In our June “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:
‘Radical’ as this might sound, I wonder Marcus if you would consider eliminating the job market reporting thread, and also placing an enforceable ban on reporting in the discussion thread (which obviously people would try to do) so that we could go back to a place where you just do your best on your materials, send your applications out, and get back to your life. I won’t pretend this is an entirely unselfish request, but as far as I am concerned we all did just fine without a reporting thread for years, and it doesn’t seem to me like the amount of compulsive checking folks do on here starting 9/15 and going all the way until mid-April is really supportive of the mental well-being of individuals in the profession (and isn’t it at least somewhat part of the mission of the blog to be a space where the rough side of our profession is considered and brought into open reflection? Well, this is now one of them IMO).
Should we vote? I vote eliminate.
I’m sympathetic with the OP’s concern that job-market boards can be detrimental to well-being. In fact, when I was on the market, I avoided similar boards for just this reason: I am not the kind of person for whom compulsively checking things is helpful. However, although I’m always willing to considering things, here are two reasons why the job boards exist and why I think they still should.
First, I am extremely reticent to generalize from some people’s psychology to others. Human beings are incredibly diverse folk–as anyone with family, friends, a marriage, etc., can attest. It can often be hard to understand how things that one wouldn’t find “healthy” in one’s own case can be things that other people sincerely appear to psychologically need or benefit from. Of course, sometimes one can be of the firm conviction that what they think they need is unhealthy for them–but in those cases, provided we are dealing with adults, the proper recourse is I think to make a persuasive case to them to change their behavior, not to decide unilaterally for them that what they think benefits them doesn’t. Which is what I think removing the job boards–even if it were decided by a vote–would do.
Second–and readers such as the OP may or may not remember this–before the Cocoon hosted its two job boards, there were other forums (“The Philosophy Smoker” and various anonymous “metablogs”) which hosted similar discussions, albeit with little to no moderation that resulted in posts that many people in the profession (myself included) considered objectionable, toxic, or even unethical. Part of the reason that I started the job-boards here–after those other forums went defunct–was to hopefully ensure that if these kinds of discussions were to occur, they could at least occur here where there are moderating standards to avoid the kinds of objectionable content that repeatedly occurred at those other forums. I think the Cocoon’s forums have mostly succeeded at that (with a few hiccups here and there that were addressed due to reader concerns citing the blog’s mission).
Anyway, I worry that canceling the job boards here would likely lead such discussions to migrate elsewhere again–and so my thought is, even if people like the OP don’t like them, it’s best all things considered for the Cocoon to have them. Sure, this may be a “lesser-evil” justification, but for all that, my belief is that it’s probably a good one given what came before–and again, I suspect there are other people (e.g., many of the boards’ commenters) who think the boards are beneficial at least for them.
What do readers think?
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