How Hard Can It Be to Get a Job as a Professor?

So what the hell am I still doing in New Orleans? Like I said, my husband and I still have jobs here. But what I really want to explain is why, despite searching for a new job for four years, I haven't been able to leave. The short answer is: the job market in academia, particularly in the humanities, is, well, take your pick: insane, outrageous, senseless, just too damn difficult.

The statistics are embarrassing for anyone who has foolishly thrown themselves into the fray, hoping that they will buck the odds. According to a Modern Language Association report, the percentage of Ph.D. graduates in 2001 who captured tenure-track positions was 42.9%. And you know the 56% who didn't get jobs will be out there again next year. And this is how it goes, year after year. There is a kind of snowball effect. "But aren't the baby boomer professors retiring?" my mom reasonably, but naively, asked me once. So I explained that many of those retiring are being replaced by part-time adjuncts because state legislators have decimated public university budgets. I know it seems incredulous to anyone outside of academia, but, as I have been informed by job search committees, hundreds of applicants apply for each position. And there are definitely not hundreds of positions to go around. Each year, there have been between 20 and 30 jobs in my field to apply for.

Trying to get a tenure-track job feels like trying to break into Hollywood, except you have to spend years of mind-bendingly hard work and tens of thousands of dollars to get a Ph.D. first. Then you slave away scouring the job ads, crafting your job letter and fine-tuning your vita, begging people (preferably big names) to write you recommendations, and mailing dozens of packets out to schools all over the country. Then you wait for your existence and, hopefully, your brilliance to be recognized. First come the Affirmative Action postcards to fill out, which you throw away because you have no minority status to report (and God don't you wish you did), then requests for your letters and writing samples, which also take weeks to get into shape, so you'd better have them ready beforehand, preferably in a variety of lengths. You might also be asked to submit a teaching philosophy, which is damned hard to write so that it doesn't sound like vague B.S. along the lines of the freshman essays you abhor grading.

Then during those first weeks of December you wait for the phone to ring as if you have been taken out on a first date and are dying for the handsome, mysterious stranger to take you out again. When he doesn't call, your despair is far greater than one little date would warrant. But when he does call, you start planning your wedding, re: your move to the most idyllic little town with an ivy-covered campus and a nice office for you overlooking the quad. The problem is, however, that this is just another date, and you are still many months and hurdles away from monogamy.

Having been through this process a total of four times, it is strange to say that my first foray, when I had the least to offer a department in terms of experience and knowledge, was the most successful. I was still finishing my dissertation, and I only landed one MLA interview. Miraculously, I was offered the job, but not until February. (The following year one of my colleagues told me I had been their third choice after two very advanced candidates. One even had a book coming out.)

After sitting out for a year, I decided to try again and did a very limited search. No interviews. The following year, I was pregnant and due on Sep. 30, just before the deadlines begin. But I wanted to apply for jobs in the Midwest, having decided that I wanted my daughter to grow up there and not in Louisiana. Only three jobs in my field fit the bill, so I did a very limited search that year. I ended up with one MLA interview again and then landed one of three campus interviews. (The story of what it was like to leave my breastfeeding three-month-old on those two occasions will have to wait for another entry.) I still ache at the thought of that lost opportunity. That was the real deal.

Last year, my book had just been published by a highly regarded university press and I had managed to get a letter of recommendation from one of the scholarly gods from Harvard. This was going to be my year to land a better job in a saner place to live! And the clock was ticking. I was also up for tenure and knew that this was my last chance to get out. Once you have tenure, you are no longer marketable because 95% of the advertised positions are entry-level. What I didn't realize was how hard it is to convince a search committee that you aren't damaged goods because you want to leave one tenure-track position for another.

