Like Sands Through The Hourglass, So Are The Days Of Our Lives: Having The Courage Not To Go To Graduate School

You would think that May would signal the winding down of things at Zenith. In fact, as we all know, the liberal arts college has a tendency to crank things up toward the end of the year. Didn't spend enough of your budget? There will be a memo asking for suggestions on how to do that. Last year, when I was chair and everyone was in ex post crash-o mentality, we saved a lot of time via a memo telling us that departments and programs were prohibited from spending down at the end of the year, although how they would be able to sift legitimate from illegitimate expenses was not clear. ("Six skateboards? Why did sociology purchase skateboards?") Prizes and various awards must be given, and we will be solicited for the names of ever-more students to receive them. Committees that have been ruminating on this or that will be rushing legislation to the floor of the last faculty meeting. These motions will be greeted with suspicion by a great many people who haven't bothered to attend a meeting all year, and who will table them: "We can't hurry an important decision like this!" they will snarl.

Subsequently, many of these ideas will die on the Island of Tabled Motions.

In the middle of all this chaos, there are the former students who write to ask for recommendations. They've been cooling their heels in Teach for America and prison re-entry programs, toiling in obscurity as paralegals at Dewey, Cheatham & Howe and Doing Good Deeds in far-flung places. Spring has come and -- guess what? There's no summer vacation! You don't get to advance to the next level of work in the fall! Furthermore, since liberal arts colleges now specialize in ginning up nostalgia (and saving money, I presume) by holding alumni reunions and commencement on the same weekend in May, the recent B.A.'s thoughts turn lovingly to:

Graduate school. As Monty Python would say, "Run away! Run away!"

Frequent readers might recall that I was critiqued roundly in the comments section of this post for suggesting that people contemplating the PH.D. might want to evaluate their chances of getting an academic job more thoroughly prior to choosing a program that suits them only for being a college professor. "I'm gobsmacked that someone who calls herself radical could publish something so reactionary," wrote one of my kinder critics. My suggestion that any person contemplating the PH.D work for a minimum of three years post-B.A. to imagine the numerous other life choices available was also rejected by many. "Why would you hold back a talented person who knows exactly what s/he wants to do at the age of twenty or twenty-two?" is a collective version of what I was asked. "If I wait, I will be almost thirty when I get my degree! Too late to start a life!" others whimpered. The most heartfelt responses were some version of: "On what grounds can you -- and people like you -- deny me the opportunity to have something precious that you already have?"

I do not yet control the fate of the historical profession, much less the academy at large, and regulating the supply of jobs to meet the demand is the committee I keep requesting, but to no avail. Give me time, why don't you?

Seriously, let me say two things: I don't think there is anything particularly radical about encouraging people to get a PH.D. in say, history or English literature. It's not like you will be educated to join the IWW, after all (although if you go into sociology you might have a crack at it), or to redistribute wealth. In addition, as I will be 52 in a couple weeks, color me silly, but I don't think 30 is too late to change direction in life, voluntarily or involuntarily. One valued family member of mine is, in her thirties, embarking on her fourth career, and I would say that each one of them has made her a more interesting and productive person.

I also don't think any education, PH.D.'s in the Humanities included, is a waste, even if it doesn't lead you to the career you thought it would. Could be a waste of money, but not time.

However: the idea that life will pass you by if you actually take time to live it (as opposed to studying it, or acquire more education to enter life at a higher level than ordinary folk) is worrisome to some of us who watch talented people graduate from our universities only to return a year later to say that they want back in. I worry that it is a symptom of being part of a generation of over-scheduled overachievers raised to believe that the sands of time run quicker if you aren't writing a memoir about your alcoholic mother, starting your own film production company or scoring big time with your new band in those crucial twelve months after graduation. The concern seems to be that living life is an uncertain proposition at best, a huge waste of time at worst. Those of us who advise contemplation and acquiring experience outside the classroom are perceived by Generation Adderall as hopelessly out of touch.

