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.

I think we’ve made it to the end of the job market posts.  I planned on typing this one up a little bit later in February, but from the looks of it most of the folks I keep tabs on have packed it in for the year.  Kroger also informed me that last week I purchased some item implicated in the peanut product recall, so I’ll probably be dead by dinnertime.  Better put down pixels whilst I still have my wits about me. 

Accordingly, some advice for those who came up empty-handed on this year’s English job market.

1.  Don’t give up the ghost too soon.  As I’ve mentioned before, the spring market is filthy with opportunity.  I certainly understand the exhaustion and existential agony that can attend a fallow fall, but I’d keep the job letter file on my desktop.  You won’t find quite as many job listings in the spring, and most of the fanciest schools have already worked their searches.  Those that post in February and March, however, generally have guaranteed funding on tap (so there’s less need to worry about those annoying canceled searches), tend to expedite their searches, and draw a much smaller pool of qualified applicants.  I wouldn’t go hog-wild, but I think it’s kinda nutty to pack up the application materials when a few fresh printouts might be all that stands between you and the magic of the tenure track.

2.  Revamp your plans.    If this is your first, second, or seventh go-round, you probably have the routine down by now.  It doesn’t take much more than a dozen applications to find the groove you need to turn and churn.  After a rocky autumn, however, I think it’s a good time to take stock of your own ambitions and expectations.  Under no circumstances should you take that statement as advice to settle.  I do think, however, that some applicants slip on the mind-forg’d manacles before making a grab at that brass ring.  Are you searching within narrow geographic limits?  Take a long look at your search radius and see if any prospects for extension present themselves.  Are you angling for the Ivy Leagues?  Be aware that you’ll probably have to log some time in the trenches before those doors will open.  Job seekers are a motley lot, and I’ve talked with folks hither and thither who conceive of themselves in peculiar ways, from the lass with three refereed articles and a book deal who has set her sights on community college to the lad with a shiny new degree and a winning smile who will accept nothing less than a 2/2 teaching load.   Honest self-assessment is hard to come by, and you may need a little help in the process of taking stock.  I spent much of the summer prior to joining the part-time faculty at Auburn in determining what I would need to do to open up a better class of doors, and having a concrete sense of my professional credentials helped me to set my sights the following fall.  The job market is often unkind, but it can be even unkinder if your reach exceeds or underestimates your grasp.  Take a look at recent hires who got the jobs you wanted and figure out what you need to do to get where you are going.

3.  Diversify your portfolio.  I’m expanding on a theme I’ve glossed before, but it’s worth repeating:  ocular proof is better than obvious promise.  The job search from the viewpoint of the hiring committee is a speculative endeavor.  They’ve got to find candidates who can not only handle the obligations of an entry-level position but also have the bona fides to hold it down for three decades or so.  Plenty of job seekers enter the market with modest teaching credentials and promise, the most elusive of commodities.  Those who can furnish the searchers with even a modicum of actual proof will stand head and shoulders above the rest.  If you’re like most Ph.D. folk, you probably had to do a lot of speculative selling at your MLA interviews.  You might complete a doctoral program with several seasons as a teaching assistant (rather than an instructor of record), a dozen sections of freshman comp, or no hands-on classroom experience whatsoever.  When that’s the case, you must sell the search committee on your ability to manage other kinds of courses.  You can spin those situations to your advantage, of course, but your candidacy becomes something like an educated guess on the part of the search committee.  Can you cover World Lit in a pinch?  Can you handle a survey with 50 students?  75?  100?  Can you cover courses X, Y, and Z when your colleagues are out on sabbatical?  Rather than asking the committee to view your candidacy as a flight of fancy, I would urge you to take a look at the regional teaching you might do to take the guesswork out of their hands.  You might have connections at your alma mater that will allow you to pick up a few sections of comp as an adjunct, but if you live an area that supports several colleges, check and see what else is out there.  Course releases, departures, and retirements often leave surveys and specialty seminars unmanned, and snagging one of those offerings performs a double duty–it proves you can handle different materials and different curricula as well.  If you live in a spot where options are scant, see if you can’t tweak your approach to the classes you already teach.  I know many job seekers prefer to teach canned versions of established classes so they can concentrate on the job market, but any new dimension you add to your classroom practice will become a new topic at your next job talk.   Being able to throw out examples and anecdotes rather than plans and projections will make your salesmanship a helluva lot easier.

4.  Think in terms of potent portables.  Allow me to be brutal for a moment (I’m not nearly as cuddlesome as I might seem):  in the eyes of anonymous evaluators, you kinda suck.  Oh, you know me and my shenanigans–I’m already on record with my endorsement of your awesome, and I stand by it.  However, if you gave that allegation even a flicker of serious thought, you probably turned promptly to those areas where you imagine you are lacking when compared to other candidates–not quite enough X, not enough Y, not nearly enough Z.  Take that self-assessment of credentials as a starting point for your professional plans for the coming year.  In truly brutal fashion, however, allow me to undercut your thinking a bit.  When it comes time to sift and sort through applications, search committees tend to make initial cuts based on quantity and quality in your scholarship and your teaching.  It’s probably the only part of the evaluation process that’s reasonably straightforward.  Accordingly, the gal with one article in a refereed journal gets ranked above the guy with one essay in a book collection; that guy gets ranked above the gal with three international conferences, who in turn gets ranked above the guy with five graduate conferences.  Fit is paramount, of course, but when search committee members meet to discuss their rankings they want to feel like they’re on solid footing.  Articles published and classes taught are durable intellectual goods–they are concrete realizations of your professional abilities in the public domain, and the search committee doesn’t have to struggle all that much to assign them value.  Accordingly, as you script your spring and summer plans I would urge you to angle toward work that will bear useful fruit.  You might put in weeks of work to organize a local conference, for example, or you might log a hundred hours in a writing center, but those efforts will be trumped in the assessment of credentials by a single twenty-page book article (which will double as a writing sample).  I’m not telling you to ditch projects you’re passionate about, just urging you to imagine how your credentials will look when they’re weighed against other applicants in similar shoes.

5.  Embrace your inner materialist.  Though Marxists may cringe, I would urge you to go into the summer thinking in fairly crass terms.  Since you’ve been through the process already, you know how much weight your words will have to carry.  Pack and polish those documents as much as possible.  Get your CV critiqued (again, and again) and tinker with layouts; spend more than a little time buffing and beefing up writing samples; get someone to sit in on your spring and summer classes so you can add a teaching letter to your dossier; pile up proofs of pedagogical innovation and success in the classroom.  While the first search season comes complete with a battery of mishaps and pratfalls, there’s no excuse for getting caught flat-footed the second time around. 

*****

I won’t offer much in the way of consolation; I’ve been in those shoes before, and condolences bounce off the jobless like ping pong balls.  Sunny fellow that I am, however, I will maintain that seasons of suffering are necessary, if only for the sake of contrast.  When you do land a gig a year from now, this season will figure prominently in your stock of colorful anecdotes…and you’ll find that your own ordeal was not a cosmic slap in the face but merely the way of the workaday world.

Yes, I’m a filthy liar.  Don’t act so surprised.  Since the topics have occurred three times in various venues, however, I decided I’d continue my series on the joys of the job market jaunt with two more posts–one on the negotiation process and one on the aftermath.  So here we go.

Let me begin by noting that I am the worst negotiator in North America.  On most issues I am a marshmallow, yet on a few matters of principle I get all Andre Linoge.  Because I am happy to be employed and happier still to be at CMU, my faculty contract negotiation here fell pretty cleanly in the former category.  Nevertheless, I’ll try to offer a little perspective on the process.

