You’ve probably all seen the news that a Colorado university posted a job ad that explicitly asked for PhDs conferred in 2010 or later. Not surprisingly, the interwebs exploded with arguments about the legality of such a requirement (is this age discrimination?) and the general unfairness of it all.

I am not a lawyer, and I don’t play one on tv. I have nothing to offer to the legality argument. What I want to talk about is the way this job ad makes explicit a preference that has long been implicit in ads for assistant professorships.

It was already in there

For over a decade now, I’ve heard PhDs who were more than two years out complain that they were being passed over for jobs in favor of those with more-recently conferred degrees. Some people got jobs their second year on the market, but even that wasn’t as robust as anyone wanted.

I’m sure there have been exceptions, but the desire for recency has been built in to assistant professor hires for a long time now.

Why? Because departments want to hire people who are intimately in touch with the most current research, so those hires can both be productive researchers and contribute that research knowledge to the department. They (often rightly) assume that if you’re teaching 4 courses as an adjunct, you’re not spending a lot of time on your research or staying current in your field. Even if you are, it’s a very different current than it was when you were ears deep in writing.

This is not an unreasonable desire on the part of a hiring department. The problem is that the overproduction of PhDs / underproduction of faculty jobs mean they can be as choosy as they want to be, because there are so many excellent, qualified candidates for every job.

Colorado State is merely making explicit what has been implicit all this time. (As I said above, I’m passing on the argument about whether this is legal.)

This might end up being helpful

There are two ways I see this going. One is that the ad / search is deemed illegal, and every search has to show that they’re looking seriously at people with a wide range of ages and degree years.

Another is that more and more ads make the desire for recency explicit, because it helps winnow down what has become a truly epic pile of applications to something more manageable.

We can all see how the first case could be helpful. But I’d argue that the second case could also be helpful.

Because all of this has been implicit, it’s been easy for PhDs to convince themselves that if they just keep adjuncting and go on the market one more time, it could work out. It could be them this year, grasping that brass ring. This enables people to hold on to hope, spend half a decade performing underpaid work, and put off the pain of really leaving.

If this becomes standard, it could help all of us know when enough is enough and it’s time to try something else.

Yes, it is unfair

In my ideal world, every fabulous PhD would get an equally fabulous job. We’re all smart, capable, insightful scholars, and I’d love to see all of that brilliance put to the service of expanding the realms of knowledge and helping the next generation learn.

That isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

In the absence of enough jobs, I want every PhD to honestly know where he or she stands. I want people to know the odds and the game, and to be able to make the best decisions they can within that game. I want people to know when to call it.

Yes, it’s really sad and unfair when bright people don’t get the job they’ve spent the better part of a decade preparing for. But you know what’s even more sad and unfair? Those same people trying over and over again even when the chances for success have dropped to close to zero.

You don’t deserve that kind of hell.

You can’t avoid this pain forever

We humans tend to avoid pain, and we tend to assume that the thing we aren’t doing is going to be so. much. more painful than where we are right now. That can be true, but it’s often just our fear talking. We tend to stay with the comfort of the familiar even when the alternative could be better.

That’s not to say leaving is easy. It’s not. Oh, it’s really not. There’s a lot of grief and disappointment and fear to work through. You’ve got to grapple with a whole new world of who you’ll be professionally. This all takes work, and it’s painful.

Is it more painful than years of constant rejection and being told institutionally that you aren’t worth a living wage or basic health insurance? I don’t think it is. We’re just used to the latter. It’s familiar.

So I’m glad that this conversation has become explicit. I’m glad that an assumption has been brought out into the light. I’m glad for anything that could spare one of you years of dashed hopes. You deserve so much better.