An academic job market story yesterday reminded me of the perils of interpreting lack of preparation with lack of worth. A philosophy candidate for a job at Nazareth College in Rochester was offered the job, made some fairly common requests, and then promptly saw the job offer rescinded. UPDATE: The candidate has revealed more details. As I hope should be clear below, she seems like a real class act to me, if perhaps misinformed.
Below I’ll first go over my agreement with many commentators that whether this was legal or not, it was unethical and outside of normal academic job market conventions, but then lay out why the specifics of her requests might have seemed quite unreasonable to the committee and administration. Finally, I’ll close with how I think Nazareth could have handled the situation better.
First, this represents a disregard for what most candidates understand the process…
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