I wrote this on 2009.12.30:
RyeHigh J-school – the faculty that hires its friends despite an avalanche of applications; hired one such friend for a substitute-teaching assignment after a ten-minute chat; and offers precisely two courses in online journalism (about which one of whose students complained to me in person) – now needs a new chairperson.
Of course it’ll be somebody you’ve heard of. This will end quite a bit worse than that lecture Michael Schudson of Columbia gave that one time recently.
On 2010.05.18, Daniel Doz, dean, Faculty of Communication & Design, issued a memo stating:
Unfortunately[,] the search initiated during this academic year… failed to produce a successful outcome for the position of Chair, School of Journalism. Therefore… I am hereby requesting suggestions as to possible candidates for a one-year interim position.
Note that he didn’t say they couldn’t find a suitable candidate. What he also didn’t say is that they even had candidates to begin with. I suspect nobody applied. But of course, I can’t confirm that because I’m not an insider; I can’t just call up my friends in the department to ask, or wait till the next dinner party to do the same.
But what I can do is mail Doz directly, asking him the following:
Please tell me which of the following is correct:
Candidates applied and none were found suitable by Ryerson.
Candidates applied. Ryerson found one of them suitable. That candidate turned down the job, or a deal could otherwise not be reached.
No candidates applied.
If something else happened, do tell.
He refused to respond.
Who could possibly want this job, let alone make it work? By now I am not the only person who knows that RyeHigh J-school is training millennials for the jobs of the 1980s, none of which exist. We’ve been through this before. Doz knows this, too; I wrote him a letter on 2010.01.19 stating as much, assuring him that “[y]ou’ll eventually find a bifocal-wearing computerphobe to run the department. Whoever you hire will be a nice reassuring choice – somebody all of us have heard of. That would be your problem right there.”