On Collaboration, Loss, and Academic Publishing

My friend and I were waiting in one of those lines that wrap around the block at a BBQ joint with a few friends and colleagues from grad school after our presentation at the National Communication Association’s annual convention in Dallas in November 2017.  As the din of the restaurant picked up, we spent a few minutes talking shop—specifically, about how to get this paper we’d just presented published in a journal worth reading.  The presentation went pretty well.  We got some great feedback from the respondent, who was gracious even though we clearly had not read her book (yet… I’ve since read it and find her arguments compelling).  The after-panel chatter was energetic and thought provoking.  We were feeling pretty good.   

As we stood in line, my friend broached the sometimes-sticky issue of authorship.  In the academy, credit is the coin of the realm.  Authorship, and the order of authorship, is often how that coin gets sorted.  Simply, being the first name listed matters, and it can matter quite a lot in a tenure and promotion case.  Both of us had something to gain depending on whether the published version appeared as her name & my name or mine & hers.

 

It came as quite a surprise when she offered, “You should be first author.”

Until that point, she had been the first author on the project.  This made sense to me because although we’d split the writing more or less evenly—I did more of the editing/organizing work, but word count was pretty even—the biggest idea in the paper was hers.  This is not to say that I didn’t contribute anything to the essay, just that what we expected would get cited by other folks came out of her primary area rather than mine.  As far as I was concerned, she had a lot more to gain by being first than me.  I also had the benefit of not needing the essay for my tenure and promotion dossier—which, by that time, was pretty much sewn up on the scholarship front.  I was in a rather convenient position to decline her generous offer to swap places in the by-line.  And so, I did.

 

We argued about it for a few minutes, but eventually, she relented and agreed to keep top billing. 

 

The paper in question was the second iteration of an essay about John Oliver’s treatment of the net neutrality issue on his Last Week Tonight.  It was a really fun piece to work on that pushed me outside of my comfort zone because my co-author’s expertise was digital rhetoric and intellectual property, not comedy (that’s my bag).  I was pretty good at the jokey stuff, but I also got schooled in the digital rhetoric literature by a scholar of the highest order.  This is why you should collaborate.  The research matters for its own sake, but collaborating forces you to see things and think things that you wouldn’t normally see or think on your own.  Collaboration is a gift—of time, of intellect, of wonder, of curiosity.  Moreover, at least in rhetorical circles, it’s a gift not given lightly.  We can be an awkwardly (obsessively) protective lot when it comes to our ideas and arguments.  

 

After the conference, we sent the essay to a really good journal.  It was rejected—swiftly and thoroughly.  This was not surprising.  We had presented an earlier version at a different conference in 2016 and submitted it to the conference proceedings a few months prior.  It was rejected there, too.  It was a good idea, but it wasn’t ready for publication yet.  Turns out the distance between pretty good conference paper and published article is a lot farther than we hoped, even though we had convinced ourselves otherwise.  

 

We met sometime in January to strategize revisions and refocus the essay.  We had a new venue in mind and a pretty good plan to turn out a new version of the piece.

 

Then plans changed.

 

On February 6, 2018, my friend died unexpectedly.  She was 36 years old.  Her husband called me that morning to share the news. I spent the day calling our grad school colleagues, choking down sobs, and ugly crying.  

 

The essay has haunted me since.  

 

Once I could finally bring myself to work on it again—I can’t remember exactly, but it was sometime in summer 2018—I started prepping the piece for another submission.  I redoubled my writing efforts convinced that the piece was at once pretty solid scholarship and, more importantly for me, the best way I could honor my friend.  

 

That summer, I went (back) to school on digital rhetoric and online activism.  I used the feedback from previous rejections to guide a doctoral seminar worthy reading list.  I dove in and lost myself in the literature.  It felt good.  I was learning something new.  I was starting to understand the vitriolic commentary in the reviews (okay, they weren’t that bad).  I could see the questions and the answers more clearly.  More importantly, I was still in conversation with my friend—even if that conversation was occasionally cursing her for leaving me to read a pile of books that I wouldn’t otherwise pick up, let alone page through and annotate.  

 

Upgrading my theoretical tool kit took about a month.  Revising the essay with the new literature and thesis took two more.  The rewriting was excruciating.  Every sentence I deleted was a little bit of my friend.  Were those my words?  Where they hers?  It didn’t matter.  Every change felt like a betrayal.  It was hard to see the essay slowly change from our voices into my voice.  It was hard to the cut arguments, especially the one from her dissertation, and subarguments that we had debated over for weeks (sometimes months) before her death.  It was harder still to put my name at the top of the paper.

 

Those revisions had to happen, though, because nobody remembers the research that didn’t get published.  I had to change the piece.  I had to get it to print.  So, I cut words. I changed phrases. I deleted citations. I restructured the argument. I didn’t feel good about any of it.

 

The end product wasn’t half bad.

