ComeBackZinc

So here's where things are, from my perspective. 1. Yes, rhet comp still enjoys a large employment premium over literature-- but that bar is so low it almost isn't worth mentioning. 2. The field has been in a huge employment contraction since 2008 but no one in the field wants to admit it. 3. They don't in large part because rhet comp people have this existential belief in our superior employability compared to literature people, which stems from the status anxiety we feel. It's always been, OK, well you guys might have positions at Harvard and Yale, we actually have jobs for most of our candidates. That emotional investment in our superior market makes it really hard for people to look around them and tell the truth. 4. And the truth is that the number of rhet comp jobs dropped in half from the 2007-2008 hiring season to the 2009-2010 hiring season. In half. And it not only hasn't improved, it's gotten steadily worse. 5. This is the worst hiring season since rhet comp started giving out PhDs, at least as far as I and other interested parties can tell. I keep seeing people quote numbers like 200 TT jobs but myself and others have been keeping meticulous track and can't account for more than 140. 150 if you really have a generous definition of what counts for a rhet comp job. 6. There have been at least a dozen searches started and canceled due to lack of funds. 7. The real damage has been to the "second round." Typically, there's a first round of jobs that come out in fall, and another that comes out in spring, which usually is made up in large measure of the lines that get opened up because people make "lateral moves"-- that is, profs who already have jobs take jobs, and in doing so they open up lines at their old schools. The second round just didn't happen this year. Traditionally, as many as half of the jobs in a given hiring cycle come in the second round. This year, there has maybe been 25 TT lines in the spring semester, at least 7 of which were outside of the United States, in places like Guam or Saudi Arabia. 8. The thing that's truly dispiriting has been the number of "assistant" professor lines that have been vultured by tenure profs. It's amazing how many lines have been called assistant lines that have actually been filled by big names with tenure. Arizona did a hire that was supposedly for an assistant prof but which resulted in them bringing three tenured stars to campus. It's a kind of cannibalism. 9. All things considered, I've been fine. I've had a bunch of interviews and multiple campus visits. But as a fourth year, I have a single authored paper in a major journal, another on the way, presentations at some of the most prestigious conferences in the field, a highly competitive administrative position in my program, I'm serving on an MA student's thesis committee, I've been a research assistant on several major projects for big name professors, I'm a peer reviewer for a major journal, a presentation reviewer for a major conference, I have a bunch of reviews and assorted other lesser publications, a bunch of pubs in the popular press, and I'm in one of the oldest and most respected programs with great letters of rec, and every step of the way, the job market has been a dispiriting, draining slog. I'm not trying to be a huge bummer. I'll be fine, personally. And I still made the right choice in coming to grad school. I'm just trying to tell the truth about where the field is, and I think it's especially important to do so given how utterly clueless so many faculty members are in this field.

Part of the problem is that little research disaggregates recent PhDs from PhDs overall. However:

I will reiterate my major point before: if it's really true that you can get your PhD and leave academia behind afterwards without regret, then go for it. But it has to be really true, and you have to understand that people start out saying that and then end up just as bitter and angry as they always said they wouldn't be. So if you make this choice, be damn sure, and endeavor to keep the same perspective then as you have now. That's all. If you know that about yourself, then I celebrate it and wish you the best of luck! Also: the reason I constantly harp on the job market stuff is because of stuff like this. People say "I know how bad the job market is," and that anyone who doesn't know how about the market is a fool, and that we all already know about the market... and then people turn around and say "the job market is bad everywhere." That's exactly why I worry so much. There is no comparison between the job market writ large and the humanities PhD job market. The overall unemployment rate has actually been improving for years and is vastly lower than that of English PhDs. To compare the two is just wrong, and it really really worries me that people aren't nearly as informed as they think they are. If you want people to stop constantly bringing up the job market around here, stop saying things that demonstrate that you don't recognize the extent of the problem.

I really would love to be able to flash forward to after everyone in this thread has finished their PhDs and see what they think. Because the endless waves of essays by embittered people with doctorates and no jobs, however I might get annoyed with them, does not come from nowhere. And I really don't think that everyone here is going to be as blase and over it all after more than a half decade of hard work and no money dedicated to a degree that leaves you with no meaningful material gain. My assumption is that a lot of the people writing this stuff still think, in the back of their heads, "I'm going to be the exception."

I was born into the academy. I literally grew up on a college campus. I never had a non-cynical portrait of the academy to lose. But asking that job search committees fulfill their ethical and legal responsibility to have a good-faith search in which multiple candidates are given a meaningful chance to be hired is not a matter of naivete. It's a matter of basic moral and political conviction. The notion that the old boys network only functions to reward people who are good at networking, rather than to multiply received advantage, is what's actually naive. It's a replication of privilege, inequality, and social disadvantage. And it's also illegal. This country has a set of laws that mandate inclusive hiring practices, and all public universities are required by statute to have an open hiring practice. If you think that the insiderism and patronage you're describing don't hurt minority groups, then I assure you, you're mistaken. What's more, people spend hundreds and hundreds of hours on their job docs. I have, personally. To solicit applications from hundreds of people, get their hopes up, have them work to develop unique job documents for your job for no pay, interview ten, and invite three to campus, when you know very well that only one person has a chance to get the job, that is unethical on its face. I'm sorry if you're too busy playing world's savviest academic, but that's a fact.

