The Great 2006 AHA Road Trip And Hope Shredder

I am coming up on a very important anniversary: attending my first American Historical Association annual conference in Philadelphia back in 2006.  I was there as a grad student making my first of six consecutive runs on the job market.  I came into it nervous but with great hope, I came out of it with my confidence shaken and my hope for the future shredded.  This time of year every year I thank God and the universe that I no longer have to subject myself to the horrors of the academic job market.

The trip started with high expectations.  A friend and I rented a car together, and decided to drive all the way to Philly and to share a hotel room to save money.  Being grad students we had to economize the best way that we could in the face of the ridiculousness whereby penniless grad students are expected to pony up big bucks to travel to a faraway city and get a lavish hotel room all for twenty minute interviews that could easily be conducted over the telephone.  We at least sprung for a full size sedan, and drove a beautiful Chevy Impala, much more reliable and much roomier than my '92 Mazda Protege, which was being held together by spit and bailing wire at that point.  The automatic seatbelt had stopped working and the horn had been removed because it had developed a mind of its own.

We drove that Impala over 700 miles straight on from central Illinois to Philly, listening to Johnny Cash over and over again, particularly "Sam Hall."  I remember stops at those isolated service stations on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, furtively smoking cigarettes backs against the cold January wind.  We rolled into the City of Brotherly Love on a cold night, parking at a surface lot near our downtown hotel, which was bustling with the nervous energy of hundreds of junior scholars trying to keep their shit together in the face of overwhelming fear and anxiety.

I didn't really see my friend until we left because he had something like twelve interviews, which made me curse studying Europe rather than Asia, which was hot that year.  I did have four interviews, however, a decent haul for someone without a PhD yet.  Once I got to the conference hotel, I realized that I may have made some unorthodox decisions.  I intentionally did not wear a business suit to my interviews, but dark tweed and tie with a dark shirt and black pants.  It seemed like a good idea before I left, but now I felt exposed.  That uneasy feeling stayed with me when I went to the hotel suite where my first interview was located.  Some background: this was for a job I considered ideal.  It was at a university in Chicago, at that point my favorite city in America.  It was primarily not a research position, but  those faculty in the department had research bona fides.  This was my ideal job, but I was having to interview for it without ever done an academic job interview before.

I predictably bombed.  I epically fucked it up so bad that I have only recently been able to come to terms with it.  I prepared intensely for this interview, I even took the time to look up and read the scholarship of the people on the committee.  I can still tell you to this day that one of the committee members wrote about the Portuguese colony of Sao Tome as well as the postwar communist insurrection in Malaysia.  Things were going okay, then they asked me about how I would teach a set of specific topics courses.  At that moment it hit me that the committee chair had told me in his phone call before our interview to prepare some answers for this.  But being a moron, I had forgotten about it, and had done an insane level of preparation for things that weren't nearly so important.  I came up with some answers off the top of my head, which were obviously not impressive.  They practically shooed me out of the room at the point.

I knew I had fucked up, and then I had to go to an interview with a large public university in Texas.  While this school was in a small city I had been to before and disliked, the school itself would have massive research support and a light teaching load.  My confidence was so shaken, however, that some of my answers to their questions were so quiet that I had to be asked to repeat them.  (The committee members were really nice, at least.)  Being trapped in a hotel suite with a group of people deciding your future is so stressful that I can only last 30 minutes, but the interview ended up lasting 45 minutes because the chair informed me that the person after me had moved their slot, and for some reason decided to extend my interview.  At that point I thought I was going to vomit.  I was too demoralized to sustain my "interview face" for that long. There went another job down the drain.

