You Don't Deserve the Job You Land Any More than You Don't the One You Don't

(This post began as a response to Sisyphus' latest post, but was eaten by Blogger.  Instead of risking repetition, I'm posting it here.  I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know.  I just think it's important to remind people what "random" really means.)

I know about fifteen people on the market this year, and I'm constantly having to remind them not to personalize their successes and failures.  When they fail, they appeal to the randomness of the market and despair—but when they succeed, they believe it a sign of their inherent value.  They're now beautiful and unique snowflakes whose true value has been finally been recognized!  Never do they stop and think about all the candidates who didn't land that job—you know, the ones who are at home consoling themselves by appealing to the randomness of the market.  So I want to say this loud and clear:

Those of you who land interviews, campus visits and offer sheets?  You are no more deserving of them than anyone else on the market.  I know you think you are—I know you're thrilled by the very thought of your own deservedness, but consider the conditions of your "triumph."  You have bested your contemporaries in a game of chance.  Put another way:

Do some players deserve to win at roulette?  Are they inherently better scholars because they do?  Of course not.  Having been on two hiring committees now, I can tell you that, short of gross incompetence, the odds of you making the final cut depend not on you, but on a host of factors to which you're not privy.  They include, but are not limited to: the personal histories of the committee members; internal departmental politics; unadvertised but vital institutional needs; &c.  (And &c. &c. &c.) 

For example, your chapter on Wyndham Lewis might be forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, but if one of the committee members believes Lewis' contributions to Vorticism are overshadowed, aesthetically, by Jessica Dismorr's, and that were it not for the sexist assumptions of early 20th Century art critics (which, by writing on Lewis, you've unthinkingly replicated) Dismorr would be hosanahed and Lewis dustbinned—if someone on the committee believes that, you've no shot at that job.  Your merits matter far, far less than their prejudices.*

If, however, you happened to write on Dismorr, and this same person is on the committee, you're almost guaranteed a campus visit.  This is what I mean when I say you don't deserve the what you land any more than you don't what you don't.  If you remove the personal element—if you treat the market like a roulette wheel, you won't believe your losses reflect poorly on you, nor that your victories are deserved.

They're not.  This will make you a much happier person. 

That is all.

---

*A purely hypothetical example.  I just happened to be reading Shane Weller's "Nietzsche among the Modernists: The Case of Wyndham Lewis," from the latest Modernism/modernity, before I composed this post.

Comments

[tomemos]

"Those of you who land interviews, campus visits and offer sheets? You are no more deserving of them than anyone else on the market."

Self-evidently false.

[Jonathan Dresner]

There are things you can do that will hurt your chances -- dumb mistakes in cover letters, getting drunk at "meet the candidate" events, getting recommendation letters from punitive but prominent bastards -- and things you can do that will help -- tailoring the letter/cv/materials, being honest about your record, getting letters from people you trust, doing good work, prepping the job talk/teaching demo, scheduling conference interviews early in the day -- but you're right that there is a huge element of "matching" and seemingly random elements.

Luck helps, though it favors the prepared.

[Adam Kotsko]

There's something wrong with this post, and I can't quite articulate it.

[Mikhail Emelianov]

jonathan, i think that, of course, there are things you can do to improve your chances, but they are still "chances" nonetheless, it seems (i think this comment is sufficiently "anti-intellectualist," wouldn't you say Herr Kotsko?)

[tomemos]

Mikhail, you can say the same thing about any accomplishment--getting any job, getting into college or grad school, getting a book published. There's no such thing as a pure meritocracy, but this post tells people not to be proud of their accomplishments at all, in fact denies that they're accomplishments at all, which is snotty and also nonsensical. This post annoyed me more than anything I've read in a long time.

[SEK]

Tomemos, I'm not on the market this year, so this has nothing to do with me personally -- hence, no intended and/or personal snottiness. My point is that for the most part, all the candidates out there have accomplished much the same thing. Yes, some may be more well published than others ... but we all know that publishing in academia's more about who you know than how qualified you are. And yes, some people may have attended a more prestigious institution, or won a more prestigious post-doc than others ... but we all know that where you go to grad school and what post-docs you win have more to do with who you know than how qualified you are. Look, I say this as someone who's been the beneficiary of this nominally meritocratic system: I shouldn't be here in the first place, and I recognize that. I lucked into the status I've "earned," and I'm not going to tell absolutely qualified, brilliant people that they're not getting jobs because their CV's inherently flawed.

I've had enough of praising the lucky for the luck. There's no method to the madness of the market, and once we accept that, we'll all be much happier. If we strike out our first time up, well, it's not because we 1) don't belong in academia, 2) never belonged in academia or 3) faked our way through academia ... it's because our stars didn't align. We didn't have the right committee overseeing these job searches. It's because we mistakenly tried to tackle some fashionable author when this committee wanted a traditionalist ... or that we took a traditionalist approach when this committee wanted the latest-and-greatest.

Really, I'm not telling people not to proud of their "accomplishments" ... I'm merely saying that what they accomplished was the successful completion of their Ph.D. As someone who paid his filing fee this morning and will earn his doctorate come Winter's end, I'm in total agreement with you. I busted my ass for this degree, and I'm damn proud of it.

BUT!

