At some point during my job search this past year, it occurred to me that sending out yet another dossier for yet another job I wouldn’t get amounted to sending a message in a bottle.
Many recent Ph.D.'s in my age group grew up listening to The Police and their song “Message in a Bottle,” which recounts the story of a castaway who yearns to be rescued before he falls “into despair.” For many of us, that desperately needed rescue didn’t come last year and might not come this year or next year, we’re told, if the academic crunch continues.
Our postgraduate expectations have been scaled back from tenure-track positions to visiting positions to, frankly, anything we can get. While employed as a part-time lecturer last year, somehow making less money than I did as a graduate-student research assistant, I was told by well-meaning colleagues that I was lucky to be employed in academe at all, given the current state of affairs. The recommended attitude to adopt seems to be, better to be underemployed than unemployed.
It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but the truth is that if we don’t try really, really hard for a job, any job, then we won’t get one at all. So we send out dossier after dossier, and feel as if we’re sending out an SOS to the academic world. The messages we send out do get read and responded to; it’s just that the responses are almost always not what we were hoping for.
I don’t save the rejection letters; I see no reason to do so. But some of them are hard to forget.
- There was the letter from a small college in the Northeast looking for a one-year visiting assistant professor. It thanked me for my interest in the position, said that one of the other 350 applicants had been chosen, and wished me the best of luck in my job search.
- A large university informed me that another of the 750 applicants was the lucky winner of a temporary position as a writing tutor. The letter assured me that I had been one of the finalists, which was kind of flattering so long as I didn’t focus on the fact that that probably meant I was one of at least 100 or so favored applicants.
- And there was the application for a tenure-track position that I had spent several days writing after much study of the university, the department, its current research, and its undeniable overlap with my own work. I got the rejection letter just the same as hundreds of other applicants. So much for my carefully crafted SOS.
We have lessons of patience forced upon us when we’re on the job market, much like the castaway in the song, who for a long time receives no reply. It’s customary to have to wait several weeks, sometimes months, to get the rejection letter from that college or university we really believed could be “the one.” Perhaps even more disappointing, however, is waiting several months only to receive a form letter saying the position you’d applied for has been canceled as a result of budget cutbacks—a fairly common occurrence during the past two years in academe.
That lonely castaway laments that “only hope can keep me together.” That is surely how many of us on the academic job market feel. There is hope that things will improve over the next couple of years; there is hope that professors old enough to retire will do so, and that their tenure-track positions will be filled; there is hope against all hope that our applications will sparkle more brightly than the hundreds of others stacked in the department office awaiting efficient elimination.
Of course, academe is not the only choice for Ph.D.'s. Many people lately are talking up the alternative options, such as high-school teaching, online education, and other industries entirely. But for those of us committed to an academic career, no matter the challenges, hope and perseverance are essential.
Perhaps the only glimmer of hope offered by the song comes in the last verse, which recounts the castaway’s discovery one morning, upon waking and finding “a hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore.” That discovery affords him the comforting realization that “I’m not alone at being alone”; he’s just one of the “hundred billion castaways, looking for a home.”
If those of us on the academic market cannot be assured that someone will find our message and secure our rescue, we can at least take comfort in the fact that we’re not alone. Here’s to hoping that this year, more of us will find an academic home after the long search from that lonely island.
