Academic Malformation

Don't be surprised if academics act like weirdos

It remains one of the most powerful graduate school images for me. My friend, who graduated two years ahead of me, was in the hurricane of the Academic Job Market. It was late in the cycle for him, and not looking promising. My memory of that year is distilled into a single image: my friend, catatonic, staring into an old desktop computer that the grad students shared in a small communal office. He was looking for sign of hope, or at least final confirmation of his failure.

Let me fill in a few details for those readers who haven't experienced the Academic Job Market. I am of the humanities, so I will limit my observations to that spectrum. I have no idea how the sciences work. This is how it was in the early aughts for those of us trying to become English professors.

All your years of study, toil, poverty, and self-doubt culminate in the final year. The year you will "go on the job market." You still have obligations as a grad student: teaching and/or administrative work, finishing your dissertation, not to mention any responsibilities you might have in your life outside academia, such as it is.

On top of everything else, you must now climb one more mountain. The Final Boss in the game of Life of the Mind. The process is somehow both grueling and tedious and finding your first academic job is a full-time job in itself (one added onto your pre-existing and ongoing work).

There are reams of documents to draft, edit, throw away, and reproduce: teaching statements, descriptions of your dissertation project, outlines of the "research agenda" you've carved out for your future self.

There's also the cover letter you must write. Two single-spaced pages (One? Three? It's never really certain) that conveys your qualifications, ambitions, accomplishments, professional acculturation, teaching strategies, and admiration for every single college that happens to be hiring that cycle. Oh, and don't forget to write at least three versions of the letter: one for research-oriented jobs, one for those that emphasize teaching, and one for Writing Center or Rhet/Comp jobs. You need a wide net since you'll be be applying for between 100 and 200 positions (and you'll have to tailor your letter for each one - toss in some nuggets you noticed researching each department and course offerings).

And you’re not the only one with some writing to do. Don't forget to reach out to 3-5 professors and colleagues you've met at the various academic conferences you've charged up your credit cards attending over the years. You'll need some letters of recommendation for your dossier.

This is all work that must be done in the months, weeks, days, minutes, and seconds before the Fall semester of your Job Market Year. Now you wait until perhaps late September or early October. The leaves begin to change and you enter your winter of discontent.

While you wait for the first listings of open jobs on the MLA website, you devoutly read The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed each day. You are a committed professional, after all. In those publications, you'll read about the bleak state of the academic humanities. There are far fewer full-time, preferably tenure-track, positions than there used to be. And it's probably not going to get better. Nevertheless, you have to set up your Interfolio account through the MLA website in order to submit your materials to these jobs you won't be getting. Oh and that will cost you for each school you submit to (I believe I remember it being between 3 and 15 dollars per application, depending on the documents that were requested -- I seem to remember hearing that those fees were eventually waived since my job search year. Someone at the MLA apparently consented that the fees were cruel, even for them).

As bad as all this sounds (and I hope I was able to communicate how bad it is), it's really even worse when you stare hard at the statistical probabilities we're dealing with. Who knows how many terminal degree-granting institutions there are churning out newly-minted Doctors of Philosophy in English each year? There are certainly many more candidates than open jobs. And that's not even the full picture of the bleak odds. Your graduating class won’t have been the first to face this horror show. Each year, there is a backlog of job-market failures from previous hunting seasons. So when you enter the market, you’re not only competing with people getting their degrees that year. You are all beginning at the back of the line, behind years-worth of earlier, more cynical job-seekers.

In short, the academic job market is menace that all academic hopefuls have to face. And the experience is part of the process of personal formation for the professional structures of academia.

Now back to my friend, who I observed in the middle of this storm. What was it he was looking for?

What he was staring at for hours each day was something I only remember every calling the “English Literature Job Wiki.” I have no idea who started it, but it was an inevitable development of the internet era, I suppose.

The idea behind the Wiki was to offer a hub to share surveillance on the current year's job market machinations. There was good sense to the idea. To an individual, the job search was mysterious, practically a faith-based activity. In religious communities, people recite their prayers and send them through the universe to their deity and await an answer without any certainty that the message was received, even if they retain belief in the existence of the addressee. And sometimes God's answer is a "no" that's implied in a lack of response. If God ghosts you, “assume it's a pass,” as literary agents like to say in their website bios.

This is precisely how the academic job market works as well. In my own application season, I sent out 150 or so portfolios and never heard back from more than half of those. This isn't all bad, as I can tell myself that maybe I am still being considered by Oberlin. There’s a certain naive plausibility to the logic, right?

But losing the plot in this key chapter of your life is emotional torment. Therefore, the Wiki.

The Wiki served as a place where candidates would file a report if they received follow-up communications for any given job: acknowledgments of receipt, requests for more documents, interview offers, even rejections.

Needless to say, if you had applied to a particular school and had not heard anything yet, it was Hell to see that other candidates, faceless bastards, were being wooed, while you were not.

This is the abyss my friend was staring into day after day as his clock was running out.

Fortunately, there was a happy ending for my friend who did receive a late-in-season interview request. He smashed the interview out of the park and ultimately found himself on the right side of the success/failure line that first year, saving him from having to descend into that Hell again the next Fall semester.

I went on the market a couple of years later. Based on what I witnessed with my friend, I promised myself I would never look at the Wiki. I did not. In discussing this piece with my wife, I found out that she apparently did log in. I hope you understand that academia upends the families of its professionals as well — part of what I tried to convey in my first, as of yet unpublished, novel.

But I also hope you can see what a brutal professional system academia depends on to confer distinction and merit upon its members.

The people running this system love to employ terms like "meritocracy" to justify themselves, but if it sounds more like sadism to you, then your understanding of the matter is clearer than that of the tenured elites fluttering about the upper-levels of this pyramid scheme.

My other hope is that this may help people understand the frequent disfunction, testiness, nastiness, and paranoia of many academics. You cannot subject human beings to this kind of pressure and not expect the high-strung mania that we often see, not only in social media, but on real-world campuses as well.

Academia's professional apparatus is structured in such a way that sharp elbows and desperate self-doubt are not a bug; they are a feature.

The gladiator school experience of the job market that I described here is but a precursor to the struggle to attain tenure among people who emerged from these battles. And now that tenure itself is fraught, withering on its deathbed, the intensity of the bitter struggle for self-assertion and professional success in the meritocracy is only going to intensify. As these professional identities that were forged in fire come under increased attack (from both aggressive political opposition and banal cultural indifference), look for the anxiety and rage to further escalate.

I've said it before. If you're looking to design a system to drive people insane or turn them into monsters, you do a lot worse than academia. And coming from the English/Literature world, it saddens me that an institution built to practice the humanities too often loses sight of its own distant humanity.

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash