Rise of the Absurdly Demanding Job Ad

Last year, McSweeney’s published an article entitled “Honest Academic Job Postings.” Written by Ryan Weber, the essay takes the form of a list of 13 darkly witty fictional job ads, such as “Biology department solicits applications for the last tenure-track position this university will ever offer”; “The College of Business seeks a new faculty member who can crush high-powered deals and make fat stacks, bro’”; and, my personal favorite, “The Department of History invites applications for an assistant professor who will make enough leftist remarks to annoy conservative talk-radio hosts but whose politics will ultimately support the neoliberal mission of the university.”

Arguably the most absurd, and certainly the longest, of the lot, however, comes from an English department:

“English department seeks a tenure-track assistant professor specializing in Shakespeare, Romanticism, Victorianism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, Southern literature, Appalachian literature, African American literature, Caribbean literature, Irish literature before 1200, Croatian literature after 1853, Joyce, Chaucer, Hemingway, Morrison, Milton’s lesser works, those damn Ayn Rand novels our male sophomores want to read, the nonsexy D.H. Lawrence books, and Soviet-era science fiction after Khrushchev. Candidates are expected to teach a 4/4 load of freshman composition.”

For anyone who studies literature, this fictive job posting will elicit panicked recognition. Those of us who have been on the job market in recent years have confronted ads that don’t look all that different from Weber’s satire. As English departments continue to downsize and outsource, hiring committees are looking for candidates who can cover as much material as possible. When there are so few tenure lines to go around, search committees are in the position of trying to hire someone who can satisfy the disparate wants and needs of not just their departments, but also of the dean’s and provost’s offices. I’ve taken to calling these postings “Frankenstein job ads.”

Weber’s mock job ad evokes the cacophony of administrative voices silently shrieking in the background of all job descriptions in the humanities these days. But it also sheds light on something we tend to talk less about: the difference, often stark, between one’s training as a researcher and the needs of the market. Scholars often find themselves applying for positions in which, as researchers, they would sit somewhat askew. As David Hobbs, a recent Ph.D. from the English department at New York University, told me recently of his job search over the past three years, “I can see all the classes you want this position to teach, but I have no idea how that’s a dissertation.”

Are the sorts of jobs Weber parodies more ubiquitous now than they used to be? The gap between one’s identity as a researcher and one’s work as a teacher has arguably always characterized higher learning, especially at liberal-arts colleges, where departments are typically much smaller than at research institutions and thus require professors to teach a wider range of material. But has this gap widened in the humanities’ current labor crisis? Is the discrepancy between one’s research specialization and the hiring categories announced on the market — between one’s training as a modernist, for example, and the advertisements for positions such as “20^th-century British literature with secondary specializations in performance studies and the critical study of race” more dramatic now than it used to be?

The answer turns out to be more complicated than I had anticipated. What I expected to find when I began doing research on the past 30 years or so of the MLA’s job-information list (JIL) was a gradual tapering off, post-2008, of more specialized jobs, accompanied by the rise of positions demanding a vaster body of expertise. As a scholar of modernism, I was especially curious about the history of the modernism job. It seemed intuitive to me that despite the robust health of modernist studies, modernism jobs would decline drastically as a hiring category after the financial crisis.

My perusal of the history of the job list yielded less dramatic, but no less concerning, discoveries. These Frankenstein job ads, or at least the less absurd versions of them, have been around much longer than I’d thought. I found, for instance, that the modernism job was in fact never especially ubiquitous, at least not over the past 30 years; more often than not, modernism has been listed as a potential subspecialization within the comprehensive rubric of 20^th- and/or 20^th- and 21^st-century British and/or American literature. It’s really not until one reaches back into the 1990s, in fact, that one finds job descriptions asking for more sharply delimited areas of specialization. In October 1990, for instance, the University of California at Davis advertised an opening for an assistant professorship in “19^th-century American literature: After 1850, prose and/or poetry” and Saint Mary’s College of California posted one in “contemporary popular culture and literature.” In October 1995, the University of Kansas advertised two different positions: one “assistant professor in British literature 1660-1800,” the other “assistant professor in Victorian literature.” And so on. Even these more specialized ads, however, existed alongside those geared toward broader expertise, such as “African American literature,” “Postcolonial literature,” “British literature 1800-present” and “American literature pre-1800.”

In other words, for the past 30 years, the discrepancy between hiring categories and research specialization has remained pretty constant; field-specific job ads have largely been the exception rather than the rule. As early as 1997, William Galperin and Susan Wolfson were worrying about the decline of the romanticism job and its subordination to the “dilated” categories of “the long 18^th century” and the “long 19^th century.” The decline, then, is more numerical than it is genetic. What we’ve witnessed in the profession in the past 30 years or so is not the rise of expansive hiring categories at the expense of field-specific ones. Rather, expansive job ads have actually been the norm — but since there are, now, far fewer jobs in general, field-specific job ads have all but disappeared.

What is different now from 20 years ago, apart from the raw numbers, is that job ads expecting period coverage are also asking for subspecializations — listed as anything from “required” and “preferred” to “desired” and “welcome” — in entirely different fields, if not disciplines, including but not limited to film and media studies; digital humanities; various strains of race, gender, sexuality, ethnic, and area studies; and such ever-elusive designations as “global” or “transnational.” A scholar who preferred to remain anonymous expressed the challenges that such centrifugal requests for subspecializations present. He told me that when he was on the market in 2019, there were “many ads that specified a range of interests, often saying that the ideal candidate would satisfy one or more of X fields. It then became the task of the candidate to try and shoehorn their project into these disparate fields. I also found it difficult to speak to some of the secondary disciplinary designations because they weren’t ones for which I’ve received training in my English department.”

