Every time I try to read a post by somebody who has been unsuccessful on the academic job market, I encounter in it something so egregiously offensive to myself and to everybody I know that any solidarity or compassion I might feel towards its author simply evaporates. Here is the most recent example from such a post:
Higher education is like the mafia: I was only able to get the adjunct gig because the dean had met one of my mentors, and so I had to say, “So-n-So sent me.” . . . I’d like to see a study done about the correlation of inflated grades as they correspond to the teachers who give them, particularly when it pertains to people who get interviews or even achieving tenure.
I’ve seen many of such posts and one thing that is consistently missing from them is an acknowledgment that their authors might have some tiny little share of responsibility to bear for not finding employment. It’s always bad academia, bad employers, bad colleagues, bad friends, bad family members, bad world, bad universe, bad historical moment – and one completely perfect sufferer caught in the midst who is denied work because everybody is jealous of so much perfection. It would be very refreshing to see at least one of such sufferers acknowledge that 2% of responsibility for their failed job searches rests with them. Or if 2% is too much, then 0,2%. Or 0,02%. Or something.
When I was on the job market, I got many rejections from places where I would have liked to work. And by many I mean MANY because I applied absolutely everywhere. Two of the rejections were due to very clear and obvious corruption where positions were given to “relatives and friends.” These relatives and friends have since then been kicked out of their jobs which was to be expected given their complete lack of requisite skills. One rejection was due to the intense hatred that somebody on the hiring committee conceived towards me for no reason I could fathom. One more rejection was due to a horrible conflict between the members of the hiring committee that made them incapable of concentrating on interviewees. Every single other rejection, however, was on me.
Oh, all the ways I fucked up. The worst one was forgetting the name of the institution I was interviewing with and not being able to name a single writer I discuss in my dissertation. This happened during the interview with the place that was my number one preference by far. There were less embarrassing but still painful fuckups. Like the time when I was asked what my approach was to teaching at a 4-year Liberal Arts college and I had no idea what the question even meant. And made it very clear I had no idea what it meant.
I was talking recently to an older colleague who said that hiring a tenure-track person for a smallish department was an extremely important decision next only in weight to choosing a life partner. “You will probably get to spend the next thirty years working very closely with this person,” my colleague said. “So it is crucial you can get along.”
And ask yourself this: would you want to work for those proverbial 30 years alongside someone who is sitting in front of you during a job interview convinced that the only reason you ever got hired or promoted or tenured is because you inflate grades / kiss ass / are connected / know the right people / sleep around / give bribes, etc.? Would you want to give a chance to somebody who denied you a similar consideration before even meeting you? Somebody who placed you within the ranks of the corrupt and the unprofessional just because you happen to have your job?
We only have one life to live. One single opportunity. You can spend it being disappointed with the universe for not making your life what you want it to be or you could work on the only area of existence that is completely within your control: yourself. The belief that “academia sucks” is a very valid belief to hold and you are perfectly entitled to it. However, it also guarantees that you will not get a (tolerable) job in said sucky academia. I know, for instance, that sales suck dick something fierce. Which is why I’m not looking for employment in sales. But if I had to do that, I would begin by learning to love sales and everything that had to do with it. Applying for jobs before that would be a complete and total waste of time.
I believe that the best thing a blogger can do to gain insight into their professional future is to read his or her own posts on the job search and ask him or herself: would I want to work with this person every day for the next 30 years?
P.S. I’m teaching 5 days a week in the 37th week of a high-risk pregnancy. I’m spending as much time at work as I do at the hospital and as I do traveling between the two. This means I’m in no mood for any drama-queenish crap from people who are abused by me having opinions. Please do me the kindness of keeping all that away from my blog. If you write a response, I absolutely promise not to come by, not to link back, and not to comment in any way.
Clarissa's Blog 
I know, for instance, that sales suck dick something fierce.(Clarissa)
Some days you just put a smile on my face. Fortunately I have known some great sales people through the years, lol. 😉
Your post was spot on! 🙂
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Oh, I’m not anti-sales. Some of my closest friends are in sales. 🙂 🙂
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Since you are in the 37th week of a high-risk pregnancy and teaching 5 days a week, it seriously is not my intention to bring vitriol to your blog, so please know that my question is sincere and not reactionary: did you read my post or did you skim? Because if you skimmed, I’d get why you think you think what you do about my post, and, given your responsibilities, I’d get why you skimmed (I wrote 4000 words as a cathartic process on a creative writing blog to which a group of us contribute). But if you actually read it, I am somewhat surprised that this (your response above) is all you took away from it. Especially since I totally agree: getting hired in a small dept is essentially a lifetime commitment. Kinda like the mafia. So y’all better like and trust each other, or it will just end up with someone getting strangled after a car crash (like Chris). You can’t hear my tone of voice, but I assure you that last sentence is meant light-heartedly as a joke. And, in fact, my metaphor about academia being like The Sopranos is meant as dark humor. I see (what I consider funny) similarities between the the process it took to get hired as an adjunct and the show.
