I spent much of a recent Monday afternoon editing the application materials of a very dear friend who is on the academic job market this year. I was happy to help, but as I pored over his documents — rewriting sentences and highlighting passages that required his attention — I was dogged by the question, “Why aren’t his advisers doing this?”
While editing his cover letter, I ran across a peculiarity so striking that I was moved to ask, “Who told you to do this?” He revealed that he was following the advice of a well-known — and pricey — academic-job consultant he had hired. That did it. No longer could tact suppress that dogging question. When I inquired about his advisers’ role in his job search, it became clear that they had left him to fend for himself — not that they were unwilling to help (well, one was) but that they had long ceased to be proactive in guiding him through the labyrinth that we euphemistically refer to as the “job season.”
My friend finished his Ph.D. a few years ago at a prestigious research university, in one of its crown-jewel programs. His dissertation committee comprises well-connected, tenured academics. How, I wondered, could such established professors justify abandoning their student who had been doing everything right — publishing in esteemed journals, securing competitive fellowships, continuing to make admirable progress on not one but two path-breaking book projects? Where the hell were they on this Monday afternoon? I had to curb the urge to send each of them an excoriating email for what they had done to — and failed to do for — someone I love.
Listening to the stories of academics on Twitter — some now securely employed, others not — showed me that my friend’s predicament was all too common. I joined that site only two years ago and therefore had been operating, during the half-dozen years since I left grad school, under the assumption that everyone in a doctoral program had the level, if not the quality, of mentorship that I had enjoyed at the University of Pennsylvania.
In other words, while I knew that some academics were better at advising than others — just as some are more skilled at research or teaching than others — I assumed that all had the same sense of what they were supposed to do for their students on the job market.
My dissertation committee had four members: from Penn, Nancy Bentley, Wendy Steiner, and the late, great Amy Kaplan; and, from Indiana University at Bloomington, Jennifer Fleissner (I name them by way of thanks). All four read absolutely every document that I was forced to draft for my job applications and commented with care, grace, and subtlety. They coached me through each of the five years I spent in search of a tenure-track job.
I’m constitutionally uncomfortable asking people for things, but, through their mentorship, I felt delightfully compelled to keep them involved in the process. Once, when I fretted about putting Nancy through yet another search, she replied matter-of-factly: “We’re in this together. I’m not ready to quit until you are.” She even made sure that I was reimbursed for interview costs well after I had graduated. And when — in what I had decided would be my final year on the tenure-track market — I ran two sets of searches (one academic, one not), all four of my advisers took reference calls from nonacademic employers. All four were unequivocally supportive of my decision not to devote my life to the pursuit of the academic white whale (which, happily, I caught that same year, with only minimal dismemberment).
I work at a college rather than a research university, and while I’m expected to publish significantly, my duties do not include training and advising graduate students. So, for a while, they were not on my radar. However, after realizing that many advisers are not tending to their students at anywhere near the level at which mine tended to me, I’ve been reflecting more and more on the implications of their neglect as they navigate a treacherous market. Beyond just getting angry — and I am angry — I have come to understand this as a problem for all of us. Simply put, there is no future for the profession if doctoral students do not succeed on the academic job market.
Certainly, the lack of full-time faculty openings is a greater problem than inadequate advising. But crisis warrants more care, not less. The withering of job offerings at colleges and universities makes it all the more important for advisers to be hands-on in their students’ searches. At the very least, faculty members owe their students the mentoring necessary to ensure that they have their best shots at the positions that do exist.
I wish all the career consultants well, but no doctoral student should have to pay for their services. Because those services are supposed to be part and parcel of what we all paid for in graduate school. Plenty of new Ph.D.s, not having experienced good mentoring themselves, may not understand their advising obligations to their own students. And if the horror stories I’ve been hearing are true, some seasoned academics may have similar advising blind spots.
For those reasons, academe needs a bill of rights for graduate students who elect to pursue research and teaching jobs in higher education. To spark that discussion, here is my list of things that every current and future graduate-student adviser should be expected to do:
- Meet early on with graduate students both to learn their career goals (the type of job and institution they prefer) and to discuss how to help position them to attain those goals.
- Read and comment on every document required for your students’ job applications.
- Ask for lists of all jobs they are planning to apply for (including links to the job ads) and encourage them to send you updated lists as they apply for additional openings.
- Contact any friendly acquaintances at institutions on those lists and talk up your students.
- Arrange mock job interviews and job talks for your students.
- Meet with students about any upcoming interviews and campus visits.
- Advise on negotiation strategies for any offers that come. Should no offers materialize, help students formulate plans to support themselves over the next year, whether by academic options or otherwise.
- Repeat steps 1 through 7 for as long as your students remain motivated about faculty job searches.
Although, as I have mentioned, I don’t work at a research university, this issue concerns me because I regard the cultivation of graduate students as a village-wide affair. No, those of us at institutions without graduate students have no formal obligation to help them through the job market, but I do think we’d be a stronger profession with all hands on deck. I have been moved by the many faculty members at undergraduate institutions who have volunteered enthusiastically to read materials for, and offer advice to, job seekers free of charge, and I hope to see more do the same.
It’s a hard time to be a graduate student. Just think what a difference it would make to this struggling generation of emerging scholars if their advisers would advise.
