the thread was giving the harmful impression that those professors are actually gatekeepers in their departments, which I seriously hope is not the case.
So you HOPE something is not true, therefore we should not discuss it?
It was absolutely sending the wrong message to younger grad students and should have been deleted.
Okay, so we should delete threads about learning methods that some of us think are not useful? And we should delete threads about publishing as a grad student, because I don't think that's important for my students?
The problem with the deleted thread was that a small cabal of older female professors was using it to spread the dangerous idea that it was important what brand of makeup young job candidates use. That simply isn't the goal that PSJR should be promoting, allowing a small set of conservative old-guard women to dictate the advice we give to younger job candidates.
Instead PSJR should be used to promote the inaccurate idea that appearance is irrelevant and thereby potentially harm young people's career prospects? Because that's the fairytale world YOU want to live in?
Listen people: the job market is tough, and this should be low on your priority list. But appearance does matter, and the thread was interesting partially because it discussed the fact that either too much or too little makeup might be a problem. I understand many of you would rather live in a world where we were all judged blindly on our merits--I would too. But it's not the world we live in, and putting your fingers in your ears is not going to change that.