CHRONICLE STORIES

A Graduate Student's Job Search Leads Her Far Afield

By ROBIN WILSON

At 11:15 a.m. on the Saturday after Christmas, Kris Fresonke stands outside Room 1212 of the Madison Hotel in Washington and knocks assertively. After a moment or two, the door opens, and a professor from the Farmington campus of the University of Maine ushers her in.

Her job interview is under way.

The annual meeting of the Modern Language Association is always a nerve-racking "meat market" for graduate students and recent Ph.D. recipients. Ms. Fresonke and hundreds of other would-be professors were in Washington in December looking for that one opening that would lead to academic nirvana -- a tenure-track job.

Lately, many of those job seekers have found out whether they have landed tenure-track positions for the fall or will join the hordes of disappointed candidates who will try again next December, at the M.L.A. meeting in Toronto.

For four months, The Chronicle followed Ms. Fresonke through the process of hunting down a job in academe until she learned which group she would be part of.

"The job market is like a patient etherized on a table. There are no signs of life," says Ms. Fresonke, who started her graduate degree in English at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1991. She studies the literature of the American West. The M.L.A. meeting, she says, "is a good place to have a complete personality meltdown."

When she came to the meeting, she was about three-quarters of the way through her dissertation. It centers on how nature writers and explorers during the 19th century were influenced by the "design argument," a 17th-century theological concept that says the beauty of the world's landscapes proves the existence of a Creator. In her work, Ms. Fresonke looks at the field journals of Lewis and Clark and the writings of Emerson and Thoreau, among others.

She also examines how those writers struggled with the politicization of the design argument, when Americans began using the concept during the mid-1800s as justification for expanding the territory of the United States and fighting the Mexican War. The argument gave way to Manifest Destiny, the doctrine that the United States should rule all of North America because this was God's will. "Americans love to look at the landscape and say, 'It's so beautiful, God must have wanted us to occupy it,'" says Ms. Fresonke.

Although she has yet to publish a journal article or a book, Ms. Fresonke did give a talk at the M.L.A. meeting and is trying to interest the University of Nebraska Press in a collection of essays that she hopes to edit to mark the 200th anniversary of the inception of the Lewis and Clark expedition, in 2003.

Her faculty mentors say the links she makes between nature writers and explorers are "original," and they call her work "dazzling" and even "brilliant." But although several institutions expressed initial interest last year, Ms. Fresonke snagged job interviews at the M.L.A. with only two places -- the University of Maine and New Mexico State University. Still, that is considered good these days. By comparison, only half of the 20 U.C.L.A. students in the job market this year even got interviews at the M.L.A. meeting -- two interviews each, on average. Only four of them received job offers. Last year, 13 out of 25 U.C.L.A. students received offers.

The M.L.A.'s "Job Information List" advertised 1,186 positions in English during academic 1996-97, a 10-per-cent increase from the year before. But the competition for jobs has stiffened, given that the number of Ph.D.'s granted in English has been on the rise: 753 people earned doctorates in English language and literature in 1995, compared with 525 in 1985, according to the National Research Council. An additional 191 earned Ph.D.'s in comparative literature in 1995, the most recent year for which statistics are available, up from 133 in 1985.

Before she traveled here for the M.L.A. meeting, Ms. Fresonke was coached by her faculty mentors on how to let professors know she had arrived for a job interview ("Always give an assertive, punctual knock.") and on what to wear ("Don't be too blah. Don't be too conservative. Wear business attire."). Ms. Fresonke wears a safari jacket belted at the waist over a short black skirt, and an amber ring on her right hand. Her professors also gave advice on more-important things, such as how to describe her future research interests. ("Don't say you want to do a biography -- it doesn't sound scholarly enough. Say 'critical study.'")

She went through M.L.A. interviews the year before, with Union College and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, so she is prepared for the interview scene here. What she hasn't planned for is that she would be recovering from the stomach flu during her trip here in December. "Oh, good," she remarks shortly before her first interview is to begin. "It all comes down to this: Two half-hour interviews on a Saturday in December when I've been sick for five days and I'd rather be anywhere else."

Although Ms. Fresonke's work has impressed people, it does present some problems. She is very clearly a historicist, who doesn't have many credentials in what she calls the "feminist theory and poststructuralist stuff" that is in demand right now.

She is surprised and pleased that her focus doesn't appear to have put her at a disadvantage with the professors from Maine. Later, over a pastrami sandwich and a beer at a bar and grill a few blocks from the hotel, Ms. Fresonke dissects her first interview. "Amazingly, not one question came up about feminism," she says, sounding relieved. She thinks things went well. (She had asked the professors from Maine and New Mexico State if a Chronicle reporter could sit in on her interviews, but they were uncomfortable with the idea.)

