It's autumn again, and I can't help but feel just a little like Charlie Brown in those classic Peanuts comic strips of my childhood. You know the ones I mean -- where Charlie Brown, dauntless and gullible as ever, charges toward the football held out enticingly by Lucy, only to swipe at the air and find himself parked on his rear end, played for the fool once again.
The long-range field goal I'm hoping to connect on this fall is an elusive tenure-track job in my academic field of American literature, and the corresponding figure for Lucy is, I suppose, a more nebulous, institutional prankster: yet-to-be-named departments of English, the Modern Language Association, the job market. I don't know if there's someone out there chortling at my obstinacy in returning to the playing field once again this autumn, but there are days when it sure feels like it.
Since receiving my Ph.D. in English in 1998 I've been on the job market twice, and in that time I've sent out something on the order of 65 letters of application. I've put together what my advisers tell me is a strong record of research and teaching; I've enriched the Postal Service by mailing out dozens of requested writing samples and dossiers; I've managed to secure a smattering of interviews, some at universities where I'd be thrilled to join the faculty, others where I was just as happy to be dropped from the candidate list.
But for all of my efforts and expectations, no job offer has materialized. As anyone who pays a modicum of attention to these sorts of matters is well aware, this is par for the course in the humanities -- some get jobs, more don't (or so it seems from the perspective of the field of play.) And no one can agree on a reliable formula for success.
Word of mouth holds that you need to expect at least three years on the job market in English. But that's unsubstantiated by any statistics I've seen.
People have different tolerance levels for this demoralizing grind, and my own patience has been dwindling. So I've determined that my third year on the market will either be a charm or a strikeout. If I don't come up with a job this time around, I'm packing it in.
The entire process of preparing C.V.'s and dossiers, scouring the ads, composing letters, and reworking writing samples, refining these materials over and over, then waiting, interviewing, and waiting again has made autumn an anxious and unpleasant season for me of late. But it wasn't always this way.
Like most people who've sacrificed a healthy chunk of their adult lives to earning a doctorate, fall was traditionally a time of hope and excitement for me. The start of the school year meant a return to books, writing, intellectual sparring: the comforting, familiar rhythms of the academic cycle.
It was never the prospect of a tenure-track academic post that drew me to graduate school or sustained me through the trying seven years during which I completed my Ph.D. I entered my program mainly with a somewhat naïve desire to extend my learning and perhaps transform myself into something of a belletristic jack-of-all-trades.
Even as I became "professionalized," the glaringly apparent facts of the job market kept me from getting my hopes too high. What propelled me was the joy of discovery I experienced in grappling with new writers, theorists, and ideas; a commitment to a dissertation topic that I believed was important and that genuinely engaged me; and the camaraderie of fellow graduate students, the mentorship of my professors, the moments of connection with students I taught in my own classes.
All of the aspects of graduate school I mention are part of a tenure-track life in academe, and there's no doubt that what was once peripheral to my ambition naturally gravitated toward the center.
But it's also true that graduate school is a protective, in many ways self-indulgent, cocoon, and I've come to understand my time in graduate school as something of an extended adolescence. (Little wonder that some, by fiat of A.B.D. status, choose never to leave it). Graduate school allows one to defer choices about the future indefinitely. When in the space of a single year, however, I finished my dissertation and became a parent, I was quickly forced to dispense with the luxury of perpetual student-hood.
I've been fortunate to have the transition eased by two years of postdoctoral teaching at my degree-granting institution. Increasing numbers of English departments are wisely adopting the policy of trying to provide full-time adjunct teaching opportunities for their graduates, and I couldn't have asked for a better stint: decent pay with benefits, upper-level undergraduate teaching in my specialty, a familiar environment.
The only thing separating me from regular faculty members was a lack of committee work (I wasn't complaining) and a lack of paid research leave (well, you can't ask for everything). I've used the time to refine my classroom skills, assemble a multitude of lecture notes and syllabi, broaden my teaching repertoire, and lay the groundwork for future courses. I have no doubt I'm now a substantially better teacher than I was coming out of graduate school.
But has this made me a better job candidate? I would like to think so, but in the end the results must speak for themselves.
So this year, determined not to put myself completely at the mercy of the academic job market, I've taken a leap and accepted a job as an editor for an Internet publishing company. I'll explore the reasons for my decision and the nature of the nonacademic work world at greater length in a future column, but suffice it to say that the job holds considerable professional promise and far greater security than anything I've found in the structurally unstable ivory tower -- although I still have my doubts.
I'll also be teaching classes at night, and applying for tenure-track jobs from this divided (but I suspect quite common) situation. The M.L.A., dispensing its own version of Lucy's 5-cent advice to its beleaguered graduate students and postdocs, has been reluctantly waking up to the possibilities in the private sector for gainful, perhaps even rewarding, work for humanities Ph.D.'s. I'll be in a position to give one perspective on the realities of that advice this year, even as I hitch a ride once more on the roller coaster of the academic job market.
It's only in the world of comic-strip characters that time is frozen, where childhood remains eternally suspended. The rest of us, even Ph.D.'s, eventually have to make choices, accept change.
For better or worse, this is my year.