I don't think it entitles me to a job when the market's as random as it is. I certainly think I do good work. I'm certainly proud of my accomplishments ... but that doesn't mean I deserve a job, and I think it's healthier for everyone, those who land jobs an those who don't, to depersonalize the process, to recognize that their "qualifications" for a certain position are as random as the stars aligning this or that way.

So yes, this post should annoy you -- not because you're you, because, as you well know, I like you -- but because the system to which we entrust our future is as reliable as a roulette wheel. Don't believe me? How about Eric Rauchway? [Edited so as to not be such a brat.] Granted, I wrote this not to annoy, but to deflate those who hit LUCKY RED LUCKY RED LUCKY RED and then think they deserve their "victory" ... because they had enough cash to enter a bid. Thing is, we all have enough green to step to the table, but that doesn't mean the winner's any more deserving than the losers. That's my point.

Not sure how that's snotty ... unless I've mixed my anti-snottiness with some confidence, which means the dilithium crystals are fixing to bust ...

[Stephen]

Scott, your argument makes some sense in terms of a particular university's choice between the three candidates who make it to a campus visit. But in terms of the overall job search I don't think it works. The idea that the job market is entirely random is just as debilitating as the idea that it is a perfectly accurate reflection of your talents and accomplishments. While there's nothing you can do to guarantee that you will get a job, there are many things you can do to improve your chances - i.e., peer-refereed publications (which most definitely do not depend on who you know), having your dissertation in hand when you apply, the quality of your letter, your level of preparation for interviews, etc. Getting interviews is a sign that people out there think that you're a reasonable candidate. Getting no interviews is definitely not a sign that you're a bad scholar. But it is a sign that you need to beef up your qualifications before hitting the job market next year.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I was mostly with you, Scott, but I'm going to have to take exception to this comment on a couple of grounds. (with the caveat that we may be talking past each other entirely, since I'm looking at the field of history, especially Asian history, and you're looking at the field of American literature)

First, a lot of the people who get "lucky" in this business do so because they do more than the minimum, and show the committees that they have the potential to grow into the jobs (the requirements of which often have little to do with the skills we've acquired in attaining our "accomplishments"). There are differences in quality between candidates -- I've been in on a half dozen or more searches, some of which had over a hundred candidates, in both history and writing/rhetoric -- some of which are under the control of the candidates themselves.

Second, I've never gotten anywhere because of "who I know," unless the person recommending me knew that I was good at what I was proposing to do -- my recommenders and contacts know plenty of smart and productive people, and have no reason to say anything nice about me if it isn't true -- and I could actually produce what I said I would. My publications weren't referreed by friends (boy, you can say that again); my national meeting panel proposals weren't accepted by friends; none of the people who've offered me jobs are "friends of friends" (unless they're keeping it secret).

I understand that you're trying to be comforting to people who deserve comfort: there are more qualified applicants than jobs in most fields these days, and job ads never really tell you the whole story about what factors are going to go into selecting short lists. That does not mean that the people who get interviews don't deserve them, just that they don't necessarily deserve them more than some of the people who didn't get them; similarly for every stage in the process. There is always slippage, error, cronyism, system-gaming, brown-nosing. But to tar everyone with that brush is simple sour grapes.

[tomemos]

"Tomemos, I'm not on the market this year, so this has nothing to do with me personally…"

I know that. My assessment stands. Telling people who have just achieved success (in any field, not just the academy) that their accomplishments are no no better than anyone else's, that they lucked into their success, is snotty. Stating that new hires have nothing to be proud of aside from their Ph.D.s (you must know that some dissertations are better than others) is a petty thing to say to people who have worked hard for success and finally achieved it. Even the way you put it is snide: putting "triumph" in quotes, implying that the successful are conceited ("I know you're thrilled by the very thought of your own deservedness"). I took some time away from the keyboard, I came back, I looked at it again, and I felt the same way. It's simply an obnoxious way of making a point that isn't correct anyway.

"I'm not going to tell absolutely qualified, brilliant people that they're not getting jobs because their CV's inherently flawed."

Come on, Scott; that is such a straw man that it makes me wonder why we're having this conversation. We are not talking about the people who didn't get jobs, we're talking about those who did. It's obvious (but still worth saying, especially in this individual case) that there are not nearly enough jobs for all qualified people, and so it doesn't necessarily mean anything if you didn't get any responses. It's perfectly fine to remind the lucky ones (and yes, they are partly lucky) that there are other people who could have gotten there instead; nothing wrong with a little humility. What you're doing here is stating that merit simply makes no difference, which is hyperbolic, irrational and, as another commenter said, sour grapes (even if it's on someone else's behalf). I don't like "the system" either, but it makes no sense to distort the truth of it and denigrate those who have succeeded just to make someone feel better.

[Rich Puchalsky]

People are going to have a difficult time believing that merit doesn't enter into the process. First, I would guess that anyone who's observed people doing skilled jobs has probably observed that there is a wide range of ability among qualified workers in those jobs. If that's so in academia, then the hiring process has to be completely blind to it to be random. Each individual interaction with the hiring process could be almost entirely determined by random factors (or those not dependent on the applicant, actually), but with enough trials, differences in ability should become apparent.

