Talk:Asian History 2013-14

Advert Timing/Job Cycle
[8 Sept] 9/6: A general query: by when will all of the job postings generally be up for the season? I am looking at previous years and in previous years it seems that there are nearly twice or three times as many postings as we currently have on the 2013-14 page. Is it simply the case that this year there are not so many openings available? Also, it seems that the number of people looking is much smaller than previous years. Is this also because of the coincidental demographics of this year's cycle, or is it because so many people found jobs last year? I am a total newcomer to the academic job search and this is very mysterious to me. Apologies if this is not the right place to stick this question -- I'd be happy to remove it and put it in the right place, if someone would just tell me where this sort of thing goes. Thank you! [query moved from front page AFII (talk) 17:13, September 8, 2013 (UTC)]
 * I think a lot of your questions can be answered if you realize that when you are looking at last year's page, you are seeing a complete job search cycle (hence many more jobs and many more users), whereas when you are looking at this year's page, right now, you are only seeing the early stages (hence fewer jobs and users). It is only early Sept. and many jobs remain to be posted -- if you check the same page at this time next year, it will probably look similar. Hope this helps. Una74 (talk) 14:18, September 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, that's very helpful, thank you! I was looking for dates on the 2012-2013 page, but generally there were only dates for notifications of preliminary interviews and on-campus visits. I couldn't figure out when the job postings themselves were being added. I assume that the bulk of the postings yet to occur are in October? 42.98.55.79 15:29, September 9, 2013 (UTC)
 * If you want to check when things were added, refer to the page history: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Asian_History_2013-14?action=history (available through the drop-down menu next to the "Edit" button at the top of any wiki page). If you want to compare what last year's page looked like on Sept. 9, 2012 (exactly a year ago), see here: http://academicjobs.wikia.com/wiki/Asian_History_2012-13?oldid=237184 . Depends on the year, but I expect jobs will continue to be added through the Fall and Winter, yes. Una74 (talk) 16:12, September 9, 2013 (UTC)

Discussion on status of current grad schools
[17 Jan] Removed from the Harvard job posting. Please bear in mind the wiki's T&C, to which you agree upon use of the wiki, about libel, and the privacy of third parties before posting. AFII (talk) 09:35, January 17, 2014 (UTC)
 * Please clarify "you can figure out what the committee was looking for by the kind of people they chose"?
 * This search clarified one thing: Columbia is the dominant POWERhouse school. Harvard didn't have enough confidence in its own students to let any try out. California (north) could only produce one ok candidate. And the So-Cal faction, despite all the maneuvering against others and for that choice, could not seal the deal. Other places are jokes. COLUMBIA has now placed everywhere, and is dominating the field for China finally as well as Japan.
 * [16 Jan] Please keep comments relevant to the search. General discussion can go on the relevant Talk or Venting pages. AFII (talk) 08:47, January 16, 2014 (UTC)
 * nice to know that the new powerhouse school is producing scholars who are humble and respectful of their peers.
 * i think it is--they are respectful of their true *peers.* maybe this will motivate other places to try and even compete. sorry for not being sorry.
 * The above comments are reminiscent of a comment on the Tufts job thread a couple years ago. That comment also referred to Columbia as the Chinese history "power house," and that comment also disparaged other school in saying something nice about Columbia. Fair enough. Continue to shout to the world that your school rocks and other schools suck, thus proving how immature you are as a would-be scholar in one of the oldest fields in the humanities. Chicago (Li), Penn (Hymes), Berkeley (Zelin), and UCLA (Lean) are the schools from which the current Columbia China historians got their degree. One may want to add Stanford (Ko) and Harvard (Tuttle) to the list. It would be interesting to see whether they would be all replaced by those whom they have groomed because they might have "enough confidence" in their own students.
 * haters gonna hate. sorry for partying. sorry you didn't get into columbia. you make some wishy washy points but concede the basic: columbia is china history power house.
