Confidence, Rejection, and Criticism: Advice from Actors to Academics, Part Three

Christmas week is especially hard for young academics trying to get a job, especially in literary studies. The annual rhythm of the job search means that most first-round interviews (the interviews that take place at major disciplinary conferences over the winter) get scheduled during the first half of December. By this time of year, grad students (and recent PhDs) looking for a job are counting the meager number of schools where their applications are still active; they may have applied to dozens of jobs and gotten one or two first-round interviews to show for it. Worse yet, many people are getting nothing but the long and lengthening silence that tells them, day by painful day, that nothing is happening for them this winter.

And then many of those eager job-seekers, who've been tops of their classes all of their lives, have to fly home for Christmas and explain to their family that they're not getting a job this year, that they're not even in the running for a job this year. The darkest time of year is pretty dark for people in my business.

So, since it's that time of the year, it's time for a third installment of "Career Advice from Actors to Academics," inspired by Robert Cohen's classic book of advice Acting Professionally. As I wrote in part one, an academic career has become like a career in the arts because of the scarcity of work and the pervasive rejection. So academics, especially newer academics, can learn from our brothers and sisters in the theater (and in the other arts as well), who've been dealing with rejection and penury since back in the day.

But the hard truth is that artists are better prepared for rejection than scholars are. Few arts careers have the kind of heartbreaking schedule that the academic job search demands, where two-thirds of your job prospects for the year can evaporate within a window of a few weeks. Actors get rejected all year round. So do writers, dancers, sculptors, painters, and filmmakers. A stand-up comic who lives in the right city and works hard enough can get rejected every single night of the week. But none of those artists have to watch most of their chances for the year slip away just before Christmas. Artists get to space out the rejections better, and to inure themselves on a daily and weekly basis. (When I was an undergraduate theater bum, every show for the semester did make its casting decisions during the first week of the term, which is the only thing in my life that even remotely prepared me for the annual MLA conference.)

More importantly, almost every working artist, including the ones who've gotten an MFA, have started racking up rejections from their early twenties at least, while scholars don't begoin to experience the hard knocks until they've been systematically unprepared for it. Every actor gets turned down at auditions constantly, and many who enter a graduate acting program have been turned down many times before they get to school. The same goes with writers and other artists. After all, if people were already putting you on Broadway, you wouldn't go to acting school. But in fact, people are not putting you on Broadway. So actors who get a graduate degree have had to toughen up at least a little; they're prepared for the hard realities of the market because they've already tested them.

The scholar's career path is completely different. The rejections don't start until after you get your PhD. Graduate school is tough in all kinds of ways, but it promises to reward all of the deserving, as the job market will never do. If you earn a degree, you will get that degree.The working life of many doctoral students is a long series of A grades, scholarships, fellowships, and departmental awards until graduating with the doctorate. Then the working life suddenly turns into a long, bitter round of pummeling rejection. Most people aren't ready for that at all. How could they be?

The only thing that will get you through is confidence, which is not at all the same as ego. Let's go to Cohen's working definition:

Confidence is the power a person has over his or her own personality; it allows the person to accept criticism and at the same time rise above it.

Note the importance here of accepting criticism without feeling belittled by it. The false confidence of a heavily-defended ego cannot take criticism at all. But an ego like that can never survive an artistic, or an academic, career. You have to have a healthy perspective that can take criticism on board (although you don't necessarily allow any given critic to override your judgment completely) and find ways to use it.

It's important here to distinguish between criticism and rejection. If you have a fragile ego, those two things sound the same, or nearly the same. In fact, they are fundamentally different. Criticism, even if it happens to be mistaken, is almost always a gift. Someone has taken time and effort, neither of which are in great supply, in order to help you improve. Some criticism is not helpful, but all criticism is an attempt to be helpful.

Rejection does not come with criticism. It just says no, and moves along. The eerie silence that haunts some job-seekers the week before Christmas, or the brief formal rejections that some hiring departments send, don't offer any tips on how to improve.