So people don't like attempts to cheer them up in this way. I suggest that instead you give maximally evil advice, and let everyone be cheered up by getting mad at you. Something like:

If you apply for many jobs and don't get one, you suck. Do something else. If you get a job and believe you deserve it, you're a jerk and will go far, until that inevitable moment later on when you realize that you've been a jerk your entire life. If you get a job and don't believe you deserve it, you're a sad sack and you might as well quit now before you hang on by the skin of your teeth for years and then inevitably self-sabotage yourself. The only way to avoid these three possibilities is through unremitting apathy, which of course will not get you a job, but which will let you feel virtuous as you sleep in your parents' basement.

[Karl Steel]

I don't mind being denigrated if that's indeed what's happening. I'm looking out from within the first semester of a new TT job, and a PhD that I received about 6 weeks ago, and I know that I'm here in part because of who I know (it's unlikely I would have advanced from my MA at WWU to my PhD at Columbia without careful networking in my WWU department), I know that at least one of my forthcoming pubs is due to talking to the right people, and I know that what I attention I've received is in part because I deliberately chose a diss topic on a hot new subfield. These are the elements that aren't chance. Certainly if I stress chance too much I'm engaging in a bit of impostor syndrome, and certainly I can't disentangle perfectly the relationship between chance and merit (knowing to seize opportunity by the forelock and all that), but with all that firmly in mind, I also know that chance matters a great deal in my getting the job I have (and in not getting the other jobs I didn't get (being a goldang fool and being simply unqualified at times also plays a role there)).

For instance: after determining who would be interviewing me at Brooklyn College, I looked everyone up. I learned that the medievalist, my now colleague and friend Nicola Masciandaro, is a big metalhead. I'm a fan of metal, too (among other things), so I made a point of working Bolt Thrower into conversation at one point. This might have sealed the deal. Who knows?

I'm remembering, by the way, what Scott wrote when it was announced on my blog purlieu that I got a job:
Karl Steel said...

and I should say vis-a-vis "deserving": no more than others. I'm happy to be where I am, but I've no illusions about having won the position through my superior, haha, medieval skills. It saddens me to have won because the market wrecks so many equally (at least!) deserving scholars. More luck to them!
5:58 PM
Scott Eric Kaufman said...

Bah, revel in the deservedness now, fret about the others later. The whole process is a crap shoot, yes -- a friend of mine with three major publications (American Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, PMLA), excellent evaluations, and who just so happens to be a charming individual got eight interviews but no bites -- but the thing of it is, it's not as if the people who got the jobs he interviewed for aren't deserving. Pity not the (present and, in my own case, likely future) wanderers, as they'll land somewhere someday; instead, revel in the fact that you had capital enough to step to the table, and that you earned yourself a job.
....
Karl Steel said...

SEK: I also had 8 MLA interviews, only one call back, which (to borrow a metaphor from ALK) came up stillborn. Then the Brooklyn job announcement popped up in Jan and the job itself more or less sprang itself on me during a few weeks of grimness. If I needed a reminder of the randomness of this process, that was it.

Pity not the...wanderers, as they'll land somewhere someday

Not pity. I'm just worried about them. CU had 3 medievalists go out this year, and the best one, so far as I'm concerned, didn't get a job. Bizarre. But good lord: a PMLA article + 2 more isn't enough? It's just so distressing. And the certainty that quality will win out: sounds a bit libertarian to me, or, at least, sounds like a sensible world, and I don't truck with any such system.

[Adam Kotsko]

I've had several articles make it through peer review, and I'm not a great networker. Indeed, even if I were, the copy of the paper that they send to the reviewer doesn't have my name or institutional affiliation on it.

And lest we think that the journal editors "know who I am," it is almost uniformly the case that they address me as "Dr. Kotsko" in correspondance -- a key indicator that they are not fully apprised of my status, which makes sense given that they don't require you to send in a CV.

Also, at the one journal where I do know the editors, I've had stuff turned down.

The statistical chance of my publishing multiple articles in the absolutely corrupt system you describe is approximately zero. Hence I conclude that perhaps the system you describe doesn't exist.

[Aaron]

It seems like there’s a problem here stemming from the unqualified use of the word “random.” A good chaos theoretician (if such a thing exists) might have something to say about the difference between “random” and “so incredibly over determined as to defy either explanation or rational planning,” which is precisely not random. Saying that we don’t have the ability to really control whether we get call backs, because there are simply too many factors to track, is not the same thing as assuming the result is really random (if we could know all the data, like the metal-preference example, then we might actually be able to control the result). Just because we can’t doesn’t mean the result is really random, any more than a hurricane is vis the proverbial butterfly wing. But good luck trying to predict one!

[hylonome]

To say the system is human is not the same thing as saying the system is absolutely corrupt. I think it was a mistake to lump publishing in the same category with the job market, for the simple reason that journals vary widely in their acceptance policies. Lots of highly respected journals don't have blind submission which means, indeed, that who you are and where you're from can matter a great deal.

By definition, however, the search process is precisely about these particulars that some journals bracket. And, again by definition, this means that searches are flawed and human and arbitrary. I think it's useful to remind both the distraught and the triumphant that this is the case. Perhaps you need to be excellent to get on the playing field, to move from a single interview to a dozen, but after that, who knows? For what it's worth, I think the only way to get through it all is with kindness, but then again I didn't get the job everyone thought I was *supposed* to get.

[JPool]

My problem with this post is more basic.

They're now beautiful and unique snowflakes whose true value has been finally been recognized!

I don't know these people. Everyone I know who's landed a job, or for that matter an on-campus interview their first time out, has been exceedingly humble about their accomplishments, no matter how power-of-positive-thinking they've been about the job search up to then.