 * ​you can, or even should, be proud of your school like anyone else. Many people on this thread would probably admit that Columbia has been doing great in placing their students at good schools. Still, do you have to call others losers when you party for your success? That petty? This seems like a serious mental problem. I hope you are the same person who made the original "power house" comments a few years ago. If not, it proves that Columbia have produced more than one academic retard.
 * Let me just point out to the a**hole who posted above that, during the previous job market cycle, columbia grads failed to land ANY of the top tenure track positions on the market (Chicago, Cornell, Duke, UCI), which went to people from, respectively, Yale, Harvard, UCI, and UCSD.  As for Ghosh getting hired over the other two candidates this year--let's just say that, had he been on the market with this package the first time that Harvard ran its search in 2011, he wouldn't even have gotten a flyout.  Placing someone in a top school out of a REALLY weak crop of candidates does not a "powerhouse" make.
 * To echo what posters below mentioned, I think you have taken the bait of a troll above. There is no need to bash a particular candidate or Columbia. Actually, I know well those candidates you mentioned or read their files and I do not think it fair to conclude that last year's bunch are necessarily stronger than this year's. It is also certainly true that some top schools found probably all of those you mentioned less interesting than their eventual hires. / I think people's comments on the powerhouse referred to a recent pattern, not a particular candidate or year. In any event, it is hard to believe a "top school" like Harvard would hire a "weak" candidate even asusming you are right that the entire pool might be less competitive. I also know people who did not get any job offer for a few years and then grabbed all the best positions in a year despite still strong competition. Sometimes, what matters more is fit or luck.
 * To return to the discussion to something relevant to the search, I saw all the talks and can say that each candidate gave a solid performance. No one, no matter from where they came, was the second coming of John Fairbank. (Not that anyone should be expected to be that). For what it's worth, there is also a rule of thumb, not always honored (calling out Yale here), that good institutions should not directly hire their own PhDs, which in part explains why no one from Harvard made the roster. That same week on Friday, there was a fourth talk at Harvard I went to by a young scholar. It wasn't part of this search, but it was on fairly recent Chinese history, and his material was also good enough that he could have been in contention were the ad written differently. He was very smart and admirable. The point of this long post is that there is a lot of good work being done out there by many people from many schools.
 * In response to the post above, if Harvard people still use Fairbank as the best model for younger generations of China historians that they strive to train, then it is little wonder that the Chinese history program at Harvard has been on a decline over the past decade. That is reflected not just in whether its own graduates were interviewed at Harvard this year. If you know who have got the top research universities' jobs over the last five years or so, you will see that a few schools have been much more productive and sucessful in training the next generation of China historians. The search committees saw other candidates working on more cutting-edge and exciting projects. No doubt, most schools/programs will rise and fall over time, but for a school like Harvard, its administrators, faculty, and students probably will not have the same sense of competition or urgency as their counterparts at a less contented institution will have. That is not always a good thing.           I suspect that the poster further above was just trolling and trying to make Columbia people look terrible. I don't think any true olumbia graduate would come out and sound so arrogant or annoying. Columbia has been quite strong, but UC, Chicago, Yale, and Princeton have been doing very well too.
 * Not a huge Harvard fan, but I think the Fairbank comment above, but I think it was a reference to the infamous job market rec letter from a few years ago in which a UCSD prof referred to his student (now placed in the empire state) as something like a young JF or the second coming of JF or something like that. This Columbia troll has been around before over a couple years of the job market cycle. I hope he / she is a younger grad student who is just immature. I have met some Columbia grads who are good people. As for Harvard, it seems like if you show up they will *always* pull this card in seminars. How do people deal with that?
 * Does anyone know who has got the Princeton job? I am not on the market, but just curioius to see how the job-placement power distribution looks like, given all the heat over the Harvard hire. In light of the notoriously slender chance for a junior hire to be tenured at Harvard, I would think the Princeton position might be more sought after than the Harvard one. Any insider from Princeton around here?