1.  Sensibly set the bar.  You probably already know about The Chronicle of Higher Education’s online digest of the AAUP faculty salary survey.  It’s a dandy place to get a ballpark sense of your earning potential, but academics (particularly those in the Humanities), be forewarned:  the numbers you see are culled from all full-time members of the faculty in question.  Were I to assume that I would start at Abilene Christian University (which I’ll single out because it’s the first on the list) at a salary of around $56,300, I would be sorely disappointed–the Humanities are a buyer’s market, and it’s typical for the scale for a new assistant professor in English to start at 15%-20% less than the listed figure.  You may feel I’m just belaboring the obvious, but I’m aware of at least a couple of folks who went in to their contract talks with the AAUP average in hand.  Because universities have to lay out more money to land folks in disciplines where the candidates could reasonably expect to make gobs of cash in the private sector (business, the sciences, etc.), those survey figures trend upward.  I think it’s generally wiser to focus on your own financial situation than to fiddle with imaginary numbers, but a little active searching will almost always turn up more indicative figures for your prospective destinations.

2.  Set the scales.  One of the reasons I’m such a poor negotiator is that my needs are exceedingly modest; I was raised in a home by a single mother who never crested $20,000 but still managed to support two beamish boys, and my idea of what a dollar can do was formed accordingly.  You will come to the bargaining table with all sorts of variables specific to you (upbringing, hubbies, wives, dependents, student loans), but the generic stuff tends to be fairly static:  schools in urban areas have to pay more to attract faculty than schools in college towns; schools in the Northeast tend to pay more than schools in the South.  It’s often helpful to weigh your variables (will my spouse be able to find work?  will I be able to afford a home?  will I be able to eat sushi three times a week?) against such constants.  Prioritize and itemize what’s material to you, as practical leverage tends to be much more effective than the abstract varieties.  When administrators set your initial salary, they have higher-order calculations in mind–future percentile raises will be based on that sum, and a shift of $500 can save the university thousands over the course of your career.  Some kind of tangible, realistic motive might prompt them to float you a higher initial figure, and if you’ve done your homework, you can tell them why that cash is needed to secure your services.

3.  Consider the whole package.   Salary is paramount for most folks during negotiations, but I’d encourage you to take a look at the whole package of perquisites that come with a given gig.  Some schools will offer scalable insurance plans,  some will offer easy-to-achieve merit raises,  some will periodically tweak numbers to correct for salary compression, and some will mix in benefits that a parent, frequent traveler, or archival researcher might find hard to resist.  By the same token, some schools engage in squirrelly accounting, hold merit benefits just out of reach, or have their fates hinge annually on the state budget.  (Check the Chronicle now and again; horror stories abound.)  All those matters might weigh on your decision to head to the U in the first place, much less set the bar for your initial expectations.  Given the state of the economy right now, it would be tough for most academics to turn down any job; if you’re fortunate enough to have multiple options on the table, however, try to take into account the big picture–one that will evolve over 30 years–not just the placement of the dollar sign, comma, and decimal point.

4.  Bide your time.  While I think it’s perfectly fair game for a school to make candidates an offer before they’ve had the chance to interview with other colleges, the question of timing becomes a bit more chippy in the thick of the hiring season.  Do not be surprised if administrators try to rush you into making an early commitment; that’s their job, after all.  When pressed, however, most will cop to  guidelines already in place that dictate how much time a candidate has to decide, one or two weeks in most cases.  Use that time–not to make the university sweat it out in the hopes that they’ll beef up their offer as the clock winds down, but to flesh out your sense of the pros and cons of making the commitment and the nature of your bargaining position.  I’m hoping other readers will weigh in with their sense of how the process plays out, but my none-too-surprising advice is to think the whole thing through, to envision a full-length career at the institution in question, and to use every second on the clock before you take your shot.

5.  Sift your chips.  Perhaps the only really practical bargaining advice I can offer pertains to the variety of items you can fiddle with.  Some schools will set hard limits from the get-go, and more than a few (for reasons of policy or practice) will make you a one-time, take-it-or-leave-it offer.  The rest, however, are willing to get creative if it will help them land the candidates they want.  The same dean that fights you tooth and nail over your initial salary might be more accommodating with one-time expenditures for concrete hiring incentives:  she might have discretionary funds at hand for moving or for travel, she might be able to open professional development coffers for library acquisitions or a new computer, or she might be able to slide you a graduate assistant or reassigned time to help you get a running start on earning tenure and promotion.  As I suggest above, the strongest cases proceed from concrete need, so if you can convince the dean that a course reduction will help you get that book finished, you have a decent chance of finding a little fiscal wiggle room.

***

Though I know full well that there are dozens of tricksier pickles–having the leverage of two job offers, for example, or having one so-so job offer on the table while wishing and waiting on news from a top choice–those scenarios would draw me well beyond the limits of my experience.  I’m happy to field questions if I can, however, and hopefully there are readers out there who can fill in the blanks or otherwise increase the supply of brass tacks.

I’ve got a few minutes today, so I thought I’d jot down a few thoughts and responses to the concerns that seem to bring readers to my posts on the academic job search in English.  My keyword bin overfloweth.

1.  Tattoos? Truth be told, there’s no telling how interviewers might respond to them.  I’ve seen quite a few folks with prominent tattoos at MLAs past, and with few exceptions (one fellow had a spiderweb on his bald pate, and another had the kind of teardrop tattoo indicative of a prison stay) I don’t think they attracted undue attention.  The folks with input into the hiring process, of course, may differ–some will be indifferent to your body art, while others may take it as evidence of all sorts of underlying qualities of character.  I don’t have an especially strong opinion myself, but I’d advise a pragmatic approach:  if concealment of your tattoos requires a  conspicuous effort–not everyone can rock the ascot–I wouldn’t bother.   If a search committee does not hire you, it will probably have very little to do with your skin and much to do with the scarcity of jobs and the depth of the applicant pool.

2.  Worst job market in recorded history?  I dunno, because I haven’t been keeping track for all of recorded history.  I’ve seen lots of phrasings of this question, however, which tells me that there’s an understandable current of despair a-flowing.  The scratchpad wiki suggests that about sixty searches have been canceled outright, and I know that a number of schools have instituted hiring freezes.  It’s reasonable to assume that a small percentage of searches will fail as well (which happens when a school identifies the candidates it wants, they all go elsewhere, and their alternate pool dries up), which means that more than a few candidates will go wanting.  It’s a tough time, no question, but the double-edged sword of the economy means that the schools that can’t fund tenure-track hires will still need to hire temps in order to satisfy demand.  When folks fall on hard times they often attempt to rejigger their resumes, so education tends to stay afloat when other sectors of the economy capsize.  That’s something like a pewter lining, but a lining natheless.

3.  Middle of nowhere?  You betcha.  Academics tend to congregate on the coasts–that’s not much of a secret.  It is therefore not surprising that quite a few job seekers voice an unwillingness to teach in the Midwest unless the gig in question is near an urban center of some kind.  If a candidate can sell a search committee on her desire to relocate to the heartland, that strategy may well work to her advantage.  Of course, job seekers should keep in mind the possibility that they’ll actually have to live with the decision.  The job market may not perk up for a few years, and in some areas of specialization the pickings are typically slim.  Prudence may dictate taking on a job for a steady paycheck, but it’s a decision you should make with open eyes.  I’ve agonized over such a call twice or thrice myself, even though my needs are modest.  Consult your circumstances and loved ones and trust your gizzard.