Rather than seeing me and my colleagues as gatekeepers, however, I would like these hopeful young people to do the research themselves before embarking on this journey. In particular, in the comments section of my earlier post I was initially appalled, then angered, and then moved, by the numerous bitter remarks by commenters who claimed they had been lied to by their own college professors about their future prospects as scholars. Many claimed that they were told that they should go to graduate school, and that the cream always rises to the top in the job market. Such people said they were not told, prior to enrolling in the PH.D. program, that only 4 out of 10 of them would get a tenure track job, much less at a college or university similar to the one they had attended.

One can't help but believe -- even if you think, as I do, that you shouldn't take all your advice about going into the priesthood from a priest -- that there isn't some truth to the experiences they are reporting, so I did a little of my own research. And you know what? I think a lot of them were lied to, albeit by well-meaning people. I was further convinced of this by a conversation with a lovely young person who was given exactly the wrong advice by a university mentor: the best young intellects go straight from college to graduate school; prestigious schools in your field don't care about you taking time to think it over; there will be plenty of jobs in (x) field by the time you get out in seven years. Not one of these things is true, and (x) field is literally crammed with the un- and underemployed. Looking back at the records of the professional association in which (x) field is located, I count 16 jobs in that field advertised in the last 5 years, and 182 if you count the larger fields which might accept an application from someone trained in (x). There were, in the same period 537 PH.D.s produced in the larger fields for which a person trained in (x) might have applied. If you count the other people, in other fields, who might have enlarged the pool for the more general job descriptions, that is less than a 1 in 3 chance of obtaining a tenure-track job over 5 years on the market.

I am estimating, given the job market that existed prior to the crash, and given that state legislatures will continue to slash away at education budgets for several years to come (remember: the commercial real estate market is slumping like a warm ice cream cone as 5-year balloon mortgages start to come due) that out of the dozen or so students who have talked to me about the PH.D. this spring alone, there will be academic jobs for 4 or 5 at best.

Hence, paying some attention to those who claim they were lied to about their prospects, I have responded to this by advising talented undergraduates, right up front, not to go to graduate school. Not yet, at least. And when you are making this decision, take into account the following:

Regardless of whether you like this or not, or whether it seems fair, it is simply a fact that actual graduate school admissions committees at select schools will regard your application more favorably if you take a significant amount of time off. Two to five years, I would say. Want to do labor history? Be an organizer; spend one of those years as a day laborer or a factory worker. An anthropologist? Leave the country and learn a language. Learn two. Cultural studies? Try an advertising agency or tending bar on the Lower East Side of New York. Whatever you do, engage the world of paid labor head on, and try to marry your genuine interests with a determination to get out of your comfort zone. Use this time to read, far more deeply than you have had the opportunity to do as an undergraduate, to discover what field compels you in a deep enough way to make a profoundly scary, uncertain commitment to it.

Your choice to attend graduate school, and their choice to admit you, is not a mutual contract that is designed to benefit all parties equally. Too often young people who have succeeded in school believe that schools actually care about them. They don't. Then why do graduate schools pay people to attend? In part, because it is traditional to do so. But in the overwhelming number of cases graduate students constitute an indispensable pool of cheap labor. You earn your tuition and stipend by doing hours of work for what seems like a good sum of money at the age of 22; by the time you are 29, it doesn't look so good.

If your beloved undergraduate mentor is over age 65, you run the risk of getting really bad advice about graduate school. In fact, I would say that few of us over 35 are reliably in touch, with some exceptions. The first thing you should do is join the professional association in your field of choice. If your income is under 25K, it costs $45 to join the American Historical Association, $35 to join the MLA, $55 to join the American Studies Association. A one year digital subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education is $72.50, and Inside Higher Education is free! Hence, for under $125, a small investment compared to the loans you will be forced to take out in graduate school to eat and keep a roof over your head, you have within your grasp the best possible advice about the current state of the academic profession, the recent history of the job market, and the degree of risk you are running if you have your heart set on being an academic.

Read blogs: start with New Faculty Majority, the mother ship of up-to-date commentary about the high rate of underemployment among academics.

As for asking live people, your most important advice in this matter, particularly at a liberal arts college, is from the youngest members of the faculty, those who have been on the job market quite recently, and whose bright and capable friends are strategizing their lack of tenure-track employment. I pick out the SLAC as a particular font of poor advice in this matter, because it is here that the romance of teaching and scholarship tends to cloud the uglier realities of academic life, and it is here that there are no graduate students to set you straight as Professor Graybeard waxes eloquent about the beauties of a cultivated scholarly intellect. Your second most important advice is from all women, GLBT people and anyone in an interdisciplinary or ethnic studies field: there never has been a "good" market for us, and we tend not to think that our special experience of success characterizes the general condition.