 * Allowing myself to indulge in academic gossip for a bit, and feeling a bit intruiged by the "job-placement power distribution" concept raised above, I went back and checked China placement records for the past 5 years.  It seems that the schools that have most consistently placed people into national research universities in the past 5 years have been, in no particular order, Columbia (Berkeley, Toronto, now Harvard), Harvard (MIT, Cornell, quite a few major state schools), UCSD (American Univ., UCI), UCI (Penn State, Duke), and Stanford (UCD, Northeastern).  Princeton, UCB, and Chicago haven't seemed to have a whole lot of luck, on aggregate, although I'd imagine Chicago starting to become a major presence due to the recent hires they've made.  Yale is more ambiguous: It does have the lateral hire into Chicago, but hasn't churned out a regular line of job market candidates for a while due to the Spence-Perdue transition.  A few Yale products are on the market this year, including Spence's last two students, though, and seem to be having pretty decent luck.  Perdue students are more of an unknown quantity.  I hear that his first student got snatched up by a law school in my region this year, but he's a JD-PhD, and probably shouldn't count for history placement purposes.
 * Yale doesn't have much of a placement reputation anymore, at least in my mind.  Perdue won't have a student to place (in history depts, at least) for another few years.
 * Subtle UCI troll is subtle. Someone keeps dropping it in as a "top position"?! Cal is in my view the best for modern China, but you need to go up north or way south. I doubt many people would even naturally recognize UCI as an acronym. UCSD/UCB each have some challenges but are still probably the best for students--no insult to any other great programs out there. Obviously Columbia is perfectly solid, and Harvard could be, with some rebuilding.
 * I'm sorry, but are you stupid?  When arguably the most influential historian of his generation (and I don't mean just in Chinese history) spends the bulk of his career at a school, it automatically becomes one of the top Chinese history programs in the country as long as he's there.  Granted, now that Pomeranz is gone the department may plummet, but at least it had a great run, including placement-wise.  Besides, if you count the vast number of students at UCB and the meager number of even semi-decent placements they've managed to get in past years, a student would be stupid to choose UCB for Chinese history over any of the major East Coast schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, even possibly JHU).  UCSD was great until Esherick retired, but now that he has, I expect it to go down the drain as well.  Let's face it, the only strong West Coast place to get a PhD in Chinese history these days is Stanford.
 * LOL, just LOL at this. Oh my sides! Are you insane? Or does his mom troll the job wiki? He has definitely made a real contribution, for sure. Anyone who does China from mid 19 century should take a look at his book and know what he is trying to do, whether or not they agree with it. That's an achievement. But he is not "the most influential historian of his generation" even within *Chinese* history, by a longshot. And what good placements has he pulled off, compared with UCSD for example?
 * I'm just going to assume you recently had a major concussion--it would otherwise be hard to come to any conclusion except that you're a complete idiot (say, if UCSD admits people like you, that's conclusive proof that it's really going down the drain).  Which Chinese historian from the 45-55 age group do you think is more influential than Pomeranz, hmmm?  Do you think anyone outside their repsective little subfields gives a damn about them?  As for placements, the past two UCI products have gone on to Penn State and Duke, whereas the past two semi-decent UCSD products (out of courtesy, I'm excluding people your department has placed in fourth tier schools or minor LACs) have ended up at American and--wait for it--UCI.  Oh wait--you think UCI is a worthless school, so that must mean you think UCSD has had a worthless placement record in recent years!
 * The Penn placement has a brain. The person at Duke is a terrible lemon, studying a boring topic, time, and place. On the greatest of a generation, we don't even have to go that far: would you advise a student prepping for exams to read most intensely A) Divergence, B) China Made, or C) any piece of paper Esherick picked up to wipe his bunghole with? I'd rank them in order of importance C, B, A. Longterm, my money would still be on UC schools over most though maybe not all others you mention.
 * It's the mass of brainwashed lemmings like you that always make me really glad I didn't return to the UC system for grad school.  Anyone with half a functioning brain knows that, if you ask 10 Chinese history grad students "who is the greatest of x generation," you'll get 10 different answers, with each person probably voting for their own advisor.  Which is why I was talking about INFLUENCE.  You'd have to be seriously brain dead to believe that, of all the Chinese history books published since 2000, China Made ranks even in the top 20 in influence, or that anything except Divergence is #1.  But you probably are, so whatever.
