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From the General Secretary: The Hiring Season
By Mary Burgan
In the seasons of the academic year, midwinter is devoted to hiring new colleagues. The festivities begin in November, when permissions to search are granted. Then, the luckiest departments, in the spirit of the approaching holidays, dream of new assistant professors. And so the process begins—the politicking of the job description through a search committee, the posting of ads in the disciplinary job lists, the hope that the precious allocation of a line won’t be cashed in by the dean at the last minute.
Once the ad is out, the deluge of applications rises; then faculty members are called upon to render their most considered judgments of potential colleagues. In the current bleak job market, search committees are relieved to spot any deficiency that will allow them to reject without guilt. What can they see in the multitudes of dossiers that will inspire an invitation for an interview at a scholarly meeting and eventually a campus visit? The fact is that dossiers emphasize the record of research—a letter outlining the directions of future inquiry, a dissertation chapter, published articles, and letters of recommendation commending the applicant’s intellectual achievements and promise. To be sure, there is the obligatory nod, proclaiming the candidate’s devotion to teaching and service, but this tends to be taken seriously only when the research record is compelling.
The psychological health of search committees can disintegrate as the hiring season intensifies. Academic job allocations are so rare that a feeding frenzy may ensue after years of starvation. Pathologies reveal themselves unexpectedly. Faculty members who joined the department in days of relative ease can become extremely fierce about whether new colleagues will meet stringent new standards. Publication in a respectable venue can suddenly become an intolerable sign of mediocrity: "Where’s the book?" And then newer faculty members who have leaped very high hurdles in their own job search may demand radical originality. The retracking of a familiar argument can seem a mortal flaw, failure to make revolutionary claims a sign of retrogression. Skirmishes can break out between the schools of thought, so that the phenomenologists become adamant against hiring another number cruncher. And vice versa. Finally, academic pedigree can come to seem more important than the record itself: status satisfaction tempts the hiring of a novice from one of the coastal elites, rather than fastening upon the greater experience of applicants who’ve become all-round candidates through their "postgraduate" work in a variety of schools.
"Experience" is what search committees really should want in new colleagues, even though they are frequently turned off by it—tending to imagine that experience carries the label "used" or "used up." Despite the difficulty of finding first-time, full-time positions in academia, some departments resist taking very seriously applicants who’ve proved themselves in the part-time ranks. The notion of graduate training as an "apprenticeship," a time of gathering experience, has also been devalued by the enlistment of teaching assistants to assume the roles of full-time instructors. Thus a recent resolution placed before the Modern Language Association asserts: "Whereas, the ‘apprenticeship’ model no longer obtains in a job system that fails to guarantee employment in the fields for which graduate students train," the term should be abolished.
In the past several years, there has been a series of attacks on faculty governance as delayed, slack, and lacking the grit necessary to make tough decisions in higher education. But in the hiring season, faculty colleagues do control the future of the professoriate. At the very roots of the profession, faculty members have hiring power, and willingly do the work necessary to exercise it. The major question is not power, then, but the values that such power sponsors. In olden days, advertisements for "academic vacancies" could be posted in the AAUP’s Bulletin for ten cents a word. Quaintly, the word "experience" appears in just about every one of those ancient ads. The job market thirty years ago was as tight as it is now, but faculties were willing to take more risks—hiring colleagues who expected to move around in a career from introductory teaching to student advising to research and graduate teaching to administrative chores. If the governing power of the professoriate is to be maintained rather than dissipated among a range of managerial half jobs, the hiring season must become both more flexible and more humane. The vision of the jobs that lie before new faculty must include duties that cannot be encompassed by a conventional c.v. We must find ways to make experience count.
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