 

I submitted to another great journal in our field in August—not as esteemed as the earlier rejection, but a regular read for folks in rhetorical circles.  I waited another couple of months (a reasonable journal article turn-around time) with full expectations that I’d be getting back an invitation to “revise and resubmit” (R&R) with some helpful feedback from the reviewers about how to tweak the argument.  I got the feedback—much of it positive and encouraging.  Unfortunately, I also got another rejection.  This one based on a split decision from the reviewers—one reviewer wanted an R&R and the other rejected outright.  That said, the editor thought the piece was “a really good read” with “a lot of potential with the right publication outlet.”  So there was a glimmer of hope.

 

I was disappointed, but not deterred.  I felt like the reviews were good enough that it might land an R&R with a different outlet.  So, I sent it out again after cleaning up a few typos and integrating the handful of changes indicated by the review.  This time, I sent it to a journal with a very different audience, but every bit as prestigious as the one that just declined to review the piece again.  About a month later (which is crazy fast), I got another rejection.  Another split review—one reviewer liked the piece, one reviewer hated it.  At least I only had to wait a month.

 

I spent the rest of the semester tinkering on the essay more and debating about whether or not it merited another shot a national level journal or if I should step it back for a regional.  The feedback thus far suggested that it was a slam dunk for an R&R at a regional, but I really hoped to place it more prominently.  This one was personal.  I can’t put my friend’s name in lights, but I at least wanted to put it in a good journal.  So, I took another shot.  

 

In early Spring 2019, not quite a year after my co-author passed, I revised the argument again with an eye toward yet another set of reviewers and sent the essay to another really good journal.  This one, too, has a very different audience, but I thought the piece was appropriate. A couple of months later, I got this response:

 

“The reviewers, however, do wish to see another version of this essay and so offered revise with major revisions.”

 

There it was.  R&R achieved—and with a really good journal!  Next step: satisfy some mostly straightforward revision requests, cut a bunch of words to get under the word limit, and revel in the glory of our scholarly success.

 

I worked on the revision for the next couple months and submitted the revision in summer 2019.  I felt good about it.  The feedback was clear—cite this, add a discussion of this to that section, cut that stupid argument—and I handled it about as well as I could have.

 

A couple of months later, my inbox chimed and I saw the editor’s name pop up.  This was it.  The reviews were in and we were closing in on publication.  I felt great.  I opened the email.  I read it.  My heart dropped into my stomach.  Another split decision, this one an outright accept without revision coupled with an outright reject.

 

“I'm sorry to inform you that your manuscript has been denied publication”

 

The editor was gracious, kind, and encouraging.  Hell, he even asked for a third review—also a reject.  He did what he could, but I didn’t do enough to get the piece where it needed to be conceptually.

 

This one hurt.  I was so damned close.  I thought I did it.  And then, just like that, I was two years out from our initial submission with nothing to show for it but a fistful of rejections and the sudden urge to scream, or cry, or scream and cry at the same time.  I was angry—at all those editors and reviewers, at myself, at my friend, at whateverthefuck killed her.  I was disappointed in myself.  I felt like I let my friend down.  My imposter syndrome was in hyperdrive.  I had a good cry.  Or two.  Maybe three.  And then I shoved the essay a drawer for a while and walked away.

 

Publishing is hard.  

 

This essay was particularly painful because of the personal connection I have to the piece, but the process, even under normal circumstances, is brutal.  The essay that we submitted to the conference proceedings and really, really good journal in 2017 wasn’t great.  It needed a lot of work.  The essay that we submitted to two different, but good, journals the next year was quite a bit better, but it, too, still needed work.  Comparatively, the one that landed the R&R was pretty darn good and the final revision was even better (“a very good revision” and “very fine analysis” according to the editor who nonetheless rejected the piece).  Unfortunately, that’s all meaningless if it doesn’t make it to print.  We could fill libraries with really good essays that didn’t make it to print in the pages of our journals for one reason or another.  

 

To be clear, the essay wasn’t perfect, and the editor and reviewers weren’t wrong (well, not entirely wrong).  It still hurt like hell.

 

A few months of sulking later, I got back to work.  After revising the style manual back to APA format for the second time (originally written in Chicago, then APA, then back to Chicago because I’m a glutton for punishment), I submitted the essay again just before the two-year anniversary of my friend’s death.  This time, I relented in my Quixotic quest to place it in a top-tier journal and sent it off to a regional—a good one, but still not the level of prestige I hoped for.  I knew that it didn’t suck.  I knew that it had a pretty good chance of at least landing an R&R.  It was better than it was a year prior and the new outlet had a higher acceptance rate.

 

March 2020 arrived and two things happened.  First, I interviewed for and received a job offer from a University back in Indiana.  Second, the COVID-19 virus hit the US with the ferocity of a thousand “reviewer twos.”  Life on the East Coast ground to a halt.  Literally, the day I was on campus in Indiana interviewing for a new job, I got an email explaining that spring semester and summer term (which I was scheduled to teach) at my job in Pennsylvania would be entirely online.  Schools and daycares closed.  Everything changed.  

