MLA Job List and some links

The MLA Job List opens today (September 10) at https://www.mla.org/Resources/Career/Job-Information-List.

Remember, this isn't the be-all and end-all that it used to be. As Jonathan Kramnick reminds us in "The Way We Hire Now" (https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-way-we-hire-now/244467):

To get a grip on where things now stand, start with the fact that the MLA jobs list has lost its monopoly. The low cost and simplicity of doing things online has meant that advertisements now appear on any number of platforms, including The Chronicle, Interfolio, Higher Education Recruitment Consortium (HERC), HigherEdJobs, and well beyond.

Don't forget the jobs at Insidehighered.com, too.

If you're looking for information on historical trends (and the now-infamous rosy vision of the Bowen report), here are some links.

MLA Report on the JIL 2016-17 (chart is from this source): https://www.mla.org/content/download/78816/2172744/Report-MLA-JIL-2016-17.pdf

At the Chronicle (paywalled but free with this link): On the Bowen report and what went wrong: https://t.co/gw9G30Aacg

Some older posts from this blog about job letters, still maybe useful:

The art of the job letter: http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2007/10/art-of-job-letter.html
The art of the job letter redux, part I:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2008/09/art-of-job-letter-redux-part-1.html
The art of the job letter redux, part II:
http://notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com/2008/09/art-of-job-letter-redux-part-2.html

Good luck, everyone!

Maybe a little bit more advice on the job letter

I've written a bunch of posts full of advice about the job letter, and I don't want to repeat myself so this will be short.

As far as I can tell, the advice has not changed from blog to blog or year to year, but there are a couple of points in otherwise good posts that I would like to challenge.

1. Karen Kelsky (Professor is In) usually has good advice, like about tailoring a job letter. (Of course I think it's good; it's advice I've given myself. ) I did read somewhere that it's too much of a burden for the applicant to tailor a job letter, but if you're applying for a job you are serious about, what do you think?

 But she thinks Interfolio and non-tailored letters from your faculty recommenders are a sign of the apocalypse, or anyway serious professional laziness on the part of faculty.  I'm happy to write personalized letters, but as a member and/or chair of a search committee, I certainly didn't expect personalized letters from faculty members that had tailored them to our specific hiring needs.

2. Philip N. Howard's helpful Inside Higher Ed essay on the lines needed in job letters has a lot of good advice, too. Amidst this excellent advice, though, is one thing that might not be true:

"Address your letter to the person heading the search or the department head. A greeting such as 'Dear Committee Members' shows you haven’t done enough research." 

"Research" in this case may involve defying the HR requirements of posting the ad, which for various reasons may not list a name at all but may instead  specify that the letter has to be addressed to "Search Committee Chair" or some such. I don't know why they do this, and I'm not brave enough to go to HR and find out.

So "research" in this case may involve using the name of the department chair, or calling the department and requesting the name of the search committee chair. I get why Howard would think this is important, but what if 300 applicants all call the administrative assistant to try to get this information in the name of "research"?  It's nice if you have the name, but don't lose any sleep over it if you don't. It's a salutation, not the Holy Grail.

Let me assure job candidates who may be reading this that, as a search committee member and/or chair, I could not tell you whether the hundreds of letters I read had my name, the department chair's name, "Dear Committee Members," or "Dear Bozos on the Bus." Quite honestly, we skip to the first paragraph -- AS WE SHOULD-- and get right to the substance of your qualifications and interest in the position.

3. The letterhead issue is another one that bloggers, CHE, and IHE have written about for the past ten years or so. Karen Kelsky points out that you should be able to get an electronic version, or, in a pinch, Photoshop a version of it for your electronic publications.  I'd only add that your department probably has this for the asking for grad students (although some don't give it out).

 In a funny reversal, when I asked for this letterhead template a few years ago, various Northern Clime admins assured me that we had no such thing for faculty or students. What was I talking about! Didn't exist! A student did have a copy of it, though, so that's how I was able to post much better-looking versions of letters to job portals and Interfolio. For the most recent logo redesign, we were officially sent the template, which is a step in the right direction.

