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[airball]

I must be an exception, and likely it is because I have no experience with SLACs at all, but my initial reaction to the premise was: "If you have found problems with all 18 of your long-listed candidates, dude, maybe the problem is you"

I read the article anyway and when I got to:

We were not interested in their many nods to cutting-edge research or their secret handshakes in the form of the latest lingo.

I felt like we were dealing with a defensive crank from a mediocre to poor school who felt threatened. So I'm glad I don't have to work there

Quick note: The author of the article is not at a small SLAC, nor did they find problems with all eighteen candidates. The committee was simply disappointed with a surprising number of them.

As for the issue of jargon, a graduate student in history who can't give a three minute explanation of their topic that a non-specialist can understand should be dropped. As I read it, the author's main objection is not to cutting edge research, but to the candidates' inability to talk about that research clearly. The candidates should know who will be on the committee and how to talk to them. If they're not smart or seasoned enough to know this, they are not ready for prime time.

airball

[ideagirl]

How about a thought experiment. Suppose all the search committees 30 or so years ago had turned thumbs down on everyone who spoke the gibberish that came to characterize postmodernism? Academia would have been spared a generation of futile drift in the humanities and social sciences.

Hahahaha
High five.

[larryc]

Excellent article, and I have seen very similar problems while serving on SCs for our 4/4 teaching school in the Midwest. The profession is simply doing a terrible job in preparing people for the job market.

[ideagirl]

Can't resist sharing these two gems from the new copy of College Teaching that just crossed my desk. "The Hermaneutics of Student Evaluations." "Epistemological Congruency in Community College Classrooms."

Oh jesus god.

A close friend who was an editor for the law review of a top-tier school tells me he once reviewed an article whose title I forget, but it was by a well-known scholar and it went like so: "Article Title:[footnote]" --and then when you looked down at the footnote, it said something like, "Please insert overly-clever postmodern subtitle here. I know such things are required these days, but I can't think of one."