 

Oh, and I took that job in Indiana.  March through May became a flurry of planning, packing, and preparing to move during a pandemic.  It was crazy stressful.  For a while at the end of spring term, my in-laws stayed with us to help get the house in order.  Then, right before summer session, they returned to Indiana with my spouse and kids.  I stayed behind to finish up a handful of projects and get the house ready for the market.  We accepted an offer on the house in early June and I packed up a suitcase and left to join my family in Indiana for the month or so before closing.

 

Did I mention that this was crazy stressful?

 

About a week after arriving in Indiana for what would become a summerlong extended stay, I got an email from the editor of the regional journal:

 

“All three reviewers suggest, revise and resubmit, and I am happy to offer you the opportunity to do so”

 

I expected the piece would get an R&R, and I was right.  It felt good, but writing was also below the bottom of my list of priorities.  I hadn’t written anything of substance since COVID rolled in and shut everything down.  The time I had devoted to writing (early mornings) had to be reassigned as teaching prep and grading time as my spouse and I juggled parenting and work responsibilities while also moving a few states away and living, temporarily (we hoped…), in her parents’ house.  I had six weeks.  And, I took them.  Then, I took a few more and a few more, and eventually six weeks became six months, and it seemed like I would never actually get around to revising the damn thing.  The editor was exceptionally gracious.

To be fair, interviewing for and getting a job, selling a home, spending a summer doubled up in someone else’s home, starting a new job, and finding and buying a home are all good reasons not to be especially productive.  Nevertheless, I felt guilty for not having this damn thing published already.  It’s not like I wasn’t thinking about the essay—I thought about it all the time—but mostly I thought about it in the abstract as fodder for my imposter syndrome, not as a puzzle to solve or as a specific argument to bolster or reframe.  If I’m being honest, I the guilt about not writing more/better/sooner/whatever still lingers.  The productivity guilt built into the academy is real.  

 

Over the next nine or ten months, I read the books recommended by the reviewers and revised every section of the essay to reflect more clearly where I thought the essay contributed to conversations about activism, digital rhetoric, and satire.  It was painful.

 

It’s always painful.

 

Every change to a tightly written argument has a ripple effect that plays out over the entirety of the essay.  Adding a citation may seem simple enough, but only if the addition is made merely to satisfy a reviewer.  Taking a new citation seriously—even a minor one—means attending to how each addition and subtraction pulls on threads in the prose that must be stitched back together for the sake of the argument.  It always takes more time than I think it should.  It always hurts more than I think it should.

 

In the end, I rewrote every section of the piece (again) and resubmitted at the end of April 2021.

 

A little over four months later—a much faster turnaround than I had managed as an author—the essay came back with another request for revisions.  For the second time, however, the essay managed to convince one reviewer to recommend publication.  Lucky for me, this time the other reviewer requested revisions and not flat-out rejection like the previous journal.  It wasn’t in print, and wouldn’t be anytime soon, but was still good news.  

 

In August 2021, I received word that I had earned yet another invitation to revise and resubmit the essay.  This time around, only two of the three original reviewers agreed to re-read the paper.  Reviewer 2 was entirely satisfied, but reviewer 3 wanted to see clearer connections between thesis and analysis—picky, picky (also, I say this all the time to my students).  In all, these revisions were pretty straightforward, and I had another version of the essay up and ready to submit by the end of September. 

 

During finals week of December 2021, I received word that my revisions had finally landed out paper an “accept with minor revisions.”  I still had work to do, but at least this time I had something to show for it.  With a request for a two week turn-around—meaning the essay would be due in the days between the Christmas and New Year holiday—I got back to work.  

This version of the essay—the 4,972^nd by my unofficial count—had reviewer 2 “impressed by the depth and rigor” of the arguments and ready to “cite it in the years to come.”  Read that again, reader, for me.  

Of course, reviewer 3 was nowhere near as enthusiastic—it’s at this point that I think the absence of reviewer 1 for the latter revisions necessitates reviewer 3 filling in the stereotypical role of reviewer 2.  I had, by this time, had more than my share of reviewer 3.  I was also grateful for their comments because, frankly, they were right, the essay benefitted from their push to tighten things up.

 

After finalizing and submitting my grades for fall 21, I got to work on the little changes necessary to get the essay over the finish line.  I submitted the essay just before Christmas.  In mid-January 2022 it was, finally, accepted for publication. In October 22, it finally appeared online.  

The first final draft was written for a conference in spring 2016 and in early 2024 it finally made print as the lead article in the first issue of Western Journal of Communication.

 

Collaboration is a gift and one that should not be taken lightly.  I’ve never been prouder of anything I’ve written than I am of this essay.  I don’t think the argument is going to change the world.  I don’t know how many people will read it, and I don’t really care.  It’s been cited exactly one time (and that was before it was actually in print).  None of that matters.  This one counts for so much more than anything you can count.  This one is my friend on the page.  This one is the conversations we had and the conversations we didn’t get to have for nearly a decade.  This one is years of frustration and anger and grief and elation.  This one matters.  

