How Was the Tenure-Track Market This Year?

My considered view is that the online JFP was largely a success. And I was particularly impressed with the APA's responsiveness to complaints and suggestions made here and elsewhere in the first few days after launch.

However, one thing I really don't like about it is the way that job ads disappear when they expire or are canceled. I thought for sure I'd seen an ad for a position at Northern Illinois, but when I started putting my application together I couldn't find the ad anywhere. I spent more time than I should have wondering if I'd hallucinated it before I thought to check the wiki and found that it had been called off. I liked the old way, where a canceled ad would be struck through, and wouldn't just evaporate into the air. So you'd know that there had been an ad, and that it had been canceled.

The other problem with the disappearing ads is that it makes it very difficult to compare this year's job-market situation with that of previous years. I take it that PhilJobs might be better for this sort of thing, but I'm not sure that you could do a straight, apples-to-apples comparison of this year's PhilJobs numbers with previous year's JFP numbers, because PhilJobs seems to have more ads for non-tenure-track positions and positions at a wider variety of institution-types. And the JFP's new numbering system isn't particularly transparent (though it seems to be better than the previous system in a variety of ways).

I suppose I could have kept track of the number of ads myself as the season progressed. But I didn't. And so I wonder if anybody out there did. Does anybody have a sense of how this year's tenure-track job market compared to previous years?

--Mr. Zero

P.S. I applied for a few more jobs this year than I have at any point since the economy turned to shit at the end of 2008, but I'm not at all convinced that it means anything.