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.