lifealive

As I thought was evident in my original post (but I guess not, and I should have taken more time to explain), this went beyond simply putting a bumper sticker on a car and admitting that you voted for a Republican. I've known plenty of more conservative grad students; few of them derailed discussions in class to make somewhat tasteless comparisons between Native Americans and the "natives" of Benghazi, or sent messages to the graduate student listserv gloating about election returns in certain districts. Really, no one cares about your political views if you're not aggressive about them. Like I said, the most brilliant person I know is a die-hard free market capitalist, and he's done just fine. I also know other people who quietly hold less popular views, and they've also gone through graduate school without incident. I do think that respecting the culture of an institution is important; for instance, I wouldn't take a job at an evangelical university and then advertise my atheistic tendencies to other professors and students. About not all political views being equal--yeah. I'm sorry, but if your party politics are premised on exclusionary practices or exploiting fears and insecurities about difference and diversity, then no, that's not okay. Ever. I worked for a public university; part of our mission is to educate all qualified residents. When a grad student holds these views about the very students we're there to educate (Muslims, Native Americans, etc.), it's not alright, and it doesn't get to fall under the umbrella of "respecting political difference." That's all I meant. I didn't mean to imply that the OP was this kind of person, or that their concerns fell in the same camp, but hey, you never know. I just decided to share an anecdote as a kind of cautionary tale.

No, it has nothing to do with the job market and everything to do with the trolling. Trolling sets me off any day of the week, especially when that trolling blames the humanities' lack of funding on its failure to accommodate a particular political agenda. But anyway, sorry for the snark. I'll curb it from now on.

It was a fair effort at trolling, but luckily it didn't go anywhere. 5/10 for mentioning a theorist that no one's discussed since the 1990s; 6/10 for invoking political relativism as something that people in the academy should aspire to (in a seminar no less); 7/10 for passive-aggressive, MRA-style "I'm too cool to really be invested in this discussion" rhetoric; 4/10 for transparently invoking the "I'm not a _____, but ...." 3/10 for accidentally flashing your hateboner for all things literary "politics" on a literary study message board; 2/10 for backpedaling on the parenthetical thing and getting reamed in the process.

Thank you for schooling me in my own job market, rising_star. You're right--my failure to get a TT job (which, by the way, does not make me unusual, and I came quite close for a few different jobs this year) is because I lack the ability to adequately market myself for different kinds of jobs. I lack the ability to see that a 4/4 load at a comprehensive college will require teaching, and therefore I put my research letter forward, which emphasizes nothing but my postdoctoral research, forthcoming book, and published articles. For research jobs, I talk endlessly about how I love teaching composition, emphasizing the 700 students and 14 classes I designed and taught solo during graduate school and after. I have also never consulted with a JPO, an advisor, an external recommender, other job-seekers from my own institution who have jobs, other postdocs, the professors at SLACs (who, by the way, have been working long enough now that they are the ones making hiring and T&P decisions, not the young "assistant professors" that you seem to think they are), the CHE forums, or TGC. But you, wow. You have really helped me here. Here I was, totally screwing up by barging into comprehensive SLACs, talking all about my research. I had no idea about how the job market worked until you came along, enlightening me about how things are done in social sciences. Your advice would have worked well in 2005. As for right now--well, as fancypants09 has pointed out, you've done nothing here but argue in bad faith or draw upon a well of bad information that perhaps works in your discipline, but not ours. And your potshot at my employment status is in EXTREMELY poor taste, coming from a mod. In this thread you have done nothing but put people down. You mischaracterized fancypants09's argument in ridiculous ways, and now you're arguing that I am unemployed because I deserve to be, while you have a job because you deserve to have one. Congratulations for demonstrating so well what many of us in this thread have been arguing. But really, you're a lousy representative of TGC's mod team. And I also hope that other job seekers don't take your advice, i.e. apply for a 3/3 load at a SLAC and assume that it's all teaching, all the time. Believe me, no one, and I mean no one, is getting a 3/3 these days without research, and I would not have even been interviewed at 3/3 SLACs without research. Ignore at your own peril.

Forgive me for not believing you.

