Just because I disagree doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of the word. As astro said, i also see it as ignorance, not disrespect.
I know what the word means. You’ve done this before: please stop providing dictionary definitions to me because I disagree with you.
Though it’s not true that she “went blabbing about this all over the internet” or any words to that effect, it is true that she identified the college to the one blogger she did email about this situation. I actually don’t understand what is supposed to be wrong with that. I know there’s this tendency not to mention specific institutions when talking about things like this, but I don’t get it. I mean, they did it by email and everything. Email is “for the record.” If you do something by email, you should understand that you’re doing it publicly.
What is the advantage to allowing institutions the de facto power to do things to people in secret? Why shouldn’t people feel free to tell everyone what this or that institution did to them? Why let the institutions have even this card in the deck?
I know for me is the inconsistency- she kept herself anonymous and named the intuition. Reality is I’m sure everyone in the field knows who she is, and if she’d kept the university anonymous they’d know who it was anyway, but it seems unfair.
The while discussion of the law of contracts is completely off the point. What is legal isn’t necessarily customary. The question is what were the reasonable expectations? Is it expected that you can lose an offer just by making an inquiry like this? If she and other people in her field (not people in other fields) don’t expect an offer to be rescinded like this because it’s not accepted or expected practice, then the college is out if line, regardless of the legality.
You are talking about two different things - this may be more common than we know, but its not talked about. So while she didn’t expect it, it may in fact be common enough to be “customary.” C-sections are common, but none of my girlfriends who had c-sections expected their child to be born by c-section.
Its unprofessional.
She gets to attack the institution, but they are legally constrained from defending themselves.
It isn’t going to take long for the circle that matters from a career standpoint to know who she is. I’m be less eager to put someone in a TT job that was going to complain to the internet every time she thought something unfair was happening in her career. Perhaps another institution will find her fight against injustice inspiring - I suspect however she has now labeled herself a “pain in the ass.” Given how competitive the field is, this seems like a very short sighted move. Even if she has another offer in hand, she still needs to get tenure.
The people at Nazareth now get to deal with emails telling them what assholes they are. If the chair of the Philosophy department isn’t cleaning out his or her inbox daily of enraged emails (some which might be threatening from the less than completely attached to reality denizens of the internet), I’d be shocked.
All the things that Dangerosa said. Particularly Point 2.
Plus, as I said before–possibly to you, Frylock (it’s been a long thread :))-- the only reason to name the college at all is to shame them, which makes W’s complaint about people “moralizing” seem more than a bit hypocritical.
Yep, it’s frankly insulting.
Usage gets sloppy over time and sometimes subtleties get lost. I like to cite authoritative older sources such as the *Century Dictionary *for that very reason.
I think that people in this thread have been overstating the awesomeness of this job offer. Yes, this is a tenure-track position, which is great and all, but that doesn’t mean it’s W’s dream job. As a fairly recent Ph.D., I’ve been watching my friends take jobs like these, or bouncing around from post-doc to visiting assistant professorship to adjunct, and the whole job market sucks. Maybe, to W, the job itself sounds good, but moving to Rochester is tough to swallow. Maybe, like me, she finds the thought of teaching a 4/4 course load seriously intimidating. (I have a friend who was recently hired to teach a 4/4 in a TT position - she had previously taught exactly 1 course. She is more than a little overwhelmed. It’s not like grad students are actually taught to be teachers.) Maybe W has a significant other whose career will take a hit if she takes this job. Maybe she just doesn’t think this job is as fantastic as some folks in this thread are saying it is. (Personally, I would not take it.)
Dangerosa, I just have to pop your bubble about grad school a little more. Grad programs are evaluated, both by their university and by the field at large, in part by how they place their graduates. The department makes a substantial investment in you during grad school, and they are not keen to waste that investment on people they don’t think have a good chance of going somewhere that will reflect well on the department. You really can’t apply to a decent grad program with a life plan that says, “I just want to learn more about history!” You have to be able to convince the admissions committee that you want to become a scholar in your field and continue publishing after you complete your degree. Once you’re in the program, you have to keep up that mantra if you want to finish. Grad students who aren’t interested in going to research universities may have a very difficult time finding an advisor or getting funding during the dissertation phase.
And yet - without evident irony - you have blathered on for a week about a woman you’ve never heard based solely on two e-mails and a scraping of context.
What has that to do with the meaning of ‘flippant’? I don’t see the connection.
Subtleties also get lost in short, informal communication. Like e-mails.
Yes, this should not have even been put in an e-mail. It should have been sent on paper and written more formally.
Seriously? She should have sent it on paper as a formal letter? That would be so out of place in these current hiring practices, almost to be laughable.
No- if anything she should have called and had a less formal conversation, adequately expressing the low-key nature of these requests.
I know, and all of that is the reason I went for the staid corporate job and didn’t go to grad school - but like grad students wishing graduate school was someone one direction (i.e. something more along the lines to a path where you weren’t taken advantage of from the time you took a GRE until the day when - if you are one of the lucky very few - you get tenure) I still wish it were more of the other - an exercise in intellectual inquiry for the sake of intellectual inquiry.
The fact is is that it isn’t either of these things. At one time it was a little more of both, I think - but that was probably last truly true maybe in the 1950s or 60s. Certainly, even when I was consider my post four year path and chose a corporate one in the 1980s, it may not have been as bad as it is now - but a starvation fellowship at a second rate school working your butt off with undergrads with very little possibility of every having a secure financial future in the sorts of fields I was interested in was the reality. Sciences at that point were still different - but watching the career paths of those leaving the Neuroscience lab my father in law worked in - that’s been dismal as well.
[QUOTE=Ulf the Unwashed]
Plus, as I said before…the only reason to name the college at all is to shame them, which makes W’s complaint about people “moralizing” seem more than a bit hypocritical.
[/QUOTE]
No. Suppose W had emailed this to the blogger without naming the college. The blogger’s reaction would be: Is this true or is W making it up? W had to name the college to convince the blogger the email exchange was real. So it was the decision of the blogger to include the specific name of the college in the post that should be questioned.
Here is the philosophy jobs blog being discussed:
http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/
No, it should have been submitted on paper in a letter. Form matters.
Again, that is INSANE. If I had been emailing with someone for weeks and all of a sudden got a formal letter, I would think something was seriously wrong.
Sorry, can’t agree with this. There’s nothing preventing W from saying to the blogger, “I don’t want this to come across as vindictive or petty, so please don’t identify the school. Since you’re a reputable blogger [I assume], you can assure readers of the post that I DID identify the school and that you are satisfied that this event really took place.”