TITLE: an engineering Ph.D. teaching math in college
QUESTION [20 upvotes]: I have a friend who has been teaching college-level math (e.g., all levels of calculus) 
for about 4 years, although all of his education, including his Ph.D., was in engineering. 
Now he is considering applying for tenure track jobs at teaching schools [edit: in the USA] and he is bemoaning the fact that nearly all the ads he sees include "Ph.D. in mathematics", rather than "Ph.D. in mathematics or related area" as a qualification. This raised a question which I don't have the experience to answer for him: are these ads, for tenure-track positions at schools that focus more on teaching, generally so serious about the Ph.D. in math that they would dismiss an application from someone with a Ph.D. in engineering instead of math? [Edit: What I have in mind here about there being a problem are legal obligations that the hiring committee would have to stick exactly to the letter, not the general spirit, of the ad. 
This is not LawyerOverflow, so examples of lawsuits over job ad wording are not necessary.]
While there are other aspects of his application which are more important for a teaching job (he gets fantastic teaching evaluations and also quickly learns how to use new educational technology), the only thing I'm wondering about on this friend's behalf is the Ph.D.-not-in-math issue and whether it's a deal breaker. [Edit: If someone knows explicit examples where it was not an issue, that would be interesting to hear about, although you can keep information about the school and the hire anonymized.]
(Of course you may ask how he got his first job teaching math and why he can't do the same thing he did then. His first teaching job was short-term, not tenure track, and his hiring had some idiosyncratic features that are unlikely to repeat themselves for the next teaching job.)

REPLY [7 votes]: Having been in a similar situation, I feel qualified to add in my $0.02.  My BS and MA degrees are in Math, but my PhD is in Industrial Engineering.  The easiest thing you can do is simply write the search committee and ask if a PhD in a related field is acceptable.
There are multiple advantages to this approach.  The most obvious is that they will save you time putting together a packet if the answer is no.  Additionally, you get a chance to put a bug in their ear, so that your application will not be coming out of the blue.  Finally, you will be able to trump up the advantages of having a degree in a closely related field.  In my case, many of the schools I applied to had large teacher ed programs, and I was able to tout my rather large stockpile of practical applications of just about any mathematical topic.
That said, it still can be a tough sell.  Over the course of two years, I had four on-campus interviews (one was a visiting position) without an offer.  And I was coming in having successfully written a large NSF grant, a pair of journal articles in review, and glowing teaching evaluations.