Why They Want to Reject You

Wrong.

Why?

Because, in a nutshell, the search-committee members want to reject you. They don’t love you. They aren’t excited to see your application come in. On the contrary, they dread dealing with it. But it’s not personal. It’s not you they dread, it’s the search itself. The whole exercise of sifting through applications, evaluating, discussing, interviewing, inviting, and offering in this demoralized and downsized industry.

Let me explain. One of the consequences of the evaporation of tenure lines and tenure-track faculty members is an intensified service burden on those full-time professors who remain. Their teaching load may or may not have increased — that depends on the reliance of their department on adjunct substitutes. But the adjunct population notwithstanding, there are things that only full-time, tenure-track faculty members can do, and most forms of administrative service are among them. There are fewer faculty members to handle more administrative tasks; they are teaching under less desirable conditions and seeing their incomes fall further behind the cost of living — and they are not a happy lot.

When and under what conditions do those overburdened faculty members actually read your files? Are they sipping cocktails on a breezy veranda, poring excitedly over the brilliance on every page? Actually, no. Here is the average day of the faculty member who is reading your file:

She wakes up at 7 a.m. to get two kids up and fed, teeth brushed, and out the door to school. Runs to the office and preps for her 300-student intro class. Teaches class. Comes back to 75 emails from large intro class complaining about grading of recent midterm. Meets with teaching assistants who handled the grading and are now at the center of an undergraduate mutiny. Handles crying TA. Rushes out to lunch meeting. Rushes back for office hours. Meets with 15 unhappy students, some of whom threaten to speak to the dean about her course. Does paperwork for recertification of large intro course for gen-ed requirements in the college. Realizes data are needed but office administrator, now shared with two other departments, is unavailable to provide data. Walks to an office across the campus to find someone who can provide data. Examines impenetrable enrollment figures. Comes back late for faculty meeting, where department head explains further 18-percent budget cut to be absorbed in the coming semester, reductions in TA lines, and increasing enrollments in all courses. Leaves faculty meeting early under the judgmental glares of childless colleagues, rushes to pick up kids from after-school care. Hustles kids home for piano lessons and soccer. Throws dinner on the table at 6:30. Cleans up kitchen. Argues with partner over unwashed dishes from breakfast. Helps kids with homework. Bathes them and puts them to bed. Folds clean laundry left over from night before. At 9:30 sits down to computer to log in … and groans to discover 349 viable applications for the department’s faculty job opening. Lecture for next day’s class still not finished.

Is this search committee member excited to read those files? Eager? Enthusiastic? No, my friend. She is exhausted. Dare I say enervated. What she wants, more than anything else at that moment, is to be able to reject 324 of those applications so that she can get to the long shortlist for the next day’s meeting, shut down the computer, and go to bed.

How much time is she going to give to each application in this initial rejection-round review? A minute or two; five if you’re lucky. The letter gets skimmed, the CV glanced at. And voila — 93 percent of the files are dispatched to the reject folder, so that she does not have to look at them, think about them, or worry about them for one more second.

Overwork, exhaustion, irritability, second shift, increasing service, ballooning numbers of applications — this all comes together into that moment when your file is opened and gets its first look. It’s not pretty. They don’t love you. What they want, with all their hearts, is to reject you.

So what do you do?

You deliver an undeniable record in a small number of flawless pages. You give them exactly the information they need, and not one word more. A two-page job letter, a one-page teaching statement, a two-ish-page research statement, and let’s say (just as an example, not a prescription) a five-page CV. On those 10 slender pages rest your hopes for permanent, secure employment, health-insurance benefits for you and your family, and the opportunity to work in your chosen profession. No other 10 pages that you write will ever carry a greater weight or will be worth more money.

And yet candidate after candidate throws these documents together in a day or two, believing that somehow — by magic, perhaps — all the years of work will automatically translate into the outcomes they desire, with no sustained critical effort on their part to translate it into language the search committee will respect and respond to.

Needless to say, that belief is incorrect. A set of job documents requires hours and hours of painstaking, exhausting, excruciating work. Some dismiss this attention to the writing as an obsessive-compulsive preoccupation with meaningless detail. It isn’t. The space of translation between the record and the outcome is a space of tremendous creativity and meaning — it is a kind of self-making — and deserves deep care and attention. You may never get a tenure-track job, despite your efforts. But go into the search (and leave it) knowing you did everything possible to succeed.

• View: Academic Workplace 2015

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