THE FACULTY

Horror Stories and Practical Advice: a New Book on the Academic Job Market

The search for a tenure-track job in the 1990s is a long lesson in how to handle paperwork and rejection. It is about desperately fighting for a position, even one that you secretly feel is beneath you. And it's about waiting.

Such themes run throughout a book out this month, On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search (Riverside Books). The collection of 40 essays offers plenty of horror stories -- but it also includes the experiences of Ph.D.'s who have landed tenure-track jobs after long and frustrating searches.

Christina Boufis and Victoria C. Olsen, two Ph.D.'s whose job searches have, so far, ended in disappointment, edited the volume. "We wanted it to be an emotional guidebook," says Ms. Boufis, who earned her doctorate in literature from the City University of New York's Graduate School in 1994. "We felt we'd heard all these stories from people about how terrible the job market was and what a toll it takes on one's life, but there was nothing in any bookstore that spoke to us about our experience."

The two women pitched the book to academic presses, which were interested in the idea but wanted it to be "polemical," Ms. Olsen says. The women wanted On the Market's agenda to be personal.

"The experience of going on the job market and getting rejection after rejection leads to so much self-doubt," says Ms. Olsen, who earned her Ph.D. in literature from Stanford University in 1994. "You keep thinking, 'It's got to be something I've done.' And this book has helped us see that it also has to do with larger trends."

Besides solace, what On the Market offers new Ph.D.'s is advice. It includes sections on the application process, job interviews, and alternative careers.

In his essay, Kurt T. Bachmann, who found a job as an assistant professor of physics at Birmingham-Southern College, advises job candidates to make sure they have some notion of what their letters of recommendation say. After sending out dozens of applications without success, he learned something that he "should have suspected long before," he says. "One of my references had written, along with several very good things about me, one comment that was just plain awful." That letter said Dr. Bachmann had a tendency to be outspoken, rather than tactful, in matters of internal politics.

After two years on the market, Elizabeth Rose Gruner found a post as an assistant professor of English and women's studies at the University of Richmond. In her essay, she looks at the treatment of feminist scholars on the market and recounts how they are repeatedly asked during interviews whether they can "'handle' the male canonical authors."

Marilyn Bonnell has yet to find a tenure-track job, but her essay makes clear that she has embraced the life of a "gypsy scholar." "Everyone bemoans the fate of the poor adjunct, but you do not necessarily have to be a victim of the system," she writes. "For instance, I am generally 'abused' to the tune of $30-$40,000 -- currently of over $40,000 -- for a nine-month contract (with full benefits). And some universities will even pay for my move! What's the catch? Well, they want you to teach."

Neither Ms. Olsen nor Ms. Boufis is now on the market for a tenure-track job. The book grew out of a reading group they belonged to, along with four other women who had Ph.D.'s and were looking for academic jobs. Only one of the six has found a full-time job in higher education.

Ms. Boufis has a temporary job as an instructor in the composition program at the University of California at Berkeley. She also teaches writing and literature part-time to women housed in the San Francisco County Jail, where she has instituted a women's-studies curriculum. She is working on a book, to be called Ordinary Women, about her experiences there. Ms. Olsen, because she has children and a husband who has a full-time job, says she had to limit her job search geographically. She applied to 60 institutions over three years and got several interviews but no offers. She does free-lance writing and considers herself an independent scholar. She is working on a biography of the Victorian-era photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.

Both women learned in their job searches that they apparently had unrealistic expectations. Ms. Olsen says she found that it both helped, and hurt, that she had gotten a Ph.D. from an elite institution. "In some ways I was ill-prepared for the numbers of jobs that emphasized teaching over research," she says. "It really helps in this market to have taught at different kinds of colleges. All the teaching I did was at Stanford, and a lot of employers looked at my resume and said, 'We're not Stanford.'"

Both women say the book has a hopeful message about the quality of the country's Ph.D.'s. "Against numerical odds for landing a job, and faced with graduating thousands of dollars in debt, most of our contributors seriously wanted to be in academia," says Ms. Boufis. "It was like a calling. I thought that was very moving."