This problem has been especially acute in the last few years. In 2015, for instance, the English department at Arizona State University advertised a tenure-track assistant professorship in “American Jewish literature,” but also added that “interest in other cultural forms, such as theatre, film, television or digital media is desired,” and “comparative and transnational perspectives are welcome.” In 2016, Boston University advertised a tenure-track assistant professorship in “modern and/or contemporary drama and performance with an emphasis on race and/or gender, with a strong capacity to teach in a related literary field.” That same year, Brandeis University advertised a tenure-track position in “Anglophone African literature, with expertise in the novel and film preferred.” And in 2012, Georgia State University’s ad for a tenure-track position in “romantic literature and digital humanities” and Yale’s ad for one in “20/21C English literature” — for which “areas of interest include but are not limited to: poetry, modernism, digital studies, and the English language in the era of globalization” — are representative of the pervasion of the MLA’s job list in the last decade by ads coupling more traditional categories of scholarly expertise with experience in digital humanities.

In other words, whereas in the 1990s a “desired” subspecialization in Victorian literature may have been something like critical theory or cultural studies, today’s ads run much farther afield, often demanding expertise in disciplines or fields that can only be signaled through certification in or affiliation with an adjacent institute or program. To be “successful” on the market today, then, demands a kind of octopoid expansiveness in one’s intellectual reach. This is not necessarily a bad thing, of course. English departments’ desire to hire a candidate who can cover vastly different areas of expertise in, say, film and media studies, queer feminism, and the history of Latin(x) literature, reflects the extent to which literary studies has become more committed to the diversification of our methodologies and objects of study. This is something to be celebrated.

But under the conditions of extreme job scarcity that candidates face today, and the disciplinary reach “ideal” candidates are expected to exhibit, the clarity of those expectations needs to be more explicitly and systematically articulated. Nasia Anam has incisively unpacked the peculiar slipperiness of the market’s new favorite term, the “global Anglophone.” She explains that while it gained currency “foremost as a problematic substitute for established disciplinary terms like postcolonial and World Literature,” in practice, the hiring category “global anglophone” has really come to mean an ability to teach and do research in “the vast majority of the nonwhite world.” She calls this a “disciplinary neologism that appears entirely to have been born top down out of market forces, rather than bottom up from the work of scholars in the field themselves.”

Moreover, what does it mean that a certain category of knowledge is “welcome”? What about “desired”? “Required” is straightforward. When I see “required” I know what to do; I either apply or I don’t. But “preferred”? For that matter, what makes the difference, for those writing these job ads, between an “interest” and an area of expertise?

Interpreting job ads is an art, and people like Karen Kelsky, Manya Whitaker, and Rebecca Schuman have provided shrewd advice on how to navigate the ads’ peculiar obscurantism. But we ought to persuade deans, human resources, and search committees that, under current conditions, participating in this vagueness is ethically dubious. That vagueness is, as we know, largely the result of universities wanting to hedge their bets — to attract a large number of candidates in order to choose the “best” one. It’s also due to internal forces not agreeing on what specifically the department needs. Kelsky has urged those writing job ads to be more “transparent” for the sake of diminishing the committees’ workload.

But let’s also remember what it looks like for those on the other side of these job ads. It looks something like this: It says here that secondary specialization in science fiction is “welcome.” Should I apply for this job? I think I will. I work on Woolf, and there are science-fiction elements to her novels. At least, posthuman. I’ll revise my cover letter to emphasize that. Let’s see, that’s application No. 72. Something has to come through. OK, nothing came through this year. Maybe it will next year. In the meantime, I’ll take on this 4/4 load so I can stay in the running. Bills are tight, my 4/4 from last year didn’t give me the time to put together my book proposal, and we want to finally start trying to have a baby (I knew I should have frozen my eggs; it’s so expensive, though), but I guess another year should be fine. ...

Well-intentioned people within institutions may not want to perpetuate the regime of contingent labor effectively running universities today. But that is one of the byproducts of the strategic vagueness often built into job ads. Staying vague keeps applicant numbers high; it also manufactures hope. Applying to jobs — anywhere from 25 to 80 or more a year — takes time, money, and energy, and puts strain on one’s mental health. Jonathan Najarian, a lecturer in humanities in the College of General Studies at Boston University seeking tenure-track employment, told me, “You put hours into tailoring each one of your materials to the specific job, trying to speak to what you think you see in the ad. And the idea that a committee would give your CV one look and instantly know that you’re not what they’re looking for — and that they could have been more straightforward in their posting to save you that time and energy — is extremely demoralizing.”

We are not going to be writing any job ads for a very long time. Covid-19 is destroying whatever was left of the academic labor market in the humanities. It will be ages before we’ll be in the position of asking ourselves what gaps we need, or want, to fill in our departments. What we might consider, in the meantime, is how the job ad is an extremely powerful institutional utterance with profound consequences for the lives of others. The language we use to articulate hiring categories, subspecializations, and “interests” that we “welcome” or “desire” or “prefer” has the power to determine the minutes, hours, days, months, and ultimately years, of hundreds of lives.

We might therefore ask ourselves how complicit we’ve been, when hedging our bets, in perpetuating a culture of indifference to the suffering of others. Language is important. Specificity and transparency are important. The very least we can do, it seems to me, is to figure out what we want and take care to say what we mean. For those hearing us, it could mean the difference between one sort of a life and another.

Pardis Dabashi is an assistant professor of English at the University of Nevada at Reno.