And finally, when you are taking advice, do what sensible people do: consider the source. Check to see how many search committees Professor Graybeard has run, and whether s/he gives papers at professional meetings regularly. Does s/he contribute to the life of the profession by serving on committees of professional associations? Does s/he mentor graduate students of hir own, or sit on committees at nearby research universities? Is s/he on the editorial board of a journal? Does s/he publish? Thanks to Google, all of this information is available to you. If the answers to all, or most, of the above questions are "No" then this person may be well-intentioned, but is not a good source of advice.

Whatever you decide: take responsibility for your own decisions in this matter so that you don't waste a lot of emotional energy trying to figure out who to blame when the breaks, and the tenure-track searches, don't go your way. The damage done is not an education that isn't worth anything -- all education is worth something, particularly to creative and engaged people. It's the damage of low self-esteem and disillusion when you have drunk the academic Kool-Aid and -- through no fault of your own -- it doesn't work out.

Monday update: here's a post on the joint J.D./PH.D. from Karen Tani at Legal History Blog. While I wouldn't advise trying to jive the job market by simply attaining multiple degrees (and Tani notes that pursuing such a program is "not for the faint of heart") it is one direction for those of you with an incurable love for learning who are also sane enough to want flexible career options.

"Hey-yay, Wait A Minute Mr. Postman:" When Recommendation Season Is Upon Us

So I’ve got a pain in my side that may indicate a cracked rib. I have a sore toe, a wrist that aches halfway up my forearm, a bump on my head, a throbbing neck, a sharp pain in my lower back and at least one elbow and two knees that are puffy and sore. You get one guess – what am I?

A football player?

Nope. Guess again. Can't?

Liberal arts college professor. And it’s recommendation season. Yep, recommendation season. And as it turns out, this year recommendations are a contact sport.

This is what happened. I was going off to a country house where there was no internet. I decided to push through all my letters of recommendation – eight students, several applying to as many as nine graduate schools -- in two days. Business school, law school, social work school, political science, history, American Studies – I wrote for all of them, sometimes more than one category for a single former student. And they are good kids, really good. How many different ways are there to say that? Well, you try to find as many different ways as there are students, not just because some are applying to the same schools, but because we all know a letter of recommendation is more effective when you can tell a story that captures something unique and special about the person. It is my view that you should be able to do that for each and every student, otherwise you should not agree to write a letter in the first place. That is part of what going to a liberal arts college like Zenith should mean: that a student is taught, known and well remembered as an individual.

But back to why letters of recommendation are a contact sport: first, they require stamina. It takes about an hour to write each one, and another hour, at least, to get all the letters packaged up in different ways for different schools. Now, granted, some deadlines are not until January 1. But some of them are December 1, so I thought, what the heck? Time spent now is time saved later. So I made the big push and got them all done. (Note: all except the request I received today.)

This is where things got rough. Yesterday morning, when my car and my dog were packed for the trip and I was headed out of town, I stopped at the mailbox to drop off the final letter. I left the car running, jumped out, put it in the post box and turned around to get back in my car. What happened then was this, as the Mayor of Munchkinland says in The Wizard of Oz.

Suddenly, huge pain bloomed in the toe of one of my shoes, and my foot stopped dead while my body catapulted forward. Because I had left the car door open (the engine was running, after all), what I saw, to my horror, was the navy blue running board of my car rising swiftly to meet my oncoming head. “Dear God,” I thought, as I flipped to the ground like a two by four in what seemed like slow motion but probably took about a second, “Not my nose again.” It’s been over thirty years since my nose was broken in a lacrosse game, but you never forget that kind of pain, right in the middle of your face. First my knees hit, then an elbow, and then – almost as an afterthought – my head bounced off the car. Somewhere in there I must have tried to catch myself with my other hand – a stupid reflex that seems to be hard-wired into the brain, and often results in broken wrists.

