Long, crazy days...

It's been another long day here at the office. And a random day, too. Among things I accomplished: sent out invitation letters for possible new members of Sigma Tau Delta, graded a bunch of stuff (what else is new?), read, read, read, and read some more, sent about 100 emails (okay, a slight exaggeration), met with students, went to a meeting, taught a class, and...

...sent out formal rejection letters for the two searches I chaired this year. Human Resources actually handles the bulk of these, but I had to send letters to anyone we actually interviewed. What a strange and depressing exercise. I know I've said before how weird it is to be on the other side of this process, but this part--sending these letters and having HR sent the other notices--has been one of the hardest.

One thing the job search makes very clear (from this side) is how very lucky I was to get my job. The thing is, if my school were to re-run the search for my job next year, and I was thrown in with a whole bunch of new candidates, would I still get it? (This assumes that my department could experience a mind-wipe and forget the how awesome I've been since they hired me. Ha ha.) The answer: Probably not. That's just strange to think about, isn't it?

One other Herculean task accomplished today: I got some shoes for Erin's wedding. Believe me, shoe shopping is NOT something I enjoy and I had to take to the internet to find what I was looking for. The only requirement from the bride (the least Bridezilla Bride out there, for which I am so grateful!) was that the shoes be gold. My requirements? Comfortable! So I went with these. What do you think?

To recap, my day started off with online shoe shopping and rejection letters. Not an ideal way to get going.

But a few bits of humor helped me make it through. First, the "Academy's" Awards. The last three are my favorites:

Best Supporting Actor, Faculty: Professor Who Manages to Act As If There Are No Dumb Questions

Best Supporting Actor, Student: Student who Manages to Laugh at Every Joke by Professor, No Matter How Awful

Costume Design: award retired in honor of the MLA convention

Second, on a related note, this year's batch of "Honest Movie Titles." The line at the bottom of the Precious poster made me laugh out loud ("Don't Bring a Date, Seriously"), which probably says something bad about me. I also loved the Up poster: "This shit comes to us in our sleep." Man, I really loved Up.

Okay--back to work I go! I've got some Poe to read before heading home. And yay! Lost is on tonight!!!

More links...

...these are decidedly academic in theme.

First, I suppose I am better late than never on posting a link to Brian Croxall's delivered-in-absentia MLA talk. (More smart analysis here.) I was at MLA this year, as we are hiring for two positions in our department, but I have yet to attend a single conference session (four MLAs, zeros sessions). Each time it was because I simply didn't have the time--the first three MLAs, I was interviewing as a candidate; this time, I was on the other side of the table.

Anyway, one of my colleagues and I talked about heading down to the Convention Center to see how busy the Job Center was and to get a general feel for this year's vibe, but we never got around to it. There were lots of good reasons: we just didn't have the time/energy after 8 hours of interviewing, it was bitterly cold and windy outside, and my colleague had a nasty cold. But I think that a big reason (unspoken by me) was that we didn't want to deal with what was sure to be a depressing scene. There were, after all, about 40% fewer jobs listed this year than last year. And last year's numbers were something like 30% less than the year before. It's nasty out there and I'm so grateful to have a job. And I couldn't handle seeing all those desparate folks who aren't as lucky as I am. Heck, I think I still have job-search PTSD.

Anyway, all of this is a roundabout way of saying, good for Brian Croxall for reminding people of how expensive, frustrating, awful, and often futile the job search can be.

Second link: from insidehighered.com, a report from a Rhet/Comp session at MLA. This session sounds like it was lame...lots of finger-pointing and pontificating about what's wrong with rhet/comp. But if you are interested, check out the comments at the end of the column. Some are depressing because of their own pontificating, but others (from Kathleen Yancy, for instance, or from Joe Essid, who I worked with the one year I was at Richmond) are quite good and give some hope.

