Perhaps the recent "Doomsday" coverage in The Chronicle about the humanities job market will be enough to crush the hopes of new Ph.D.'s in English or history. But if hope might be futile for aspiring teacher-scholars, hopelessness almost certainly is.
So I want to share my recently concluded odyssey on the academic job market—not to persuade an undergraduate to go to graduate school or to give distraught applicants hope without foundation. But I do want to help reclaim an aspect of the process that is sometimes lost in lamentation: its entertainment value.
After 16 first-round interviews and 10 campus visits over four years, last month I finally received an offer to be an assistant professor in Florida, the state where I received my Ph.D. and where I most hoped to work. Allow me to recapture some of the hilarity of the search process now that it's behind me.
There were moments of humiliation. For example, at a prominent state institution in Tennessee, I decided to spray two shots of my new cologne—given to me as a gift—on my wrist before the committee chair took me to a coffee shop. When we returned to the car to drive to the campus, we both silently agreed to drive with the windows down to avoid the smothering smell. It was about 22 degrees outside.
At a private college back in the Volunteer State, I was asked by a receptionist during an interlude if I was single (more on that question in a moment). I nervously said I was, but she assured me, in complete seriousness, that she would have no problem helping me marry one of the nice young female undergraduates. Maybe she thought I was a prospective student myself. I decided to feel flattered.
There were also moments of providence. For instance, after studying for, and taking, the Law School Admission Test one summer, I was within hours of spending $600 on 10 law-school applications with the click of a button. But before going home to commit that act of resignation, I absent-mindedly checked my campus mailbox, which contained a letter explaining that my book had been accepted for publication by a university press.
That notice saved me hundreds of dollars in the short term. In the long term, it probably cost me millions. But it kept my peculiar dream to be a faculty member alive.
I have also had my version of Jack Nicholson's "You can't handle the truth!" moment on several campuses, when I sensed I was not going to get a job and began answering questions with vindictive honesty. After being reminded repeatedly that a high majority of students in the South were Baptists (my book is on a different religious group in Europe), I shot back, "My work is not evangelical!"
And I once showed open disdain to a dean who asked me how I was going to "teach to the middle" by asking if the institution worked under the legal auspices of No Child Left Behind.
The interviewers have had their breaking points, too. In the waning hours of one two-day interview, my primary host sat in his office, peered through the window at an emptying parking lot, and murmured, "We really need a black man in the department." I thought of many caustic responses I could make, about ways I might remedy my Caucasian background, but wisely decided that silence was safest.
While such moments seem wildly unprofessional, they occur because many faculty-job interviews are much longer and more repetitive than they need to be. One learns to be forgiving and hopes mercy is mutually extended. Resilience is an underestimated aspect of the process.
I began to expect to be asked, "Do you have any questions for us?" at least eight times during any on-campus visit. Early in the visit, I would ask the most pressing questions to which I really wanted an answer, and then I would default by repeating those questions and sitting through the monotonous answers. The tediousness can create an internal tension that sometimes leads to outbursts.
One also learns to decode questions. I will list a few questions I have received in various forms at nearly every institution, with the implicit question in parenthesis:
- Will you be coming here alone? (Are you single?)
- Would you like to see information on the local elementary schools? (Do you have children?)
- Will you be purchasing a home the first year you are here? (Are you married with children?)
- And my favorites that, for reasons of subtlety, need no further explanation: Are you married? Do you have any children?
It is supposedly illegal to ask such questions, but you are going to be asked them and you might as well be ready. I came to accept that the reason I was asked those questions had nothing to do with concerns about inappropriate student-teacher relationships, and everything to do with fear that a candidate would be using the job as a steppingstone to a better one. It is much easier to seek greener pastures when you have no spouse who must also find work or children who must transfer schools. I half expected any job offer to come with a free local subscription to Match.com.
All of those experiences involve issues that candidates conceivably might anticipate. However, the most valuable moments in job interviews occur at junctures that have little bearing on the candidate's hiring but must be enjoyed for their mixture of the sublime and bizarre.
