Georgetown Open Position

anyone know who landed the urban job?

and what about the open job?

Can somebody "post" the rejection letter, or the "best" "parts" of it, for those of us "playing" at "home"?

I can't resist sharing. It really was very sweet:


"And we mean that most sincerely, for the number of applicants for this position reached at least 324 persons, and the riches that we encountered in so many of the applications that we read often made me (for one) shake my head in wonder and admiration at the high quality of young sociologists emerging from Ph.D. programs today. We deeply hope that you will soon hold the position that truly fits finely with your own particular gifts as both scholar and teacher.

And it is surely not enough for me to repeat the standard invocation that “there were many worthy candidates” for this position. Such boilerplate does not properly respect the efforts you made this past fall. The job market for young sociology Ph.D.’s like yourself is a truly nasty one, and I wonder how I myself would have fared in it when applying for jobs a quarter-century ago, with only the promise of book ms. in preparation and only a single article even in the pipeline. While things did turn out well for me as scholar and teacher, that was more promise than performance back then. Yet earlier, even the famed functionalist theorist, William “Cy” Goode, could write back to us, applicants for a Stanford position in the early 1980s, that he could not have imagined so brutal a job market when he, as a newly minted Ph.D., had moved during the 1950s directly into a fine position at a stellar university.

The committee and myself wish you all the best of futures in sociology and other worlds, and we anticipate with pleasure future encounters with you and your scholarly research."