4.  Should I let the search committee know I’ve got another campus visit?  That, I think, depends largely on your motives for doing so.  Multiple visits may afford you a certain measure of leverage, but of a kind you may find difficult to exploit.  A simply informative message never hurts:  if you just had a campus visit and now have two more back to back, it would be wise to tell the early birds that you may be out of touch for a few days (don’t worry–they’ll figure out the subtext).  If you hope to use awareness of an imminent visit to coax an offer out of the early bird, I would recommend silence if not circumspection:  the promise of a visit itself is not an especially strong bargaining tool, and committees (especially ones bound by institutional protocols) may not be able to make a hiring decision any earlier even if they would like to.  If a campus visit is drawing nigh and the early bird actually makes an offer, then I’d keep mum on the subject (unless of course you want that job above all others).  Telling the folks offering the job to hold on while you check out another option strikes me as more than a little awkward; you may find yourself in a temporal pickle if the decision clock on the first job is ticking while you wait for a call from the second, but the fallback prospect remains a paying gig of some kind.  Like any job seeker, you have the right to observe a policy of Advantageous Honesty:  refer to your own interests and spill as many beans as you see fit, but exercise due caution when it comes to pitting prospective employers against one another.  I’ll probably post a bit on negotiation in the coming weeks after all, but I can attest to knowledge of at least one occasion when a job seeker’s miscalculation resulted in a double default.  The worst case scenario is uncommon, but it occurs from time to time.

5.  Sham hiring/inside hires?  These are by far the most common keyword combinations that brings folks to my job search posts, and judging from the wiki there is a great deal of concern about the subjects.  I will offer what insight I can, and mayhap veterans of the search process will respond or expand in the comments.

First, I would contend that sham searches are unbelievably rare if they happen at all.  While some schools actually have the kind of throwaway money it takes to perform an elaborate pantomime of an open search, we should all keep in mind that we’re dealing with academics.  Imagine first that the college is willing to sponsor trips to MLA for 2-4 faculty members and also willing to foot the bill for 2-4 campus visits (airfare, accommodations, and meals included).  I don’t think that happens all that often.  Even if it did, a full search puts the department through the wringer:  administrative assistants have to collect and collate materials for 25, 50, or 100 qualified applicants; a search committee has to consider those applications in full (all shammery aside) because they’ll have to pile up the paperwork to justify their preference and satisfy administrators; faculty will have to pick up candidates from the airport, take them to dinner, come to their talks.  What kills the idea for me is the belief that either everyone or no one would have to be in on the joke:  either every single person in the department would have to know it was just a search for show (in which case they would have a helluva time staging the visit), or else the decision-makers would have to sucker the majority of the faculty into buying the sincerity of the premise (and hope like hell that it reached the ”right” decision of its own accord).  I know of a couple of hiring decisions in which a vocal, powerful minority was able to overrule the majority, but I’ve never seen a faculty bother with a full-blown search when they knew who they wanted already.

The prospect of an inside hire is a bit thornier; here’s my sense of that phenomenon.  For the reasons above, it’s tough to convince a faculty to conduct a full search if the gal or guy they want is already on staff and willing to grab that baton.  I can’t imagine that happening unless the temp or VAP (visiting assistant professor) in question tried playing cute in early contract negotiations.  I do, however, believe in the tailored hire:  some colleges conduct open searches as a matter of course, but if they have a candidate on staff that they’ve got to shepherd through the process they can just write a job ad that will eliminate most contenders.  Folks will apply anyway, of course, creating any number of administrative headaches, but the department could quite reasonably say that they hired the best person for the job specified.  This, I think, is a rare scenario for all the reasons I list above…but it happens.  The good news, however, is that such searches are invariably ended before they college incurs unwanted expenses.  If you visit the wiki you’ll see a few ostensibly open positions that were filled in October and their searches subsequently called off.  When shammery happens, I think that’s what it looks like.

VAPs, in contrast, are no guarantee that the job prospect is already locked up.  In fact, the very best thing I’ve seen on the wiki is one VAP letting job seekers know that he was never in contention for the position that many assumed he had sewn up.  There are typically four kinds of VAPs (and this is a taxonomy I’ve drawn up from the experience of myself and my friends, many of whom have held such temporary gigs).  Some fancy schools purposely corral promising youngsters, often those in ABD shoes; if the prospect makes a stride or three during his time at the school in question (he secures a book contract, for example, or gets other strong indications that he’s a rising star), they’ll usually keep him without a search.  One shiny scholar (and former roomie of mine) is employed in the UNC system as the result of just such an arrangement.  A second kind of VAP evinces the same intention without the same funding:  the visitor is essentially a scholar-in-residence, a person the school would love to hire…if they had the money.  They will accordingly  hire them on at the introductory rate on an interim basis in the hopes that the college will be able to foot the bill for a tenure line in a year or two.  As above, if the college has such a person on staff and the desire to hire, they will not bother with a search–you would never know they had an opening.  The third kind of VAP is the postdoctoral cookie, a one-year holdover job that fancy schools can use to a) get an inexpensive teacher and b) allow a recent graduate to sweeten his resume.  I had just such a VAP at Emory, one of the many kindnesses the university and my mentors extended me.  Those VAPs stand virtually no chance of getting hired by the college; it would be a lot like intellectual inbreeding.  If you see a position advertised despite the presence of a seemingly qualified youngster already on staff, check his credentials if you can.  If you learn that the hiring institution awarded him his degree, you can all but rule him out.  Finally, there are the pinch-hitters, one-year replacements who step in to a void that came as the result of an unexpected departure.  Those are the only folks with whom you might have to contend.  Bear in mind, however, that schools choose such pinch-hitters with all the selectivity the term implies:  the person they need to replace might have covered a great deal of territory, but a one-year replacement only needs to handle 4-8 of the classes that she normally taught.  The person may indeed have a shot at the permanent gig, but in all likelihood the bother of a new search will tell you all that you need to know about the institution’s long-term plans.

I’ve got a little extra time today, so let’s see if I can wrap up this miniseries (give or take an epilogue and/or curtain call).  Without further ado:  some thoughts on the on-campus research presentation.

1.  Wrap up the packages.  I’ll refine this first point as we go, but the gist is this:  by the time you reach the campus visit, your essential packages–the dissertation briefing and the overall outlook of your research agenda–should be tight and tidy.  Over the course of the visit you can expect to be asked about your core ideas again and again by many folks who’ll be getting their very first gander at you.  (Sidelong tip:  do your best to handle this repetition graciously; while it’s by no means a deal-breaker, I’ve seen a few candidates sour their chances by being brusque when asked to summarize their project for the tenth time.)  Accordingly, you should be able to fire off clear, bite-sized précises of each like a human Pez dispenser.  This is doubly important during the visit because you are likely to be sherpaed around campus by members of the hiring committee, peeps who have already seen your job letter and heard you treat your research over the course of an MLA or phone interview.  You don’t want to lose their attention, so the more efficient you are in offering summaries of your existing work, the more time you’ll have to show them new tricks. 

2.  Anticipate the unsaid.  While the query itself may take on various forms, at some point during the visit a questioner will ask you explicitly to cover territories untouched in your habitual fields of research.  If you’ve wrestled with feminist issues in your diss, expect to be hit with a question about formalism; if you’ve spent five years  delving into Victorian economics, expect a question on fin-de-siècle theology.  I’m obviously working the outskirts of the realms of possibility with those two examples, but I’ve seen questions of the kind materialize in all of my own interviews and surface in the war stories of those of my peers.  While they can leave you flat-footed for a moment or two, those questions help hiring committees assess the way you conduct yourself under duress.  Sometimes you’ll be able to address the question by translating it into a familiar frame of reference, and sometimes you’ll simply have to concede that your research never took you in the direction the question presupposes.  In either case, such questions afford job candidates a real opportunity to impress the folks making the hire–they’ve been in your shoes before, and that remembered discomfort will make your own escape from the scrape more memorable.  In one campus interview back in the day a senior faculty member asked me to address several French poets, no matter that my work to that point had dealt almost exclusively with the British novel of the eighteenth century.  I soon learned that the poser of said question almost always raised it, and I was praised for the dexterity with which I sidestepped the query several times over the course of the visit.  Depending on the complexion of your interview, those honest, improvised responses may be the closest thing to “live” intellectual engagement your peers-to-be may see.  If you handle the matter with grace and intelligence, folks will remember.