[Karl Steel]

“so incredibly over determined as to defy either explanation or rational planning,” which is precisely not random.

thanks, good point

[SEK]

I should begin at the end, with JPool's comment:

Everyone I know who's landed a job, or for that matter an on-campus interview their first time out, has been exceedingly humble about their accomplishments, no matter how power-of-positive-thinking they've been about the job search up to then.

This response was only partly to Sisyphus -- it's also the result of weeks of annoyance with people on a particular listserv who have been announcing their interviews as they get them, keeping a tally of them in their autosigs, &c. These aren't genuinely bad people; they're desperate, insecure people misplacing their enthusiasm and making other desperate, insecure people feel even more desperate and insecure.

Aaron:

Saying that we don’t have the ability to really control whether we get call backs, because there are simply too many factors to track, is not the same thing as assuming the result is really random (if we could know all the data, like the metal-preference example, then we might actually be able to control the result).

Beautifully put, and absolutely correct. The process is overdetermined, not underdetermined. From the ground, the situations seem the same. This is why the idea that's cropped up a few times -- that while you can't control your chances, you can increase the odds of a good roll -- deserves more attention than I paid it. Yes, the more publications you have, and the better the venue, the more likely you are to land an interview. Goes without saying. But then there are all the stories you hear about the person with no publications who landed a sweet job through what seems to be a random alignment of the stars -- something certainly happened behind the scenes, but we can't be sure what it was, and we certainly shouldn't attempt and/or think we can replicate it.

(I'll note here that a few of the big blogger academics have admitted as much, i.e. that they were shocked that they landed one interview, that it went poorly, that they were brought for a campus visit and, againt all odds, won the position they shouldn't have even been in the running for.)

This (not the parenthetical part, but the previous paragraph) speaks to Jonathan's point above:

a lot of the people who get "lucky" in this business do so because they do more than the minimum, and show the committees that they have the potential to grow into the jobs

I wholeheartedly agree: to the extent that you control anything, you make your own luck. The thing is, there's quite a bit of luck out there being made -- nay, being mass-produced by the hundreds of people vying for those fifteen TT jobs. Even if you limit the pool of qualified applicants to those who've made their own luck, you still leave a lot of talented, hard-working people in the cold.

I've never gotten anywhere because of "who I know," unless the person recommending me knew that I was good at what I was proposing to do -- my recommenders and contacts know plenty of smart and productive people, and have no reason to say anything nice about me if it isn't true -- and I could actually produce what I said I would.

Certainly, certainly true -- your connections come with the luck you make. But the cultivation of those connections -- the production of the work they said you could produce -- doesn't mitigate the fact that you still have them. Another way of putting it: earning your way into Harvard still puts you at Harvard, and as Karl's admitted concerning his time at Columbia, connections worked to put him into that particular Ivy network. He earned his luck too -- though where he found the music tastes of his potential colleague intrigues me -- but being at Columbia in the first place, having that particular back-channel, not to mention that imprimatur, helped grease the wheel of chance.

And before anyone asks, I'm not denigrating those who have or earned connections. It took connections to get me into UCI -- Pat McGee's behind-the-scenes aid was invaluable -- and I'll be leaving with some nice connections, some of which I've earned through merit, others through blogging.

Adam and Hylonome:

You're right, I shouldn't have lumped publication in with job market stuff. The two obviously aren't unrelated (inasmuch as one undergirds the other), but the process of acceptance isn't comparable.

Rich:

People are going to have a difficult time believing that merit doesn't enter into the process.

It certainly does, but not nearly so much as people think. We can all rattle off a list of candidates who would, were merit a serious deciding factor, have 20 interviews and have to choose between available jobs. (The first person on my list is up there disagreeing with me.)

[adjunct whore]

this has been a really interesting thread to read--i guess my only question is why undermine those people who by some miracle squeak through? why not, rather, focus on trying to explain the conditions in the academy (ala mark bousquet's astute analysis of the system working perfectly) that have led to so many underemployed or unemployed ph.d.'s in the humanities?

it does seem strange to feed the collective neuroses by suggesting that a)your accomplishments matter little; b) cronyism is more responsible than not; c)any decent intellectual would feel awful for having a job when so many do not.

maybe i'm not as connected as you are, maybe many are not, but these things don't seem to come into play in my world all that much. and by my world, i include quite a number of people without ivy degrees, mostly public university degrees and jobs.

i appreciate the gesture in pointing out the many conditions of hiring/interview committees invisible to those not sitting on them; i'm just not sure blaming the lucky is prodcutive or even accurate.

[tomemos]

It's the absolutism that make this fall apart, Scott. You didn't say that applications are largely about luck--which would be hard to dispute--but rather than it's wholly a matter of luck: "a game of chance," "roulette." (At first I thought you might be hyperbolizing, but you repeated the roulette reference in comments.) If this were really true, then people would be wasting their time trying to improve their dissertations; they should instead be writing cover letters, applying to as many places as possible because statistically they'll make it eventually. Or they should be out schmoozing: the more contacts they make, the better the odds that one will come through for them on the market. Actually perfecting your academic work would make no difference in getting an academic job.

