The Job Market Flashback Part 3

This post is a continuation of my reflection on my experiences on the academic job market.  If you haven’t already read Part 1 and Part 2 about the first two waves of the job cycle, feel free to check them out.  

As Winter break gave way to the start of Spring semester, my job market luck took a turn for the better. I did two screening interviews for assistant professor positions—one at a private University in the Midwest and one at an extension campus of a public university in the South. Both interviews were remarkably unremarkable—although I did awkwardly refer to myself as “just your average straight white guy” in a joke that went over like a lead balloon in one of them—and I hoped to hear back about campus invitations soon after they ended.  In the former case, I was actually very confident that I’d be invited because one of the search committee members was a former colleague and he emailed me to share how well the committee responded to my interview.  It's good to have friends.

Of course, what I expected to happen and what happened were not the same.

After my screening interview with the search committee at the private university, the Dean sent me a list of questions, mostly about how I fit the university’s mission, and requested that I respond to them in writing.  Although my writing time was dedicated to finishing my dissertation, I complied (because… job).  The resulting document was probably three or four pages and a couple of days of writing momentum lost.

During this time, another small college in the Midwest requested a similar essay/letter response to a series of prompts about the institutional mission and position before interviewing me.  I, of course, provided the essay a few days later.  It didn’t matter, not only did they not interview me, they didn’t correspond with me at all.  

Intellectually, I recognize the value of having additional screening tools in the interviewing process, but this was really part of the application, not the interview.  If it’s an interviewing tool, then it should come with some reciprocity (interviewees are interviewing institutions, too).  As it was, this particular college extended the period of time during which an applicant has the least amount of agency for even longer than the normally agonizing period between application and interview. Requesting additional materials makes it seem, at least for this job seeker, that the college is interested in the candidate.  I saw the request as a rare step of positive reinforcement in the otherwise brutal silence-rejection cycle that we call the job market.  Unfortunately, it was more like job fair 2.0, this time with less job fair, artificially inflated expectations, and more wasted time.  Probably better not to have landed that gig, but that’s hard to see when you’re worried about how you’re going to pay for groceries in a few months.

I digress.  After finishing my post-interview writing assignment for the private university in the Midwest, I sent off my essay and expected to hear back from the Dean in a day or two with notification that not only had my brilliant responses landed me the job without need for a campus interview, but that s/he would be hiring me as a tenured Full Professor rather than as an Assistant Professor and that the university would be offering a Mike Trout-esque signing bonus to secure my services.  Because I’m a really good writer, y’all.

I waited confidently for the next few days.  No response from the dean.  My confidence waned a bit as the days became a week, and then more as one became two. At the start of week three, I was convinced that my responses must’ve landed in a spam folder.  I mean, if s/he had them and had read them the overwhelming force of my sheer awesomeness would demand a response, right?  Since there was no reply, the only logical conclusion was that my response essay got delivered to the wrong digital doorstep.  I emailed the Dean to make sure that s/he had my responses.  

About a week later, the Dean replied.  Two short sentences.  The search was cancelled.  Funding for the position was no longer available.

Searches get cancelled every year.  This is a reality of the job market.  It’s also bullshit.  Here, I thought I’d landed a sure thing.  This was a job for which I was a good fit and I had nailed the interview.  Turns out, that and a cup of coffee will get you a cup of coffee (and a little more debt because you probably paid for the coffee with a credit card since you don’t have a job).

By the end of February, my job prospects were less promising than I’d hoped.  The Midwest sure thing turned out to be a big pile of nothing. I’d wasted a few writing days responding to bullshit pseudo-interviews.  And, I hadn’t heard back from the university in South after my mostly positive phone interview.  And I was behind on all of my dissertation deadlines.  Oh, and we had just had a baby.  The job search, new parent, sleep deprived, I’m-never-going-to-be-PHinisheD anxiety was in full fucking swing.

This time seemed to stretch on forever even though it was only about a month.  Things move slowly through committees and bureaucracies.  The academic hire requires three phases of screening—application, screening interview (phone, video chat, conference, etc.), and the campus visit.  Each phase typically includes some deliberation, either by a committee, department, or administration.  That stuff takes time (and the time doesn’t decrease because you keep refreshing the jobswiki… which I did… frequently). 

I’d sent out around fifty applications and the stream of new job ads that began flowing at the end of January seemed to have dried up.  The third “wave” of job market activity (early Spring semester), hadn’t panned out.  Heading into the middle of Spring semester, I was seriously starting to actually worry that not only would I not find work for the coming year, but that I was, in fact, unemployable.  Of course, I wasn’t unemployable and I did find a job for the following year (and the one after that), but we’ll get to that in another post... eventually.