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Breaking Out of the Ivory Tower
T he advice in this book draws from my four years of writing and consulting as “the Professor” at The Professor Is In, a blog and business dedicated to demystifying the tenure track job search in this time of contraction of the academic job market. It also stems from the fifteen years I spent as a tenure track and tenured professor, and the five years I spent as a department head. My primary field is cultural anthropology, with a secondary focus on Japan. After completing my Ph.D. at the University of Hawai’i in 1996, I held joint positions in anthropology and East Asian studies at two R1 research universities, the first that I call West Coast U and the second that I call Midwestern U. I was head of the East Asian Studies Department at Midwestern U. As a humanistically oriented cultural anthropologist and the head of a humanities department, my career from start to finish evenly straddled the social sciences and the humanities.
From my earliest days as an ABD job seeker (“all but dissertation”—the status you are awarded after completing all program requirements and defending your dissertation proposal), I was fascinated by the unspoken cultural norms, biases, and expectations of the tenure track job market, and determined to analyze them. I led my first “job market workshop” for my graduate school friends in 1996, when, still a Ph.D. student myself, I had just received my first tenure track job offer after two years of searching. I continued to lead similar events every year as an assistant professor, and to incorporate professionalization training in every one of the graduate seminars I taught. I served on or chaired more than ten search committees and participated as a faculty voter on many more, and in those capacities observed the painful errors made by candidate after candidate—errors that eventually came to show a consistent and predictable pattern of misapprehension of the actual judgments governing our hiring decisions. It was clear, from these experiences with visiting candidates and with graduate students at my institutions, that the need for Ph.D. career advising was urgent and the supply virtually nonexistent. Indeed, the sum total of job market advice I received as a graduate student was from my department head at our new student orientation in 1990, in which he told us, “You’ll never get an academic job, so don’t even bother trying.” As a tenure track and tenured faculty member I knew that my tenured colleagues rarely spoke of the job market or of the need to train our graduate students to prepare for it. When I did so in a variety of formal and informal ways, my colleagues were generally, at best, bemused. Nobody I encountered in the academy, including my cultural anthropologist colleagues, found the cultural practices of tenure track hiring a compelling or worthy subject of investigation.
I left the academy—and an ostensibly successful career—in 2009. This was a highly unusual move. People rarely leave tenured positions. As the department head of a small humanities department at a major research institution in the Midwest, I made an excellent salary, had funded graduate students, generous summer research funding, and few obligations beyond the ones for which I was paid: holding faculty meetings, balancing the department budget, running searches, meeting staffing needs, handling tenure cases, filing faculty paperwork, and calculating faculty raises, on the occasions there were any. I was busy and stressed, but not nearly as busy and stressed as I had been as a new assistant professor. And I had far more to show for it at the end of the day. Unexpectedly, I enjoyed administration.
In the end I left because of two fundamental problems: 1) I needed to remove my children from a bad custody situation; and 2) my soul was dying at Midwestern U. I described my situation at Midwestern U and my reasons for leaving in detail in a guest blog post called “Death of a Soul on Campus,” on Amanda Krause’s Tech in Translation blog. 1 The outcome of the difficult situation in which I found myself was that my partner and I made a joint decision: If she found a job back in our beloved Pacific Northwest that could support the family, I would leave behind academic work entirely. This was not a completely wrenching decision for me to make. I was ready to leave academia. Faced with the choice between money and status at Midwestern U, and no money and no status back in the Northwest, I chose the latter.
The year that followed my departure from a successful career and identity as an academic was bewildering and painful. I struggled to imagine fulfilling work that would offer something of value to the world. Eventually, I decided to turn my painstakingly gathered fund of knowledge about the job market, and my determination to share it with desperate job seekers, into a blog, and eventually, a business. I began blogging on The Professor Is In five days a week in late 2010, aiming to build an online body of freely available advice for all tenure track job seekers, covering essential information about basic job application documents, the elements of a competitive record, interviewing practices, and search committee attitudes. The response was immediate and gratifying. Tentatively, I hung out my virtual shingle offering job market related assistance in June 2011. Within a week, I had my first client. Soon I had a roster. My instincts were correct: People needed this help, and were not getting it anywhere, certainly not in their departments.