Speaking personally, I feel forced to engage on job market stuff because people on here constantly say some version of "I know how bad the market is," and then turn around and say things that demonstrate that they really don't know how bad it is. Look, I've said it many times: I made the right decision by going to grad school, personally. It's been a lovely, fulfilling time. And as with others on this board, when I started I had been on the job market for two years and got nothing remotely worth taking. So I totally get the sentiment you're expressing here. But here's the thing: it has to be really, actually true that you can do 5-8 years of very low paying work as a grad student, not get a job, and then just leave academia with a smile on your face afterwards. It's easy to say such things on a message board, when the idea is still theoretical. If people are really convinced that they can hand le this, good for them; it's none of my business. But I fear that there are many people who say such things to themselves when in fact those are just rationalizations that won't hold true in the long term.

A more honest definition of the number of TT rhet-comp jobs this year is somewhere on the order of 140 or 150. A lot of jobs end up in stats that aren't actually rhet/comp. There were probably another 25-30 attractive NTT jobs, jobs with long-term contracts and good working conditions. Speaking conservatively, the field will mint about 225-250 new PhDs this year. That does not include all the people switching jobs who are current assistant profs (who always have a leg up), people who went on the market last year and were unsuccessful, and people who are finishing postdocs, assistant prof positions, and other short-term contracts. Additionally, I know of at least 10 searches that were started and canceled due to lack of funding. Another concern is one of those open secrets: some jobs are listed when the committee already knows who they're going to hire before they begin. They necessarily tend to keep that under their hat, but as someone who's pretty well connected in a connected program, I hear things. It's very discouraging.

I'm sorry, but getting an office job, whatever that means, is not generically as hard as getting a job as a professor. I know people hate it when I bring up the job market, but I constantly feel forced to because people say things like "It's OK, I don't need to get a TT job at an R1 university." That's not the question. The question is whether you can get a job with a long term contract at all. I agree with you that grad school is not the hardest thing in the world, but the point is that for the vast majority of people there is never a ladder to climb. I believe the MLA jobs list had 8 initial TT listings for medievalists this year. There are many programs out there that will graduate 3-4 medievalists by themselves. Besides, we're not saying grad school is hard so you should give up. We're pointing out that the things she says does not indicate that she doesn't like academic culture at all, and that getting three masters degrees does not seem like a sensible plan.

Everything else aside, I'm just not sure that's true. I can't imagine that many literature PhD programs would discard an application simply because the applicant has an MA in Humanities. After all, literature programs accept applicants from history, religion, or the arts all the time, to pick some examples. If you write a strong statement of purpose and a writing sample that indicates the depth of your knowledge in literature, you should be fine. If you just think that your current resume is inadequate to get into good programs, that's a common feeling around here. I would suggest, if you're bent on a PhD, adjuncting for a year, doing some new research, sending papers out to online journals and conferences, and working on finding that third recommender.

Well I don't mean to offer unsolicited advice, but I think that one aspect of getting your MAT should be to try hard to set NYU aside emotionally and intellectually. Get away from it. And get away from that branch of academia in general. Really throw yourself into teaching and then, when you finish that degree, you will be able to make decisions about PhD programs with a clear head, and hopefully with the bad taste of NYU fully gone.

There's no guidebook. I would have done a thousand things differently if I had to do it all again. But whatever else is true, I've spent 4 of the most rewarding years of my life in my PhD program.

Well that all makes some sense to me.... If you're sure you want to get that MAT, I think you should just apply for that, go through your training and your student teaching, and see how you feel when you're done.

Yeah, but that's not really my point. Why do you want to be a PhD student? And why do you think high school teaching experience will make it easier for you to get into good programs? If you just want experience teaching on your applications, then you'd get a lot more out of adjuncting for a year. If you're in NYC, there's plenty of colleges where you can teach a couple sections of freshman writing as an adjunct. The pay will be bad and they won't care much about you, but it'll be real college teaching experience and you won't have to go through the motions of getting a MAT that you only want as a bridge to a PhD program. Unless I'm misunderstanding your purpose in getting teaching experience. Do you want to get a PhD in lit specifically to become a professor? And is that because of a love for research, or a desire to teach, or what?

