First, Know Thyself

The other day, our director of admissions handed me a copy of Jean M. Twenge’s Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable than Ever Before (Free Press, 2006). She suggested I read it to help understand the challenges of marketing to, and recruiting, potential undergraduate students who in her experience have a very particular way of looking at themselves and their aspirations.

On that same day, coincidentally, I read for the first time Jill Silos-Rooney’s now highly controversial First Person essay in The Chronicle, “When It’ll Never be a Good Fit.” While I am wary of leaning too hard on pop social science like Twenge’s book, I found the connections between it and Silos-Rooney’s column to be instructive and helpful as I think about recruiting faculty.

I am not interested in piling on Ms. Silos-Rooney, who is having a bad time in the comments to her column and in the follow-up thread in The Chronicle’s Forums titled, “City-Slicker Visits the Sticks.” I would say, though, that her thoughtless generalizations about her rural potential colleagues, and the plainly class-based denigration of where they buy their underwear, display an unfortunate tin ear to the realities of academic life.

I grew up in Los Angeles, and if you’d told me 30 years ago when I graduated from high school that I’d be working at a university in a town of 12,000 people roughly 125 miles from the nearest metropolitan areas, I’d have laughed in your face–I would neither have wanted to do so nor believed that I would be “reduced” to that outcome over the course of my career. It’s awfully nice to be young and certain: as Twenge remarks, “This is where self-esteem crosses over into entitlement: the idea that we deserve more. And why shouldn’t we? We’ve been told all of our lives that we are special.”

The problem is the collision of reality with what we believe about ourselves, and as I have remarked before, this collision is the source of an enormous amount of misery for young faculty members or, as is apparent in Silos-Rooney’s commentary, for young prospective faculty members. I hasten to add that I have more than once adopted her tone–during my first tour of duty in Iowa from 1990 to 2000 I more than once commented adversely on shopping at farm-supply stores. My first job was in a town that was smaller than my high school in suburban L.A., and as a kid I routinely made fun of my dad for having graduated from the University of Iowa.

So I certainly get where she’s coming from, and I understand her pain in encountering what she perceived as the stunted opportunities of working at a rural institution. I commend her as well for honestly concluding that such a job was not for her, undoubtedly a good outcome for her as well as the institution, should they have offered her the job. Still, I wish for the sake of everyone involved that she had figured this out earlier, before she had such a negative experience in her interview, and particularly before she recounted that experience in The Chronicle. Either that, or I wish she had attended more carefully to her interactions with her potential colleagues, who I am willing to bet she would have found to be bright, committed, and engaging, regardless of where they bought their underwear.

When you go out on the academic market, you should consider ahead of time what’s really important to you. If proximity to high culture is a make-or-break proposition, don’t apply to institutions in rural areas. If you need a 5-million-volume research library, make sure you’re within an hour of one. If a vibrant research culture is important to you, don’t apply to a teaching school with no graduate students.

But at the same time, it’s surprising what you may find at a place that doesn’t look that exciting at the outset. In the past year, I have spent significant time in Chicago, Williamsburg, San Francisco, Seoul, Busan, and Istanbul. I have been to famous museums and eaten wonderful food. In fact, I probably made more of my visits than I would have had I lived in a big city, because I made special efforts to take advantage of the amenities in these places. I have had these opportunities because my institution is amply resourced and because, as a matter of principal, we support faculty and staff travel, knowing that our location is isolated and that people need to get out and have different experiences to be effective here in our small town.

The key, I think, is to draw a bright line around the positions you know you simply won’t take, and don’t waste either your time or the institution’s by applying to them. For the rest, apply to them, but be ready to give them a fair chance and don’t simply assume, because they are not the places you envisioned yourself inhabiting professionally, that they are fundamentally deficient or that their citizens are losers. The academic market doesn’t work that way, and job candidates can get a head start on professional success and happiness if they figure that out before they apply for jobs rather than in the middle of an interview.