It was when I published a column called “To: Advisors. Re: Your Advisees” in the Chronicle of Higher Education in September 2011 that things took off. The essay opens with this: “Dear faculty members: I sell Ph.D. advising services on the open market. And your Ph.D. students are buying. Why? Because you’re not doing your job.”
The column asks, “Why am I the pinch-hitter for an absentee professoriate?” and points out the thundering absence of anyone willing to teach desperate graduate students career-related skills such as deciphering a job ad, constructing a CV, delivering the elevator speech about the dissertation, planning a publishing trajectory, cultivating well-known reference letter writers, and writing effective job applications. “You are sending your Ph.D. students out onto this job market so unprepared that it would be laughable if the outcome weren’t so tragic,” I wrote. “Meanwhile, when students ask for help with their job search, too many of you respond with some version of ‘not my problem’ or the tired incantation: ‘The Ph.D. is not professional training.’ When one of my clients asked her advisor for career help, he accused her of trying to ‘game the system.’ ” I noted that, ironically, the awful job market has become a rationale for refraining to advise. “ ‘Well, the job market’s impossible,’ my former colleagues would say, airily, ‘of course I always tell them that.’ ”
More broadly, the column accuses advisors of mystifying the financial foundations of academic work. It critiques advisors’ failure to acknowledge graduate students—and themselves—as workers who operate within an existing money economy, and their denial that scholarly accomplishments require a living wage. I wrote:
To be sure, my clients tell me that advising occurs—endless advising of “the dissertation project.” As if that project, and its minutiae of citations and shades of meaning, is the point of graduate school. It is not the point of graduate school. It is simply a document that demonstrates a mastery of a discipline and a topic. The point of graduate school, for the actual graduate students themselves, is preparation for a career. A career like yours, with benefits and a retirement plan, to the extent that still exists.
That kind of career derives far less from a thick wad of dissertation pages than from the quantity of one’s publications, the impressiveness of one’s grant record, the fame of one’s reference writers, and the clarity of one’s ambition. I don’t find it problematic to say any of that openly. But apparently you do. You reject it as “vulgar” and “careerist”—as if wanting to have health insurance is vulgar and wanting to not go on food stamps is careerist.
I concluded, “Your job is to tell [your graduate students] the truth….And to extend an ethos of care beyond their writing and research to encompass their material existence. Because your students need work, even when it’s not the coveted tenure track job. Work is good. You work. So should your Ph.D.’s.”
I published this column with great trepidation; I expected to be excoriated. And, to a degree, in the comment thread, I was. But I was also thanked, effusively (by graduate students). The immediate outcome of the column was a deluge of pleas to my fledgling business for help. Emails came by the (literally) thousands, from desperate, panicked Ph.D. candidates and tenure track job seekers. They came from the Ivy Leagues, from the Public Ivies such as Berkeley and Michigan, from second and third tier programs, and from campuses around the world. They came from new ABDs fearing their first foray onto the market, longtime adjuncts who’d been fruitlessly searching for jobs for years, and assistant professors seeking to move out of stressful and unfulfilling positions.
New clients came telling two versions of a single tale. Either version A: “My advisor, X, barely reads my material, barely writes a recommendation letter for me, and has nothing whatsoever to say about the job market.” Or version B: “My advisor, X, is really nice, tries to be very supportive, does a great job in terms of my dissertation, and has nothing whatsoever to say about the job market.”
When I inquired why the advisors were so unhelpful, my new clients described several scenarios: Some advisors understand their advising responsibilities to end with the writing and defense of the dissertation manuscript. Other advisors who obtained their degrees and jobs in a far different era are devastatingly ignorant of the conditions of the new university hiring economy. And then there is advisor selfishness, laziness, and indifference—factors in many client stories. One tactic some professors employ to silence intensifying graduate student requests for help is exceptionalism based on institutional rank or field. Rhetoric and composition faculty believe their field immune to market forces, while Ivy League advisors typically scoff at the notion—in the face of all evidence—that their Ph.D.’s don’t sail effortlessly into top-ranking tenure track positions. “My advisor told me everyone in the program gets good jobs,” said one client from Yale, who went on, “but I know the cohorts of the last few years, and only two made it onto the tenure track. He’s delusional, living in some outdated fantasy of institutional prestige.”