Third link, also from insidehighered.com: this one made me laugh--a column about a panel of historian parents and their historian offspring at the annual American Historical Association meeting. Choice quotation? "[I]t turns out that the way you rebel against an American historian parent is to become a medievalist." Ha. Beyond the laughs, though, are smart observations about how the field (and academia) has changed over the years. Good stuff.

One last link, which is only going to be funny to English folks...MLA 2010.

Fall Break...

Technically, we are on Fall Break today and tomorrow, but I've been up here at school since about 9:00 this morning. Despite this, it does feel a bit like a break--it's very quiet here and I've been ultra-productive. After all, on a normal Monday, I would have already taught three classes and held a bunch of office hours by this point. (What does it say about me that "feels like break" = "time to be productive"? Note to self: consider more ways to expand life beyond work.)

Anyway, here are the three things that have been occupying me so far today:

1) Printing and organizing application materials for our two job searches. All of our materials (with the exception of reference files) are submitted online (official university procedure), but someone (me!) still has to print them out for colleagues who don't like to read online documents. It's a pain the neck and takes an incredible amount of time (hours and hours and hours), especially with my super-slow printer, but it is easier on the candidates this way and I am all about making things easier for the poor folks on the job market.

2) Working on my third-year review portfolio, due on October 15. It's not all that different from the teaching portfolio I put together while on the job market, although this one includes documentation of scholarship and service, too. It's coming along, but I have lots of question about formatting and stuff and no one to ask until Wednesday when we are back in session. I also think it's always a bit strange to put together what is essentially a binder all about how awesome I am (ha!) and how they ought to keep me around. I mean, I know you've got to do it, but it's a weird process.

3) Working on my paper on Constance Fenimore Woolson for SSAWW. I've been done with the research part of the project since the end of the summer, actually, but haven't taken the time to do the actual writing. It's all up in my head and everything, but I've got to just sit down and write the thing. And I am about to write another post about how cool she is...

Don't worry too much about me working through the break: I have scheduled myself to stop at 2:30 to run to Hagerstown to run about a thousand errands, with a healthy mixture of "fun" and "practical" tasks on the list.

What'll you'll be asked in an interview...

So I've just come back from a lunch with the President. No, not that President. This one. Anyway, the lunch was a bit of a celebration for those of us at Shepherd University who are about to finish our second full year. We have been part of a new faculty "learning community" for these past two years. Today's lunch marked the end of that community's formal meetings. I asked, "Does this mean we can't play the 'I don't know--I'm new here' card anymore?" The answer: "That's right. Now people can say, 'You don't know that? Why not? You've been here long enough!'" Gulp. Anyway, now that I am no longer "new" faculty and will next year find myself in the position of chairing two search committees (another "gulp!"), I feel a bit more qualified to link to this story about job search advice.

Back when lots of my friends started to go on the job market, I cobbled together a list of just about every question I had been asked in my years on the market and every question I'd heard other people talk about having to answer. (And I'd be happy to share it with any of you who haven't seen it yet.) This list, though, is pretty terrific. Though it says it's tailored to community college jobs, I think it would work well for any job where teaching will be your primary duty (as opposed to research).

You'll also want to have a list of questions about your research, of course, but for teaching, this list is a great start.

It's also worth noting that coming up with smart, thoughtful answers to these questions (even once you have a job) can help you better understand who you are as a teacher and why you do what you do.

More job search/grad school links...

1) Thomas H. Benton is back with more reasons why people shouldn't go to grad school in the humanities. As much sense as he makes in certain places, I kind of hate this dude. This part especially rankles:

So I do not wholly trust anyone who applies the word "love" to graduate school; such language strikes me as possible only from a position of naïveté or privilege. The rhetoric of sentimentalism is used by people who are not willing to interrogate the reasons for what they do, or, more likely, the reasons for asking others to do something irrational.