My dog sniffed thoughtfully at my head. I mused (as more pain began to blossom at the various locations described), "I have given all I have to give for my students. I am done. There is no more." I crawled hand over hand into the car and looked over my shoulder: there I saw an odd four inches of rebar, probably left by Stupid Overpriced Electric Company, inexplicably poking above the ground next to the mailbox. This is what had caused all this havoc – that and my bifocals. I can either see straight ahead or down, but not both at once. Had I been looking down I would have seen the rebar -- but then maybe I would have missed the car.

And you didn’t think writing recommendations was a dangerous activity, did you? Hah. OK, seriously, it is not my former students’ fault that I am a bruised and battered mess tonight. It’s some jackass of a telecom worker or sidewalk layer who didn’t finish the job right – hopefully the postal workers’ union will deal with this hazard eventually. But since I can do little else today but nurse my injuries, can the Radical take a moment and complain about what a messy, non-system is currently in place for graduate school recommendations?

I know that those of you who are recommending graduate students to me at the end of their training may feel you have a harder row to hoe. And you do. But let me tell you, this is what you could agitate for to make my life easier, and it might even make your life easier too in the end.

A common application. They do this for college and law school – why not Ph.D. programs too? What is so special about all you guys that you have to ask different, equally ridiculous, questions on each, separate, application? And that is between five and seven per student – it’s not like I am sending a single letter to Interfolio, like you do.

What’s with ranking students by percentages? And in multiple categories? What does that tell you? And how the heck should I know what percentage they belong in? If you are asking about the top 1% of students I have ever taught, I am placing one person in a category that contains approximately 120 other people. For one of my colleagues, with the same number of years of teaching but at about twenty students a semester, 1% makes that student one of a group of about 30 people. Now how does this make for a useful comparison? Furthermore, I am clearly supposed to recalculate where this student stands for every application, since for some of you it is 1-2% for my career; for others it is top 5% for a period of my own choosing. This is not information. This is a crap shoot, and I don’t believe you even take these numbers seriously yourselves.

Do you know how much time it takes me to fill in my name and address over, and over and over? Jesus. And why do you ask for my phone number? Not once in sixteen years has anyone called me about a graduate school recommendation I have written. Not once.

Could you all get on the same page about how you want to receive the application? Some of you do it electronically, although not all of you use the same company. Some have me send it directly to you. Others want it sent back to the student, signed over the flap, something I really hate, because then you have to worry about whether the student receives it in time, and because it is nearly impossible to produce a legible signature over an envelope flap. And how would you know it was me? Really? Do you have my signature on file? You do not. But this is only slightly more ridiculous than the electronic “signature” I am asked to produce over and over. Which is not a signature. It is just typing.

While you are mulling over all these suggestions, feel free to send me boxes of anti-inflammatories. You have my address -- it's right there, on the letter.

Dream A Little Dream Of Me: Six Easy Steps to Writing a Great Job Letter

Last year I was in conversation with a fine scholar and a caring mentor from an excellent northeastern university. Since I have no graduate students, I expressed surprise -- given how much more emphasis is being placed on readying candidates for a tight market at institutions like hers -- that the quality of job letters in a recent search was so uneven. She rolled her eyes. "If my students would only show me the letters they write," she said. "The problem is they tend only to show their job letters to each other, and they repeat each other's mistakes."

So this is where we need to start, as you ready yourself for the job season by drafting the letter you will use as a template for your job applications. Don't write your letters in isolation, and don't get advice from other people who don't have jobs yet. The letter is what introduces you to search committee members: not your recommendations, not your vita, not your writing sample, not your teaching portfolio. And while writing a great letter won't get you the job, it needs to perform a single function well which is to get you a preliminary interview.

The letter should, in other words, say to a search committee:

"I'm fabulous. I am your fantasy hire. Dream about me"

Pay attention to the following basic principles, and you will have a good chance of writing the letter that makes you some committee's Dream Baby. Or at least, one of ten or twelve Dream Babies who will get preliminary interviews.

