Surviving the Academic Job Market

I've been lucky enough to have been off the job market for the last several years, but the debut of each year's MLA job list somehow still produces a thrill of anxiety, like the sound of the alarm clock that woke me up for school as a child. I spent 5 years "on the market," and I've watched many of the people I care about go multiple rounds with the academic beast. As a result, when the list comes out I feel bad to be part of a profession that makes its promising new members suffer through a process whose mechanisms are often mysterious and whose rewards often seem to be doled out at random. The systemic problems with the academic job market are myriad and well worth our concern, but the larger questions of how to "fix" the market don't offer much to the individuals who are trying to find academic jobs at present. So, for what it's worth, I've assembled here a few pieces of advice, based on my experience searching for jobs, talking to people searching for jobs, and participating on search committees, for surviving the process as it currently exists.

Remember that it's not personal. Not getting a request for more materials, or not getting an interview, always feels like a gut-punch, but the fact is that, a lot of the time, the reasons search committees don't pursue specific applications have little to do with the worth of the candidate. I have seen job applications thrown out for a lot of reasons, and only rarely has the reason been that the committee members felt the work was sub-par. Sometimes, people are thrown out because they are ABD and there's already a large pool of candidates with a degree in-hand. Sometimes, applications get tossed simply because the work of the candidate is too close to the work of someone already working the department. I've also seen candidates passed over because the work was too different from what was being done in the department (as in, "This person is too theoretical for this department"). On the more sinister side, I've seen applications thrown out because of ideological commitments and petty internal politics. As a graduate student serving on a search committee, I saw (what I thought was) a promising application scrapped with only the comment, "Ugh, a real formalist!" In that same search, I saw Committee Member A argue (successfully) against the candidate preferred by Committee Member B simply because Committee Member B had successfully argued against the candidate preferred by Committee Member A. This isn't to say that all search committees are insane: but even healthy search committees generally find themselves with more qualified, interesting candidates than they do opportunities to interview them, and so, even in well-meaning, self-aware search committees decisions get made not so much based on the individual worth of the candidate, but for more nebulous reasons of "fit." Everyone who goes on the job market gets more rejections than interviews, and so, while rejections are never easy to take (particularly when that school you'd give your right index finger to work at doesn't even ask to see your writing sample), it's important to remember that rejections have a lot more to do with the state of the job market than they do with your worth as an academic. Given that fact, it's important that you...

Focus on what you can control; try to ignore what you can't. This bit of advice applies to all areas of life, but I think it's particularly tricky on the job market, where the line between what can be controlled and what can't sometimes seems a little blurry. It's easy to get drawn into trying to anticipate what a search committee is looking for, whether at the application stage or the interview stage. I've seen people work themselves into fits trying to personalize job letters for specific schools, trying to word everything just right to please this member of the department or to avoid pissing off that other member. But the fact is that, even if you know who is in the department, you don't know (at least at the application stage) who is on the committee. You also usually don't know the internal politics of the situation, which, as I mentioned above, can have an unfortunate impact on the choices that get made. You cannot read minds, and you cannot be all things to all people. What you can do is put together application materials that present the main ideas of your project clearly, that explain why these ideas are interesting, and that demonstrate your commitment to your classroom. In other words, to adapt a phrase from Jersey Shore, you do you, and search committees do them. In the job market process, the only thing you have control over is your work and your presentation of that work, so focus on doing that well, and, as much as possible, try to avoid imagining what the search committees can be thinking. That way madness lies.

Have a plan B. Everything I've just said points to one of the biggest problems with the academic job market for those who are suffering through it: candidates have very little control over their fates. To a large extent, I think maintaining some measure of sanity on the academic job market requires finding ways to get a bit more control over your own future. And the more I think about it, I believe one of the best ways to do this is to actively search out other possible career paths that would make you happy. On a campus visit my second year on the market (for a job I did not get), I was exchanging job market stories with a junior faculty member, and he told me about how close he'd come simply to leaving the academic game altogether. After a few years of searching without a tenure-track offer, he'd made up his mind: if he didn't get a job on the next cycle, he was going to become a substance abuse counselor. Of course, in the next cycle, he got his job, but what struck me about his story was how much more relaxed he said he'd felt that last year on the market. It wasn't just that he'd decided, "It's this year or nothing"--that, I think, would have been more anxiety-producing that anything else, since it would have put all the eggs in one basket and then set that basket on explosives set to a timer. Instead, he'd come up with a concrete, alternate career path, and started looking into what it would take to follow that career path, even while he was continuing his search for academic jobs. One of the most disempowering aspects of the academic job search is the extent to which we feel trapped by it. Our fates are held hostage to a year-long search process during which we have no control over what the "gate keepers" of the profession will do, and for a lot of people on the market, it feels like there's no choice--or at least no good choice--but to subject ourselves to this mysterious machine. But the fact is that we are all talented individuals capable of doing many different kinds of jobs with our academic training: we shouldn't have to be held hostage to the dehumanizing process of the academic job search. Thinking about what else you can do--and what else you'd want to do--is a good way to take back some measure of control because it allows you to decide when enough is enough. Looking into alternate career paths does not mean giving up your dreams of being a college professor: it's simply a way (1) to remind yourself that you have worth regardless of whether the academic job market recognizes it, (2) to give yourself options in a situation where choice is power. The ability to choose to go another round on the job market, rather than feeling forced to do so, makes a big difference for your mental and emotional well-being. It also, I think, makes a big difference to your self-presentation, which can sometimes improve your chances on the academic job market.