My third interview was with a small liberal arts college in rural Virginia.  It was in the Appalachians, my favorite landscape in America, and I'd heard good things about the collegiality of its department from someone acquainted with the school.  This is the one interview where I felt comfortable, largely thanks to the friendliness of the committee.  At the same time, I got the feeling that they had a very specific need to fill, and I was not the guy to fill that need.  Still, it was the one interview I left Philly thinking I hadn't totally fucked up.  I had even managed to overcome the awkwardness of interviewing in an actual hotel room, rather than a suite.  And yes, one of the committee members was sitting on a bed.  (Having your future decided in what feels like a "drug deal gone bad scenario" isn't comfortable.)

I definitely didn't do a great job with my last interview, which was on the last day of the conference in the morning with a private university in Los Angeles.  It was also my one and only interview in the official interview area.  Sitting with a bunch of other anxious and shell-shocked grad students in ill-fitting business attire made sitting outside of the hotel rooms waiting to be let in seem positively heavenly by comparison.  It was a place that smelled of fear, desperation, and broken dreams.

I remember the committee chair coming to get me, and walking with him past table after table after table.  This space seemed endless, and filled with the voices of young academics trying their hardest to impress while holding it together in a huge sweaty cacaphony.  I was seated in front of four people, almost like a tribunal.  I had a hard time knowing who to look at, and I still remember the committee chair being amused at one of my answers.  They were looking for something, and I wasn't it.  It didn't help that at that time in my life I was probably afflicted by undiagnosed anxiety disorders and depression, so in such situations I was incapable of acting naturally and probably came off as the kind of weirdo that you cross the street to avoid.

The time between the interviews is a little bit of a blur.  I have some strangely specific memories, though.  I walked with a friend down to the tourist sites, and I had to wait in a ridiculous security line to see the Liberty Bell.  My PhD university still had an alumni party at the AHA back then, and I quaffed the free booze and got some words of comfort from the people I knew who had been able to find in prior years.  Over the three days I ate at a lot of Irish pubs, since there were many in the area and they were the one affordable non-fast food eating option.  I ate from a huge box of mandarin oranges bought to supplement my diet of lamb stew and shepherd's pie.  I spent my spare time reading George Packer's Assassin's Gate and contemplating the war in Iraq.  Such things were actually a welcome distraction from the intense waves of fear washing over me.  If I didn't get a job, I didn't know what I was going to do with myself.

Those thoughts crossed my mind the next day as I drove with my friend on a bitter cold morning back to Illinois.  I remember the snow on the ground in the woods of central Pennsylvania, and my friend telling me stories about growing up in China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.  I was at least really happy for him.  I look back at this trip, though, and I have a hard time feeling any sentimental nostalgia.  While I know this isn't the case for most people, my time in grad school was pretty idyllic.  I had amazing friends, lived the life of the mind, and was lucky not to have any financial emergencies at a time when I was poor.  The trip to the AHA suddenly made me realize that this idyll was coming to an end, and that it was not going to have a happy ending.  In the ten years since I have lived in three different states, met my wife, started a family, and switched careers.  The ending has been happy, but only once I made the decision to leave academia.  There's so much I cared so much about back then that I don't care about anymore, especially the academic job market.  I think back to the great 2006 AHA road trip and feel longing for my friends who live so far away today, but no longing whatsoever to be part of that world anymore.

A Simple Way To Make The Academic Job Market Less Horrible

I haven't been blogging much about academia recently, since I feel so removed from it now that whatever I have to say about it probably isn't worth listening to.  That said, I'd like to tug on your coat about something today.  Talking to a friend this weekend about the academic job market gave me some bone-chilling flashbacks to the period between fall 2005 and spring 2011, which was spent looking to get an academic job or to get a different one.  Beautiful fall weather is here now, and for the first time in years I don't have a fear-laden Pavlovian response.

Those who have endured it know that the academic job market is especially ridiculous and soul-crushing, combining slim chances with months of waiting and a painful amount of rejection.  It also happens to be a lot of work.  When I was on the market during September, October, and November I felt like I had a second job that mainly entailed retooling job letters and making a lot of trips to the post office.  It wasn't enough for the application process to fill me with insane levels of anxiety, it also had to suck up all of my free time, too.