 

Collaboration is a gift and I’m so grateful that my friend helped me get this one to the finish line.  I just wish that she could have read it.

Job Market Flashback: Part 10

Welcome back to my semi-regular attempt to wrestle with what it has been like to be on the academic job market.  If you want to read the whole saga, you can treat yourself to a few thousand words of distraction here.

The alarm came earlier than I’d prefer, but I wasn’t sleeping soundly anyway. I was in a strange town and nervously excited for my final interview with Mid-Sized Regional University (MRU). Without snoozing the alarm, I rolled out of bed and readied myself for the day-long gauntlet otherwise known as the campus visit.  

At 7:30AM, I made my way down to the lobby to meet the faculty member tasked with making sure I ate something and got to campus.  We had breakfast at a cool little diner a short walk from the hotel that covered its basic diner bones with a chic facade of pop art and off-beat menu items—andouille sausage gravy, anyone?  My chaperone and I chatted about the department and curriculum between bites of omelet—the interview starts early, even if you haven’t had a proper cup of coffee yet.  After about an hour, we gathered our things to head to campus.

My first official meeting that day was with the department chair.  He was warm and welcoming and although he had my CV in his hand, it wasn’t clear to me that he’d read past the line with my name on it.  Even so, his job was to sell the department and university—and sell it he did.  Although this was, technically, an interview, he spent more time extolling the virtues of MRU than asking questions about my teaching, research, and service.  Having been on the other side things now, I know that this is a really, really important part of the process.  Just as the department wants to select the best candidate, they need to make sure that the candidate is sufficiently smitten to accept an offer.  I wish, in hindsight, that I’d spent more time poking and prodding at some of the issues that were clearly hang-ups for the department—such as the extension campus that was assured I “would not be compelled” to teach at and the status of the basic course in the general education curriculum.  Even so, I felt like I left a pretty good impression and ended the meeting with quite a bit more information about MRU and the department than I scrounged from the website.

From there I bounced around faculty offices for 15 minute meetings with one or two members of the department.  These conversations were cordial, get-to-know-you-type affairs and mostly focused on a combination of the “what will you teach here” question and folks hyping the university and the town/region.  All good.  By mid-morning, I’d pinballed around almost all of faculty offices and found myself settling in nicely.

The day’s major event, the teaching demonstration, came next.  I had thirty minutes or so to prep—in the department chair’s office—before teaching.  Or at least, I was scheduled to have thirty minutes to prep.  As it turned out, a faculty member with whom I was not scheduled to meet because of teaching conflicts opted to use my prep time as their own personal impromptu meeting.  The chat was friendly, but it took almost the entire block of prep time that was on my schedule—and lasted longer than any of my scheduled meetings with the other faculty members.  In all, I ended up with a couple minutes to click through my slides and make sure my media worked before the search chair came to escort me to the classroom to set up.  You can’t count on down time, even when it’s on the official itinerary.

The teaching demonstration at MRU was a combination research talk and teaching demo.  My task was to teach something, anything really, about my research.  My audience was a lower-level Small Group Communication class, about ten faculty members, and the department chair.  My plan was to teach the concept of “persona” using a few examples of George Carlin’s progression from suit-and-tie jokester to counter-culture comedy icon from my dissertation.  I had more compelling examples from Richard Pryor’s comedy, but couldn’t justify bringing the n-word into conversations with a cold audience on an interview.  Discretion, I’m told, is the better part of valor.  The Carlin jokes did the job.

George Carlin

NOT George Carlin

A couple things stand out in my memory of this teaching demonstration.  First, as I introduced my examples, I asked “does anyone know who George Carlin is?”  Nowadays, students are less and less likely to recognize the George, but I figured I had enough faculty in the audience that someone would hit that softball into the bleachers.  After an awkwardly long pause, a faculty member, the only member of the search committee I’d yet to meet, answered, “he’s the comedian who smashes watermelons.”  I waited a beat.  And then another.  “Um, that’s Gallagher, not George Carlin,” I corrected, gently, deferentially, almost apologetically.  I eyed the class with caution as the faculty member’s face reddened with embarrassment with each passing heartbeat.  Thankfully, another faculty member raised his hand before things got any more awkward, “Carlin is the guy who did the seven words you can’t say on TV.”  Tension broken.  Teaching demo saved.  I was ready (able) to move on.  In a public setting—like a research talk or teaching demo—everyone, even the department faculty, are in the pressure cooker with you.

Once we got past the awkward embarrassing Gallagher/Carlin gaffe and watched a little comedy (two different performances of Carlin’s “hippy dippy weatherman”), the discussion really took off.  The lesson worked well enough and the handful of students participating in the conversation were really engaged.  Not bad for coming off the bench cold.  Discussion has long been my preferred teaching method and, as a result, I’m pretty good at getting and keeping the conversation going.  

