In the dead of night, when the world is asleep and no one is looking, I dabble in the blackest of arts:  statistics and probabilities.  My inner mathematician is mysterious, mighty, and mischievous.

I’m a duffer, as you might guess, so rather than compiling Excel spreadsheets and clogging my computer’s circuitry with programs designed to crunch numbers, I instead have a variety of Word documents in which I record those patterns that promise to bear peculiar fruit after several years of steady observation.  When I go mad (I’ve tentatively scheduled May 2010 for my meltdown–save the date!) and they haul me away, I’m going to make some lucky cryptonumerologist very happy.

Anyhoo, here are some festive observations from my first three years at CMU (aided and abetted by today’s release of Student Opinion Scores, Central’s standard evaluation mechanism).  First, the basics:

• My teaching may be improving, as my “overall effectiveness” scores follow a simple, straightforward progression:  3.20 to 3.40 to 3.61.
• Literature continues to be my principal strength, with a three-year average effectiveness score of 3.55.  This is an especially interesting figure to me, since I have taught only one seminar (out of nineteen total classes) in my primary area of scholarly specialization.
• Intermediate composition continues to be the noirest of my bêtes noires, with a cumulative score that hovers around 3.10.  I’d like to think I’ve improved quite a bit (during my first year I taught four sections, which is decidedly atypical for a member of the tenure-track faculty, and earned two sub-3.0 scores that will evermore ballast the average), but my Achilles heel continues to be early commitment to a semester-long pedagogical arc.  I’m afraid that CMU’s master syllabus for ENG 201 and I don’t get on especially well.

And, thanks to my three-year tracking, some more interesting (if sketchier) findings:

• Statistical outliers (typically in the form of “very poor” assessments when the majority of a class deems my teaching “very good” or “good”) directly correlate to the forced enrollment of unknown students.  Our course caps are apparently spot-on.
• Courses in which I administer exams (and for which, I should note, I have corresponding review sessions and review sheets) score a full quarter-point better than classes driven primarily by essays.
• The same pattern holds true for lecture/discussion classes, in which I score a full quarter-point better than workshop classes with a high degree of discursive input by students.  I apparently talk real purdy.

At some point this summer, as I compile my tenure/promotion portfolio, I’m going to have to make a case for the ways in which my teaching (and service, and scholarship) exceeds departmental standards, which will involve some imaginative work with my own numbers and those included in the normative distribution reports provided by CMU’s Office of Institutional Research.

Let’s hope that I have the verse manuscript finished by then, lest I begin my fall reenactment of The Number 23 prematurely.

Right now, for reasons I do not care to question, it is 46 degrees in Central Michigan.  I have accordingly turned off my heat, thrown open my windows, and read “In Just-” to round out the trifecta.  That makes for a respectable Saturday morning.

The day looks fairly promising altogether, truth be told.  I’ve nearly finished grading my first batch of essays for the semester, and the writing is mighty fine so far.  I’ve also got an essay on tap that I’ve looked forward to reading, one on a topic near and dear to my heart.  I’m terribly curious to see how the subject was treated, and the same holds true for the student-led class discussions we’ll kick off in the coming week.  On Monday we’ll dip into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in my survey of British literature, and the week’s work in my Stephen King seminar involves both ethical questions (the breadbox in my wheelhouse) and a breather day as we slide from Night Shift into Different Seasons.  After that we’ve got Cycle of the Werewolf, and after that, spring break.  This semester is blazing by.

It might just be the springtime friskiness talking, but I’m also preparing for a major sea change in my writing life.  Although I’ll undoubtedly continue my obsessive habit of jotting down short story ideas on the 418 yellow pads that litter my office and my apartment, the coming year will properly be devoted to verse and scholarship.  I’ve got one long-gestating article (the inescapable Charlotte Smith piece) I’ll need to finish off, and I’ve also been encouraged to submit to a new collection–encouragement that happened to coincide with the rediscovery of some perfectly suitable notes on Defoe.  Those two pieces and some summer work with peeps in CMU’s Honors and McNair Scholars programs should fill up my daylight hours pretty well, daily trips to the gym notwithstanding. 

All carnival-quality antics aside, my nights will be devoted to finishing the manuscript of a full-blown poetry collection.  To turn the existential screws I plan to apply for a summer grant that will cover the costs of production and contest submission, and in a self-reflexive way my readiness to do so would seem to confirm my readiness to round out the collection itself.  I likes my reasoning like I likes my cookies:  soft and vaguely circular.

And with that, I’m off.  I have a longer post on the writing life a-brewing in my skull, but I’ll save it for a more wintry day.

I’ve generated about as much sunshine as I can, and I hope I’ve offered a little useful perspective to folks who are weathering a tough search season.  If, however, you watch Rainbow Brite just for cameo appearances by Murky Dismal, here’s an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education for you.  (Thanks to my Emory cohort Melissa M., who posted at Facebook earlier this morning the link I repost here.)