But more than anything, the desperate emails I received then and continue to receive daily reveal the enduring “Work of the Mind” cultural mythology of the academy. 2 This mythology dictates that nobody must ever associate intellectual endeavor with payment. It is unseemly and crass to speak openly of the wages of intellectual work, let alone to teach students the strategies and practices necessary to build a paying career. These efforts are held as contemptible “careerist” betrayals of the pursuit of pure scholarship. As higher education critic David Perry observed in a recent Chronicle Vitae post about the resistance of nearly everyone in the academy to unionization: “Many academics, especially those in the tenure track, just resist seeing themselves as laborers.” He continued, “Still we persist with the myth that the university is a special space, exempt from the power and pressures of capitalism and the neoliberal worldview.” 3
The academic blogger and commentator Ian Bogost remarked, at the close of a blog post about the tactics of midcareer hiring, “I’m sure I’ll receive a host of insults that include the word ‘neoliberal’ for suggesting we think tactically about the reality of the organizational-political moil of academic job-seeking.” 4 He went on, “But there’s a flipside to academic freedom. We might cheekily call it ‘academic paydom’: the need to tend to our own professional situations in a way that allows us to do the rest of our jobs effectively—including the idealistic intellectualism.”
The Work of the Mind stance of intellectual purity often casts itself as a noble critique of neoliberal logic, which is a logic of pure monetization, in which intellectual pursuits are useless that do not yield immediate patentability or profit. Neoliberal values have taken over budgetary decisions by both the Left and the Right in modern-day America, and lie behind the wholesale assault on (and determined defunding of) the university as a mostly wasteful and self-indulgent space of “pointless” research. On this side academic critics insist that the purity of intellectual pursuit must be defended against the encroachments of money values. And indeed, those critics look with horror at my business as the complete capitulation to neoliberal logic, in that I urge my clients to commit themselves to an entirely instrumentalizing relationship to scholarly pursuits, packaging everything into quantifiable units of productivity for the purposes of job market competition.
Are they right? Am I reinforcing the same logic that has created the job market crisis?
Yes and no. The Work of the Mind is indeed valuable. But it cannot be pursued without adequate income. Nobody on public assistance, sleeping in a car, or living with two children in their parents’ basement has the luxury to do this work. For me, the overriding ethical imperative is not to parrot proper political critique, but to assist desperate people. Ph.D. candidates, like other workers, first and foremost need secure paying work.
All successful tenure line professors draw regular salaries and enjoy health insurance, benefits, and retirement plans. Tenured professors enjoy (for now) a job security unheard of in any other sector of the economy. Professors know perfectly well that their own career progress rests on tangible outcomes in the form of publications, grants, and conference papers, and often pursue these with tactical precision. They also know that they would toss posthaste any application for a tenure track position in their own departments that did not include most or all of these same elements of a competitive professional record. Yet they fail to support—sometimes even actively discourage—their own graduate advisees in the same tactical thinking. As I wrote in my Chronicle column, “The irony of faculty ‘work’ (‘I’m working on a project on death and the abject’) is its scrupulous denial of any acknowledged kinship to the actual wage-work for which [faculty] do, indeed, draw a salary.”
This discourse of intellectual purity meanwhile functions to disguise the truth that the modern university system systematically requires an unending supply of young, vulnerable idealists to work for poverty wages as graduate student teaching assistants (and, of course, adjuncts). The advanced degree these students earn is, as Marc Bousquet has argued, simply a by-product of this systemic exploitation, and not meant to carry value forward as a basis for high-wage employment. 5 Faculty who encourage bright undergraduates to enter Ph.D. programs, and current graduate students to remain in them, are, from this point of view, engaged in a form of unscrupulous “subprime lending” (which I discuss more in chapter 57 ) meant to funnel resources from this vulnerable population both to wealthy universities and their well-compensated administrators, and to the banks, through the systematic debt that is now a core part of most graduate school education.