For instance, in the last four years, I have:
- Discussed the playoff prospects of the Miami Heat with a 7-year-old boy.
- Been led by interviewers to a rare book shop in northern Georgia where I was vehemently pressured to purchase an early edition of Fielding's Tom Jones.
- Been asked to remark on the quality of the clay tennis courts at a country club.
- Toured the upper rooms of a cloister where "no man had walked before."
- Dozed on the couch in an interviewer's office in rural Kansas while he celebrated the retirement of a colleague in a different campus building.
- Been driven through the Appalachian Mountains in a snowstorm at 4:30 in the morning.
- Delivered a lecture in a Boston dining room that reeked of meatloaf.
- Listened to a man at an interviewer's birthday party deliver a long lecture to me on the merits of a homeless life.
- Sat in reverent silence in a Honda in front of the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.
I look on those experiences fondly not only because the conclusion of my story is that I received an assistant professor's position that will keep me in this career for a while. I was also fortunate enough to return from my interviews to my home base, where I had professional and supportive faculty members, engaged and talented students, and stimulating intellectual communities.
With each rejection that arrived through e-mail, letter, or just plain silence, my disappointment was mitigated by my appreciation for the temporary jobs I held at the time. I value the 10 years I have spent as a graduate student and as a non-tenure-track faculty member. And I like to tell myself that I would feel the same way, even if I hadn't been fortunate enough to get a job I desired.
Homelessness might have its merits, and so might law school, but there are worse ways to spend a decade than discussing novels, poetry, and history with other intelligent and sensitive people.
Now I just need to call that secretary to see if her matchmaking skills are still available. I have some really striking cologne.
Comments
1. august - May 02, 2010 at 10:16 pm
Brilliant, and oh, so true.
2. chron7 - May 03, 2010 at 12:28 am
My path to the tenure track occurred in much the same fashion, with my own, but very similar, stories of interviews. Best of luck to the writer and others in their stage of the application and interview process.
3. texasguy - May 03, 2010 at 01:04 am
I am sorry to read that the writer took questions on marital status and number of childre as unwarranted inquisitions on his private life. When I ask such questions, it is to tailor my sale pitch to its audience. For instance, I would explain to a single candidate that our university is located in a fairly large urban area with plenty of dating opportunity with intelligent educated people of the appropriate sex. If I hear that he or she is married, I will tout our schools. My aim is always to sell our university and our urban community.
We are a research-oriented university and care deeply about the research potential of our new hires. We also worry about their teaching skills and try to guess whether it would be easy or hard to work with them. Conversely, we attach little or no importance to the race, the religion, the ethnic origin and the sexual preference of our future colleagues. That is the way it should be and that is the way we run our department.
4. drpud - May 03, 2010 at 03:56 am
"I am sorry to read that the writer took questions on marital status and number of children as unwarranted inquisitions on his private life."
To texasguy above, these questions are unwarranted. Period. Wait until you've extended an offer and then ask your new colleague if she or he needs pointers about local schools and so forth. The interview should be conducted in a strictly professional manner without needless anxiety on the candidate's part that the committee is trying to pry into his or her private life.
5. sher2824 - May 03, 2010 at 06:56 am
First, congrats! Second? *If* you need a book before you can get a job (I couldn't tell if that was the major factor in getting the job; and it wouldn't be the first time I've heard that), it's another sign of lit. studies faculty not smelling the coffee when it come to admitting more grad students than the market can bear. But again, congratulations and best of luck to my lit. colleagues.
6. joe_in_decatur_ga - May 03, 2010 at 08:13 am
Sher2824,
Do you honestly think cost-cutting deans will keep graduate programs open that don't admit enough students? I guess those departments can all relish how well they "smell the coffee" when their programs are closed, and their jobs are redefined, if indeed they even keep them. But wait, maybe the world needs more MBAs.