While we can't make a bunch of tenure track jobs appear out of thin air, we can at least reduce the workload drastically and easily.  When I applied for jobs at private high schools, I was amazed at the ease of the process.  It was simple, I just uploaded the necessary application documents to a centralized website where the schools would post their ads.  (This is the NAIS careers site, for those interested.)  I had to upload my CV a grand total of one time.  I did not have to pay to have it mailed to 20 different schools by a service or print and mail it that number of times myself.  When I wrote my specific job letters to the schools I was applying to, I just had to upload them via an online application.  It saved me both a lot of time and a lot of money.

If departments at different universities or an organization like the AHA would cooperate to set something like this up it would drastically reduce stress levels for already over-stressed junior scholars getting chewed up by this awful process.  It could also be tweaked in ways to help with other parts of the process.  Rejections could be sent en masse electronically, making it faster for the candidates to know, or to even know at all.  They don't need a form letter in the mail, this is not 1962.  They do, however, ought to have the courtesy of a reply, which all too often is not granted.  Schools could also standardize their requirements, and not expect more than a letter or CV at the start of the process.  Expecting all 120 applicants to submit a letter, CV, recommendations, teaching portfolio, and writing sample is completely ridiculous.  Save that for the second round.  At least under this system system applicants could simply upload those bigger docs at the start and not have to pay for the expense of mailing a massive portfolio to a hiring committee that won't even look at it.

And here's the deal: universities do this already with undergraduate applications.  Many have agreed to use the Common App, which also cuts down on busy work.  They allow recommenders to just simply upload their letters.  (I know this because I am now using this system to write recs for my high school system.)  It is obviously a way more efficient system than I went through at age 18.  If universities are already making it easier on their student applicants, why not their job applicants?  They might reply that they want to reduce the number of applications to save them the time of sifting through, but in that case just learn to write better, more specific job ads.

The Reality Behind The Rage

Last week witnessed a rather intense dispute between two bloggers whose opinions I tremendously respect, and whose blogs are actually linked on this site.  Rebecca Schuman (aka Pan Kisses Kafka) had written another biting piece about the realities of the academic job market, particularly the case of a search committee who sent out their invitations to an interview and a national conference with less than a week's notice.  Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) took issue with Schuman's accusations, feeling that her tone was counter-productive and that the criticisms lodged by Schuman were ill-founded and not properly sourced.  It was difficult to read their heated exchanges on Twitter, since it was like having to listen to my parents fight.  (I also know people who know both Schuman and Potter and think they're good people, and I get sad when good people fight each other.  Yes, I am actually a huge softie beneath all of my bluster.)

Within Potter's critique was a strong reaction against "rage" based dialogues, and the response in the comments section of her blog and on Twitter duly  displayed the rage of many junior scholars and post-academics who are fed up with a system that has let them down.

I do not agree with Potter's criticisms of Schuman, but I can certainly acknowledge that expressions of rage are not always the most productive way to engage in dialogue.  However, I also know well where that rage comes from, and that until the powers that be in academia hear that rage, in all of its force, pain, and vitriol, contingent faculty will never have a chance at improving their conditions.  There are a lot of well-meaning tenured folks (hell, some of them are even radicals) whose hearts are in the right place, but aren't truly aware of the realities beneath the rage, and they desperately need to be, despite their good intentions.

I lived that reality for too long.  I worked two years on the contingent track as a VAP in a department where I had to use the metaphorical servants' entrance on a constant basis, and where many tenured and tenure-track faculty would not even say hello to me.  (There were, of course, some absolutely great folks that gave me a lot of help.)  My publication record surpassed that of some of the very people who treated me as beneath regard.  I busted my ass, putting in 80 hour weeks my first semester to get my classes up and running, but soon found out that my chair judged VAPs solely on the number of student complaints he heard about them.  Our job was to toil silently, STFU, and just give the customers what they want.