Are your friends representative of all hires out there? Are they even in English? I never said that teaching completely unimportant for getting hired at certain SLACs. Only that the common knowledge--that SLACs are all about teaching, except for the very top ones--no longer holds true in many searches. To repeat: the job market is competitive enough that many schools that were previously considered "teaching oriented" are now looking for different candidates. And much of it is coming from the ground up: promising candidates get hired by SLACs, they turn around and chair search committees a few years later and look to hire similarly promising candidates. They also WANT to spend their time doing research and push for an increase in sabbaticals, or use the promise of sabbaticals to recruit other candidates. Of course this is #notallslacs--never did I say it was. This isn't exactly news. Why you keep fighting it, I don't know. Then be the change you want to see in the forums and start new threads. But the rest of us have been having a conversation. No one said you had to read it. It's the internet, get over it. Except that no one said that the people who make lateral moves or move from NTT to TT or hold multiple positions at once are the people at fault here. Literally no one. Other than strawmanning your way through this "circle jerk," do you have anything else to offer? Okay.

Nice troll bait. But not all political views are created equal. And if you'd actually included the rest of my passage, you'd have had to confront the fact that this person was obnoxious and aggressive about his views, which turned people off. And no, we did not sit around talking about your hero Romney in the same way he talked about Obama. We had more important things to do, like talking about what we'd actually read that day, for class.

I don't know if I fully understand the point about identity politics. As to your point about servility: I think appropriate deference is part of it. I also think that academia has an obsession with people who look like they don't work very hard (or work very hard at the wrong things, i.e. teaching or landing a job) or want something too badly. Not to be too tongue-in-cheek, but it harks back to an old-boy system of wealth and privilege where the sons of the WASPy upper class simply told their school masters what Ivy League school they wanted to attend, and it was done. The privileged need not break a sweat about their future because the future is always a sure bet. It's that kind of attitude that lives on even today, totally at odds with our current economic system and needs. Even The Professor Is In lays down a bunch of crap about "not appearing too enthusiastic" about the job you're applying for. The reasoning, of course, is that a candidate who wants a job really badly doesn't have better options. And of course we don't want someone who doesn't have better options; we want someone who is currently being wooed by every university in the English-speaking world, even if the current job market makes such a prospect absolutely ludicrous. The job candidates that universities want to hire will OF COURSE have multiple options. Because other institutions will naturally recognize their genius. And that is what makes them valuable. Apparently academics are incapable of making decisions about a candidate's merits based on their writing sample or some other thing like that. Take the UC-Riverside case of two years ago. UC-Riverside gave its MLA interviewees five days' notice before the MLA convention even began. This caused a huge uproar; it meant that some candidates might find themselves scrambling to make hotel and flight reservations five days before the convention. And given the cost of such accommodations and the meager pay of most grad students and adjuncts, that could mean two months' salary. But of course, if you get an interview at MLA--even just ONE interview--you have to go. Why? Because if you don't go--if you tell the committee "gee, I can't afford to go, can we do this on Skype or in some other way?"--Oh my God, you have just shown your hand. You don't have any other interviews. No one else thinks you're worth the time of day, so neither will the committee. Again, in our discipline, our value is determined by all the other institutions that quietly confer our status. Worse, if you don't have money to go to MLA, then you don't have a department with enough clout to pay for MLA. And everyone knows then you are Not To Be Hired. This all goes beyond dressing for the job you want. It's more like buying a house in the neighborhood you someday want to be able to afford so you can get into the country club, even if doing so means taking out the worst mortgage ever. In fact, I think that MLA interviews are one of the most ludicrous ways that our discipline shows itself to be totally out-of-touch and seeking to ferret out which candidates are backed by invisible currencies of wealth and prestige and which are not. It's like a miserable test--if you can afford to go to MLA, then you must deserve to be there. So much for bootstraps--if you don't have enough invisible institutional wealth backing you, don't bother. "Self-made?" Don't apply. The list of such behaviors goes on and on. People are told not to teach at community college because you'll never wash off the taint. Yes, seriously. That's what certain gatekeepers think about actually working and teaching for a living--it is a "taint." Don't email/call a search committee to ask about the status of your application! Doing that shows that you're actually concerned about getting the job. Of course, a sought-after job seeker is one that would never be concerned about the status of their application. Be cool and unenthusiastic when corresponding with search committees or professors. Again, any kind of enthusiasm could make you look desperate. And on and on. I was never told to dumb myself down, though. I'm guessing that things are different at different institutions. At most of my interviews I had to prove I could operate at a higher level.

Oh, you'll be fine then. Now you've left me wondering who this guy is, though.