Of course, just because what I've just described is unpleasant to contemplate, doesn't mean it's not true. But an extreme claim like that requires pretty strong evidence. The people I know who have gotten jobs (admittedly, a small sample) have generally been among the hardest-working grads I've known, the ones who I strongly suspected would succeed. For the most part, the inverse isn't true of those who haven't yet gotten jobs, but again, that's different from what you said, which is that those who have gotten jobs aren't at all distinguished from any of their fellow applicants.

[SEK]

adjunct whore:

i guess my only question is why undermine those people who by some miracle squeak through?

I'm not undermining them so much as reminding them of the equally qualified candidates who weren't as lucky. (I mean, I don't think Karl felt like I attacked him, nor should he.)

it does seem strange to feed the collective neuroses by suggesting that a) your accomplishments matter little; b) cronyism is more responsible than not; c) any decent intellectual would feel awful for having a job when so many do not.

The impression I've gotten from people who've landed jobs is that all of this stuff is visible from the other side. It's not cronyism per se, but I know that emails of support for a particular candidate are launched through back-channels, and I know those emails significantly alter the market. Obviously, you want to produce the strongest work possible, but the strength of your work only matters if it's read closely and carefully, and if a committee member's predisposed to read it charitably, &c.

Tomemos:

You didn't say that applications are largely about luck--which would be hard to dispute--but rather than it's wholly a matter of luck: "a game of chance," "roulette." (At first I thought you might be hyperbolizing, but you repeated the roulette reference in comments.)

And then I revoked it after Adam's comment: it's not random, it's overdetermined in unknowable ways.

Actually perfecting your academic work would make no difference in getting an academic job.

I'm not saying it makes no difference, only that it might not make as much of a difference as we like to think. Many factors intrude here -- from the fact that our published material might not represent our best work, or may have edited poorly by the journal post-acceptance, &c. -- but I don't think you can say that the person with the best dissertation gets the best job. Strength of work is but another unknowable factor in our fate -- and this assumes that there's some sort of consensus for what qualifies as "strong work." A Lacanian would find my work weak, inasmuch as I don't mention Lacan or venture readings under the aegis of Lacanian thought. I can easily imagine a situation in which two psychoanalytic-inclined/historicists/&c. critics end up on a search committee. With such variable definitions of strength, there's room for impressive confusion as to what constitutes quality.

If this were really true, then people would be wasting their time trying to improve their dissertations; they should instead be writing cover letters, applying to as many places as possible because statistically they'll make it eventually. Or they should be out schmoozing: the more contacts they make, the better the odds that one will come through for them on the market.

Rauchway's "Do Thy Homework" post addresses this wonderfully: yes, you should be endlessly revising your cover letter; yes, you should familiarize yourself with the members of the department you're applying to so that you might better schmooze during the interview; &c. All of these things are essential to getting a job, and none of them has anything to do with the quality of your work. (Although your ability to research what you need to know to properly schmooze certainly indicates something about your commitment, scholarly and otherwise.)

All of which is only to say: yes, I obviously pushed the counter-intuitive position as hard as I possibly could. I did so on purpose, but not merely for rhetorical effect: I sincerely believe that the quality of your work doesn't correlate with your success/failure on the job market. I've seen too many truly talented people turn adjuncts, and too many marginal talents land jobs their first time out. I don't begrudge them -- I fall on the hard-worker/marginal-talent side of the spectrum -- but it's important to remember that factors beyond your control are equally responsible for "your" success on the market. You do what you can to stack the deck, but in the end, you don't know the house rules, or even what game you're playing ...

[Adam Kotsko]

I agree with Adjunct Whore -- that was my unarticulated objection, that the problem is systemic rather than being a matter of individual cockiness.

[j.s. nelson]

completely off topic:
aaron, from a mathematical perspective i'm not sure there's a clear difference. check out chaitin/kolmogorov complexity sometime. chaitin works in terms of numbers and computer programs but it's relatively easy to extrapolate to events, etc.
nothing is really not determined, except at the level of fundamental physics, and even that's under debate (see bohm interpretation of quantum mechanics). the best way to categorize a pattern as random or not turns out to relate to the complexity of predicting/reproducing it.
if something is so overdetermined that you can't reduce its complexity by learning outside information (that is, if the information you'd have to learn to be able to predict the pattern is significantly more complex than the pattern itself) it's random in the technical sense.
in some cases this definition doesn't seem to match up with out intuitive sense of randomness, but it's the best that mathematics has to offer at the moment and it's useful for a lot of other things.

in this case i'd tend to side, if only slightly, against SEK, because i do think that it's obvious that not all candidates have an equal chance of making it. however, i do think that he may be right when the application pool is narrowed. if the obvious bad fits are weeded out, i think the contingent factors could play a bigger role than the meritocratic factors. thus a successful applicant would not have reason to think him or herself more fit than his or her fellow final round contenders, only more fit than the folks that were weeded out early on. of course the process is so opaque, one doesn't know who those are...

anyway the sort of thinking SEK describes in the first paragraph is a well documented psychological phenomenon.

