Who's Hot? Who's Not?

Online rumor mills shine a light on faculty job searches but may also intensify the star system

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By ROBIN WILSON

With 11 campus interviews and an offer from Yale University, Susan D. Hyde quickly emerged as the darling of last year's faculty job market in international relations.

Her good fortune was clear to anyone with an Internet connection, courtesy of a new blog that tracks jobs in her discipline. Through anonymous postings, the blog followed Ms. Hyde's nearly every move, from her interviews at the University of Virginia and George Washington University to her decision to accept the offer at Yale.

"Ah, to be Susan Hyde," remarked one online poster to the blog, which calls itself the IR Rumor Mill.

For Ms. Hyde, a soft-spoken young scholar who lurked but never posted, reading the blog's anonymous quips about her career was a bit surreal.

"You know that during the job market everyone is gossiping and talking about who is getting interviews and who is not," says Ms. Hyde, who started this fall as an assistant professor of political science. "But before this blog, I would have been blissfully ignorant. It's an odd sensation to be able to hear the gossip about you and be talked about on the Internet."

The IR Rumor Mill is one of several blogs that have cropped up in fields including Middle Eastern history, American politics, and political theory in the past year. They join some long-standing online rumor mills about the job market in physics. All of the sites are meant to make the inner workings of the faculty job market a bit more transparent. And they offer young scholars a lifeline during the anxiety-laden process of landing a tenure-track job.

"It's an incredibly stressful time, when you're waiting to have your future decided by shadowy forces beyond your control," says Martin White, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley who just started a wiki — a communal Web site — to track the faculty job market in astrophysics.

But the mills are based on rumors that are not verified by colleges, and they can be wrong. They also offer young scholars one more reason to waste time obsessing about their job prospects. And they promote and perpetuate academe's star system. "This unfairly magnifies the five to 10 people who are on all the shortlists because it's known to everyone," says Jason Tumlinson a doctoral student in Yale's physics department. "This has only contributed to the great stress of the whole process."

Anonymous Tips

The first academic-job-rumor mills began as Web sites in astrophysics and theoretical particle physics several years ago. The one in astrophysics is known as the "astromill." Tipsters send e-mail messages to an anonymous person at edwinhubble@hotmail.com (named for the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble). The site lists faculty job openings along with the candidates believed to be on each university's short list of interviewees. It also specifies who eventually gets an offer and whether the candidate accepts or rejects it.

Until last year, the astromill was run by Brad K. Gibson, chairman of theoretical astrophysics at the University of Central Lancashire, in England, who is just now starting to let that information slip out. Of course, the new administrator remains anonymous.

Mr. Gibson became involved back in 2000, when he received an e-mail message from "Vesto Slipher," the name of an early-20th-century astronomer. "As one of the most faithful contributors to the rumor mill," it announced, "you are hereby invited to join the Edwin Hubble team." Mr. Gibson accepted the job of sifting through rumors sent to the hubble address and posting the information on the Web site. Before long he realized that he was the only one doing so. He has never heard from "Slipher" again.

Mr. Gibson was a postdoctoral student at the University of Colorado at Boulder when he began running the site. The reason he operated anonymously, he says, was to stop search committees and job candidates from trying to pressure him to add or remove information: "Sometimes I would get these angry messages from someone saying, 'I didn't give you my permission to put my name up there.' Sometimes someone was playing one offer off another and didn't want the universities to know they were doing this, or they had a position already and were looking to move and didn't want their home institution to know." Mr. Gibson says he never removed information unless he was persuaded that it was incorrect.

He quickly learned that the rumor mill can have a powerful effect. Once, he recalls, a senior faculty member (at a university that he declines to identify) mentioned that he had noticed a particular job candidate's name popping up a lot on the astromill. Unaware that Mr. Gibson ran the site, the professor told him, "'We paid closer attention and shortlisted the person as well.'"

Lisa L. Everett says the rumor mill in theoretical physics was a topic of conversation during her interview at Brown University last year. By the time the young physicist visited the campus, the rumor mill had already revealed that she had two job offers in hand.

