2 Lectureships in Economics at UL

The Department of Economics at the University of Limerick is looking to hire 2 tenure-track Lecturers below the bar, one in Macroeconomics/Monetary economics. The closing date is 10 April, 2015. All details are here. 

By Stephen Kinsella

Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick.

7 replies on “2 Lectureships in Economics at UL”

That’s great. Meanwhile, my humanities department has lost about a dozen permanent staff members. Not one has been replaced while enrolments have risen by 20%.

But, of course, economics is vitally important. I mean, imagine the trouble we’d have gotten into without that army of economists warning us about property bubbles and insisting on changes in government policy…

Oh, wait, never mind.

I mean, imagine the trouble we’d have gotten into without that army of economists warning us about property bubbles and insisting on changes in government policy.

“After the tragedy of 1666, it was clear that London had no need for firemen.”

@Enda

The analogy doesn’t hold. It would only work if firemen caused the great fire, since bad economic advice of the sort enthusiastically and nearly unanimously endorsed by our academic economists (cf. neoliberalism) was the cause of our recent economic troubles.

“UL should not hire these two lecturers lest their rampant neoliberal ideology cause another recession. The UL economists probably didn’t even predict the banking crises in Munster of 1836 and 1885.”

Come on, Ernie. The snark at the announcement of two new academic jobs is unnecessary.

@Enda

Think so? Ask yourself why there are jobs for economists but none for humanists and what that says about the kind of society we’re constructing. Then add to the mix the fact that the replacement of permanent lectureships with insecure (and therefore tractable to “professional” administrators) adjunct staff is the direct result of the sorts of (neoliberal) theories dear to our economists (almost to a person) and you might come to realise that my “snark” is the least of your worries.

UL and Moyross are in the same city.
Poor Moyross suffered a lot under the dominant economic narrative.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/mar/29/war-against-humanities-at-britains-universities

Currently fixed in the crosshairs are the disciplines of the humanities – arts, languages and social sciences – which have suffered swingeing funding cuts and been ignored by a government bent on promoting the modish, revenue-generating Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) subjects. The liberal education which seeks to provide students with more than mere professional qualifications appears to be dying a slow and painful death, overseen by a whole cadre of what cultural anthropologist David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs”: bureaucrats hired to manage the transformation of universities from centres of learning to profit centres. As one academic put it to me: “Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.” The humanities, whose products are necessarily less tangible and effable than their science and engineering peers (and less readily yoked to the needs of the corporate world) have been an easy target for this sprawling new management class.

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