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Give a Mugwump a Chance

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By Elle Madison

Everyone hates a mugwump.

A distant cousin of the much-maligned flip-flopper, the mugwump was the product of another American political campaign, back in 1884, when some Republicans voted against party lines and became the targets of ridicule. The mugwump is a fence-straddler, with its mug (face) on one side of the fence and its wump (behind) on the other.

Since finishing my Ph.D. and not finding a full-time academic job, I've attempted to straddle the fence between the academic and nonacademic worlds. Becoming that kind of mugwump seems to be an inevitable fate for those of us trained as academics who are, by choice or by default, pursuing nonacademic careers. We do not clearly belong on one side or the other, and we have to manipulate our CV's into résumés in order to market ourselves to employers outside of academe.

My strategy? To apply for jobs in both realms and search for a position that might be the perfect balance between the two. In the process, I've begun to notice the resistance to those of us who have not clearly remained on one career track or the other. And I noticed it most after interviewing for a job that seemed to be the ideal combination of both my academic background and my nonacademic experience.

For the sake of anonymity, I'll just say that the position was at a research institution editing books in a field related to my own. I had experience as an editor, I knew the relevant foreign languages, and I had been engaged in the field while in graduate school. In applying for the job, I was able to combine my academic and nonacademic cover letters, my CV and my résumé; for the first time, I thought I was describing myself completely.

I thought my mugwumpish qualities would be considered a great asset for the job. But I was caught unprepared in the interview when the search-committee members repeatedly asked questions that seemed directed at understanding one thing: What side of the fence was I on?

First, the interviewers seemed stumped by the fact that I am employed as a copy editor. That was the only job I found fresh out of graduate school after deciding to pass on adjunct teaching. I had thought it would be a way for me to pay the bills while I searched for a position more tailored to my educational background.

Instead, the interviewers seemed to see me as a copy editor by trade, one who had little knowledge of content editing or even academic writing. Although I tried to emphasize my strategies in teaching writing to undergraduates and my experience editing colleagues' work, my current position seemed to overshadow any previous experience.

In other words, my stopgap measure to pay the bills had backfired. The search-committee members, Ph.D.'s themselves, saw me -- a recent Ph.D./copy editor -- as a suspicious hybrid, and resolved that confusing dilemma by labeling me as a copy editor. The job description itself appeared to call for a mugwump, one who knew about both academic research and publishing, yet the interviewers viewed the mugwump aspect negatively. I was an unwelcome interloper, a dilettante, a poseur.

The experience brought home the importance of choosing your post-Ph.D. position very carefully -- a warning I had received in graduate school but ignored. At the time, I had understood that it was dangerous to step off the academic track because you might not be able to get back on once you left. But the interview experience led me to believe that the resistance to hiring a mugwump is more nuanced.

You are not welcome back in academe because there is something inherently suspicious about someone who tries to play both sides. The mugwump by definition is understood as a turncoat, a defector, rather than as someone who knows both sides of an issue and can use that knowledge productively.

My interviewers remained loyal to that academic code, even though they were seeking to fill a nonacademic position. In their eyes, my editing experience canceled out my academic background, rather than forming a collective body of work.

Members of the search committee also questioned whether I would actually be interested in the subject matter of the books they published. I discussed the connections with my own closely related field and my familiarity and interest in their books, but I seemed unable to convince them. Frankly I was baffled by the questions. I felt the affinity between my graduate work and the subject matter of their books was obvious. But the interviewers' line of questioning, I later realized, thinly veiled a fundamental concern about whether fences can and should be straddled.

In the end, I'll never know whether distrust of mugwumpery ultimately guided the committee's decision to hire someone else, but I did learn that you have to be prepared to defend your employment path from every possible angle during the interview process -- even when fence-straddling seems to be part of the job description.

Their skepticism on that front was not new to me: My scholarly work straddles academic fields, as well, which is why finding a tenure-track job has been more difficult than usual. Courses and degree programs are increasingly interdisciplinary in the humanities, but search committees are still looking to hire candidates with training in traditional fields, such as a specific language or field of literature.

My course work and dissertation instead explored the connections among different national literatures, critical theories, and fields of study. I had found a home on the fence while in graduate school, but in my job search, I have had to market myself as an expert in one field or another, with mixed results.

Is my mugwumpery also interfering with my academic job search, which I'm conducting simultaneously? I left my copy-editing job off of my CV, with the hope that search committees would be understanding of the plight of recent Ph.D.'s. But was the resulting employment gap on my CV the reason I received no interviews in my first set of academic applications since graduation? Did the hiring committees find out I was a copy editor and hold it against me? Those questions have yet to be answered.

In my opinion, there are great advantages to knowing how the world functions on both sides of the fence. Now that I have learned to think like a copy editor, I will never be the kind of graduate adviser who takes out my frustration about a copy editor's comments on one of my own students' papers (which happened to me as a graduate student). I know the copy-editing rules now; I know when I'm breaking them and why; and I understand why copy editors don't let me get away with that. At the same time, I'm also a better copy editor because I understand academics' investment in their research and writing.

So here's my plea, to both academic search committees and employers in the real world considering hiring Ph.D.'s.: The mugwump's knowledge of both sides of the fence is not dangerous and can enrich classrooms and boardrooms alike.

Give a mugwump a chance. Learn to love the mugwump.