Guest Post: VAP Trap

Here's Cinderella, with a highly depressing tale from the trenches. -- PGOAT

The VAP Trap has been thoroughly unpacked and elucidated here before. But I don't recall seeing the one in which the Department Chair, desperate for a real, live Ph.D. to teach four back-to-back sections of a required class as a VAP, dangles the possibility of a tenure-track hire in the next couple of years, "for which you'd be warmly encouraged to apply (wink, wink)." Then when the position is finally advertised, the Chair passes on the app without even a glance because "we don't have any interest in offering tenure-track to anyone who's ever taught this class; it doesn't fit our self-conception as a department."

I seem to recall there's some formal fallacy in which the negation of the sufficient condition is the necessary condition. But perhaps I'm wrong about that; teaching as a VAP apparently causes irreversible brain rot.

-- Cinderella