[adjunct whore]

there is a way in which your argument about getting sympathetic readers who are predisposed to recognize some gem in your work, rather than the many gems that simply get read over or ignored, reduces all the variables to an exclusively politicized process. those of us with doctorates in the humanities are, in part, trained to be decent citizens of a department, elegant writers, and convincing rhetoricians. we spend a ludicrous number of years, in fact, learning the subtle arts of how to be original while joining an existing conversation, being provocative while not offending, and being brilliant without social retardation that such studiousness fosters--god knows, a ticking bomb is a terrifying thing. isn't this other, invisible, training as much a part of landing a job as your 'work'? and isn't this why the golden ring is really so golden, because achieving this balancing act is a feat worthy of ten tenure track jobs?

that academic expectations are so insane does not itself mean that some people don't strike the balance amazingly well.

i just think your argument is flawed; as a polemic, it has obviously proven fruitful--again, the thread fascinates.

[SEK]

J.S.:

i do think that it's obvious that not all candidates have an equal chance of making it.

I'm not sure about that. If you presuppose that departments possess unknown/unknowable criteria, aren't you forced to assume that the notion that "quality" matters less than "happen to fit the unpredictable, idiosyncratic needs of the department"? If that's the case, then no candidate could deliberately set him/herself as objectively stronger than any other, right? I mean, how many departments are looking for "well-published in Sub-Discipline X"?

adjunct whore:

there is a way in which your argument about getting sympathetic readers who are predisposed to recognize some gem in your work, rather than the many gems that simply get read over or ignored, reduces all the variables to an exclusively politicized process.

Maybe not all of them, but certainly a large portion of them. I have friends at other institutions who've told me that their advisor/committee member has the back-channels humming with news of their current brilliance and unlimited potential. (Though not phrased thus, of course, but in a way calculated to have that effect. These are experienced writers of letters of recommendations, after all.) [Edit: Or maybe they are effusive in the back-channels. If you're talking to your friends about a student, there's no need to be circumspect in the way required in letters of recommendations. It's more like talk-around-the-water-cooler, in which we often talk up our impressive students in uniformly glowing terms.]

those of us with doctorates in the humanities are, in part, trained to be decent citizens of a department, elegant writers, and convincing rhetoricians. we spend a ludicrous number of years, in fact, learning the subtle arts of how to be original while joining an existing conversation, being provocative while not offending, and being brilliant without social retardation that such studiousness fosters

We're certainly trained to be incisive readers, but that doesn't necessarily equal charitable, does it? To turn my earlier example around: I stopped immersing myself in psychoanalytic theory in 2001, so if I read an application in which someone used psychoanalytic theory to excess, I would 1) wonder what the point of it all was and 2) not be competent to judge an original, sophisticated reading from clumsy, derivative one. (Alright, maybe I could tell from sophistication, but at this point, I couldn't pass judgment on originality.) Cast this logic discipline-wide, and the implications are frightening: disciplinary balkanization has made it very difficult to judge the quality of work done by those outside your sub-sub-sub-discipline, which in turn means that two-thirds of a hiring committee must rely on the expertise of its one field relevant member. The biases of that member become the operative principles of the search, meaning that the most "qualified" candidate isn't the "deserving" one with the "strongest" dissertation, but the person the resident expert finds most suitable. (That they're often disastrously wrong is God's way of paying them back.)

that academic expectations are so insane does not itself mean that some people don't strike the balance amazingly well.

I don't want you to think I don't believe in power of our professional intangibles -- I certainly do, and have witnessed many an enthusiastic, exciting candidate go down in flames during the meet-and-greet with grad students, at the dinner party after their talk, &c. But you can balance expertly and still fail to land an interview.

[ben wolfson]

I've always felt that Wyndam Lewis's contributions were not nearly as important as those of Wyndham Lewis, but then, it's not my area.

[Corrected, Mr. Smarty Pants.]

[Sisyphus]

Jumping in here to cause trouble, since my self-indulgent whinery started the whole discussion...

I was using the roulette wheel in my post to discuss the difference from one job market year to another; so much is random in the collection of jobs posted and search committees to which you apply that it strikes me as very strange that people say, "because you got 4 interviews last year, you should get _8_ this year; it's your second year out." It depends more on whether there are 8 jobs out there that you really "fit" than on your own qualifications, just as if the roulette wheel were to stop on 8 a hundred times in a row, there is no reason why it would stop on the 8 next time; each spin is completely separate.

That said, reading over this discussion makes me think that the metaphor of the market is one of oversaturation, not randomness. What really strikes me as wrong here is the idea of the "best candidate succeeding." That because there is one final "winner," the "best" exists. Everyone feels like a fraud academically but in truth the unqualified and stupid and bad scholars aren't making it through their programs to the other side. Everyone is smart at this level, after multiple levels of weeding out from undergrad to grad to comps to the Dissertation Death March. We simply have far more smart, hardworking, capable scholars than there are jobs. And the notion that somehow a search committee picks out the "best" from their MLA list is just wrong --- I was grad rep for a search and of the 12 candidates we saw at MLA, 10 of them would easily have fit in well and thrived in our department and produced wonderful research. At that level, there is no sense of "best" or "superiority" or "qualifications" --- the decision was purely made on the search committee's taste. Call it "fit," but it was more a question of "I like peppermint more than cinnamon; let's offer the job to candidate #6."

So I would turn around the title of this post to highlight the oversaturation aspect of the job market: "The poor sods on the short list deserved the job you landed just as much as you." i.e. there is a surplus of qualified applicants.

And what I take from this conclusion is not that we should be beating ourselves up for what we have or don't have, or attacking each other in competition, but we all should be pushing for more full-time jobs, and adequate compensation and workload for adjuncts, since there isn't a difference in quality between the vast army of "losers" and the small number of "winners," or that mythical "best candidate."