It took three years on the job market to land a tenure track job that turned into a nightmare of bullying, low pay, and being forced to teach a majority of classes outside of my field of study.  My publications were treated as threats rather than accomplishments.  I hoped to move on, but the 2008 crash happened, and despite three highly placed articles, several courses developed, stellar teaching evaluations (both peer and student) and a book contract, I did not get a single interview on my last go on the market.  I was stuck living in mental torture in an isolated, unfriendly town over a thousand miles away from my spouse, and the harder I worked to escape, the less success I had.


Many of my friends have had similar experiences, and I often felt like we were voiceless peons with no way to get anyone on the other side of the academic divide to understand what we were going through.  Except in rare cases (usually among former contingent faculty made good) they just didn't want to listen, or got angry or defensive in response.  I channeled a lot of the pain and frustration into my blogging.  You can read examples of my rage here, here, here, and here.

There are a lot of realities beneath the rage that established academics don't see or understand, but the shift in the job market is one of the biggest.  Many of those who have responded negatively to Schuman have repeated the handy mantra "didn't you know what you were getting into"?  One critic even callously called her "stupid" or "naive" to not realize the difficulties of the job market as a grad student.  These critics tend to assume that today's abattoir of a job market is the same as the shitty one they endured in the 1990s or even early 2000s.  It's not.  The market went from awful to impossible after the crash, and it still has not really recovered and never will, in large part because the austerity policies that followed in the wake of the crash have been used ruthlessly by administrators to slash tenure-track lines and even whole departments.  Those who were unfortunate enough to get their PhDs between 2008 and 2011 have had their careers killed, because today's search committees want what I call the "new car smell," and don't seem to want to hire candidates who have been on the contingent track for more than two years, even if they have released well-reviewed books with good presses.  (I have at least two friends in this boat.)  I repeat: the current job situation is not the crummy one I prepared myself for in grad school, but is something new where low-paid contingent labor is the norm, not the exception, for new PhDs.  Contingent jobs are no longer stepping stones to permanent positions, but are just waystations on the road to the next poorly compensated, low prestige position in another town halfway across the country.

When people are being exploited and treated like peons, when they are expected to STFU about their conditions or lose their jobs (which happened to two of my contingent friends), when they have enough qualifications to earn tenure at schools that won't even give them an interview, rage is an appropriate response.   As I wrote recently, I have made the conscious decision to let my rage go, based both on my personal health, and because I have had the extreme luck to have transitioned into a great job into an area of the country I love.  I applaud those still caught up in a cruel, unresponsive, inhumane system who are expressing their rage.  No one in power ever helped those without it out of the kindness of their hearts, and without the rage to make those in comfortable positions feel uncomfortable, things will remain as they are.

To quote Bob Dylan, there is one last reality beneath the rage that bears understanding, "when you ain't got nothing, you've got nothing to lose."  The rage of people like me could stand to be more productive, but it is not going away until things change.  Sorry, but those who are unsettled by it are just going to have to deal with it.

Do I Have a Moral Obligation to Stop Writing Grad School Recommendations?

Hot on the heels of Rebecca Schuman's blistering Slate article on the perils of graduate school, Sarah Kendzior has penned a piece about the exploitation of adjuncts for Al-Jazeera that Cranky Bear would heartily approve of.  These articles have provoked outpourings of bitterness and approval from my friends with experience in the academic world, and for good reason.  They well articulate the feeling of betrayal that many of us have.

Yet today, in the midst of all of this angst, I was talking with a former student over email about his possible grad school plans.  His one option is a terminal master's program at a very prestigious university (the same program at the same university that I graduated from), and he's wondering whether to go or not.  I have tried hard to expose him to the realities of the academic job market, but he is a very passionate and idealistic young man.  Like me once upon a time, he is the type of person willing to sacrifice his youth and quality of life to pursue the scholarly dream.  Unlike my younger self, however, he went straight from college into the work world, and now has a steady, well-paying job in the business world, and gets to live in Austin, Texas, to boot.