I don’t entirely agree with Benton (not by a longshot, really), particularly in his characterization of prospective graduate students.  The statistics he cites near the end of the piece, however, should be sufficiently sobering for most current job-seeking peeps.  For those folks who found my blog searching for keywords along the lines of “worst job search season for English ever,” a 21% decrease in MLA postings and a 40% decrease in overall hiring may confirm your suspicions.

Well, here I am on the day of my first final exam and I just caught up with my grading for the semester thus far about 45 minutes ago.  That either makes me a banana slug drunk on molasses or a ninja of the space-time continuum.  In any case, it’s certainly not the worst place to be–100 more exams and I can call it a year.  (I figure I’ll spend the last three weeks of December sleeping.)

The break looks pretty promising.  I’ve got a story to wrap up and a couple more shorties on deck, and then I think it will be poetry o’clock.   At some point I’ll need to touch base with established poets regarding the process of preparing and submitting a book-length manuscript, which strikes me as a pleasing prospect as well.  (And if established poets happen to be reading along, an intervention may be in order.)  I also have a computer upgrade on tap in the near future, one that should allow me to run some mighty fine recreational programs to help me while away my odd hours.  This, too, is a nifty thing, since the temptation to drive to New York and give dozens of cable programming directors fat lips is pretty strong.  Seriously, if the best way they can think to work through off-season hours is with marathons of Storm Chasers, MANswers, or video countdowns originally aired in 2002, they’ve got fat lips coming.

What preoccupies me today, however, is a loss:  my formal interaction with the folks in my Romantic Poetry and Prose seminar ends on the morrow.  I’m a wistful kid by nature, and my memory is populated with all sorts of recollections that those involved have long forgotten, but one doesn’t come across like classes like this one too often.  When I do, I hate to see them end.

I should say up front that mine is a fairly traditional student-centered pedagogy, but one that entails any number of contingent risks.  My job, as I understand it,  is to guide the ship out of the port and then let students take the wheel.  I might describe other ports of call, footnote various discoveries (“That is not a mermaid; that is a manatee wearing a feather boa”), and offer conventional assessments of the constellations that we spot along the way, but I try not to refer to my charts too often.  For students who like more directive, prescriptive classes, my approach to communal discourse can be maddening, and some literally freak out when afforded too much freedom.  It takes a certain combination of personalities to concede to the inevitable drifting of the ship and a measure of collective faith in an arrival that will justify the journey.  I teach, of course, the kinds of classes I thrived in when I was a whelp, but like any approach it’s not attuned to every learner.

This section of 439 fireflied.  It’s my homely version of lightning in a bottle, an understanding that describes causes and consequences a little more accurately.  Lightning in a bottle gives too much credit to the person holding the bottle, and most of the time it amounts to nothing more than dumb luck.  Fireflies in a mayonnaise jar, however, strikes me as somewhat more apt–especially since I’m the kind of prof who prefers to keep the lid off. 

I remember walking through the dark with a jar of fireflies when I was a kid.  I didn’t want them to suffocate, so I would just lay one hand over the top with my fingers spread.  It never seemed like they were generating enough light, but it was always just enough for me to see my way.  Some were brighter than others, some lit up more often, and some kept a kind of weak glow going.  I might have spent a few tense seconds in darkness now and again, but after awhile I developed the necessary faith.  I knew the light was coming back.

Since I’m feeling all metaphorical today, I should note that a jar full of fireflies is just enough to steer you through the woods.  Hold it up in front of your face and you won’t get lashed in the eye with pine branches; hold it down low and you won’t trip over protruding roots.  It takes a little practice to navigate with it, and if you let them drift in and out of the jar as they please, chances are good that you’ll be left in the dark before long.  This time around, however, they kept each other company, and while they probably weren’t entirely sure where the guy carrying the jar was going, they never let that jar go dark.

As a prof, I wonder how rare those experiences are from a student’s perspective.  Group dynamics and chemistry tend to carry the day, and off the top of my head I can’t recall a single comparable experience in my own undergraduate career.  Sure, I had plenty of classes with good friends, and from time to time we would shoulder loads for one another, but it’s not often that you come across a bona fide collective effort, even in graduate school. 

Now that I’m old and wizened, I get around in the dark by myself pretty well;  I quite like it, actually.  Even so, there’s nothing quite like having a jar full of fireflies, if only for a while.  I’m sorry to see them go, and I’m sentimental enough to hope they’ll remember the work of reliable light long after they’ve forgotten the jar was ever there.

Since I covered the requisite prefatory material last time around, let’s see if I can polish off my general remarks on the cover letter today.  If I finish up early, I might actually get some sleep.

1.  Gloss the oddities.  As most candidates figure out pretty quickly,  many job descriptions in the MLA Job Information List represent swings for the fences.  The make-believe ad I posted the other day (the search for “a specialist in prose fiction of the long eighteenth century, ideally one with secondary expertise in Romantic literature and the ability to teach composition and the first half of the British literature survey as part of a 3/3 teaching load”) is fairly typical:  most departments are hoping to fill not just one but several gaps with a single hire.  If you can trot out evidence of appropriate secondary expertise, fantastic–sell it like a five-dollar Yugo.  If you can’t, be sure to at least make mention of your willingness to take on those obligations any generalist would be expected to pick up.  Not all 18th-century specialists can cover the Romantic period, and I would certainly understand if an applicant elegantly sidestepped the prospect or touched on that limitation lightly.  An applicant that purposely avoided addressing the usual General Education courses that most profs routinely teach, however, would have a tough time gaining traction. 

