An unusual job advertisement at Cornell University — seeking “a tenure-track assistant professor in some area of the humanities or qualitative social sciences” but offering few other details — recently drew widespread confusion and speculation in higher-education circles. In some departments at the university, it is now clear, the listing also drew disapproval.
Several department chairs sent a heated letter on Wednesday to the four deans of Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, expressing alarm that the job posting had “appeared out of nowhere.” In the letter — which was first obtained by The Cornell Review, a conservative student publication — the chairs linked their ire over the ad with broader concerns about low morale in their departments and “the position of the (overall) humanities at Cornell.”
They made several references to an article, published last month in The Chronicle, in which Scott MacDonald, a senior associate dean at the college, explained Cornell’s rationale for the ad. “Indeed the comments attributed to Senior Associate Dean Scott MacDonald in The Chronicle are the nearest we have to an understanding of what is going on,” the chairs wrote, “rather than through appropriate communication and discussion at Cornell within the college.”
Roger S. Gilbert, chair of the English department, was one of the letter’s signers. He said in an interview that there had been some communication between the chairs and the deans about the search, but not much. “I don’t think that we’ve heard anything from the deans that’s very different from what was reported within the article,” he said.
Mr. MacDonald told The Chronicle last month that the listing had sought in part to hire a socioeconomically or ethnically underrepresented faculty member and in part to create a tenure-track position for which all of Cornell’s current postdoctoral fellows were eligible to apply. Mr. MacDonald did not respond to multiple requests for comment on Thursday.
In the interview last month he said that the college wasn’t planning to look at applications until the end of the year and that the deans hadn’t finalized a process for handling the search. One possibility, he said, would involve creating pools of applicants and then sending each pool to a corresponding department for review.
Broader Concerns
But in the letter the chairs questioned such a use of faculty members’ time and effort. They wondered whether they were “to be expected to read 100+ applications for a position their department will never get.”
According to the letter, the chairs still do not know which departments were involved in the search or what to tell prospective applicants. Several departments, they wrote, have received “dozens to hundreds of inquiries” related to the ad. While Mr. Gilbert had not yet fielded many such inquiries in the English department, he expected the number would increase as the academic hiring season picked up steam. He said he had heard of colleagues who had received many more requests for information than he had.
Five other chairs of departments in the social sciences and humanities either declined to be interviewed or did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
The chairs also saw the ad as a broader sign of trouble for the humanities and social sciences at Cornell, citing the lack of communication and the limitations of running a national search “in all fields for only one or two positions.” In the letter they indicated that the university “is reducing support for the humanities and curtailing their role” and that there were a number of faculty members who were considering leaving Cornell or retiring because of the poor climate.
They called for discussion of a “new core curriculum across Cornell in which the humanities play a central part” and for regular meetings, at least once or twice a semester, between humanities and social-sciences department chairs and the Arts and Sciences deans.
There are concerns that the university might target those fields for cuts in the near future, Mr. Gilbert said, but “I’m not quite ready to say that we’re in a crisis.”
“Certainly this ad represents a very different approach to hiring than anything we’ve ever seen before,” he said. “It’s easy to take it as a sign that they are looking at the humanities in a different way.”