3.  Finesse your nemesis.  Another commonality in the interview experience is the emergence of a personality who actively or passively sets out to undermine your candidacy.  I’m exaggerating again, of course, but I’ll bet you a nickel that by the end of the visit you’ll feel that way:  some guy or gal will figure prominently in your nightmares as a presentational enemy, an interrogator who calls your foundational premises into question, who batters you with points from books you’ve never read, who suckerpunches you in several ways over the course of a Q&A.   I won’t fib:  some folks really are out to get you–they might prefer another candidate, or they might have a vision of the department’s developmental trajectory that doesn’t include a scholar like you.  In any case, bear in mind that these folks, just like the blindside question, represent opportunities.  They’ll oblige you to call up the best of your interpersonal resources, and how you deal with them will give observers some sense of the colleague you might become.   Even in cases of perceived hostility, I think it’s helpful to handle the rise of the  nemesis as an intellectual trial.  While it’s best not to treat him cavalierly, bear in mind that those two or three skirmishes may be the only interaction you’ll ever need to have.  Holding your ground and articulating your own position clearly and vividly will give folks in the department compelling evidence of your ability to fit in.  And if the nemesis in question is always ill-behaved, some folks might even think of hiring you as acquiring an ally.

4.  Fight for the future.  Part of the reason I emphasize tightening your presentational package when it comes to your previous work is that the campus visit tends to be the Promethean portion of the program–your interviewers will want to know more about the scholar and colleague you will someday become.  The majority of young academics will cop to plans to revise the diss for publication, but that leaves a lot of territory unexplored and time unaccounted for.   When it comes to outlining a future research agenda, I would recommend laying out parallel lines of time and work–chart your progress in accordance with the institutional clock, and break down the increments of your progress with as much transparency as you can manage with that calendar in mind.  If you have five years before the tenure decision arrives, let the faculty know how you’re going to use that time, how your work will accumulate to meet departmental standards in the interim.  It would be obscene (though perhaps hilarious) to plot out your next ten articles, but do your best to describe in detail one work in progress, the (somewhat hazier) project that will follow on its heels, and the whole you are building toward (whether it’s a book, a series of studies, or some other clearly-defined arc of development).  (Side note:  if you have an especially generative scholarly mind, feel welcome to mention budding projects in passing–just don’t try to pass them off as more than seeds or seedlings unless you are ready to handle much more pressing questions about them.) A fully-realized research agenda will give the hiring committee a strong sense that you’ll stick, that you’re not only capable of bringing down the white whale but have also charted a course toward full-blown professional productivity.  Ideas of what academics really ought to do may vary, but a pragmatic, goal-oriented vision of how you will earn all the perqs the college has to offer will go a long way toward supporting your candidacy.

5.  Walk the line.  In my opinion, the most fascinating aspect of the campus visit by far is the candidate’s negotiation between her two selves:  on the one hand she is a humble petitioner, a person pulling out all the stops to land a job, and on the other she is an expert and authority–at dissertation’s end she may literally know more about her subject (narrowly construed) than anyone else in the world.  That’s a tough place to be, and I’ve seen some candidates struggle to strike a comfortable balance.  In the first job talk I ever witnessed the candidate stomped all over a poor, benighted grad student who had the audacity to question a foundational premise, and I’ve also seen a candidate yield to the opinions of others so often that I couldn’t recall the ideas he advanced in the first place. 

When I started this series I urged job seekers to remember their awesome, and here I’ll repeat that advice.  If you’ve earned a doctorate over a long stretch of study, you’re no slouch in the noggin department.  Remember that when you hit the beat:  no matter how badly an interview goes, nothing those wankers say can take that work away.  It may seem wise or polite to defer to your hosts, but there will be times when a little bonus backbone is appropriate.

Just because you’ve got all that book-larnin’ under your belt, however, doesn’t mean you’ve got to flaunt it.  Wear your learning lightly (ideally in a way that makes your work accessible to those outside your field), and don’t feel obliged to turn every vagary of conversation into a talking point.  At times your visit will actually turn into a visit, with people talking to people about the travails of the job, their lives and loves, their days and ways.   I can’t tell you how to handle those occasions, but I will tell you that those moments are openings.  The only way you can really botch them is by attempting to represent yourself as something you’re not.

I’ve got some sexy syllabi to hammer out, so I’ll jump in with what I hope will be my penultimate post on the English job market.  Today’s topic:  the teaching presentation.

First, let me break to you the very good news:  there are many, many ways to succeed.  I’ve sat in on a mess of teaching presentations–and I should note that these were live pinch-hitting classroom sessions rather than the fairly rare “tell us how you teach” symposia–and, judging from my own perspective and subsequent group reactions, candidates can make a great impression in all sortsa ways.   I’ve also seen a few sessions that clearly nudged applicants off committee wish lists, however, so I’ll try to wind my way through the good and the bad as I boil things down.

(If you do wind up with one of the rare “tell us how you teach” symposia, I have only one bit of advice, since I’ve only seen two of those myself:  slide back and forth between the conceptual and the exemplary clearly and often.  It’s fairly easy to cull a few keywords from a departmental website and return to those concepts again and again over the course of an hour, but most profs will want to know what those concepts mean to you in particular, how you would implement corresponding practice in a classroom setting.  The more fluidly you can make those connections, the more concrete and compelling your teachin’ talk is likely to be.)

So here we go.

1.  Bring your I Game.  I think the most common source of awkwardness in the teaching presentation is the impulse to adapt (quite often for the first time) edgy-yet-unfamiliar pedagogical approaches into the proceedings.  Most schools will offer you some broad, basic parameters (i.e., you’ll be teaching this text from this syllabus with this thematic emphasis), and you might even get the chance to touch base with the usual instructor to get some sense of the group’s progress thus far.  Given that context, however, I think the most successful candidates refine and revise that established script in ways that take advantage of their own peculiar aptitudes and abilities.  If you are an engaging lecturer, lecture; if you orchestrate conversation like a party planner, then emphasize participation; if you lean heavily on tech in your day-to-day teaching, incorporate as much as you can.  There’s no realistic way to slip seamlessly into the flow of the course that existed before you got there, so it’s wise to do what works for you.  The only ungainly presentations I’ve seen involved attempts to kick up the zazz in a fashion-forward way.  If you regularly accompany your lectures with interpretive dance and laser shows synchronized to The Wall, fantastic; if you’re only doing so to dazzle the folks on the hiring committee, you might wish to reconsider.

2.  Teach the class.  This might be a departure from conventional wisdom, but I think the best teaching sessions demonstrate a lively engagement with the classes in question, not that row of smiling or stony colleagues-to-be sitting in the back.  When I sit in on teaching presentations, I tend to watch the students as well as the candidate.  I want to see how they are responding, how much they are engaged, how well the teaching reaches them.  Based on the limited experience of my own campus visits, the kind of presentation a committee asks you to make is telling:  if they want you to teach a class, they have a different sense of evaluative criteria than those schools that want you to speak at length about your research agenda.  The easiest way for them to tell how well you’ll perform in their classrooms is to see how well you connect with students in those classrooms.  It’s tempting to lob in-jokes and highbrow references to those gray-haired kids in the back, but I think it’s both simpler and safer to teach the paying customers, to give your students of the day something they might take away.

