My Academic Job Search Postmortem, Part One

A review at the
end of an effort or project can be known by many names, depending on the field
or specialty. Sometimes it’s a debriefing
or a completion report, and the goal
is almost always to articulate the lessons
learned during the process. 

I’m using postmortem here, however, because
my academic job search is dead. D-E-A-D. As a doornail, dodo, et cetera.

Not because I’m
no longer a viable candidate, mind you, but because—with only a handful of
local exceptions—I will no longer bother to look.

Here are nine observations
made while examining this still-warm corpse:

1) Married? Kids? Care
about where you live? Good luck

Younger writers
are more likely to be unmarried and to not have children, which means they’re
better candidates for uprooting and moving to far-off (and perhaps less
desirable) stops on their Nomadic Academic Adventure™.

I’m 38, which puts
me in the second-largest age range for jobseekers in creative writing, at least
according to self-reported data on the popular academic jobs wiki. Writers
younger than me comprise the largest group. My wife and I own a home, and we
just had our first child. I’m not going to ask my family to uproot unless the
right job comes along. This puts me squarely at odds with the pervasive
mentality in academia that we should go
where the job is. This mentality, IMO, is one reason so many academics are
unhappy.

2) The MFA is on its way
out

The MFA is “the appropriate terminal degree,” according to the Association of Writers and Writing Programs
(AWP). Increasingly, however, job openings require a PhD, or
else the ads say “PhD preferred,” which is the same thing. Many departments this
year sought to hire someone who could teach creative writing and literature and business writing and
you-name-it. I strongly believe these “open/mixed” listings will dominate
future job seasons. Many committees bring in PhDs because it’s just easier to
push those candidates up the chain of command. If the trend of hiring
generalists continues, then those with only an MFA will find themselves on the outside looking in.

This year, my
department hired a tenure-track poet. In the group of three finalists, two had PhDs
and the other had a law degree. All three had also earned an MFA along the way,
which means my degree is increasingly seen as just another stop on the academic
road creative writers must pursue. Pay special attention to departments that
hire two positions in a given year. Often, an MFA hired will have a book or two,
while a PhD hired will have published a few articles.

The MFA might
still be a terminal degree, but not in the way we used to mean. Writers in
academia who championed the MFA have lost, plain and simple. That means you, AWP. You lost.

3) You have a published
book—nobody cares

Publishing a
book is no longer a distinguishing characteristic, especially for writers in
academia who only have an MFA—every serious applicant has a book. Many have two
books, or one book with two more under contract. Hiring committees can decide
to make the first cut based on such a detail; if the group decides to only consider
applicants with at least two books, the pool shrinks dramatically. Dealing with
100 applications is still a lot of work, but it’s much easier than looking at 250.
Applicants must come to terms with this: Your qualifications may exceed every listed
requirement and the committee can still choose to dismiss your materials with
nary a glance.

Most committee
members don’t know anything about small press publishers, either, and that’s
where the majority of books of poems and short stories are published now. This
year, I asked a few seasoned writing professors to look at my CV, and the only
potential concern raised—and they all stressed that it was only a potential concern—was that hiring committees
might not know anything about Press 53, the publisher for both my story
collection and a fiction anthology I edited.

Maybe they are
right. The kicker, of course, is that tenured writing faculty at several of the
universities to which I applied have used their Press 53 (or other comparable
small press) book to secure tenure. But they were already on the inside.

4) Teaching experience
doesn’t matter

Every job ad and
department claims to care about teaching, but it really doesn’t matter that much.
A writer who’s taught as a graduate assistant—and maybe for an additional year
or two after finishing the degree—is a more appealing candidate than someone
like me. I have taught university writing courses since 1999, and I’ve held the
same full-time position off the tenure track since 2002. Instead of suggesting
that I am not a job-hopper, that I’m someone who stays in one place for a
respectable amount of time, this detail actually conveys that I’m obviously a loser. 

My official title, Assistant Professor, also doesn’t help during the job
search. Once during a
campus visit, a dean asked why I hadn’t become an associate or full professor
after more than a decade in my current position. She gave me the husky stink-eye
when I explained, as if I were trying to get away with something. For the
record, most positions like mine carry a similar title.

Here’s another True
Life Scenario™: I applied for a tenure-track job a few years ago, even though I
knew the visiting professor—a writer I had come to know—was clearly the inside
candidate. Sure enough, they hired him. He admittedly didn’t have much teaching
experience, and he didn’t really like the city. Later, he confessed that he was
worried about me and other writers with tons of teaching experience. The
university talked a good game about its commitment to teaching, but I knew that
was just lip service. His writing had already won a few prestigious awards, which
was more than enough to win them over, even if they had reservations about his
in-classroom abilities. The right book or award always trumps teaching experience.

