Rhet/Comp & Tech Comm 2015

[ProfLorax]

You should also check out Connected Community (is that it's called?). Lots of CCCCs presenters upload their materials just for this purpose!

[bhr]

There will also be the Kairos reviews coming out over the summer, which will include plenty of notes (and some links). Just checking the hashtags for a particular session may help as well. I know during a few of my sessions there was as robust a conversation in the twitter feed as in the actual room.

[bhr]

" I propose to this thread that we create a new conversation: 

 

"How do we move past the stress, professional posturing, the anxieties, and the crap of this conference, hack it, use it for our own uses and purposes, and find something meaningful out of the experience?" 

 

So, I had been thinking about Heja's challenge before we got to Cs, and figured out how to "hack" it for my own purposes. For me, as an academic newcomer and non-presenter, I decided that I was just going to talk to as many people as possible about my research, and see what happened. I even commandeered a table in the action hub for three hours to show off a project I'm working with with a pair of my fellow students. I had program directors, WPAs, students and even Peter freaking Elbow sit down and listen to something I was working on and give feedback, which was far more valuable, to me, than sitting in a session or two during that time.

[ProfLorax]

ComeBackZinc: I always appreciate your reminders about the job market (that sounds sarcastic, but it's really not!). I think it's important to always keep the economic realities of our field in mind. I always wonder, though, how the lit and the rhet/comp job markets compare. Just how dire is it out there for rhet/comp folks? I know it's not ideal--I read the WPA listserv--but I also know lots of rhet/comp folks who are securing TT jobs straight out of grad school. So what's it like on the market as a rhet/comp grad? What sort of experience (teaching, service, research) are you finding to be especially valued by hiring committees?

[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. 

[ComeBackZinc]

As far as advice...

 

1. You must publish. You must publish. 

2. Hiring committees like round pegs for round holes. You want to be as easy to interpret as possible. That means you need to choose a particular lane of rhet comp and be that as thoroughly an as obviously as possible. In other words, if you're going to be a WPA, you need to be a WPA through and through. If you're going to be a queer scholar, be just that in the most obvious and clear way possible. The field says it likes interdisciplinarity, but when the rubber meets the road, it wants people who fit into certain slots. So pick a slot and make sure you fit it securely. Start crafting a CV now. Start crafting a cover letter now. And when you do, sit down and say "how can I tell the story of how I perfectly fit Slot X in a way that's comprehensible and supportable?"

3. Be a busy beaver at conferences. Meet everyone you can. Ingratiate yourself. It really does matter.

[ToldAgain]

As far as advice...

 

1. You must publish. You must publish. 

2. Hiring committees like round pegs for round holes. You want to be as easy to interpret as possible. That means you need to choose a particular lane of rhet comp and be that as thoroughly an as obviously as possible. In other words, if you're going to be a WPA, you need to be a WPA through and through. If you're going to be a queer scholar, be just that in the most obvious and clear way possible. The field says it likes interdisciplinarity, but when the rubber meets the road, it wants people who fit into certain slots. So pick a slot and make sure you fit it securely. Start crafting a CV now. Start crafting a cover letter now. And when you do, sit down and say "how can I tell the story of how I perfectly fit Slot X in a way that's comprehensible and supportable?"

3. Be a busy beaver at conferences. Meet everyone you can. Ingratiate yourself. It really does matter.

 

Thanks for this great advice, especially about fit. As somebody who is really sitting on the fence between Lit and Rhet/Comp (I did equal work in both in UG), I have always thought: Well I'll just do everything! I'll find an awesome project that integrates scholars from every field imaginable! And I'll throw in Paula Dean, too, because yum, I like butter.

 

As I start to prepare for my MA, though, I know I am going to have to make a choice soon and really start working toward a clear and easily understood goal that is marketable. This is obvious advice, but maybe sometimes it is good to remind yourself that your curiosity can be both a strength and a weakness. It can either lead you to explore an unknown question or leave you trying to juggle too many interests all at once.

 

I, for one, think that I need to separate my interests and my professional specialization.

