A New Appointment in Advanced Unclarity
Perfunctory University is pleased to announce the creation of the post of Assistant Professor of Obscurantism, a role established in response to the troubling spread of plain English across higher education. The successful candidate will ensure that no useful idea reaches a reader without first passing through several layers of terminology, qualification, theoretical positioning, and preventable doubt.
Based within the Department of Epistemic Complication and Strategic Inaccessibility, the Assistant Professor will support the University's longstanding commitment to making familiar matters appear newly difficult. They will work closely with colleagues in Discursive Fog, Applied Ambiguity, and the Centre for Questions That Were Already Answered.
Principal Responsibilities
- Turning straightforward ideas into unnecessarily impenetrable prose.
- Developing theoretical frameworks for phenomena already understood perfectly well.
- Replacing ordinary words with terminology accessible only to six other academics, three of whom disagree about its meaning.
- Measuring scholarly sophistication by the number of subordinate clauses per sentence.
- Critiquing clarity as an oppressive epistemological assumption.
- Designing diagrams that leave the original problem harder to understand.
- Answering direct questions by questioning the ontological legitimacy of the question.
Teaching and Student Experience
The appointee will lead the flagship module OBSC101: Introduction to Things That Resist Introduction. Assessment will consist of a 4,000-word abstract, a diagram with no key, and a reflective statement explaining why the marking criteria cannot be known in advance. Students who fail to understand a lecture will be reassured that this demonstrates the lecture's profundity.
Office hours will take place at an undisclosed time in a room whose number exists only as a contested social construct. Queries submitted by email will receive an automatic reply inviting the sender to problematise their expectation of a response.
Research Profile
The ideal candidate will have an emerging international reputation, demonstrated through publications with titles such as Problematizing the Problematic Problematization of Problematized Knowing and Towards a Post-Legible Hermeneutics of the Photocopier. A proven ability to cite oneself before publication will be considered advantageous.
If you can explain it clearly, you probably haven't theorised it enough.
Person Specification
Applicants should possess a doctorate in a subject adjacent to the one they intend to discuss, together with an extensive vocabulary and a principled reluctance to define it. Essential attributes include confidence without conclusion, fluency in the passive voice, and the ability to transform a yes-or-no question into a two-day symposium.
The salary is competitive, although comparison has been rendered methodologically inadmissible. The appointment is permanent in a provisional, contingent, and institutionally deniable sense. Informal enquiries may be directed to the Dean of Unnecessarily Complicated Things, provided they are neither informal nor enquiries.