOR – we have faculty teaching students the same bad habits with Project Muse too, and a couple of other small-aggregate-publisher sites that are far inferior search choices than using a comprehensive A&I database or probably even Google Scholar.
madamesmartypants - January 27, 2012 at 3:33 pm
The problem is convenience–students like the anywhere, anytime accessibility of JSTOR, while libraries require that you actually plan to go someplace to study ahead of time (as opposed to, say, 4 am the night before your paper is due). If driving is a necessity at your school or your school has a lot of commuters, I would add that access to a car and paying for gas adds a whole other level of complications for your average student.
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bookishone - February 1, 2012 at 7:01 pm
I am a faculty member in the humanities and I finally realized that I have to dedicate half a class day to help my undergrad majors understand the differences between JSTOR, Project Muse, the various field-related indexes, and the like. We go over their principles of selection (dates, “moving wall,” different fields of study, books vs. journals, index/bibliography with links to fulltext vs. fulltext compendium of journal issues) as well as the ever-popular notion that “if it’s not in fulltext, the library doesn’t own it.” Even so, I find students gravitate back to JSTOR.
sgray17 - February 1, 2012 at 8:54 pm
That’s great that you do that, bookishone! I wish more faculty outside of the library took the time to explain the information landscape in their discipline to students.
I think the other component that makes JSTOR so popular is that searchers always get the full text. For many of our other databases, it’s sort of like playing the slots as to whether the full text will be available at all, or if it is, students may have to jump through three more hoops to get to it. It’s definitely the path of least resistance when good enough is good enough.
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