Getting Hired

Terry Caesar Getting Hired In order to have a job, you've got to be hired. If you've got a recent academic position, however, the process by which you were hired is likely to have been one of the most interiorized, prolonged, politically fraught, and severely rationalized it is possible to undergo in any field. Getting hired for an academic position is not like business where the interview is at the decisive center of the process. Indeed, one of the curiosities of academic hiring is that it is consequent upon a decision whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. You're never sure precisely what will prove decisive even if you get as far as the on-campus visit, meet with the graduate students in order to ask them if they have to share office space with the faculty , luxuriate throughout in some sort of minority status, and get a jolly chuckle from everybody during the interview when you express relief at not having been asked to pee into a bottle. How has the hiring process changed, and how has it changed, in turn, the very idea of an academic career? I'm not sure it would be possible to determine exactly how getting hired has changed during the last forty years. Take simply the matter of expectations. A hiring, like a marriage, redefines a larger instutitional structure each time. Henry Wilbur begins his entry in The Academic's Handbook, "On Getting a Job," with the following statement: "The first task of the new Ph.D. is to obtain an academic position." Then he refers to his own experience. His first paragraph concludes as follows: "On the basis of that experience, I immediately qualify my opening sentence: before you set out to obtain a job in a college or university , you should do some frank and honest soul-searching" (63). Forty years ago, would Wilbur have felt the need to make his qualification ? Thirty years ago? Twenty? When did academics begin to align themselves with businessmen as wage-earners? When did it become imperative to caution "entry-level" candidates about the rigors of committee work? When, for that matter, did it become necessary for a book to appear with a chapter such as Wilbur's? One feels that if he turned any more of his skepticism on the very process he aims to elucidate , he simply couldn't provide his wise counsel to leave hobbies off your c.v. or to be sure to appear in business clothes if the department has asked about your marital status. When did getting hired, one could ask, become so thoroughly routinized that some attempt at detachment from it now only appears to be idle or fatuous? It's very difficult not to posit some point in time during which hiring was easier, more humane, and on a more casual scale. Therefore 226 the minnesota review historical perspective unavoidably becomes an exercise in idealization. Let me consider in this regard B.L. Reid's charming memoir, First Acts, which concludes with his working as a milkman in 1946, before an employment agency in Chicago notifies him of a position at Iowa State College. He and his wife are both offered jobs without interviews. Although Reid mentions "an exchange of letters," presumably none of them were letters of recommendation. I think we can further presume that Reid didn't submit either a cover letter or a c.v., and it probably would have been as inconceivable for his new employers to have asked him to deliver a formal lecture as it would have been to check their offer against affirmative action guidelines. We do not, in short, understand Reid's situation today according to the one characterized by Kafka in The Trial: "The verdict doesn't come all at once, the proceedings gradually merge into the verdict." Nonetheless, idealization can be resisted insofar as proceedings did obtain, which enable Reid's initial good fortune to be understood as merely part of a more comprehensive sentence. Four years later, while teaching at Mount Holyoke, the intelligence was discreetly given to Reid that he would be fired because he lacked a Ph.D. It...