Every PhD student on the market in an oversupplied field must at some point sit down and scrawl a whiny rant about the conventions of academic hiring. Every PhD student, no exceptions.
But first, the disclaimer. This hiring year has been a tough one for a lot of people, which is why PMB is glad he only got in halfway. Before I go on, it's important to explain that I will be OK. Technically I don't even possess in my furry paws that little piece of paper that says I'm Dr. Bear. But so far I've been fortunate to have interviews and concrete prospects both within and outside of academia. I mention this because the animus that follows is directed at a system, and not its relative sparsity of opportunities.
In fact, even (if not especially) among academics, the working assumption is that late-stage graduate students and people on the job market in the humanities and some oversupplied sciences and social sciences are unhappy because they find that it's extremely difficult to get a job in academia, while they've thought all along, as graduate students, that doing a PhD and doing it right would land them an academic job. Call this a thesis on graduate school as suspension of disbelief: you're just complaining because, despite that we told you it wouldn't be easy, you thought it would be easy. As a consequence, people on the job market are said to complain about lack of opportunity, as though they weren't informed of this likelihood before enrolling in a PhD program with the aim of finding academic employment afterwards.
At the risk of disappointing you, however, this isn't that kind of rant.
Obviously being on the job market during a recession in the general economy, to say nothing of the market for humanities professors, is difficult and often frustrating; but as far as this bear is concerned, that's just life. Inexcusable, however, is the way the academic hiring process in the humanities is frequently conducted.
The first point, then, is that an academic job application takes a lot of time and effort. Specifically, it takes more time and effort than applications for just about every other job. I know this because I have worked other, non-academic jobs, interviewed for a dozen more, and applied for ten times more than that. If you're looking for a chance that an academic hiring committee will give you the opportunity to send them more of your stuff just to make it to the second half of the first round of the application process, you're not sending in a resume and a one-page cover letter. Academic hiring committees in the humanities typically want, up-front, a 2-page cover letter tailored specifically to their department and their university, a CV, a 1-2 page dissertation precis, a 1-2 page statement of teaching philosophy, your graduate school transcripts, a portfolio of student evaluations of your teaching, 3 letters of recommendation, and a 25-30 page writing sample. Sometimes, in addition or interchangeably, they'll ask for a 1-2 page statement of current and future research, a 1-2 page statement of teaching interest, a 1-2 page statement of your commitment to diversity or to the religious ideals of the university (if applicable), a sample syllabus, a new syllabus designed specifically for a course they would want you to teach if hired, and a collection of one-paragraph course descriptions for courses you would design and teach if hired. Naturally, once you laboriously draft versions of each of these documents, you can cut and paste and recycle them for different jobs; but ultimately every single academic job you apply to is different, has different needs and priorities, and demands, if you want a chance at being interviewed, much less hired, that you tailor all of your materials specifically to them and their needs.
Compiling and tailoring these documents takes quite a lot of effort; and for a decent chance at an interview, if you're any good, you likely have to send out around 100 such applications. The odds are miserable; count on being one of 200-700 PhD-holding applicants for a single job.
Imagine for a moment, then, being a professor in a PhD-granting graduate program. Maybe you're supervising 5 students at a time, such that more or less every given year you have approximately 5 students whose doctoral dissertations you've supervised who will require, without exception, a letter of reference or recommendation from you. In fact, observing the numbers above, they will each likely require about 100 letters of recommendation from you, each year. Conservatively you're then writing 500 letters of recommendation between the months of September and May every single year (yes, we have dossier services now; so instead of the professor writing 500 letters, they write 5, which are each then sent out by a dossier service administrator, un-tailored, 100 times a year). What happens to those letters, you might ask?
Hold that question for a moment; let's do some more math. A hiring committee in the humanities, as I said, can expect between 200-700 applications for one job. Let's be conservative and call it 300 applications. Each of those 300 applications requires 3 letters of recommendation. That means 900 letters of recommendation go to a single hiring committee, which is also reading cover letters, CVs, teaching statements, research statements, writing samples, etc. etc. etc. for whichever applicants it takes enough interest in. So of the 900 recommendation letters that a hiring committee receives for a single job, in addition to the other supporting application materials required of each of those 300 applicants for that single job, how many of those 900 recommendation letters, painstakingly written by busy professors all over the world, do you think the hiring committee will actually have time to read? Consider, now, how many such letters are distributed to hiring committees throughout the duration of a single job candidate's year on the job market: for each candidate 3 letters per job, 100 jobs per year; for each job, 300 candidates. Quick, what does this add up to?
Ding! A big fucking waste of everyone's time.
I don't like to rant without making constructive suggestions, so here's one: if you're on a hiring committee likely to get hundreds of applicants for one job, and you know, as a reasonable person, that there's no way in hell you'll get through 600-1200 letters of recommendation, let alone all the other materials you ask for up-front but don't read until you've already narrowed down the candidate pool, DON'T ASK FOR SO MUCH CRAP UP-FRONT! We both know that if you could read all those documents in the time you spend doing hiring work, you wouldn't be a university professor; you'd be getting prodded in a lab somewhere deep in the bowels of CIA headquarters under suspicion that YOU'RE A FUCKING CYBORG.