A good opening paragraph delivers complete and relevant information. It should answer the followng questions: What job are you applying for and where did you read about it? (Yes, there may be more than one search in the department.) In one sentence, how do you describe yourself as a scholar and what are your major and minor fields? (It's best to do that in some way that makes an immediate and logical connection to the job that is advertised and the department you are applying to, don't you think?) Then you need a sentence that describes where you are in your career. (When do you expect to/did you defend? Where are you teaching now, and on what basis? Do not tell the committee that you just lost your job; your referees will handle this for you. And do not offer any explanation for why you are leaving a tenure-track job after two years. It is none of anyone's business at this, or any other, stage.)

Then you need one sentence that describes the writing sample you have sent, and that relates it to the topic of your dissertation/manuscript. This should be written in such a way as to cause the reader to think: "Ooh! How interesting!" as opposed to, say, "How early is it okay to eat lunch?" And please note: if you have not yet defended it is a "dissertation;" if you have defended it is "my book manuscript." And if, like many recent degree holders, you are silently twittering, "I have such trouble thinking of it as a book!" please remain silent on this point throughout the process. In my fields, history and American Studies, graduate students write dissertations; people with Ph.D.s write books. People who get hired are people who can project the image, at least, that they are people who view publication of a book in the next three to six years as realistic.

The penultimate sentence should state what is included in the application that you have sent, and a final sentence that says who the committee should expect to receive letters from and which of these people is actually your current/former dissertation director. Remember, you have no parents. You are directly descended from your graduate advisor. And you are helping the search committee cultivate a lovely fantasy about -- you!!! "A Smartypants Breathtaking student!" they want to be able to say to each other, with little stars flying out of the corners of their eyes, as if Professor Breathtaking herself will be coming to the department in your body.

But to return to a more serious tone: you want to be clear about who you are and what you do. Every sentence needs to contain basic and relevant information that will cause the committee to proceed with interest in and great openness to your candidacy. You do not want committee members to keep reading after a sigh of exasperation that they are going to have to tease the information they need out of the rest of the application (some people are too lazy to do this. Sorry, but it's true.) You can certainly recapture interest, but why come from behind when you could start by throwing the long ball and scoring first? Which is all to say, writing a letter is no different from writing anything else: the opening paragraph should contain the structure and information your reader needs to understand you as you mean to be understood.

That you are fabulous.

The next two paragraphs should describe the argument of your current major work; say why it adds to the literature; and characterize the research you have done. One paragraph for the argument and its significance to the field; one paragraph for your sources and methods. This is the part of the letter that can be reproduced verbatim for any job, because this is the one thing about you that won't change. In paragraph two, you will want an opening sentence that tells me this: if the archive, data, literary tradition has been written about a lot, why are you going back to it? If, however, your research is quite new, emphasize this. Remember, particularly at small colleges, or in small or mixed discipline (say "humanities") departments at large universities, there will be people on the search committee who aren't in your field or perhaps even in your discipline, or may -- I am sorry to say -- not be very active scholars: it doesn't hurt to draw everyone a map. And don't forget to add a closing sentence that lets the reader know what has already been published from this research and where; or what is under review.

The fourth paragraph should characterize your teaching experience, and why it, and your scholarship, makes you the person they should hire for this job. Don't make the committee figure this out on its own; better yet, don't force the person on the committee who is enthusiastic about your scholarship and field have to make the case to his co-committee members that you should have made to all of them about why they should pursue your application. This paragraph is the place to say you have actually taught the Victorian Lit survey, or to say that you haven't, but you have included a syllabus that you have thought up for the occasion (this, my friends, is where the teaching portfolio can do you some good; and if you don't have a teaching portfolio, include this syllabus in your application anyway.) This is the place to say that you offer something special: that although a microbiologist, you have taught sections of Freshman Comp for the last three years and you would love the opportunity to teach young science majors at a small liberal arts college how to write; that although a historian, you have a master's degree in anthropology, and would love to teach a course in ethnohistory, or oral history methodologies.

Eliminate jargon. This is so important I wish to repeat it.