Still here

A conference, some deadlines, more travel, a hectic week, and then some more deadlines.  News I thought about writing about but didn't:

• At The New Yorker, the case for banning laptops in the classroom (wait--I already did that). More on this from WaPo and Margaret Soltan. [Edited to add links.]
• Cursive handwriting improves learning.
• The MLA recognizes a jobs problem but touchingly believes that (1) 60% of graduates get jobs and (2) that jobs are going begging in museums, libraries, and nonprofits, all of which will snap up vast numbers of English Ph.D. graduates immediately if we can (3) lower the time to degree and provide different sorts of training without (4) diminishing the number of graduates.  
• Quick quiz: which of these items is probably true?  Answer: 3. Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker does a quick check of the MLA's math.
• Mad Men, although that may be yesterday's news. 

A real post soon.

Abolish the MLA interview? Sure, why not?

Dr. Virago and Miriam Burstein have posts up about Michael Berube's public Facebook post suggesting the end of the MLA conference interview in favor of Skype or phone first-round interviews and his follow-up post discussing the benefits.  Go see their posts and comments for a more comprehensive look at the idea.

Among the potential benefits:

• The obvious one of eliminating or cutting way down on the costs for job-seekers who go to the conference for the interview.  It's expensive to go to MLA, in terms of time and money both, and no, faculty members don't get their way fully paid.  
• What I love about this idea is that candidates wouldn't have to stress out about how they're going to pay for everything in addition to worrying about whether they're going to get an interview or not. 
• The possibility of interviewing more candidates than the 12 or so customary at the MLA.  
• If the MLA decided to discourage the conference interview, that should have some effect on quashing what Flavia and others suggest is the "prestige factor" for the MLA interview, as in "if we don't take a suite at an MLA hotel, candidates will think we're not serious about hiring." The MLA pronounces judgments and passes resolutions about a lot of things, and this would be one that would have a substantive effect. 
• The possibility of holding MLA in smaller cities, since the conference would be smaller.  MLA apparently doesn't make money on the conference anyway.

There'd still be campus interviews, but maybe universities could bring more candidates to campus (4 instead of 3, 3 instead of 2, or whatever) if they didn't have to partially fund a search committee's trip to MLA.

Also, if you're hiring in rhet/comp, creative writing, or other fields that have different major conferences (CCCC, AWP), this would bring those hiring processes into alignment with ones in more MLA-centric ones. 

Are there negatives? Maybe, but they're relatively minor ones:

• You might not get to hear candidates present papers at the conference, because that might confer an unfair advantage (wouldn't it?) if you met or saw in person a candidate outside the Skype or phone interview.  On the other hand, if you're on a search committee, you can barely leave the interview room as it is, and you probably can't attend a candidate's panel in any case.
• It's nice to meet a candidate in person and shake his or her hand. Well, yes it is, but is that preference worth putting the candidates through the expense of the process?
• Skype (or Google Hangout, or any of the others) isn't perfect; you get dropped calls sometimes, or Goofy Face Freeze Frame.  But if everyone is using something like this, the playing field will be level. 

I like the positive turn that this whole conversation is taking. On to Chicago!

Nobody knows anything

By "nobody," I don't mean the estimable Dr. Crazy, New Kid, and Sisyphus, all of whom have excellent posts (responding to Thomas Hart Benton at the Chronicle) about the wisdom, or lack thereof, of attending grad school in English, with New Kid emphasizing that the often-offered panacea of teaching at a community college isn't one and Crazy rightly protesting that Benton's formula would have only the super-privileged continuing to be the super-privileged. They know something, all right: that the job market is terrible and that getting a Ph.D. in a humanities discipline is risky.

But when those eager undergrads come to us holding out a dream that goes "I want to be a professor!" we ought to be able to do something more productive than smash it. What are the alternatives?

This is why I say "nobody knows anything." We gesture toward some alternatives, sure, but what do we know about them?

• Law school? But there are a lot of unemployed or underemployed lawyers out there. As I understand it, the law profession has been undergoing the same adjunctification, if that's a word, as the academy, with big firms scooping up fully qualified attorneys and paying them a pittance without the prospect of being an associate or making partner (equivalent of t-t and tenured).
• Tech writing? Yes, this is a good option in normal times. But in a job market where even the mighty Microsoft is laying off employees, is it a realistic one? What are the prospects out there?
  
