Career Opportunities

The paradigmatic academic career seems so straightforward: get the degree, get a job, get promoted through the ranks. Actual careers seldom follow the model; in particular, the move from graduate school to a permanent position rarely happens without interim steps, if at all. But if that job appears, adapting to it (and the paycheque) is not hard. Certain obvious differences exist between graduate school and tenure-stream work, but none is unusually burdensome. Teaching a full course load is time-consuming, but the shock soon dissipates. The schedule lends structure to weeks and terms, a not unwelcome change from the relatively unstructured and solitary days of thesis writing. Committee work is sometimes onerous, but such obligations are not always unpleasant, nor are they unfamiliar to those who have performed university service at earlier stages of their careers. My own recent entry into the profession—I’ve been teaching full-time for three years—has been relatively uncomplicated. But one thorny issue, which places the transition from graduate school to the workplace in the broader context of the academic job market, has been consistently taxing: dealing with students who want to become academics themselves.

I find the material elements of the job easier to manage than the less tangible aspects of the shift from cloistered student to professor with a public role. I don’t mean that the job confers celebrity (if only!) but, rather, that faculty members represent to students the profession and the institution. New professors find themselves sudden authorities and gatekeepers, embedded in a system that, when it comes to graduate school, is evidently failing. To put it bluntly, the basic requirements of teaching—to generate excitement about the humanities, to make literary studies seem vital and intellectual life attractive—conflict with the need to counsel students about job prospects for those with graduate degrees in English, especially the phd. The details of the employment crisis in the humanities don’t need to be rehashed.¹ It is a truth universally acknowledged, after all, that the profession is scarcely in want of more supremely qualified graduates of excellent doctoral programs who cannot find satisfactory work. And everyone agrees that getting a job requires good fortune—although it is a fiction widely entertained that those who do not secure permanent jobs are somehow less suitable than those who do. The infamous articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education denouncing graduate school as a cult and the life of the mind as a “big lie” have said all that can be said from the pessimist’s perspective.² But our collective hand-wringings are unknown to each new cohort of students who want to pursue a higher degree: that an employment crisis exists must be explained anew to successive waves of students. In my experience, virtually all graduate students arrive unaware of hiring trends and the differences among types of academic appointment. The others typically fail to grasp the seriousness of the situation. Nor should we expect otherwise—students are justly excited by their recent achievements of convocation and matriculation. Moreover, it seems duplicitous to temper students’ enthusiasm immediately: Welcome to grad school! Too bad you came.

How then to encourage students without perpetuating false expectations? And how to treat students candidly while meeting departmental needs, particularly when programs aspire to attract top candidates and therefore cannot advise students impartially? Considerable capital, figurative and actual, is at stake in sending students to master’s and doctoral programs; departments and individual professors profit from the prestige. Graduate students early in their studies can deflect anxiety about future employment into a gallows humour that fosters camaraderie; into blind faith—many students have only ever known academic success, so ultimate failure, or only partly satisfactory outcomes, can hardly be imagined; or into hard work on research and teaching, the ostensible keys to the lock of employment. But those of us with recent experience of searching for work know that options may well not materialize. It becomes apparent, on the job market, that publications and awards do not guarantee success. And the consequences of a failed search come into view, perhaps for the...