The World's End

This post has absolutely nothing to do with academic issues; but it's my blog, and I'll digress if I want to...

My spouse and I recently went to see Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's most recent film, The World's End. Having been fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (the swan kills me even in memory), we were looking forward to another successful parody film. What I liked best about the first two was that they managed at once to be send-ups of a genre (horror film and cop movie, respectively) while also being rather successful examples of the genre. This has always been the hallmark of good parody to me. The World's End wasn't quite the same kind of thing, however. It might be called a parody of a sci-fi film, but, particularly given the similarities between The World's End and Shaun of the Dead, that seems like a stretch. The film also wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as the previous two. Somehow, however, I walked away from The World's End liking it the best of all three.

My musings on the film might have ended there, were in not for the fact that, the day after I saw the movie, Simon Pegg tweeted this essay by A. D. Jameson that provides a fairly involved and interesting interpretation of The World's End. The link he makes between the film and the Medieval quest narrative in many ways solved the generic confusion I felt after the movie, and his analysis of the references within The World's End to the previous films makes me think that, if the movie is a parody of anything, it's a parody of the other two films. But what most struck me in Jameson's reading was his analysis of the main character:

King begins the film a tragic character, his many flaws all apparent. Only he recalls the past as glorious. Everyone else is glad to have left it behind, and now thinks him mad—a loser unable to function in the world of 2013. King’s biggest mistake, his error, is that he never moved on, never shaped up, never got with the program—he never grew up. As such, he’s treated like a child—as he later cries, complaining about the rehab center, “They told me when to go to bed!”

The message would appear simple: This is going to be a film about learning to mature. “You can’t live in the past, Gary King!”

But what if it turns that out one can? What happens if we take Gary King seriously?

Jameson proceeds to do just this--to take Gary King seriously--and in doing so he gets at what I now realize was for me the central attraction of the film: for once, the fuck-up doesn't have to either (1) "grow up" or (2) die.

I have always liked main characters who are a little bit (sometimes a lot) bad--who are subversive in some way, unwilling to "behave" according to rules determined more by social forces than common sense or necessity. (This is probably why I've spent a good part of my academic career on Milton's Satan.) But the consistent trajectory of such characters in our culture's narratives leads them either to be destroyed by their own destruction (think Cool Hand Luke, or Milton's Satan), or to be domesticated, tamed, and reformed into someone capable of maneuvering within a pre-existing framework (think Rebel Without a Cause, SLC Punk, or, as Jameson points out, Shaun of the Dead). Both options convey the same message: deviance will not be tolerated. But in some ways the second--the reform narrative--is worse because it tends to relegate rebellion to the realm of youthful exhuberance, a phase that inevitably we all have to grow out of to take our place in a world made by others--a place within what The World's End calls "the Network." The hero can live, but rebellion must die.

There's a part of me that prefers rebels without causes. It's not that I have anything against causes: quite the contrary. But to an extent the channeling of rebellious energy into a cause is just a remaking of rebellion into palatable form. We can accept the desire to fuck shit up only if there's ultimately a goal, the promise of a new order that will arise out of ashes of the destruction. This requirement that we place on rebellion to an extent echoes the tired refrain of Occupy critics. All this youthful energy is fine and well, but where's the message?, talking heads whined: what are their goals? Leaving the side the fact that the Occupy movement did in fact have a message that the media mostly ignored, the specious demand that Occupy articulate a specific, unified message was just a way to invalidate the anger. Being pissed off that the world sucks, apparently, isn't okay: you're only be allowed to be angry about it if you have a plan to fix it. We seem incapable as a society of imagining the possibility that the appropriate response to a problem might simply to burn everything to the ground, and it seems to me that this refusal to consider such a thing even possible grows more out of fear than reason.

Which brings me to the other, closely related related feature of The World's End that I liked so much. The apocalypse in the film isn't presented, as it is almost universally in films, as the worst thing ever. Things are harder now, Andy Knightley tells us at the end, but it's really not so bad. Most of us live in fear of order collapsing: both, I think, for the very real reason that the sudden demise of the structures that govern our world would likely cause immediate physical peril--how do we feed ourselves if the world goes dark in winter?--and for the reason that the structures by which we make sense of our lives would cease to exist. I am a college professor, and have always wanted to be: what happens to me when "college professor" isn't a thing any more? There's something therefore brave in the willingness to look at the prospect of total chaos, shrug, and say, "whatever--it's not so bad." In The World's End, the world's end is a comedy, not a tragedy. And the fuck-up hero gets to keep on being a fuck-up, only now in a world where that just doesn't matter. The rules end when the Network collapses, and suddenly what looked like a weakness in Gary--his utter refusal to conform to the norms of the "grown-up" world and his childish desire to lead a band of pseudo-knights--is a strength. He's not afraid to let the world burn for the right to keep being a fuck-up, and somehow, after it burns, being a fuck-up just isn't the problem is used to be. And the world keeps turning.

None of this is to say that I think it's a good idea to live like Gary King (or Cool Hand Luke, or Milton's Satan), or that this is what the film advocates. It's a film: I don't think it's advocating anything. But I think part of the charm of the movie for me is the way it stands our fear of rule-breaking on its head. We think that, if rebellion or aimless antagonism towards social boundaries goes unchecked, the world will descend into chaos. The World's End entertains exactly that notion, but it shows us an end-result where the chaos isn't the horror show we all think it will be. It asks us to look at the fear of losing order--of losing control--that is so pervasive in our culture (as evidenced by the recent popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives) and laugh at it.