Friends who work outside of academe think I’m telling a self-effacing joke when I say that I only ask two things of potential employers -- that their campus not be located in one of the Dakotas and that their paychecks rarely bounce.
When architects, physicians, and electrical engineers tell me that I should be able to write my own ticket with a doctorate from the University of Virginia, I know that they are only trying to be supportive. I try hard not to play the victim too overtly when I tell them about how everyone else who applied for the jobs I did has a degree from an esteemed institution, how they also have advisers who write and speak enthusiastically about their qualifications, and how they also outnumber me 100 to one.
It’s cute that those friends think the academic job search is anything at all like other job searches, in which you have a reasonable hope of living in a region you find desirable and getting work commensurate with your qualifications. They don’t realize how someone intelligent, competent, and disciplined enough to earn a Ph.D. can be utterly desperate, forced to apply for every job advertised and to take anything offered.
Staring down the possibility of spending another year making sushi or parking cars, I found it incongruous that the one college that invited me for an on-campus interview this winter did its best to make me feel wanted. It certainly didn’t have to. I was the one with something to prove.
After I arrived at the college, the department head escorted me to the house where I would be staying. It was the president’s house, vacant because the current president lives in a dorm with his students. I felt like I was being allowed an intimate look at the college and the town when I walked into the kitchen, leaky faucet and all. The Eisenhower-era yellow Formica countertops gave me hope that there would be a lot of cool, retro kitchens in apartments near the campus.
Despite that hospitality, however, I was on my guard for hidden tests of my suitability for the job. I supposed that even the contents of the refrigerator -- three bottles of Molson, one Heineken, and three O’Doul’s -- were meant to assess my “fit” with the blue-collar nature of the town and college. (I drank the Molsons, not wanting to seem like either an elitist or a teetotaler, in case anyone was checking up on me.)
The more formal parts of the interview the next day seemed alternately like a receiving line and a gantlet. After meeting with the dean and then the president, with whom I spoke casually about teaching style and the mission of the college, I taught a class on the development of Christian theology through the fifth century. I tore through the lecture at a very fast pace, realizing that I had overprepared by about 50 percent and hoping that the students’ (and faculty’s) stone-faced impassivity was not a sign of boredom or incomprehension.
Afterward, the department head invited young, vibrant recent hires in other departments to have lunch with me. I surmised that this was a plot to convince me that I would have friends my age there. It worked. I liked all the people I met, and I was able to imagine many more conversations with them, intellectual and otherwise.
But someone could have handed me a coupon for two Big Bites and a Slurpee and sent me off to 7-Eleven on my own, and I would have found the job no less appealing.
When there’s only one name on your dance card, you’re a pretty cheap date.
I boasted after the campus tour that the search committee would have to try a lot harder if they were aiming to tire me out and see how I held up under pressure, and they delivered in a 90-minute session in which the department’s entire faculty grilled me on my views of teaching and research, and my career goals.
The final stage of the interview was dinner at a seafood restaurant. Colleagues had warned me that I would be on trial even at meals, unable to eat anything because I would either be answering a question or listening intently to long-winded senior professors’ declamations about the college or the field, never breaking eye contact long enough to see if anything was on my fork.
But it became clear that the dinner was meant to be a social occasion more than it was another chance for me to be sized up. I relaxed, tried to seem collegial despite being exhausted, and enjoyed it.
The next morning, I drove the five hours back down the interstate -- dodging 18-wheelers and, only four months removed from a reckless driving ticket, keeping a close eye on my speed -- thinking that I did as well as I could have, and that I would get the job.
Even so, the offer came as a surprise. I was still in bed when the phone rang just four days after the interview, and, squinting at the caller I.D., I recognized the area code as that of the college. I didn’t pick up.
I was too afraid. In part, I didn’t want to embarrass myself by talking to a potential employer in a raspy voice at an hour when most decent people were already at work. (I’d made that mistake before, answering a call for a conference interview late in the morning, but after I’d gone to bed at 5 a.m.) The job was offered to me, then, by voice mail.
I spent a week frantically calling friends, family, advisers, and the institutions where I thought (wrongly, it turned out) that I still had a chance of receiving another offer before I accepted the job.
In the weeks that followed, almost everyone I told about the job asked me, “Are you excited?”
I wasn’t sure. An idealist at heart, I always have been more comfortable with possibility than with finality or certitude. Would I be teaching the same classes for the rest of my life? Is the dream of living in a seaside town and driving a golf cart to class now unrealizable? What if Miramax wanted to turn my dissertation into a movie -- would I be able to get out of my contract?
Lately, though, as I have been reading the books I’ve assigned for my classes and shopping for tweed blazers (I dreamed of being a professor for a long time, and now I’m determined to look the part), I realize that I am excited. I’m both relieved that the search is over and satisfied in having reached a huge professional goal. I am also grateful, knowing how much of it all hinges on dumb luck and that many, if not most, people earning Ph.D.'s these days don’t ever get a tenure-track offer.
My anxieties have not entirely left me, but they have been transformed into more tolerable forms: fear that the teaching load will keep me from becoming the darling of academic publishers I assumed I would someday be; uncertainty about which Flannery O’Connor stories best illustrate the relation between grace and free will; worry that rising interest rates will make student-loan repayment more burdensome.
Anxiety’s antidote is confidence, and I am very confident that I’m joining a good department and college. From the moment I met my new colleagues, I liked them. They were warm and funny, and they showed none of the smugness I’ve detected in other search committees whose members in subtle ways suggested that I would always be the low man on the totem pole, as if they had never felt like supplicants themselves.
Even though I might always think in my insecure moments that my new colleagues did me a favor in hiring me, they never once made it seem that way. After years of trying to prove myself to professors, waiting for the pat on the head that suggests, “Good boy; keep it up, and maybe you can be one of us some day,” it was good to be extended a hand of welcome.
Jonathan Malesic, who earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia, will be an assistant professor of theology at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., starting in the fall. He has been chronicling his search for a tenure-track job this academic year.
