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Will We Make the Grade?

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By Laura Kellerman

Waiting for your prospects to reveal themselves is a strange experience, alternately unnerving, exhilarating, and exhausting. Waiting as a pair only heightens the emotions.

My husband, Ben, and I are among the many academic couples going on the job market this year for the first time. We are both in the department of English literature at a prominent Midwestern university: I am finishing a dissertation on English Renaissance literature; he, on 20th-century American novels and literary theory.

We met at the beginning of graduate school and married a year ago. We have liked being graduate students, and (on most days) we love the work that we do. But lately, we've spent a lot of time worrying and fantasizing about how the next year will unfold. Much of the rest of the time we spend hunched over our respective computers -- not exactly the popular image of newlywed life, but one that, I guess you could say, we signed up for.

Now that job listings for tenure-track positions in English literature have begun to appear among our other, more-innocuous e-mails, the future will start to assume definite proportions, to limit itself in the process of making itself known: Will a big Midwestern research institution be advertising for an assistant professor of early modern drama? How many liberal-arts colleges on the East Coast will want an Americanist? Even more pressing, will there be colleges in the same city with openings for both of us? Might we hit the jackpot and find two lines in the same department?

This leads to a set of difficult, touchy questions. We have told ourselves that if two jobs don't turn up in the same area, we will go where the best one is. But we both suspect, especially late at night, that it might not be so easy to determine what qualifies as the best job. Will it be location, money, tenure-track status, teaching load, prestige, or more likely, some alchemy of all these factors? How closely will our priorities match? Who will be willing to give up what, and for how long? Will we sacrifice spending the next year (or more) together, and how would that decision affect our marriage? What about kids -- that is, when in the world will we find time to have them?

Some of our professors tell us that we may need to be "flexible" for a few years until one or both of us can negotiate a place for the other person. Sometimes I wonder, futilely -- and I admit it, self-pityingly -- if maybe the profession itself could be a little more "flexible."

Such musings are especially futile in the humanities, and have been for the last 30 years. A stagnant economy and record-breaking state deficits don't improve the current picture. Based on the anecdotal evidence of last year's job seekers from our department, we each stand, at best, a 20 percent chance of landing a tenure-track job in our first year on the market.

We've heard that the market may start to turn around this year, that the long-promised flood of retirements might open up positions, that it can't get any worse. Ben and I belong to Generation X, however, the same generation that avidly consumes I Love the 80s on VH-1 and witnessed the rise and fall of the dot-coms. In other words, we have heard it all before.

Don't get me wrong. Ben and I are not crying in our beer over the sad state of our job prospects, though we are drinking plenty. Hours can drift by as we weigh the relative merits of big universities and small ones, gritty urban campuses and bucolic (or desolate) rural ones.

Recently we wiled away a pleasant half hour (during official dissertation writing time) with the World Almanac, counting the number of universities and colleges in different cities. We discovered, for instance, that Grand Rapids, Mich., has 15 institutions nearby, while Detroit has only five. Amazing! And the other night we invented a game: "Where would you rather go?", as in: Florida or Georgia? Kentucky or New Mexico? Oregon or California?

The coping function of such games is easy to recognize: They give us practice for the hard, not to mention limited, choices that lie ahead, while allowing us to dwell in the realm of the possible for a few days longer -- a space where we can still think about picking Pennsylvania over Maine, Montana over Arkansas.

Lurking behind all these dreamy, anxious speculations is an urgent, if undesirable, question: Will we make the grade? Are Ben and I the material of which graduate seminars, research leaves, and endowed chairs are (someday) made, or are we cut from more modest cloth?

I find it hard to commit this question to print, with its loaded implications that one kind of faculty position is inherently better than another, or that there's one set of criteria by which to judge success in this profession. Worse, the question smacks of naiveté, betraying the fact that we haven't yet experienced the complexities of the job market or the nuances of a faculty position.

We both know that our futures as academics will most likely be mutable, contingent, and varied. But I would also argue that the academic job market structures itself in a way that encourages us to feel like adolescents again, waiting for the rest of our lives to begin. When I started graduate school, "older" students told me of its infantilizing effect; but this moment before the job search is not so much infantilizing as sophomoric: We are the cynics who know everything and nothing at all.