Also, please know I don’t begrudge anyone for knowing how to play the game better than me. I am a gamer, so it’s my nature to reflect on the moves I took to lose a game. So I don’t begrudge anyone for knowing how to play better than me. I admire better players and try to emulate. It does depress me that, with my publications and competitive fellowships, my CV doesn’t speak for itself. But that’s me being a better student than a person ready to be a colleague. It’s obvious that I don’t know how to play the (job application) game, and that’s my fault (I didn’t have a chance to take my university’s job prep class before my husband had to move across the country for his own Ph.D. program–it was my choice to not live apart from him for another 6 months while I was in my own high risk pregnancy and now I am paying for it). I think Dr. Karen from The Professor Is In would also say that my advisors failed me (I told them I was moving, but I asked how important that job prep class was and no one said it was worth staying for–I would disagree today). Plus, I am totally culpable for keeping my job search limited to a certain geographic location. I am operating under no delusion. I brought a lot of this on myself.
But my students in the spring…I did not bring all their hatred on myself. And I feel convinced that if I had just inflated their grades on the first go (and not have them revise and resubmit), the semester would’ve gone differently. But only 2 students had thesis statements in their papers! 2 out 20, and we spent 3 two-hour class periods creating and developing them. I put it on the assignment sheet. I had 20minute individual conferences with each student where I made sure each student had a preliminary one before they left. I worked with some students via email. 2 out of 20. That had never happened before. I didn’t feel good just arbitrarily inflating their grades because I valued them understanding the importance of a thesis statement for their subsequent essays more than them liking me. Hence, the revise and resubmit process. It was a calculated risk that failed miserably. I also went over the problems and confessed what I considered my possible mistakes in painstakingly honest detail and turned over my syllabus, assignments, email exchanges, with the head of the dept, the dean, and a professor who teaches that class a lot: they all agreed that the group was unnecessarily malicious. I lost them after that first essay. I honestly, desperately, wanted to know what I could do to improve and avoid that from ever happening again. I was told that THAT just happens sometimes. Especially in the humanities of a technological university. The fact that I have been absolved of a crime doesn’t make me feel better. Because if I am a good teacher, would that really happen to me? The hurtful thing is that it could haunt me and negatively impact my chances at a TT job , just when I am learning how to play the game finally. Not to mention: why would they rehire an adjunct who can’t stay invisible? I am just an outsider. I am not family (that’s me trying to be funny again).
My blog post was a creative writing exercise in catharsis because I am still hurting from the bad adjunct semester and I have allowed it to influence the way I feel about what I thought was my dream job. I have to evaluate what I ultimately want, so, yeah I have re-read my blog post a lot to try to process the pain. Before being an adjunct, I thought being in academia was what I wanted to do. Now I don’t know. I have learned that the campus culture has a lot more to do with my happiness than I previously knew. And I think it’s okay to use the blog as a way to figure that out. I didn’t invade your blog, btw. You pinged me. So I really hope this doesn’t upset you.I honestly mean no disrespect by responding. But it felt like a misunderstanding of my tone happened. If you still hate my guts, let me know. Maybe I’ll start an anti-fan club.
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” so please know that my question is sincere and not reactionary: did you read my post or did you skim? Because if you skimmed, I’d get why you think you think what you do about my post, and, given your responsibilities, I’d get why you skimmed”
– And you are still doing the same thing. 🙂 The reader is bad, she did not read carefully enough, etc.
“If you still hate my guts, let me know.”
– I really have no idea who you are. I was responding to a text.
A general question to everybody: what is it with people who insist that engaging with their writing and ideas is indicative of some intense personal feelings towards them? Just last week, I addressed a complete stranger’s post and she immediately plunged into an investigation of why I supposedly hate her. Is it some sort of a superiority complex where people can’t believe anybody can genuinely disagree with them and hence any disagreement has to have personal reasons??
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Ah, because generally that is how most people engage with other people’s ideas. As we previously noted, people appraise reviews on Amazon on the basis of whether these accord with their values. The quality of the review isn’t considered as important.
America is a very, very emotional society. Spielberg and Hollywood epitomize this. Stories are supposed to be uplifting and to have a moral message — nothing grainy, artsy or dark.
Culturally, people find it unreasonable to be asked to move beyond their emotions.
