'The Scary Place'

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Nine thousand professors of language and literature came here just after Christmas for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association. But they attended two entirely different conferences. One was full of erudite papers on obscure authors, cocktail chitchat, and leisurely browsing through stacks of books. The other was Job Interview Hell.

Getting a doctorate in English now takes an average of nine years. Nine years! When these students started graduate school, no one had heard of Amazon.com, Monica Lewinsky, or hanging chads. This December, the trip to Philadelphia was yet another stop on the long path to that dream faculty job -- the tenure-track position. Half will fail.

But first they all had to endure the academic meat market in the Pennsylvania Convention Center.

Everyone at the conference entered the main hall, once the 13-track train shed of the Reading Railroad, with its grand, 509-foot iron roof arching overhead. The lower level hummed with the jovial bustle of scholars heading to sessions and exhibits. But some of them -- the ones wearing their professional best -- rode the escalators up to the ballroom to enter another world.

There 148 tables were lined up in rows. About 16 inches wide and 4 feet long, the tables were really tiny stages. Job candidates sat down for their 30-minute performances while scores of other auditions went on around them. Officially named the "interview area," the ballroom was better known as "the pit." A few graduate students called it simply "the scary place."

"I never thought a roomful of academics could be so terrifying," said Anjeana K. Hans as she sat on the edge of the ballroom.

A Ph.D. student in German at Harvard University, she had just one interview that week. (Discipline matters: The job market in German and Italian is supertight. Positions in Spanish are plentiful. Likewise, students in composition and rhetoric face far better chances than those in literature.) Ms. Hans smoothed out her skirt repeatedly to wipe the sweat from her palms.

"The question is always, Do I shake hands with my sweaty palms or not?" she said. "And if I do, will they realize they're sweaty? And then all that worrying makes them sweatier."

A few minutes later, the professors at the Kansas State University table stood up and waved her over. She did shake hands; no one visibly recoiled.

That's the scene every year. Different ballroom, same long odds.

About 50 percent of the graduating Ph.D.'s each year get the full-time tenure-track jobs they are looking for, according to the association. And despite a news release that tries to put a good spin on the job situation, this year will probably be no different.

Enrollments have increased in the past generation, but growth in full-time faculty jobs has not kept pace. Those additional classes are taught by part-timers.

While that is an oft-told tale inside higher education, few outside are aware of the problem, said Rosemary Feal, the MLA's executive director. "Parents look at class size, at the dorms, at a million things," she says. "Very rarely do they ask whether the teaching will be done by full-time professors."

As hundreds of candidates interviewed for full-time jobs, a session at the Philadelphia Marriott, next door, focused on the limbo in which the unsuccessful might be stuck: part-time teaching. About 75 percent of the 100 sections of freshman composition on the University of Houston's downtown campus are taught by adjuncts, said Sandra L. Dahlberg, a professor there. Some in the audience gasped when another member of the panel revealed that adjuncts in her program earned less than $1,700 per course.

Not all of the job interviews were in the pit. But the alternative, an interview in a hotel suite, may not be any easier. Candidates tell of interviewers' lounging on a bed while asking questions. Upon entering a posh suite at the Ritz-Carlton, one candidate was greeted with "You should see the toilet."

Ryan Poynter, who is earning a Ph.D. in French from Yale University, had interviews both in hotel rooms and in the pit during the conference. As his 9:30 a.m. appointment neared, he sat on one of the 20 chairs lined up just outside the ballroom, looking anxious. But that was much better, he said, than waiting outside a hotel room by himself. "Seeing everybody else out there makes you more at ease," he said.

Nearby, Wendell P. Smith ascended the escalator looking for a quiet place to relax before presenting his paper at a panel on "Visions of the East in Medieval Iberia."

Not until he peeked into the ballroom and saw the rows of tables did he realize where he was. He had been there before. If he couldn't get his visiting gig at Dickinson College upgraded to a permanent job, he would be there again. But this year he was glad to stay out of the pit. "It's kind of like the doctor's office, getting poked and prodded," he said. "You feel like cattle."

Still, he noted one advantage of having a life-altering meeting in a cavernous ballroom. "It's like breaking up with a date at a restaurant," he said. "There are just so many people around that you know they can't yell and scream at you."