Job requirements are out of control

To the faculty of Sweet Briar College, behold the four-page list of job requirements for a full-time Assistant Professor of History at Lansing Community College. (Don’t worry, it isn’t just the humanities – the requirements for their other positions contain most of the same ridiculous language.) If you don’t have time to open the linked PDF document, check out the required Professional Qualities and Abilities from page four:

• Serves as a role model of good written and oral communication skills and good time management skills.
• Possesses a positive attitude; able to see good in self and others.
• Shows flexibility including the acceptance of and willingness to change; sees change as an opportunity for growth.
• Seeks improvement over time by taking risks and trying new things.
• Knows and acknowledges personal limits.
• Displays self-discipline and a strong work ethic.
• Accepts responsibility for professional and personal growth.
• Demonstrates commitment to be a productive and supportive member of the college community.
• Successfully organizes, executes and follows up on projects; sets specific objectives and measures to achieve results.
• Accepts criticism gracefully and uses it as an opportunity for growth.
• Handles conflict effectively.
• Inspires others; sets an example of professionalism both within the college and the community.
• Leads and/or follows as circumstances require.

These are real requirements for a real job, not something made up by The Onion. I think that my favorite is the last one. Combined with the other requirements, they are essentially saying, “we want the perfect faculty member, who knows what to do in all situations and, in the event that we decide that they are not doing the right things, knows that they were wrong and quickly starts doing what we say to do instead.”

While some of these are just ridiculous, I’m more concerned by the fact that institutions feel the need to spell these things out in a job ad rather than communicating them through mentoring, at orientation, etc. Attending commencement, for example, is probably expected at many institutions, but it seems that LCC expects a situation to arise where a faculty member says “Oh, I didn’t attend commencement because it wasn’t in my job requirements,” so they put it in the job requirements. College students typically complain about faculty treating them like high schoolers. Nothing good can come of treating the faculty that way.

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What Becker and Goffman did when they couldn’t get jobs

The history of the sociology job market contains some interesting peculiarities. For example, George Herbert Mead received an M.A. in philosophy from Harvard and then went to Germany to work on his Ph.D. Before his dissertation was completed, he accepted a faculty position at the University of Michigan where he taught philosophy and psychology before later following John Dewey to the University of Chicago. He never completed his Ph.D. (Imagine the field day that a certain job site would have with his hiring today!) It was, I suppose, a different time. (A certain job site does have a field day with discussions of full professors whom it is argued couldn’t get a tenure-track position in today’s market with their current records.) The cases of Howie Becker and Erving Goffman show that not all of the big names in sociology had such an easy time on the job market while reinforcing how different things were back then.

At ASA in San Francisco this year, Howie Becker was the discussant on one of the “Young Ethnographer” panels (the one without Alice Goffman). About the papers, he said something along the lines of “How am I supposed to talk about such different papers at the same time” and then moved on to a discussion of his belief that the best ethnographic work (he actually stated that he prefers the term “field work”) is typically conducted by young people in graduate school who have the benefit of time.* Early in his career, he and his fellow University of Chicago graduate Erving Goffman (if this had been the session with Alice Goffman he could have brought things full-circle…) were unable to find work. So they conducted research.

According to Wikipedia (which has incorrect information about Mead’s education and, thus, may or may not be a reliable source of information on the biographies of sociologists), after completing his Ph.D. Becker conducted research at the Institute for Juvenile Research, in a postdoc at the University of Illinois, and as a research associate at Stanford before starting as a faculty member at Northwestern. Although things might not have seemed too dire because he received his Ph.D. when he was only 23, it was over ten years before Becker started what today would probably be considered his official career. Goffman, meanwhile, worked as a research associate at the University of Chicago and then for the National Institute for Mental Health before beginning as a faculty member at Berkeley.

Becker’s point in discussing the job market woes that he and Goffman experienced at ASA this year was that they both relished the opportunity to focus on research during those years, even as their friends took pity on them. My point in discussing them is to highlight the evolution of job market pathways in the intervening years. While a candidate today might be able to get a postdoc, the increasing reliance on adjunct labor means that the prospects for somebody without a tenure-track job who wants to stay in academia are much more likely to include cobbling together a poverty-level salary from various adjunct positions than earning a comfortable living conducting research. The outcomes of these pathways are also clear, since adjunct teaching leaves little time for building a publication record that will result in an eventual tenure-track job.