You also need confidence to deal with the polite silence of rejection. Here is Cohen again:

 [Confidence] allows an actor to believe in the reality of his or her performance even when no one else does. A person may have all kinds of doubts about his or her potential for career success, but may not doubt that "he is an actor," that "she can act."

Note that confidence is not a prediction about results. I will be a star someday is not confidence. I am an actor, even when you've been turned down for the fifteenth audition in a row, is confidence.

In the same way, your conviction that you will get an incredible and shiny job this time out is not confidence. (In most cases, it is simply magical thinking, which is unhealthy.) Confidence, in the sense Cohen is using it, is not about predicting career outcomes. These businesses are too precarious for predictions like that. Confidence is not your will to believe that the plum Ivy League job on this fall's listings will be yours. Confidence is the belief that your work is valid, that your scholarship is actually a contribution. You might note the distinction here is very close to a distinction between believing in "yourself" and believing in your work as something separate from you, which I think is largely a healthy distinction.

Confidence, in Cohen's sense, is about believing that the work you do is useful and worth reading: that what you do is scholarship, no matter what the external rewards are.

I would add one further thing about weathering rejection. In all of the arts, the psychologically healthy rule of thumb is that successful artists (read: academics) get rejected all the time, and that they are rewarded only sometimes. To put it another way: you will be rejected even if your work is good, indeed no matter how good your work is, but you will never be accepted at all unless your work is good.

That means that you should usually only attach meaning to the good results, and write the rejections off as the normal cost of doing business. That would be an irrational approach in most other endeavors, but in the arts, including the scholarly arts, that approach accurately describes the real facts on the ground. If the talented are only rewarded one time in ten or twenty, then the single success is more meaningful than the nine or nineteen rejections.

If you are a struggling new academic and you are finding that the rejection is truly universal -- if, for example, you applied for three dozen jobs this fall and none of them even asked you for an additional writing sample -- then you probably need to change something about what you're doing. Most likely, there is some qualification that you need and don't have, something that you need to add to your CV in order to enter the pool of viable candidates.

But if you are getting small flashes of encouragement inside dark, watery depths of rejection, then you are perfectly rational to take the encouragement, and not the rejection, as meaningful. No one can afford to reward all of the deserving job-seekers. There are too many good people to offer them all even a first-round interview. This is the literal truth. But at the same time, no one has any need or reason to waste their own time with someone who isn't, on some level, a viable candidate. You only get asked for extra materials if your CV is up to snuff. You only get a conference interview if the committee thinks they might actually hire you. And even if you don't progress to the next round of interviews, you should remember that the people who interviewed you saw you as a professional doing real work.

There are more good people than there are rewards for good people. So even the good are only rewarded rarely. But only the good are rewarded at all. Forget the failures, because everyone fails. Remember the successes, because there is only one explanation for success.

cross-posted from (and comments welcome at) Dagblog

Solving the Two-Body Problem

For years now, my spouse and I have had what academics call the "two-body problem": two careers at two universities in two places. It's a common problem for our professional generation, and we have an easier version of it than most. My spouse (the more accomplished blogger Flavia) works at a school about 250 miles away from mine. We maintain two homes and commute between them. We have been lucky that we are not farther apart, and that we can travel by car rather than plane. But like most of our generation, we have had no visible or easy solution for our problem. Professorships are very hard to come by, and job mobility after one's early career is almost nonexistent except for a handful of stars. We have always promised each other that we would  live together full-time some day, but we have never been able to promise when or how that day would come.

Now we know. As Flavia has announced recently, we have completed a busy and complicated season of job searches. The result is that she will be moving to my university in the fall of 2015 with a position befitting her accomplishments. This, as she points out, is mostly the result of outrageous luck: both of our schools unexpectedly listed a job in just the right sub-field this year. That not only meant that we could apply to each other's departments, but that each department understood that it might lose us to the other. We never planned for this, because we could not have planned for this.

