This post is a continuation of my reflection on my experiences on the academic job market. I write under the false notion that these short essays are to help my students navigate their own experiences. In reality, I'm just trying to make sense of the unnecessarily traumatic hazing rituals that we put people through. If you haven’t already read parts 1-4, click here, here, here, or... here to check them out.
After returning back to Ohio from my awkwardly successful visit in the South, I sent around a few more application packets to the jobs that had popped up in the fourth wave of job cycle (around mid-March to May). The jobs had changed quite a lot from the first three waves. Gone were the cushy tenure-track jobs at well-known universities. They’d all be swept away by a rush of short term, one-year positions at WhoTheFknowswhereU and a few post-doc type jobs at bigger universities. My total applications neared 70 at this point and I’d only had a handful of phone interviews and a single on-campus. The academic life is about rejection and being ghosted by search committees.
Anyways, about that job in the South. A couple of days after I returned, I was offered the position. It was a 4-4 teaching load (meaning four classes per semester, typically the highest required teaching load for a four-year University), minimal research expectations, and 43K per year salary with an okay benefits package.
The offer was less compelling than the job and I wasn’t in a strong position to negotiate. I didn’t have any other interviews lined up. I was assured by the graduate coordinator in my PhD program that a fifth year of funding was, in no uncertain terms, impossible. Oh, and we’d just had a baby.
I turned it down anyway.
It was terrifying in the moment, but I don’t regret that decision for a minute. My graduate school colleagues thought I was crazy. Here, I’d been offered a tenure-track assistant professorship at a public university and I said, “no thanks.” Hell, I thought I was a kind of crazy. At the end of the day, my gut said it was bad news. I was afraid that I’d get stuck there and I really, really did not want to get stuck there.
I took a day or two to chew on the offer and pumped the dean about my potential teaching schedule (which was all public speaking) before declining. It was the right decision, but I was a mess—I was convinced I’d never get another interview, let along another offer. I was certain that my unfinished dissertation was garbage and would never be completed. I was pretty sure I’d be back to working in restaurants (my CV includes Wendy’s, a bar/arcade monstrosity called Gameworks, and Red Robin) and scrounging up pro-audio gigs by the end of the Summer.
My anxiety was acute, but short-lived. The fourth wave of the job cycle moves a lot more quickly than the first three and by mid-April I had a phone interview for a post-doc at a Big State University (BSU) and one for a professorship small college in Ohio. Before the semester ended, those two interviews became two offers.
In the case of the post-doc at BSU, there was only one interview—a video chat with the basic course director and her graduate assistant. The conversation was professional and courteous and they were clear that their timeline was condensed. I was offered the job (presumably one of many such offers) the following week via email by the Department Head—whom I had met at a summer doctoral seminar (read: it’s important to network, people). The post-doc position was a 3-3 lecturer post at a very well-respected university in my discipline with a solid benefits package (including $2.5k for travel and research expenses—which is, frankly, a ridiculously high number compared to what other universities offer tenured or tenure-track folks) and a ~$33k salary. After a little push back, the Chair bumped the position up to a 4-4 teaching load and $44k. And just like that, my concerns about declining the crappy tenure-track job were a distant memory because even though the post-doc wasn’t tenure-track, it was, by all other measures, a better job.
At the same time, literally the same week as the post-doc interview, I was interviewed for an assistant professorship at a small liberal arts college (aka SLAC) in Ohio. In a rather strange occurrence, the search chair called me before the interview was scheduled to warn me that the pay was low—only around $40k (RED FLAG). Nevertheless, the difference between $40k and $0K was more than clear in my mind at the time, so I was not deterred.
I was invited to campus the week after my phone interview. I’m not certain, but I suspect I was the only person invited to campus. As searches get more desperate to hire before the end of the term, the conventional practice of bringing a slate of candidates to campus and selecting the best sometimes goes by the wayside.
The campus visit was pretty standard. I stayed in a hotel near campus the night before the interview—although this part of the visit was in question because they weren’t sure they had the budget to put me up for a night (RED FLAG). When I arrived on campus, the search chair welcomed me and led me to a meeting with the Vice-President for Academic Affairs. The college was undergoing a search for a new president, so this meeting was as far up the administrative food chain as it could be. This is also the kind of thing that only happens at SLACs. You’ll never find a BSU vice-president interviewing faculty—ever. Our conversation was cordial, but it was mostly driven by the VP trying to spin the obvious limitations of the college into positives (RED FLAG). For reference, whenever an administrator brings up cost-of-living it’s to attempt to curtail your shock when they talk salary. Also, whenever they emphasize the “the university’s mission” they’re talking about unpaid service expectations. He was nice, but too apologetic. I actually wanted to work there—like for realz—and the conversation kept digressing into discussions of the college’s complete lack of resources.
After my chat with the VP, I met individually with all of the members of the search committee. The committee was comprised of the entire department of Communication and English—three English PhDs, an actor, and a Communication MA with a foot out the door. I was surprised to see that none of them were Communication scholars. In fact, my academic ambition was met with a fair amount of skepticism by the non-PhDs in the bunch—the folks who would be my colleagues, and, as it turns out, by most of the college’s faculty because there were only a handful of PhDs on staff at the entire college (RED FLAG). The Communication faculty were great interpersonally, but it was clear almost immediately that we had difference perspectives and priorities in the classroom—and in the academy.
The interview also included the strangest teaching demonstration I’ve ever given. Rather than teaching a class to demonstrate my pedagogical skills, I was invited to join a speech class on a presentation day. After the students gave presentations, I was asked to prepare an informative speech myself and then lead a Q&A with the class about my topic. It was bizarre. My teaching demo lasted all of twenty minutes and instantly revealed some stark differences in how I taught public speaking compared to what the current faculty expected of their students. It went okay, but it remains one of the most awkward experiences I’ve ever had in the classroom (and I’ve been in a lot of classrooms… and I’m awkward).
After the teaching demo, I was taken to a deli for lunch with the committee. As before, the conversation at lunch was fairly routine. I chuckled a bit, though, when I ordered a whitefish sandwich after the entire group ordered pastrami. Momentarily, they looked at me like I was some young contrarian set on bucking their experience and wisdom (I was not, the pastrami at that deli, as I would later discover, was LEGIT). Their concerns were short lived, though, when they realized that it was a Friday during Lent and that most of them (as I) were Catholic and expected to abstain from eating meat. With some awkward chuckles, they changed their orders. All of this during an interview for a job at a Catholic college where a nun—one of the English professors—sat on the search committee. I’ll be honest, it felt like a test until I saw the genuine disappointment in their faces as they changed their orders and realized that they would have to watch the lone non-Catholic in the bunch enjoy her pastrami sandwich.
Things weren’t great, but they were looking up.
