I’m a baker. I’m good at cakes, great at cookies, and OK at bread. Those skills came in handy on the tenure-track job market.
Twenty years ago, I wrote a column for The Chronicle, “Baking My Way on the Job Market.” It described my strategy of making homemade biscotti for professors who wrote recommendation letters on my behalf, in the hope that they would keep at it for what I expected would be (and was) a protracted job search.
Every year between 2000 and 2012, either my husband, Timothy Morton, or I — and often both of us — were applying for openings on the faculty job market. He is a scientist (entomology) in a very competitive but not easily classified subfield. I am in education with extensive K-12 teaching experience predating my time in graduate school. We met in the final years of my Ph.D. program at the same research university in Chicago where he was a postdoc. At the time of my 2002 essay, we were newlyweds — he in his third one-year contract at a liberal-arts college and me in the second year of a five-year contract at an R2 university.
Twelve years on the market. That’s almost as long as one of my favorite cooking shows, The Great British Baking Show, has been televised. Watching its 13th season on television, the thought occurred to me: This show is a reasonable metaphor for the academic job market.
Consider: Both are competitive, performative, and unpredictable, with seemingly random events wiping out otherwise excellent candidates. On both the show and the tenure-track market, there’s a lot of public eating involved. Each season of the Bake Off (as the show is known in Britain) begins with 12 challengers, which — depending on the size of the applicant pool — is similar to the first-round-interview stage of a faculty search.
Even the structure of each episode parallels the campus visit for finalists: There’s the signature bake (aka, the teaching demo), the technical challenge (the interviews), and the showstopper (the job talk). If you nail your presentation or have a great interview with the provost, the sense of satisfaction is not unlike getting a coveted handshake from the show’s co-host, Paul Hollywood.
Like the British contestants who triumph over poorly laminated pastry and runny lemon curd each week, my husband and I persisted in our search and are now surprised to find ourselves in jobs that perfectly suit our skills, personalities, and expertise. In our 12 years of job hunting, we had dozens of phone interviews, about 20 on-campus interviews, and nine job offers (some on the tenure track and some on multiyear contracts). Our search took us from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as far south as North Carolina, and as far north as British Columbia. We got interviews and offers at every type of institution, and between us, we have had full-time jobs at three different liberal-arts colleges, an R2 university, an R1 university, and a community college. And then in 2021, just as we seemed settled in our career paths in higher education, things took an unexpected turn once again (more on that below).
With that perspective, what advice can I offer to job seekers? Especially those who are part of an academic couple? Let’s see if it can be couched in Bake Off terms:
Sometimes the dough just won’t rise properly, even if you have all the right equipment. With degrees in two very different fields — both in high demand — Tim and I seemed to have all the ingredients we needed for a successful joint tenure-track search. We never considered living apart, so sometimes we applied to positions that weren’t a great fit for one of us, because the other had found a good position nearby.
Twice we had on-campus interviews at the same institution in the same hiring season: once at a research university in Canada and then at a liberal-arts college in the rural Northeast. That gives you a flavor of the breadth and variety of the places we considered and that considered us.
Ultimately, we were never offered tenure-track jobs at the same institution or even in the same state or province. And we never got the kind of offer that would have allowed us to negotiate a second tenure-track spousal position. So despite plenty of yeast, our dough did not rise evenly.
Find a shoulder to cry on and some helping hands. Unlike the British bakers who frequently offer hugs and handkerchiefs to their fellow competitors, there is little or no camaraderie among tenure-track job seekers competing for the same faculty position. That’s because as a candidate, you rarely know the names of the folks you’re up against, let alone meet them.
It is crucial to have support among people who have some clue about how academic job searches work. Tim and I had each other, but we also turned for advice to friends from grad school and from our previous and current positions. And of course, I had my recommendation writers, who were delighted to receive dozens of shipments of homemade biscotti during the job-search decade.
Don’t blame yourself if you never win star baker. Whenever we interviewed for a position and didn’t receive an offer, we always wondered what we had done wrong. But you cannot know what the competition will bring to the table.