• Foundation work and grantwriting? Again, communication skills are important, but what are the prospects like in this economy?
• High school teaching? I tell my students (truthfully) that high school teachers are better paid than professors, but they still would need to get certified, unless they're willing to teach in a private high school. If the "want to be a professor" dream is really about wanting to teach, this would be a good option. But several states put caps on the number of teachers that can be trained, so this could be a limited option.
• Going into another field--science, maybe? It's not as farfetched as it sounds. If the student is generally strong academically, apparently medical schools are looking for people with varied backgrounds, as long as the person can also pass organic chemistry or whatever. And if it's research that attracts the student, why not get a Ph.D. in nursing? The desperate shortage of nurses is due in part to a lack of faculty, since practitioners can make more than Ph.D. nurses who teach, so there's a growth industry.
  

If you look at a list of what English majors do when they graduate, it's really eclectic. Some go into their family's business, or go into sales, or work as a tech writer, or teach, but the paths that take them there are individual paths. But I don't think it's enough when they come to us about wanting to go to grad school and we say, dramatically, "Do something else, anything else." That's probably the same advice they're getting from their history, art history, and languages teachers.

The question is this: what do we (the academy) tell them? I don't know enough. Do you?

Nobody knows anything.*

[*For the record, this is William Goldman's famous quotation about Hollywood in Adventures in the Screen Trade. I'm stealing it but didn't want to plagiarize or anything.]

It's not you--it's the market

This is bad news and good news.

From Inside Higher Ed:

Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA’s Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language and literature, the drop will be 22.2 percent and for foreign languages, 19.6 percent. . . .
For English jobs, the 1,420 positions the MLA lists this year is a drop from 1,821 last year. While the English totals hovered between 1,000 and 1,200 for several years during the mid-1990s, they have not been as low as this year’s figure since 1997-8. For foreign languages, this year’s MLA total is 1,350, the smallest number of jobs since 2003-4.

Over at the Chronicle, on one of the job boards, there is--or was--a little bragfest going on in the guise of problem-solving: "I have twelve MLA interviews and just don't know how to schedule them."
I submit to you, the jury, these ideas:
-- such claims are either highly exaggerated or just plain false
-- the job market is as bad as it has been in a long, long time
-- especially for Americanists
-- and that if you don't have an interview, it's not necessarily about you, your publications, your teaching, or anything else that you can control.

So the bad news is this: It's about the market, which is awful.
The good news, such as it is (and it isn't much), is this: It's not about you.

The art of the job letter redux, part 2

Even though we're all saying similar things, some information about job letters may bear repeating:

• When you write the letter, think about your audience. I know, this goes without saying, but you'd be surprised at how many writers do not address the criteria for the job they're applying for. If a committee at Small Directional State U gets an application from Fancy U many thousands of miles away, one natural question is this: why is Fancy U Ph.D. applying here? If the letter is the standard research/teaching boilerplate, without any mention of the job except for the INSERT JOB TITLE HERE slot in the first paragraph, the search committee may deduce, probably correctly, that the applicant is papering the known world with applications and decide that the writer isn't serious.
• And then think about your audience again. If you're applying for a job at a teaching-oriented school, it's not just a matter of switching the paragraphs around and putting your teaching paragraph first instead of your research paragraph. The search committee will want to know how all those grandiose statements about teaching will translate into the courses you can teach for them. The job ad should give you some clues, even if it seems schizophrenic (eighteenth-century literature and modern poetry, for example). Use those clues, and talk about your teaching in specific ways.
  
• And again. This usually comes out only in the interview, if you get that far, but if there's any hint of condescension, of how grateful the school should be to get your expertise, coming as you do from Big R1, know this: such an attitude is not received well. At all.
  
