Job Market Flashback Part 6

This is the latest installment of my reflections on my time on the academic job market.  You can find the rest in one ridiculously long blog post here: Job Market Flashback

A couple of days after my interview at the small liberal arts college (SLAC) in Ohio, I received a phone call from the VP offering me the position and detailing its salary package.  I would be paid $40k if I finished my PhD before starting in August and about $37k if not (want to put a price on a PhD? It’s worth about $3K…). I would also receive benefits (not great ones, but benefits), an office (which I would share), and about $1k of research/travel support (which is pretty reasonable for a small college).  The position was not tenure-track, but I was assured that renewal was all but certain—aside from being one of only a handful of Ph.D.s on faculty, I was told not to “kill or sleep with a student or anything like that.”  The offer was underwhelming, but it was everything I expected it to be.

After chatting with the department chair a bit, I was able to get a sense of what I’d be teaching—in addition to public speaking, I wound up with seminars in Film Studies, TV & Radio, Mass Communication, and Intercultural Communication—for my first year in the department.  Pleased that I’d have an opportunity to build my CV and teach a few classes that I would enjoy, particularly Film Studies and Intercultural, I set to work figuring out how to make the salary figure and precarity of a short-term contract work.  

A brief interjection for aspiring job candidates: notice, please, that none of these courses falls into my areas of expertise—Rhetoric and Cultural Studies.  In fact, this particular SLAC didn’t offer any courses in those areas.  The closest I could come to actually teaching a Rhetoric seminar was the senior level Communication Theory course.  This is quite common in smaller departments where longstanding faculty tailor the curriculum around their interests (teaching and research).  Apparently, I was replacing a PR scholar who spent a few years redesigning the curriculum as a mostly Strategic Communication curriculum and then left quite abruptly.  You might be wondering why, then, a rhetorician would be hired as the replacement for a PR prof.  The answer, is because the search committee included no Communication scholars—not one.  How were they to know that I wouldn’t be qualified to teach those courses in departments that knew better?  Regardless, the benefit, for me, was about how I could use those new course preps to tell a more compelling story about my teaching experience and to put lines on my CV that said something other than “public speaking.”

At this point, I had two offers in hand—non-tenure-track Assistant Professor at SLAC in Ohio and post-doc at Big State University—neither was especially appealing, but both were better than not being employed.  I was torn about which to take, but I was relieved to have both offers in hand after declining the tenure-track position in the regional campus in the South.

Here was my predicament. I wanted a job, but I didn’t actually want either of the jobs I’d been offered.  Unlike the job in the South that I was offered and declined, I was willing to take both of them, but I didn’t really want them.  In either case, I also knew that I’d be on the market again the next year and looking for a better situation (I was and I found one). 

I was disappointed.  I’d been working my ass off in graduate school.  I was one of two dissertation fellows at the top of my class in my graduate program.  I had great letters of recommendation from people that I and, perhaps more importantly, other people respect.  I’d sent out nearly seventy applications.  All that, and I came up short.  I didn’t get that cushy tenure-track job at a Big State University and I worried that I never would.  I worried that I’d found my ceiling.  

My imposter syndrome was on fire.  That seems ridiculous, because I was literally just handed two job offers, but it was as real as anything.  From my position, I’d applied to a bunch of jobs I wanted, really wanted, and ended up with a choice between two jobs I’d accept because paying the rent and student loans seemed prudent.  These two jobs that represented the extent of my potential. The ones I really wanted were out of my league.

Stuck, I called my people—advisors from Ph.D. and M.A., colleagues, non-academic friends—and talked things through with anyone who would listen to me prattle on about my impending decision between two decidedly less-than-ideal versions of my immediate future.  I imagined idealistic futures that would never come to pass.  I shuttered at the thought of getting stuck in either gig.  None of that mattered.  I had to make a decision.

Eventually, I made a trusty, old pro/con list for each offer.  Here’s how those broke down: 

Big State U had a few things going for over and against SLAC.  It paid better for the same teaching load—around $44k.  It offered an absurdly good travel fund (but they had to because travel out of that place is particularly tricky and, as a result, expensive)—around $3k.  It was in a department with a bunch of people I respect and would like to get to know better—meaning, I’d have a chance to cultivate a pretty good reference.  It was in a very well-established department in my field, so the letterhead on my applications the next year would be getting a serious upgrade (if you think this doesn’t matter, you’re wrong).  It was, generally, the better networking opportunity of the two because I’d be working alongside other post-docs (mostly from the doc program at Big State U), graduate students, and faculty.  It had drawbacks, too—I’d be teaching more public speaking/intro-level stuff, I’d have to move my family and interrupt my spouse’s career, it carried the rank of lecturer rather than professor,[1] and I’d be an outsider from a lesser university trying to ingratiate myself into an already established intellectual culture.  If I’m being honest (or leaning into my imposter syndrome), it felt a little like punching above my weight class.  

The Small College gig had some benefits.  The primary benefit was location. I could work there without moving.  At more than two hours from my home, it wasn’t convenient—I crashed with a family friend a few nights a week and was, therefore, away from my spouse and child—but it meant that my spouse could keep her position, which she liked, and not have to push reset on her career for a job that, in my case, we both hoped would be temporary.  The Small College gig also carried Assistant Professor rank and clear expectation for renewal—meaning, I’d be putting Assistant Professor in my signature line on next year’s job applications and that I wouldn’t have to worry quite so much about being unemployed if the next year’s job market didn’t bear fruit.  The Assistant Professor gig also had clear opportunities to expand my teaching experience even though none of that experience would be in my area of expertise.  Further down the negative side of the ledger, the position paid like crap and the college was so small that it garnered almost no name recognition—I’m from Ohio and I literally didn’t know that it existed until I saw the job ad.   

There are, of course, no objective measures in weighing the pros and cons between two otherwise very different positions and arguments could be made for either position (literally, two of my faculty mentors were diametrically opposed in their recommendations… and both for good reasons).  For me, it came down to being able to keep my spouse’s career on track, rank, and teaching opportunities.  

The idea of having to ask my spouse to move and then, potentially move again in a year was a tough pill to swallow.  The small college meant not having to do that.  Similarly, being able to tell stories about being an assistant professor seemed—even at a small college—seemed like a better frame than continuing to narrativize myself as a graduate student/Post-Doc.  Service to the college takes time away from research, but it also grants perspective otherwise hard to come by and I wasn’t going to have serious research time in either position. Finally, I’d been teaching public speaking for seven years at that point and I desperately wanted to do something else.  Also, having been mostly ignored by the research jobs to which I’d applied, I figured loading up on my teaching credentials would pay off next year (it did) because, as my M.A. advisor reminded me, “they’re all teaching jobs.”

At the end of the spring 2014 semester, I signed a contract to teach a 4/4 load for $40K with the SLAC in Ohio.  I hadn’t finished my dissertation yet, but I had employment.   And, because I didn’t want to stay there, I was still on the job market.

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[1] Academic rank usually proceeds as follows: Instructor, Lecturer, Professor.  Within each category, additional ranking is common such as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Full Professor (or just Professor) or Lecturer/Senior Lecturer.  There are also some oddities out there like Clinical Professor, Teaching Professor, and Professor of Practice all of which usually carry more weight than Lecturer, but less that Professor and follow the same additional ranking metrics (Assistant, Associate, Full).