What a strange academic market this year

The US academic market is extremely cyclical, because state funding for universities itself is overly cyclical. The reason lies in constitutional constraints that prohibit many states from incurring deficits in their yearly operational budgets. In the current recession, this is compounded by the fact that many private universities have lost a substantial part of their endowment and thus need to tighten their belts. The situation now is that many if not most universities have hiring freezes. Newly minted PhDs will thus have a really hard time finding positions. There may be more visiting positions than normal, though, as departments do not have authorizations for permanent hires, but still need to cover classes. But I cannot see this compensate for the acute lack of new assistant professor positions.

Strangely, it appears that the market for more senior positions is more active than one would expect. Ads for these positions are less numerous than previous years, but not much. But more interesting is the fact that many departments are "informally" seeking to fill positions. From what I could gather from many conversations is that many have the authorization to look but not yet to hire. Basically, if they can land someone interesting, they can hire. And this opportunistic attitude seems quite widespread. For one, universities authorities are letting departments compete for positions with candidates instead of some proof of need. Then, many universities seem to look to poach from more distressed colleges, say in California, Arizona or Florida. Finally, public universities cannot openly hire, despite huge teaching needs, in the face of hiring bans.

In other words, the phone bills in many departments are going to be much higher than usual...