"Letters of Recommendation Are Required"

Academia as a folk horror cult

“Darling, they want it all.” — Edwyn Collins

It's a grad school image forever burned into my memory. My friend was in the hurricane of the Academic Job Market, and not the calm eye of the storm.

It was late in the hiring cycle and things were not looking promising. My memory of that year revolves around a single image: my friend sitting nearly catatonic in front of an old desktop computer that grad students shared in a small communal office. He was looking for sign of hope, or at least final confirmation of failure. It was two years before my own foray into the Job Market, and the memory filled me with dread of the process. What abyss was he gazing into? I'll get to that momentarily.

First, let me fill in a few details for those readers who haven't experienced the Academic Job Market. A glimpse of how it was for those of us trying to become English professors circa 2010.

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.

All of that swirls in your face, and you must now also climb this magical mountain. The process is somehow both grueling and tedious, and finding your first academic job is a full-time job in itself.

There are reams of documents to produce, edit, throw away, and reproduce: teaching statements, descriptions of your dissertation project, outlines of the "research agenda" you've carved out for your fabricated future self. There's also the cover letter you must write. Two single-spaced pages (perhaps. That's never really clear) that convey your qualifications, ambitions, accomplishments, professional acculturation, teaching strategies, and admiration for every single college that happens to be hiring that year. Oh, and don't forget to write at least three versions of the letter: one for research-oriented jobs, one for schools 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 finding the words for these documents is bad enough. Wait until you begin torturing yourself over what the best font choice would be. I settled on Garamond, in 12 points.

There's an element of social anxiety that adds spice to this process too. You'll be expected to reach out to 3-5 professors and colleagues you've met at the various academic conferences you've maxed-out your credit cards attending. It's important for your dossier. Letters of recommendation are required to validate that you've been adequately professionalized.

This work must be done in the months, weeks, and days before the Fall semester of your Job Market Year. Now you wait. The gates will open in late September or early October. As the leaves begin to change, you will enter into your long winter of discontent.

And while you wait for the first listings of open jobs on the MLA website, you studiously read The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed each day. You are a devoted professional, after all. In those publications, alongside their own job postings, 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.

Ignoring the odds, you'll have to set up your Interfolio account through the MLA website in order to submit your materials to all those 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 an institution requested -- I seem to remember hearing that those fees were eventually waived. Someone at the MLA perhaps recognized their own cruelty).

I don't even know if Interfolio still exists, and I don't have the heart to look.

As bad as all this sounds (and I hope I effectively communicated how bad it is), it gets exponentially worse when you stare down the statistical probabilities we're dealing with. Who knows how many terminal degree-granting institutions there are in America and the English-speaking world that churn newly-minted Doctors of Philosophy in English each year? There are certainly many more fresh candidates than jobs.

And that's not the full extent of the bleak odds. There's the factor of the "stale candidates" to add in. One would have to be a fool to believe that only those in YOUR graduating class face the Sisyphean struggle. Each year, there is a growing backlog of job-market failures from previous hunting seasons. So when you enter the market, you are not only outnumbered by people getting their degrees in the same year, you are all beginning at the back of a line full of years of previous graduates.

Now back to my friend, who was in the middle of this superstorm of existential crises.

What he was staring at for hours each day was something I only remember everyone calling the "English Literature Job Wiki." I have no idea what the web address was or who started it, but it was an inevitable development of the internet era, I suppose.

Photo by Mason Kimbarovsky on Unsplash

The idea behind the Wiki was to offer a networked hub for shared surveillance on the current year's job market machinations.

The concept made sense. To an individual, the job search was mysterious and an essentially faith-based activity. In religious communities, people recite their prayers and send them through the universe to the deity. Then they await an answer without certainty that the message was received, even if they still retain belief in the existence of the addressee. And sometimes God's answer is a firm "no,” implied only by a lack of response. If God ghosts you, assume it's a pass, as agents and publishers like to say.

This is precisely how the academic job market works. In my own application season, I sent out 150 or so portfolios and never heard back from at least half of those. This isn't all bad, as I can tell myself that I am still being considered by Oberlin.

But losing the plot in this chapter of your life is emotionally trying. 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, etc...

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 (or perhaps strung-along), while you were not.

This is the darkness my old friend was staring into day after day as his clock was running out. Fortunately, there was a happy ending for him. He eventually did receive a (very) 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 in his first year, saving him from having to descend into that Hell again. A successful Hail Mary.

Despite this happy ending, I hope you can see what a brutal professional system academia has developed.

The people running this system love to employ terms like "meritocracy" to justify themselves. But if it sounds more like sadism to you, then you understand the matter more clearly than 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, 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.

Academics and elite higher ed institutions are now under public siege. Many of the attacks are unfair and not coming from a position of good faith. But let's be honest, please. Academics and the "overproduced elite" have done themselves no favors in the way we often present ourselves publicly. There is an undeniably elitist and cruel energy we repeatedly bring to our interactions with the normies, online, on our podcasts, and in person.

What I'm trying to convey here is a bit of context for all our assholery. What kind of person would you expect to emerge from this professional network? Sure, we produce valuable research at times, but that’s very much blind squirrel/acorn. Our biggest export is paranoiacs, egotists, and those riddled with self-loathing, depending on how the profession sorts them.

Academia's professional apparatus is structured so that sharp elbows and desperate self-doubt are not bugs; they are features.

The gladiator school experience of the job market is just a prologue to the struggles that come after that battle is won or lost. The social anxiety of relocating one's life. The quest for tenure, including the opaque nightmare of “publication requirements.” Fighting endless culture war battles that we associate with our "professional expertise." The academic life is not a genteel one anymore, if it ever was.

And now that tenure itself is fraught and 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 simple cultural indifference to our atomized niches), look for the anxiety and rage to further escalate.

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 has lost sight of its own humanity.