In fact, as a faculty member now, I often find myself in the Paul Hollywood/Prue Leith role of evaluating candidates. I’ve served on, or chaired, six hiring committees since settling into my current position in 2007. From that vantage point, I can assure any frustrated job candidates reading this that you probably did nothing wrong (unless of course you know that you did).
Perhaps one of the other applicants had a secondary line of expertise that fit better with the needs of the department. Maybe there was a spousal hire involved. Or maybe no one got the offer. Early on, a colleague and I applied for the same job at a flagship state university. We were the only two who made it to the campus-visit stage, and she sent me an email of congratulations after she was turned down for the position. Her note arrived at the same time as the email informing me that I, too, had been rejected. No one got the glass cake plate in that particular season.
Even if you are eliminated, you can still succeed. At two different stages in our long search, my husband’s contract for temporary faculty positions ran out while I was in a tenure-track job. Since he already had plenty of teaching experience, he decided against trying to piece together adjunct work while he went back on the academic job market. In both cases, Tim took a part-time job at Trader Joe’s instead. That company paid better than adjunct teaching, offered great benefits, and allowed him to arrange his schedule to spend a lot of time with our son at crucial developmental stages — something he never would have been able to do if we were both trying to earn tenure.
The point is: You, too, may have to temporarily work outside of your field, especially if it makes sense for your family life at that moment. It didn’t feel good professionally but Tim kept up with the literature and stayed in touch with mentors and colleagues, and found a way back to academe.
Amateurs versus professionals. Here’s where my Bake Off analogy breaks down and reveals a key, heartbreaking difference between televised baking Brits and tenure-track job seekers. The bakers, for all their skill, are amateurs; they have professions and lives to which they can return. That’s not the case for Ph.D.s. We dedicate years of our lives preparing to be scholars and teachers, and some of us never find work appropriate to our training.
The best advice I have to offer, after all this time, is that there is life outside of academe, and it can actually be better than the faculty life where you have toiled and strived for so long. Tim had a circuitous route to that realization. After switching between temporary faculty positions and two stints at Trader Joe’s, in 2012, as if by a miracle, his postdoc adviser called to see if he would be interested in managing her lab. At the time, I had just earned tenure at a liberal-arts college in Kenosha, Wis., just north of Chicago. For nine years, Tim ended up back in Chicago — mentoring students, organizing research, writing papers, conducting experiments, keeping the lab humming along. He was thrilled to be able to employ his childhood farm upbringing in managing his lab’s field station on the other side of Lake Michigan.
We moved to a place halfway between our two institutions so we could split the long commute. We had done it: We both had great full-time positions in higher education.
Expect the unexpected. Just at the moment when our showstopper was about to face the judges — we had blended together two great jobs, a new home, and a teenager who was thriving in high school — my spouse’s PI and her lab moved across the country. Tim was invited along, but with our son in his junior year of high school and me in the middle of my term as department chair, it was not a great time to start over in a very expensive new city. So in 2021, he left the ivory tower/baking tent, and took a job in industry, something both of us had always avoided.
Somehow, 20 years later, we now find ourselves in jobs that are perfectly suited to each of us. Tim is working as a natural products chemist in a big industrial lab that produces calibration formulas for pharmaceutical and research labs around the world. He loves the work, and is openly appreciated and fairly compensated — something that does not always happen in the university setting.
I am in my third faculty position in higher education, tenured at a teaching-focused college where I have the freedom to develop skills beyond what is typical to my discipline. For example, I am working with a group of scientist colleagues on a National Science Foundation Noyce grant to improve the training of secondary-school teachers in science and math, and I am a part-time host at the local public radio station, interviewing guests about education topics.
Like the technical challenges that surprise and stretch even the most experienced bakers, we never could have foreseen these opportunities until faced with them. After 20 years, our best advice for job candidates is this: Sift and blend, temper and combine, proof and allow to rise. That applies to baking, to careers, and to marriages. Just because they begin in the hallowed halls of academe doesn’t mean they have to end there.