7. tappat - May 03, 2010 at 09:10 am
Great attitude about matters: grad school is life, too, as you very nicely show! Of course, you seem NOT to be one of the many: that is, you are not a person who just wants a job to retire on, before he or she retires from it, 25 to 30 years later. And you certainly seem humanely capable of good collegiality, in part developed by your experience interviewing for jobs.
8. ramber - May 03, 2010 at 09:38 am
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9. tridaddy - May 03, 2010 at 09:40 am
Congrats! Now when you serve on faculty search committees seek ways to improve the process beyond the sometimes inappropriate nature of the ones you endured.
10. authors - May 03, 2010 at 10:16 am
"Thomas," now that you are more or less fully employed you will be able to afford the Tiffany silver necklaces advertised in the spam response #8.
Seriously, just as I found myself inexplicably euphoric when Don Draper made partner, so too do I now find my heart beating fast with happiness. Wishing you joy, old man, wishing you joy.
I think you will also find like Tennyson's Ulysses that
. . . all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and forever when I move.
Which is to say that as you have probably already discovered the brief interlude of rejoicing has given way to worry about reaching the next goal: tenure. No help for that but death.
11. rightwingprofessor - May 03, 2010 at 10:53 am
Seriously I find this a sad story. By my calculations the author is probably 35 years old and just starting out on the tenure track making $45K per year, meanwhile the guy he went to high school with who went to plumbing school is pulling in $90K and starting his own business by now.
12. blue_state_academic - May 03, 2010 at 11:09 am
texasguy and drpud: The correct way to handle this is to put together packets of information for *all* prospective candidates that contains information about the virtues of your institution and community for all kinds of applicants -- single, married (with or without children), straight, gay, white, minority, Christians, Muslims, Pagans, etc. Then you don't have to ask under the guise of trying to provide helpful information that will assist in recruting all types of candidates.
13. marka - May 03, 2010 at 12:04 pm
Hmm ... where has texasguy been all these years? I sure hope not a state institution, where clearly it would be -illegal- to ask any of the questions he poses. And if his institution accepts state or federal funds, same result. And even if it doesn't ... same result. Not just unprofessional & unnecessary, but illegal, jeopardizing state standing, government funding, and reputation. Yikes!
14. 22108469 - May 03, 2010 at 12:13 pm
in re. to rightwingprofessor, my historian/spouse got his tenure-track job at age 35 and was hired at the late-twentieth-century salary equivalent of $45K. He cares so deeply about his work that he is totally unconcerned about the ramshackle state of our house, our lack of children, the size of his 401K, the rust on his car, or the minimalist quality of our very rare "vacations" (during which we visit historical sites). This is the way for professors to be happy--they must love the work more than any other aspect of life.
15. anonscribe - May 03, 2010 at 12:29 pm
nice article. of course, the prospect of going through four years of these insane interviews terrifies me. i'll need to begin some more intensive psychotherapy preemptively. then again, i'm watching my fiance go through a similar number of strange corporate interviews (just sit here with your five main competitors for the job and talk about your appreciation of "corporate culture").
___
rightwing - get off it. there's more to life than a salary. i'd rather make 45K teaching and writing than make 100K wading through other people's feces or wrecking my knees and back through relentless manual labor. also, empirically, you're wrong. median salary of a plumber in florida (where "Thomas" is working) is 37.8K: http://www.bls.gov/oes/2008/may/oes472152.htm
much respect to plumbers, and they should probably make more than english profs anyway, but i can't stand this myth of the filthy rich blue collar worker. it stands in open contradiction to the reality of the labor market. (for instance, does the plumber have Thomas' option of going to law school whenever he likes and making 80-110K after just three years of extra schooling?)
16. futureprof7337 - May 03, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Very well written! You would/will be welcome in publishing as much as in the legal professions--and from the humor displayed in this piece you are not lacking in collegiality either. And as for the joys of plumbing while making tons of money, ah well, I don't really know about that, but I do know James Joyce has added more meaning to my life. There are so many perks to a university life, that I'd take a job for 15-30K just for sheer joy and intellectual stimulation. Yo ho yo ho the life of mind for me! Thanks for a brighter take on the humanities prospect. I loved geeking out on literature in grad school and I look forward to more of it. It's not about the money, people! It's about a meaningful and rewarding career doing what one loves. And that passion goes a long way!