Despite what might have been perceived by their friends as early-career stumbles, Becker and Goffman went on to have illustrious careers in sociology and made large contributions to the discipline. How many similar contributions does the current opportunity structure within academia deprive us of?

*Later in his career, he claimed that he found time for field work by being a bad departmental citizen. It is best that we don’t mention the advice that he solicited on this topic from a few esteemed audience members.

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Start-up packages and long-term vs. short-term investments

When I was offered a job after going on the market again this year, I knew that this would likely be my only chance to negotiate for pretty much anything. Because the school also has more financial resources than the institution I’m leaving, I wasn’t sure exactly what would be appropriate to ask for (and I definitely wanted to avoid any Nazareth-like situations) but I knew that a request for new office furniture would be necessary.

At my current institution, the entire department had moved and received new furniture a few years before I began, so I inherited furniture that was relatively new. During my campus visit to my new department, though, it was pretty clear that everybody had office furniture from near the time they started. This meant that there was a large difference between the offices of those who had been recently hired and those who have worked there for a decade or more. Since my new institution has more financial stability I also thought that it would be worth asking for an ergonomic desk chair rather than something like I’ve been sitting in for the past five years (and on which I’ve worn through the right armrest twice).

I ended up with a lump sum that I could use to purchase office furniture. Having no idea how much office furniture actually costs, I didn’t think too much about this amount until I recently started planning my office space. Thinking about how I use my current office, I decided that I need a desk for myself as well as something else that I could set things on when I came back from class. Because I’m losing two closets, I also wanted something that would provide some covered storage for the old notebooks and binders that I currently keep out of sight. Finally, inspired by Eric Grollman’s efforts to create a more welcoming environment I wanted to find a table for meeting with students (maybe this post will inspire an update – I’m eager to see how this setup worked during his first year).

Looking at various vendors for these things online and adding up the prices led to the realization that office furniture is expensive! College discounts with certain suppliers mean that I should be able to get everything I want, but only after spending thousands of dollars on furniture that is in no way “fancy” (look at Grollman’s desk for comparison – it will be all flat surfaces with no handles for me). Although the cost is high, this furniture is likely to last at least a decade, if not longer*. It is interesting, then, that the amount I was given for purchasing office furniture was less than the amount I was given for purchasing technology like a computer and monitor that is unlikely to be in use even five years in the future (based on the title of this post, I believe that this is what they call “burying the lede”).

I feel like the fact that a school is willing to spend more money on short-term technology than office furniture that will be in use for much longer says something about priorities these days, either of institutions or their faculty. Because I’m still recovering from a long year, however, I’m not sure what that something is. Maybe it is related to students who choose schools based on sports teams and climbing walls. Or maybe it just demonstrates that we spend too much money on computers. Have you seen how much Apple charges for RAM?

*At home I use a Steelcase desk that I bought used for $20 12 years ago. Given the color it was probably at least 15-20 years old when I bought it.

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The other side of the market

Although I’ve highlighted posts before that focus on the other side of the job market – that of the search committee – I’ve still never been on one myself. I’m sure that the excitement about seeing the other side of the process quickly wanes when sorting through hundreds of applications, but I still look forward to the day I get to unravel a bit of the mystery. In the meantime, here are two posts from Dr. Mellivora at Tenure She Wrote:

The first deals with writing the job ad, sorting through applications, and conducting phone interviews. As a new member of a STEM department of six at a public institution, her experiences are likely similar to those of many at liberal arts institutions.

The second post deals with campus interviews and the selection process and concludes with some general advice. Most interesting in this part is the revelation that in her department, faculty and the chair can recommend different candidates for hire and, in her case, she was not the choice of the department as a whole.

Hopefully I will be part of many search committees before I decide to do something like going on the market again. I wonder, though, if those who have seen the other side of the process feel better or worse about their chances as candidates after seeing how the sausage is made.

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Facebook, blah, blah, blah.