The particular version of a happy ending we got is the one I least expected. It's not just that I viewed it as the most unlikely result; I have operated for years under the assumption that it was not possible. I thought my employer would never offer my spouse a job, and was absolutely certain that they would never offer one she could afford to take. I was wrong. But that wrongness was the basis of my career strategies for years; that is how little I planned this.

So how to solve the two-body problem? My advice is worthless, in normal academic-job-advice terms. I could not have made this happen, nor could Flavia. Most of the key events were entirely beyond our control. But that is true of every academic job search. You cannot make someone offer you a job. You always have to be lucky. All you can do is be ready when the lucky break comes.

One of Flavia's old friends once asked us, "So what is the strategy for you two?" and we had to say there was no strategy, because there was no obvious endgame. The only strategy was to keep doing our jobs as well as we could and to build our professional value as best we were able. But that is a strategy, too: the only strategy you can really follow. The last few months and weeks have been exceptionally busy and superficially eventful, but most of what Flavia and I did to make this happen, the things that were about our efforts instead of about luck, happened over the four or five years before those jobs were ever posted.

The real success here is Flavia's. The ultimate resolution of our problem was a job offer to her, and I will  enjoy the privilege of living and working with my spouse mostly because I am lucky enough to have a talented and ambitious spouse. 

The conventional wisdom is that it is easier to find a second job for a less accomplished partner. If one of us were clearly junior to the other in career terms, or did not have a serious research agenda, the usual thinking goes, it would be much easier for a department to find a starter gig or to create a non-tenure-track job. It's harder and more expensive to find a job for a professional peer. So, on paper, marrying an intellectual heavyweight like Flavia should have been a big mistake; she is nobody's trailing spouse. And nobody moves back down to an entry-level job the same week her book comes out.

But that "wrong move" turned out to be the right move for me. My colleagues and my institution saw a chance to hire someone who, because of the nature of the profession, would not otherwise be applying for this job at this stage of her career. (Every academic job search gets an abundance of applications from talented new PhDs, but since the market is poorly structured for mid-career job-seekers only a few places get many talented mid-career applicants.) This was not about credentials that Flavia scraped together after this job opening turned up. She didn't write that book over Thanksgiving weekend. This was about qualifications she has been steadily building for years, before she had any notion that this job opening would exist.

My ultimate role was to strengthen Flavia's negotiating hand. The decision to offer her a job was about her qualifications. The decision to make her an offer reflecting those qualifications was almost certainly about both the opportunity to hire her and the possibility of losing me. Hiring Flavia is a bargain at virtually any price, but passing up a bargain is easier than giving up something you already have. My school could have saved money by hiring one of those promising-but-inexperienced applicants for less money, but only at the risk of losing one of their established faculty members.

I am sure that my colleagues believed that I might leave; I have spent the last five years working under the assumption that I would eventually have to. And I have tried to be aboveboard about external job searches, telling my department chairs when I was applying and keeping them up to date about the progress of outside searches (including telling my chair promptly when I was eliminated). That included being transparent about my application to my spouse's school. 

I have also worked hard on publishing my research over the last five years, because it's a publishing record that is most likely to help you change jobs. My annual reports have made it clear that my supervisors consider me productive. So the idea that I might leave my job in order to be closer to my wife wasn't a new concept introduced in the midst of negotiations. I didn't actually say anything to my bosses during negotiations. My institution had already spent a few years thinking about the chances that I might leave, and the chances that I could.