 * But anyway, regardless of what the UCSD troll thinks, my broader point is that UC schools are generally spiralling downwards these days, and can't really compare (either resource-wise or, after recent retirements and departures, faculty-wise) to the top Ivies or Stanford.
 * Wether a school stands out as a possible "powerhouse" can also be gauged by whether their graduates will be the leaders of the current and the next generation of Chinese history. So it may be more helpful to take a look at the schools from which the Assistant and recently tenured Associate Professors in Chinese history at the major research universities came. In that sense, Chicago might be pretty strong (Columbia, Toronto, etc, add names you know)., Yale (Princeton, Chicago, etc.) and UCLA (Columbia, UNC, etc. add more names here) seem to have done pretty well, and so has Columbia (Berkeley, Stanford, Toronto, and now Harvard, etc.). By the way, for what its worth, I heard from the grapevine that three different former Columbia graduates could have taken the recently filled positions at Harvard, Chicago, MIT, Toronto (2nd position there) if they wanted to over the last three or four years. For the schools which have done better placement-wise, part of it is because their programs are bigger, often including award-winning young China historians or some of the still active but most famous scholars in the field, and another big part of the reason, I guess, is that how they are training their students. Whether the faculty members want to devote their time to advising their students on dissertation or job search can make a huge difference in how their students fare in the short term. This might have less to do with the research potential or ability of their graduates than to do with the culture or mentoring tradition of the graduate program. But it is possible that after a while, more successful programs (in placement) tend to attract more competitive (and thus sometimes better prepared) graduate students and new faculty members, creating a good cycle for some schools and not so for others. But it is not clear that any of the above-mentioned schools have become a powerhouse yet. And much of their successes probably hinged on one or two senior faculty members whose departure or retirement (e.g.,Yale/Spence, Princeton/Naquin, Harvard/Kuhn or Kirby, UCSD/Esherick, Berkeley/Wakeman, Chicago/Duara, Columbia/Hymes or Zelin) would or did deal a serious blow for quite some years. At the same time, how much an individual can eventually accomplish as a scholar will have very little to do with where they originally graduated.
 * ^Wait, so now we have ANOTHER pro-Columbia propagandist, this time out of Scarborough? Give it a rest! We all get Columbia is a great place. I just think a lot people are objecting to the attitude that seems to clearly be coming from more than one person here, judging by IP addresses. When you brag so much it's like you have tiny-penis defensiveness. Keep your micropenis to yourself please.
 * I'm a bit of an outsider to the more elite arguments going on here, but I wanted to make one request. Can we lay off the term "retard," which is getting thrown around a lot? It's offensive. Please, by all means insult each other, and do it in creative ways. It makes everything here more fun to read. But maybe let's retire that one. I find it ironic that the "Pomerantz is the greatest" troll in particular uses that term. How do you think your hero would think about that, given his personal situation? But please, let the arguments continue. I actually feel like I've learned a lot from reading all this.
 * Point taken.  I've revised my postings to use less offensive terms.
 * Offensive language aside, I personally find this thread hilarious to read as a bystander. By informal count, the schools that have been explicitly trashed so far by various people include Harvard (for being outdated academically), Columbia (for producing assholes), Yale (for not producing enough job market candidates), and pretty much the entire UC system, but especially UCB (for bad placement ratios), UCSD (for producing "brainwashed lemmings"), and UCI (for producing "horrible lemons").  Princeton, too, has been on the receiving end of disparaging comments, only somewhat milder.  I mean, is there ANY major Chinese history hub that doesn't attract rabid grad student haters these days?  Kinda glad that I'll be graduating soon and leaving all this behind...
 * Oh, and because the nature of my own work makes a Great Divergence-related brawl kind of hard to resist, let me just say that, whereas opinions can reasonably differ as to quality, it'd be very hard to find a recent Chinese (or global) history book that's generated more attention, debate, and changes to general historiography. I believe that's how people usually define influence...