I agree with echo449 in that approach is going to matter here. I have seen people get burned in programs because of political disagreements--not because of politics, necessarily, but because they advertised those politics far and wide and were obnoxious/aggressive about them. (The best example that comes to mind is a guy who, during an election year, slapped a Republican bumper sticker on his car and actually spoke about "Obamacare" and "Obama's idiocy" in seminar. He got terrible grades from that professor and the next year was asked to leave the program. I don't know if one thing actually had to do with the other, but his political views were a topic of discussion among grad students and professors alike--everyone knew that he was a Republican and he didn't have a lot of fans.) I think that echo449 also brings up a compelling point--that much of what we do rests on Marxist theory. But this is just part of the issue. Espousing a neo-liberal view of the marketplace is very politically tricky in university settings, as so much of the current funding scarcity and job crunch has been driven by a devotion to free market capitalism. A lot of people might view you as out of touch with the current climate or actively working against efforts to unionize. Then again, if you're good, you might get away with it. I know a PhD who subscribes to the free market like it's a religion, and he gets support--but only because he's good. If your views are unpopular, you better be really freaking brilliant. Really.

This is just flat-out wrong. First of all, the job market has tightened to the point where small liberal arts colleges can and do command the best and most elite job applicants possible. That's not just the top 25 to 40 programs anymore; that's more like the top 100, maybe 150. It's why you get SLACs far outside of the Oberlin 50 looking for candidates who have a research profile. They might want people who can teach--sure, all schools say they do. But they mostly want people who look good to the outside. Even students at St. Mary's College and Wittenberg University are paying out the nose for an education. So again, the way to secure those investments is to shore up that institutional prestige. I actually interviewed at a SLAC in the top 150 this year, and they were interested in my teaching, sure. But I wouldn't have even gotten the interview if it hadn't been for my research profile/fancy postdoc. Second of all "teaching ability" and "teaching experience" have become increasingly subjective in this day and age. A lot of people get hired at SLACs with precious little teaching experience, or with just enough experience to prove that they can handle themselves in a classroom. When it comes to teaching, these days less is more. If you have taught just a few classes at the right institution, you'll be on the same footing with someone who's taught 10 sections of comp and 5 massive literature surveys. In fact, you might even have an advantage because your teaching portfolio is probably peppered with the articulate feedback of students who were happy to be in your class. You might have also had more freedom to design classes with trendy course themes rather than "functional writing 101" and "Introduction to the entire literary canon for non-majors." Trendy course themes translate well to SLACs. It is true that non-national SLACs and small teaching colleges put more emphasis on hiring candidates with teaching experience. An elite degree will not help you on that market. Unfortunately, though, many of those schools aren't hiring. They're getting by on adjunct labor, or they're asking their existing faculty to take on increasingly high course loads. They do make some hires, and that's where you can just hope to get lucky. But those schools have really been hurt by the economic crunch. ??? Huh? I've never said that the people who take these positions are doing anything wrong. I don't think fancypants09 has said that either. I don't know in what context you've misread this whole thing as moralizing against people who get admitted to multiple graduate programs. I'm saying that I think the structure of graduate and higher education culture--wherein people must accrue advantages through systems of prestige, not actual achievement--is a fucked-up model worth our attention. I personally don't care about the personal ethics of someone who plays graduate programs off one another, or even jobs off one another. Given the climate of academia, and the meager amount of money typically being negotiated, I think that you'd be stupid to not negotiate out of a sense of moral obligation. What I abhor is that our system actually celebrates such a thing, deliberately seeking out candidates simply because they've been "vetted" or "anointed" by another institution and holding fast to the belief that having a job means you deserve a job, and that failing to secure a job means that you don't deserve to work in academia ever. There is enough talent to go around that institutions don't need to hold positions while people finish postdocs. As fancypants09 pointed out, the working world doesn't operate along those lines. If you get a position at Goldman Sachs but want to try out another job at JP Morgan, Goldman says, "Enjoy JP Morgan; we've got other candidates lined up and work that needs to be done right now." That academia doesn't operate that way is indeed mystifying--and, as I've said in other places on this forum--only serves to devalue its purpose. If you've hired someone to teach at your institution but don't actually need them TO TEACH or physically be present--to the point that you can pawn the duties off on a grad student or adjunct--then that says volumes about how your institution perceives teaching. And since teaching is the lens through which the public understands our contribution most clearly, this attitude toward teaching--that it can be done by anyone--is harmful to us all. I'm surprised you don't see the issue. ETA: I agree with fancypants09 above that you're being willfully obtuse, rising_star. I really don't understand why you're attributing things to people that they clearly didn't say, or making ridiculous comparisons that make no sense. I don't know what your end game is here, or what your purpose was in derailing this discussion, but you should drop it because it sucks.

