Sunday, June 17, 2007

Rocking the Passive Voice XI*

The asterisk in the title means I'm doing rigorous analytic philosophy. Because when you make simple ideas needlessly obsure by sticking asterisks and primes and acronyms into them, that means you've developed the ideas rigorously.

Anyway, I realized there was something else I had to mention about that PFO from yesterday's post. Here's the PFO again, in case you missed it:

Thank you very much for your interest in our open-rank positions this year (JFP vol. 171, positions [#] and [#]). We wanted to let you know that we have now filled both positions from an extremely impressive pool of applicants.

Please accept our best wishes for your future endeavors.

[So and so]
Professor and Chair
Department of Philosophy
[Fancy pants] University.

That's the whole thing. Notice anything missing? There's no "Dear Mr. PGS." There's no salutation of any kind.

That's really fucking shabby. I mean, the least they could do--and I mean least--is to get a work-study student to plug names into the form e-mail. But I guess not. If the work-study student was doing that, there might have been a whole hour when professors ran the risk of having to do their own photocopying. And god knows that's more important that acknowledging the personhood of job applicants.

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