by Jon Lackman | 24 March 2010 | Career
Art history now has robust online rumor mills for jobs and salaries (now in their third year) as well as a place to discuss both, although there’s not as much to discuss this year, given the relative lack of openings. A few years back, The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote an article about such sites that detailed their potential for misinformation and star-system propagation as well their upsides: “All of the sites are meant to make the inner workings of the faculty job market a bit more transparent. And they offer young scholars a lifeline during the anxiety-laden process of landing a tenure-track job.” Art historians are taking advantage of their site to hold universities accountable for confusingly written job advertisements, time-wasting pseudo-searches (advertisements intended to conceal the fact that a hire has already been chosen) and exploitative contracts. Incidentally, there seems to be general agreement not to post the names of job-seekers (other than one’s own), although there’s been some debate over the utility of refraining after names have already gone public.
