First Person

Just Say Yes

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By Mary Werner

I yelled at my partner for wanting to watch a murder mystery instead of listening to me whine about whether the candidate would call tonight. I am not good company. My nerves are shot.

It's already two days beyond the two weeks that the Modern Language Association tells me I have to allow the candidate from the time I made the job offer. Turns out he has already called; left a message on my voice mail at work. He says he wants five more days.

That can only mean one thing. He's waiting for an offer from the university that interviewed him after we did. A research university. A big state university.

Yet his phone message contained a vague implication that he already had the offer in hand from the state university. Does he need five days to ponder it? Can this be good for me?

I can't blame the guy for wanting to be sure. And I can't blame him for considering the other offer. It's what every graduate student is told to want -- a nice, tenure-track job at a major research university. You teach courses in your specialty, graduate students can do big chunks of your research for you (or with you, if you're generous), and the rewards are all measured in semesters off from teaching.

But this guy's a real teacher, as we are at my liberal-arts college. At our place, he won't run into faculty members who think teaching gets in the way of their research. Were we able to get across to him in the campus visit that ours is a place that expects your research to inform your teaching and expects that your teaching can just as easily spark your research?

Sure, we have no graduate students, and I know they can really keep you on your toes. But I also know, from my friends who got what we thought at the time were "better" jobs than mine -- at state universities -- that graduate students keep you up nights and home over spring break reading dissertation chapters that have nothing to do with your own research areas.

I want to tell our guy about a colleague of mine who recently retired. She started at our liberal-arts college at the same salary as a friend of hers who was starting at a major state university. They retired the same year, both from the same jobs they had entered more than 30 years before. My colleague was taking in $20,000 more a year in salary than her friend when they retired.

And we publish. We're very lucky. Private colleges like ours often have much better provision for research leaves than do bigger institutions. They, after all, depend on the whims of state legislatures. We depend on the good will of rich alums. I want to tell him about my grad-school pals, the ones who teach the Ph.D. students. Some of them have no sabbaticals at their institutions. State legislatures often don't understand the need for small course loads and semesters off for research. And even if this session of the state legislature understands, who's to say the next one will?

But I can't keep e-mailing him. I don't want to sound desperate. There are, after all, other A.B.D.'s in the sea. Plenty of them. Why should I sweat over this guy? Just because my department has come to a glorious consensus about this candidate? Just because the cultural-studies advocates and the high-aestheticists miraculously agree? Just because his teaching fits so beautifully into the goals of the department and the new curriculum our faculty has just passed? And because he actually, clearly, unashamedly loves teaching?

Maybe it was a mistake to make him the offer while I was driving him from the campus after his visit. But I wanted him to know how enthusiastic we were about him. His degree is not a traditional one, and I wanted him to know that we wanted him for exactly that reason. But ours was his first campus visit -- maybe I should have waited to make the offer, let him discover that he wanted us first, before I let him know that we wanted him.

It's too late to be coy, I know. But I must refrain from calling him to point out the many reasons why he should just say yes, dammit.

Five more days, he says. But we could also have more days of negotiations if he has two offers, as he tries to sort out his apples from his oranges.

In the meantime, I have developed an immense amount of sympathy for our other candidates, the ones who are sitting at home sweating, like me. Are they waiting for me to call them, knowing that I've probably made an offer to someone else but hoping there might still be a chance? Or have they all taken other offers, while I wait for our Chosen One to make up his mind?

I never was good at waiting. And I'm a lousy gambler. There's no bluff in me. I can't threaten the guy into making up his mind earlier, as I am too worried that he'd say no. All I can do now is sweat, try not to let my short temper alienate the people around me, and wait.