But also this inability to read something in a light other than “how does this serve me or fail to serve me” has a feedback loop, so that people are so used to getting biased responses that they naturally defend against them.
In all, people are behaving very naturally because they don’t have any idea that it is necessary to move beyond what feels natural, to develop higher culture.
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“America is a very, very emotional society. ”
– I think this is because people here are lonely and have no idea how to develop emotional connections with others. So they invest casual anonymous contacts online with some sort of a profound emotional significance. It really creeps me out, though, when people respond with “Why do you hate me so much?” when I quote their posts. I don’t even hate my former mother-in-law (who is actually a really evil person). How could I hate a completely anonymous blogger whose post I found by accident???
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I see. Yes,it seems they do not know how to communicate very well, without getting upset or going on the attack. I mean, it would have been possible for the person commenting on my short video on Irigaray to say, “I don’t really understand French philosophy or see much use for it. I have the suspicion it may be antiscientific, but I’m not sure why I feel that way. Something about it bothers me.”
Instead, I am presented with ideas I know to be false, such as that I glide through life, or that the writing is “drivel”. I am absolutely certain that both statements are as false as can be.
If people want to break out of their loneliness, they could try speaking in a normal, civil way, just for a start.
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Drivel in online speak means “anything I’m top stupid to understand”. And trolling means “anything that doesn’t please me.” And bullying means “anything that vaguely upsets me.” 🙂
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Yes, I’ve figured that out about drivel. People can fail to understand something and then they communicate to you that they feel threatened by the ideas they can’t immediately grasp. That’s not a scientific attitude, or even a civilized one.
What is more problematic is that people feel the need to cut their chances of social interaction by expressing nastiness. I can understand what they are telling me, that they do not understand what I am saying and that they feel that perhaps my life is easy because I can understand things that escape them, but why do they need to also shoot themselves in the foot, by proving they are dislikable? It seems to be going too far.
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A general question to everybody: what is it with people who insist that engaging with their writing and ideas is indicative of some intense personal feelings towards them? Just last week, I addressed a complete stranger’s post and she immediately plunged into an investigation of why I supposedly hate her. Is it some sort of a superiority complex where people can’t believe anybody can genuinely disagree with them and hence any disagreement has to have personal reasons??
1. Some people identify intensely and emotionally with their ideas. This isn’t limited to academics and activists. It’s absolutely hilarious to hear a Descartian sob about rationality, “Cogito ergo sum!”
2a. That particular post to which you responded to now was not about any particular idea. It is a long series of unfortunate events united by a metaphor.
2b. Also, you used the words,”egregiously offensive to myself and to everybody I know” to describe this post, which the post writer took as you having an emotional reaction to her emotional reaction.
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There is a huge difference between hating what one has to say and hating them as a person. The problem that I keep encountering is that when I write something like: “I really hate this statement” people hear it as “I hate you.”
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oooooooooooooooooooo
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“We only have one life to live. One single opportunity. You can spend it being disappointed with the universe for not making your life what you want it to be or you could work on the only area of existence that is completely within your control: yourself.”
You know, this is just the perfect piece of advice. And it’s helping me stop feeling sorry for myself and start working on those assignments I’d deferred until recently. Thanks!
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Or as Nietzsche said, life is far from ideal, even on human terms, not to mention it is not divine.
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I know you will do great on these assignments! And imagine the relief when they are finally done.
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I disagree with the “achieving tenure” bit, but in my own department (which I like!), we are told explicitly at the start that our rehires are indeed dependent 100% on our evaluations. Today I got THE MOST irate email from THE PISSIEST student about how my class is going to be a complete waste of his time because he already knows “perfectly well” how to write a paper, and I am going to try my damndest to engage this kid and get him to like my class, but if he doesn’t, you best be sure he will take it out on my eval, and that will have serious consequences for me. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t feeling a little bit held hostage by this little f*cker. I actually find that as soon as you are full-time and have any research responsibilities whatsoever, your evals start getting treated with the grain of salt they deserve. FWIW, my evals are spectacular, and I am a great teacher and I am not afraid to say so. I have also been pretty clear (I think) in saying that I am definitely responsible for my spectacular failures on the job market, but that my decimated field–and the misleading advice I was given by people I had no reason not to trust–also has something to do with it.
That said, please take care! Keep that blood pressure down, and I hope that your family leave kicks in soon so that you can treat yourself for the final days of your pregnancy, and here is wishing you a wonderful and heathy birth, and the baby a wonderful entrance to life!
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Thank you! The BP is good but my legs are the scariest legs in the world due to PUPPPS. Today, I caught a student staring at them and becoming deathly pale with terror. Well, at least this might teach him to stare at profs’ legs in class!
