Reminiscing

In the old days before the Internet, the middle of October was the pivotal moment of the academic year for job seekers in English and modern languages. Sometime about now, the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List would land on desks at graduate programs across the United States, and within minutes (seconds, even) eager graduate students would be flipping desperately through the nearest available copy to see how the market looked for the year.

Like picking apples and raking leaves, grabbing the earliest copy of the JIL was a fall tradition. My program kept copies in the graduate lounge, and even the new M.A. students would comb through them carefully to see if they could spot market trends that would determine their odds a few years down the road. In a way, the JIL was a temptation to fantasy, and there was a tremendous amount of trying possible opportunities on for size in that lounge. It was also a social event where students with knowledge of particular institutions would comment on them, and those without would speculate, sometimes irresponsibly, on what the places would be like.

The Internet’s role in advertising academic jobs may have done away with this fall ritual, perhaps especially its social aspect. I haven’t been around my graduate program (or any doctoral program) for nearly 20 years, but I am pretty sure students still fantasize about potential job opportunities, just in a more gradual and piecemeal way, perhaps alone in front of a laptop screen rather than among friends in the student lounge.

We used to talk about the jobs in the JIL over a cup of coffee during breaks in studying, writing, and teaching. I learned a tremendous amount about the mythology of the academic market in English in those discussions, much of which has shaped my subsequent thinking about graduate education and the interface between doctoral education and the needs and realities of the academic market, one of my regular subjects here and in some other writings I’ve done.

Thinking back, I’m amazed by the conversations we had, which comprised an appalling amount of academic and locational snobbery and revealed a horizon of expectations that was, even then, plainly unrealistic, though we surely would have denied that at the time. I wonder what all those people — many of whose names I don’t even remember — are doing. I wonder how they have done in academic careers or outside of them, when their JIL hopes didn’t work out. I do still know a lot of my grad-school colleagues and keep in touch with some of them, and in many cases they have done very well.

It is a testimony to the power of this fall ritual that all these years later at about this time I still feel the instinctual pull of the JIL. The jobs I might look at now are not advertised there, but it’s the home of my disciplinary history and my past professional hopes. The falling leaves outside my office window call me back to the grad lounge, the cup of coffee, and the printed record of a range of possible futures and roads not taken.