3.  Recruit the students.  The prior point is informed by one constant in my own experience offering classroom presentations:  students have always been my greatest allies.  I landed one tenure-track job largely due to the liveliness of a discussion-based presentation, and I also kindled an impassioned debate on another hiring committee, one that prompted an indignant member on the losing side to write me to explain why they went in another direction despite a killer class.  I take little credit for those successes, however, because I did nothing more than capitalize on the tendencies of a group of students keenly aware that they were on stage as well.  Knowing that their everyday profs were sitting behind and beside them, they were understandably eager to distinguish themselves and empathetic enough to the plight of their visitor to fill in silences with questions and educated guesses.  Few things make a stronger impression on a panel of observers than seeing a customarily reticent class perk up or having to wait for a circle of students surrounding the guest lecturer to dissipate at period’s end.  Special cameo appearances by visiting candidates take much of the normal pressure off them, and in my experience they’ve responded with more kindness, attention, and solicitude than a visitor has any right to expect.

4.  Take nothing for granted.  That being said, I would also urge you to think of the special guest session as a self-contained experience, one abstracted from all the other historical and cultural references that might come into play.  By far the worst teaching presentation I’ve ever seen was a talk delivered to a British literature survey in which the candidate made extensive reference to Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and The Canterbury Tales–texts that the class had not read (and the candidate should have known this, by the bye, since he had been provided with the course syllabus).  The class zoned out in his preface, and he then used the movie Memento to make an extended analogy about cultural memory and narrative reconstruction…even though not a single student raised a hand when he asked if they’d seen it.  While you can make high-percentage plays to help students import literature into their own frames of reference (make a joke about Facebook, a sidelong reference to The Dark Knight, etc.), it’s always much simpler and safer to focus solely on the text or task you know they’ve got on tap.  Even if they haven’t really prepared for the day, they’ll know where to look.

5.  Center the attention.  The last bit of advice I’ll offer today may traumatize the wallflowers of the world, myself included, but I hope it will help when it comes time to deliver your pitch.  For those 50 or 60 or 90 minutes, however long your class may be, make sure attention is fixed on you, what you do, and who you are as a teacher.

The very first bit of advice I received about the teaching presentation, of course, was just the opposite:  a mentor aware of the anxiety that can attend such presentations urged me to begin with some relevant distraction, a film clip to frame the discussion or a handout to circulate.  If you’ve got 50 tension-packed minutes to teach, taking a three- or ten-minute break to summon your superpowers seems like a savvy thing to do.  For those precious minutes, however, the search committee learns nothing about you.  They will probably be grateful for a little time off the clock as well, but they’ll leave your session with a little less information about your work in the classroom than the visitor who taught and talked and engaged from bell to bell.

Don’t get me wrong:  handouts and film clips and other tools can all be assets in the candidate’s arsenal, but I think it behooves the candidate to use them as ways to reveal teaching.  When I use handouts, for example, they always consist of materials the class (and the observers) needs me to gloss–even though I’m one of the more retiring people you’ll meet, for the duration of the session I want all the parties involved to think about me, not zone out as they stare at an outline on an overhead projector or glance down at the handout whenever I venture a question.

Film can work for you in much the same way, and I’ve got a great pair of bookends to emphasize the point.  In one exceedingly memorable case a candidate used a twenty-minute film clip to make what was essentially a single bullet point; when the hiring committee sat down with those faculty members who had seen all three candidate presentations, the candidate in question descended instantly to the bottom of the list despite otherwise impressive credentials.  In contrast, a candidate in a separate search showed fifteen minutes of a film then launched a PowerPoint presentation.  The difference, however, is that the PowerPoint consisted of stills from the clip we had just seen, and she used the clip and images to lead a discussion that beautifully fused a sensitive close reading with her research interests–although her talk was media-rich, it would have been utterly meaningless without her authoritative explanatory presence.

I should report that she ultimately did not get the job–but only because she was offered a gig at a fancier school before that search committee could make her an offer.

As is the case with all aspects of the campus visit, I would urge you to think of the teaching presentation as an opportunity, not an ordeal.  When the committee sits down to hash out the case for each candidate, the teaching talk will be one of their brightest stars to steer by.   If the classroom does not yet feel like your natural habitat, you can still find plenty of ways to capitalize on the natural aptitudes that you bring to the table.

Allow me to begin with a slap in the face, one that I hope is bracing rather than insulting.

I paid visits to a couple job search blogs and wikis over the weekend, and I came across a recurrent complaint:   seekers distressed by the fact that some universities had already made (or planned to make unusually early) contract offers, thus denying candidates the negotiating leverage they ought to enjoy.   While there are sterling candidates out there who will assuredly earn and deserve multiple offers, those schools asking for early commitment appear to be doing so because they want to make their hires so that higher-ups in the administration cannot rescind funding.  Might they be hoping to save a few bucks by making determinations earlier than other schools?  And might they want to secure the best available candidates while other schools are working through more leisurely procedures?  Absolutely.   It seems to me, however, that it’s tough to argue against competitive hiring practices when the sensibility that motivates them is the same force that would allow candidates to negotiate better deals by dint of competition.

I was going to draw an analogy to VH1 to make a point, but I’m not sure you deserve such heavy-handedness.

Today I’d like to talk a little bit about the campus visit, since you’re likely to receive those calls in the near-ish term.  As usual, there are much better places to go if you want counsel on points of professional practice or etiquette.  I deal only in metaphysics.

Without further ado, here we go.

1.  Breathe easy.  As was the case with the MLA interview, I think the most important thing to do is set your mind at ease:  make plans that will allow you to enjoy the visit rather than fretting ad nauseam about the myriad Things That Might Go Wrong.  You can take for granted that the universities you visit will make dense plans for you–you’ll meet a lot of peeps and shake a lot of hands over the course of a day (or day and a half) chock-full of commitments.  Accordingly, arrange those few variables that remain in your hands in a way that conduces to your peace of mind.  On past visits, for example, I’ve paid a little extra to get plane tickets to the closest possible airport, I’ve paid for taxis when a rental car might have been more economical, and I’ve overstuffed a carry-on with backup clothes in case my suitbag was lost in transit.  My anxieties center around being lost or underprepared, so I did the things I needed to do to soothe my fretful breast.  If you worry about losing your presentation materials, make two copies and store them in two places; if you worry about losing your PowerPoint, e-mail yourself a duplicate.  Do whatever helps you to focus on taking in the atmosphere and relating to the new people you meet.

2.  Control what you control.  Imagine yourself as a guest:  you have certain presentational and representational responsibilities, but much of the work of the visit belongs to your hosts.  You’ll give your talk or your teaching presentation, and you’ll have various têtes-à-têtes with deans and chairs and peers; those are the objects of discourse that fall to you.  If you fall off schedule because a visit runs into overtime, however, or if you miss your first morning engagement because the folks who took you to breakfast decided to risk a trip to the busiest bistro in town, let it go.  I confess that the first few times these things happened to me I was caught off guard, and such fumbles left me flustered.  After two or three visits, however, I came to understand that these things always happen.  While such gaffes may seem momentous to you (especially when you arrive to your fifteen-minute meeting with the college’s president ten minutes late), it’s quite likely that your hosts will hardly notice.  There will be minor scheduling flubs, crossed wires, missed connections, and other issues, and all you can do is handle them graciously.

