On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search

Academe, Jan/Feb 1999 by Kurland, Stuart M

On the Market: Surviving the Academic Job Search Edited by Christina Boufis and Victoria C. Olsen. New York: Riverhead Books, 1997, 382 pp., $12.95 STUART M. KURLAND

INDISPENSABLE READING FOR GRADuate students and recent Ph.D.'s, the essays in this collection illuminate the practical-and personal-aspects of the current employment crisis in higher education. The thirty-seven contributors, who represent a wide variety of disciplines, mainly in the humanities, share their personal experiences in looking for entry-level jobs in the academy, coping with the stresses of the job search, and reassessing-and revising-career goals when jobs failed to materialize.

These mostly anecdotal essays are generally brief and informal, and a number are extremely personal. Some writers offer explicit advice, including practical tips on such matters as writing application letters, assembling dossiers, and interviewing. The essays, taken together, portray a generation of would-be university professors devastated by unanticipated shifts in the system of faculty employment, under which tenured positions (finally) opened by retirements are being left unfilled while unprecedented numbers of undergraduate students are being taught by part-time or non-tenure-track faculty, a process Michael Berube calls "the adjunctification of the professoriate." Having undertaken advanced study not only for its own sake but also with the reassurance that an academic career would be a realistic possibility, this generation of teachers and scholars now finds its aspirations betrayed by larger economic forces. There is, understandably, much pain and bitterness, though also fortitude, humor, and even hope.

The essays are arranged topically, with chapters devoted to the application process, academic conferences and interviews, and the aftermath of the job search (that is, dealing with rejections); identity politics and other aspects of the contemporary profession as reflected in hiring; the balancing of the personal and the professional; different paths and alternative careers; and "critiques of the academy." Each chapter features a brief introduction followed by three or four essays. There are also brief afterwords by Louis Menand and Berube and an "appendix of useful resources for the academic job search."

Job applicants, whether hopeful, resigned, or both, may learn many things here-not least that they are not alone. And this collection should be required reading for faculty and administrators involved in counseling graduate students and hiring faculty: placement directors, directors of graduate study, department chairs, and members of hiring committees.

For those not personally affected by the crisis in the academic marketplace, what does this book add to ongoing discussions about the nature and future of the academy? It does not aim to offer a comprehensive analysis of the academic enterprise, which is a relief, since despite the subject and intended readership, this is not a scholarly book. Every essay refers in passing to the dismal state of the 1990s job market, or to universities' increasing reliance on adjuncts to teach undergraduates, but these larger issues tend to remain in the background, unexamined. Also unexamined are certain perceptions of the academic enterprise, seen, as it were, from the bottom: that market forces drive the modern American university in illiberal and inhumane directions, that the current system unfairly exploits graduate students and other marginalized academics, that meritocracy in such circumstances is a myth, and that "political correctness" or bias not infrequently dominates the decisions of universities and hiring committees. And, most significant, the focus is exclusively on entry-level faculty hiring (there's nothing on midlevel or senior hiring, retention rates, or tenuring, or, for that matter, on filling nominally entry-level positions with experienced faculty), which leaves little room for analysis of larger trends such as changes in disciplines (including the emergence of new fields of study), national and international educational (and economic) developments, or even structural changes in the American university system.

The value of this book lies in its admittedly impressionistic representation of a vital segment of a professoriate in crisis. Beyond the personal testimonials and practical advice that are the collection's ostensible subject, its real contribution is the glimpse it offers of the human consequences of seemingly implacable demographic and institutional forces. If the doors to the academy remain closed to the next generation of teachers and scholars, the costs will be borne not just by the individuals whose career aspirations are frustrated but by all of us now on the inside, by our institutions, and by our current and future students. What healthy organism eats its young? Whither-wither-the academy?

Stuart Kurland is a member of the English department at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh.