Thoughts on hiring committees and humanities PhDs

By John Osborne. Part two of John Osborne's response to Tim Pettipiece's article on sessionals.
Last week I began to respond to Timothy Pettipiece’s op-ed piece in the current issue of University Affairs, noting the dearth of new tenure-track faculty positions being created at the moment, and the underlying financial factors which have created that situation. As I opined elsewhere, in a response to Ira Basen’s CBC Radio documentary entitled “Class Struggle”, nothing would give me greater pleasure than to hire 100 new faculty members tomorrow; but that would require an additional $10M in my base budget, and that simply isn’t going to happen unless tuition fees are completely deregulated nationwide or the provincial government finds new pots of money. More...