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There are great people everywhere

This year Alpha Kappa Delta, the sociology honor society, put on teaching and learning preconferences at a number of regional conferences. I was fortunate to attend one of these and I came away with a lot of new ideas for things to try in my courses. This experience also provided a reminder that there are great people everywhere. While there were people present from all kinds of institutions, the most interesting discussion I took part in was led by a professor at a community college who had a lot of great ideas for engaging students both inside and outside of the classroom.

I have written a lot about the academic job market over the years and my experiences going on the market twice have reinforced the notion that you are not the status of your institution. Institutional resources and departmental norms may influence the amount and type of work that somebody is able to do, but we should not assume that those things influence the quality of somebody’s work, much less their intelligence. It is frustrating when sociologists overlook the structures that lead to differences in status and it is important to remind ourselves from time to time that at a conference the name of somebody’s institution is not as important as the name above it.

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On my record

One of the biggest questions that I had when deciding to go on the job market again as an advanced assistant professor is how my record would be perceived in comparison to other candidates. Although I was wary of of lowering my publication expectations to meet the requirements at my current institution, I also faced the reality of life as an assistant professor with a 3-3 teaching load and high advising and service expectations. As a result, I had several concerns:

My first concern was how my record compared with the records of candidates who were ABD. Although I taught a lot of courses as a graduate student, my teaching experience since that time coupled with strong course evaluations was likely hard for ABDs to match. On the other hand, I have only published a few peer-reviewed papers since graduate school, so it is likely that many ABD candidates had stronger publication records than me.

My second concern was how my record compared with the records that search committees imagined candidates who were ABD having by the start of their fifth years. Again, my teaching probably compared favorably (or at least was not a liability), but it would have been easy for search committees to imagine the publication possibilities that awaited a freshly-minted Ph.D. Comparing my “real” publication record to the “potential” of another candidate (whether or not the candidate would ever reach this potential) was probably not in my favor.

My final concern was how my record compared with the records of others who were going on the market again. Because the job market was bad for a number of years after I obtained my current job it is likely that there were a lot of people who were attempting to improve their situations. For example, of the 124 hires currently listed on the Sociology Job Market Forum, 46 are clearly identified as people who had been tenure-track faculty, post docs, or visiting assistant professors. Again, my teaching likely looked fine, but there was the familiar question about my publications.

In the end, the extent to which these comparisons mattered probably depended on what the department was looking for. There were a lot of schools that I did not receive interest from, but I have no way of knowing why they weren’t interested. In some cases, these sorts of comparisons may have come into play. In others, they may have disliked the font that I chose for my CV or had a grudge against one of my graduate school advisors. As I’ve argued in the past, there is nothing one can do about these sorts of mysteries of the job market, so it is best to focus on the things that can actually be affected.

As a point of comparison, the institution that I will be joining in the fall has a ranking that is very similar to an institution where I interviewed when on the market the first time. When I compared my record to the person who was hired by that institution instead of me, I found myself lacking. Comparing our records today reveals an even larger gap, suggesting that they may have made the right choice (or that the lower teaching load and higher levels of institutional support allowed that person to focus more on research…).

Interestingly, though, the institution has hired several other people since that time and none of them have a record that is comparable to the person who was hired instead of me back in 2008. At the time, I thought that I was not qualified for the position. In hindsight, it appears that it would have been hard for anybody to compete with the candidate who was hired and in another year I might have gotten the job. I also don’t know what stood out to the search committee that decided to hire me over other candidates this year.

Idiosyncrasies like these are of no comfort to those on the market who do not get jobs. Neither is the statement that “there were many qualified candidates” that I have seen in so many rejection e-mails. At the end of the day candidates are left to do the best they can and hope that one of these idiosyncrasies tilts the opinions of a search committee in their favor.

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Money vs. mission

At my current institution, there is a constant battle between faculty members who are interested in preserving the mission of the school and administrators who are interested in preserving the financial stability of the school. Unfortunately, the perspectives of these parties are often at odds. For example, although the creation of programs for non-traditional students several decades ago essentially saved the school financially, there are some faculty members who feel that this move took our institution down a path from which it cannot return. These tensions were present when I visited five years ago, but they have increased recently as continued financial struggles require faculty members to take on more responsibilities without the possibility of raises.