I have told him that he should not jettison his current life for a shot at the academic ring unless he really, really wants to do it.  I have told him the odds, but like Han Solo in an asteroid field, it's still full speed ahead.  I don't know what else I can do, apart from refusing to write letters of recommendation, an option that's off the table because I already wrote glowing letters for him.

As much as I tried to dissuade him from applying, I also know in my heart of hearts that he's the by far more suited to being a scholar than any other student I've had.  His knowledge and theoretical understandings are warped by growing up in a repressive, rural Texas environment and attending a third-rate university full of traditionalists, but I know that grad school would easily set him right.  I look at someone like this with his ability and drive, and think that it is an insane profession that would not welcome someone so suited for it.

I then remind myself that it is in fact an insane profession.  For instance, I know multiple people who've published books with reputable presses on important topics who can't get tenure track jobs.  I know many more who are fine scholars and stellar teachers who toil as low-wage contingent faculty, or who are on the tenure track at schools that pay little and offer a pittance, if anything, for research funding.  At the same time, I know complete and utter mediocrities with tenure.  I have seen someone get promoted to full professor, apparently on the strength of his having been a crappy department chair.  The more I think about it, the more I realize that it is these people who keep the academic dream alive.  The youngsters see such mediocrity and think "if they can make it, surely I can too."

It's becoming obvious to me that just telling my former students to reconsider graduate school isn't stopping them.  They don't even listen to the advice I give them on how to play the academic game.  I know other former students at second tier doctoral programs who are worried about their career prospects, but who ignored my advice to jump to more prestigious universities after completing their master's degrees.  These two students are very intelligent and highly capable, and will most likely toil for close to a decade to get a degree from a school whose appearance on their CV will mean an automatic toss into the discard pile come job application time.

I also told them that grad school was not the way to go in the first place, but they obviously didn't listen.  Of course, neither did I at their age.  I heard the horror stories, and thought to myself "I'll make sure that won't happen to me" with all the arrogance and stupidity of youth.  It is becoming increasingly clear to me that the only way I can do my part to preventing the next generation of youth from being sacrificed to the Moloch of graduate school is to refuse to write anyone a letter.  Deep down I know I'm not capable of such an extreme move, but I am beginning to think that this reflects an incurable sentimentality and optimism on my part, not the best interests of my students, or my moral obligations to them.

Things I Learned the Hard Way on the Tenure Track

This week I got the happy news that the top journal in my field has asked me to write another book review for them.  I had written two others that were well-received by the editor, but this is the first request I've had since leaving academia and teaching at a private school.  It feels good not to be forgotten by my former life.  Anyway, this event has prompted some reflection on what I managed to accomplish and where I failed in my academic career.

I came into my tenure-track job with two years as a "visiting" professor behind me, so I though I was wise to the wily ways of academia. I learned that it is entirely unfair, that getting a job really boils down to "fit," and that the university runs on cheap labor. However, the three years I spent at as an assistant professor at a third tier public university in Texas were a wholly different and further learning experience. Here are a few hard-bought lessons/realizations, aimed at those on the job market this year just lucky enough to find that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.  (Finding a pot of gold is just as likely as getting a good job in the current market.)  For all the other t-t folk out there, feel free to provide any I missed in the comments.

The Intellectual Stimulation of Grad School Never Returns
When I was a visitor, I noticed that parts of my brain were beginning to stagnate. My job then, as on the tenure track, did not require me to find great insights into scholarship. Instead, my main task was to find out how to take complex historical events and distill them into hour-long chunks of knowledge that an undergrad can comfortably digest. I still managed to get some research done, but there were few intellectual conversations among my colleagues, partially due to lack of interest and partially due to lack of time.  A very large percentage of academics simply check out from being scholars once they hit tenure, or even before, as was the case at my old school.