After the demo, I gathered my stuff and offered my thanks to the students and faculty shuffling out of the room afterward.  None of this is remarkable.  As I followed the crowd of people from the classroom to lunch, however, I overheard a few variations on the following: “did you notice that he learned all of their names?” This I did not expect.  I’m as good at learning names as the next person, but I’m not especially good—a friend of mine literally gets all of her students names on day 1… she’s good.  I do, however, make a conscious effort to ask for and then use students’ names until I know them.  This behavior is so engrained in my teaching that I do it almost by reflex—“that’s right! What your name, again? Thanks, Anna.”  This little tic, as I learned on my way to lunch, is apparently impressive.  At lunch—with a bunch of faculty, many of whom attended my teaching demo—no one asked me about the content of my class, but more than one person asked me directly, almost defensively, if was “good with names.” The lesson, how you interact with the students during a teaching demo is always more important than whatever you teach them--as long as you teach them something. 

After lunch, it was time to pinball to a few more faculty meetings—which included an incredibly helpful fifteen minute crash course on the union contract at MRU—and then a meeting with the Dean.  Well, not with the Dean, but with an Associate Dean who apologized for having to stand in for the Dean.  Where I was pretty sure that the chair hadn’t read my CV, I was certain that the Associate Dean had printed it moments before I walked in.  And that makes sense.  Unless the administrator—Dean, Provost, VP, Chancellor, whomever—interviewing you is from the department for which you are interviewing, they assume that the department did its homework on your scholarship and teaching bona fides.  Their role is to figure out what draws you to the University, the area, or the department and to make sure you won’t be an obvious liability to the University.  

In this case, my interest was all about the curriculum—which I discussed at length—and that it was a better job than the one I had—but, of course, I left that bit out.  That response went over well enough, but it did slow our conversation a bit because the Associate Dean wasn’t prepared to address the department’s curriculum in anything other than broadest strokes.  Nevertheless, apart from mixing up some Greek satirists with some Roman satirists, which like four people on the planet would catch let alone call me on, the administrative portion of my interview went just fine. 

By this time, it was mid-afternoon and I was starting to feel the wear and tear of a full day of being “switched on” in interview mode.  Thankfully, there was only one more item on my dance card.  Of course, other than the teaching demonstration, it was probably the most important meeting of the day: the official interview with the search committee.

Honestly, I don’t remember much about how this conversation went down.  It was later in the afternoon, maybe 4PM, and my brain was mush.  I remember being at a total loss for an answer to the question “which theories do you emphasize when teaching public speaking?” I answered, but my answer was not good. It was so not good that one committee member supplied the example of “like, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence”—which I teach on the regular—and I said something articulate like, “Oh, yeah.  I do that.”  Not my best moment.  Otherwise, I used my time at the end of the interview to compliment the committee for organizing my visit and extolling the virtue’s of MRU based on what I’d learned that day—it seemed like a good place to work and, contrary to some of the other places I’d interviewed, it wasn’t riddled with red flags.  Of course it helps that it was a massive step up from the gig I had, but let’s not sweat those details…

The campus visit came to close around 5PM and I was shuttled back to my hotel to relax a bit before dinner.  A couple of hours later, two of the search committee members, including the one who mixed up George Carlin & Gallagher, picked me up to get some dinner at a swanky restaurant in town.  I was totally exhausted, so I spent most of the time trying not to put my foot in my mouth—which I often fail at—and staying attentive enough to track the conversation.  The food was great—although I’ll never understand why folks insist on serving a beautiful piece of fish with mashed potatoes (soft on soft… ugh)—and the conversation was easy.  After a good meal, glass of wine, and a complimentary digestif from the bar (which I slugged down like a shot because I’m classy like that…), I was ready to call home and crash.

My visit technically extended to the next day, but my agenda was open—no meals, meetings, or demonstrations.  Instead, I used the time to grab a nice breakfast at place recommended by one of the committee members and explored the town (on foot) while searching for an ATM so that I’d have some cash to tip the car service for my ride back to the airport.  

Pro-tip: Always tip the car service.  Always.  In some cases, the driver might have driven all of the finalists back and forth from the airport.  They’re a great source of information for candidates—and search chairs.

The town was great, but its East Coast claustrophobia was quite a bit different from the spread out Midwest open spaces that I was used to.  I remember calling my spouse at least once while traversing the little town saying things like, “all the houses are connected” and “the houses are all tall and narrow.”  After walking a few miles and taking in as much of the town and campus (I walked back down there, too) as I could on my own, I packed up and met the car service at the hotel for a shuttle back to the airport for my midday flight home.

I arrived back in Ohio that evening exhausted and also stoked.  I wanted this job, and I wanted it bad. 

Job Market Flashback: Part 9

Welcome back to my semi-regular attempt to wrestle with what it has been like to be on the academic job market.  If you want to read the whole saga, you can treat yourself to a few thousand words of distraction here.

My second run at the job market wasn’t all a tale of doom and gloom.  I did manage to land interviews with three different universities and, most importantly, snagged a great job.  

