The annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting is big, amorphous, and generally a lot of fun. I go every year, and since this column is anonymous, I don't mind admitting that I spend some of the time playing -- seeing the sights, buying books, catching a few papers, hanging out with friends, and generally hobnobbing. Next year's conference is in San Diego, which should be really fun because the beach will be nearby. . .
I digress. This year I actually had a mission that distracted from my fun. My goal was to position myself for getting a new job that would take me off the academic D List.
I was not entirely successful, if we define success as getting a job, but my experience was instructive, so in what follows I would like to describe three scenes that capture what it was like job hunting at the society's annual meeting.
Scene 1: An E-mail Exchange
The first scene takes place a couple of weeks before the conference. I have e-mailed a friend to see if we can get together during the meeting. We have been toying with the idea of editing a book together, so I'm hoping we can discuss that with more seriousness, and since we work on the same topic, it is always good to compare notes.
He writes back to say he's probably not going to go, and "oh by the way" he has accepted a research position at an up-and-coming divinity school. That tidbit catches my attention because the position also happens to be one of the four I have applied for as part of my own job search.
I am disappointed on a number of levels. For one, since I hadn't heard anything from the school, I had assumed the position was still open. I know some people who knew some people on the search committee, and I was hoping to use those contacts to track down a few committee members for an informal meet-and-greet.
I also felt like that job was my best prospect among an admittedly small selection. The school was advertising for someone with my research specialty, and it seemed to be the one place were my experience teaching at a small religious college might not be a detriment.
But most of all, I don't consider my friend to be that far ahead of me professionally, at least not to the degree that he should receive an offer when I do not even get a sniff. We received our degrees about the same time, have a comparable number of publications (which I know because we compare CVs all the time), and, as far as that goes, I am at least as competent a scholar as he.
Rightly or wrongly, I can't help experiencing this as a D-List moment. The thing that most separates my friend from me is that his pedigree is A-List all the way, from his undergraduate college to all of his graduate training. Is that what made the difference? It's possible that not even the committee knows for sure, but I wonder.
For the record, I am genuinely happy for my friend. He will fit in well, and he's a very good hire. I only wish I had gotten a chance to make a better case for myself.
Scene 2: Interview in the Lobby
Most of the conference takes place in the convention center, but there is always one nearby hotel that becomes a central gathering place. In this scene, the hotel lobby in question is packed. The only available seats are at a deserted bar area, around which the rest of the conference participants, it seems, are noisily milling.
This is where I have agreed to be interviewed by the dean of a second-tier seminary.
Despite the fact that we have to seriously invade each other's personal space to be heard, the interview starts very well. My description of what I want from the position matches his description of what he wants for the position. He seems impressed by my research agenda, and he appears to think it would fit in well with the overall agenda of the school.
I say "appears" because one of the strange things about our talk is how transparent my interviewer is. Every time I say something he likes, his face lights up and he gets animated. Every time I say something he doesn't like, he frowns and barely responds. I don't know if he is like this only in interviews, or even how conscious the behavior is, but it is odd. I have to resist the urge to answer each question by randomly blurting out different words until I find the one that elicits the good response.
Anyway, I know precisely when I lost the job. He asked me for my position on a specific theological issue. I had anticipated that the question might come up, because his school's denomination differs from mine on the issue. So I had prepared a response that was forthright about that difference but that emphasized my willingness to work with a variety of perspectives.
Wrong answer. Big frown. I have no idea what he wanted me to say, but I never got a positive response from him after that. I will never hear from him, but it's hard to feel too bad, since I have no idea what else I could have done.
Scene 3: The Distinguished Professor
The third scene takes place in one of those generic conference rooms. I've gone to a paper session to check out what I have taken to calling "my competition." Which is to say, one of the papers was by another young scholar in my field, at about my level professionally, but who has -- you guessed it -- an A-List pedigree and job.
His paper was very good, and the whole session, which included one of the distinguished scholars in our field, was quite interesting.
In fact, it's really the actions of the distinguished scholar that stand out the most. The question-and-answer period ranged pretty far from the actual paper topic, and as it went further a-field, it became increasingly clear that the young presenter had very little to contribute beyond what he had said in the paper.
But as the junior scholar increasingly fumbled, the older scholar began to step in, graciously but decidedly, and field the questions. It was a virtuoso display, really. He deftly deflected bad questions, kept the room focused, and spoke with great authority on a number of issues, some of which had nothing to do with the subjects that made him famous. To my mind, it was the kind of performance only possible after a lifetime of teaching, thinking, and writing.
Early in the job-hunting process, one of my mentors said that for me to get a job, I would have to be a little bit better than everyone else. I knew what that meant, that I would need more and better publications, superior teaching, and all of the extra stuff that would make me stand out in a mountain of CVs.
I accept all that, but now I wonder if being better requires more than just having a better CV. Doesn't it also require developing range, using the disciplines of teaching and research to gain mastery over my chosen field?
I guess it does, which gives me some comfort, despite my relative lack of success so far. It's easy for me to get caught up in the mechanics of getting ahead, from plotting exactly how many articles I will need to get hired to imagining the glory and creature comforts of a top job at Harvard or Yale.
I don't deny that all of that is part of my motivation for moving on. If Yale wants me, it can have me! But it is also true that I got into this profession for reasons that have nothing to do with teaching at an Ivy League university. I genuinely love what I study, and as I have tried to say before, that love actually grows the more I study it. I also believe in the power of scholarship to recover memories, make connections, and so open us to otherwise unimaginable possibilities.
Though heartfelt, I realize how sappy that sounds, and sappiness rarely plays well in the interview room. Still, my conference experience has given me a better sense of what I need to do to move forward: Keep doing the things to make my CV a "little better," and stop sweating the stuff I cannot control. I'll eventually get the break I need.
Most of all, however, I need to remember that I'm in this for the long haul. To become a scholar is the work of a lifetime, and that work continues no matter where I happen to hang my hat.