I am showing my 19th-cent. American lit. leanings a bit here, but his dismissal of emotion (here dismissively labeled "sentimentalism") is grating. But perhaps that's what makes this column and the one before so frustrating and, it must be said, so thought-provoking--he refuses to be even the littlest bit sentimental, romantic, idealistic, or even emotional about his claims.

2) In Benton's defense, though, the numbers in this MLA/JIL midyear report are awful. Read 'em and weep. Seriously.

Skip down to page 21, look at those American lit. numbers, and marvel once again at how the heck I ever got a job. It's a good time (well, relatively speaking) to be in rhet./comp. or multi-ethnic lit., but that's no big surprise. What accounts for the up-tick in creative writing positions, though? That makes me happy for all my poet/fiction-writing friends.

3) Finally, some advice about how schools can conduct their searches more humanely. And I love the Huck Finn reference the writers uses to kick off her article. The advice that she gives is so obvious, so straightforward, so logical, it's amazing that she even has to give it. And yet, anyone who has done a search in the last few years knows that again and again, that some schools treat job applicants horrendously.

One of my favorite anecdotes about this subject involves my first year on the job market when I applied to Ursinus College in PA. Each step of the way, the search committee chair kept all of the applicants fully informed about where they stood. I remember learning over Thanksgiving break (via email) that I had passed a certain round of elimination. She even explained how proud candidates should be for getting this far, giving us the raw numbers: maybe 150 people had applied and now it was down to 50, then down to 10, etc. Very good for the ego when a person is getting mostly rejections or silence from other schools.

After the MLA interview, the search committee chair contacted those who weren't being invited to campus to tell us the news, basically saying, "So it looks like you won't get an offer here." It was courteous, warm, and just decent of her to do it--especially in such a timely manner.

I know some schools don't respond at every stage of the process--they want to keep all their options open until the very end, and yet, come on: why keep the people who you cut out in that very first round wondering? And, believe me, I know this kind of communication takes time, but it's worth noting that 3.5 years later, I still think of that school and that department so fondly. (You don't want to end up on the Universities to Fear list, do you?)

Oh--and when I interviewed for Shepherd? They were similarly amazing. Yes, I have to say that, but it's also true.

More link dumping: Grad School Edition

Three this time:

1) From the Department of Obvious Statements: The New York Times tells us that Humanities PhDs Are Anticipating Hard Times.

2) Laugh through the tears, folks: Check out the Profzi Scheme.

3) And finally, from McSweeney's, Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years.

How in the world did I get a job?

The title of this post is a question I find myself asking the universe every once in a while. This is usually followed by some quick prayers of thanksgiving for the job I have.

Anyway, insidehighered.com, which has been nothing but bad news lately for English folks, has given us two weeks of disturbing stories in a row:

1) The Adjunctification of English

2) Disappearing Jobs

The sobering news: total job listings down by 21%. And only 7.3% of total jobs were in American literature? Gulp.

The market, retiring academics, and the job market...

I haven't checked out the recently released MLA job list, but I hear from those who have checked that it looks pretty bad so far this year. The recent news about the economy probably won't make things any easier, as you can read about in this article. In a nutshell: professors who can still work might consider putting off retirement as long as they can--bad news for newly-minted PhDs who continue to wait for the long-anticipated (the promise is almost mythical, it seems) future rush of retiring baby-boomer academics.

Just today, I received my semi-annual report from TIAA-Cref, and it shows another net loss, but I don't worry too much about these things yet. I don't know...maybe I should. This morning at the copy machine, I talked with a colleague who is much closer to retirement age than I am. He was worried, he explained, about his money, also tied up in TIAA-Cref--and maybe with very good reason.

"You're very young, of course," he said to me. "By the time you retire, things might have recovered."

"Or there will be nothing left," I jokingly replied.

"Maybe," he said quite seriously. Yikes.

But at least I have a steady job now. After three years on the market, I can't be more grateful. By the way, we are hiring for two positions in our department at Shepherd, if you know anyone who is interested. (One position is in poetry and poetics, the other in 18th-century British literature.)