I ended up with a surprising but gratifying five interviews. But there the courtship ended. No fireworks. One interview was embarrassingly awkward as a professor began by joking about my seat being wired to shock me. Another was very warm and felt like true love but was apparently all show. (One of the committee members later told me they went with someone else who was a better "fit," that vague quantifier ubiquitous in the academic job market). Another was nice but groggy at 8 in the morning. One, for which I had been told I was one of their top candidates, went well until a professor said she couldn't imagine why I would want to leave New Orleans and I had a difficult time convincing these snow-bound Midwesterners that life in the Big Easy was anything but easy. The fifth and last was congenial and refreshingly frank as they explained to me how cash-strapped their institution was and how difficult it was to cater to their ill-prepared students. Although this school later called my references, I pulled out, knowing that a move to this school, which sounded a lot like where I already was, wasn't worth the upheaval to my family. In retrospect, it would have been. We would be living in a safe place, closer to family, and I would still be employed as a professor. Now, four months after Katrina, that job is looking pretty good.

Instead, however, I got tenure by a unanimous vote of my colleagues, and my husband and I decided to make our lives in New Orleans. We bought a new house in a great neighborhood and prepared to embrace all that the city had to offer. We gave up on our dreams of returning to the Midwest and decided that life was pretty good. We had it all, we realized, and we stopped looking at the seemingly greener grass over the fence. We both had good jobs and many good friends, and a new home for our daughter to grow up in. Then came Aug. 29.

One of my first thoughts after I learned of the loss of our home and the flooding of New Orleans, a realization that literally made me sit up in bed, was that this would likely be the end of my career. But in the following weeks, I did what I swore I would never do again. I dusted of my C.V. and rounded up my letters of recommendation and wrote a new job letter. This year, no one would wonder why I wanted to leave. And many friends predicted that search committees would have sympathy for displaced New Orleans faculty. Apparently not. I was supposed to be spending this week between Christmas and New Year's Eve at MLA interviewing for jobs. Instead, I moped around my mother's house and decided to start this blog.

At a Crossroads in New Orleans

Probably the main reason that I have decided to take up blogging is that I find myself approaching a crossroads right now. Katrina has irrevocably changed the lives of thousands, and my family and I are no different. So many were uprooted and tossed across the country and now find themselves starting over somewhere new. We have decided to go back for now, but it is unclear how long we will stay. Many of our friends who have not left are considering major, life-altering moves. We are all just taking a little longer to do it.

My husband stayed through the whole ordeal, and I have since returned to a ruined city, in order to keep working. While so many have lost their jobs, we are very lucky to still have ours. Without deep roots in New Orleans, our jobs are keeping us there for now. But for how long?

They say you either love New Orleans or you hate it, but the real feelings are more complicated than that. People who have grown up there have a deep attachment to the city. They are the ones you hear on the news saying without skipping a beat that they will rebuild New Orleans bigger and better, whatever it takes. Those of us who have moved to the city from elsewhere tend to be more divided--and we were before the storm as well. Sure, there are some who jumped right in and soaked up every experience they could. Others, such as myself, were more reluctant to embrace the city. My husband and I loved the culture, music, food, and people, but couldn't get past the crime, the corruption, the appalling schools, and the stark stratification between rich and poor. And, of course, there was always the threat of hurricanes. I have to say that for me, the fear of rising water made it impossible for me to ever feel safe there.

When I moved to New Orleans from the Midwest six years ago, I had no idea what I was getting into. I accepted a job as an English profressor without even visiting the city. Jobs in my field are so scarce that I did not have the luxury of weighing my decision. This was my one opportunity for the holy grail of academic positions--a tenure-track job. The fact that the department was not paying for campus visits was my first clue to the city's and the university's poverty. The second red flag was raised during my interview when the chair of the department asked if I'd ever been to New Orleans. "No, but I've only heard good things about it," I said cheerily. ("Be upbeat about everything" was the mantra I had learned while preparing for interviews.) One of the committee members shot me a surprised look and mumbled, "Oh really? I could tell you a few things." But the chair quickly changed the subject. Those words have rung in my ears ever since.

