Welcome!

Welcome to the IR Rumor Mill. If this is your first time here, please familiarize yourself our policies as they have evolved in recent years. It will make things easier down the road.

If you want to continue with a discussion from an earlier set of threads, we've posted a list of 2007-2008 threads on many topics. This list extends through the summer of 2008. If you want to keep your queries active, you should re-post them in the new threads below.

We've finally gotten around to adding labels to our posts. This should make searching the Rumor Mill easier.

If you have any comments or suggestions on the Mill itself, you should post them on the relevant thread.

This year we expect to build the "Big Board" organically, i.e., to list jobs when rumors start to come in. If anyone wants to volunteer some time and send us an HTML-formatted table with active job listings, feel free to do so.

If you want to contact us, email us at ir11rumor11mill@gmail.com. Don't forget to leave out the 11s (as in, "these amps go up to") for actual delivery!

2008-2009 Job Rumors (September)

This is what it all comes down to: the kickoff thread to post job rumors for the 2008-2009 season. Remember the rules (and to check them if you're confused), such as:

1. all comments are moderated;

2. we seek confirmation before posting rumors concerning lateral moves;

3. source your rumors, e.g., "I overheard someone in the hall saying that his friend heard from another fellow at Belfer that her friend at Big State University knows the administrative assistant at Small Liberal Arts College who said that they were interviewing...." or, more likely, "source: the candidate";

4. keep it clean.

Also, remember that we sometimes inadvertently violate our own policies, that we appreciate emailed rumors, that we will always keep our sources confidential, and that threatening to sue us only makes us mad.

At the risk of repetition, we note that no one has a "legal right" to keep information about his or her interview a secret. If you're tempted to claim otherwise, consider a simple fact: if we find out about your interview, it usually means it already isn't much of a secret.

We often try to accommodate reasonable requests to hold information. We believe, moreover, that our attempts to operate in good faith account for the high-quality information we receive. We are very good about honoring requests to hold rumors by people who send us those rumors.

But do not assume that our team is made up entirely of powerless first-year graduate students (although it might be... we're not saying) and that making absurd threats against us won't engender blowback. We know some people who are very good with voodoo dolls.

Tally Board and Confirmations

Thanks to those who have emailed us with updates about their status--particularly in terms of offers, acceptances, and declines. The wiki currently reports a lot of information that we don't. This is because we either haven't gotten responses to our queries about the information there or we haven't tracked down the relevant individuals yet. If there's a rumor about you on the wiki, please email us to let us know whether or not it is correct so that we can post that information here.

As always, our email is the name of the blog at gmail.com.

IR Rumor Mill Discussion

We just realized we don't have a current thread for "meta" discussion of the Rumor Mill. Consider this it. One thing that might be worth discussing is our policy on reporting offers. We have not been entirely consistent about it this year, but it is now becoming an issue in comment moderation. This is what we wrote last time around:

Our current policy is not to disclose offers unless that information comes directly from the candidate in question. Job offers involve sensitive information exchanged between schools and prospective employees. A candidate often negotiates with a school over the terms of the contract. Other schools may have reasons to adjust their searches in light of a job offer. These and other reasons strike us as sufficient warrants for treading carefully in this area.

Robert Axelrod on Academic Rumor Mills and Gossip Blogs

In a message sent to Political Science departments, Robert Axelrod, APSA President and eminent political scientist, writes:

In discussions with APSA colleagues, I have learned that a number of private web sites and blogs have emerged recently that are widely used by political scientists, particularly graduate students, to discuss the academic job market. In their best form, such sites afford a new vehicle for the "grapevine" discussions that have always accompanied the academic labor market. However, I have also been shown anonymous postings on these lists making racist, sexist, and homophobic attacks on political scientists. The context makes clear this language is coming from within our discipline. There is little we can do to respond directly to these anonymous postings. We can speak out however. I urge you to stay attentive in the departmental communities you lead to gauge whether there are incivilities in the exchanges among your students and colleagues. Where you hear evidence of them, directly or indirectly, confront this behavior in whatever ways you consider appropriate and best. I truly believe these events are infrequent and at the fringe of our community. But the integrity of our professional exchange is the bedrock of our community. I hope you'll agree with me it is our obligation as leaders of the discipline to sustain the respectful and civil treatment of colleagues.

We heartily endorse Professor Axelrod's concerns. We hope that we have made the IR Rumor Mill relatively free of such vices, and that faculty-members and graduate students will, in recognition of our efforts, continue to aid us as we seek to provide accurate and timely information about developments in the IR job market. We also hope that APSA, or some other institution, will eventually render websites such as our own obsolete by setting up procedures for departments to report on the same information we post here.