I apologize for misinterpreting the reason for the outrage of your original message. Yes, it is outrageous that a university would allow someone to defer for two years and use an adjunct (but more likely a VAP, considering the caliber of this type of institution) in their place. Quite simply, the "winner takes all" approach goes far in academia because academia looks to other institutions for validation. Being able to hire a professor who was sought-out enough to juggle multiple offers is a way to validate your department and to know for sure that you got someone good. Never mind the fact that there are tons of equally qualified people whose CVs are just sitting there. This "one who almost got away" has been rubber-stamp validated by other institutions, so they're the ones to shell out cash for, or to lure away with a hefty research budget. And that's the kind of thinking that's becoming the slow death of academia. Taken to its other extreme, it's precisely why adjuncts or unemployed academics can't get hired. They weren't rubber-stamp validated. No one thought they were good enough that particular year (even if they have publications or tons of teaching experience), so no other institution is going to stick its neck out either. Many of us have already experienced this kind of thinking in graduate admissions. These programs like to play it safe there too: If you're under 25 and come from a good school, you're a more attractive bet than someone who's older and started off at community college. Etc. It's insane, really. I was trying to explain today to someone outside of academia why your PhD is basically worthless about 2 years after it's been conferred. They didn't believe me and thought I was making the whole thing up. They were like, "That doesn't make any sense! Why would a PhD stop meaning anything simply because two years have gone by?" They don't understand that in our system, the only way you can make it is to have someone else validate you within a very narrow window of time. Failing to get that validation ripples outward, telling everyone at all the other institutions that you are Not To Be Hired. And as a side note, rising_star is wrong about SLACs wanting people with more teaching experience. SLACs are really the new R1s when it comes to hiring practices. They are looking to hire elite candidates regardless of what kind of teaching they're actually capable of doing. When parents are shelling out $60k for an education, they want professors with elite credentials. In fact, it's now a given that SLACs are notoriously not-picky about the candidate's research, either--unlike R1s. "Professor So-and-So got his PhD at Yale" is much more immediately compelling to parents than "Professor So-and-So got his PhD at Indiana but is published in American Literary History and has a book forthcoming on a topic you've never heard of." My advisor has basically told me that I have a better chance of getting hired at an R1 than a SLAC because an R1 is actually going to look at my research and my publications while a SLAC won't know one journal from the next and goes immediately for the name on the degree.

I didn't "jump all over" you, rising_star. I merely questioned why you were niggling over a rather minor point when the larger issue is that academic hiring practices replicate institutional privilege. I personally don't agree that taking a job is trampling over the prospects of another or cheating someone--it's more like cashing in on systems of privilege--but that's not really the bigger issue, is it. Changing the subject--i.e. emphasizing a poster's naivete and outrage over common hiring practices--is derailing, as far as I'm concerned. If you don't have anything constructive to contribute, then don't butt in at all. And now, rising_star, yes, I am jumping all over you. In case you were wondering.

Why does it matter, rising_star? Does fancypants09's naivete excuse the larger abuses of the academia labor market? In other words: what's your purpose here?

The academic market is generally like the economy at large: there will always be that top 1% that is immune to all recessions. https://chroniclevitae.com/news/929-academia-s-1-percent I actually know someone like the person you're describing--postdoc at an Ivy League school, job lined up afterwards at one of the top 15 universities in the country. That job is sitting empty right now. If it's any comfort, though, it doesn't require much teaching anyway, so I doubt that any adjuncts have been hired to take on the onerous 1-1 course load. Quite simply: it's an outrage because the person being touted as the "best person for the TT job" is one who has most likely accrued advantages throughout the years and is now sailing by on those privileges. The people sought out for these kinds of positions are generally the ones who came from the right schools, did the least amount of teaching, and were protected from the realities of academic labor at every turn. They were given a lot of time to do their research; therefore, their research is good. Also, it is looked at as good because they were given these advantages. Academia loves this kind of circular logic: the best person for the job is the best person for the job because we have decided that they were the best person for the job. Same stuff that we see here every year: "the best applicants get into the best grad schools because they simply are the best applicants because graduate programs are self-sorting." No one ever stops to examine what this kind of thing implies--that it is the very opposite mentality of the Marxist social justice rhetoric that many faculty profess to believe in. The Chronicle Vitae article I linked above explains it better than I ever could, anyway. Fascinatingly, the person I referenced above has been hailed as the future of our discipline even though they have never published an article. But the scholarship that is coming is amazing, I can guarantee that. Because we've already decided that it's amazing.