17. frogprof - May 03, 2010 at 07:12 pm
Oh, futureprof, from your mouth to God's ears! We need more like you in the teaching world ... I've been in something of a flame war on another forum with some doofus who threw the "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach" BS at me. I, too, would "geek out" on literature whenever possible [unfortunately, due to economic and nutritional demands, I've had to take employment outside "The Academy"]; and even now, as an ABD in French Lit, would happily go back and do the whole series of degrees in English Lit this time ... not necessarily to teach, but to have someone with whom to discuss books I've read but perhaps never fully understood or enjoyed.
I miss teaching, but I'm also enjoying my job now as a researcher and grammar Nazi in a medical safety consulting firm; I'm actually using many of the skills I learned with my humanities studies. And guess what? Even at my WAY-more-than-age-35, I'm not YET making much more than that plumber in Florida [the one with the median salary, that is]. In fact, my base salary is just about what I made as a paralegal in 1991. Thank God for overtime ...
18. zagros - May 04, 2010 at 07:11 am
Texasguy--asking questions about marital status *is* both illegal *and* an unwarranted intrusion into my private life. I recall one interview at (major public research university) where the question of marital status came up. I politely answered that I was married and then had to defend that my spouse would NOT need any job assistance as the committee members commented that it might be difficult to find a job around there except at the university! I told them that she was self-employed and that her work was done over the Internet but, as far as I was concerned, the damage was done--they had effectively guaranteed that I *would not* accept any job offer from them.
It ended up taking me 7 years to acquire my coveted tenure-track position (I spent those 7 years mostly in government). There had been questions about whether I could publish but 15 refereed journal articles and 3 scholarly books in 5 years after landing on the tenure track guaranteed my tenure and promotion to associate professor at (aspiring public research university). The lesson: there is hope and I am so glad that this article was published because for years I thought I was the only one who had to take the hard route to a professorship. Well done!
19. ottavina - May 04, 2010 at 12:29 pm
"Will you be purchasing a home the first year you are here? (Are you married with children?)"
While the other questions are pretty horrible, I'm not so sure this one is specifically about one's marital/family status.
At my last interview a few years ago, I was told, within 45 minutes of starting the interview process, about the housing market (there are not a lot of rentals, but affordable homes are available to purchase). The (single) search committee member who told me this had just purchased a house. At least five other single faculty members in my department own homes. I was grateful to have this information, as it helped me understand the housing market in the area, and I was also grateful for the tour of the area so I could see what typical homes looked like. When I accepted the job, I was single with no kids, and I bought a home right away. Knowing that affordable housing was available was one of the reasons I knew I could afford to move to the area, so I'm glad the topic cameup in my interview.
In the author's case, the question could, I'll agree, have been stated better, because it does suggest something else: "Are you in good enough financial shape to buy a home?" or "Will you stay here long if we give you the job?"
20. skypark - May 06, 2010 at 05:13 pm
Another area of uncomfortable (and illegal) inquiry is age. On one campus interview I was asked to provide information, including my birth date, to expedite the hiring process"in the event" I was selected. On another I was asked to give birth date information so that the institution could book the air transportation (in response to new security laws). Both, I'm sure, legitimate reasons for asking for the information, but it leads one to wonder, after not getting the position, whether age was a factor.
21. jon_margerumleys - May 07, 2010 at 07:12 am
Let's be careful about the word "illegal". It's not illegal to ask these questions. No one can call 911 and have a person arrested for asking them. What _can_ happen is that a university can be sued for making hiring decisions based on the answers to inappropriate questions. That's bad, but it's different from inappropriate questions themselves being "illegal" to ask. "I'm going over to the provost's house to soap his windows. Wanna help?" THAT'S an illegal question. ;)
Inapproprate is the word, I think, though I'm open to other suggestions. It's inappropriate to ask these questions. I understand the impulse. As another poster noted, we're trying to sell ourselves. We want the best candidates and to get the best candidates we have to sell our institution and the community in which it's located. Again as the previous poster noted, that means tailoring the message and it's difficult to do that without knowing one's audience.