5)
Sometimes the numbers are not in your favor

I have taught upwards
of 3,000 students in more than 200 sections of university writing
courses—freshman composition, introductory creative writing, fiction writing,
screenwriting, and so on, and I have delivered that instruction in nearly every
possible learning environment (f2f, online, hybrid, and so on). I have accepted
overloads, assumed teaching duties in other classes mid-semester when the
instructors were no longer able, and designed or redesigned courses no
one else wanted to teach. My work has been deemed meritorious for eleven of the last twelve years, and the group of peers who didn’t award me merit that one year might have been on the pipe.

In most fields,
this would mean I’m a proven veteran who can be trusted to do the job right.

But if, like me,
you’re a member of the Writing Professor Corps, Armored Tank Division®, then you’re
just another grunt sent into battle before anyone else, not an officer
deserving decoration.

You thought you
were building up a CV and gaining a wide variety of experience? Nice try,
dingleberry. Limiting your chances of ever finding a better job is more like
it.

6) The competition is
fierce

A few years ago,
I was a finalist for an MFA director job that received almost 300 applications.
A major research university in the same city received close to 800 applications
that year. Just the other day, I finally received a ding letter for an open
genre/open rank position that I’d applied to six months ago: “We received over 300 applications for our position, the
majority of them from candidates with tenure at premier Universities and
Colleges both in the United States and abroad. The pool, in short, was
dazzling.” At least six other positions I applied for this year had a applicant
pool of 300 or more. I’m sure there were many others, too, with similar
numbers.

It’s understandable
that a job near New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Portland—or
any place where creative people might like to reside—would draw a high number
of applicants. But even jobs in small-town Georgia and South Dakota receive
more applications than hiring committees should have to endure. And thousands
more writers graduate with a terminal degree every year, so this won’t ever become
easier.

Let’s say that
30,000 people have earned an MFA since I earned mine. If only 10% of that crop continues
to write and teach—and assuming there is equal distribution among the most
common genres (poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction)—then I could potentially compete with 1,000 other
fiction writers for every decent job advertised.

I’m no
statistician. If I had such abilities, I’d work on Wall Street or for a Major
League Baseball club. But the odds don’t seem to be in your favor, Katniss.

7) Where you studied
matters more than what, or with whom, you studied

The writing program
I attended was as good as any of the other five programs that offered me an
assistantship—better, I would argue. My professors, who were the only reason I
attended the program, retired or moved on to more lucrative gigs. In
retrospect, attending a more recognizable program—Iowa, say, or Columbia—would
have better served me on the job market. But I don’t think it would have done more
for my writing.

Alternately, I
should have considered pursuing a PhD after the MFA, but even then—after
teaching for three years and earning a graduate degree—I was still grossly
uninformed about academic job-related maneuvering. My program was an MA when
I started, and I didn’t know the difference one letter made. It became an MFA
before I graduated, and I had the choice between walking away with the MA or
continuing for one more year to earn the terminal degree. By then, I knew the MFA
might allow me to teach. A few months after graduating, I was hired full-time at a university in my home state, but I didn’t know right away what a
non-tenure-track job entailed, or why it could be problematic. I just knew I’d landed a teaching job right out of grad school, something few of the program’s graduates had ever done.

8) What’s in a name?

So you’re a
poet? Call yourself a cinematic poet who writes Scriptverse™, as you’ll
have a better chance of standing out. You can be hired for any poetry, screenwriting, or open genre position. Bonus: Throw around the term “digital humanities” in your materials,
as absolutely no one knows what that actually means. The committee will
probably grant you a first interview.

Also, your specialty doesn’t really matter for creative writing positions. You’re really a poet, but your many prose poems could be flash fiction in the right light. You’ll be hired for the fiction gig. Fiction, creative nonfiction—it’s all just prose, isn’t it? (American literature, medieval literature—it’s all just books, isn’t it?)

9) The academic jobs wiki
is your frenemy

Even though I’ve
made reference to the wiki in this post, I advise using it only to learn of new
job opportunities—then leave the site to find the details of those
opportunities. While the wiki can illuminate certain aspects of the academic
job market, the anonymous interactions are mostly a cesspool of either desperation or arrogance, if not both.

iN PART TWO, I’LL GET INCREDIBLY PERSONAL AND COMPARE MYSELF (FAVORABLY OR UNFAVORABLY) TO AT LEAST FIVE PEOPLE HIRED INSTEAD OF ME.