My humble suggestion is that you only ask for a cover letter and CV up-front; then when you cut your applicant pool down to 20 or so, ask for other documents; and don't ask for letters of recommendation until you're looking at 6-10 candidates you're considering for interviews. Save us all the time.
It's also time academic hiring committees learned a thing or two about rejection.
As an applicant, I can state with confidence that there are two kinds of hiring committee e-mails that I consider my favorites: my first favorite is an e-mail that tells me something positive, like I'm being invited to submit more work for the next round of the process, or I'm being offered an interview, or you'd like to hire me; my second favorite is an e-mail that says something to the effect of 'we have reviewed all materials and regret to inform you that of the 566 applications we received for this single job, yours was not chosen.'
You might think it's odd that I like receiving rejection e-mails; but I assure you, and I'm not being sarcastic in the slightest, I love getting short, to-the-point, informative rejection e-mails. They bring important closure, so I'm not sitting around wondering what's going on, hoping for the opportunity, but dreading the rejection. They ease the irrational disappointment that comes with rejection by informing me that the problem is not that I suck or am hopeless, but that I simply was not the lottery winner who drew the offer out of 500-odd highly qualified (and I believe it) applicants for that single assistant professorship. Finally, they indicate that the institution that rejected me has the capacity to treat its applicants with basic human and professional dignity. I don't ask for a 'nice' rejection letter if an employer doesn't want to hire me; just A REJECTION LETTER, full stop.
The following, however, are unacceptable ways to indicate to an applicant that s/he has not be selected for the job:
1) Posted on the HR website: 'If you have not heard from us by March, assume your application has not been successful.' This is one of the most disrespectful and cowardly ways of bringing a hiring process to a close...or not. Technically, my assumption that I was not hired cannot be affirmed until the hiring body tells me so.
2) One year after date of application: 'Thank you for your interest in XXX. After reviewing the applications...blah blah blah... However, we would be grateful if you would fill out and return the attached applicant demographic information survey, which helps HR...blah blah blah.' We (royal) would be grateful if you got back to us in a timely manner about our application status; and we recommend you take your HR survey, rip it up into little pieces, and eat it.
3) 'We regret to inform you that your application was not successful. Also, nobody loves you.' Actually, I've never gotten that one; but it's not implausible.
The point here is that we should all consider it part of a hiring committee's professional-ethical duty to treat applicants with a baseline of respect and professionalism, and to inform unsuccessful applicants of their status in a timely manner. The excuses we put up with from hiring committees are simply unacceptable. Despite what people think, hiring isn't a science, especially when professors do it. It shouldn't take more than 6 weeks to conduct a hiring process, from the application deadline to the offer to the rejection notices. No applicant should be wondering what's going on with a prospective job for months after the application deadline, and no employer should ever accept an application from anyone without responding to that person with a result. Even if a hire is drawn out because a preferred candidate has other options and needs time to make a decision, or scheduling difficulty pushes back the interviews, a hiring committee should be able to contact within 4-6 weeks at the very least a shortlist of people who are not selected for interview but are in the running pending the preferred candidates' decisions, along with the rest of the applicant pool who are no longer being considered for the position. There is no excuse for anything else.
The final segment of my rant concerns a much larger, deeper, more convoluted phenomenon than these other aspects of the academic hiring process. Put succinctly: there is a waning market for scholars.
Years ago, when this bear entered graduate school, I knew that job prospects were dismal, the competition was stiff, and it would take time to land the right academic gig. Countless articles in countless media outlets feature the lamentations of humanities people wringing hands over the dismal job prospects and the poor, naive little graduate students who think they're signing up for 'a life of the mind' when if fact they're signing up for unemployment benefits. I have addressed that ridiculousness elsewhere and don't mean to dwell on it here. But there is one sense in which I do feel that we in the humanities, and in higher education in general, are letting ourselves down.
When I say there is a waning market for scholars, I mean specifically that most job opportunities are simply requests for cheap teaching labor. Departments and universities are preying upon the vulnerability of people on the academic job market desperate for a gig that lets them stay 'in academia,'; so they'll offer 20-something thousand dollars a year to have a newly-minted PhD from Columbia teaching 4 sections of first-year composition, the same work a first-year, tenure-track professor would do, but for half the salary. Further, they'll call these glorified adjunct teaching jobs 'postdocs' or 'fellowships' in order to inflate expectations, and, I half-think, to make highly accomplished young academics who are overqualified for such positions feel better about applying for and accepting them, so they can call themselves a 'postdoctoral fellow' rather than an 'adjunct instructor.'
Don't get me wrong; I love teaching, including writing and composition, and believe it to be the most important thing an academic does. But teaching is hard work, requires long hours of preparation, entails high levels of responsibility, and, ultimately, demands in a sane world a salary above the poverty line.
The kind of exploitation I see in the academic job market today makes me question whether those in my profession retain vertebrate status.