Activist and writer Ann Larson tells a story from a 2011 event in her English graduate program, when two illustrious Marxist rhetoric and composition scholars, John Trimbur and John Brereton, came to speak. 6 During the Q and A, one graduate student spoke up: “The job market is terrible right now,” she said. “What advice do you have for us? Where can we find hope?” Larson wrote, “This was a very relevant, even poignant, question….I too was very eager to hear some words of wisdom and comfort.” However:
To my dismay, Brereton responded by advising the student to stick with her program undaunted. “If you have a Composition and Rhetoric doctorate,” he told her, “you will find a job.” Some in the audience murmured in disagreement. As for me, I was shocked at the complete ignorance of Brereton’s response. It’s not that I expected him to tell this student to choose another profession. Nor did I expect him to express the unmitigated job-market gloom that many graduate students and new PhDs know all too well. I expected, simply, the truth. Even a sugarcoated version of the truth would have been preferable to (let me just say it) an outright lie about rosy job prospects for Humanities graduates in any field.
Was Brereton truly unaware of the labor crisis in the Humanities in general and in Composition in particular?…After all, the MLA had declared a job market crisis back in 1998, which is plenty of time for the news to trickle up to those who occupy even the loftiest towers of the academy. The shadow of contingency is everywhere.
Co-presenter Trimbur, she observed, far from correcting his colleague, remained silent, despite his established Marxist theoretical bent. “It seemed to me that Trimbur was annoyed to have to respond to a job-market question at all.”
The outcome of this silence, writ large, among Marxist and non-Marxist faculty offices and conference halls across the country is that thousands of Ph.D.’s from every rank and status of program are left on their own without skills or training to confront a brutal job market in a collapsing academic economy. Thousands of Ph.D.’s left, in Ann Larson’s words, “heartsick and furious.” The fact that the academy’s tenured idealists—all comfortably ensconced in secure positions with stable paychecks, abundant health insurance, and generous retirement plans—won’t talk openly about the job search out of some commitment to “cultural critique,” is in my view indefensible. No critique of the neoliberal academy should take place on the backs of its most vulnerable members.
My advice in this book is meant to fill this void, addressing every angle of professionalization from building a competitive record, to writing a job cover letter, CV, and teaching statement, to managing an interview, to negotiating an offer. It explains the unspoken cultural biases and judgments that govern tenure track hiring and demystifies the criteria upon which tenure track job seekers are actually judged. And it points to possibilities outside the academy for those job seekers who decide to move on and reinvent themselves for a post-academic career.
Let me pause here to make myself perfectly clear: Individual efforts alone cannot overcome systemic forces. My advice cannot counteract the wholesale contraction of the university economy, and this book cannot conjure jobs where there are none. Job seekers can and should make their very best efforts, but there are not enough jobs for everyone. Some—perhaps most—people reading this book will eventually have to move on to nonacademic career options.
What this book can do is reveal how the job market works, so that you can make educated choices about how to proceed in it. As a cultural anthropologist I am always alert to the ways that members of a group create boundaries of insider and outsider, get and keep power, operate within hierarchies and then challenge them, and impose unspoken norms of speech and behavior. In everything I write I disclose the taken-for-granted knowledge of the academy that is widely understood by insiders (tenured professors) but rarely spoken aloud to outsiders (you, the as-yet-unproven graduate student apprentices). I explain the systems of value by which academic records of productivity are judged, so that you can most efficiently devote your time to the productivity that counts on the job market. And so you can decide when the effort exceeds the return on investment, and when it’s time to move on to another career.
Is it strange that I run a business helping others get into a career that I left? Some seem to think so, but I don’t. I’ve been both happy and unhappy in the academic career. Not all campuses or departments are the same, and when you find a good match between your goals and a campus culture, the academic career can be delightful. I know what it means to enjoy an academic job, and I hope that a few lucky individuals still have the opportunity to do that.
For you, the tenure track job is probably still Plan A. You want the job because it’s what you trained for and it is a job doing the things you most enjoy, particularly the research and teaching that you’ve mastered at such sacrifice and effort, over so many years. In this job you get to work with smart, like-minded colleagues. And in this job, once you get past tenure—and assuming that tenure continues to exist—you get unparalleled job security. Millions of graduate students pour their hearts and souls and dollars into graduate school training. The best thing you can do is to learn just how the tenure track job market works, how to plan for it from the first day of graduate school, how to perfect your applications for it, and how to decide when it’s time to move on.
While I strongly believe in your ability to leave the academy and do other things (I devote the final part of the book to this topic), I know that you want to make your best effort to succeed in your Plan A. We don’t know how much longer tenure track jobs will be around. But they’re still around now in small numbers, so if you want to go after one, I support you.