In my previous post, I mentioned not having any conference interviews and that’s a little misleading.  A Mid-sized Regional University (MRU) that I had applied to in the middle of October contacted me prior to the conference with a request to meet during a 30 minute window.  Unfortunately, it was a 30 minute window during which I was scheduled to present a paper.  Apparently busy for the remainder of the conference, the search chair offered to set up a post-NCA video call interview in early December.  This practice is now very typical, but at the time, it was only just starting to become a thing.  I didn’t have any conference interviews, but I found myself constantly looking over my shoulder to see if I ran into anyone from MRU.  

After sitting interviewless until the end of November, I was grateful for the opportunity to brush up on my elevator speech and practice my pitches in the video call.  I had no way of handicapping my shot at getting the gig and I wasn’t especially excited about MRU—in fact, I didn’t know that it existed until I applied for it.  I applied to the job based almost entirely on the fact that I was well-qualified and the location wasn’t as horrible as some of the other places I had been looking.  The call was for a tenure-track professor to teach a 4/4 load of public speaking and additional courses in the department’s programs—which, importantly for me, included undergraduate and graduate courses in rhetoric.  The curriculum was appealing, but I still had no idea where the place was.  That changed pretty quickly after the interview was on my calendar and I went to school on all things MRU website.

The video chat interview—on either Skype or FaceTime, I can’t remember which—happened during the first week of December in 2014.  During the interview, I met with two faculty members at MRU for a good conversation about the program and department.  I don’t remember much about the interview other than the two interviewers were pretty punchy (their words) and that they were interrupted by a number of folks in the department—including the chair—on at least three different occasions during the call.  It went well, lots of back and forth conversation and, importantly for me, lots of laughter.

This was, to my knowledge, one of the only times that I’ve ever competed with a friend for the same job.  I’m sure there were other times where applications overlapped, but this is the only time that I recall both of us actually interviewing for the same gig.  It was weird, but I shared the questions that the interviewers asked—a good reminder to take notes—and talked a bit about how the tech worked—bear in mind that this was before the COVID-19 transition to Zoom University, so we were still getting used to the idea of video chatting for high stakes, potentially life-changing interactions.  I have no idea how my friend’s interview went (he said, “pretty good,” which is what he says about almost everything), but I still felt really good about my chances of landing a campus interview.  

I didn’t expect to hear back from MRU until after the start of spring term since I knew that they were conducting screening interviews right up until the end of fall term, and that faculty (myself included) are pretty protective of those few weeks in December and January without teaching and service responsibilities.  Nevertheless, I stewed over the search chair’s radio silence, just not quite to the extent that I had the year prior.  I was lucky. I was working a crappy but full-time job so I kept myself plenty busy until after the holidays.  Even during winter break, I had two new courses to prep, another course to revise, and syllabi to get together with hard deadlines in the not so distant future.  I also had a handful of applications to get together for the next wave.

On January 10, before the start of spring term, I received the campus invitation. I was one of four finalists for the position and I was scheduled to visit on January 27 (a Tuesday).  Over the following two weeks I purchased airline tickets, built a “workshop day” into my syllabi for all four of my classes, and got my job talk together.  

I was as prepared as I could be, but the visit on January 27 never took place.  The weekend before I was due to arrive, a nor’easter slammed the East Coast and my flight was cancelled leaving me to sit on my hands and watching the weather channel hoping for a thaw.  The day before I was supposed to be on campus, I instead worked with the search chair, who was attempting to fit my visit in around two other searches that were happening simultaneously, and rescheduled for the following week.  

The next day—the day I was supposed to be on campus— I got a rejection letter from another job.  You can always count on the job market to kick you while you’re down.

The Job Market & Me (not pictured).

The East Coast cleaned itself up, but travel to campus, now delayed a week, was still in question.  I didn’t teach on Mondays, so I planned on driving myself straight to the airport rather than heading to campus to unload my stuff for the week.  At the time, I lived about two hours from my SLAC job and the airport from which I’d be departing for my visit to MRU.  I left my house on a bright February afternoon and headed East into gathering clouds, rain that became snow, and general lake-effect nastiness.  When I got to the airport, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to leave.  It was desolate and folks were already queued up asking about accommodations for their soon-to-be-canceled flights.  I was scheduled to depart in the early evening and, by then, the snow had been falling for a few hours.  Sitting by the gate, I watched, exasperated, as the snow just kept falling.  When the time came to board the plane, I still wasn’t sure we’d get in the air.

As it turns out, I caught the last plane out of Cleveland that day.

At every talk about the job market that I’ve ever heard, the presenter eventually says something like “the interview begins the moment you step off the plane.”  Sometimes that’s more true than others.  In this case, the interview started the moment I collected my suitcase from the baggage claim carousel.  My flight arrived around 7:30PM and I met the search chair outside of baggage claim for the final leg of the journey.  MRU is anywhere between thirty minutes and ninety years from the airport depending on traffic—because East Coast—so we had a nice long chat as we rolled into town.  The chair was cordial, talkative, and clearly relieved to have cleared the biggest logistical obstacle for the visit.

