Faculty hiring is outdated in a lot of ways - it takes a really long time, there is a very high burden on the candidate, in terms of preparing teaching and research statements, and often arranging for reference letters to be sent directly, and no real reciprocity from the university (I mean they can ask for a lot and give nothing in return). Also, faculty positions (at least STEM disciplines) don't pay well compared to many jobs.
I was wondering if we'd start to see changes in the process, as universities must be losing the best candidates to industry jobs. Apparently they've gone a different direction. This implies there must be a glut of PHDs willing to work for free to get the experience. But I'd expect this would no be attracting top graduates, it looks more like a remedial way for people with money to get experience.
There are plenty of people who are willing to forgo a lot to be able to do research.
It is hard to overstate the difference in mentality. Few who are primed in academia would even think about salary as a main argument.
Sadly, the trajectory runs in the other direction. There’s a glut of good and internationally mobile candidates who will literally work for free around the clock for a chance.
Exploitation by a system based on education, by highly educated people, for the advancement of society. This is what you get when you are powerless and dependent on good faith even in the best environment.
Compared to Humanities, STEM faculty are the highest paid in academia. There is no "glut' of chemistry and biochemistry PhDs. There is high demand for biochemists with an expected 5% increase in positions in the next decade.
I'd bet someone just wanted to teach a course for fun and without compensation, but they had to formalize it and pose an actual job listing online for a month.
Probably explains why the "Open date" & "Final date" are just 30 days apart.
How would that arise, that someone is connected enough to get them to post a course but not pay them to teach it? You can't just walk into a department and volunteer to teach a course.
And everyone else has to waste their time applying for a job for which the successful applicant is predetermined in order for the university to be able to tick the box that it was awarded fairly.
Chances are nobody is going to apply for a job that doesn’t compensate them? How desperate are they? Working for Mc Donalds would be a better source of income…
No, you're not reading that right. It states "Qualified candidates will have a Ph.D. in chemistry, biochemistry, or equivalent discipline and have significant experience and strong record in teaching chemistry or biochemistry at the college level."
> Chances are nobody is going to apply for a job that doesn’t compensate them?
Having "UCLA professor of X" on a CV looks way better than having nothing.
Keep things in perspective: there are people who pay large sums of money to go on boot camps so that they can have a line on their CV that can open doors.
postretirement I'd be more than happy to have a non-tenure track position with an office on campus and access to some campus resources at one of my neighboring universities. I would not ask for compensation.
This is extremely common in academia. This is typically used to ensure exceptional long time researchers and PhD students, who already have all the context they need to have, have a shot at staying in the institution as a reward for their work.
The standard application process doesn't allow this because you have literally the whole world to compete with for a position, evaluation processes can be gamed and exploited, and in some cases you also have unscrupulous individuals who falsify their credentials in a way that can't be corroborated in a timely manner.
Not exactly. At least at UC, there are non-salaried "Researcher" titles for this purpose. This posting described teaching duties (though it's been taken down now.)
I’m not sure what they’re doing is legal either (not a lawyer), but I suspect it’s impossible to figure out from a job posting; not enough information.
In some places managers regularly post job openings for jobs they have candidates for. They even go as far as interviewing a few people and not let them know that they have no chance. They have rules that say that all jobs have to be posted.
Interesting how a rule that was meant to curve corrupted hiring practices get so easily circumvented.
They do this especially if there’s a diversity clause for interviews. They already have an internal candidate but need to interview at least one person of color or other diversity qualification. It wastes everybody’ time.
Yes, it definitely sounds like it breaks minimum wage laws, and if it doesn't, precisely how it avoids doing that would be something quite interesting.
> Yes, it definitely sounds like it breaks minimum wage laws, and if it doesn't, precisely how it avoids doing that would be something quite interesting.
Actually, it sounds like it definitely doesn't break minimum wage laws. Since UCLA is a public land grant university, not private, wouldn't this simply be a volunteer position that isn't subject to minimum wage?
Universities are given special laws, so much so it makes you wonder if there aren't small illiminati-esque alumni that ensured it so. Just this week California was very quick to change the law to stop one of their unis from being sued.
