Perhaps the recent “Doomsday” coverage in The Chronicle about the humanities job market will be enough to crush the hopes of new Ph.D.'s in English or history. But if hope might be futile for aspiring teacher-scholars, hopelessness almost certainly is.
So I want to share my recently concluded odyssey on the academic job market—not to persuade an undergraduate to go to graduate school or to give distraught applicants hope without foundation. But I do want to help reclaim an aspect of the process that is sometimes lost in lamentation: its entertainment value.
After 16 first-round interviews and 10 campus visits over four years, last month I finally received an offer to be an assistant professor in Florida, the state where I received my Ph.D. and where I most hoped to work. Allow me to recapture some of the hilarity of the search process now that it’s behind me.
There were moments of humiliation. For example, at a prominent state institution in Tennessee, I decided to spray two shots of my new cologne—given to me as a gift—on my wrist before the committee chair took me to a coffee shop. When we returned to the car to drive to the campus, we both silently agreed to drive with the windows down to avoid the smothering smell. It was about 22 degrees outside.
At a private college back in the Volunteer State, I was asked by a receptionist during an interlude if I was single (more on that question in a moment). I nervously said I was, but she assured me, in complete seriousness, that she would have no problem helping me marry one of the nice young female undergraduates. Maybe she thought I was a prospective student myself. I decided to feel flattered.
There were also moments of providence. For instance, after studying for, and taking, the Law School Admission Test one summer, I was within hours of spending $600 on 10 law-school applications with the click of a button. But before going home to commit that act of resignation, I absent-mindedly checked my campus mailbox, which contained a letter explaining that my book had been accepted for publication by a university press.
That notice saved me hundreds of dollars in the short term. In the long term, it probably cost me millions. But it kept my peculiar dream to be a faculty member alive.
I have also had my version of Jack Nicholson’s “You can’t handle the truth!” moment on several campuses, when I sensed I was not going to get a job and began answering questions with vindictive honesty. After being reminded repeatedly that a high majority of students in the South were Baptists (my book is on a different religious group in Europe), I shot back, “My work is not evangelical!”
And I once showed open disdain to a dean who asked me how I was going to “teach to the middle” by asking if the institution worked under the legal auspices of No Child Left Behind.
The interviewers have had their breaking points, too. In the waning hours of one two-day interview, my primary host sat in his office, peered through the window at an emptying parking lot, and murmured, “We really need a black man in the department.” I thought of many caustic responses I could make, about ways I might remedy my Caucasian background, but wisely decided that silence was safest.
While such moments seem wildly unprofessional, they occur because many faculty-job interviews are much longer and more repetitive than they need to be. One learns to be forgiving and hopes mercy is mutually extended. Resilience is an underestimated aspect of the process.
I began to expect to be asked, “Do you have any questions for us?” at least eight times during any on-campus visit. Early in the visit, I would ask the most pressing questions to which I really wanted an answer, and then I would default by repeating those questions and sitting through the monotonous answers. The tediousness can create an internal tension that sometimes leads to outbursts.
One also learns to decode questions. I will list a few questions I have received in various forms at nearly every institution, with the implicit question in parenthesis:
- Will you be coming here alone? (Are you single?)
- Would you like to see information on the local elementary schools? (Do you have children?)
- Will you be purchasing a home the first year you are here? (Are you married with children?)
- And my favorites that, for reasons of subtlety, need no further explanation: Are you married? Do you have any children?
It is supposedly illegal to ask such questions, but you are going to be asked them and you might as well be ready. I came to accept that the reason I was asked those questions had nothing to do with concerns about inappropriate student-teacher relationships, and everything to do with fear that a candidate would be using the job as a steppingstone to a better one. It is much easier to seek greener pastures when you have no spouse who must also find work or children who must transfer schools. I half expected any job offer to come with a free local subscription to Match.com.
All of those experiences involve issues that candidates conceivably might anticipate. However, the most valuable moments in job interviews occur at junctures that have little bearing on the candidate’s hiring but must be enjoyed for their mixture of the sublime and bizarre.
For instance, in the last four years, I have:
- Discussed the playoff prospects of the Miami Heat with a 7-year-old boy.
- Been led by interviewers to a rare book shop in northern Georgia where I was vehemently pressured to purchase an early edition of Fielding’s Tom Jones.
- Been asked to remark on the quality of the clay tennis courts at a country club.
- Toured the upper rooms of a cloister where “no man had walked before.”
- Dozed on the couch in an interviewer’s office in rural Kansas while he celebrated the retirement of a colleague in a different campus building.
- Been driven through the Appalachian Mountains in a snowstorm at 4:30 in the morning.
- Delivered a lecture in a Boston dining room that reeked of meatloaf.
- Listened to a man at an interviewer’s birthday party deliver a long lecture to me on the merits of a homeless life.
- Sat in reverent silence in a Honda in front of the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr. was shot.
I look on those experiences fondly not only because the conclusion of my story is that I received an assistant professor’s position that will keep me in this career for a while. I was also fortunate enough to return from my interviews to my home base, where I had professional and supportive faculty members, engaged and talented students, and stimulating intellectual communities.
With each rejection that arrived through e-mail, letter, or just plain silence, my disappointment was mitigated by my appreciation for the temporary jobs I held at the time. I value the 10 years I have spent as a graduate student and as a non-tenure-track faculty member. And I like to tell myself that I would feel the same way, even if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to get a job I desired.
Homelessness might have its merits, and so might law school, but there are worse ways to spend a decade than discussing novels, poetry, and history with other intelligent and sensitive people.
Now I just need to call that secretary to see if her matchmaking skills are still available. I have some really striking cologne.
