Since some applicants might not want their current employers to know they are looking for a job, the philosophy department’s hiring committee has apologized to those applicants, and the department has also apologized to the public.
The Daily Nous, a U.S.-based website for philosophers, reported on Monday (Jan. 30) that when the philosophy department in NU’s College of Letters and Social Sciences emailed some applicants to tell them that their recent job applications had been denied, it put the recipient’s email address in the cc (carbon copy) field instead of the bcc (blind carbon copy) field.
This revealed the names of more than 200 applicants, so the people who got the information could see who had applied for the same job but needed to know what the job was and when they used it.
The report says this mistake could hurt academics whose jobs are already in danger because many don’t want their bosses to know they’re looking for work elsewhere. They don’t want to upset their bosses or give their employers a reason not to renew their contracts.
The Daily Nous asked the Department of Philosophy. It also said it was sorry to the public when it realized it had made a mistake.
When asked about it, NUS told a reporter from the Union-Tribune to read a statement from the philosophy department. The report said that this was a terrible mistake made by the department and was not only rude to the applicant but also a severe breach of privacy. Worst of all, it could hurt many people in the profession who are weak, especially those whose jobs are uncertain.
“It’s already hard to look for a job. We feel bad that we’ve made things harder for people who trusted us enough to apply for jobs. We don’t come up with excuses. We want to do better, and we will. We are going over our hiring process, including how we talk to people who want to work for us, to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen again. We’re sorry to everyone who was hurt by this.”
