My job search is done. No more prowling the online history ads and checking real-estate prices in cities I had a slim chance of calling home. The universe of possibilities that opened in the early fall has closed to the realities of the spring. I will not be sipping espresso in the Pacific Northwest, sunbathing on the Gulf Coast, or freezing off my behind in Upstate New York. My CV has gone into hibernation; my interview blazer has gone to the cleaners.
This year's search ended differently than last year's. Instead of hitting a plastic Christmas penguin out of anger and frustration, as I chronicled in my first column, I'm entertaining multiple job offers. I've reaped a bumper crop of good fortune and would be outside running victory laps if not for the thought of the dozens of equally qualified and deserving historians who may be out there injuring lawn gnomes, pink flamingos, and garden whirligigs at this very moment.
The job market can wreck spirits and inspire acts of bizarre outrage. My public confession to murdering Lighty the Penguin struck a chord with many readers. I received numerous e-mail messagges, and I thank the responders for their words of support and for sharing their stories of frustration. Yet for all the good I think Lighty's death has done, had I known how far his story would travel I doubt I would have had the courage to write about the darkest moment in my professional life. Killing an ornamental penguin gave me a measure of renown, but it also got me in trouble.
Among the qualities that search committees look for in job candidates, collegiality ranks as one of the most significant and hardest to discern in an interview. A person may be smart, eager, and widely published, but how will they behave at the department picnic? Will they double-dip in the guacamole, tell an off-color joke to the associate dean, and then leave in a huff when a graduate student disparages their latest article? Life is short, and no one wants to spend chunks of it with a boorish, unresponsive, or embarrassing colleague.
I thought I had the interpersonal aspects of the profession covered. I'm by no means an accomplished socialite. I can't work a room, and if I sold cars for a living or ran for public office, I'd die poor or voteless. But I've always had friends. Dogs, children, and coworkers seem to like me. I have a sense of humor, and I value courage, imagination, and generosity over prestige, competition, and power. Imagine my surprise when, a few days after Thanksgiving, I learned that I had a bad temper.
Questions (by whom, I don't know) had been raised about my collegiality and some had reached the ears of the search committees where my applications were under review. I racked my brain for the comment or incident that could have sparked such rumors. Had I inadvertently said something in a seminar or a conference that offended someone? I've never been arrested for brawling, malicious mischief, or damaging property. I remain undefeated in schoolyard fistfights because I've never had one. I could think of no professional circumstance where a teacher or a fellow student watched me fly off the handle.
And then a light came on. I had lost my cool in front of hundreds of witnesses by signing my name to a penguin mugging.
I could have avoided this situation. The Chronicle offers job diarists the option to disguise their identities with a pseudonym. I chose to use my name. The column was about honesty: I had to sign my name. I thought I understood the consequences. I knew some members of the profession would neither appreciate my humor nor agree with my arguments about the job market damaging the spirits of would-be higher educators.
Their voices filled my head: "Keep your mouth shut. You have an Ivy League degree and a book contract. You will find a job if you don't blow your credibility writing about tacky Christmas decorations." But those serious-minded people would be appalled that I owned a penguin named Lighty, much less punched one. I discounted their opinions and sent in the essay.
I'm glad I did. The column broke the fever that had gripped me since the previous winter. I lost my anger by finding its source. I never disliked the people or the institutions that rejected me. I'm married to an assistant history professor, and I've witnessed job searches from her perspective. She's a nice person, but when she chaired a search she broke hearts just like everyone else.
The problems with the job market are economic and institutional, not personal. The friction generated by my life rubbing against these huge, amorphous forces sparked my ire, and my emotions reached a boiling point as I struggled to find a way to express them. How do you fight economic trends and demographic transitions? I was fuming. I needed an outlet. I found it in this job diary.
After the rumors of my bad temper reached me, I spent a desperate week waiting for the phone to ring. Just how high, I wondered, is the karmic price for battering a waterfowl icon associated (albeit tenuously) with the season of Christ's birth?
Not very, it turns out. The phone rang; I went to the historical profession's annual meeting for seven interviews. From those, I received several invitations for on-campus visits, and four departments offered me jobs. In the end, Lighty's death did help me land a job, but not by eliciting a universally favorable response from googling search-committee members. The penguin advanced my candidacy in some cases, trashed it in others.
Writing about my anger and frustration, however, changed me, and that made all the difference. For the first time in years, I felt honest. Instead of molding my attitudes and persona to fit other historians' expectations, I put my strange, angry, genuine, penguin-abusing self out there. This exposure proved a comfort. I knew people were rejecting me, not some character I had pieced together to please them. To be successful on the job market, I had to redefine the meaning of success: Be true to yourself and the rest is gravy.