We arrived at the hotel around 8:45PM. I checked in, dropped my bag off in my room, cleaned myself up as best I could in thirty seconds, and went back to the lobby to meet the search chair and head to dinner.  Thankfully, the brewpub where we were meeting two of the remaining three search committee members was right next door to the hotel.  It was Monday night, so the pub was pretty slow and the other two folks joining us for dinner had already ordered a few appetizers and a round of drinks.

The search chair and I settled into the booth across from the other two committee members and we set to chatting about MRU, the department, curriculum, and the awesome little town in which it was situated.  The conversation went very well.  It didn’t feel as much like an interview as it should have.  After the first few awkward minutes, we got on like old friends.  The folks on the committee seemed to get along with each other pretty well and they seemed like my kind of people.  I felt good about how I handled their questions and even better about how they answered mine.  Our conversation went so well that I ended the evening feeling the job was mine to lose.

I’ve done enough of these interviews from both sides to know that the social situations of the process—meals and meet and greets—are my long suit.  I’m competent enough in the classroom and in my scholarship to make a good impression, but I’ve always been my best self at a dinner party.  It’s the reason why I’ve committed a fair amount of time, money, and energy learning to BBQ—I like to hang out with people.  In this case, the interview schedule, revised because of my travel delays, played into my hand.  Instead of having a series of meetings with chairs, deans, and faculty before my first informal interaction with the committee—as originally scheduled—I started with a couple of meals with smaller groups.  I can’t say one way or another if I made a good impression on the folks I met with during those interactions, but I can say for certain that those informal meetings gave my confidence a serious shot in the arm for the rest of the visit.

The first day was a whirlwind.  I left my house around 1PM that day, white knuckled a drive across the state, prayed to all the gods that my flight would get out on time, had an hour long pre-interview car ride with the search chair, closed down the restaurant with the committee, fretted over my teaching presentation for an hour or so, and then collapsed in my hotel room bed around 1:00 A.M.  All that, and I only had two more days to go… 

Job Market Flashback: Part 8

Welcome back to my semi-regular attempt to wrestle with what it has been like to be on the academic job market.  If you want to read the whole saga, you can treat yourself to a few thousand words of distraction here.

In fall 2014, I was teaching four classes, comprised of three different preparations (speech, intercultural communication, and TV/Radio), at a Small Liberal Arts College (SLAC) in Ohio.  I was working on a year-to-year contract and making a salary that was about ten thousand dollars less than the student loan debt I had accrued during my doc program (which was less than you might expect).  I was working in a city about 150 miles from my family and crashing with a family friend (who is a saint) Monday-Thursday.  Nothing about my situation was ideal, but I was, at least, a professor.  Given the brutality of the academic job market, I felt pretty good about that.

I felt less good about my long term prospects at the SLAC since the college didn’t have tenure but did have paltry pay the pay and no hope of getting a raise—on my first day, a long-time faculty member related the story of his promotion a few years prior that included an $800/year raise… and a pen.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, I updated my CV, burned the midnight oil revising articles and book proposals, and scoured the job boards in search of an escape route.  

Welcome to job market run number 2.

My second run at the job market was remarkably better than my first.  It ended with me landing a tenure-track position where I would eventually earn tenure and promotion, direct a graduate program, and work alongside a cohort of stellar colleagues who became even better friends—proving at once that there is some truth to the adage that it’s easier to get a job if you have a job and also that the brass ring can be pretty great if you’re fortunate enough to hang onto it.  The outcome was better than I could’ve hoped for, but even then, the process was horrible.  I won the game, but I hated playing it.

Having applied to around 75 jobs in my first run at the market, I was in no hurry to redouble that effort.  The second time around, I made it a point to apply only to positions that were equal to or better than the job I had—which was, frankly, most of them.  Unlike my first, desperate attempt to secure employment, I was also much more selective in terms of required specialty and geography.  I applied to jobs in far flung places, but only the ones that were really good fits for my specialty and career.  Otherwise, I focused my search on universities closer to family (Ohio and Indiana).  Even though I wasn’t thrilled about my employment situation, I was fairly secure in my position at the SLAC—as one of only a handful of fully credentialed professors at the entire college—so my desperation wasn’t quite to the same level as it was the year prior.

In all, I submitted twenty-three applications in my second run at the market.  More than two-thirds were for rhetoric, speech, or argumentation positions and the remaining few were generalists with rhetoric as an optional specialty.  The positions were skewed toward SLACs, but included a fair number of mid-sized or large regional comprehensive universities and a couple of big research one-type gigs.  All but one of those positions was for an Assistant Professor and most were tenure-track.  Even so, the the cycle was every bit as disheartening the previous year.  Out of twenty-three apps, I landed three screening interviews. Batting .130 isn’t very good in any league, but it was at least a slight improvement over my .120 the previous year.