As a result of these tensions, during interviews (whether phone, Skype, or campus) one of the questions that I asked nearly everybody concerned the relationship between the faculty and administration and my questions for administrators always focused on their goals for the institution and how they saw their institution fitting into the changing landscape of higher education in the next few decades. Answers to these questions differed dramatically based on the institution’s financial stability. Those at wealthier schools focused on their vision for the college and ways that they were trying to improve student experiences while those at schools with fewer resources talked about how “every school” experiences financial difficulties that cause tensions between the faculty and administration.

Even at the most elite private schools, with endowments measured in the billions, financial resources affect academic decisions. I am interested in seeing, however, how these tensions will play out at my new, more financially stable institution in the fall. Although there are no special programs for nontraditional students, there is certainly a large number of underpaid adjuncts teaching important courses that allow the school to function. It will also be interesting to track my own perceptions of these differences, such as whether I will see things as less problematic than faculty members who have not worked at schools with fewer resources. In any event, raises will be nice. (Clearly, this is proof that I have already sold out!)

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A small change to improve the job market

While I don’t think that the job market experience will ever be considered “good,” after going on the market again as an assistant professor there is one thing that I think would improve the job market for both candidates and search committees: don’t request everything up front.

For me, a complete set of job market materials typically consisted of: cover letter, CV, teaching statement, research statement, evidence of teaching effectiveness, and letters of recommendation. Sometimes, schools added to this with requests for diversity statements, unofficial transcripts, or, worst of all, official transcripts. Even once I got rolling with the application process, it typically took me at least an hour to put all of these things together. This time included visiting the school’s website and tailoring my cover letter and evidence of teaching effectiveness for a particular job. The thing is, some of these schools probably didn’t look past my cover letter and CV before deciding that I wasn’t going to make the cut, so again I implore search committees: don’t request everything up front.

Submitting only a cover letter and CV would have reduced the amount of time I spent on each application dramatically, while still giving search committees the chance to see if I made the first cut. Not only would this have made my life easier, I suspect that it would make things easier for search committees, too. I found that for schools that requested everything up front, I tailored my evidence of teaching effectiveness to include only relevant courses, but left my teaching and research statements largely the same. For schools that requested cover letters and CVs first, followed by a request for more materials if I made the first cut, however, I tended to tailor my teaching and research statements as well. Knowing that the search committee had at least some interest in my application allowed me to put a bit more effort into it than I did otherwise, which likely gave them a better idea of how I would fit into their department and allowed them to make a more informed judgment about my application.

I’m sure that some candidates put this level of effort into all of their applications, but this probably isn’t feasible for those who cannot dedicate all of their time for a semester to applying for jobs. Since nearly everything is electronic now, giving candidates a week to submit additional materials would seem to be a worthwhile delay in the hiring process. The more schools that do this, the more time candidates can spend tailoring their materials for the schools that are actually interested in them and the less time will be wasted getting things “just right” for schools that will take one look at their CVs and place their application in the “not a chance in Hell” pile because they used Arial.

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On the market again

Five years after going on the market as an ABD graduate student, I went on the job market again this year. Although I had applied for a different job before, this year I decided to conduct a full search (some of the reasons for this will be detailed in future posts). This included another stop at the ASA’s meet market, countless applications, phone interviews, Skype interviews, and campus visits. Here are some things I noticed this time around:

The market moves more slowly now. Although there are still schools that post positions over the summer, this is not as common as it was when I was on the market the first time. Going by my records of jobs I applied for, here are the numbers posted in each month for 2008 followed by 2013 in parentheses: May – 4 (0); June – 10 (2); July – 14 (10); August – 4 (5); September – 1 (4); October – 4 (12). My sense is that many schools, especially those with less money, are waiting for the final word from administrators before posting their jobs, which wasn’t the case in 2008. Of course, I don’t know how many of the jobs I applied for in 2008 went unfilled because of the economy.

Almost everything is electronic. Most of my job market materials in 2008 were sent by mail. This time, I sent four applications by mail. The rest were submitted either via e-mail or online application forms. Rejections (when sent) are also handled by e-mail. In 2008 it seemed that I was constantly receiving envelopes from various schools containing letters telling me that they had hired somebody else. This year I think I received one. In fact, I became so accustomed to receiving e-mail rejections that I was sometimes surprised to find that an e-mail from a school was actually requesting more materials or a phone/Skype interview.

