A job listing

Excerpts from a genuine job listing, describing a tenure-track position in philosophy:

Our students tend to be poorly prepared for college level work, intellectually passive, interested primarily in partying, and culturally provincial in the extreme. . . .

The academic environment at SEMO is distinctly non-intellectual — somewhat like a Norman Rockwell painting — and the candidate cannot expect to attract students by offering courses that assume innate curiosity about ideas and books, or intellectual playfulness, or independence of moral and political thought.

Snopes calls this listing cynical. Other readers might call it honest. The fellow who got the job now heads the Department of Political Science, Philosophy, and Religion at Southeast Missouri State University.