Lookup tenant rights for student housing. Students don't have it, they're explicitly exempt.
A university does not have to follow the commercial process, they can make predatory contracts well outside of reason, tax free (for them), and reap all the profits.
Things universities intentionally avoid teaching so students won't organize against the system abusing them.
Probably off topic, but how can an institution prioritize the following 3 efforts simultaneously?
1. "The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer"
2. "It is the policy of the University to undertake affirmative action, consistent with its obligations as a federal contractor, for minorities and women"
3. "All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity..."
I believe the idea is that facing adversity makes it harder to achieve, and they're instrumenting on attributes that would cause people to face adversity. Those people may be better applicants even if they're not as accomplished because they had to fight harder so everything they've got. So I guess they're claiming they're not considering race... but using it to consider the adversity they've faced.
This, of course, begs the question why don’t they directly ask about and consider the actual adversity people faced, instead of a roundabout way of using very weak statistical proxy for it. Even if they could not ask directly about adversity (which they can and do), they could use much better proxies, like, say, past household income. Why don’t they?
The answer is, obviously, that the “adversity” is just an excuse, and they do in fact directly care about racial and sex composition of faculty and student body. Nobody’s fooled here, racial discrimination is the entire point of the exercise.
People opposed to affirmative action like to use verbal tricks. For example, here OP has described affirmative action as "racial discrimination", which is perhaps technically true, but not as most people understand the term.
No, it’s the “affirmative action” that’s the ultimate verbal trick: if you didn’t know the origin of the phrase, and how it is used, you’d never guess what it means. On the other hand, describing it as “racial discrimination” is perfectly clear and straightforward, as AA is quite simply all about discriminating between competing candidates based on their race.
"From 2009 until 2014, the paper “Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard” finds, 43 percent of the Caucasian applicants accepted at Harvard University were either athletes, legacies, or the children of donors and faculty. Only about a quarter of those students would have been accepted to the school, the study concludes, without those admissions advantages."[0]
I'm reminded of the words of Malcolm X—"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."
Americans may have struck down de jure segregation (big applause!) but we're still de facto segregated a generation or two later. K-12 schools serving predominantly black communities have less funding, less extra-curriculars, less honors/AP courses (UCLA expects a 4.5 GPA, have fun getting one wifhout lots of advanced courses available). Don't get me started on the racial discrepancy in being able to get childcare or pay for ACT/SAT prep courses that all my white peers did in their summers.
Affirmative action is discriminatory in the sense it admits there's more to applications than your number, as much as that irks SWEs who love to reduce people to an algorithm. You can't just say "we have no black students because no qualified black students applied!". There are certainly qualified minorities, maybe the way in which you're measuring "qualified" has a racial bias? To give one example, the father of SATs and AP courses was a racist eugenicist who thought (correctly, but for the wrong reasons) standarized tests would help stop minority admissions since the 1920s were all about the idea that race and intelligence are linked. [1] Do we think that intention is totally irrelevant to the outcome of these tests? There's a reason educators don't like them! Cheaper to use scantrons than to try and assess with any nuance.
If you take these statement literally, it can’t. However, this is just a legal fiction, where you first pretend that Civil Rights Act applies equally to all races and sexes, so that it is not ruled unconstitutional, but then in practice you designate some races or sexes as “oppressed”, and give them special privileges, and others you designate as “privileged”, and give them no special privileges.
This is how this is all widely and commonly understood: if you ask around whether “white men” are a “protected class” according to Civil Rights Act, most people will say that they aren’t. They in fact are, but that’s just the “fiction” part of the legal fiction here.
Depends on the interpretation. An advocate of textualism like the late Anthony Scalia, would argue the letter (vs the spirit) of the law should still be implemented - arguing that it is the duty of the judge to implement, and the duty of the elected congressmen/Senators to legislate the laws.
Those three statements don't say what I think you think they say.
Let's break it down:
Statement 3 days all applicants will be considered, regardless of criteria. One can consider a candidate while preferentially selecting based on some criteria.
For instance, a common way organizations will operate is to use minority status as a tie breaker between two equally qualified candidates. Both candidates were given full consideration, satisfying #3, while some prefer was used to provide for disadvantaged groups, satisfying #1 and #2.
