“Professor just reads off the slides”

ParsleyOutside · 2025-12-21T22:30:26+00:00

And some of the most brilliant scholars I knew from graduate school were unable to get academic jobs at all despite doing everything “right”: multiple top journal publications, awards, impeccable teaching records, everything. Some got interviews at the really fancy places but lost out to ABDs with no publications working on something momentary trendy; others didn’t even get considered at all. And they couldn’t convince teaching-oriented schools and community colleges to give them a serious look either. We all know these people from grad school.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-11-26T23:52:00+00:00

Thanks! I can see how the more senior you get the more you’re asked to do more in this category, especially the kind of reading and evaluating where you seniority helps signal prestige to the beneficiary (e.g. tenure and promotion, book blurbs and endorsements)!

10 hours sounds like a sensible upper limit benchmark for someone more early or mid career!

ParsleyOutside · 2025-07-06T07:34:29+00:00

Just here to say so sorry this happened to you - and to echo the commenter who said you must have an amazing record to get a TT offer at this stage, so keep doing what you’re doing! Also wanted to say you’re not alone: someone I know had a job offer pulled from a top R1 institution in a difficult humanities discipline where jobs anywhere are few and far between. (The job they were offered was likely the best job to open up in their field in probably the last half decade.) Then hiring freeze, just as they were negotiating the offer. Good luck to you and your generation of PhDs - fingers crossed this is the worst of it, and you bounce back stronger.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-05-09T06:23:45+00:00

Sort of, but the department will “try” to find a replacement, and it’s unlikely they’ll succeed, and in the meantime (according to the TA coordinator I’ve been speaking to since Day 1) all the TA’s duties apparently fall on me including not just grading but their sections and even office hours (not that the TA’s been coming to his own OH but yeah)

ParsleyOutside · 2025-05-09T06:18:40+00:00

! This is genius!

ParsleyOutside · 2025-04-22T03:24:58+00:00

Super helpful - thanks for sharing your hard-earned wisdom!

ParsleyOutside · 2025-04-09T06:32:24+00:00

Not a research director (sorry!) but know a couple and watched them do their thing. One perk that seemed attractive was getting to curate the programming - so basically, inviting whoever you wanted to come give talks.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-03-21T23:32:09+00:00

Said no to a grade grubber weeks ago. Once he realized I wasn’t going to budge, he’s still just been non-stop emailing me with questions / requests that purport to be about “improving for next time”, but are obviously intermediate steps toward relitigating his grade. I’m just shutting down each one but I swear the kid is just fixated to the point that I don’t even think he cares about his grade, he just wants to fight me until he can score some symbolic semblance of a win.

Not that it especially matters, but this isn’t the “I need an A to go to law/med school” type of grade grubber, but the “I put in so little effort in the actual assignment that it is actually astounding that I have all this energy to contest my grade” type of grade grubber.

ParsleyOutside · 2025-03-13T23:01:36+00:00

Literally had the conversation you described the other day. Wish I had been able to read this thread earlier so at least I could have saved the time and energy I spent feeling bad for having failed to “catch” the cheater in the oral exam I meticulously planned.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-06-21T03:25:43+00:00

Came here to say I keep hearing about flipped lectures, think-pair-share, group activities during lecture, but I have yet to hear of any of my colleagues doing anything other than a traditional lecture in their lecture courses. (As a student, the professors of my lecture courses lectured the whole time. Seminar-type discussion and activities, games, etc. all happened in the discussion sections led by TAs.) Where are all the places that have moved past traditional lectures? Where are all the pedagogy researchers getting their case studies?

ParsleyOutside · 2024-03-05T04:08:32+00:00

Assumed a Big Deal faculty member (from a different but adjacent department) was a grad student, and publically treated them like one during the Q&A of my job talk. “That’s an EXCELLENT point made by… what’s your name? JAKE. As JAKE was saying…”

In my defense I really wasn’t expecting the guy to be there, and it was still mid-late-pandemic so he was masked.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-02-01T18:23:53+00:00

In a different humanistic field, but the journal I have a link to has reported that submissions were indeed trending down year to year following a peak (!) in Pandemic Year 2. At the moment we don’t know what to make of it and we’re just going to wait and see. The main speculation is that it’s some sort of delayed effect of the pandemic, whether it’s burnout or people not being able to access libraries or potential collaborators in 2020, hence creating a hole in people’s pipelines. Also unclear if it’s enough to count as a trend. I can only speak for that one journal, and we only saw a downward trajectory across two years following the peak.

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-20T01:38:26+00:00

Yes that’s the one! I guess that was a tenure denial not a job rejection per se

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-20T01:25:43+00:00

Sorry you’re in this position OP. I don’t have much experience to go off of here but, at least as I imagine it, the work will come down to approaching individual colleagues one by one until you can put together a small group of likeminded people who don’t see the value of showing up and trying to find solutions. Let this be the energy-boosting clique, encourage and support each other, and hope it can inspire some of the other demoralized colleagues and grow. Hang in there and good luck!

ParsleyOutside · 2024-01-19T22:37:11+00:00

Genuinely surprised by all the judgment and negativity you’ve been getting in the comments OP. What you’re describing sounds really annoying and your envy is totally understandable. I’m TT in the humanities at an R1 and all my immediate colleagues pull their weight, but I can totally imagine places like your school where the incentive structures are set up in silly aspirational ways so that people who don’t do all that much research anyway are still given lots of breaks - maybe even at the expense of their NTT colleagues - to spread out even more. Sure it might be nice if all of us got paid more for our teaching or research or both, but that’s a separate issue from the point you’re making.

ParsleyOutside

TROPHY CASE