I have experienced academic life at seven institutions on three continents, as a student, a faculty member, and an administrator. If I’ve learned anything from my international experiences, it is how little we academics know about one another, even in the English-speaking world.
We read one another’s work and meet at conferences, but there is often a much greater gulf between our systems of higher education and our expectations than we assume. As a British friend asked me in surprise recently, “In America, a bachelor’s degree takes four years?”
Insularism seems to be expected, or even encouraged in some spheres. Surely academics, with our levels of education, curiosity, and research abilities, couldn’t help but pick up something about our colleagues abroad? But the ignorance seems in some cases willful. I once mentioned the annual convention of the American Historical Association to a colleague in London, who said, in a dismissive tone, “Oh, that’s that jamboree they have over there, isn’t it?” She had never attended the meeting, had no idea what took place there, and had little interest in finding out.
There is also the casual dismissal of entire regions. A professor from another institution was serving on a search committee when he commented to me: “We had applicants with Australian Ph.D.'s. I mean, are there any good historians in Australia?” I am still stunned by such America-centric or Eurocentric comments, no matter how frequently I hear them.
The sciences seem to have done a better job of internationalizing than many sections of the humanities. It is among humanists that I’m more likely to encounter scholars who are teaching at the same institution where they completed their degrees. They have no experience of academic life anywhere else and are in no position to offer good advice to students applying for jobs more broadly.
Cultural pressures in many places have maintained academic insularity. In much of continental Europe, the structure of higher education requires a second Ph.D. (or habilitation) to begin applying for assistant-professor jobs. Candidates hit the job market only in their mid-to-late 30s, and that “prolonged adolescence” understandably has its own attrition rate. A high number of people working in academic administration in Europe have Ph.D.'s but would not be considered qualified for faculty jobs, because they lack the second qualification.
That requirement (added to language barriers) is a major obstacle for outsiders who want to be considered for teaching jobs in Europe. Although the habilitation has been abandoned recently in Spain, and officially this “second Ph.D.” is not needed to apply for a job in Germany or Austria, in practice it tends to be. Some employers state they will accept a second book instead of the extra degree, but few applicants from outside Europe who have two books will be interested in applying for an entry-level assistant professorship.
Perhaps because the Carnegie classifications created compatible categories of universities and colleges across the United States (and facilitated student transfers between institutions), American academics don’t realize how programs and institutions are far from streamlined elsewhere, even within a single country. Americans sometimes make the parochial assumption that other people know the Carnegie system. They don’t. I have seen European colleagues look blankly at American applicants’ references to things like GPA and “graduate credits.”
The European Union’s Bologna Process has recently introduced three-year bachelor’s degrees across the continent (to match Britain’s). In the past, there were no bachelor’s degrees; the first degree you could earn was a five-year master’s. The change has led to student strikes and riots in several countries. The system is supposed to streamline the transfer of students within the EU, but generally between their first and subsequent degrees, not during.
The level of dependence on the state is another difference: In much of the world, universities are all public institutions. Students are accustomed to paying trivially low fees (even at elite institutions like the Sorbonne) and receiving a government stipend while they study. That helps explain the extended time to degree in some countries and the difference in student attitudes in Europe compared with the United States.
Depending on how large their stipends are, students attend the nearest university to their homes and commute, or they move out of their parents’ houses into shared apartments and live on the student dole. But the idea that going to a university should cost a student (or a student’s family) a significant amount of money faces entrenched resistance in Europe.
Conversely, in much of continental Europe, being a Ph.D. student is considered a “job,” in a way that it is not in the English-speaking world.
In the current economy, more people are looking to apply internationally for academic jobs. The era in which people could look for jobs only in the United States and still call their search “geographically unrestricted” has passed. Any faculty members who are advising graduate students and don’t know about universities outside their own region are doing those students a serious disservice.
So what steps should you take if you are seeking employment in a country outside your own?
If you have no previous experience in a country to which you are applying, you face many potential pitfalls. Do not assume anyone in the hiring department is familiar with the type of degree you have or the institutions in which you have taught. Explain.
And don’t assume that the university you are applying to teaches in the same way as the ones you have studied or worked at before. For instance, some American applicants stumble when they talk about their ability to teach “survey” courses: Such courses exist in Australia and some Asian universities, but are not a big thing in Europe. Applicants also falter when they use numeric codes to describe courses (“I’ve taught 200-level courses”) as if those numbers mean the same thing worldwide.
Be ready to learn—fast—about what the standards are in your newly adopted country. That may include things that would have lawyers swooning in Australia, Britain, or the United States. I have had to complete forms asking for both my parents’ names and religions, I’ve been asked about my marital status, I’ve had to provide a photo with some applications and to list my age.
To universities in many parts of the world, the North American approach to an academic search—a months-long process punctuated by conference interviews, phone interviews, and 48-hour campus visits—seems long-winded and bizarre. Nor am I convinced that such a baroque system yields better results than searches that take six weeks from advertisement to appointment, culminating in the interview of all finalists on the same day and an offer the next morning.
It cuts both ways. North American search committees often ask applicants for their transcripts and student evaluations of their teaching: two things that don’t exist in a lot of the world, including some English-speaking countries.
If institutions want to be open to the best talent in the world, they need to demonstrate some flexibility in what they will consider—and that includes making sure that HR doesn’t simply reject an application from France or New Zealand because the applicant didn’t send American-style documentation. Online application forms that only have space for a North American phone number or a five-digit zip code are an example of the knee-jerk insularity.
Even some articles giving advice about how to deal with “foreign” job applications give in to the attitude that regards American hiring practices as normative. Nobody wants to feel condescended to, and the geographic subordination is often part of the same thought process.
Academics need to change in two ways: to recognize, first, that international applicants to U.S. institutions are not necessarily inferior, and second, that taking a job overseas is not a sign of mediocrity for an American Ph.D. I’ve seen many scholars from Western countries who have cursed the day they accepted a job in Asia, not realizing that it would limit their chances of ever returning to their home country because of the common assumption on search committees that “anyone who was any good” wouldn’t have been working outside Europe or North America in the first place.
Having an international career has brought me many opportunities for advancement that I would not have seen had I stayed in one place. As more universities everywhere attempt to recruit students worldwide, an understanding of different educational systems becomes an asset for any faculty members or administrators who seek to broaden their own possibilities.