Can I ask-- why do you want to be an English professor? I'm sure there's a lot of reasons that your experience was unpleasant, and I don't doubt that there are many pompous professors in the world. But if you're particularly bothered by that kind of thing, academia might not be your long-term career goal. I don't detect a lot of pomposity in my own academic life, but I'm not sensitive to it. More to the point, I worry that your hate of NYU's MA program may have less to do with the specific program and more to do with academic culture writ large. I'm also disturbed that you would define your MA as useless and a school as "really shitty." If you don't value your own education, how can you turn around and ask PhD programs to respect your work? I get that this is partly why you want to get an MA in lit. But if your MA in lit is only a means to improve your PhD program chances, that seems like a low-upside approach to me, given that the literature job market is so terrible and that you'd likely be paying out of pocket/with loans for an MA in lit. And since you're talking about getting a second MA, then teaching high school, then getting a third MA, we're looking at, what, 4-5 years in a best case scenario, then 5-8 years of a PhD? I'm not trying to be discouraging. I just don't really get this plan. Do you want to teach high school? It's an honorable profession that can be very rewarding. The pay is low to start and it can be a major emotional investment, but in time you'll make more money. And your odds of building a career are much higher than in higher education, and would take way less school than the plan you've laid out here. Have you thought about that? Or is high school teaching just something that you see as a means to get into a PhD program? I'm not sure that would help you. I dunno, just my 2 cents.

To be clear, I think this sort of thing is very very rare... but I also think that the insane job market leads to crazy pressures that can make people do crazy things. And the prof is one of the kindest, most giving people I've ever known in my life.

I would voice it just the way you did here-- if there's anything you can send me that you feel comfortable sending me, etc. Make sure you say upfront that you recognize the fear of people stealing research and understand completely if they don't want to. Otherwise, it's a perfectly reasonable request. Funny/scary story: one of my closest mentors at Purdue is a full prof who is probably the most influential scholar in the history of second language writing. Anyway, he told me that years ago he wrote up some preliminary research and presented it at a second language conference. An assistant prof at the conference stole his research and wrote it up, and by that I mean he had literally taken wording from the slides and information from the handout and put it into his own submission to a major journal. Unfortunately for him, one of the peer reviewers who got assigned to his research was... my professor whose work had been stolen! He contacted the guy and said, look, if you withdraw this paper right now, I won't make this any bigger of a deal, but if I have to I will. The guy did immediately. I guess the drive for tenure just makes people crazy. Scary thing is that if my prof didn't have as much institutional and field authority if he did-- if he was just a grad student, say-- he might not have been able to apply that kind of pressure.

I thought maybe people considering Purdue R/C would want to see this list of presentations from current Purdue people at CCCC and ATTW this week. Not really a representative sample, of course, but a nice slice of what current students and faculty are working on. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2VnGW7jBt3xd3c0M2hCSHhDN0E/view?usp=sharing

we keep it family

Every year we do Feed the First Years, where in the first few weeks before we get a paycheck, all the older cohorts cook and buy a ton of food for the first years, to welcome them and to help them with the financial burdens of being a grad student. It's always blast.

I got three separately-worded rejection emails and a physical letter for the same postdoc. It's like they were afraid I wouldn't get the hint and show up on campus.

They did a hire for Lunsford's position this season. I didn't follow up to see who got it. And yeah, Berkely Rhet is really a theory and cultural studies program. More Judith Butler than Quintiliian.

Nope. I mean, UPenn has the Critical Writing program, but it's taught mainly by non-TT labor. There are no Ivy League rhet/comp doctoral programs, and very few in elite private colleges in general. Stanford has a single rhet/comp faculty member (Andrea Lunsford) who was given a special position precisely so that she would not be threatening to lit faculty.

I can't ameliorate your depression. But I want you to think about this. Many of the top programs in these fields select perhaps 5 or 6 students for their programs. They might get 300 applications or more on the high end. Right off the bat, we're looking at admissions percentages in the small single digits. Now let's think about this from the perspectives of these programs. The nature of the beast is that these departments will always be serving their own needs first. That's how it goes. So if Prof So-and-So has been lacking in advisees, and they need someone who studies the same things as he or she does, and your specialty is already overrepresented in the department, guess who's going to get a leg up over you? Or if your department is heavily skewed towards women scholars and you're a man? Departments require subject-matter diversity because of the nature of graduate programs, and the want demographic diversity because of the noble principles of multiculturalism. Then, there is the fact of patronage and connections, which people hate to talk about here but absolutely do make a difference. Maybe just one person in your application pool will get a spot because they have the connections you lack. But if there's only 5 people accepted in a round, what does that do to your odds? And so you have to arrive at this inevitable conclusion: if you're not a great candidate, you'll never get in. But you can be a great candidate and easily get left out. People know enough to say that this process isn't fair, but I suspect after they get in to programs, they secretly believe that it is. Well, "fair" is not a concept I'm really interested in. What I am interested in is acknowledging that chance and randomness and weight of numbers plays a huge role in this process, and you've got to give yourself a break for that reason.

I can't tell you anything about UCSD, and I don't mean to speculate, but it is not unheard of for adcomms to keep track of who has applied before and flag those candidates. Remember that one of the principle functions of the early rounds is to find some means, any means, to whittle down the pile. Which, you know, is messed up.

I just really cared about writing and teaching, for one. I also was interested in empiricism, and I have become, somehow, a quant, having taken a ton of classes in research methods, psychometrics, and stats. Now, I've learned that the field's return to its empiricist roots is more theoretical than actual-- empirical stuff is still not getting regularly published in the major R/C journals. But I'm happy enough with where I am, if I've grown more disillusioned by the field.