Simple. You ACTIVELY LOOK for women and minorities, you train your people to be less biased, you do everything you can to have a more diverse pool of interviewee. But if in the end you still have to choose between a more competent white man and a black woman for the same salary/position you choose the white man.
It's like 1984's Doublespeak. These people say obviously contradictory statements without making any logical association between them. And, if you attempt to argue logic with them, they will use institutional and political power to silence you.
There are few people indeed who could afford to volunteer full time at UCLA. Heck I tried volunteering half time at a UCLA lab and ended up quasi-homeless one summer because my part time job couldn't pay the rent
Not a rhetorical question. I genuinely would like an explanation of how you can legally post "Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position" in a job posting, when minimum wage laws dictate the minimum wage that can be paid for employment.
Specifically, in California [1]:
> Although there are some exceptions, almost all employees in California must be paid the minimum wage as required by state law.
The 'exceptions' are for learners (those with little experience), the mentally ill, and the disabled, which all have different wage laws (none of which allow any of those groups to be employed for free either).
So an interesting caveat to this apparently is [1]:
> FLSA prohibits public sector employees from volunteering, without compensation, to work additional time performing the same type of services or work for which they are employed. For example, a police officer can properly be considered a volunteer, and need not be paid, for reading to school children at the municipal library. The same officer must be paid, however, and cannot be considered a volunteer, when directing traffic for a city-sponsored road race in the same municipality where the police officer is employed.
So I guess if you already have a position in another state school, you apparently can't take this one.
> But there is nothing in this job posting indicating that this is for a volunteer position.
This position is unpaid at a public not private employer. In this case the commonly understood meaning of "volunteer" is likely the same as the legal one.
There are limited exceptions for interns as well, but those cannot replace a paid position and must be enrolled in a school at which they will receive credit for the internship.
I'm really wondering what this job posting is about as well.
It isn't of course. It's patently illegal. As well as just plain slimy and awful.
Which is what makes this episode so juicy. First the language was not in the least ambiguous -- the post means exactly what it says. And from the fact someone (if not multiple people) not just at PhD level, but reasonably high up the totem pole in that department must have signed up on post.
It might be another way to graft onto external financing, like having a department's chair financed by some company. This will of course lead to undesirable consequences, but for some time now, university boards only seem interested in real estate and funds.
This is how American higher education gets hallowed out by opportunistic administrators that have carved out high-paying jobs in the non-profit sector.
I was actually neogtiating with my university-employer to _get_ such a job. Why you ask? Research is my thing, I can win grants which easily allow me to pay my own salary, hopefully til retirement. I just need the affiliation to be able to apply for many grants.
In my case the employer actually declined, because of the risks involved with German job security laws (it may have put me in a position to sue for a paid position after some time).
I believe it's a pretty common thing to do to use (some of the) grant money to "buy your time back" from the university (where the expectation would otherwise be that you do 100% teaching).
Sure can. I can get grants specifically to hire someone. As long as that's specified in the grant, and I can prove that's what I did with the money, there's no issue. Non-profit in this circumstance, rather than education.
Do they still have privatdozents in Germany? I remember an article by Hermann Weyl about that system. It was motivated by academic freedom: because the privatdozents weren't employees of the State, the government couldn't tell them what to do, and (somehow) the government also couldn't tell the professors who they could appoint as privatdozents. Becoming a privatdozent made you eligible to lecture at the university, so it meant the professors rather than the government were in charge of who was allowed to teach classes. That apparently wouldn't have worked if the privatdozents got any salary. They instead charged tuition directly to the students. But, it doesn't sound like this UCLA slot allows that.
Requirement: Ph.D. in chemistry, biochemistry, or equivalent discipline and have significant experience and strong record in teaching chemistry or biochemistry at the college level.
I remember a department head telling me they got offers constantly from people willing to be an adjunct for free. Why? Because it would boost their credentials when doing other work and consulting.
The math is easy to figure out: if you spend 75 hours a year as an adjunct to increase your day rate by $100, then your time as an adjunct is worth up to $250 / hr.
How is the comparison to doublespeak absurd? They are literally making contradictory statements while refusing to make any logical association between them. That's exactly what doublespeak is.