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I shaved my own legs this morning because I was scared to be Professor Stubble on the first day of class–but it is so true; their fault for staring at ’em! Good luck, I’ll be thinking about you and your health, and the baby!
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Oh, Rebecca, I had spine surgery in May…and am currently not allowed to bend or twist. I have not been able to shave my legs (probably the first time I’ve gone more than a day or so in 40-some years). It’s a very weird feeling.
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I can’t shave mine because the skin is so sensitive, it starts gushing blood.
Ok, I will stop with the naturalistic details now.
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Clarissa, on an unrelated note, how are you handling maternity leave? Do you get some teaching release? Is there a university-wide policy or did you have to negotiate your case individually with department chair/dean or similar? Sorry if you posted on this before. My Uni has no policy for faculty and it’s basically left to individual departments to work it out.
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We are a state university, so we are entitled to 12 weeks maternity leave (8 weeks paid and 4 unpaid) under FMLA. The only problem is that the leave starts on the due date and not a day later. But at least there is a leave, so I’m happy. I’m hoping not to have to go back to work until January.
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The point with these posts against the meritocracy is that one is told, from many quarters, that not getting a job is 100% one’s fault. And when anything goes wrong of any kind, people do not say neutral things like sorry that did not work out; they say, what did you do to deserve that? Come clean! Admit where you screwed up! That is what you replicate with this kind of post — imagining that people are not already OD’d on the discourse of “personal responsibility” and all the other rot.
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Nothing is easier than not to listen to what you don’t want to hear and to surround yourself with those who will repeat mechanically and indifferently how sorry they are.
Only today I rejected two link backs from posts that were trying to say something negative about me. What can be easier than that?
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If you want to know what it takes to be employed, ask the employers, not the employees.
Why? Easy. If you are a bad employee, you are probably jobless or never had a job for very long. No reason to take tips from someone who sucks at it from the beginning. If you are a good employee you have likely been employed with the same employer for quite some time and have no idea anymore what it takes on the job market. Needs change and what people where looking for ten years ago probably isn’t up to speed anymore.
A good employer however, given a base size of course, will be employing all the time. There will always be a reason to hunt for new employees at a reasonable large company (retirement, expansion, etc…). So they will not only have a lot of experience reading CVs, but also recent experience.
Doesn’t mean that you should take their words without a grain of salt, naturally. Employers kind of have a reason to have you sell yourself short 😉
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I agree. There are some very offensive posts out there in the blogosphere from unsuccessful job seekers. Since I’ve been on hiring committees, I will acknowledge that lots of factors go in to making a hire. And when we get well over a 100 applicants for one position, we do indeed cut plenty of candidates who are strong–but just didn’t quite “fit” as well as another candidate.
However, on the flip side, I do want to say that just about everyone from my institution has landed tenure track positions. (In English literature; some fields, like philosophy are much more brutal.) It took a few years and tenacity but generally people that I personally know, are indeed finding work. But there is a small handful of people I know that haven’t found work and, inevitably, those are people who were geographically restricted: people who want to live near their partnesr or people who refuse to live in the South or Midwest, or people who only want to live in a major city etc etc. All of these people have perfectly legitimate reasons for being geographically bound but the fact remains that they applied to comparatively few jobs. On the other hand, people who found work, like me or my other classmates, applied to many many many jobs in all areas of the country.
So when people, who refuse to move for the job, get bitter and snarky to me who moved quite far for my job, I get very very very annoyed. If you want a job in academia, you have to move. And very often you have to move to a place you never pictured living. It’s just the reality of the situation. And pitching a fit because you want a tenure track job with the university up the street is immature.
And a big caveat at the end of this…….I’m sure there are people who are doing everything right and applying to every job and still not finding work. I do understand that. I’m just speaking of the situation that I’m familiar with…
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A very dear friend of mine was one of such geographically bound candidates who could only look for jobs in a very small area. It took him several years but he has found an amazing TT position this year.
It makes me very happy to hear such stories and to share them. 🙂
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That’s great news!!! And again, I have no issue for people who are geographically bound. I have an issue with people who apply for very academic jobs and then are shocked and angry when they don’t get them. Like you, I applied everywhere. Literally, I applied to hundreds of jobs. (It took me about 3 years to find a job.) And everyone I know who found work also applied to many many jobs. So I just resent the implication that people who have found tenure track work are somehow corrupt. Just about everyone I know in a tenure track job worked very very very hard to get it.
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“So I just resent the implication that people who have found tenure track work are somehow corrupt. Just about everyone I know in a tenure track job worked very very very hard to get it.”
– This is exactly how I feel!
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ETA: “very FEW academic jobs.” Not “very academic jobs.” 😉
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