Comment Moderation Enabled

We've decided to turn on comment moderation for the immediate future. As interesting as it is to discover that, among other things, some people over the age of 12 find King Missile's post-1990 ouevre funny enough to quote from (extensively) on this blog, we think it might be easier to screen as many posts as possible rather than to delete them after they appear.

New Regime

IR Rumor Mill is now under new management. While we're getting our house in order, a few important notices:

• Job listings will be available soon. We recognize that most job applications are either due on October 1st or October 15th and that, in consequence, the list will be of little help for those making decisions about their applications. We hope, instead, that the listings will serve as a reference point for job-market developments.

• After a brief experiment with comment moderation, we have decided to disable it on a temporary basis. Please be on your best behavior; we will delete comments that bring disrepute on the IR Rumor Mill. If the comment sections begin to look like those found on some of the other "rumor" and "discussion sites" (some of you know what we're talking about) we'll return to being a moderated forum. The short version: we do not view discussions of the quality of specific job applicants as appropriate subjects for the IR Rumor Mill.

• We suspect that some short lists are already decided and that interviewees have already been contacted. We will soon be establishing discussion threads for job-market related information. A few rumors are currently circulating at American and Comparative Jobs. We have no corroborating evidence for these rumors, however.

IR Rumor Mill Discussion

In order to separate out rumors from discussion of the job market or the rumor mill itself, please comment here if you wish to discuss the rumor mill itself. This includes complaints, suggestions, or compliments. All of the relevant comments from the IR Job Rumors Fall 2006 have been moved here. Since this is a process that currently must be done by hand, please post comments about the mill itself here rather than on other postings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Most FAQs generally tend to be RAQs (Rarely Asked Questions). Nonetheless, here are a few questions that we'll attempt to pre-empt by asking and answering them.

• What's the purpose of this?

To formalize the informal rumor mill through which most job market and postdoc applicants find out whether they've been accepted or rejected. This has been implemented in Astrophysics, Theoretical Particle Physics, Experimental CM/AMO Physics, and Theoretical Nuclear Physics. These have been written up in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

• What will you be posting?

Initially, job and postdoc listings that specify international relations as one of the target fields will be posted here. Currently we have a IR Fellowship List Fall 2005 post and a Fall 2006 post as well as an IR Job List Fall 2006 post. Please note that this is not a clearinghouse; jobs are primarily from the APSA ejobs list. If you have a job listing that we don't have that is NOT on APSA ejobs, please email us or leave a comment on that post. You can subscribe to the IR Rumor Mill Atom/RSS feed and thereby find out about IR jobs and postdocs throughout the year. Once shortlists are generated (and we are informed about them), those will also be posted as individual entries and linked from an IR Job Rumors Fall 2006 post (not created yet). You can see the how the process works in the IR Fellowship Rumors Fall 2005 post, which we are currently updating as rumors come in. Please contribute!

• How can I contribute?

If you have a rumor regarding job or fellowship offers that have been made already, post a comment to the appropriate Rumor entry, e.g. the IR Fellowship Rumors Fall 2005 post. If you have information about a fellowship or job that we don't have on a list, post it to the the appropriate List entry, e.g. the IR Job List Fall 2006 entry. If you have more specific information on a job or fellowship already posted (what a particular department is looking for, the makeup of the search committee, etc.), e.g. you know something about the Adelphi University job, post it to that specific entry. You can also send email straight to IRRumorMill AT gmail DOT com.

• What are the comment posting rules? How can I be anonymous?

Please keep your comments short and informative. The idea is to post information, not opinions. Got a strong opinion? Great! Start your own blog and link to the entry if you like. No profanity, please. We'd like to keep the comments open to all, but if the comments are abused, we'll have to limit them. Anonymous comments are the default! However, some participants have chosen to use persistent pseudonyms instead of submitting anonymous comments so that the community can get a better sense of the veracity of the rumors. Just select "Other" when you leave your comment and type in your pseudonym. Even better, create an account on blogger.com (owned by Google, so you may want to grab the namespace in any case!) and your pseudonym will be password-protected.

• Who are you guys, anyway?

Members of the discipline who have decided that the existing job market does an extremely poor job of letting candidates know where they are in the process.

• Can I join you?

The best way to contribute by sharing whatever information you have with us through comments or emails. The actual site upkeep is really boring.