On April 26, The New York Times published Mark C. Taylor’s instantly infamous essay, “End the University as We Know It.” Taylor argued that we need to rethink, restructure, and regulate university education for the 21st century. In the meantime, however, as Taylor observed, the outlook remains grim: “Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist).”
I’m one of those candidates. On May 1, I received a letter from a university in Oklahoma regarding one of the few tenure-track jobs that still exists. It was the first I had heard from the search committee in six months, since a brief acknowledgment of my application. The chair wanted me to know that the search had been successful—not for me, but for the department. It had hired an exceptional candidate for an American-literature position, someone with two Ph.D.'s, no less, one in English and one in history. The committee was grateful for my interest.
So the solution to market saturation is not for departments to produce fewer Ph.D.'s but for candidates to earn multiple doctorates? Maybe, but as someone who occupies a contingent position—a good one, admittedly, but one with no hope of renewal—I saw the rejection letter as the perfect, end-of-the-week, microscopic-level complement to Taylor’s ominous, Sunday-morning macroscopic vision.
I write this essay not because I am more deserving than other rejected candidates. (And I’m also no more likely than they are to dust off my GRE study guide and earn a second Ph.D.) No, this essay is meant as a simple proposal to counter Taylor’s extravagant one. While I agree that we need to think about the future of the university and, in particular, the role of the humanities, what I am proposing in the meantime is a stopgap measure to make an unfortunate situation on the job market slightly more humane.
And my proposal is actually doable, right now, before the job openings get posted and thousands of us update our CV’s and cover letters. It would benefit both applicants and search committees, and might help us weather this nearly untenable situation until a better solution appears.
We tend to accept bad behavior in academe, often on the grounds that only social misfits like to spend their lives burrowed in university libraries. I’m simply suggesting some decent manners.
Require a cover letter and a CV only. Restricting the initial application to those two documents would be the simplest way to alleviate some of the pressures and expense imposed on job candidates. I have served on a search committee and observed it in action; departments do not need more than those two documents to make their initial cuts.
A narrower application would not only help applicants, it would also simplify the lives of the committee members by reducing the material they have to read in order to weed out applicants.
Requiring only a letter and a CV used to be standard practice, but the current buyer’s market has fostered a kind of “application creep,” allowing departments to make onerous demands as part of the initial packet. About half of the job ads I responded to last fall requested writing samples and recommendations upfront.
It is no exaggeration to claim that you spend the better part of a day on such applications: crafting the job letter, selecting and revising an appropriate writing sample, assembling a portfolio of teaching materials appropriate to the position, submitting requests for recommendations and transcripts. Applicants are thrilled to commit that kind of time if the committee is genuinely interested in hiring them. But that genuine interest only emerges later in the process.
Every day that applicants spend obsessing over a front-loaded application request is a day they are not reviewing drafts of student papers, preparing for class, revising an article that might bolster their CV, or spending time with their families.
Clarify dossier requests. Search committees use the term “dossier” as if it signified an agreed-upon entity when, in fact, each committee seems to have something unique in mind. The key is clarity: Committees will get what they want if they say what they want. I propose a clarification of two typical dossier components:
n The writing sample. A request should come in three varieties: the conference paper (10 pages); the article (25 to 35 pages); and the chapter (35 to 50 pages). Departments should request the kind of writing sample they would expect the candidate to produce as an active scholar in his or her field.
n Teaching materials. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been asked to submit “examples of teaching excellence.” That’s inviting a flood of material that will probably prove unenlightening. Once the initial herd is culled, committees should ask the viable candidates to submit the types of teaching materials that junior faculty members would be expected to produce for evaluation.
Notify candidates at each stage of review. The final point of this modest proposal hinges on two fundamental principles: openness and timely communication. Applicants want to know their status as soon as possible. In my field, that is especially crucial for those applicants who are not invited to interview at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. Unfortunately, graduate students and contingent faculty members cannot afford to go to the MLA for the sole purpose of professionalization. Conservatively speaking, if you travel by plane, spend two or three nights in a hotel in a major city, pay the conference registration fee, and require food to survive, you can expect to spend about $1,000. That’s an investment if you make $40,000 a year; it’s courting indigence if you make less.
Yet applicants must register for the MLA convention, book flights, and reserve hotel rooms simply on the off chance that they might receive a last-minute interview invitation.
Perhaps this is simply another consequence of the buyer’s market, but the lack of communication borders on shameful when you consider the resources that candidates expend on each application. Recently, I spoke with a colleague in religious studies who has yet to receive word from three departments she applied to last fall. While I wouldn’t be so brazen as to call that the norm, such total lack of regard is familiar.
It needs to end, and it would be so simple to remedy. I served on a search committee this past fall. In early December, after we had narrowed the field of candidates, every applicant not on the list of finalists received a letter notifying them that they were no longer under consideration. Every year, other searches follow similar protocol; there’s no reason every committee cannot be equally forthcoming in its communication practices at every stage of the process.
It makes sense for the committee to play its cards close to the chest, but that does not excuse keeping everyone on the line. A simple e-mail message would suffice: “At the moment, we cannot offer you a campus interview, but we would like to keep you on a short list of reserve candidates for the position.”
What shouldn’t happen is what so many candidates experience after the initial interview. I have sent follow-up e-mails to committee members only to have those messages ignored. As of July, a friend has yet to hear a single word from the departments she interviewed with at the MLA conference in December. Committees have typically left me wondering about my status well into April. One post-MLA letter, dated several months after the initial interview, began with this line: “I regretfully write to inform you of what must be painfully obvious by now.”
Though reviewing applications can be harrowing work, that does not excuse the kind of rampant disregard that candidates report every year. We can do something to raise the level of professionalism in what is necessarily an impersonal process.
Indeed, I am not arguing against the impersonal nature of the market. If you’re receiving 50 rejection letters a year, it’s nice to know that all of those committees do not personally find you unfit for the profession. But imposing expensive and time-consuming demands as part of the initial application, keeping candidates in the dark, or not responding to them exceeds the boundaries of merely being impersonal.
Those of us seeking tenure-track jobs are coming to terms with our diminished prospects. In the meantime, the least departments could do is make a grueling situation slightly more humane. It’s called the humanities after all.