2.  Speaking of teaching, qualify and specify.  One cheap trick that job applicants (myself included) like to play is language theft:  they’ll pay a visit to a department’s web page and see if they can’t cull language that corresponds to a program’s stated imperatives.  I recently spoke to a colleague at another skool who was involved in a rhet/comp search, and she complained that quite a few candidates peppered their apps with sexy keywords and phrases straight from the program’s mission statement without really demonstrating what they might mean to them in practice.  The teaching paragraph in my earliest application letters often dropped terms like “student-centered learning” and “discourse communities” fairly irresponsibly.  They were authentic aspects of my practice, but I failed to explain my usage–what my student-centered practices involve, what discourse communities look like to me.  In my second go-round on the job market I took the time to develop those themes, and said themes resurfaced in phone interviews and campus visits.

3.  While you’re at it, exemplify and illustrate.  Some pedagogical tactics don’t require much elaboration:  if daily reading quizzes or close reading essays are part and parcel of your classroom practice, you won’t need to burn much (if any) prose to explain yourself unless you know that some aspect of your approach to those assignments is innovative.  If you are using the kinds of terms described above, however–or more importantly, if you are a tech-savvy teacher who has bewikied, betwittered, and hypertextified your daily assignments–give the hiring committee a glimpse of what they look like in practice, a glimpse that dovetails with the professed premises behind your pedagogy.  Tell and show if you can.  In my revised letter, for example, I explained how I organized one class on Gothic literature around student-generated content:  rather than giving them a list of conventions, we spent an entire summer semester discovering, describing, and defining those characteristics from our reading as a group.  There’s nothing cutting-edge or sexy about the process, but with one short sentence I was able to juxtapose my ideas about student-centered learning and discourse communities in handy nutshell form.  When I’m reading through apps I sometimes jot down nifty teaching ideas, and I can actually tick off the names of the associated applicants from memory.  That’s a powerful way to make an impression.

4.  Speaking of power, present a unified front.  In my opinion, the applications that pack the biggest wallop are the ones in which the candidate explains the reciprocal relationship between her teaching and research (and sometimes even her service).  This is not quite of the same order as the globalizing periwig example I used last time around–that kind of relationship smacks of prioritization and subordination (as teaching just occurs as time burned between wig projects).  If, however, you can help the hiring committee understand how your research and teaching dovetail, how one informs the other, then your profile becomes much more vivid and cohesive.  While you might not want to be identified as such at Applebee’s, it’s not a bad thing for a committee sitting down to haggle over rankings to know you, to refer to you in unison as “the life writing guy,” “the ethical humanist,” or “the feminist aesthete.”  (Do hiring committees actually talk this way?  Oh yes, yes they do.)  An integrated identity will make you memorable, and your credentials will do the rest.

5.  Finally, if you want to get jazzy, take advantage of the Mystery Paragraph.  The job letter tends to be a formal, formulaic affair:  the candidate opens with a salutation/solicitation (“I want the job you’ve got”), proceeds with a discussion of her primary research project, outlines her research plans in brief, glosses her classroom practice, thanks the readers, and signs off.  The whole affair normally takes about two single-spaced pages (and readers will forgive you if you create space with slightly smaller margins or an 11-point font).  As I suggested before, the balance of content should be proportioned to the position you have in mind (a 3/3 load will probably involve an even research/teaching split, while you’d want to emphasize research for a 2/2 and teaching for a 4/4), but many writers fill space with materials that don’t really serve their cause.

If you find yourself with extra space–and if you have good, tight paragraphs describing your big project, plans, and teaching, you almost certainly will–be sure to use it for self-promotional purposes.  Advanced scholars will probably have room to discuss service or community outreach a bit, and that can be a valuable way of humanizing and rounding out the applicant.  Anything that makes it easy for the hiring committee to imagine you as a seasoned pro is beneficial.  Quite a few applicants, however, will simply sign off after a page and a half or else use those extra 10-12 lines to pluck highlights from the CV.  The CV and letter tend to work best as complementary, synergistic documents, and simply reprising your fellowships, foreign languages, or conference presentations in the letter strikes me as a squandered opportunity.  If you’re stymied by those extra lines, consider using them at least to particularize your teaching practice or flesh out your research agenda.  Better still, use them to touch on those aspects of your candidacy that the CV, transcripts, and letters of recommendation could never adequately address.  You probably don’t need (or want) to tell the hiring committee that you have six pet ferrets, rule at WoW, or give awesome hugs, but you might want to give them a snapshot of an influential prof, a formative experience, or a personal philosophy–anything that clarifies their understanding of what you bring to the table and/or what brings you the table.  Don’t get all Tuesdays with Morrie, but don’t be shy about giving your readers a (brief) glimpse of the human behind the professional.  After they’ve read 30, 50, or 70 applications, an intelligent variation on the established pattern can go a long way.

