In the comments section of Helen's recent post in praise of ordinary academics, Derek Bowman wrote:
The problem is that even positions like these now require one to be – or at least to present oneself as – exceptional. How many of the many job market threads here at the Cocoon are about how to *stand out* rather than simply how to be a good teacher or a good philosopher?
NK then added:
To add to Derek's comment: It's long bothered me that so much of the discussion here is about how to stand out. To an extent, I get it. But telling everyone how to stand out arguably just intensifies the competition (and reinforces the background assumption of meritocracy) that's already making so many of us so miserable. I'm actually inclined to think that giving job-seekers advice about how to get a job is a lot like encouraging athletes to use performance-enhancing drugs (setting aside the fact that the latter are against the rules): if you give the advice to a few, and they take it, it will likely help them; but if you give it to everyone, and most of them take it, the result is that everyone is working harder (suffering, or taking the risk of suffering, the side-effects of the drugs) for basically the same chances of success. So the whole exercise seems pointless (irrational, even).
Helen then responded by saying, "The way I see my mission on The Cocoon and other forums is to help level the playing field…[by providing] free information…[that] helps to make it clearer what [kind of] candidate you are." However, NK wasn't persuaded that what we do helps to level the playing field.
Because these kinds of concerns have come up before (and I do understand where they are coming from) I'd like to try to clarify why I am still hopeful that the tips and information we've provided may help to level the playing field in good ways.
Allow me to begin with a true story. A number of years ago (before beginning our first job-market boot camp series), I was at a conference in the early fall, just around the time the main academic job-market season begins in earnest (at least in North America). At the conference's happy hour, I met a nice young grad student from a lower-ranked program who seemed sharp and sounded like he did interesting work. When I found out he was defending his dissertation soon, I asked him if we was going out on the job-market. When he said that he was, I asked him if he was all ready to go with his materials (i.e. cover letter, research statement, teaching portfolio, etc.). The answer I got from him stunned me. Not only hadn't he even begun to put his materials together: he seemed to have no idea what they even involved (particularly, the teaching portfolio). He asked me all kinds of really basic questions, such as what should go into a portfolio. When I asked him whether there was any job-market guidance in his department–or from his dissertation advisor–he told me he'd had no guidance at all. I found this unconscionable. Maybe this student should have known better than to get a PhD in a department like this in the first place, but still, it seemed to me profoundly unfair for this student to head out on the market completely unprepared. And, over a period of time, I encountered more and more early-career people like him: people who clearly weren't on a level playing field with students coming out of programs with better mentoring.
That's one story. Here's another: my own! After scuffling around on the job-market for about five years (not doing very well at all), a couple of friends of mine told me they used a job-market consultant…and that they both got tenure-track jobs after using the service. Because I was pretty much at the end of my rope, I coughed up several hundred dollars for the service…and I learned that I was presenting myself badly in my cover letters, research statement, and teaching statement. I learned from the consultant that I was making a lot of common mistakes (see here, here, and here). Why? Because I had never been advised better. Think about how unfair that is: to spend the better part of a decade in graduate school and then half a decade in a non-tenure-track position, only to find that I didn't have good information on how to present my materials well!
Finally, here's another thing I've learned. That advice you receive in grad school about how to become competitive on the job-market? For the most part, that advice is coming from people who have spent their entire careers at R1 universities–people who have little to no experience knowing what hiring committees actually care about at teaching-focused institutions. Having worked at a teaching-focused institution for ten years now (and having served on four search committees), it became increasingly clear over time that many candidates–and the people advising them–were out of touch with what it takes to be competitive for (or a 'good fit') for different types of jobs. All the while I learned (from other friends of mine) that they came out of programs that did give them good advice on how to be competitive for different types of jobs. That too seemed to me unfair.
This, in brief, is why I've thought our aim here (in giving job-market tips) to be a good one. Although there are so many unfair and awful things about the market, one thing we can do to make it more fair is to help everyone work with more accurate information. I think this does help to level the playing field. It helps to make the job-market less arbitrary–less a matter of how lucky or unlucky you were in terms of the mentoring you received. Sure, if everyone follows the same tips, it may be more difficult to "stand out." But that, I think, is precisely what fairness involves here: giving as many people as possible good information so that their performance on the market is more a matter of their actual qualities and accomplishments as a philosopher, teacher, and colleague–the things they have worked so hard at!–and less a matter of whether they were lucky to receive good information and guidance.
Or so I'm inclined to think. What say you?
Leave a Reply