The market is still a mystery. Once again, there were several ads that seemed to match my qualifications very well that I never heard from, while there were also some that seemed to barely match where I had phone interviews and even campus interviews. The school where I accepted a job is more highly ranked (for whatever that’s worth) than the school where I currently work and I applied to a large number of schools between these two positions, many of which had no interest in my application (though one school did tell me that I had made their long list in my rejection e-mail).

Going on the market while working at a full-time job is difficult. In 2008, I was on fellowship while I looked for a job. In 2013 I was teaching three courses in addition to writing, advising students, and fulfilling my service obligations. People often say that being on the market is like a full-time job, and stacking that on top of an actual full-time job is incredibly difficult. It seemed like I was constantly writing cover letters, compiling evidence of teaching effectiveness, and even just keeping track of the positions to which I needed to apply after my paid work had ended for the day. I still feel behind.

In the end, it was a grueling experience but I am hopeful that it will pay off. I am excited about my future students, colleagues, and institution. Now there’s just the small matter of surviving the rest of the semester.

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Know your audience

Since the news broke of a reported job offer being rescinded by Nazareth College, nearly everybody has weighed in on the issue (including Slate, Forbes, Jezebel, Inside Higher Ed, and academic bloggers). Quickly moving past the fact that I think rescinding an offer is wrong, even if none of the requested items can be provided, we can see the way that one’s experiences affect perceptions of the request and reveal how this sort of request may have been made.

My own response to the situation was probably closest to Kate’s at The Professor is In, who writes:

In short, 3 points: 1) rescinding an offer when a client attempts to negotiate is outrageous and unethical; 2) the institutions that rescind offers strongly tend to be tiny teaching colleges with current or former religious affiliations, so if you are dealing with one of those, tread VERY carefully; 3) this candidate, W, made some grievous errors in her approach to the negotiations, showing a tone-deaf lack of sensitivity to the needs of the institution. That does not justify the rescinding. But if she had worked with me on negotiating, I would have told her to remove or rephrase many of the elements on her list of requests, because they were inappropriate to such a small, teaching oriented, resource-poor, service-heavy kind of institution. However, again, her sin of negotiating ineptly is miniscule compared to the sin of an institution summarily rescinding an offer.

At my own institution, things like pre-tenure and parental leaves are based on institutional policies that are not up for negotiation. Regarding salary, the AAUP Faculty Salary Survey can provide candidates with a rough sense of what is normal for a particular institution.

On the other end of the spectrum we have Female Science Professor, who works at a research institution and states:

I don’t know if there is a gender angle to this incident or not, but speaking as someone at a research university, there is nothing in the candidate’s email that surprises or offends me. I have been asked for many of the same or similar things by candidates; some of these requests are routine, some of them require discussion. I say ‘yes’ when I can, and ‘no’ when that is the appropriate response for my department/university. Negotiations can be constructive and interesting discussions.

The gap between these responses is elucidated by David Ball at Inside Higher Ed, who reminds us:

Nazareth’s rashness also reveals a troubling disconnect between SLACs and R1 institutions around the hiring process. Job expectations and institutional cultures are oftentimes dramatically and necessarily different between the two. This communication problem can be exacerbated by the lack of liberal-arts exposure on the part of either the candidate or her advisers and the corroding belief many R1 faculty still propagate that SLACs can’t offer their candidates conditions in which they can flourish, even for those applicants most keen to teach in a liberal-arts setting.

Representatives from SLACs can be understandably fatigued when pushing back against these expectations and gun-shy when candidates demonstrate interests in a research agenda that appear to eclipse their investment as teachers. Graduate departments have an imperative to educate themselves about the expectations of liberal-arts colleges by listening to colleagues and recent Ph.D.s teaching in those settings. Likewise, SLAC hiring committees must proceed, particularly at the negotiation stage, with the knowledge that their hires may be getting advice that is oblivious to the realities of their institution.

Since there is a great deal of variation even within institutional types, it would benefit everybody involved to keep these things in mind when working through the hiring process. And, of course, remember that you should never rescind an offer.
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