Whatever you do, use that space.  Give them a good, long look at the colleague you might become.

Last time around I glossed some general principles that I think might aid and abet the application process.  Today I’ll try to give you a glimpse into one bald man’s act of sifting and sorting.

I think folks on the academic job market, particularly those who have never before explored those  waters, should come armed with two bits of useful (and heartening or disheartening, depending on where you stand) information.  First, the water’s very deep.  For any given gig you’ll be competing with dozens of qualified (and overqualified) applicants, no matter if you’re applying to Punxsutawney State or Highfalutin’ U.  Some of those folks have been engaged in the profession for years as instructors, fellows, postdocs, or visiting professors, and they will inevitably have a nice pile of credentials to slide across the table.  When those credentials are position-appropriate–when the candidate has publications and teaching experience perfectly suited to the gig specified in the job ad–they almost always make it into my “deserves further consideration” pile.  It can be a little daunting to know that the competition is so stiff, but I think it also offers some solace.  I’ve come up short in a few job searches myself, and I found it fairly reassuring to know that I was contending with the big boys and girls.  It can be a painful exercise, but take a look at the faculty webpage of Turnedyoudown College the following fall:  you might just see that the person who beat you out for the job was toting around a record of performance more suited to an associate professor than someone just starting out.

That part you really can’t control; the second part you can.  In addition to the DFC heap, I also maintain what might best be called a “promise” pile.  The idea of “promise,” of course, is a little misleading–anyone who’s managed to earn the Ph.D. is a beamish boy in my book.  What I mean, then, is that these applications have qualities that stand out, features that create a bit of separation from the pack.  This gets a bit more subjective, but I think a glimpse into these biases might be useful.

Before I begin this segment, let me offer you a bit of reassuring truth:  I read every single page of every single application packet.  While I admittedly have to boil things down to a memorable impression in my notes (i.e. “great writing sample about 18th-century periwigs”), I’m determined to give every applicant a full hearing.  Truth be told, it’s quite a lot of fun; folks out there are doing some fascinating work.  There’s also a point, however, at which things start getting blurry.

To wit:  recommendation letters are valuable but somewhat problematic.  Mentors and advisors invariably sing the praises of their proteges to the heavens, and the paeans to each candidate’s awesome run together after awhile.  Sometimes it takes a lot of energy to cull for context beneath the compliments.  The same holds true for transcripts, which are fascinating mostly in terms of what they reveal about institutions.  Most folks coming from Ph.D. programs are toting around four-point-ohs, and there’s no useful way to differentiate among them except by course work that implies the kind of coverage a job description demands.  Writing samples, particularly if they’ve been published, offer a clearer snapshot of professional prospects, but folks in the promise pile usually have comparable qualifications, the hallmarks of early-career endeavor.  A publication from a prestigious refereed journal tells me that a candidate can bat for average, but when it comes time to differentiate among forthcoming book articles, I seldom enjoy the same clarity of context.  As such, most weight in my evaluative process falls on the CV and the job letter, which I think serve as critical acts of self-representation.

Accordingly, given the muchness of that ado, here are a few things I would recommend about the letter in question:

1.  Be sure to particularize your application, at least nominally.  I mentioned this last time around, but I think it’s crucial to demonstrate at least a passing familiarity with the institution and position.  Given the imaginary job ad I posted in the prior entry, I would expect to see a specific opening paragraph saying that the applicant is applying for the position in British literature with specialization in prose fiction of the long eighteenth century.  Most of the content of the letter can be generic, but I need to feel confident that the applicant knows exactly what she’s getting into.  The opening paragraph is a simple, declarative thing, but it can have some real muscle if you let the reader know you’re zeroed in on the proper job.

2.  At the same time, don’t oversell.  This is especially true if you’re not entirely certain about the university’s intellectual culture.  It’s perfectly reasonable to make certain assumptions about a department based on webpage data–one might look at CMU’s page, for example, and ruminate about how swell it would be to join such a robust TESOL program or active  children’s literature faculty.  Offering sweeping blandishments that could apply to any faculty or any student body at any university, however, doesn’t help the hiring committee to determine why you would be an especially good fit.

3.  Give the readers a plainspoken summary of your major project (the diss or the book in the works).  Because most hiring committees of necessity must draw on the expertise and assistance of folks outside your field (a Victorianist, for example, might have her application evaluated by a medievalist, or linguist, or rhet/comp specialist), emphasize readability rather than discipline-specific proofs of your project’s awesome.  When I was on the market I tried out three different versions of my diss paragraph, each expressed with a different degree of specificity and complexity.  The clearest, layman-flavored variation (which, in my opinion, also turned out to be the most sophisticated and nuanced) opened the most doors for me.

4.  Speaking of clarity, be sure to set out a clear research agenda.  A dissertation helps readers to map where you’ve been; readers will also want to know where you are going.  The research agenda is a good place to be modest and forthright, letting readers know where you stand in relation to the ongoing debates and conversations in your discipline.  It’s more or less a given that you are going to try to publish chapters of the diss, so offer insight into a few complementary areas (ideas, works, authors) where there are other doors that you alone might open.  Again, don’t oversell your awesome–just give the committee a sober sense of the work you’ve yet to do.

5.  Finally (for this installment anyway), show your range.  Most of us come out of Ph.D. programs with demonstrable mastery of a small, specialized set of concerns.  When I look at applications, however, I always hope to see that such command is only a portion of a scholar’s intellectual life, that she has other irons in the fire.  I think that speaks well of both scholars and teachers in general.  If I’m down to two last applications for my DFC pile, I tend to prefer those with broad, translatable skills, ones with obvious applied value.  In contrast, I tend to worry when a researcher’s dissertation looks to me like a conceptual inhibitor–when our periwig expert, for example, has organized his surveys and composition classes around 18th-century wig imagery.  A one-trick pony needs a pretty nifty trick to contend with the rest of the critters in the circus.

That’s all for now.  Feel welcome to offer any feedback or pose questions that you’d like to see answered.  I’ll manage what I can.

This is how I rope in the Suzanne Vega fans.  They are, as you know, a key demographic.

Many moons ago I went to a dentist to have a filling replaced.  She saw me on short notice, proved to be quite nice, and explained clearly her rationale for going with a simple fix that could always yield to the complex fix if needed.  Happy to have the matter handled, I debit carded my co-pay on the way out the door and added the dentist’s name to list of Mighty Fine Reasons to Be Happy with Mount Pleasant.  Two months later I received a Final Billing Notice, filthy with angry red ink.  According to said notice, I was days away from being referred to collections; I had received three prior notices, the form insisted, and if I was not going to fork over six dollars and change they would sic the dogs on me.  When I called to inquire about this imminent threat, the billing agent suggested that I wouldn’t be in this pickle had I not been so negligent.  I in turn suggested that I might have liked one of those first three notices.

I quite like that dentist, but I’ll never go back.

Back when I blogged anonymously I chipped away at a 114-part series entitled “Why I am still single.”  It was intended as a diversion for my friends, and it consisted of a cavalcade of my faults, foibles, and idiosyncrasies.  (In retrospect, 114 strikes me as a laughably low estimate.)  It was modeled loosely after Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, because I figure that whimsy ought to be celebrated as a form of self-expression.  At bottom, I don’t think I’m much more unreasonable than anyone else.  When it comes to the vagaries of dating and relationships, however, I observe a few peculiar policies that contribute to my standing solitude.  Some folks might think them unreasonable.

As the example of my former dentist suggests, I don’t believe in second chances. 

When it comes to relationships, I have never been one to deserve or receive second chances.  This has been something of a double-edged sword, and part of this phenomenon is clearly of my own making.  On the one hand, the most perverse dogmatism I might muster in my dealings with the cosmos runs just about parallel to the perverse dogmatism my dating career has met with.  One girlfriend broke up with me for cheating on her, for example, and she persisted in her resolution even though about thirty disinterested parties could attest to my very public whereabouts on the night said cheating allegedly occurred.  Another kicked me to the curb for failing to earn my third-date merit badge, an implicit set of proofs that I, insensitive boor that I am, was far too dense to realize were in effect.  As it turns out, I don’t generally engage in those behaviors that normally warrant the second-chance relational mulligan:  I never cheat, I keep my word, I remember toes I ought not step on.  The dearth of second chances in my dating career, then, either points toward arbitrariness equal to my own on the part of my square dance partners or else masks underlying causes of which I could not be aware (i.e., they needed to let me go for other reasons and used matters of personal policy as an excuse). 

On the other hand, alas, I lack the semiotic sophistication to recognize when these rejections are not matters of personal policy but instead ploys or performances.  From time to time I’ll be involved in relational flare-ups, ones that, poor benighted chump that I am, I will try to manage on the spot.  A woman might tell me I have not been sensitive enough to her needs, or attentive enough, or liberal enough with my time, and I offer all the assurances I can conceive of with a sincere heart.  I am nothing if not an earnest beau.  Nevertheless, the dreaded break-up comes…and then, weeks if not years later, when I’ve settled into a steady friendship with the woman in question, I learn that the episode was something of a test.  I should have chased after her; I should have fought to win her back.  I should have stalked her, picked fights with her new boyfriend, and gotten all Cusack on her ass.  Ergo, I must be both a reject and a failure, since I did not realize that these elaborate kiss-offs should really be considered opportunities for me to prove the depth of my passion.  Frankly, I blame Catholic school.

All in all, I reckon those two variations on a theme account for about 80% of my relational failures.  The former I can live with:  we are all entitled to our deal-breakers, and if I happen to give massages in a way that reminds her of an old boyfriend or if I happen to have an IQ that suggests to her dubious prospects for socialization or if I happen to fail to “give her the wall,” showing a reckless disregard for her personal safety, then so be it.  (And lest you think me nuttier than usual, those are all actual examples of snafus that have undone relationships in my sordid past.)  Some deals were meant to be broken.  The latter makes me feel as though I should watch more episodes of Gossip Girl and perhaps invest in a good boom-box.  Alternately, I could gnaw off my own head.

