Imagine that you’re a humanities graduate student. You’re struggling to finish your dissertation before your funding runs out, facing piles of daily grading, and applying for jobs and postdocs. If you don’t get one, you’ll be adjuncting six classes per semester, looking for a nonacademic job (“Sorry, you’re overqualified”), or sleeping on your parents’ sofa.
However, you’re lucky: Your department has a job-placement seminar. The Placement Director is warm, helpful, and annoyingly cheery. She tells you all you have to do is produce a CV, cover letter, dissertation abstract, teaching statement, DEI statement, research statement, two or three writing samples, a 20-page document proving your teaching effectiveness, and two or three original syllabi. That shouldn’t be hard, right? And by the way, they have to be perfect. Because there are almost no jobs, so nothing short of perfect will get you even to a longlist. Questions?
Hands go up and the Placement Director begins to answer. No, you can’t use sentences from your cover letter in your other materials — you must find at least five different ways of saying the same thing. Yes, you should apply in three or four different fields, and you must have different documents for all four, and ... what? Yes, that does mean you’ll need to have 40 different versions, but don’t worry, it gets easier after the first ones. Do of course highlight your publications in top peer-reviewed journals, the conferences you’ve organized, the major keynotes you’ve delivered, your New York Times op-eds, your disaster-relief work, and, yes? A Nobel Prize? You should certainly mention that. And don’t let that neoliberal phrase “the market” capture your soul! Remember your joy in the work! (“I’ll get right on it,” you mutter, as you’re packing up your things.)
Caricature notwithstanding, that Placement Director is me: annoyingly cheery (perhaps), but also angry when I see what we demand of our applicants, angry at how needlessly, recklessly we squander their talents, time, and energies. I recently invited those applying for jobs to share their experiences. Some told me they’d submitted over 300 applications, others no fewer than 15,000 pages. But it’s not the number of pages that’s the problem, they said, or even the lack of jobs (they were prepared for that), it’s the hundreds of variants they have to produce, the thousands of hours they’ve spent tailoring documents for different ads’ demands. One candidate wrote: “In this job market, it’s borderline abusive to expect this level of bespoke tailoring.” And yet we do expect it — not just those who write the ads but all of us who take part in humanities hiring.
Faculty members protest the bureaucratization of the university and its neoliberal demand for “productivity,” but we routinely replicate it in one of the few practices we actually control.
How did this happen? The short version runs something like this. As the humanities job market shrank, hiring committees began to receive staggering numbers of applications. Attempting to distinguish among the 500, 700, 1,000 excellent candidates, they began to request more material. With fewer lines, committees also demanded virtuoso skills: “Assistant professor of world and U.S. history, indigenous studies, and public-facing digital humanities with expertise in video-game design.” As competition rose, applications had to show detailed knowledge of the institution to demonstrate that candidates didn’t just want a job but this job. At the same time, a growing body of career administrators and consultants established corporate-style standards that trickled into job ads (“evidence of teaching effectiveness,” “leadership initiatives,” “research impact”), demanding new documents. Diversity officers invented the DEI statement — a well-meaning idea, another new document. Committees complied, but they also chafed at uniformity, wanting to “think outside the box.” “Let’s ask for teaching portfolios!” “How about a community-engagement project?” “I know, a personal statement in verse!” As administrators begat administrators, documents begat documents. Somewhere along the way, we came to believe that more pages made for better hires and forgot to notice that they don’t.
Faculty members protest the bureaucratization of the university and its neoliberal demand for “productivity,” but we routinely replicate it in one of the few practices we actually control, blithely demanding ever-increasing pages from our supplicants. We protest the university’s exploitation of contingent instructors (its creation of the “reserve army of labor” that Marx said was crucial to keeping workers in subjection), but we grossly increase graduate-student labor, unpaid labor, which they undertake in the faint hope of a job. We may see our visionary ads as an invitation to reimagine the humanities. But in doing so, we’re forgetting those whose outrageous labor our innovations demand. Far from reimagining the profession, our ads represent a tremendous failure of imagination — a failure to imagine our way into our applicants’ lives.
Imagine yourself (again) as a job candidate. On little sleep, you’ve somehow produced the requisite documents. Applying for a postdoc at the Columbia Society of Fellows, you’re ready to adapt your cover letter when you see that they require instead a 500-word “personal statement” with discussion of your “personal trajectory.” You’ll have to write a new essay. None of your other documents will work either. You’ll need a new 3,500-word writing sample (the 25-page sample you’ve prepared is 8,000 words), a longer research statement, and shorter everything else. All before the deadline.
But you’re determined, and — miraculously — get everything ready on time. You navigate the first pages and then, with 15 minutes to spare, you see the box that says “100-word project summary.” That wasn’t in the “required documents.” If it’s bad, your application goes in the virtual dumpster. At breakneck speed, you type a few sentences — 123 words. What can you possibly cut? 102, 101, 100. You’ve done it! You rush through the rest of the application, and just as you’re about to hit “submit,” you get a notification: “Application Period Closed.”
Determined to stay positive, you turn back to the Chronicle and MLA job listings. When you click on each “apply” button, most come up “not found.” However, one link works, and it’s for the dream job in your field: Assistant Professorship in Post45 Anglophone Literature at Harvard. You know it’s a longshot, but you’re ready. You have your cover letter, CV, teaching statement, research statement, writing sample, and ... what? A “service statement” demonstrating how you “strengthen academic communities”? No one ever mentioned a “service statement.” In fact, you’re pretty sure this is Harvard’s clever innovation. You want to tell them: Grad students do nothing but service (grade for faculty, teach composition). And how have you strengthened your academic community? By throwing parties to blow off steam from all that service and organizing strikes to protest all that service. Hmm, better not tell them that.
