This is not the column I expected to write. I expected my job search would be over by March, at the latest, and I would be able to sign off with a definitive narrative of success or failure. By this time last year, I had known I wouldn't be getting a job offer, and had adjusted my plans accordingly.
This year? Well, that's the question.
Because most departments wait until their first choice signs a contract before letting the other candidates know where they stand, I have yet to hear from two of the English departments where I have had campus interviews. Meanwhile, there are several visiting positions left on my list of places to apply, and I'm still filling out affirmative-action cards and responding to requests for my writing samples.
Under the circumstances, it's difficult to make plans or commitments. So I've been weighing the merits of alternative careers: Grant writing? Teaching English abroad? Writing up a disguised version of my adventures on the job market and marketing it as a Regency romance?
That last plan actually seemed viable. The past few months have certainly contained enough interpersonal drama, suspense, and fleeting encounters in hotel ballrooms to fill out a novel or two -- until I remembered that most readers of romance stories demand a proper ending.
Sensible of them. Job candidates in a glutted field have no such luxury.
Not knowing what's coming forces you to live in the moment. Every time I look at my freshman composition students, I feel grateful for the weeks that are left to us. I've been experimenting with new assignments and new methods all year, rethinking how and why I teach. One of the perks of the job search is that it provides so many opportunities to talk about teaching with people who are passionate about it, and I've been feeling a renewed level of energy in the classroom.
Another perk is that I've been reminded at every turn of how much I genuinely like academe. I hadn't expected that to happen, since most stories about the academic job search emphasize the brutality of the interview process and the dysfunctional aspects of the profession. Sometimes I worry that I might be experiencing a new form of Stockholm syndrome.
Nevertheless, it's easy to forget that all professions have their own brand of craziness, and the selection criteria in academe may be more rational than most.
While traveling to a campus interview, I got an unexpected glimpse of how things work in the nonacademic world when I found myself sharing a table with a stranger in an airport food court. He was an executive for an oil company. When he found out that I was on my way to a job interview, he decided to give me some advice.
"What counts in an interview is people skills," he said. "That's what I always look for. I'll give you an example. I like to ask people how many thousandths are in an inch when I interview them. Some of them laugh in my face, and that's all right. That tells me they've got a sense of humor. And then there are some people, engineers, who can't answer the question."
"Is that a trick question?" I asked, puzzled. "Is the answer something other than a thousand?"
"No, it's a question like 'Who's buried in Grant's tomb?' And some of them can't answer it! Give you another example. Before someone walks in the door for an interview, I always throw a piece of paper on the floor and see whether they pick it up. And if they don't, I ask them why. Sometimes they say, 'Well, I didn't know I was interviewing for a job as a janitor,' and that's when I show them the door."
I don't know anybody who has been asked how many iambs there are in a pentameter at a Modern Language Association interview, or why they didn't pick up the room-service tray from the floor when they came in.
When I told that story to two members of the search committee at dinner, we all agreed that if we went into a strange faculty member's office and saw there was a piece of paper on the floor, we would assume that the owner of the office simply felt like keeping that particular piece of paper there. Perhaps people in another line of work would find that assumption as bizarre as I had found my lunch companion's advice. But it was my brand of bizarreness, and it made me feel right at home.
I experienced another sort of homecoming a few weeks earlier. While driving home from another job interview, I found myself only an hour away from my undergraduate alma mater and decided to make a detour. I wandered around the English building, thinking how little the place had changed: the same peeling paint on the stair railings, the same fading Doonesbury cartoons on my favorite professor's office door. I was pleased to see that the door was slightly ajar, and stopped in for a chat.
After I had filled him in on my dissertation and my latest interview stories, he pointed out -- rather belatedly, I thought -- that I could be making six figures a year if I had gone to law school.
Perhaps he had forgotten that he was the reason I hadn't gone to law school. I had met him in my first semester of college. I was 18 and thrilled to be able to take an entire class on Shakespeare, but I hadn't quite bargained on having a professor who could draw connections between Henry V and the Soviet news service, and liked to throw his freshmen into the deep end by making them puzzle out Troilus and Cressida.
He had cornered me after class a year later and told me I should think about getting a Ph.D. in English. We had epic arguments about where I should apply, but he had never wavered in his insistence that I belonged in graduate school. I suppose most academics have a mentor like that somewhere in their past, a professor who first showed us what -- or, perhaps, who -- we wanted to be when we grew up.
I shook my head. I didn't regret not going to law school.
"Thanks for stopping by," he said as I was leaving. "You make me feel young."
Too bad I was starting to feel old. I walked out under the spreading beech trees that I remembered so well, thinking about the passing of years and torches.
I don't know where the path I have chosen will lead. I do know that it has meant years of watching mentors turn into colleagues, being invited to my students' plays and concerts, even carrying microwave ovens up a flight of stairs in 90-degree heat to help students in the summer program where I work as a tutor move into the dormitory.
Perhaps that is enough. If I can't yet end my story with certainty, I can say, at least, that the uncertainties have been worth embracing.