• But in a lot of ways, the choice isn't about you. For example, if you're applying to Small School near Big R1, you may assume that Small School is lucky to have you, and indeed, Small School might feel this way in other circumstances. But if Small School already has three or four graduates of Big R1 in its department, the committee may not think it wise to hire another, just because they want a faculty with diverse educational experiences.
• It really isn't. As a lot of other people writing about this have mentioned, committees and departments don't always know exactly what they want, although they've written a job ad that presumably addresses everything. But maybe when the applications pour in, they discover that people with expertise in X and Y also tend to have a background in Z. They realize that Z would be a "special added attraction" to the department, so to speak. Although it might be nice to cancel the search and cajole the powers-that-be for a new search next year that includes Z (as if that would be approved!), that's not how the world works.
• There may be reasons why an ad specifies a full dossier. It may seem, and even be, more rational to ask for a cv and letter in the initial job ad, especially because sending all that information is expensive. But the committee may in fact be using letters from references or writing samples to get from the list of total applicants to the list of those who may be good matches for the job. Also, an institution may have layers upon layers of bureaucracy that have to be negotiated at every step, and adding the challenge of sending for more information, having it arrive and be processed, and then sending all the necessary paperwork through the system to the next step (more paperwork, more processing) might slow up the selection process intolerably. You can't predict this, of course.

[More posts and more links here.]

The art of the job letter redux , part 1

The MLA Job Information List goes live in about a week, and ABDs, new Ph.D.s, adjuncts, instructors, and tenure-track people looking to "trade up" will all take a look. (So will those of us on search committees, since we'll hope that our carefully crafted, word-by-argued-about-word ad will bring in good applicants.)

Some other things will happen, too. The forums at the Chronicle of Higher Education will overflow with questions ("What does this school REALLY mean if it asks for underwater saltwater basketweaving instead of just underwater basketweaving?") and furious screeds about slights in the hiring process, some of which verge from rude to heinous and others of which can't be helped ("It's been two weeks and I haven't heard yet. What is WRONG with these people?").

One of the good things that will happen is that the Chronicle, and Inside Higher Ed, and the forums will all offer some good advice. Mentors will offer good advice. Departments will offer good advice.

Bloggers will offer good advice, too: Tenured Radical, for example, has promised a series on the search process. If you've read all these job-related blog posts for the past several years, the ones posted by Bardiac, Tenured Radical, Dr. Crazy, Sisyphus, Dean Dad, Narratives, and CitizenSE, among others (you can see a list here, in a post I wrote last year about the job search), you'll see that we're all saying variations on the same things. Every year we're all saying variations on the same things.

And that's a good thing. What this consistency says is that there are conventions, but there is no magic bullet, no secret formula that will guarantee a job. It's not news that there are a lot more people looking for jobs in MLA fields than there are jobs. Ultimately, and I know everyone has heard this before, it's not about the job seeker; it's about what the department needs, or thinks it needs. The only thing you can really do is to present yourself in a way that makes the department believe that you can answer those needs, and this is the art of the job letter.

Glimpses of another time

Squadratomagico has a post up about what academics (and implicitly academics in the liberal arts) give up when they choose academics as a career. Among the things that she discusses are proximity to family, choice of a place to live, sense of a self outside the job, and even separation from one's partner if one follows the job instead of the partner to a new place and hopes for a better placement in a few years.

It's been this way for at least thirty years, as everyone who has gone to graduate school since the 1970s has always known before going into a Ph. D. program, but that doesn't make the situation good. It's been the same for several decades and despite occasional spasms of hope ("Urgent need for more Ph.D.'s in English predicted, studies say"--remember those headlines?), the employment situation doesn't seem to be changing.

There was a time, though, when the situation wasn't like this, as I've heard from older colleagues, so I thought a glimpse of those times might be interesting--or maybe would call them into being again.

An older colleague once told me about his experience at MLA back in the late 1960s: "I had six interviews, but when I walked into the pit (the interviewing room), search committees from other colleges would try to flag you down and get you to interview with them. They would try to sell you on their schools as you were walking by." I think he was ABD at the time when this was happening.

Another colleague told of going to MLA on a lark ("lark" and "MLA" are two words that do NOT belong in the same sentence these days) with some friends. They took some resumes with them and planned to sign up for some interviews with schools while they were there, because back then schools posted job descriptions and signup sheets. If you were there, and you fit the description, you could sign up and get an interview, apparently.

Let's hope those days aren't gone for good.

Just the facts, ma'am

From "MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship," Profession 2007, pp. 27-28:
Estimated percentage of English and Foreign Languages Doctorate Recipients Who Become Tenure-Track Faculty Members and Achieve Tenure at the Institution Where Hired

Completed doctorate degree: 100
Hired to tenure-track position within five years: 60
Considered for institution at institution where hired: 38*
Awarded tenure at institution where hired: 34

*According to the report: "The MLA survey indicates that the largest number leave one tenure-track appointment for another. We have no way of tracking tenure outcomes for these junior faculty members" (27).