During the 50-minute interview, she told the Maine professors how she would go about teaching an American-literature survey course, using an approach that she borrowed from a friend. "My pedagogical angle is 'representative men' -- a phrase from Emerson's book of the same title," she explains. "The idea is to read books in the American literary canon and decide why each is a representative text. How do you find out what is American about it?" A friend at U.C.L.A. is doing his dissertation on the subject.

After lunch, she walks to her second interview, at the Mayflower Hotel, where she meets with three faculty members from New Mexico State. It lasts precisely half an hour, and Ms. Fresonke is not upbeat when she emerges. "They gave me an entree, and I didn't take advantage of it," she laments. "They liked the fact that I did Western literature, but I got sidetracked on talking about American literature per se and not talking about the American West." She sighs. "They laughed at my jokes, but I just don't think I sparkled."

It is the kind of moment that must make Ms. Fresonke question her interest in an academic career. It wasn't always her plan. During her undergraduate years at Columbia University, she considered law school, but an English professor persuaded her otherwise. Now she wonders about that advice. "There were supposed to be all of these retirements and turnover," she says. "But there is a whole generation now that's been deceived. How do I explain to my parents why I can't get a job? If you're a truck driver or a C.E.O., you can probably get one after a few months of looking. I can't."

Unlike a lot of would-be academics, Ms. Fresonke hasn't given serious thought to cobbling together adjunct teaching jobs to make a career. That would give her little time to pursue her scholarly interests, she says. She would consider a part-time post only if it was in New York or Los Angeles, two places where she would like to live.

The day after Ms. Fresonke's job interviews at the M.L.A. are over, something unexpected comes up. After she appears on a panel with one of her faculty advisers and presents a paper on the influence of Manifest Destiny in Western adventure stories, the adviser tells her that he's heard about a job opportunity. A friend of his from a Midwestern university is interested in interviewing Ms. Fresonke for a three-year appointment. Although the university hasn't advertised the job opening, the Midwestern professor is putting out feelers and has told Ms. Fresonke's adviser that the post could eventually turn into a tenure-track position.

Ms. Fresonke and her adviser, Blake Allmendinger, an associate professor of English at U.C.L.A., decide to meet the woman in the lobby bar at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. "This is the ideal way people get jobs," says Mr. Allmendinger. But the woman from the Midwestern university is horrified to find a reporter from The Chronicle in tow. Her face turns red, she covers her name tag, and says she would lose her job if the incident were reported. A university that fails to advertise job opportunities and hold a formal search opens itself up to discrimination complaints under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, although professors acknowledge that informal searches are common.

Nothing comes of the job possibility, and Ms. Fresonke returns to Los Angeles to wait for word from Maine and New Mexico State. Typically, institutions contact candidates in February to ask them to travel to the campus for a second interview. But during telephone interviews that month, Ms. Fresonke reports that she has heard nothing from either university. She is growing surer and surer that neither will offer her a job.

In late February, she decides to move to London to be with her new husband, Richard Major, a curate with the Church of England, whom she married in January. Although she has not received rejection letters from her interviews in December, she has started to plan out the next year of her life, assuming that she'll be in London. She has applied for an extension on the funds she has received from U.C.L.A. to write her dissertation. She had planned to finish it this summer if she had received a job offer, but now she figures she'll take the next year to write.

Ms. Fresonke also plans to apply to a graduate program in critical theory that is offered by U.C.L.A. in Paris. "This will make it look like I know critical theory and give me a year to keep myself active and writing," she reasons. She also has learned that the Journal of the Southwest has accepted one of her papers. It concerns the writings of a 19th-century man who traveled down the Colorado River.

In the back of her mind, however, she has started to wonder whether she should pursue another Ph.D. in a different field, or even a different career. "I keep wanting to sit down and have a conversation with myself, but it's too awful," she says in a telephone interview from London. "After five years, incredible amounts of work, and some debt, I don't think I'll get an academic job as I had planned. I don't want to wake up someday and realize I don't have a career at all."

In late March, the rejection letters arrive. The one from New Mexico State is particularly irksome: "We enjoyed meeting you in [Washington]." The fact that someone neglected to remove brackets from the form letter is "the final indignity," Ms. Fresonke says.

To fill the position at New Mexico, professors hired Allison Giffen, who earned her Ph.D. in 1995 and has taught for three years in a tenure-track position at the University of Puget Sound. At the University of Maine, Siobhan Senier will be the new assistant professor in the humanities department. She studies American Indian and women's literature and published an article in 1994 in American Literature. Ms. Senier, who will receive her Ph.D. next month from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had interviews with nine institutions at the M.L.A. meeting and received three job offers.

Along with the rejection letters, however, there is a ray of hope for Ms. Fresonke. She receives a telephone call from an East Coast college that she applied to last year but hadn't heard from. A professor there says the English department is now interested in interviewing her.

A few days later, the professor calls back: The department has decided to postpone the search until the M.L.A. meeting in December.