As I look back through my notes from 2014-2015, I remember being really, really excited about two positions—one a SLAC in Ohio and another a Big State University (BSU) nearish to family.  Neither was the position that I ended up getting (more on that in another post).

The SLAC that caught my early in the cycle is about an hour from where I grew up and has an established program in rhetoric with an excellent reputation.  I was a great fit in terms of teaching and research.  I was living and working in Ohio and I was as familiar with the region as anyone could be.  Hell, before the football coach landed at the university, he was my middle school gym teacher (seriously). Even better, the job posting came up in August with an early September deadline—the first wave—so the process would be wrapped by the end of fall semester.  I couldn’t wait to tell my story on the interview that I would surely get, land this gig, and jump off the job market carousel by the holidays.

I didn’t even get a phone call.  

I’m not sure I can adequately relate how devastated I was at not even having a chance at this one.  I got over it—and myself—as time passed, but I had convinced myself that it was perfect for me.  It was near my family.  It was in my area.  It was a SLAC not unlike where I did my undergraduate work.  Frankly, it was perfect.  Unfortunately, it was more perfect for someone else.  That said, I’d send my materials their way if they opened up again… and I did.

The second position that I let myself dream about was a BSU that is ideally located almost equidistant from our families.  They were hiring for a rhetoric-type scholar on the tenure-track.  They have a graduate program.  They tend to be more under-the-radar in the field—not a heavy hitting grad program (and certainly not in rhetoric) but their name carries enough weight to be instantly recognizable. 

Honestly, I didn’t think I had a legitimate shot at this job until the big annual conference.  In fact, because I hadn’t secured a single conference interview in my second job cycle, this BSU included, I had given into the assumption that the opening—like all of the others in waves one and two—was already filled.

At the conference that November, I trudged down to the meat market that is the job fair and, to my surprise, found BSU holding down booth advertising the search with literally no one in their queue.  I did a double take.  I walked past twice just to be sure it wasn’t a mirage.  I couldn’t believe it.  But, I wasn’t about to throw away my shot.

I spent probably ten or fifteen minutes chatting with the search committee folks at the booth. I let slide that I had applied to the position, gave them an extended version of my elevator speech, and prodded for information about their timeline.  It was great.  They were warm, they were gracious, and, more importantly, they were receptive to my teaching and research.  My confidence was growing by the minute. 

And then, quite unexpectedly, one of them mentioned being a BGSU grad—just like me.  Oh, how the networking gods smiled.  BGSU isn't a very big program and it produces scholars with a wide range of academic expertise, but most of us land at primarily teaching institutions.  It’s not everyday that I run into someone I don’t already know who passed through those halls, and certainly not someone in or adjacent to my area of expertise.  This was my in.  And even better, I had an ace in the hole.  At the time, BGSU was still in the habit of hosting an open house at the convention, so I used the opening to invite the search committee to the open house.  “Did you get an invitation?  No?  Here, take mine.  I hope you get a chance to catch up with some folks from BG.  Take care.” 

Even though the rest of the job fair was the typical carnival of dehumanization, I walked out buzzing.  I wanted this gig. I had an in. And, I nailed the job fair.  Nailed it.

Under normal circumstances, I treat conference open houses like most conference goers—a chance to catch up with friends, float around, and awkwardly network while trying to score free drinks and remain sober enough avoid being referenced on the discipline’s listserv (NCA New Orleans was a real doozy for CRTNET shade… it’s archived, too, so you should look it up).  If BGSU has an open house, I always try to drop by, but I usually only stay for a little while before heading back out into the swirling confusion that is conference networking.  Imagine my surprise when I bought a round of drinks for some underemployed friends at BGSU’s open house and saw the search committee from BSU stroll in.  The networking gods smiled again!

Not only was I now certain that I had scored points at the job fair, but I was about to get some free airtime.  It’s pretty common for job seekers to drop by open houses to press the flesh—been there, done that, didn’t get that job either—but I never expected, not in a million years, that the search committee would to come find me.

After they’d had a chance to grab some snacks and a drink, I wandered over to thank them for dropping by and to see if I could help them catch up with any old colleagues.  We talked for probably half an hour.  We laughed.  We cried.  We exchanged cards.  It was beautiful.  I felt more in control of my job market future than I ever had during my first run.  I made this meeting happen and I was positively on fire.  I left the conference bursting with confidence and with a spring in my step.  My escape plan from my SLACker job was coming together and my career was about to get big boost.

And then… crickets.

I didn’t even get a phone call.

In hindsight, I can understand why the committee moved my application to the “no” pile.  I know who they picked up, and they’re doing just fine without me.  Nevertheless, my ego really wanted this gig.  I wanted it so much that when I didn’t get it, I applied again five years later (and didn’t get an interview then either).  My ego still kind of wants this gig, but I’m not bitter.  

Eh, who am I kidding?  I’m a little bitter.  Isn’t that kind of the point of blogging?