Last autumn, our heroines began their job searches together, bright-eyed, optimistic, blithely comparing notes about where they'd applied, dreaming about being colleagues in nearby universities, out to change the world. Now, as the season winds down, one finds herself gainfully employed, while the other remains embattled, embittered, and uncertain.
To recap from our first and second columns, we are friends and colleagues from different doctoral programs at different universities in different states. Lynn is a Ph.D. candidate in English, and Anne is a Ph.D. candidate in an interdisciplinary program in the humanities.
Anne is not entirely sure how it happened, but it did. She got a job. A good job. A tenure-track job. In an interdisciplinary department. At a university in a fun city. A job. A comfortable salary. A generous research package. A job.
For a while there, things were looking pretty bleak for Anne. People had stopped asking how her job search was going. Her dissertation was languishing. She was eating a lot of cookies. The rejections were piling up, her mailbox practically overflowing with form letters beginning; "Thank you for your interest" or "We were very impressed with your qualifications but" and "Really? You thought that we would even consider you? Seriously, that's hilarious."
Anne's campus interviews were not yielding any offers, and the massacre of cookies was intensifying. She had one campus visit early in the season for a job that she didn't even want. But when that college rejected her, she went into a tailspin. She had gotten good at not getting jobs that she really wanted. But being unwanted by an undesirable institution? For some reason, that really smarted. Still, she soldiered on. She even impressed herself by landing a spot as a finalist for a competitive postdoc at a prestigious institution; unfortunately, the campus visit was total misery.
By the time she was packing up her purple suitcase again to head out for one last interview, Anne was just about done. The morning before she left, she woke up with a cold. That figures, she thought, but armed herself with homeopathic remedies and boarded yet another plane.
The first evening's events were fine, but when she got back to her cushy hotel room to revise her job talk again, she checked her e-mail and found that some well-meaning doofus had forwarded her that now-infamous column by Thomas H. Benton (aka William Pannapacker) called "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go."
After reading his column, Anne spent a good long while with her stuffy nose pressed against the glass of her hotel window, pondering the distance to the street below. After she determined that the stupid hotel windows wouldn't open (apparently they lodge many a job candidate), she went to bed. A few fitful hours later, she arose and grimly suited up for the day ahead ... which ended up being great. The faculty members, the students, the place, everything was just as she would have hoped. Later, as she made the familiar drive from the airport parking lot back to her home, she felt something she hadn't felt in a long time: good. As she recounted the events through a mouthful of Oreos (this time celebratory), she teetered dangerously close to hope that this one, finally, would result in an offer.
And it did.
Now that the paperwork is signed, the tables have turned. Anne, remarkably, is now firing off rejections of her own. Another invitation for a campus visit? Graciously declined. Did she want to be considered as an alternate for that fellowship? To that, a resounding (but graciously phrased) "Hell, no." Should another search committee reactivate her application now that it was looking for a non-tenure-track hire? Nope. For the moment, at least until she has to seriously consider the prospect of defending her dissertation, Anne is quite content.
But her happiness is muted by the fact that Lynn's situation remains uncertain. The we're-in-the-trenches-together solidarity that had so defined their job searches doesn't really exist anymore. Of course, Lynn has been enthusiastic and congratulatory, and the relationship has proved strong enough to withstand the bouts of market-induced envy (as when Lynn was getting near-daily dossier and interview requests and Anne was getting nothing but the occasional affirmative-action-data card). Still, Anne feels skeptical of a system that has yet to find a place for a scholar as creative, talented, and dedicated as her friend.
And as Lynn celebrated the news of Anne's triumph, she got a bit of her own news to celebrate: a request for yet another interview. This time she made it through several grueling cuts to become one of three finalists for a visiting assistant professorship at the University of South Purgatory. Lynn, however, had been a finalist before.