For a reasoned analysis, read the report. The short version of the "Is the glass half full or half empty?" question seems to be that if you get a position, as 40% will not, and are considered for tenure at the same institution, you're pretty likely to get it. I'm not sure if this counteracts any of the gloom about MLA interviews and job anxiety, but I hope so. It's still a bad market.

Updated to add: Miriam Burstein has a good summary of several of the articles.

Moving up or moving out

The big dust-up over junior faculty moving (see the posts at Dr. Crazy's, Maggie May's, and at the snark-about-students blog), and especially the tone of animosity with which those junior faculty are attacked, is both dismaying and bewildering. For the record, I'm senior faculty and honestly can't see what the problem is with junior faculty looking for jobs. It's especially fascinating that this gets characterized as selfish, for what's more selfish than demanding that someone hang around and publish like crazy for six years without anything more than a "you'll probably get tenure" promise to go on? Pot, meet kettle.

One perspective that no one has touched on yet is this: if I were a beginning job candidate, with a Ph. D. on which the ink was still fresh, all this talk about job-hopping junior professors would be making me nervous. I'd wonder how I could ever compete with people who already have a tenure-track job and are looking to move up. I can't say anything useful about the junior/senior split, but I can talk a little about this issue. (These are my personal opinions and observations; if, God forbid, anyone figures out who I am or where I work, they should not be taken as either exemplary or representative of the opinions there.)

First of all, things do even out when you have a pool of candidates. Let's say that you have 200 qualified candidates for an average search (I've heard of some pools of 700, but I don't think that's usual). Of those, extra materials will be requested from some--a shorter list, and maybe 10-12 will be interviewed at MLA. (Some schools interview 30 or more.) Of those, 2 will be invited to campus, and 1 will get the job.

In that mix, when considering who'll be invited for MLA interviews, there'll probably be some new-minted Ph.D. degree holders, maybe some advanced ABDs, some new assistant professors looking to move, and maybe some advanced assistants or associates also looking to move. Assume that the letters, research agendas, and so on make those in this list (maybe 30-50 people) seem like good prospects. Each category, though, has advantages and disadvantages:

ABD. If you're ABD and in this group (i.e., the group we're considering inviting for MLA), your research probably looks really promising, and your letters are probably glowing. Disadvantage: You're, well, ABD. We would need to be reasonably sure that you would finish your degree before you get to campus and are likely to look for that assurance both in the letters and in our MLA interview with you.

New Ph.D. You have the degree in hand, and you probably have a good, competitive research agenda. The disadvantage is that you may not have as much teaching experience, but here's the thing: we don't expect as much teaching experience from you, although we do expect interesting ways of talking and thinking about the courses you could teach for us.

Fairly new assistant professor. You've probably served on committees, taught a full load, and have a research program in place. Your narrative has to make sense to us, though, especially if you've bounced around in a few t-t jobs. Why are you applying? Is it to move up? Get a reduced teaching load? Your letter probably explains this (or not, if you just have one job and it's clear that we would be a step up for you).

Advanced assistant professor or associate professor. You know the ropes and have published enough that we know what we'll be getting, which is an advantage. A committee will have different research expectations for someone who has been out for a few years, too. If you're a fifth- or sixth-year assistant, though, we may wonder about your tenure prospects where you are or whether you really want an offer from us just for leverage with your home department. If you're an associate and we're advertising for an assistant professor, you may have some 'splaining to do. Are you really willing to give up tenure and start the tenure clock over at this job? That may be the case, but again, the narrative (loosely conceived) that you're telling us has to make sense to us. Also, if it's not advertised as "open rank," there's no chance that the committee will suddenly decide to hire at the associate level, so using that as a negotiating tactic is a non-starter. If the ad had specified associate professors, we'd have had a different pool to choose from, and such a switch would never be approved by the administration.

A committee can't second-guess why candidates apply for a job, or why they want to move, or anything like that. It can only try to choose people who seem to be the best fit. My point is that candidates of all levels can be that "best fit."
[Updated to add: There's an index of all the posts on the junior/senior divide at Prone to Laughter.]