3.  Anticipate improv.  At the same time, however, some universities (by accident or by design) will really throw you curve balls.  From my own experiences and those of my peers, I would contend that this is the rule, not the exception.  One school asked me to prepare a twenty-minute mini-lesson on poetic meter but then handed over the entire fifty-minute period to me; another scheduled activities from 8:00 AM to 2:30 PM, but as I was packing up my things I was hustled to an extra meeting with a person with a heavy bearing on the hire.  Though I gnashed my teeth and beat my breast after the fact, there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about those situations except wing it as well as I could.  Even if no surprises of that magnitude happen to you, you should still expect a few questions that catch you off guard (“How does your work on the Venerable Bede relate to the Harlem Renaissance?”) and a few plot twists and ironies.  Again, there’s not much you can do but handle these situations with grace and good humor.  Once I knew these wrinkles were not only possible but likely, I was able to handle them with philosophy, if not felicity.  You’re better off knowing beforehand.

4.  Control disclosure.  As you may know, search committees nowadays are bound by many rules:  there are certain questions they cannot ask you (regarding sexual orientation, marital status, religious affiliation, and the like) and questions that they normally avoid as a matter of standard practice.  Because the folks you meet will be looking at you as a future colleague, however, they are likely to be very interested in you as a person, not just a professional.  It’s worth knowing that, for all intents and purposes, you get to draw the lines of disclosure.  If you feel that doing so will aid and abet your cause, don’t be afraid to let personal tidbits slip into conversation–some folks will be delighted to know that you’re a young parent, a lapsed Methodist, or an NRA member.  It’s also not a bad idea to react genially and sensibly to the flow of conversation.  I spent one lunch nodding along to a glowing recommendation of the local school district, for example, even though I have no kids for schoolin’.  I wasn’t trying to snooker my hosts; I just didn’t want them to feel that they had wasted such a useful selling point on me.  I could have cut them off curtly, but I always try to keep in mind that the campus visit is about the subjective sense of “fit” much more than questions of professional qualification–something you and their other candidates are likely to share.  Members of the hosting department will be looking at you as a companion for the next thirty-odd years as well as a colleague, so letting them get selective glimpses of the critter behind the curtain is seldom a bad thing.  You may want to hold off comparing scars, piercings, and tattoos until you’ve got the contract in hand, but most hiring committees will find a few glimpses of your humor and humanity (assuming you’re a human) welcome.

5.  Be yourself.  That sounds platitudinous and asinine, I know, but in the intensive framework of a campus visit you may experience a great deal of pressure to be the person you think they want to hire rather than the person that you are.  Let me tell you some of the bajillion ways that might go wrong.

One pal of mine, a high-tech teaching wizard, played down his tech cred and emphasized during his campus visit that he was perfectly happy with pen-and-paper pedagogies.  He knew that the college was small and had only two mediated classrooms, and he wanted them to believe he would be happy in a little red schoolhouse.  What he didn’t know was that an alumnus had left the school a couple million in his will and wanted someone to spearhead a tech revolution.  He had a winning hand but he folded.

Or consider the Modernist, a clever, perceptive close reader who never had much use for literary theory…at least until she learned that the retiring prof she might replace taught period courses and the upper-division literary theory class.  She accordingly played all the theory cards she had in her hand at the interview to let the search committee know she could step into the breach.  Only after the fact (thanks to a call from her advisor to a friend on the faculty) did she learn that her candidacy had been torpedoed by the prof who had been waiting in the wings to teach that theory class for years.

Worse still, imagine the anti-theory 18th-century specialist who successfully bluffed her way through an interview and convinced the hiring committee of her willingness to teach theory.  She thought she’d be able to pawn off the obligation sooner or later, but she’s been saddled with Intro to Theory for five years running.

Off the top of my head I can think of a half dozen similar scenarios, but I think you get the gist:  there’s not much point in misrepresenting yourself unless you know with perfect certainty that some elaborate pretense will get you hired–and let us not ask the thorny question of whether or not getting hired for being something you’re not is necessarily a good thing.

Speaking realistically, most of us will never know why a given committee preferred another candidate; quite often the decision comes down to intangibles.  Since that’s the case, however, there’s not much else we can do but offer them the qualities we bring to the table, the ones they can’t get anywhere else.  If their close encounter with your best professional self isn’t enough to land you the job, you will at least enjoy the consolations of Rasselas for virtuous conduct–you might wish you had acted differently, but you’ll have no cause to repent that you acted as you did.

I’m running behind (thank you, Public Works, for your mighty fine job of plowing some roads, ignoring others, neglecting corners, piling snow directly in front of otherwise accessible roads, and otherwise making my trip to the coffee shoppe a zany, madcap adventure!), so let’s jump right in.

By now most folks will have learned their MLA fates.  Some will have landed beaucoup interviews, and some will have a tidy pile of rejection slips to use as kindling or office wallpaper.  If you’ve come up entirely empty on the search season, canceled your hotel reservations, commisserated with your chums and mentors, and readied an irresponsible quantity of eggnog for a quiet, jobless holiday, fret not!  This post is for you.

1.  It ain’t over till it’s over.  There’s a good chance that you haven’t heard back from some schools yet, even though they announced their intentions to interview at MLA.   This sometimes is a product of procedural negligence or handcuffery (some schools cannot send formal letters of rejection to you until they’ve confirmed campus visits or actually made a hire, which could leave you hanging for weeks or months), but quite often it means your app is still alive.  I know of several cases (a few of my own included) in which apps presumed dead suddenly resurfaced in March, when many colleges start making offers and conjuring their alternates.  The odds remain stacked against you, but you may find yourself the recipient of an expedited search in the spring.  Don’t burn bridges with that resentful letter quite yet.

2.  Save room for holiday leftovers.   One ugly consequence of the search process is resentment, and I don’t know that it’s avoidable.  Because I am a petty man, I can say in all honesty that there are some schools that treated me so poorly as a job candidate that I plan to harbor lifelong grudges against them.  Be aware, however, that being passed over for an MLA interview and placed on the alternate list (even if it involves ungodly suspense) is nothing like a snub.  The market is glutted with highly qualified applicants right now, so some very good folks–folks that the college would otherwise be happy to have–must be nudged down the list.  Top choices may wind up with an offer or three (or, more often nowadays, may be obliged to commit to a choice before all their offers are in), leaving many schools bereft of their primary preferences.   If they really didn’t want folks on their alternate list, however, they would simply toss them; no department takes the hiring of a colleague who may be with them for 30-odd years lightly.  If a call comes, no matter how late, put on your interviewing shoes and head to campus.  Don’t assume they’re desperate to make an 11th-hour hire, but do assume that they are determined to give you a long look, that they are imagining you as a peer in the making.

3.  Brace yourself for extra innings.  The spring market is admittedly a different beast, but it is rife with opportunities.  Some folks abandon the search after a hard winter, but I would urge you to give the job list a second look come January.  Many new gigs will appear on the horizon, and spring searchers enjoy a few advantages:  they get to join a much smaller pool of applicants, they can look forward to a much less dilatory search timetable, and they can be sure that the schools advertising jobs already have the funding to support the hires they’d like to make (according to my peeps on the hunt, more than a few openings this year were closed thanks to hard times in the academy).  Accordingly, if you see opportunities that suit you, don’t hesitate to throw your hat into the ring.  It may make your spring semester labor-intensive, but you may get repaid for that labor come the following fall.

4.  Take a long look at short-term options.  If you found yourself blanked by the big kids, chances are that you lost out in the comparative sweepstakes:  you have skillz, as evidenced by that Ph.D. you’re toting around, but other folks were better fits for the gigs you wanted.  It’s not happy, but it happens.  While you’re sloshing your eggnog, remember that the spring list abounds with instructorships and VAP positions (and many of the latter may be converted to tenure-track jobs down the road):  they may feel like sorry defaults or short-term fixes, but they’re valuable opportunities to rejigger your credentials for the next go-round.  Try to get a variety of teaching under your belt; try to engage in the life of whatever department you join.  Fresh Ph.D.’s  can have an especially tough time convincing committees that they are ready to handle the responsibilities of a tenure-track job, and logging a year or two of quality full-time teaching and scholarship is the best proof you can show when you hit the list once again.

