This is an unsettling time of year. The disciplinary organizations held their conferences, and the interviews that accompanied them, months ago. Search committees have brought candidates to campus, crowning one the winner. Most of those who were destined to get a job this year already have it. A trickle of hirings may close out the year, but with these exceptions the doors of the academy have swung shut, not to reopen until next fall.
Those of us who didn't get a job are left with the haunting, insistent question of what to do now. I can speak only for myself. After seven years on the market it is time to face the reality that my chances for an academic job have dwindled to zero. I will no longer search for work in academe.
This decision has not been easy, for the counter argument is seductive. To quit now is to dissipate seven years of relentless searching; of scouring the job ads; of writing hundreds of cover letters and mailing them along with CVs, transcripts, reprints, and teaching evaluations; of begging colleagues and former professors to send off yet another letter of recommendation. Isn't the admission of defeat always premature? What would have become of Andrew Jackson, for example, had he left politics after the election of 1824? Perhaps one more year, one more application, would have coaxed a rush of quarters from the academic slot machine. After all, I need only one job.
But this rationale no longer persuades me. Seven years of frenetic activity has netted me only one on-campus interview, a handful of phone interviews, and no offers. I got the one on-campus interview, a member of the search committee let slip, because I lived only a few hours' drive from the college, saving it the otherwise obligatory expenses of airfare and a hotel room. Geography, not my CV, had won me that interview, but it wasn't enough to clinch the job.
My decision to give up the academic job search might have been easier had I found someone, some institution, some large economic force to blame. But there aren't any scapegoats. The university that trained me gave me an assistantship each of my seven years in the program, augmenting it the last four with a research fellowship. The embarrassing truth is that I made more money in graduate school than I have since receiving my Ph.D.
Nor can I accuse market forces of playing Judas, betraying me with a kiss. I knew all along that my field -- the history of science -- isn't an alluring commodity. I knew I could never hope to compete with the savvy graduate students in computer science and engineering. They were ensconced at the other end of campus, in the buildings with glass and light, new laboratories and computers. Their Ph.D.'s would always have more cachet than mine. This is the reality of the market, both in academe and the corporate world. I did not question it then and cannot point a finger at it now.
The unpalatable truth may be that my failure to land an academic job is of my own making. Perhaps I have not been enough of a scholar. Although I have published two books, only one is with an academic press. The other rolled off a commercial press and so lacks the gravitas that would otherwise add weight to my CV. The same is true of my articles: Most appear in magazines rather than in peer-reviewed journals. Search committees have a right to hire a potential colleague, and I made it easy for them to pigeonhole me as a journalist rather than a historian. I might retort that magazines pay, but the exigencies of earning a living don't factor into hiring decisions.
I also confess indifference to the machinations of the marketplace. I studied the history of science because it entranced me, not because I saw it as entree to a career. Graduate school became its own justification, and I gave too little thought to what I would do afterward. The routine of seminars and colloquia, conferences and informal dinner parties were enough for me. That a world existed apart from graduate school was self-evident, but it was too grubby, too full of petty particulars to interest me.
Besides, I was irrationally confident of getting an academic job. The odds were slender, I knew, but I would claw my way into the academy despite them. This belief was not haughtiness. It was an extrapolation of the fact that tenacity and diligence had always gotten me what I wanted. What worked in the past and present must work in the future.
Every logic, no matter how eviscerated, has consequences. The phrase "alternative careers" was not in my lexicon. I never visited the career center, never drafted a résumé, never attended a mock interview or workshop, never tried to form a network of friends outside my field. By choice I stayed within the orbit of my discipline, ignoring the larger cosmos.
My actions were full of irony. Graduate school taught me to question assumptions, to adopt skepticism as the filter through which I sifted information. Yet I never questioned the belief that Ph.D. programs, at least those in the humanities, are good only for producing professors. How could my knowledge of 19th-century agricultural science have value outside the academy? In the real world, knowledge that is arcane is useless. The dichotomy between academe and the world at large convinced me that in pursuing history of science I had irrevocably chosen the path toward professorship, a conviction that academe reinforces in initiating acolytes into the profession. Academics take pride in setting themselves apart from the larger culture as though self-imposed isolation is a prerequisite for creating a cadre of intellectual elites, a club I would have done anything to join. I mistook pride for exclusivity and exclusivity for vocational purity. Graduate school sealed my destiny. To leave would be unthinkable, for it would mean to abandon the search for truth, an abandonment that no amount of money from the corporate world could make right.
My determination not to leave made me willing to settle into a holding pattern as an adjunct while I hunted for work. But seven years of looking are enough. I can no longer hover in limbo between the anxiety of cobbling together a livelihood semester to semester and the hope of landing a tenure-track job, or even a one-year appointment. The search for an academic job, once a source of exhilaration, now requires too much psychic energy. This is no confession of disillusionment but rather an acknowledgment of reality. Life is full of implacable limits, and this is one of them. No matter what I do, an academic position will elude me. What should I do now?