Oh, but... Assistant Professor of Writing and Digital Humanities at the American University of Paris? Screw Harvard, you’re going to Paris! Cover letter, CV, “statement of pedagogical philosophy with evidence of teaching effectiveness” (OK, though you’ll have to revise), and, wait, what’s this? “Evidence of successful engagement in digital-humanities projects.” A new essay with supporting material. You’ll also have to add something on your “creative interests” to your research statement. What creative interests? All your creativity is going into your job applications.
Well, Harvard and AUP view themselves as special; most ads will be more standardized. For instance, there’s an Assistant Professorship in Global, Comparative, or Transnational Literatures at Montana State University at Billings. CV, cover letter, list of references, and … “philosophy statement.” What? Philosophy of what? You’ll have to guess. Another new essay.
By now you’re no longer surprised that every ad asks for a different teaching document: a “pedagogic philosophy”; “statement of teaching goals”; “description of classroom practices”; “evidence of teaching excellence”; “teaching and diversity statement”; “teaching and personal statement”; an essay on how you “eliminate barriers to learning”; one on how you’ll “incorporate undergraduate students into your research.” For Harvard Expository Writing, you’ll have to propose materials for their “Expository 20” and “Studio 10 to 20” sequence. For a one-year Yale postdoc, you’ll have to describe your “specific approach” to their Directed Studies Program and discuss how you’d teach a book on their syllabus.
Every document must be a different length — you must have one-page, two-page, and four-page research statements. Some are mysterious. One, for instance, asks for “anything else requested in the description” (is it a trick question?). Others read like satire: “Please state concisely how you’ll ‘realize a sustainable and inclusive future for humanity.”’ You’ve now produced over 27 different documents and applied to only three jobs, at least two of which you have no chance of getting. It’s with a sinking heart that you realize you’re in the Bleak House of academe — an infinitude of new pleas, a paper chase that never ends. A lucky friend of yours got a job after applying for only 143 of them. With an average of seven new documents per job, that amounts to 1,001 documents — like Scheherazade, 1,001 nights of desperate storytelling to try to save yourself from academic death. But unlike her, after 1,001 nights you may not survive.
Nineteenth-century prisons devised special labor machines such as the treadmill and the “crank” that served no useful function. Their only purpose was to torture prisoners until they collapsed from exhaustion. We’ve devised our own version of the treadmill and crank — unintentionally, perhaps, but with a sociopathic disregard for the lives of those who labor under them. In this, we’re hurting not just them but ourselves. As one of my candidate-correspondents wrote, the sheer number of pages “feels like cruel and unusual punishment for both applicants and committee members.” We want to save the humanities, but we’re multiplying pointless labor, consuming not just the vital energies of future academics but current ones too. A new U.S. presidential administration is openly bent on destroying us, and we’re helping it along.
We’ve devised our own version of the treadmill and crank — unintentionally, perhaps, but with a sociopathic disregard for the lives of those who labor under them.
There are many things in the university that we don’t control, many broken things we can’t fix. But we can fix this. In fact, it’s almost embarrassingly easy. Here’s how. We can create a common humanities job application, in wording so bland and impersonal that no one could accuse it of a viewpoint, let alone original thought. My proposed version is as follows:
Please submit a CV and a 2,500-word-maximum statement describing your research, teaching, and other relevant activities. We may request additional materials later.
No specious cover letter, sycophantic paragraph, or document-to-document repetition — just the essentials.
If you’re serving on a hiring committee, you might object. The job you’re looking to fill is so special that you can’t identify viable candidates without more materials, and besides, it saves everyone’s time to ask for materials all at once. But don’t you in fact set aside most applications after reading the first few paragraphs? And in saving yourself time, aren’t you just shifting the burden onto your profession’s underclass? If you think about it, will it not begin to seem monstrous to demand all those documents from applicants you know you won’t hire (as it indeed is), rather than only from candidates you’re seriously considering?
In fact, committees should ask only for materials they deem essential — interviews can do the rest. Zoom has freed us from the limitations that conference budgets and airless hotel rooms imposed on interviews. We need to do more interviews and longer ones, not only because Zoom now makes this possible but also because, in the age of AI, we may want assurance that the candidate is as brilliant viva voce as in writing. Relying more on interviews, we will need to work harder not to be swayed by mere charisma. But this too is something we can do, and we will get better at it.
Simplicity is key. No centralized online application (like the college common app), no high-tech resources — only a groundswell of support from key organizations, job-list banner ads, email campaigns, a recognition of how unconscionable our current practices are, and a will to change. And, while waiting for organizational consensus, we can just do it, one ad at a time.
This isn’t a brilliant or sexy idea. In fact, it’s so shockingly obvious that we should have done it long ago. But sometimes simple, unsexy ideas are quietly radical ones. For job candidates, it would be revolutionary. To do it, we need to realize that reading more does not mean reading better. We need to say goodbye to administrative-consulting mandates. And we need to get over ourselves and our vain attempts to express individuality through our job ads (surely we can do it elsewhere). Instead of sacrificing excellence, we would unleash it by removing the impossible burdens that currently crush it. We would — by the by — also free ourselves. We may not be able to stop global warming or save democracy. We may not be able to rescue the humanities, or even our universities. But as long as we’re permitted to hire, this is something we can do.