The quiet of summertime has descended over our Midwest college town. The students have long since packed up and returned to their homes, and we have settled into our new routines: Jason, at the office most of the day, and me, Graham, working on my tan with every intention of getting myself back to work -- tomorrow.
We are also, at long last, tying up the loose ends of our joint search for faculty jobs. I am a new Ph.D. in English looking for my first tenure-track job and Jason is a tenured professor in philosophy looking for a position at the same rank. As readers may recall, we are an unusual couple: gay, Christian, and conservative in our politics. But we face the problem all too familiar to academic couples of trying to find two faculty positions in the same town.
There is, to be sure, a happy ending to our story -- or at least to Jason's side of the story. Like most happy endings it came only after a tedious tale of suspense and woe. You're not going to read that happy ending here. Instead, I'm going to focus on my side of the story, which has ended far less conclusively.
Last fall, the first job listings from the Modern Language Association seemed awash in opportunities, and I blanketed the country with applications. All told, I sent out more than 30 applications for tenure-track positions and another 10 for postdocs.
I felt every confidence in those early, naïve days that I would reap an abundant reward for my efforts. My committee was reassuring, my letter writers were encouraging, my fellow graduate students were supportive, and my partner was resolute. I had about a dozen requests for writing samples and dossiers -- not a bad yield.
My first call for an interview came in early December, a sure sign that a greater bounty was soon to follow. But that first call would prove to be my only call, and confident anticipation gave way to bewildered self-recrimination. I racked my brain, trying to account for my miserable job-market debut.
The most obvious explanation, to my mind, was that my dissertation project was simply unappealing. Yet I trusted that my adviser would not have steered me into an unmarketable project, and one cannot simply walk away from three years' work and start fresh.
Those three years had been underwritten by a number of research grants. Maybe they were the problem. Teaching-oriented institutions might label me a "researcher" and fear that I would use whatever means available to flee the classroom and bury myself in the library. Research institutions, on the other hand, might be turned off by the esoteric nature of my dissertation research, which is somewhat interdisciplinary and focused on texts outside the traditional literary canon. Indeed, mine is an archival salvage and textual-reclamation project, and I imagined that some hiring committees might worry that I would be unwilling or unable to teach the canon-oriented courses that are their mainstay.
Beyond these concerns lay the shadow of my letters of recommendation. What dark secrets or unfavorable comments were lurking in those classified documents?
There's probably nothing wrong with any of my materials, but it is impossible to know for sure. Who can tell why the phone didn't ringing, or why requests to see my writing samples were not followed by requests for interviews?
In the deafening silence that follows the submission of job applications, it is easiest to blame yourself for the lack of response, but such blame is ultimately unproductive. It gets you no closer to solving the problem -- whatever that problem is.
I could take some comfort in the fact that my letter writers seemed genuinely surprised by my lackluster showing. Clearly they had expected better results. And my vita had all the bases covered: a variety of teaching assignments, a couple of refereed publications, conference presentations, research grants, and even departmental and university service.
Could the explanation simply be that at the time I had not yet finished my dissertation?
"Ph.D. in hand" may be the secret password that allows access to interview suites. That would certainly be the most encouraging explanation, since I defended my dissertation two months ago. Having been ceremoniously hooded, I am now -- finally and officially -- a Ph.D.
But in those cold winter months before and after the MLA convention, when my dissertation was still an unassembled mess, it was all Jason could do to keep me from falling into utter despair over my professional prospects. And despite my despair, I knew that it was important for me to stay upbeat going into the one interview I did get.
Oddly enough, although I was rejected by institutions representing every rung on the prestige ladder, my MLA interview was with a very respectable state research university in a part of the country where I really wanted to be. Of all of the positions to which I had applied, it was one of my top five choices. So if I was only going to get one interview, that was certainly the one to get. (And how bad could my materials have looked if Ideal State University was interested?)
Slinking through the halls of the hotel, lest I should be seen by a colleague who might ask me how the job search was going, I made my way to the interview suite. There I was greeted by three friendly committee members whose pictures I had already seen on the department's Web site and whose work I had acquainted myself with.
We had a very pleasant conversation for 45 minutes. Most of that time was spent talking about my writing sample. I found that somewhat surprising. They asked nothing about my publications, and there was only one perfunctory question about teaching, right at the end of the interview. So it wasn't quite the conversation I had expected, but it did go well.
I left the suite without my habitual self-doubts. Jason and I were both very excited about this possibility, so although we knew we should remain cautious, we could not quite help taking a look at the university's philosophy department, real-estate listings, and other information that we hoped would shortly be of crucial importance.
It had taken three months to get to this position of guarded euphoria. It took only three days to have those hopes dashed. I spent a week mourning the loss of what I had come to view as "my job," before forcing myself to get back to work on the dissertation.
It is difficult to motivate yourself to work day and night for the privilege of graduating into unemployment. But there were two factors that helped me shift into high gear. The first was my adviser's insistence that the only thing standing between me and a successful job search was completing the dissertation.
The second is harder to characterize, being more emotional than rational. I woke up one morning with a strong feeling that I was ready to be done, that I was tired of being a student, and that even being unemployed with degree in hand was better than another year on the TA rolls.
It is amazing how quickly a dissertation comes together once you've resolved that it's going to come together.
In those final frantic days of writing and revising, Jason was his usual helpful self. Like the shoemaker's elf, Jason corrects my work as I sleep. (I have tried to return the favor, but philosophy makes my brain hurt.) That is one of the reasons why I can't imagine living away from Jason. Our relationship offers professional as well as personal support.
It amazes me, really, that he so cheerfully does all of this for me: copyediting a dissertation is one thing; going on the market and leaving a job in which he has been genuinely happy is a sacrifice above and beyond the call of duty.
While he was consoling me on my disappointing market debut, he was weathering his own stormy job-search seas. As it turns out, his was the boat to bet on, for while my maiden voyage was by and large a disappointment, Jason's search for a senior-level position took a far more successful tack. But the telling of that story (which we promise will be free of nautical metaphors) must wait for another day.
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Graham Bennett is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. candidate in English and Jason Lindsey is the pen name of a tenured professor in philosophy at a public research university in the Midwest. They are chronicling their joint search for academic appointments this year.