In much the same spirit, I believe I’m entitled to my own standards.  If a woman dates me, dumps me, dates some other feller, and returns a penitent (her comparison shopping having taught her that I am the bee’s knees and he is the bee’s cankles), a decent man might choose to renew the acquaintance.  I am not a decent man; I stitch up my scars and move on.  Likewise, on those occasions when a galpal opts out of an engagement with me, citing gangrene or stab wounds, rejects my offers of attendance, and then appears out on the town with her peeps, I assume the magic is gone, notes from Asclepius notwithstanding.  Solitude is difficult, but weathering the affections of a woman who holds me in such low esteem erodes the soul.  And let’s face it, I don’t have much soul to work with.

Lest you think me some kind of doctrinaire monster, it’s worth knowing that those who earn places in my affections technically cannot “wrong” me:  they are never subject to my rigorous second chance policy because they cannot exhaust their first chance.  Fun fact:  when folks who are close to me apologize, I often need them to explain how they thought they’d offended me.  Part of the reason my best relationships never escalate into second-chance territory is because all the petty transgressions that might sever a lesser connection can never accumulate sufficient force when forgiveness is a given.

Solitude is where I live, which is not to say I don’t let people in.  Like most folks, however, I’m disinclined to invite bad guests back, and when it comes to relationships I think all I can do is leave the door open and hope that the best guests will stay.

Let it be known that I am not especially British, so today’s title is really quite clean.  No bobbies were harmed in the composition of this post.  The cindies, however, did not fare so well.

We’ve just about wrapped the second week of classes here, and all seems to be going well.  My students are terribly sharp and, better still, they consistently question and challenge me in order to make better sense of the texts we’re working with.  They keep me on my toes, and in this, a short week that found me pretty tuckered out from submission overload, I think I needed that extra electroencephalic boost.  (Fun fact:  that’s a real word, though I thought I might be making it up.  Three cheers for Greek etymologies!)  We’re in the thick of Beowulf in one class, and today, assuming we can make sense of Burke, Barbauld, and Cowper, we’ll be off and running into Big Six territory in my Romanticism class.  A jaunty time will be had by all!  Periwigs all around!

As you can probably tell, I’m in the process of exhausting my supply of enthusiasm (read:  caffeine) so I can enjoy a sedate weekend.  We had a full Faculty Association meeting last night, one that centered on the ongoing negotiations for our new contract.  It was a surprising turnout (at least to me, who attends to such matters virtually more often than bodily), with approximately half of all our tenure-trackers accounted for, a number even more surprising when one accounts for the additional 10-20% that were teaching at the time.  The meeting left my mind humming and set me to tossing and turning at bedtime, but it looks like most of the faculty is on the same page and supports the position of the bargaining team.  I’m hoping for a speedy resolution, or at least one that doesn’t meaningfully impact my teaching time this semester, but this will be my first go-round in the negotiation process so I have no idea what might happen.  So long as we stand firm on our demand for marble busts of Pallas in every office, I’ll be happy.

Today I received a contributor’s copy of The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, which is chock full o’ interesting material worth a look-see.  My contribution, “Polyphemus,” appears in a version I worked out in conjunction with the editor, Kristin Zimet, and the negotiated form does some fascinating work.  I’ll have to sit down with the original later this evening for the sake of comparison; I so seldom have the chance to look at my verse with borrowed eyes.

I did a little work on revisions this morning, though I know I’m in for a struggle.  The poems in this particular batch will prove slippery for both logistical and technical reasons.  One selection I would certainly include in the batch is under consideration; it has made it through an initial editorial trim-down and may make the final cut.  The other selections, however, including my first alternate, will probably require fairly extensive reimaginings.  I’m certainly up to it–in the set I just mailed out, I successfully tangled with perhaps my most problematic poem–but my viewpoint now is quite a bit different than it was way back when.  I’m both daunted and excited to see what insights a fresh look might produce.  This is how you might learn I’m something of a nerd.

That should just about do it for the time being.   Once the semester gets underway my mind tends to gravitate toward business, but you can be sure the usual miscellaneous metaphysics will crop up whenever I get the chance to catch my breath.

First, a disclaimer:  there will be no sex in this post.  I will never let truth in disclosure stand in the way of a zazzy title.

Today’s post also requires more contextualization than usual, as it was prompted by readings of a recent post at The Salt-Box and an older post from The Chronicle of Higher Education  that I dredged up to refresh my memory.  For folks unduly fascinated by hypertext and rabbit holes, The Salt-Box also links to a recent study conducted by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, which will be germane to my morning meanderings.  Point and click to your heart’s content.