5.  Move forward.  For the sake of your sanity, I would urge you to erase your short-term memory (I regularly rub my skull with a magnet expressly for that purpose).  What’s true for the Detroit Lions is true for you:  there’s always next year.  Spend your time stacking up portable credentials–show the next set of search committees that you’ve been writing and teaching and otherwise doing the job.  Be sure to prioritize the portables (landing an essay in a scholarly journal or edited collection will open up more doors than presenting a paper at a local conference; teaching a new course prep at a local community college will serve you better than a tenth section of comp at your alma mater), and do your best to give next year’s search committees a few fresh credentials to gawk at.   If you fear this year’s market will haunt you, don’t be afraid to write a few polite, professional letters of inquiry to those search chairs who seemed kindly (or kindly disposed toward you).  They almost certainly won’t be able to supply particulars, and they may not give you news you want to hear (i.e., “We hired the candidate who’d already taught graduate seminars in periwig imagery,” or “We hired Harold Bloom”), but they can often identify those weaknesses you might want to shore up.

At this point, however, you can probably identify them yourselves, and you probably already know they’re remediable.  If that’s the case, take some time off, enjoy your holiday, spend time with your peeps, and get some sleep.

And then get back to work.

First, the various and sundry.

The highest score on the Bald Man Compatibility test thus far?  38.  By a feller.  We call it a bromance, people.  It’s like Scrubs, so I’m calling dibs on Sarah Chalke right now.

I also called the nurses’ station in the ICU this morning and learned straight from the Woman in the Know that my mother’s condition is “poor.”  Horrid though it may sound, I can’t tell you what a relief it was to hear that from someone authoritative.

Given that news, please bear in mind that I’m still searching for my Zen equipoise, which means I will veer all over the place in terms of tone.  Self-abstraction is my strong suit, but even I have my limits.

So let’s dig in.

Today I’d like to focus on the MLA interview, a rite of passage most English folk must weather eventually.  Let me tell you in advance that I have never had a good time at MLA, though I understand that some folks do.  Dinner with far-flung friends aside, however, the best part of my MLA experience has been the job interviews themselves.  Despite all indications to the contrary, they are not quite as traumatic as they are made out to be.

There are plenty of guides on the web that handle the sundry protocols involved, so I won’t dwell on them overmuch.  What I’ll offer instead are survival strategies from a bald man who doesn’t really like humans very much at all.

1.  Do or do not; there is no try.  I would recommend committing to the excursion early or opting out earlier.  Any number of advantages attach to making that determination as soon as you are able.  In addition to locking down better hotel rates and cheaper plane tickets, you’ll have the easy-peasy option of adding that bonus line to your job letter (“I will be attending the MLA convention in Swank City, and I would welcome the opportunity to speak with you further,” or words to that effect).  There is risk involved, of course, but even if you don’t land many interviews it’s a fine occasion for zero-pressure hobnobbing and meeting with your old Ph.D. peeps.  From my perspective, I would much rather foot an unnecessary bill if it allows me to avoid the intense stress of lining up travel plans at the eleventh hour.  Committing to the trip early takes one variable out of what can be a harrowing equation, and if you come up altogether empty you can usually back out at only a modest loss.

2.  If you don’t do the Yoda thing, at least set an arbitrary threshold.  Right now it’s a buyers’ market, so you may not feel inclined to be persnickety, but if you are vacillating about the prospect of making the jaunt to MLA, define your threshold of “success” from the outset (and keep in mind that earning the Ph.D. is an epic win in and of itself–never forget that).  You may need one killer interview at a school you love, or you may require two interviews at schools where you’d be willing to work.  I’ve seen some episodes of fairly advanced angst emerge when peeps are forced to set their thresholds after the fact, deciding if a tenure-track 4/4 gig in the middle of nowhere justifies the excursion.  Unsurprisingly, the real trouble is going to an interview for a job you’re not entirely sure you want in the first place.  You might go for the practice, you might go for the sake of gainful employment, but I think you’re far better off making that determination ahead of time than wringing your hands in mid-December.  Besides, hiring committees can usually detect that brand of qualified apathy.

3.  Be patient.  I’ll say this again, and it bears repeating ad infinitum.  As it turns out, academics tend to be on the slow side when it comes to processing search data.  It’s not because they hate you; it’s because most of them are wrangling with a) huge applicant pools, b) internecine warfare regarding the composition of their interview lists, and c) institutional procedures that may gum up the works.  It’s not uncommon for hiring committees to make their interview calls after December 15th, and quite a few will try to arrange interviews from their list of alternates at the convention itself.  (On that score, make sure you leave your name and location at the MLA central registry so that search committees can hunt you down.)  I think the latest I’ve seen personally was a December 23rd call, which is why I recommend the whole “committing early” thing.  I’d hate to be scrambling to make arrangements if that obscenely late call was for a gig I really wanted.

4.  Address the stress.  More than anything else, it’s the stress that will get you.  Academics seem to be fairly high-strung in the first place, and MLA can be a crucible of anxiety.  Accordingly, do whatever you feel you need to do to get yourself settled.  I can’t really handle the hubbub at the central conference hotels, for example, so I usually settle in to a hotel somewhere in the vicnity just beyond ground zero.  I try to schedule my interviews with ample breaks in between (some folks like to cluster them together so they only have to enter the zone once), and I tend to plot out my plans for the day(s) of the interview(s) as fully as possible.  You know what you’ll need to feel comfortable, and by all means find some way to release the tension at day’s end.  Keep in mind that everyone there is stressed to some degree, and even a little uncoiling of that spring may make you seem much more relaxed and at ease than other applicants for the gig you want.  I’m wound pretty tightly myself, yet even I was more composed at my last convention than the candidate who interviewed after me.  (The fact that he was knocking his forehead against the wall in the stairwell and muttering “keep it together” to himself was something of a giveaway.)  Sure it’s tense, but a goodly percentage of that tension is manufactured by the candidates themselves.

5.  Brace yourself for at least one awkward moment outside the interview.  Trust me:  your interview will go better than you think.  If you’ve landed a face-to-face, the members of the hiring committee pulled you and perhaps a dozen others out of a pool of 30, 75, or 200 applicants, so they are already prepared to think well of you.  You’re already distinguished in their eyes.  That being said, chances are good that you may find yourself obliged to make men’s room urinal small talk with an interviewer (happened to me), or you may get caught by the interview team at the local watering hole with nacho cheese in your goatee (happened to me), or you may get caught walking out of the hotel fitness room in your sports bra and spandex short-shorts (happily, not my anecdote).  When it happens, there’s nothing to do but laugh it off after the fact.  And I can safely say that the most awkward situation in the world won’t undo a good interview, since the spandex gal just earned tenure at the school where the interviewer bumped into her and I’m working at the nacho cheese gig right now.

6.  By the same token, don’t beat yourself up.  Yes, you’ll probably need time to process perceived interview gaffes and get them out of your system–there’s nothing wrong with that.  Because of the slow turnaround, however, you can kvetch about a faux pas for weeks or months, and keeping the error fresh in your memory will only reinforce your (mistaken) belief that you lost the job because of it.  Since you may need to run the MLA gauntlet twice or thrice before landing the gig you like, there’s no sense developing a complex.  There will always be comments or examples you might like to have back, but when you’ve seen a bedraggled hiring committee coming back from MLA, you’ll know full well that their memory of your perceived blunder is not nearly as strong as your own.