Shortly after I arrived, the two junior members of the department filled me in. They took me out to dinner and what ensued can only be called a form of hazing. I heard every outrageous story imaginable--some about the department but many about this city that had become my new home. There were the crumbling schools with no air conditioning despite the subtropical climate, the highest murder rate in the country, the third-world living conditions, the constant muggings at gun-point, the ubiquitous rats and flying roaches. Last, but not least, I was informed of what all of America now knows, the rapidly disappearing marsh lands south of the city and the increased threat of hurricanes. "They say that if the 'big one' comes straight up the river and hits New Orleans the city will be wiped out," one of them told me. By the end of the evening, I could only laugh at their increasingly shocking stories. I couldn't believe the state they had worked themselves into. Surely these two are depressives who need help, I told myself. Really, I was not ready to hear their dire tales. I wanted to look on the bright side as I settled into my new home. But within three months I was battling flying cockroaches (they call them palmetto bugs, but they are nothing but cockroaches), my hubcaps had been stolen, and everyone I knew had verified my worst fear: that I was indeed living in a city that could any day be wiped off the face of the map.

When my husband got a good job with the paper the following Spring, we bought a house north of the lake about 40 minutes from the city. His new job required that he live in the community he was covering. We were happy to be together, but it felt like exile. While thousands of white folks had moved there over the years, fleeing the city's problems and many motivated by racism, we wanted to go the other direction. This was the kind of strip-mall suburb that was safe but mind-numbingly bland. We might as well have been living anywhere else in America. It feel light-years away from the unique culture that New Orleans had to offer. But we stayed put for five years, waiting to see if we could get out of Louisiana all together.

Within months of moving into our home, which was just above sea level, we experienced our first tropical storm (Allison). We woke up in the middle of the night to the most frightening sound I had ever heard--I can only describe it as Niagra Falls pouring straight onto our roof. We got up to look outside and found that our backyard had become a lake. Soon water began seeping in along the back wall. We frantically gathered towels and stuffed them against the walls. They soaked through almost immediately and we yelled at each other for more. But it was hopeless to try to stop the insidious seepage. And, of course, what we could see happening in the bathroom, we soon realized, was happening all along the back of the house, including under the rug in the living room. We were lucky. The water stopped coming and only the rug was ruined. But that night taught me how vulnerable we were, in a one-story home on the Gulf Coast that had supposedly never flooded before. Every year from June to November, I could never feel safe. And how can you make a life for yourself and your family if you are always waiting to be washed away? How can you raise a family and plan for the future if you are living with that kind of fear? The only way you can is to learn to ignore it. Many are still doing just that. But I no longer can.

An Admittedly Timid Beginning

I should have started this blog months ago, as the news that Katrina had swept away our lives began to filter through my evacuation haze. But I wasn't convinced then, in the midst of so much suffering, that I had anything much to say. Our story was like thousands of others, it seemed. But now I can't resist any longer. There is so much to say--about life in post-K New Orleans, trying to be a good mom in the midst of so much uncertainty, and figuring out what the hell to do with my life and our family.

I'm not sure if blogging is for me. I have only recently discovered the medium. But I'd like to give it a try. Writing in a journal feels so secret and so futile. You shamefully allow yourself once in a while to imagine someone reading it someday, perhaps after you are a famous writer. Or, more likely, your kid will be eager one day to discover who you used to be. But all my journals are gone now, a soggy mess in the bowels of my mold-infested home. Who I was as a college senior or a high school exchange student is gone forever. Fortunately, though, I did have the foresight during our evacuation to call my husband and ask him to get my most recent journal and put it on a high shelf in the closet. It got wet but didn't sit in fetid water for weeks, so it is salvageable. It reeks and the ink has bled a bit. But it is legible. It is in a zip-loc bag in the freezer for now, my attempt at mold remediation. In a few months I can take it out and maybe I'll have the time to read through it and even type it up. It is the journal I kept when I was pregnant with my daughter (now two) and in the months after her birth. It is a record of the most important period of my life, and I am grateful to have it.

But having lost so many ideas, so many parts of myself, in those soggy journals, I find that simply starting a new one (which I have done) is not enough. I have been sending op-ed pieces to papers (one was printed) and writing more pieces with an eye to publishing them. But I feel some urgency, some need to get these things out of me and onto the page, some page, any page. So here it is. My first blog entry. Let the blogging begin!