Eliminate jargon. By this, I do not mean eliminating language that is part of being a specialist, although you might take the trouble to prune it a bit so that you can demonstrate your ability to make your work accessible to the vast number of non-specialists you will work with and teach. Nor do I mean shelving the theoretical perspective, and its attendant language, that places your work in its field. But I do mean that you have to make yourself clear, and it is a sign of scholarly immaturity to not be able to express ideas in a way that most other people with Ph.D.'s will understand. Confusing people, and creating a big mystery about what your work really is, is not fabulous. If you are in a marginal field, and you use jargony language, you reinforce ignorant prejudices about the unimportance of your specialty to the larger field rather than persuading the committee that universalist paradigms, to paraphrase David Liu, need to speak to minority knowledges, and vice versa. If you are in a field that is central to the discipline, don't make that field unrecognizable to those who know it well by putting it in a fancy party dress: say clearly why your work adds to a powerful and interesting set of questions that are in circulation. Jargon doesn't make you sound smart, and it can have the opposite effect of making you seem inaccessible and unaware of how you are perceived by others, the last thing one would choose in a teacher or a colleague.

Know your audience. Before you re-draft your basic job letter, go to the website for that department and see who works there and what they teach. This should guide your choices about what you emphasize as your minor teaching fields, or a specialty course you could offer. Extra points for calling attention to the fact that you have done this homework, e.g. "An intensive seminar I would like teach on gay liberation might ideally be positioned as an upper level elective for students who have taken the Theory of Social Movements course already offered by the department." This not only marks you as a person who is aware of others (see above), but as a person who takes initiative as part of a team.

Proofread your letter. Let it sit on your desk overnight. Then have someone else proofread it. You also need to eliminate basic mistakes like: putting the wrong name in the salutation (I have seen, bizarrely, a colleague from another institution being greeted; and I have seen "Dear Professor Zenith.") If no one is named as the chair, "To the committee" is graceful (although I do not care for the laborious and outdated, "To whom it may concern"); and if someone is named, "Dear Professor Radical" will do (not "Dr. Radical"--I'm not a real doctor.) And for a variety of reasons, in this day and age I think it is wise to avoid gender completely in the salutation.

And for God's sake, proof that first paragraph! It shouldn't say you are applying to Zenith when you are actually applying to Potemkin; it shouldn't say you are applying for a job in twentieth century United States history when the job description said "post-1945 United States."

To sum up: Let the letter represent you in all your fabulousness. It is true that brilliant people write bad job letters, and people who write bad letters get jobs (a friend of mine once hired someone who sent a job letter that was not only confusing, but written on a piece of theme paper. This former job candidate -- who turned out to be Fabulous -- is also now Very Famous.) But although you can get through to the next stage with a job letter that doesn't represent you well, why leave it up to chance?

Next week: For the scholar with everything, why ask for more? Applying for a job when you already have one, and -- for the search committee -- how to evaluate a candidate pool that contains scholars with different levels of experience.

If At First You Don't Succeed: Getting A Visiting or Adjunct Teaching Gig -- And Do You Really Want One?

Since the dollar is crashing, the Democratic nominee for President is as yet undetermined and Eliot Spitzer has gone home to either a divorce lawyer or years of couples therapy, it is time to return to those unworldly things that are preoccupying us as academics. And what's at the top of the list for the next two months?

Hiring, or getting hired as, a full-time visitor or adjunct.

Yes, now is the time that unexpected resignations are upon us. Searches have folded without a hire being made. It is the time of year that grants have come through for us, but perhaps not for you. It is the time of year that – for those of you have been on the market – you know now (or strongly suspect) that you won’t be interviewed for any of the jobs you applied for, or that someone else has been hired for the job for which you did get an interview. *Sigh.*

After a year of being on several search committees, I have read a lot of curriculum vitae, so today’s post is for those of you who have gathered the strength to be dusting off your c.v.’s, checking them twice, trying to figure out whether they make you look naughty or nice. You should be adding the things you have accomplished since the fall, updating the status of manuscripts out at journals and listing conference panels that have been accepted for next year. In other words, you are generally trying to make yourself look even more accomplished than you were back in September. So here are some things to check for.