6.  That being said, don’t embrace the crazy.  Based on anecdotal evidence, I would guess that one job candidate out of every ten rules himself out as the result of some egregious breach of protocol.  Every member of every search committee I’ve ever spoken to has at least one such anecdote, a deal-breaker that the applicant did not have the presence of mind to realize was a deal-breaker.  These are not the consequence of naughty Foucault jokes or suchlike things:  I’m talking about candidates who answer their cell phones in the middle of interviews, or who sit down to dinner with interviewers unbidden.  More common, however, is the anxious candidate who spots a member of the hiring panel and asks for reassurance or feedback after the fact.  It’s an understandable impulse, to be sure, but it’s a rookie mistake–very few panelists will be at liberty to comment on your performance in the first place, and such evidence of underdeveloped professionalism can certainly enter into the committee’s decision-making process.  So long as you’re under consideration, it’s important to maintain the illusion that you’re a pro’s pro, even if this is your first time around the block at MLA.  Just get into the interview, do as well as you can, get out, and stick to the pleasantries after the fact.  If you would like feedback, most committee members will offer it freely…but they may well be constrained to silence until after a hire has been made.

7.  Accordingly, wait.  It’s not fun, I know.  If the run-up to MLA generates 100 foot-pounds of anticipatory angst, the days following the interview can generate 1000.  Given the state of the market nowadays, some universities are taking care of business with greater and greater alacrity–they want to lock in the best available candidates before anyone else gets a crack at them (that’s a post for another day).  More often than not, however, committees may be obliged to drag their feet.  Some will debate heatedly over who they want to bring to campus; some will record all the MLA interviews on video- or audio- tape and can’t pull the trigger until all members of the personnel committee have had a chance to give each candidate a hearing; still others will have to pass paperwork up the river, making sure they have the budget to bring candidates to campus, making sure the short list meets various institutional hiring imperatives.  At CMU, for example, we tend to conduct linear searches:  if we’re hiring for several positions, we bring finalists to campus one batch at a time.  The year I was hired I did not get the call until late March, and that could mean that my search was last in line, or that I was on their alternate list, or that they banked on signing a candidate, lost her, and had to dip back into the pool once more.  (When you’ve been hired you are always free to assume that you were the university’s first and favorite choice, as I often do.)  The point here, for better or for worse, is that deliberations will take about five days longer than you think can stand.

I reckon that covers it, at least from my limited point of view.  If you’re headed out to San Fran this year, good luck!

Today I can offer slightly more assured insight, as we sat down for our hiring committee scrum this morning.  As you might expect, I cannot go into great detail, but I can offer you some sense of my own sorting process and discuss the kinds of topics that surfaced in the course of our discussions.

First, the process.  We have a standard sheet that the hiring committees can work with, one that divvies up each application packet into four general areas:  education, teaching, scholarship, and professional development.  The sheet treats each area as perfectly proportionate raw data, which is why most committee members either a) use their own rating process or b) modify the sheet.  I belong to the latter group, so rather than assuming each area ought to represent a commensurate raw score (where education is just as important as teaching which is just as important as scholarship), I tweak the ratio a bit.  I assigned 40% more points to scholarship and teaching and 20% fewer to education; the former seem like stronger indicators of professional capability to me, better evidence that the applicant can handle the gig.

Because this was my first go-round, I was of course concerned that my process would yield results radically different than those of my peers on the committee.  That was, however, not the case at all:  we plan on inviting only a handful of folks to personal interviews at the MLA annual conference, and our rate of correspondence (and all of us used different methods to arrive at our top choices) was higher than 85%.  Moreover, we all had pretty clear reasons for including or excluding candidates in that set of 15%.  Accordingly, those job seekers who fear that the selection process is exceedingly capricious can probably rest a little easier.  Although a variety of folks are coming to your materials from very different perspectives, we reach the same conclusions much of the time. 

As I’ve mentioned before, perceived fit proved to be paramount.  When it came down to splitting hairs, we invariably turned toward those candidates whose work promised to augment the department’s representative coverage in some meaningful way.  Folks whose work overlapped significantly with members of the standing faculty had a hard time gaining traction; folks whose work was narrowly defined (in terms of publication and conference credentials) really had to make a stronger case for their coverage in their job letters. 

There really weren’t tie-breakers per se.  After we compared notes and identified our must-see applicants, we each introduced 1-3 folks who performed well in our own personal rankings and considered their qualifications.  A couple of those candidates were added to our list of interviewees after a bit of debate–we dediced that they were scholars and teachers who really deserved a live hearing–but on this occasion we avoided the uncomfortable circumstance of ruling one prospect out to rule another in.  I don’t know if that’s typical, but that’s how matters played out this time around.

Some general advice I would offer to all folks on the hunt for a position in English, especially the ABDs.

1.  Make sure you cover all the bases.  Some applicants were excluded from my pool because they did not supply evidence of teaching effectiveness (one of our listed needs).  Others had to be excluded because dossier services failed to send their letters of recommendation or because registrars failed to deliver their transcripts.  It’s a pain in the ass, I know, but the committee needs all the pieces of the puzzle to evaluate the picture. 

2.  Arrange your materials to spec.  In addition to tailoring your job letter for the position in question, make sure that your writing sample fits into the advertised parameters and make sure that you’ve sent the requested number of supporting letters.  Some places (like CMU) will not specify any limiting criteria, in which case it’s fair game to fire away with your best letters and your best work.  When it comes time to assess materials, however, I think it’s reasonable to assume that most readers are going to approach 20-page seminar papers and 60-page dissertation chapters differently than they would a standard article-length essay.

3.  Check your letters by hook or by crook.  95% of all letters of recommendation are glorious paeans to the candidates’ abilities, as I’ve mentioned before.  We’ll often use them to get a better sense of a research agenda or classroom abilities, for example, but we take the praise with a grain of salt.  In some cases, however, candidates may fall prey to two essentially negative letters:  the boilerplate recommendation (in which a recommender advocating more than one candidate in the pool praises them both in identical ways) and the damnation-by-faint-praise letter.  That might actually be putting it too kindly:  a very small number of letters functionally damn the applicant, letting a committee know that the writer has serious reservations about the candidate’s abilities.   It’s hard to make it over the usual hurdles if you’re carrying that weight.

4.  For jobs you really covet, work the Google.  I realize this isn’t possible for every job in a given season, but when it comes to your top five, make sure that you can sell your credentials as a probable colleague.  This might mean you’ll have to dig a little deeper than a department’s basic webpage.  Were I to go on the market, for example, I’d have to make sure my abilities met real needs in the department I wanted to join.  I specialize in British literature of the long eighteenth century, so if I was looking at a job in a department with a Restorationist and a Romanticist already on staff, I would narrow my field and emphasize my study of texts written from 1700-1789.  There are surely some profs out there who are simply territorial, but for the most part the hiring committee simply seeks to avoid redundancies in coverage.

5.  Finally, keep plugging away–plug away at all facets of your game.  Some really excellent scholars take years to find a job that suits them, and most work in the trenches for 1-5 years before landing on the tenure track at a job that brings them lasting professional happiness.  Turn those years to your advantage.  Rather than writing book reviews, work on that refereed article; rather than attending the local graduate conference, splurge on a trip to a regional or national; rather than picking up an extra section of comp at your alma mater, see if you can scare up a survey at a nearby university.  Give hiring committees a chance to see your commitment, your versatility, your forward motion.

Generate enough forward motion and it will start to look like momentum.  When hiring committees look at your credentials, they will see somebody who’s ready to hit the ground running.