The art of the job letter

So many people have written such good posts about this recently that this post may be short. Check out the advice at Academic Cog, CitizenSE, Dr. Crazy, Bardiac, Tenured Radical,and Narratives, just for starters, and don't neglect the excellent advice in the comments. (I wrote about this issue last year, too.)

Some things to remember:

Your letter is just part of the process.. As the talk that Sisyphus heard indicates, you can have a letter perfect in all details, but if you look too similar to someone already in the department, or offer a subspecialty that isn't needed, or whatever, you might not make it to the interview stage. It's a matter of fit; it really is. Also, if the committee is searching in some area that overlaps with another area (women's studies, say), committee members have to be sensitive to the research areas (and touchy egos) of that department as well. These are things you can't predict or control, so don't feel as though you've done something wrong if you don't get an interview.

Make sure that you really are suited for the position. I know, lots of people now have jobs that they applied for and got even though they were a long shot for the position. If you just had one grad course in a field, though, or have just taught one course in it, do consider carefully before putting yourself forth as a specialist in the area. Even if you get through the committee's review, which is unlikely, candidates invited for interviews will still need to be vetted by diversity committees, HR, or other agencies that ensure that those invited match the qualifications of the job.

Make your research sound exciting. When I think back to the search committees I've served on, after questions of fit and suitability for the position, the excitement generated by the possibilities of the candidate's research program is really what sticks in the mind and makes the candidate stand out. Also, don't make us do the math: if it's exciting and has great potential for changing a field, explain how that's the case. If you are the first person to study the social significance of lawn mower blades in consumer culture, you need to tell us why that is important. You recommenders will do this, too, but it's your letter that we read first.

Ask a nonspecialist in your field to read your letter and especially your research paragraph. Some research paragraphs sound as though they've been turned out by an academic cliche generator: "always already," "interrogate" (which has come to seem an increasingly uncomfortable piece of LitCritSpeak, given the current political climate), "imbricate," etc. Everything will be "trans" and not "inter": transnational, transcultural, etc. Gender is always "performed"; hierarchies or binaries or boundaries are always "interrogated" or "deconstructed" or "destabilized." Some of these are unavoidable, of course, but if you give your letter or your paragraph to a person in your department (but not in your field) and his or her eyes glaze over, it's time to lighten the mix. Oddly enough, sometimes writers never mention the authors or texts they're working with in this paragraph, so dense is the theoryspeak. A little of both is better. The best research paragraphs use critical terminology but describe the projects in such a way as to make us see immediately the significance of what you're doing not only for your immediate project but for the discipline.

More on the research paragraph.. Also, if you have publications (or forthcoming publications), mention at least one or two of the relevant ones. I know they're on your CV, but again: we read your letter first. The letter tells us how we ought to read your application. If we've got, say, 200-300 letters to read, you can't count on us to scour your CV to figure out that you got X prize or that you have Y publication forthcoming. We will probably notice it, but we might not.

Tailor your letter for the institution. This is old advice, I know, but when someone sends what's clearly a piece of boilerplate (intro, research, teaching, and conclusion) rattled off with no regard to the institution or the specific needs of the department in regard to teaching, it gets less consideration. This is especially true if you're applying to a teaching-oriented school. What courses could you teach? How could you fit into the our department, and what needs would you fill?

Don't make us do the math. I mentioned this above about making the search committee ferret out your real area of specialization, but this goes for the CV, too. If you lump all of your "works in progress" and "works under consideration" in with your publications, we'll just have to sort them out anyway, and it won't make us happy to do so. Also, you can point us to your web site, but we probably won't go there unless we're really interested. I guess the sum of the advice is this: If you want us to know something, tell us; don't make us hunt for it. We don't have time.

Teaching is important, too. Your teaching paragraph should--surprise!--be specific and convey your excitement about teaching. Again, think about all those eye-glazing cliches about "student-centered classrooms" and "interactive assignments." What we want to know is this: how do you achieve this? What do you actually DO that's innovative or that works? You don't have to go on for pages, but an example or two would be great.

Letterhead or no letterhead? I'm with Tenured Radical: use the letterhead. It's not disloyal, and everyone else uses it. I'd say that fewer than 1 out of 10 letters won't have some kind of letterhead.