But I also spent the last five years trying to be a good citizen of my department and university. This should also have been the wrong move, because I didn't expect to be able to stay, but it almost certainly turned out to be the right one. The conventional wisdom when you want to change jobs is that you should focus as much of your energy on research and publication as you can, and as little on service or committee work as you can get away with. I've written before about research as hard currency and service as local scrip. Publication is valuable to outside employers, while service is mostly valuable to the place you're serving. One keeps its value wherever you go, and the other can only be spent on-site. Amassing local scrip has no purpose if you're planning to leave. More importantly, I didn't believe that my institutional scrip could ever be put toward what I really wanted, because I didn't think "Mid-career Job for Spouse" was something they carried in the company store.

But I've spent the last few years doing a lot of administrative work. I have told my department that I needed to look for other jobs, but I have also told them that I was committed to doing my job properly for as long as I was here. That means working for the school's long-term future whether I intended to share it or not, doing some serious administrative chores inside my department and also becoming one of the department's public faces to the rest of the university. I did those things for the same basic reasons that baseball players run out ground balls: not because I thought it would get me anywhere, but because I would feel bad about myself if I didn't and because I was afraid if I stopped doing things the right way I would develop bad habits and lose the ability to do my job properly. But today I see the last few years differently. If I had used my weekly commute as an excuse to slack off, I'm not sure my colleagues would have worked so hard to end that commute. And I don't think they would have focused on keeping me if I had focused on trying to leave, at the rest of the department's expense. This could not have possibly happened if Flavia were not so very qualified. It likely would not have happened if my department did not think I could, and would, eventually leave. But they also had to believe that I was worth keeping.

The other reason they teach ballplayers to run out hopeless ground balls is because occasionally it does actually get you somewhere. Sometimes you hit the ball and don't seem to have any chance at reaching base. But then some piece of unexpected luck, some fluke, gives you an unforeseen opportunity. Players are taught to run hard for first base, no matter what, so that they have a chance to be lucky. You need to put in the work before there is any apparent hope; if you don't turn on your full speed until something surprising happens, you're probably too late. If you ever get a sudden bit of good luck, you need to be running as hard as you can.

cross-posted from Dagblog

Do PhDs Expire?

cross-posted from Dagblog

Last week the annual job list for college literature professors went live, in an annual ritual I've blogged about before. And it looks like the worst list for Shakespeareans in history.

Two years ago, I used this space to explain how the 2008 crash had killed the already far-too-small job market for new PhDs, and how poor the rebound was two years later:

When the financial crisis hit in 2008 ... [w]hat had been about five dozen jobs teaching Shakespeare or Milton became four dozen, or less, although there were still the same hundred and fifty or two hundred or two hundred and seventy-five people trying to get them.

[In 2009] there weren't even four dozen jobs advertised in the fall. There were still 200 smart young Shakespeareans, Miltonists and Tamburlaine experts out there looking for work. In fact, there were more, because the forty or so who'd gotten jobs the previous year had been replaced by two or three times that many new PhDs.

 And in 2010 there were only about two dozen entry-level jobs for my younger Renaissance colleagues. Four years on from the crash, it's worse than ever: the initial job list has only 13 entry-level tenure-track jobs teaching Renaissance lit in North America. There were 19 jobs; three are outside the country; three are senior positions for people who are already well-established (as in "full professor at the University of Chicago" established). That leaves thirteen for new PhDs who want to stay in the profession and have a middle-class salary. Thirteen. Some more jobs will trickle in over the next few weeks, and there will be a smaller round of listings in the spring (if the listing can, indeed, get any smaller), but thirteen jobs for a year's crop of Renaissance lit PhDs is a famine. And it isn't just one year's crop of PhDs, but all of the accumulated jobless graduates from the past few years.

As if all this wasn't grim enough (and some other subfields are having better luck than Renaissance is, but not much), this year two universities that are hiring decided to declare that people who hadn't gotten tenure-track jobs during the crunch years were now persona non grata.