In the spirit of something like truth, I’ll open by admitting that I’m single and (so long as women insist on adhering to “standards” or exercising “good judgment”) likely to remain that way, my Cusackian skills notwithstanding.  That foundational element of my subject position will inform my none-too-surprising opinion, which is this:  I have serious reservations about couple hiring. 

I think the Clayman Institute takes a reasonable, measured approach to the issue, and its policy recommendations—that universities should consider developing dual-career academic hiring protocols, moving the discussion of partner issues to the fore of the job search process, and collaborating with neighboring institutions to facilitate tandem hires, among other things—strike me as sober and sensible.  It’s a matter that deserves to be addressed, but even the most level-headed resolutions raise thorny questions of practice and pragmatics.  I appreciate the attitudes about partner hires expressed by Dr. Jones (a theme I’ll expand on momentarily, at which time I’ll also start referring to “Dr. Jones” as “Jason”), I sympathize with the struggles of academic couples, and I think the importance of employment status (and satisfaction therewith) for such couples goes without saying (even if it sometimes goes unsaid).  Nevertheless, I resist.  I’ll attempt to elaborate until the coffee runs dry.

Let me begin with the quasi-obvious:  it’s hard out there for a prof, especially if he has a partner.  As I plodded through my morning routine after reading Jason’s post, I reflected on the situations of my many friends in academia.  Jason’s circumstances (both he and his lovely wife profess at Central Connecticut State University, which is lucky to have them) are the happy exception to a generally unhappy rule:  most couples have to swallow bitter pills in one form or another.  Some of my friends and colleagues are locked into anxious holding patterns, praying for regional openings in the vicinities of their breadwinning wives and husbands.  Others have accepted relatively unfulfilling positions of necessity, given the shaky nature of the academic job market:  I know several folks who teach as adjuncts or instructors or postdoctoral fellows that they might remain close to a spouse on the tenure-track, and the recent departures of several of my CMU colleagues were apparently spurred by the difficulty of maintaining long-distance relationships with academic spouses.  For many couples with professorial aspirations, job satisfaction is an ongoing negotiation.  Academic employers routinely ask young members of the professoriate to make personal sacrifices for career prospects, and the rise in dual hires over the past thirty years deserves that kind of context.

Of course, negotiating the academic job market is no picnic for single folks, either.  The few single academics I know have experienced search patterns like mine, fraught with false starts on the tenure track, anxious resort to visiting and part-time positions, and a perilous, uneven climb toward some measure of lasting satisfaction.  If we enjoy greater liberty and mobility in our choices, single folks also generally face these choices alone, without the support of a spouse or the fiscal fallback position one might sometimes provide.  I am, as you know, terribly romantic when it comes to such things.

Moreover, I think it’s safe to say that academia is a couples culture.  “Singular Mistreatment” (the Chronicle piece, if you haven’t read it) notes that about 76% of academics are married, as compared to 57% of the American public.  (As a single guy, I’m something of a novelty act:  86% of all male faculty members are married or partnered.)  According to the more limited scope of the Clayman Institute study (which focuses on faculty at thirteen research universities), the overall figure stands at about 86%.  At CMU, at least within my limited sphere of knowledge, the percentage may be a bit higher:  I would guess that roughly 90% of the faculty members in the English Department are married.  We had our annual kickoff picnic this past Wednesday, and the festivities were chock-a-block with husbands, wives, and woobies.  The faculty here has been incredibly welcoming (and given how retiring I am, that’s no mean feat), but I think it’s fair to say that some of our local norms and cultural assumptions take family standing as a starting point.  I would guess that’s true more generally as well, and much of my institutional experience bears that assumption out.

Unlike some of the folks in “Singular Mistreatment,” I have not suffered at the hands of a cruel couples culture determined to oppress me and my bitchin’ singleness—to be more exact, I have not experienced different treatment as oppression.  There have, of course, been moments when my status has prompted concern.  One university, for example, predicated its benefits on marriage:  couples, for reasons never fully or satisfactorily explained to me, enjoyed better health coverage at a lower cost than single faculty members.  (As “Singular Mistreatment” notes, single folks also miss out on tuition remission programs, subsidized day care, and the like—over the course of a career, a married professor might enjoy literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in benefits that her single peer will never get.)   During my most recent job search I also endured quite a bit of awkwardness negotiating talk of local school districts and the like; though interviewers are typically forbidden to ask sensitive questions about marital status, I think most job candidates would be hard pressed to dodge the usual presumptive topics over the course of a day-long campus interview.  The search committee at one remote Midwestern university also set aside time for an hour-long meeting with their job placement specialist, a woman who would help my wife find local work.  That didn’t go so well.  Quite frankly, however, I am thankful for such questions and meetings—clearly these universities were doing their best to learn more about me, to accommodate me, and I think that speaks well of their approaches to faculty welfare.  Even so, I would be fibbing if I suggested that couples culture did not sometimes assume a more sinister aspect.