Make sure your contact numbers are listed clearly at the top of the c.v., and that you are easy to reach. If you don’t feel comfortable listing your home telephone number, list your cell phone. There is nothing more aggravating than not being able to get hold of someone about a job, or having to leave a message on an office voice mail box where the message might not even be picked up until Monday. For a tenure-track line, if we are already interested in you because of your scholarship, we will take the time to track you down. For visiting and adjunct work, we may simply go on to the next person. Believe it or not, this kind of conversation happens around the country during Adjunct Season:

Chair of department (who is dishing off work to the newly minted associate prof. who needs to begin learning to do these things but, more importantly, is available to do it): “OK, so start at the top of the list of candidates we liked. The first one to answer and give a reasonable response gets the job.”
NMAP: “What if no one answers?”
Chair: “Leave messages. First one to call back and give a reasonable response gets the job.”
NMAP: “What if they don’t call back for a day or so?”
Chair: “Go back into the files and call someone else. Use the brains the Goddess gave you! We need to get this done before the administration pulls the funding.”

Now that we have it straight that you need to answer the phone, what does your c.v. need to do for you to generate that call from Opportunity U. in the first place? I have but two more pieces of advice, and they are very simple:

Your dissertation title, and the members of your committee need to be clearly listed at the top of the first page. You might be shocked at how many people fail to do this, or how many people make search committee members hunt through the various documents in the application trying to figure out this very basic information. Do not forget this one important fact: you are not you. You are (insert famous professor’s name)’s student, and you have worked with (insert the names of other famous people.) Given your limited teaching experience, knowing who you have been trained by gives us a better idea of what you might be able to do for Opportunity U. Indicate clearly which member of the committee is your primary advisor and – since the real job season is over – you can now be honest about when, realistically, you will be finishing the dissertation. In fact, you must be clear about this point, because if you are hired, you will be asked to provide proof: Ph.D.’s are paid at a different rate than ABD’s. If you had been hired in a tenure-track job, you would have finished the diss. in a long, ugly final push that would have warped your relationship to your work forever. Now you not only don’t have to finish, but you shouldn’t – you are crafting the document that is really going to get you a job next year. Take your time, for God's Sake.

The category “publications” should not be lumped together with any other category of scholarly activity. Best case scenario: it obscures the fact that you are quite well published for an ABD; worst case scenario, you look like you are trying to hide your insecurity that you have not published at all, or enough. Presentations of your work, at conferences or elsewhere, are not the same as publications, and when you bury that single paragraph you contributed to the Dictionary of Lesbian Painters in a collection of miscellaneous scholarly activities it does not obscure the truth: that you really have no publications to speak of. If you haven't really published, be brave and let it all hang out. More importantly, if you are applying for adjunct or visiting work, your publication record doesn’t really matter because we are more concerned about what you will do in the next twelve months than in the next seven years. In fact, this once, switch the section of courses you have taught and T.A’d with the list of articles you have published or that are in process. Courses you are willing to teach will go in your cover letter.

But here’s the other piece of advice I will give you. It is a real question whether you should get a full time visiting teaching gig; or whether you should stay away from teaching for a year, delay submission of your dissertation until April, and get some articles out to journals. If you can teach and write at the same time, fantastic. But also know that full time teaching is often consuming, even for a veteran teacher, and it is also really interesting, which means that you will want to spend time on and with your students that should probably be spent on your writing at this stage of your career. If you do not yet have publications and/or a polished dissertation, writing is a better use of your time in the long run, as long as you can find some other way to feed, house and clothe yourself, and as long as your committee will agree to keep you on the books for another year.

Because honestly? Showing that you are a mature scholar who can see an article through to publication and a person who has a clear sense of how the dissertation will become a book is going to help you far more than a year of teaching when, in the fall, you pull out your c.v., dust it off again, and go back on the market.

Another Brick in The Wall

Well, the shrapnel has flown among the literary scholars in Shoreline, I guess. A young acquaintance forwarded Helena Echlin's Letter from Yale, first published in Arete Magazine a few years back. Boy, and they say the blogosphere is mean. Doesn't hold a candle to what editors will approve for publication. At least those of us who blog have a range of enemies who read us secretly and write nasty, anonymous comments that hold us accountable for our sarcasm; and friends who call to say gently, "Are you sure you want....?"

