Welcome to the Underachievers Club, the Humanities Job Search. I'm currently facing a second year in this soul-killing market. Before I describe my first unsuccessful stab at the market, let me tell you a little about who I am.
I like to call myself a public-school lifer. I got my start in the impoverished public schools of a rural Oregon convulsed by the early-80's recession. I dropped out of high school and eventually took an adult equivalency degree from a community college located in a wheat field equidistant between two towns you've never heard of. I got a bachelor's degree in history at an anonymous West Coast university.
Then, thanks to a sword-in-stone meeting with a revered adviser, who nonchalantly asked if I had ever considered graduate school, I set off on my current path. Fast-forward 10 years and I'm at a different state school, submitting the final chapter of my dissertation and looking around academe for a tenure-track position in modern European history.
If I've eschewed name-brand illustrious institutions, I've nonetheless worked hard at building a strong vita. I won a Fulbright and a couple other national fellowships, and I have a decent smattering of publications, conference presentations, and even two semesters of lecturerships. My dissertation is a major project in international history, incorporating unpublished archival materials from four countries.
I mention all of this not simply to boast -- believe me, at this stage I don't suffer from an inflated ego -- but to convey that I'm not a pushover. I've thrown all of my eggs into the academic basket, and this is what I do. You get the picture: humble origins; struggled to succeed; essentially competent, serious, ambitious, etc.
With these various qualities, I set out last year at this same time in search of a job. I canvassed my friends and professors for words of guidance. The advice I received from everyone in the field was disconcerting. "You've got to go into this with somewhat lowered expectations," an old prof told me. "Your goal should not be employment. That's probably unrealistic."
"Unrealistic?" I protested. "I need a job. That's why I'm doing this. What other objective could I possibly be pursuing?"
"Take it easy!" he shot back. "One thing at a time. Just try to get a couple conference interviews. Maybe next year you'll get invited to a campus. Who knows, in a few years you could receive an offer. Anything is possible."
This was not the kind of pep talk I needed as I sent out my job applications. But a very unscientific poll conducted in the halls of my department confirmed that this was the standard line on my field. The chances that I would land a tenure-track job were so slim that no one believed it should be the primary purpose of the search.
I phoned a colleague, a former student of my adviser who was several years ahead of me. When I reached him at home, he said he couldn't talk long. He was expected at a local café where he played the guitar and sang folk tunes for tips. "Come on, Dan." he said to me, "Let's get real. No one is going to hire you." I listened in silence as he continued. "They might, of course. Don't get me wrong, it could happen. But you'll be disappointed if you go into the search with those kinds of lofty aims. Get your foot in the door, get some experience in an interview or two. Be patient." I wished him luck at his coffee-shop gig and hung up.
With that advice, I applied for around 35 advertised positions. These ranged from elite, East Coast, liberal-arts institutions, to tiny Methodist colleges in the Plains, to one-year posts on the Gulf Coast, to community-college jobs with a course load of five classes a semester. I cast my net as widely as possible.
The applications in the mail, I waited for interview calls. My hopes had been so beaten down from the very beginning that when I received three interview invitations, I was ecstatic.
To my astonishment, the promise of three conference interviews left my advisers and colleagues as unenthusiastic as before. Hoping for a revised perspective, I rang up the Ph.D. folksinger. "Could we review my goals?" I asked him. "I scored the interviews, just like you said. Let's up the ante. I think I might have a shot at one of these jobs. What's your take on it?"
"Careful." he advised. "These are conference interviews. You aren't even on a shortlist yet. Just do your best in there. Act smart, look your best. That's all you can do. Don't worry about getting the job."
And so I set off to the conference, driving the 160 miles to Chicago in my beat-up, '87 truck. Strangely, I felt good, almost exhilarated. The universal belief that I had no reasonable chance of getting a job had taken all of the pressure off the interview process. In fact, just landing those three interviews had made me a minor hero back in my home department. "That's him." I could hear them say as I strode out of my office, "That's the guy! He's sitting on three conference interviews! Can you believe it?"
Then the conference itself. The absurdity of that scene is difficult to describe. There I was, the bigshot, Mr. Interview. I soon found myself surrounded by wannabe apprentices, all of whom had only one, or at best, two interviews. One poor schmuck, a friend from my Fulbright year, had come all the way to Chicago without a single interview. He followed me around all weekend.
Looking back, I'm horrified at my cockiness. I can still see myself: Gesturing with mock seriousness to the circle of admirers gathered around me, conspicuously shuffling my prep sheets for those three interviews, my newly anointed assistant looking on admiringly. "You see," I boasted arrogantly, "I've got to keep these folders apart, since each interview is bound to be very different."
The interviews, themselves -- well, what's the point? They were almost an afterthought. The whole idea was to land those babies, not to convert them into regular paychecks.
In the end, all of that advice was right on the money. There were no callbacks and certainly no campus interviews. The letters of rejection from the colleges I'd interviewed with as well as others I'd applied to rolled in steadily, about two a week for the next three or four months. I finally got the last one in the first week of August.
And so here I am at the start of a new job search. It looks like it's going to be a tough year. After all, I have a reputation to uphold. But that's the thing about the Underachievers Club. It's easy to do better every time out. Maybe I'm being a bit overconfident, but I'm going to predict that this year I'll land at least four conference interviews and a campus visit. In 2002, I plan to double that. I'm not going away anytime soon.