Still, the questions are inappropriate. It's odd that society has become simultaneously more isolated and more nosy. We don't often spend social evenings with groups of friends anymore and our parks are, for the most part, deserted. But we feel free to ask candidates for President of the United States what kind of underwear they prefer. **sigh**
When I am asked inappropriate questions, I have to admit that I answer them, though sometimes I gently point out that the question is inappropriate. Other than religion (I'm Jewish) I get to give the easiest answers: I appear white, am not all that old (47) and am straight, married, and have two kids. I recognize that those are privileged answers and wince for those who face the prejudices which are perceived to--and sometimes do--underlie the questions.
Bottom line: I'm glad that the author has been offered a tenure track position. This is a wonderful life that we get to lead. We make an acceptable salary (my rule of compensation is that if I make more in thousands than I am years old, I'm probably doing okay), have an acceptable workload, and some of the most amazing working conditions in the world. We are fortunate indeed.
Jon Margerum-Leys
22. supertatie - May 07, 2010 at 01:05 pm
If you guys think this is bad, I should tell you the questions I got when I was in law school, and interviewing for summer clerkships in my second year:
1. At one on-campus interview, I was asked to come back later in the afternoon. When I did, wearing a suit, the guy asked, "Why are you wearing a suit?" I said, "I thought this was an interview." He said, "No, I wanted to walk down to [local pub] and have a drink." When I demurred, saying that I thought it was against the Placement Office's policy to "fraternize" with interviewers (I couldn't think of anything else!), he looked at me for a second, then pulled out a stack of my classmates' resumes and said, "Well, in that case, here are some of the people we are considering hiring; tell me what you think of them."
2. At an on-site interview with a firm in Florida, I was told I would be taken out to dinner. I was. With one make partner, who kept trying to get me to drink. Finally he asked, "Are you married?" I said, "No." "Have you ever BEEN married?" I said, "No." He said, "Geez, how'd you get this far in life without being married?" I said, "I'm 23 years old, and I've been in school since I was six." Then he insisted on walking me back to my hotel room DOOR. I've never been so uncomfortable in my life.
The next day, at the interview itself, one of the senior partners asked me, "So, did [name] hit on you last night?" Said grinning. I thought, is this some kind of test? So, to be safe, I said, "Of course not, he was a perfect gentleman." To which this man replied, "I can't believe it! He hits on all the female candidates we bring down here."
This was the late 80s.
23. supertatie - May 07, 2010 at 01:07 pm
More fun law interview stuff...
At another on-campus interview, I was asked to wait until all of the other candidates were done. I did so, thinking that perhaps this meant that they wanted to talk to me again! (Oh, that bodes well!) Instead, when everyone had left, the interviewer stuck his head out of the office door, and as I went to walk back in, he said, "Oh, I don't need to talk to you again, I just wanted to know where you got that great suit. My wife would love one just like it."
And the hits just kept on coming.
24. supertatie - May 07, 2010 at 01:08 pm
Sorry, my comment #22 above should have read "one MALE partner," not "make" partner.
On the other hand, perhaps it was freudian.
25. jdlanzillo - May 07, 2010 at 01:17 pm
I am glad to read the comments about salary/happiness. I sincerely doubt that most people consider higher education as a path to considerable financial wealth. I just completed my doctorate, at age 40. I have worked in the private sector, and if/when I find a full-time faculty position, I am certain it will be a lateral move at best, in terms of salary. At my age, I have friends making $250k a year. Good for them! I don't want to do what they do. I went back to school later in life, after aduncting and taking what was apparently the necessary time to discover that the classroom is where I feel passionate.
I question the sincerity of any educator that is in it for reasons other than the student.