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At What Point Does Moving On Make Sense?

September 9, 2011, 12:06 pm

By Gene C. Fant Jr.

There’s an old story about a big-time football coach who was chatting with a group of eager alumni. One man, hoping to impress everyone, said to the group, “Coach, the other night I saw a player who got knocked down in a game by a much larger player and he got right back up again. On the next play, he got knocked down again by the other player and again, he popped right back up. On the next play, the same thing happened. I was so impressed with his perseverance. All I kept thinking was, ‘Wow, we need a player like that on our team next year.’ Coach, isn’t that the kind of player we need?”

The coach sighed and said, “No, actually I’d rather have the guy who kept knocking him down on our team. We’ve already got plenty of guys who can get knocked down.”

Sometimes the job market is like that larger player and applicants are like the guy who keeps getting knocked down. Year one on the market comes and goes and the applicants prepare for year two. Year two comes and goes and the applicants prepare for year three. The same happens in year three and the applicants by this time must be wondering if it’s worth pursuing a fourth year on the market. After all, it’s the proverbial definition of insanity to repeat actions but expect different results.

When I am approached by friends or former students who are heading into their third or fourth year on the job market, I ask four very hard questions:

1. Have you actually finished your terminal degree? The longer it is unfinished, the harder it will be to avoid being perceived as a perpetual A.B.D., which is deadly for applicants.

2. Are you portable? If you cannot relocate for whatever reason and have exhausted the local market, it’s time to rethink your employment plans.

3. Are you applying for “reasonable” positions? If you have a Ph.D. from Compass State University, you needn’t apply at Flagship State U or Ivy League College. Whether it’s fair or not, academe has peerage just like European royalty.

4. At what stage do you seem to be running into the brick wall? Applications? Phone interviews? On-campus interviews? Have you investigated to see why this keeps happening? Can a mentor or peer help you figure out what has been throwing you off-track?

What advice would you offer for folks who have been on the market for a long time? At what point do you think that moving in another direction is the better part of discretion?

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  • http://skepticaljew.blogspot.com/ MKR

    [Inserted into other comment.]

  • http://skepticaljew.blogspot.com/ MKR

    “For decades, the rationale for why the humanities are essential to the college curriculum were the same.” –As it were. 

    Actually, I count three subject–verb disagreements: besides the one in the first sentence, there are these two:

    “The humanities has been on the defensive for more than a century.” They has?

    “In the last few years, though, the rationale for why the humanities should stay in the college curriculum have changed significantly.” It have?

    It is also a bit rich that someone who uses a phrase like “clearly transparent” (second sentence) should chide Matthew Arnold for indulging in “tautology” (third paragraph).

    These solecisms distract from a post that otherwise makes some worthwhile points about the misuse and overuse of Arnold’s famous phrases.

  • captain_chronicle

    Venkman: Einstein did his best stuff when he was working as a patent clerk!
    Stantz: You know how much a patent clerk earns? Personally, I liked the University; they
    gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything. You’ve never been out of college. You don’t know what it’s like out there. I’ve worked in the private sector — they
    expect results!

  • yellow1

    I cannot stress how much I think #2 is important for all of us to realize AND accept. I have never been happier in a professional setting than where I am now, but where I am now is a time zone and 600 miles from where I planned to be geographically.

    This is also advice we give our students where we I work. They need to understand that working in field may require working ANYWHERE.

  • fly_on_the_wall

    I think there needs to be a #5: Face the prospect that however able you are, however willing to relocate, however reasonable you might be regarding the relative fit of the prestige of your program to the positions you apply for, that the chances are very great that you will not ever have a position in your field. You may want to reconsider the vision you had of your professional future. In short, do something else.

    When students come to me for guidance about their future plans, I always make a point of laying it out for them. They have a right to know before embarking on “following their passion” in the idealistic expectation that their enthusiasm, intelligence and performance will assure that they will be the exception to the rule. Most will not. It is the reality of an academic world 70% populated by adjuncts.ABD or PhD, adjunct is as good as most of them will ever get. It is unconscionable that this publication continues to natter on, fiddling while the academic world to which the writers refer burns to the ground. 

  • edwoof

    I believe in deadlines. I would always advise somebody to establish a number of years that they will try for a tt poistion and if they cross the deadline without a tt position, then they should pursue Plan B for their career (which they already should have formulated).

    Plan B may consist of simply resigning oneself to being an adjunct, but then being able to use all that psychic energy for some other enriching and rewarding endeavor (for example writing the novel, local theater) instead of the exhausting application process.

    Personally, I would set a deadline of 3 to 5 years for myself. 

  • denadavis

    I think these 4 points are very well taken.  When I had been on the market (with PhD) for 4 years, I faced the reality that I was unlikely to find a t-track job in my humanities discipline, in an area where I could bear to raise a child.  So I went to law school, ending up getting a very good job in legal academia, and now have an inter-disciplinary chair back in the humanities.

  • totoro

    If you have a post-doc or VAP position that is perfectly OK, keep searching for a TT position if you want to. If you are an adjunct or working outside academia in a job that is not relevant to your field, then unless you are also getting published in the top journals or got a book contract with a good press (depending on field) you need to give up because your application won’t be considered really given all of the other good applications. We here in Australia are hiring like crazy (at least in my field). Some searches get a pile of applicants and others not many good ones. So if you are prepared to work anywhere you should think about it. I got a US PhD and took the work anywhere thing seriously and first came to Australia.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Dave-Newport/100000330111921 Dave Newport

    A better number 1 might be: “how old are you? If you are over 50, plan for retirement, not a new job.” If <50, read on.

