San Francisco — Frustrated job candidates (and would-be employers) will be glad to see the back of 2008. Will 2009 have them saying, “What fresh hell is this?”? At the MLA meeting, which ended yesterday, The Chronicle asked Donald E. Hall, chair of the English department at West Virginia University, for his views on 2008-9. An edited transcript follows.

Q. What positions are you hiring for?

A. We are hiring a tenure-track assistant professor in Latino/a American literature.

Q. Are there any openings that have been frozen or that you have reason to think may be frozen?

A. No, our funding is secure. For the moment, anyway, the State of West Virginia is fiscally stable because of the coal and gas industry. My partner works in a field related to that industry (as an attorney), and only recently have there been signs of some weakening in gas exploration (his particular legal area),...

San Francisco — It’s a long trek up Nob Hill from the Hilton San Francisco, where most of the English sessions are being held, to the Fairmont Hotel, the location of the MLA Job Information Center. The Fairmont is about as deluxe as a hotel gets, with marble columns and an excess of gilded wood in the lobby. Nervous job-seekers park themselves on the the lobby’s plush chairs and settees before heading down to interviews in a ballroom in the bowels of the hotel. A pre-interview salon with crystal chandeliers and mirrored walls offers an unexpectedly posh place to collect one’s thoughts before the big moment.

The setting is deluxe. The job prospects aren’t quite so rich. Rumors of canceled searches and hiring freezes abound.

Jane Malcolm is a graduate student in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. A specialist in modernism and 20th-century literature, she applied for ...

San Francisco — So Harvard’s not hiring this year, and it’s not alone. A lot of language-and-literature departments, though, are proceeding with searches — for now. How much do the job jitters extend to the employers’ side of the interviewing table? The Chronicle talked to professors on several search committees to find out.

Like everybody here, Ian Finseth, an assistant professor of English at the University of North Texas, has heard the stories about suspended searches and frozen positions. He heard a rumor that one department, fearing that a budget freeze was imminent, made job offers by Thanksgiving to try to beat the money clock.

Mr. Finseth is chair of a search committee interviewing candidates for a position in early American literature. Does he worry that the money for that job might dry up? “No concern at all,” he said. With a budget surplus, Texas has a healthier economy...

Today is the last day before my university closes for a week for the winter break. Nearly everyone is gone, and the halls are quiet. It’s snowy outside here in rural northwest Iowa, and it looks like we will get more snow in the next few days.

I have had nice e-mail conversations with candidates who have accepted some of our positions, and one who has an offer outstanding. In early January, we will see several more candidates on campus for a search that has proved particularly challenging. After 12 consecutive years (and 15 out of 17) of attending the MLA convention, this will be the fourth year in a row that I will instead spend the week after Christmas with my family. While I miss the hustle and big-city fun of the convention, and especially seeing my friends from graduate school (not to mention the book display!), I am glad to have the chance to take a real break.

I am thinking a ...

Since everyone is exhausted from paper grading and the end-of-year activities, I thought I’d post something light.

One of my lasting memories of doctoral work came after I had completed my comprehensive exams. I had a subsequent recurring nightmare that I hadn’t actually taken my exams and that when I showed up to take them, they made me drive to the local mall, where they gave me a seat in the food court. I tried to write my essays on one of the wobbly tables but kept getting interrupted by my students. I woke up with my heart in my throat every time it happened.

I had similar dreams when I was on the market, that I had an interview for a position, again in the food court, but the search committee was staffed entirely by my dissertation committee, who scowled and corrected my every answer.

Have any of you had dreams or nightmares about your job searches?

While doing some archival research, I once ran across a former college professor’s faculty application from sometime in the late mid-20th century. I laughed out loud when I examined it: Of the first 10 questions, about seven were now illegal to include. My favorites were items like “Describe any physical deformities you might have” and “Height/Weight.” Even crazier: “List your graduate academic degrees” was the 25th prompt on the application!

Certainly we may complain about how higher education has gotten carried away with the various regulations we have concerning what’s proper and what’s legal in the application process, but that application was a stark reminder to me about just how much better the process truly is.

What parts of the application process do we still have that might one day be laughable?

In an effort to keep college affordable during the economic storm, small private colleges are cutting back in other areas, like faculty hiring and salary increases, to free up money for student aid, according to the results of a survey released Thursday by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.

The results—which came from 371 private colleges, nearly 90 percent of which had enrollments of less than 5,000 students—found that while 50 percent of colleges had frozen hiring or planned to do so, only 8 percent had cut or were planning to cut their student-aid budgets. Only 10 percent have cut or plan to cut student services, and just 7 percent expected academic programs to be affected.

Read more.

The University of Texas system’s Board of Regents has named its only finalist for chancellor: a pediatric transplant surgeon who heads the university’s Health Science Center in San Antonio, the Austin American-Statesman reported this morning. Francisco Cigarroa, who comes from a family of Laredo-based doctors, would be the system’s first Hispanic chancellor.

The board announced its unanimous decision on Thursday after nearly five hours behind closed doors. “He’s a wonderful academician, he’s a top surgeon, and he’s been very successful as president of the health-science center,” said Raymund Paredes, the state’s higher-education commissioner. “He’s turned that center into a major research institution. He’s got the kind of academic stature you would want in a chancellor of the UT system.”

The board also commended its other top candidate, John Montford, a previous chancellor of the...

Commercial publishing houses, including Random House and Farrar Straus Giroux, have been rocked by layoffs and reorganizations in recent weeks, as the effects of the economic downturn eat away at the book trade. Are university presses next?

In what may — or may not — be a sign of things to come, one of the larger university presses, SUNY Press, has laid off five employees, the Albany Times Union reported today. “The cuts, made earlier this month, represented nearly 15 percent of what was a 34-member staff,” the paper wrote. “The business manager’s office overlooking Lark Street is now empty. A publicist, a clerk, an editor, and a production manager also lost jobs.”

Will the layoffs spread to other university presses? Sales at some (but not all) had been down in recent months, even before the economy took a nosedive. “I certainly expect that sales are going to continue to slump,”...

Some years ago, Dilbert.com had a forum where fans could post tales from the workplace, usually at the prompting of the forum’s conductor. One of my favorites was “How do you know that it’s time to put out your résumé?” A common answer was, “When the toilet paper disappears from the restrooms and the snacks disappear from the break rooms.”

I thought about that the other day while having lunch with a friend who recently left a doomed institution. He said, “I knew it was time to hit the market when the food disappeared from all meetings and I got yelled at for leaving the lights on in a lecture hall. When the president started sounding like my dad complaining about the electric bill, I knew we were in trouble.”

So, whether facetious or factual, how do you know when it’s time to dust off the CV?