Her response to the news was lukewarm. The position boasted the wondrous freedom to teach multiple courses of her own design to undergraduate and graduate students at a diverse and dynamic urban campus, and to broaden her experience and her portfolio in ways no other job had yet offered. Still, it would have required a disturbingly heavy teaching schedule and rendered her responsible for literally hundreds of students as well as the graduate assistants assigned to her courses each semester, presumably with little guidance or in-house preparation, and rather paltry pay for such intensive labor.
Anne's new footing provided her some perspective that Lynn had not yet achieved, and she worried that Lynn's generous spirit would be crushed by recession-induced opportunities for the exploitation of her labor. Communications with Lynn's prospective employer were consistently genial, but Anne nonetheless helped Lynn to imagine the setting wherein the department chair composed his euphemistic letters to naïve hopefuls. With cloven-hoofed minions dancing naked around his office, he drafted his closing lines: "Thank you again for your interest. I was so shocked and delighted when I saw your stellar application that I dropped my pitchfork, and when I bent down to retrieve it, I banged my horns on the desk. Anyway, send me more of your genius soon. Even if we don't hire you, we can always steal your syllabi. Muwhaaahaaa."
A good laugh, even a maniacal one, kept Lynn from mauling innocent baked goods or flinging herself out the window of her one-story ranch.
Propping the ladder against the house to try the roof, Lynn knew she had not yet reached the point, as Anne had, where she was in a position to comfortably reject would-be employers, no matter how tiring the application process, how grueling the teaching schedule, or how questionable the interview methods. As Lynn prepared for the brief telephone interview with members of the University of South Purgatory, Anne pointedly reminded her that she was also interviewing them.
And how did they fare? Not well. They asked friendly questions about her research as the damned howled in the background, yet they did not offer her the opportunity to ask even one question. Instead, the conversation ended when the chair abruptly said, "We're out of time. Good-bye." Probably the smell of sulfur was getting to him.
Over the next few days, the phone did not ring, and Lynn understood from experience that this was her tacit rejection. Lynn was disappointed, a feeling hardly mitigated by her mounting reservations about actually accepting that particular gig.
Cocktail in hand, Lynn wonders now about the different trajectories her search and Anne's have followed. While Anne had only a handful of initial interviews, nearly all of those conversations led to campus visits. Lynn, on the other hand, received significant interest at the early stages of the process, including telephone and conference interviews, yet she has not been invited to a campus interview. The steady pattern of renewed hope followed by rejection is unnerving, and each interview gets harder rather than easier. Still, the consistent interest that her materials have garnered, even as her prospects dwindle, buoys Lynn's spirits a little. So does the fact that she has completed her dissertation. The bound books she picked up from Office Max a few weeks ago are proof of a very real personal victory, one that she will celebrate in earnest, preferably on a beach in Mexico.
It is hard for our battle-weary heroines to know what to make of all this. Anne is relieved and excited, of course, but also truly flummoxed by how Lynn's job search is faring. Lynn oscillates between considering a new career as a Zumba instructor and checking The Chronicle daily for new postings, one of which, she hopes, will be a good, if temporary, fit as she regroups for next year's search, when she will have her Ph.D. "in hand." And while Anne struggles through final edits on the dissertation and fits of panic about the prospect of moving to a city where she has spent a total of 36 hours, Lynn will keep revising her letters and fine-tuning her interview skills. She will keep her eye on the market, send out articles, and take the first steps toward seeing her manuscript published.
The job market is a kind of academic purgatory replete with haunting uncertainties. Anne has landed a tenure-track position, but wonders daily whether she is even capable of doing the work that will be expected of her. Lynn has completed a dissertation, but without a tenure-track job, is not sure how to evaluate its success.
Our shared mission, then, is to keep reminding each other of what we have achieved rather than what we have not. So Lynn vows to accompany Anne on a house-hunting excursion in her new city, and Anne is already ciphering away, deciding how much of her new salary to apportion for a vacation for two: a respite from worry and doubt, somewhere, anywhere, with sun, sand, and umbrella drinks.