One complaint for search committees: I wish that job ads would specify the head of the search committee instead of HR or "Search Committee" or the academic coordinator as the person to whom the letter should be addressed.

And good luck to all applying this year!

No job candidates today! No driving today!

This week has been all about the job candidates, and our department is not done yet. As a member of the search committee, I've had to be there every day (which means I've put in more hours driving this week than I would in a part-time job), but it's been interesting listening to the candidates talk both in our smaller meetings and in their job talks. Some observations:

Since the entire reason we're hiring someone new is that we don't have someone who's exactly in the subspecialty for which we've advertised, it's exciting to hear someone talk about research in fields and eras that would bring a lot to the program. It's exciting to hear people talk about their research intelligently.

The turnout was excellent for both candidates and included people from other (related) departments as well. That's important, since (I hope) it showed the candidates that we're interested in them as well as vice versa. It is a courtship dance on both sides, after all, and I'm assuming that as in other searches, the candidates will have other offers.

The semi-formal events (lunches, cocktail parties, dinners) are fun but a little tricky. Talking too informally about family life can veer dangerously into prohibited EEOC waters, but at the same time, you don't want the dinner to be just another Q & A about research interests, which the poor candidate has by then been talking about all day. The events I attended struck a pretty good balance, although I did change the subject when someone wanted to go into enthusiastic detail about the many turbulent and terrifying flights she'd had when leaving from our airport--the one from which the candidate was scheduled to depart the next day. [A digression: What's up with people who do that, anyway? There is no circumstance, none, under which I want to hear about a bad flight, especially when I'm on a flight that isn't, shall we say, glassy smooth, and yet people in the seat behind me always feel compelled to tell horror stories to each other in a loud voice.]

About the talks themselves: Dr Crazy has a good post about this, so I'll only add the following:

Don't worry if you're a little nervous; we expect and allow for that.

Dr. Crazy says to be sure that you identify some of your more obscure references, and that's good advice--sometimes. But if you identify someone that people ought to know, you can come across as condescending. Saying "Abraham Lincoln, who was the sixteenth president of the United States," for example, or "Shakespeare, who was quite a well-known playwright in his day" (I'm making this up) is a bit much. I'd rather look up a reference later than hear this kind of statement; it's insulting. We have advanced degrees, too, so trust me: we'll keep up.

The "look up the department members to show interest" as part of doing your homework on the department can be a double-edged sword. Some candidates do it, and some don't; some of my colleagues are flattered by it, but I had one person a year or so ago say that she found it creepy. The majority wouldn't agree, probably (I don't find it creepy), but I thought I'd pass that along.

A different PSA about the MLA Job List

Flavia posted a PSA the other day announcing that the MLA Job Information List is now online. Like Flavia, I kept up a sporting interest in looking at the list even after I had a job (and tenure), but that changed after serving on (and on occasion chairing) search committees.

I have a PSA of my own; it's basically a few pleas for job seekers based on experiences past and current. (BTW, this post is a snark-free zone, unlike some others I've posted.)

Please do think about whether you're really interested in the institution and the general area of the country before you apply. If you're not really interested, don't apply. For example, if you get an interview and end up asking questions that basically ask how often/how much you can stay away from the institution/the area, we know that we've pretty much wasted our time and interview money on someone who doesn't want to be there.

Ditto if you tell us that your advisor thinks this would be a good "first job."

If the ad specifies a specialist in Subject Y, and you taught one course in Subject Y back in grad school but your major area and dissertation are in another field, please think twice before applying and trying to spin this into a major area for you. We'll figure this out in any case when we read your materials.

Proofread your cover letters carefully. Concluding with some variation of "and that's why I'm a perfect candidate for [Not Your Institution]" doesn't inspire much confidence.

If your research is exciting to you, and teaching is exciting to you, make sure that that comes across. You don't have to jump on a couch, but if you want to spend your life doing these two things (teaching and research), the search committee, and later the interviewers from the committee, ought to be able to figure out why it's exciting, what the possible research implications might be for the field, and so on.

This gets said over and over again, but try to personalize your letter for the institution to which you're applying. Printing out a boilerplate letter is faster than tailoring one to the job, but reading the same phrases in densely printed boilerplate about dissertation, teaching philosophy, and so on, especially in the increasingly long letters that we get, is a MEGO moment (my eyes glaze over).

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