  • livebythegoldenrule

    At what point does moving on make sense?  I’m at that point now.  I have been actively searching for a decent librarian and/or archivist position for several years after my museum art librarian position was downsized, never to return.  Nada.  Nada.  Landed one school librarian job after that which was like being incarcerated in Leavenworth and critically understaffed and underpaid.  The competition for these jobs (or, I should say, what is left of these jobs) is fierce.  It’s not that I have no experience in the field – have 15 years, but still no takers.  I’ve come close in a few interviews where it’s down to two people, but when you have 300 people going for one job, “close” is still not enough.  So, after much thinking, I am leaving the profession for good and returning to the administrative field – that’s right – clerical and secretarial jobs.  This is all I can find in this abysmal economy and, even then, competition is tight.  I am very afraid for our future when I see the state of the economy and its lack of good jobs.  Most that I see are $10 – 15/hr with no benefits.  Who can realistically live on that for any length of time, let alone support a family?  Middle manager jobs have been almost totally eliminated – and that is what most librarians and archivists are.  So, now I’m off to an interview for a part-time job as an administrative assistant to a local scientist.  This is all I can find and I’m grateful for even this.  Just sign me – No Longer a Librarian.  Yes, I’ve moved on.

  • http://twitter.com/JoVanEvery Jo VanEvery

    I would advise that the corollary to #1 is “are you publishing”? There are too many people out there that think all the low paid teaching jobs they are doing are “good experience”. They aren’t. If you cannot demonstrate that you are committed to scholarship by finishing your PhD and publishing from it, then you aren’t going to get a tenure track job. If you don’t like the sound of that, stop looking sooner rather than later.

  • http://who-will-kiss-the-pig.blogspot.com Richard Grayson

    I’m old enough to know a great many people who have moved on and are now over forty, and by now I don’t think any one of them regrets it.  Humans are wonderfully adaptive.

  • cwm4c

    Except the adjuncts I know spend more time and energy teaching more classes, at possibly more universities, than any tenured professors I know.  Not sure where they are to get all this extra energy?

  • graddirector

    I would say that if you are on the academic job market for more than two cycles, it is time for some soul searching.  Particularly, you need to be brutally honest with yourself  about how competitive your credentials are.

    On a regular basis I encounter Ph.D.s who have been applying to faculty positions for years who say that their lack of success occurs because “I have been treated unfairly because I am a ____” or “there are no jobs in academia”.  However, a look at their credentials always reveals that the problem is that they have either 1) no demonstrated productivity (in one case I saw an article about the plight of perpetual postdocs where the poor downtrodden “example” had generated fewer publications from their entire Ph.D. and 7 years of postdoc than some of our best undergraduate researchers) and/or 2) no teaching experience at all. 

    These folks are very employable in a variety of fields, but they have demonstrated that they do not have the self discipline necessary to be productive as academics.  In that case, it is time to move on.

    In that same light, in many/most cases the truly competitive applicant finds themselves weighing 3 or more job offers and perhaps even turning down interviews at some schools. Thus, many different search committees have made the same assessment that a candidate is great. This is why so many faculty searches “fail” since these competitive applicants can only take one job. Thus, if you have no interviews after sending a 100+ applications, one should consider this as 100s of independent assessments stating that you just are not competitive for a faculty position.

  • copesan

    Thank you for your honesty in this.  I spent too many years on the job market, having gotten my degree at 50, thinking it was my fault, because it never occurred to me that my previous decades of working experience in education would work against me as a newly minted Phd.

  • AndrewSshi

    The question, however, is what to do with someone modestly productive:  Say you finish grad school with no book contract but a couple of articles and book reviews, and no instructorships but a few years as a TA.  For that person, it may take more than a couple of years to bolster the CV with some instructorships and to get his/her manuscript to a publisher.  That person should probably keep going after year two.  But yeah, if you haven’t gotten hired for a TT position after you’ve got your book contract, it’s probably time to move on.

  • bookishone

    Related to #4, in the essay, but I think more important: Are you getting interest in your candidacy? If you’re getting close to hiring — some campus visits in your last round on the market, for example — you’re still a good candidate. If you’re getting interviews, you’re a viable candidate. If you haven’t gotten any nibbles, and you’ve been applying pretty widely for a few years, it may be time to look elsewhere.

    Also, if your family finances are on the verge of disaster, you may need to cut your losses and move on. I was on the market for several years and ended up with a great job, but I was getting interviews and campus visits all the way along, and I had good interim jobs in academia (VAPs) so I was encouraged to (and financially able to) stick with it. I also had back-up plans for law school or secondary school teaching, which I think helped me not feel as desperate. 

  • graddirector

    Well, I am in a science department, so book contracts are not of issue, it is all about peer reviewed journal publications.  Few if any people in my field get TT faculty positions right out of grad school, the norm is a 4-7 year long postdoctoral training stint after the Ph.D..  Thus, productivity is usually averaged over a 8-14 year period between entering grad school and job hunting.  It is seldom that someone who has been modestly productive at best over such a long time is suddenly going to blossom into a publishing dynamo.

  • AndrewSshi

    Okay, fair enough–I was thinking of the humanities, where the standard used to be an article or two to get hired and a book for tenure but has now mostly become several articles and a book to get hired and another book for tenure.

  • ElizaBro

    “It is unconscionable that this publication continues to natter on, fiddling while the academic world to which the writers refer burns to the ground.”  You’re not a regular reader of this publication, are you? It’s been publishing Thomas H. Benton’s columns for years, ranting about adjunctification and urging graduate students to reconsider graduate school. And there have been countless news stories about these trends for 10-plus years. 

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