[adjunct whore]

well put, as usual, sisyphus.

[SEK]

So I would turn around the title of this post to highlight the oversaturation aspect of the job market: "The poor sods on the short list deserved the job you landed just as much as you." i.e. there is a surplus of qualified applicants.

I absolutely agree -- it's one of the premises of my post. But there's an undercurrent up-thread that suggests some people think otherwise, i.e. that they believe some candidates are more qualified than others, and that quality (whatever that is) will out.

(I hope, at the very least, to have highlighted the sheer lunacy of claiming that a discipline as balkanized as ours can possibly have some "standard" to which other people barely meet, some people competently, and others blast past on their way to academic stardom.)

[Aaron Bady]

J.S., thanks, that's really illuminating; given how easily we toss off terms like "random" (Scott's initial argument was based around it, for example) it's fascinating to see how people with very differnt stakees work with the concept. Seems to me that far from there being a differnece between random and merely highly complex (my point was simply that it was the latter case, not the former in this situation), you're suggesting there really isn't anything that is absolutely random, that we're dealing with differing levels of complexity. In the case of a job search, the problem for the applicant becomes almost a problem of data management, deciding which variables can be usefully addressed (should I try to get another publication, burnish my dissertation, go to conferences and shmooze, etc), thereby maximizing the number of factors that go into the selection process that we have control over. And the question then is whether or not the factors we can control are outweighed by the myriad factors we cannot (and are totally unaware of), or whether a significant enough number of the determining factors are things we can knowledgably bank on and use. I'd tend to lean towards the latter, but perhaps that's because I'm not on the market yet.

The actual moral, though, is that the only way to get a job in the humanities is to study chaos theory. (now that's frightening!)

[adjunct whore]

I absolutely agree -- it's one of the premises of my post. But there's an undercurrent up-thread that suggests some people think otherwise, i.e. that they believe some candidates are more qualified than others, and that quality (whatever that is) will out.

i can only speak for myself--as one of the "others" you seem to be referring to--but my own critique of your post was more based on the outright dismissal of a person's overall candidacy, in addition to what seems a somewhat hostile tone. you also did not suggest anything like a systemic problem in the academy but rather seemed to emphasize the arbitrary, or networked basis, of decisions made on hiring committees.

i never disagreed with your assessment of how committees necessarily weed out very smart and qualified people--as cog rightly points out--at that point, we're all smart and qualified; but that this does not completely undermine not only fit but that some people are doing particularly good work ("work" in all the forms i list previously).

[tomemos]

Sisyphus said, "The poor sods on the short list deserved the job you landed just as much as you," which I completely agree with. Then Scott said:

"I absolutely agree -- it's one of the premises of my post. But there's an undercurrent up-thread that suggests some people think otherwise, i.e. that they believe some candidates are more qualified than others…"

In other words, believing that some candidates are more qualified than others means believing that the person hired is always better than those on the short list. This strikes me as a false choice.

Some candidates are better than others. Scott, in this very space you've written about bad academic writing--it is possible to write a dissertation that isn't as good as other dissertations, and hiring committees pay attention to that--not infallibly, but with some reliability. None of that implies that any individual candidate who doesn't get hired is less qualified than one who does; oversights happen, plus, yes, there are many, many more qualified applicants than there are jobs. I agree with Sisyphus that this is where our concern should be.

Beyond the logical arguments, basically I believe in being charitable--reassuring those who haven't made it yet, but letting those who have rejoice in their success. Your refusal to do that is part of my problem here.

[SEK]

adjunct whore,

i can only speak for myself--as one of the "others" you seem to be referring to--but my own critique of your post was more based on the outright dismissal of a person's overall candidacy

Actually, I was referring to Stephen and Tomemos' comments, not yours. I think you're right to point this out:

you also did not suggest anything like a systemic problem in the academy but rather seemed to emphasize the arbitrary, or networked basis, of decisions made on hiring committees.

I didn't emphasize this, largely because (in my head, at least) it's a given: we know job-seekers run a poorly designed, deliberately obfuscatory, senselessly painful gauntlet. We should be doing something to change that ... but none of us are in a position to do so. (Plus, there's the idea, so prevalent among our elders, that because they had to run this gauntlet, we should too. After all, the market was right about them and their peers, so it must be something more than a unnecessary hazing. And yet, careers depend on this.)

but that this does not completely undermine not only fit but that some people are doing particularly good work ("work" in all the forms i list previously).

Absolutely. I singled Stephen out earlier because he's doing particularly brilliant work, has a strong publication record, is an excellent course-designer, and a genuinely nice person (although, he's Canadian, so he doesn't get credit for that personally). In a rational marketplace, Stephen would have had a TT last year; in ours, he's on the market again this year. Granted, he's gotten numerous interviews both times -- that he's beat the initial vetting process two years running indicates that people on committees can appreciate his value. If he lands a job, he'll certainly deserve it ... only I'm not sure he'll deserve it any more than the three other candidates he beats out to land it.

(As for the hostility in the original post, that's really residual anger from the aforementioned listserv discussions. In other words: mea culpa.)

[tomemos]

Adjunct Whore said it first and speaks for me.

