In our first column, we sketched out the institutional hurdles we saw blocking our path to being hired as an academic couple in the budding field of game studies.
We talked about issues of power, space, money, rank, skeptical colleagues, and the fact that we're not really even a couple in the romantic sense of the term (though since that entry was published, friends and acquaintances alike have taken to teasing us about china patterns and children -- we may wind up getting married just to spite them, and to get the wedding gifts, of course).
In this update, we'll get down to the nuts and bolts of the application process itself. Specifically, we want to share the strangeness that is assembling a dual-hire packet. We are looking to be hired as a package deal because -- while one of us is a new Ph.D. in media arts and the other a tenured professor of English -- we both study computer games and do our research and writing on the topic together.
Undoubtedly one of the toughest parts of putting an application together is crafting the cover letter. Cover letters have to do so many things, and do them well. They're introductions, biographies, polemics, expressions of good will, theses, and promissory notes. When done well, they also condense what in some cases might be a lifetime of work down to a couple of glossy, elegant, and self-confident (but not unctuous) pages -- convincing enough to sell manure to a pig farmer.
Most folks don't get a whole lot of practice with this particular epistolary form. Many academics, in fact, go decades without ever so much as drafting one. That is strangely comforting in the sense that anyone who writes a great letter has likely had far too much practice, and thus probably ought not to be hired.
Dual-hire letters are doubly hard to write.
To begin with, there's the physics of shoehorning two scholars' careers into one tersely worded letter. Let's be honest: Two to three pages really aren't enough to describe one candidate, let alone two, especially when the candidates have backgrounds as diverse as ours.
We thought briefly about letting a five-pager rip, but realized nobody would read it. There are so many candidates for so few jobs these days that it's all search committees can do to keep from getting buried. Excess work winds up being just that -- excess work.
Writing just the right amount is even more challenging because a dual-hire letter is a rare bird. Only one person we asked thought she had seen one, and when we pressed her for details, she recanted, saying that she must have imagined the whole thing.
Because they are so rare, dual-hire letters have to clearly and adroitly announce themselves as such. They have to explain their raison d'être, and do so in a way that seems credible rather sensational (though a little sensationalism never hurt anybody, especially in a job letter). But even craftily done, this kind of explanation takes up space, leaving still less room for the oh-so-important sales pitch.
There's also the "joined at the hip" problem, as a senior colleague of ours has drolly termed it. A dual-hire letter has the impossible task of not only emphasizing the collaborative power of the applicants, but at the same time describing those applicants in terms of their individual abilities and accomplishments.
The reason is simple: A dual hire is still two hires -- two different people, with two different sets of research, teaching, and service inclinations. They are two different promotion and tenure cases. Last we checked, tenure still turned on individual accomplishment.
What it comes down to, ultimately, is producing a novel but still professional document that hiring committees will take seriously. We had a devil of a time, for example, figuring out how to address the question of service. Every institution wants good citizens, and rightfully so: Slackards and egomaniacal, ill-tempered individualists make more work for everybody. But how do you talk individual citizenship in a letter designed to emphasize the magic of collaboration?
There was also the challenge of differentiating our research agendas within the context of an emerging discipline that many academics still view with suspicion. We discovered firsthand, for example, that the idea that we each have different but complementary approaches to studying computer and video games is difficult to convey lucidly to people who tend to see such work as "just more of that cultural-studies stuff."
In the end, our cover letter was about two and a half pages long, emphasized our effectiveness as a team, and pointed out that our individual accomplishments were available for perusal on our enclosed CV's. The latter documents, which we left unadulterated by dual-hire rhetoric, do in fact show that we have well over a decade of ambitious and even award-winning individual scholarship, teaching, and service between us.
As individuals, one of us received promotion and tenure, while the other received his Ph.D. in a highly respected program -- and both of those achievements happened at a top research institution. We decided that those individual credentials would have to speak for themselves, and that what needed our special suasive care was our commitment to collaboration (both with each other and with whatever faculty we might ultimately join).
Almost all of our applications are out now and we've started going on campus interviews. Surprisingly, dual interviews are great for candidates, although they're probably a bit strange for interviewers. We'll tell you why in our next installment.