"Right away the chairman at Brown said: 'I see the rumor page, and I know you have this offer and that offer. What are your thoughts about coming here?'" she says. "Once people know you have offers, instead of having to sell yourself, people look at you differently."

The field of academic physics isn't necessarily one you'd expect to be swirling with rumors. "One does not normally associate the highbrow world of particle physics with ... gossip-mongering," John Terning, an associate professor of physics at the University of California at Davis, writes on the theoretical-physics mill, which he helped start about 10 years ago. Mr. Terning is one of the few mill operators who is not anonymous.

The rumor mills may have taken off in physics because each subfield is tiny, and everyone seems to know everyone else. That makes it easy to track who is interviewing at which institutions. The theoretical-physics site listed just 38 jobs at laboratories and colleges within the United States and abroad last season. The astromill, one of the more plentiful job sites, listed 90 positions under the category of tenure-track assistant professor and lecturer. "The excitement of the year is always who gets hired where," says Ms. Everett.

Eric Gawiser, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, says the astromill sometimes gave him information faster than colleges did. "The greatest help these sites provide people is in giving bad news," he says. "You find out a university's made a shortlist and you don't seem to be on it, or they've made an offer and you don't have it. Institutions tend to give you that information very slowly."

In one case, says Mr. Gawiser — who ended up on the shortlist at six universities last year — "an institution kept saying, 'We're still in the process,' but the rumor page told me they'd already made some offers." With that information in hand, he says, he knew to keep looking. He will start as an assistant professor of physics at Rutgers University's New Brunswick campus next fall.

Easier to Maintain

Mr. White, the Berkeley professor who started the wiki in astrophysics, hopes it will deliver information to job candidates even faster. Because the wiki can be edited by anyone who visits it, information does not have to go through a site monitor.

"When the job season hits, you get this bottleneck [on the astromill] where one person is responsible for managing this flood of rumors and keeping the site up to date," says Mr. White. "This way no one has to try to maintain the whole thing."

Mr. White watches the online rumor mills to see "what are the really cool, happening places that have hired the young hotshots," he says. Sometimes he invites candidates who have been popular on the job market to speak at Berkeley as part of a lecture series.

Other professors, however, express only passing interest in the sites. T.B. Williams, a professor of physics and astronomy at Rutgers, led the search committee that hired Mr. Gawiser. He says that rumor mills do not influence professors who are looking to fill academic posts. "They are incomplete, and the accuracy of the information is not guaranteed," he says. "We don't use them in any real way."

What's more, the rumor mills can be wrong. The Middle Eastern-history blog, for example, lists an Islamic-studies opening at Duke University with a tip from an anonymous poster who writes: "Rumor has it they will be making a senior and a junior appointment. The junior appointment is a possible spousal hire."

But Bruce B. Lawrence, director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center, says all that is untrue. "I haven't projected two jobs even in my dream world," he says. "There is only one job, and there is no secret agenda here to hire a spouse."

Nonetheless, Eileen J. Findlay, an associate professor of history who leads American University's search for an assistant professor of Islamic world history, says that though she had never heard about the online rumor mill in Middle Eastern history she thinks it's a good idea. Inside information about the job market has always been available to candidates who have good Ph.D. advisers. "This will open up that process to more people who don't have those faculty contacts," she says.

A doctoral student who calls himself "history Ph.D." started the Middle Eastern blog in July. In a telephone interview with The Chronicle, he said he realizes that "search committees may view this as intrusive because we're shedding light on the process." But he hopes professors will visit the site to "get an idea of what candidates are talking about and what concerns us."

Like those who started the rumor mills in international relations and political science, the blogger did so anonymously and asked The Chronicle to identify him only as a doctoral student at a research university in the West. He hopes that the blog will ease his own jitters about the forthcoming job season.

"The whole process seems quite arbitrary, and I'm already obsessed," he says. "This is a nice forum to share that with other candidates out there."