I would venture to guess that my gender and marital status had a strong bearing on one job search:  a women’s college opted not to hire me, and the woman they did hire had not yet completed her dissertation, had one year of teaching experience, and had no publication credits.  There are a handful of men in that English department, but all are married, so I suspect my marital status carried slightly greater weight than my gender.  I have a fairly Nietzschean attitude when it comes to such things, and their decision contributed to my eventual happy landing here at CMU.  It stuck in my craw at the time, of course, which is why I know far too much about the woman chosen for the job.  Even without the sinister implications of some kind of predatory sensibility on the part of single men, I am under the impression that single folks more generally are viewed with some suspicion because we lack the conventional tether:  when we make vocational decisions, we need consult no feelings but our own.  A new faculty member who carves out a comfortable situation with a spouse and children has a much more involved decision-making process, bringing the usual occupational inertia into play.  The flip side of stress is stagnation, and while many couples struggle to find some viable initial accommodation, I would guess that even more find themselves stuck at the proverbial dead-end job because many stars would have to align for them to find better situations for all parties concerned.  This brings me back to the subject of dual hires, which spares institutions some of the risks of hiring singles and halves of couples by transplanting families in a way that makes them decidedly more difficult to uproot.  Double-edged swordplay is involved, however, so perhaps I’ll get around to offering some of the promised perspective.

That situational difficulty is, as you might expect, an issue in its own right.  However unsatisfied an academic couple might be, the relative rarity of dual hires presumably makes better situations hard to come by.  One or both new members of the faculty might find themselves miserable, though dual incomes and professional fulfillment could conceivably ease the pain.  As Jason notes, divorce is something of a wild variable, and I would add disparities in individual institutional satisfaction to the equation as well.  Such are the thousand natural shocks that couples are heir to, and I think they hold true in most occupational cases.

From an institutional standpoint, those same forces strike me as more problematic.  A divorce could be quite damaging, especially in a smaller department, and the travails associated with tenure could easily leave one half of a couple on the outside looking in—a fairly ugly scenario for both the couple and the university.  The Clayman Institute takes an optimistic approach, noting that institutions with proactive approaches to hiring couples are likely to attract and retain strong candidates and promote diversity, although it too notes that “couple hiring is fraught with complexities and pitfalls.”  I’ve twice been witness to the dynamics that arise as a consequence of intradepartmental divorce, and they ain’t pretty.  In both cases one half of the couple was flagrantly marginalized, and internecine turmoil would periodically bubble up.

In analogous fashion, I think public perception of dual hires tends to be divided.  I’ve rooted around my memory for a few minutes, trying to think of a perfectly egalitarian situation, and I can’t come up with one—even when searches are conducted independently, one of the two hires is likely to be perceived as a coattail rider (quite possibly both, given beauties in the eyes of multiple beholders).  The Clayman Institute speaks often of the great benefit of securing and retaining prized candidates, of competing for “the best and brightest,” yet I think instances in which both candidates are perceived as blue-ribbon winners must be quite rare in actuality.  Students in particular can be quite merciless when they imagine themselves the victims of the hack who was only hired to secure the services of Dr. Awesome.  Such perspectives can be poisonous, no matter how slender their basis in reality.

Dual hires must also complicate the search process in ways I cannot fully fathom, having never sat on a personnel committee in all of my travels.  Does one hire the well-qualified man who will require some professional accommodation for his wife, the well-qualified single woman, or the well-qualified woman coming to town with a feller ready to make shift by hook or by crook?  Those are tough hairs to split, all other things being equal.  I can also vouch for secondhand knowledge of a junior faculty member who chose to vacate his post rather than accept the results of a search process he felt was brutally compromised.  After months of work on a hiring committee, sifting through close to a hundred candidates, he and his peers found their recommendations rejected in the interest of diversity, albeit diversity that occurred in the form of a spousal hire, a man who was only granted a campus visit as a courtesy to the standing faculty member.  The kicker is that he quite liked the candidate in question and thought he would make an excellent colleague—he just resented what he felt was the sham of the search.  Dual hires involves a necessary measure of compromise, however protocols and policies are negotiated.

To tie my two threads together, I would also appeal to my single status to establish a bottom line:  no matter how advantageous or expedient it might be to hire both halves of a couple, I am of the opinion that the best candidates, regardless of all other considerations, should earn the right of first refusal when it comes to job opportunities.  I know full well that “best” is a subjective term, one that hinges not only on credentials and experience but more slippery matters of “fit,” and I would have no compunction about choosing the spouse of an excellent candidate for another position if he or she rose to the top of that talent pool and all else were equal.  When that’s not the case, however—when a department has solicited applications from candidates all over the country and connection to another desirable addition is the sole motive for preferring one over a more qualified other—I just can’t see my way clear.

I’ll probably be serving on a hiring committee or two this year, so we’ll see if I feel differently by the spring.  At present, however, while I recognize the realities of hiring and retention, the problems facing dual-career academic couples, and the need for universities to put policies in place to clarify practice, the increasing rate of dual hires concerns me.  I can think of nothing worse than being employed by a university that thought little of my qualifications but figured it could make do with me in the absence of better alternatives; being passed over for a less qualified candidate signed on to secure the services of another job seeker, however, would rate a very close second.