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By Jack Z. Blake

If you see an intriguing job announcement in a creative, professional field this fall and you have related experience, and you're at least working toward a terminal degree, please at least check us out. Talk to us. We're very nice.

OK, we're not in Boston, or the San Francisco Bay area, or Puget Sound, or Raleigh-Durham. The nearest beach is about 300 miles away. The local culture is conservative, with more churches than bookstores. We are south of the Mason-Dixon line, but we have indoor plumbing and a National Public Radio station on the campus.

There is a major metropolitan area only an hour away. The weather is good, housing is affordable, the crime rate is low, and so are taxes. Schools are good, even if there is no Advanced Placement French or Urdu offered in the second grade.

As a native of New Haven, Conn., home of a fairly well known institution of higher education, I faced a bit of adjustment in moving to the semi-rural South. But speaking as "a townie" with degrees from the local state university in New Haven, rather than from the major institution that graduated the last three presidents and the actress Jodie Foster (whom I met once at a party, but I digress), well, let's just say that there are advantages in the hinterlands. Here, I am as good as anybody, including alumni from that other university. I mix freely with people with ivy on their degrees here without any awkwardness on their part or mine.

Oh, yeah, we have one other impediment besides geography and culture: Our teaching load is 12 credit hours a semester (i.e. four courses a term), and we do expect some research and service on top of that.

It might sound daunting, but we have a supportive faculty, staff, and administration. The politics aren't nearly as evil or competitive as in the big paper mills. We make a difference to our students.

All in all, it's not bad.

Still, we have trouble filling tenure-track positions across the university, including in my field, journalism and mass communications.

We're trying to fill a job again in my department. This will be our second search to fill the position since a longtime faculty member and fellow Yankee left two years ago to be nearer to his grandchildren. He was an instructor with considerable professional and academic experience.

Last year's search was instructive. We wanted someone with academic and professional experience but also someone who could do more research than the previous faculty member did; someone to collaborate with me. Our new vice chancellor for academic affairs really wants someone with a terminal degree or at the very least someone working toward it. We were especially looking for minority and international candidates.

We won't discriminate, but let's be honest here, we were not looking for a white male Protestant over 50. We already have that demographic very well represented. Our department consists of three white males in their 50s, an Asian man in his 40s, a white guy in his 40s (me), a white woman and a black woman in their 40s, and a new hire, a white woman in her 30s. Five of us have terminal degrees, four of these are white males and the other is the African-American woman. Everybody with a terminal degree, including myself, is at least an associate professor with tenure.

I think the profile is fairly typical, and we want to change it. But the realities of the job market can be frustrating. Even in a tough economy, it appears to me, especially after reading some of the First Person columns on this site, that many tenurable academics would prefer to read Proust in a Boston Starbucks and work at slave wages as adjuncts at a big-name university than to make a difference in the lives of first-generation college students in a land in which Levi Strauss makes jeans, not critiques of cultural hegemony.

After my colleague left in 2002, we began a yearlong search to fill the slot. Our pool looked pretty strong, with more than 20 candidates. Five or six even had Ph.D.'s in hand. One African-American candidate had a strong research agenda we liked, but little professional experience. Another Ph.D. created simulation board games. While that was not exactly what we were looking for, he at least had the degree and some research. There were three recent retirees who wanted to get back into teaching, presumably to solidify their retirement portfolio. One of these was in Asia, and our budget precluded us from flying him in.

I had contacted a friend of mine who had professional and teaching experience, and the committee thought he was great, but my department head informed me that the university would not consider non-tenurable candidates. My friend had a master's and had no plans of pursuing a Ph.D.

At our first search-committee meeting, the field winnowed itself quickly. Many candidates simply didn't have the credentials. About half the candidates said they had some experience in some tangentially related field and made no effort to make that experience relevant. One memorable applicant complained how much he hated his current industry job and just wanted to get out.

We eliminated more than half of the candidates, and our department head then contacted the rest for preliminary interviews. Some of the remaining candidates refused to even discuss a job that involved a four-course teaching load. The African-American researcher was quickly snapped up by an East Coast institution for nearly twice the salary we were offering. The game maker found a job closer to his field.

One candidate stood head and shoulders above the rest -- a 30ish woman with an M.F.A. and a great deal of professional experience. She was originally from the South. I took the liberty of e-mailing her and informing her she was our top candidate. She seemed to like that. We had a phone interview and we seemed to have a good rapport.

Our department head tried to schedule an on-campus visit, and she said she was looking at other institutions too, and would get back to us. We waited two weeks, and when she did finally return our calls she told us she had followed her artistic muse to a fine-arts program, eschewing her communications background.

We went back to the résumés and came up empty. However, we had another search going on at the same time in a related field, and we had hired a local woman who had both professional and academic experience. She was enrolled in our Ed.D. program and we expect her to complete the degree in two or three years.

In that pool we also found an applicant who had some secondary background in the area we wished to fill. By this time it was late April, and interviews were tough to schedule. He visited in late May, and although I personally missed his visit, my colleagues said he was well-informed and convivial. And he was our only candidate. We offered him the job, and he accepted it.

In July, my department head got a terse e-mail from him saying that he had visited our town with his wife and that they had decided they could not accept our offer because of concerns she would not find a job. He never bothered to discuss her situation with us, and he never told us he would be visiting with her. No one we know talked to them when they came.

I never met the guy, so I am not sure what happened. But one senior professor who met the candidate said he believes the guy's excuse was "absolute B.S." My colleague says he thinks the guy just got cold feet. He was leaving an adjunct position at a major research university with a standard six-credit load. His university is the state's flagship institution with 50,000 students. We have 10,000 students and are a second-tier state university.

We quickly hired two adjuncts, both with master's degrees from our program and professional experience, and they are doing well. But they aren't in Ph.D. programs and are thus not tenurable.

We will try the market again this year.

And as I read the First-Person columns this year about the scarcity of tenure-track jobs and the complaints about the indentured servitude of the adjunct track, I will try to resist the temptation to scream, lest I disturb my academically employed wife and my well-schooled daughter in our nice, large, affordable house three blocks from the nice public library in the semi-rural South, far from academic Mecca.