If a University has a Bad Reputation for Faculty Retention, it is Usually Well Earned
To keep myself from getting in trouble, I'll just say that I learned this one the hard way.  This is an increasingly widespread issue, since schools are using the punishing market to squeeze faculty at every turn, and then remind them they are recplaceable once the tweed army starts to flex its muscles.

At Less Exalted Universities, the Values of the Institution Trump Those of the Profession
During my three years on the tenure track I worked hard to succeed according to the dictates of my former profession. I published articles, secured a book contract, taught many new courses, and took an active role in university service. However, I have seen others accomplish much less in these traditional categories of merit, yet reap much bigger rewards. Why? Because they did the odd things that the institution cares about, things that at most universities might be considered extraneous or even tacky. Here's a piece of advice for all the newbies on the tenure track: keep in mind that many of your senior colleagues might have very little connection to the profession, and a great deal to their employer. It behooves you to do what they want if you'd like to get the goodies your department doles out (raises, sabbaticals, etc) even if it's the kind of thing your advisor would never tell you to do.

You Need to Learn How to Say "No"
I was thankfully mostly spared from a common pitfall of junior scholars: overextension. In many departments a great deal of the service work, especially the most menial kind, is foisted on the new faculty. If those faculty are female or people of color, the burden and pressures are usually that much greater.  No matter how much you might think you have to do everything you are asked, occassionally it's good to set boundaries by saying no, especially if you keep getting asked.

Accomplishing Too Much Makes You a Target
Workers in all walks of life often resent the super-keener, because they end up pushing a speed-up of work for everyone. Academics are no different. If you make yourself conspicious by your accomplishments, you may earn the dislike of those who wish to just skate by, or feel threatened by your abilities. When I got publications as a visitor, the news was not praised by the full profs who had never published anything in their careers. Similarly, I know of adjuncts who have received worried looks rather than praise for the publications from department chairs. Although the reactions aren't as extreme for t-t faculty with stellar publications, I have heard them described as "divisive" by senior faculty at my old job.

The Informal Academic Job Market

This time of year gives me flashbacks to the six grueling winters I spent on the academic job market.  Around about now those fortunate enough to have interviews at the AHA are getting ready for the inhuman pressure cooker that is the conference's jobs pit, where dreams and dignity go to die.  Those less fortunate are rueing their fate, wondering if they will get a chance.  If all they want is a job, they need not worry, because another, informal and less public job market will be opening up around May.  You won't find many ads in the Chronicle of Higher Education for these jobs, but trust me, they're out there.

Here's the deal: at the end of the school year, department chairs have to scramble to fill all the slots in their introductory level classes in the Fall. Because of hiring freezes and tenure lines that go unfilled, with each year the gap between class sessions that need to be taught and the number of faculty on hand grows more severe. However, department chairs can safely rely upon the large reserve army of unemployed academics to take low paying adjunct work at the last minute. They never have to look far. Just as a contractor knows the corners where the day laborers wait and can be hired for low wages, department heads have a steady supply of newhomegrown MAs and PhDs who need work and are willing to teach classes for peanuts and without benefits.

The key to the informal job market is to be at the right place at the right time. Most department chairs want to put as little work as possible into finding the warm bodies necessary to fill in the classroom gaps. In the past I have witnessed patently incompetent people get jobs simply because of desperation on the part of department chairs. These incompetents then managed to retain their jobs because it was just too much bother to replace them with someone who knew what they were doing. The quality of education received by the students very rarely factors into the equation. Even worse, the naked exploitation of a captive labor force making poverty-line wages never, ever seems to make those doing the hiring lose any sleep.

As the formal job market gets worse with each passing year, the informal market will only get bigger. The math is pretty simple, actually: tenure track positions keep getting scarcer, but enrollments are still high. Until we shine a light on the informal market and force the same "accountability" on university administrators that's being forced on faculty, in no time at all the "formal" market will be a thing of the past.