Because the accusation has absolutely nothing to do with doublespeak, and given the fundamental difference between the meaning of doublespeak and the case discussed then it's so far-fetched that just reads as a desperate attempt to gratuitously pin the fascist label.
> They are literally making contradictory statements while refusing to make any logical association between them.
If you knew the definition of doublespeak and read the article and the comments you'd quickly understand the absurdity of your accusation.
This is most likely for someone at UCLA on sabbatical to have an affiliation. Some evidence it might be someone fleeing Ukraine and is being externally funded by a foundation directly as a fellowship. UC policy requires even direct onboarding like this to be posted as a 'job'. Bureaucracy..
If people are referring to the UCLA job posting of March 4, 2022 for an assistant adjunct professor in chemistry and biochemistry with no compensation - I have no idea how HR approved this. It is a violation of minimum wage laws, and the UCLA faculty contract. As a CA college professor I'd like to respond to some of the misconceptions in the replies:
Sabbatical leave faculty are compensated. A fellowship is a paid position. Unpaid positions are not created for refugees.
Faculty do not teach courses "for fun." It is a job.
It is NOT extremely common in academia. I've been a college professor for over 25 years and have never heard of advertising an unpaid faculty position. It is outrageous.
This is not a "volunteer position." There is no such thing as unpaid "volunteer" faculty.
Faculty in the medical school and other areas may have research grants to cover their appointments. However, this position requires teaching without pay. That is a violation of the UCLA Faculty Association collective bargaining agreement.
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.
An astonishing ethical (and intellectual) lapse on the part of someone at UCLA, in other words. It's easy to see why it got removed so quickly.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadI was wondering if we'd start to see changes in the process, as universities must be losing the best candidates to industry jobs. Apparently they've gone a different direction. This implies there must be a glut of PHDs willing to work for free to get the experience. But I'd expect this would no be attracting top graduates, it looks more like a remedial way for people with money to get experience.
It is hard to overstate the difference in mentality. Few who are primed in academia would even think about salary as a main argument.
Sadly, the trajectory runs in the other direction. There’s a glut of good and internationally mobile candidates who will literally work for free around the clock for a chance.
They are, of course, mercilessly exploited.
Probably explains why the "Open date" & "Final date" are just 30 days apart.
Having "UCLA professor of X" on a CV looks way better than having nothing.
Keep things in perspective: there are people who pay large sums of money to go on boot camps so that they can have a line on their CV that can open doors.
If somebody better wants to come and teach for free, this is how they'll find them.
This is extremely common in academia. This is typically used to ensure exceptional long time researchers and PhD students, who already have all the context they need to have, have a shot at staying in the institution as a reward for their work.
The standard application process doesn't allow this because you have literally the whole world to compete with for a position, evaluation processes can be gamed and exploited, and in some cases you also have unscrupulous individuals who falsify their credentials in a way that can't be corroborated in a timely manner.
Source: I’m not in this department, but I’ve worked at UCLA for ~10 years
Interesting how a rule that was meant to curve corrupted hiring practices get so easily circumvented.
Actually, it sounds like it definitely doesn't break minimum wage laws. Since UCLA is a public land grant university, not private, wouldn't this simply be a volunteer position that isn't subject to minimum wage?
A university does not have to follow the commercial process, they can make predatory contracts well outside of reason, tax free (for them), and reap all the profits.
Things universities intentionally avoid teaching so students won't organize against the system abusing them.
1. "The University of California is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer"
2. "It is the policy of the University to undertake affirmative action, consistent with its obligations as a federal contractor, for minorities and women"
3. "All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, gender identity..."
The answer is, obviously, that the “adversity” is just an excuse, and they do in fact directly care about racial and sex composition of faculty and student body. Nobody’s fooled here, racial discrimination is the entire point of the exercise.
I'm reminded of the words of Malcolm X—"If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out that's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they haven't even pulled the knife out much less heal the wound. They won't even admit the knife is there."