Not that I hold such a brief for the old alma mater, you understand (full disclosure: I took a B.A. in English there back in the New Criticism days and loved every second of it. Then went into a doctoral program in history.) One of the individuals named as a culprit for ruining Echlin's desire to get a Ph.D. in English literature is an old classmate from those happy undergraduate days at -- oh, all right, for those of you who have not guessed already -- Oligarch (Yale) University. And really, I can't believe he isn't the decent, sweet fellow he always was, and a marvelous teacher. Fortunately for all, Echlin has already left Oligarch's program, but her complaints range from the familiar (too much tongue-twisting, inpenetrable theory, not so many jobs) to some zingers that I haven't heard before: that literature professors no longer view fiction as a laudable pursuit in and of itself; that they live in the suburbs ("The bastards!" you exclaim); that you can barely hear yourself think in a room full of graduate students because of the smacking sounds of lips landing on tenured behinds; that Echlin's professors did not read for pleasure and that the profession cares so little for the written word that an Eng Lit graduate student at Oligarch can receive credit for a course in quantum physics but not in creative writing.

Well Helena, I have two words for you: American Studies. OK? Take the "English" out of "English literature" and you have a group of people that are hot-smart, but spend most of their spare time going to the movies, watching TV, and reading mysteries. They also love to party: visit the ASA meeting in Philadelphia this October if you don't believe me.

Seriously, are things that bad in English Departments that it is just theory, theory, theory 24/7? Really? See I wouldn't know. In the first place, I am a historian, and in the second place, I idolize English departments. Historians as a professional group value theory almost not at all, to the exent that when they worry that they are missing something, they complain that history doesn't have "a theory" (this is when scholars in other fields fall over laughing because the idea that there is one theory that could explain everything is incomprehensible to anyone but historians.) People write whole books about why theory is valued so little in the modern historical profession. And then people like Joan Scott, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Hayden White, brilliant and field-changing as they have been in their very different ways, have gone through prolonged periods of getting dished by other historians because what they do is so theoretical, according to their critics, it is "not history." This little drama is often played out on the departmental level as well, as many of my readers who are historians have, I am sure, observed. Unless you claim to do philosophy of history, in which case people leave roses at your door whether they understand what you have written or not. Go figure.

And of course we all know that familiar complaint by the ideologically or disciplinarily driven: "I don't understand it, therefore it is useless drivel!" as if these two thoughts necessarily follow one another. Nobody understands everything. And really, it isn't necessary to understand everything, even if it is written in English. I read French pretty well, and if I tried to read Derrida in the original my head would explode trying to decode it. As it is, when reading French theory in translation I wear an ice bag just in case.

Your Radical is not one of those who dish, you see: she is one who Has Been Dished, although without, unfortunately, becoming famous. I went through a period of reading every bit of feminist and queer theory I could get my mitts on, and now I can't because too many people are writing it. Oh yeah, I also went through my Marxist theory and neo-Marxist theory stage (people have more or less stopped writing that), not to mention my sociology period and my cultural studies phase-- both pretty theory-driven if not entirely theoretical, which is a blessing of sorts. While I am not famous or cited constantly like the luminaries noted above, I think it is fair to say that I profited from reading theory immensely, and still do when I am moved to make the effort. Because history does not seem to be receptive to producing overarching theories - except, of course, Marxism, the original Modern Theory of History -- so, like those silly birds who put eggs in the nests of other birds, we have to travel around grafting our work onto theoretical traditions produced elsewhere, especially in English departments. Where would history be were it not for theories thought up by all those birds in other disciplines? And why should the rest of us care how they lay their eggs, as long as they continue to do so?

So this leads me to my point: Literary criticism, in my view, can be a field for the masses, but you might just have to go somewhere other than Oligarch to be that scholar and get that education. Going to a school because it is famous, and not because you know that what they teach there is going to suit your intellectual desires, is a huge mistake and it is yours, Helena, and no one else's. And actually, English departments like Oligarch's do a great service, which Echlen has failed to note. While the rest of us are reading the latest Alice Munroe and catching up on our TV shows so the DVR won't erase them automatically, at Oligarch and Duke and Santa Cruz they are thinking up all those hard theories that we can just borrow and footnote! How great is that? So people should stop kicking English Departments around for -- not to mention that what they do for a living is a lot like being those people who built armour in seventeenth century Europe without knowing whether anyone would be using it twenty or thirty years hence. One does hope for a better outcome, of course, even though all culture and the history of the entire world will be available for iPod download in early 2010.

So Helena, lighten up, girl. Leave those kids alone.

Hat tip to Anonymous Untenured Colleague.