[bhr]

From watching my friends on the market this year, let me add "be willing and able to teach business/tech writing classes." The people I know with tech and business writing experience (mostly out of top 20 programs, admittedly) all wound up with multiple TT offers. True, most of the R1s appear to have been filled by lateral movers, but that opened up lines (that are still opening, as far as I can tell) elsewhere.

[empress-marmot]

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. 

 

Thank you so much for sharing! As an incoming graduate student, I know I'm supposed to publish, research, and seek out administrative positions for my Rhet/Comp specialization. There's a lot of unknowing between knowing that and knowing specifics. 

 

From watching my friends on the market this year, let me add "be willing and able to teach business/tech writing classes." The people I know with tech and business writing experience (mostly out of top 20 programs, admittedly) all wound up with multiple TT offers. True, most of the R1s appear to have been filled by lateral movers, but that opened up lines (that are still opening, as far as I can tell) elsewhere.

 

My prospective program head all-but-makes her students take the certificate in Business/Technical Writing, and she makes her students TA those classes as well. Her students received multiple offers, so I completely agree with this.

Edited March 27, 2015 by empress-marmot

[ProfLorax]

CBZ: thanks for such a thorough and candid response! I always like knowing what's ahead, even if it isn't as cheery as I assumed.

[ComeBackZinc]

Tell a story with your CV. As you learn more  in the field and decide how you want to define yourself, say, "how can I write a cover letter that expresses who I am as a scholar, and how can I integrate evidence from my CV to make that story concrete?" You can get a job, but you've got to be prepared to lay yourself out in that way-- claim about who you are, what you research, and what you can teach on your cover letter, then references to a CV that backs it up. In order to do that, you've got to fill that CV. So be relentless in sending things out for publication, whether it's researched articles to the biggest journals in the field or little reviews to online pubs. It's so valuable, in the long run, to have a string of smaller CV lines that add up to a lot. There's lots of opportunities! But you must fill your CV. If you want more specific recommendations for where to look, let me know. You'll be fine.

[empress-marmot]

I wanted to ask about a couple points brought up in That Other Thread, which I also call the Thread of Doom. If you folks think that the topic of some people not liking rhet/comp is better off buried, though, I totally understand. 

 

If some people we work with (tenured or not) think  "I've taught for seven years and my students loved me and you're just a soulsucking job-stealer and I don't have to listen to you," how do we change their minds? Or if we can't change minds, how can we keep this attitude from spilling into instruction? 

 

If the posts on That Other Thread are the way some people react to a WPA trying to improve composition instruction, then it signals some issues in the field. Has anyone ever encountered this kind of resentment before? How have you dealt with it?

[ComeBackZinc]

Sure, I've dealt with that kind of resentment before. It's not uncommon, although I find it's a minority opinion. In a healthy labor market, I don't think it would exist.

 

Unfortunately, in my opinion the field has responded in the worst way possible, which is by largely abandoning writing pedagogy at the height of the field's research arm-- in the most prestigious journals and conferences-- and embracing cultural studies to the point where a lot of rhet/comp scholarship is simply indistinguishable from cultural studies. That's a recipe for losing the disciplinary identity that gave us stronger institutional standing in the first place. 

 

Of course, I'm just a crank, and many people would disagree. I would recommend, though, Richard Haswell's "NCTE/CCCC's Recent War on Scholarship," Susan Peck McDonald's "The Erasure of Language," Davida Charney's "Empiricism is Not a Four-Letter Word," and "Sheep in Wolves' Clothing: How Composition's Social Construction Reinstates Expressivist Solipsisim (And Even Current-Traditional Conservatism" by Keith Rhodes and Monica McFawn Robinson. (The last one is in fact my pick for the most important state-of-the-field piece written in ages.)

 

[Wonton Soup]

I can only speak from anecdotes, but my experience is most people see the value of a WPA. The people who don't tend not to understand that 1) there have always been "WPAs" (or people performing the role of WPA), even before rhet/comp really grew as a field. SOMEBODY had to hire, review, and fire writing instructors. 2) the role and need for WPAs of various types grew as people realized that writing was not a remedial lesson, but a process embedded with the act of learning at all levels and in all fields. And 3) Writing and rhetoric is really quite complex, even (and maybe especially) in the general freshman comp course. Not understanding the complexity is not the same as the complexity not existing.