Americans may have struck down de jure segregation (big applause!) but we're still de facto segregated a generation or two later. K-12 schools serving predominantly black communities have less funding, less extra-curriculars, less honors/AP courses (UCLA expects a 4.5 GPA, have fun getting one wifhout lots of advanced courses available). Don't get me started on the racial discrepancy in being able to get childcare or pay for ACT/SAT prep courses that all my white peers did in their summers.
Affirmative action is discriminatory in the sense it admits there's more to applications than your number, as much as that irks SWEs who love to reduce people to an algorithm. You can't just say "we have no black students because no qualified black students applied!". There are certainly qualified minorities, maybe the way in which you're measuring "qualified" has a racial bias? To give one example, the father of SATs and AP courses was a racist eugenicist who thought (correctly, but for the wrong reasons) standarized tests would help stop minority admissions since the 1920s were all about the idea that race and intelligence are linked. [1] Do we think that intention is totally irrelevant to the outcome of these tests? There's a reason educators don't like them! Cheaper to use scantrons than to try and assess with any nuance.
[0] https://slate.com/business/2019/09/harvard-admissions-affirm...
[1] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/racis...
This is how this is all widely and commonly understood: if you ask around whether “white men” are a “protected class” according to Civil Rights Act, most people will say that they aren’t. They in fact are, but that’s just the “fiction” part of the legal fiction here.
...or it really can't and it's quite clearly breaking the law?
Let's break it down:
Statement 3 days all applicants will be considered, regardless of criteria. One can consider a candidate while preferentially selecting based on some criteria.
For instance, a common way organizations will operate is to use minority status as a tie breaker between two equally qualified candidates. Both candidates were given full consideration, satisfying #3, while some prefer was used to provide for disadvantaged groups, satisfying #1 and #2.
Not a rhetorical question. I genuinely would like an explanation of how you can legally post "Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position" in a job posting, when minimum wage laws dictate the minimum wage that can be paid for employment.
Specifically, in California [1]:
> Although there are some exceptions, almost all employees in California must be paid the minimum wage as required by state law.
The 'exceptions' are for learners (those with little experience), the mentally ill, and the disabled, which all have different wage laws (none of which allow any of those groups to be employed for free either).
[1] https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_minimumwage.htm
If you pay someone more than $0, that’s when you need to pay them at least minimum wage.
> FLSA prohibits public sector employees from volunteering, without compensation, to work additional time performing the same type of services or work for which they are employed. For example, a police officer can properly be considered a volunteer, and need not be paid, for reading to school children at the municipal library. The same officer must be paid, however, and cannot be considered a volunteer, when directing traffic for a city-sponsored road race in the same municipality where the police officer is employed.
So I guess if you already have a position in another state school, you apparently can't take this one.
[1] https://www.wardandsmith.com/articles/wage-hour-law-voluntee...
This position is unpaid at a public not private employer. In this case the commonly understood meaning of "volunteer" is likely the same as the legal one.
The "without salary basis" looks pretty clear to me, and I'm sure someone holding a PhD could spot that as well.
I'm really wondering what this job posting is about as well.
Which is what makes this episode so juicy. First the language was not in the least ambiguous -- the post means exactly what it says. And from the fact someone (if not multiple people) not just at PhD level, but reasonably high up the totem pole in that department must have signed up on post.
In my case the employer actually declined, because of the risks involved with German job security laws (it may have put me in a position to sue for a paid position after some time).
Position: Unpaid Intern to teach classes
The math is easy to figure out: if you spend 75 hours a year as an adjunct to increase your day rate by $100, then your time as an adjunct is worth up to $250 / hr.
Because the accusation has absolutely nothing to do with doublespeak, and given the fundamental difference between the meaning of doublespeak and the case discussed then it's so far-fetched that just reads as a desperate attempt to gratuitously pin the fascist label.
> They are literally making contradictory statements while refusing to make any logical association between them.
If you knew the definition of doublespeak and read the article and the comments you'd quickly understand the absurdity of your accusation.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220318235002/https://recruit.a...
And yes, it literally says:
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA seeks applications for an Assistant Adjunct Professor on a without salary basis. Applicants must understand there will be no compensation for this position.
An astonishing ethical (and intellectual) lapse on the part of someone at UCLA, in other words. It's easy to see why it got removed so quickly.