Colorado State advertised for a job teaching pre-1900 American literature, but specified that applicants had to have gotten their doctorates in 2010 or later. Their explanation was that it was an entry-level job with an entry-level salary, and they were trying to screen out people who'd already been on the tenure-track for several years. That part is fair enough. But their language obviously ruled out people who hadn't gotten a tenure-track job, and who'd been toiling away as adjuncts or lecturers since, you know, the whole economy cratered. An uproar ensued (see great posts from SEK, Historiann, Dr. Crazy, and what the heck, more SEK) and Colorado State changed the wording of the ad. It further turned out that Harvard's Comparative Lit department had published a job ad asking for PhDs from 2009 and later, and they too changed that wording. But the cynic in me doubts that someone who's been teaching college off the tenure track for more than a year or two will end up with the Colorado State job. (That someone who's been teaching off the tenure track for more than three years would land the Harvard job is out of the question.)

The ugly question, "Does a PhD expire?" has two answers: one for search committees, and one for job applicants. To search committees, I say: it is obtuse and inhumane to screen out job candidates because they've been underemployed in an irrationally savage employment market.  We all know that there are talented and deserving people without steady jobs, because there are many more talented and deserving people than there are steady jobs, so don't turn away qualified applicants for no damned reason. Just read their CVs. Yes, you have hundreds of CVs to read. Screening out the adjuncts and lecturers won't shrink your pile in a meaningful way. It will only shrink your heart, and blind you to potential hires who could help your department enormously.

But for the talented and deserving people working away out there, trying to find a job with a future in our profession, I have hard news.

PhDs do expire. Absolutely. But you have to let them.

I have two graduate degrees, in two related but distinct fields. One of my degrees has expired. I could not get a job, nor apply for a job with a straight face, on the basis of that degree. It is, at best, an interesting thing on my CV, but only to someone who is already interested in me because of my other degree, which I have not allowed to expire. One of my degrees has value as a job credential and the other has not, because I have maintained the professional value of one and not the other.

My first graduate degree is expired because I have not published in that field for years. It had expired by the time I got the second degree. (All my publications in the first field are from the years I was studying for that degree. My last publication is from the year I graduated and switched fields. It couldn't be more legible on my CV.) I no longer practice that discipline. I don't teach it, although I have taken over a beginner's class when the scheduled teacher fell through. But I would not teach an advanced course, let alone a graduate course, or direct even an MA thesis. I don't do that anymore. My qualifications have lapsed. On the other hand, I am working in the field where I got my second terminal degree, and that degree has kept its value as a job qualification because I continue adding value to it.

What about those tenured people who haven't published in years? Why haven't their PhDs expired? The answer is that they have. None of those people could get another job in the field. They can hold onto the jobs they have, but they can't even apply for others. Is it unfair that they hold onto those jobs? Sure. (Although sometimes not; I think that there are sixty-somethings who no longer have the fire in the belly for new research projects but who are nonetheless entitled to a professional autumn as teachers.) But the question isn't what's fair. It's what's best for you. And if you do not yet have a job, you need to keep your doctorate up-to-date by continuing to do work in the field.

In the humanities that means writing and publishing, no matter how heavy your non-tenure-track teaching load is. If you got your degree in 2008 and don't have a peer-reviewed publication since then, search committees won't give you a pass because you've been teaching so much comp. They have plenty of applicants who have been publishing more recently than you have, including applicants who were teaching the same brutal loads that you have. If you haven't published since you got the degree, departments will view that degree as nothing more than a technical qualification. It will no longer be a sign of your actual qualifications, no longer a reliable predictor of success. Not publishing suggests to search committees that you won't publish, and they are not crazy to think that. This isn't a job market where you can get credit for qualifications that are not in evidence. A degree that hasn't been followed up by published research will be construed as a sign that you're finished as a researcher. If that's an unfair assumption, it's also the only assumption that hiring committees can feel confident in making.

Getting your degree is an achievement you can be proud of. But more importantly, it is an indicator of your potential for future achievements as a scholar. And you need to keep demonstrating that potential by achieving more things. Your degree has as much value on the academic market as you give it. Use it or lose it.