[SEK]

Tomemos,

You snuck your comment in there. As for my unwillingness to credit those who land jobs with their achievement, well, as Karl quoted me writing above:

Bah, revel in the deservedness now, fret about the others later. [...] Pity not the (present and, in my own case, likely future) wanderers, as they'll land somewhere someday; instead, revel in the fact that you had capital enough to step to the table, and that you earned yourself a job.

In particular instances, I certainly do that. (I'm a hypocrite, what can I say?) But structurally, because of the system, I don't actually believe those who land jobs are more deserving than those who don't. The fit the invisible, unknowable criteria better than there competitors, but they didn't do so willfully, i.e. the had no intention of meeting the standards they're unaware exist. How could they? This isn't to say they didn't bust their ass to get to where they are -- of course they did.

But the mistake seems to be a corollary to one we encounter in the classroom: "Jimmy, just because you worked really hard doesn't mean you deserve an 'A' on your essay." In fact, the market's like a nightmarish teacher, the one students suppose we are whenever we hold them up to any sort of standard:

"How was I supposed to know that I needed to write a chapter on Chaplin to get this job? I mean, I'm a Renaissance person who doesn't dabble in film, and had no idea that with the dissolution of the Film Studies program they needed someone who could teach their Intro. to Lit. and Film.? How could I have known that my non-interaction with Deleuzian thought meant that two of the committee members wouldn't consider my work 'serious'?

You see what I'm saying? I'm saying that if we posit that two people can have identical publication records and equally strong dissertations, the one who "earns" the job is the one who happens to fill a random set of department-specific needs. Does the winner of this competition "deserve" the job based on the traditional standards of merit? Do they say to themselves, "I feel vindicated, my dissertation is good"? Or do they think, "Thank God I got to TA for that Film Theory class that had two units on Deleuze"?

[Rich Puchalsky]

There's something about this comment thread that unavoidably reminds me of people wondering how they are finally going to, um, succeed romantically, either in the sense of first trying out sexuality or, later, in finding a life partner. You have bits of personal self-improvement advice bandied about: you could lose weight, work out, try to be more interesting, listen more, etc. People who are deemed successful say what's worked for them, and it's debated whether their advice is of general utility. Then someone annoyed by the preening of the successful among their less successful and generally somewhat younger peers says it's mostly random (or perhaps "overdetermined", though you'd have to be in a very geeky set for that to be used in this context), once you bother to do the basics. And then someone says that there's no single way to be attractive, that everyone has their own style or whatever, and that different people are looking for different styles anyway.

And then people accept the reality, that although two people, let's say a handsome surfboarder and a brilliant musician, may be attractive in very different ways, and that they each may have no chance with the people who'd be attracted to the other one, it still makes sense to refer to them both as generally very attractive, and other people as not.

And the analogy to academic ability is really pretty exact, I think. What are you going to do, work harder? It's impossible to force yourself to work harder than you're already forcing yourself to work in grad school; you're running up against whatever your personal limits for making yourself work harder are, and they aren't easily changed. Become more brilliant? Yeah, good luck. Turn to networking? But your social skills are probably pretty fixed by then, too.

And the idea of working for jobs for everyone doesn't work. Sure, I oppose adjunctification, but unless economic limits suddenly go out the door, what that really means is a few more professors, many fewer adjuncts. There are always going to be more people who want to be professors than there are jobs. I suppose that you could stringently control how many get to enter grad school in an attempt to guarantee them jobs, but then you'd just get undergrads going on about how they've been applying and applying to get into grad school.

So, some people start out with innate advantages, and some people get lucky, but over time, those with innate advantages tend to win out. At least it's better than, say, competition for wealth, in which by far the most important thing is who your parents were and your personal qualities don't even much matter.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I'm not undermining them so much as reminding them of the equally qualified candidates who weren't as lucky.

Where are these legions of self-satisfied fools, and how are you going to change their minds without undermining their sense of their self-worth? How many people, do you think, actually get through the process without recognizing the random elements? When I applied to graduate school, I was accepted by one Ivy and rejected outright by an equally good school: how the hell is anyone supposed to interpret that as anything other than a liminal state? When I first went out on the job market I sent out 42 applications, got six first-round interviews, two campus visits and one job offer. I got beat out at forty-one schools (didn't even make the first cut at 36!): how good could I be, realistically?

Never mind: I get the very clear sense that this is a rant against someone who isn't here and who may not really exist.

But there's an undercurrent up-thread that suggests some people think otherwise, i.e. that they believe some candidates are more qualified than others, and that quality (whatever that is) will out.

As Tomemos (I think) pointed out, you're dealing in unjustified dichotomy. Hiring committees -- the vast majority of them, anyway -- are honestly trying to figure out how to judge the quality and suitability of the candidate pools without turning it into a life's work. That they sometimes fail or, more often, succeed but don't have the resources to give positions to all the qualified candidates, doesn't discredit the market in itself.

I think you need to distinguish between qualified and deserving, or perhaps we do.

[Oso Raro]

I'm afraid my head is spinning a bit from all this commentary on what struck me as a relatively benign observation on chaos and the job market. As academicians, we specialise in parsing beyond the valley of the parse, but sometimes we just need to step back and see the forest for the trees. The larger point here perhaps is that chaos is as determinant as any other factor in our little hothouse, something I have written about before on my own blog.

A little story to illustrate the point: last year I had an MLA interview at a private, élite baccalaureate college on the eastern coast of North America. For a number of reasons, I felt I had to be perfect, and was a wreck beforehand, prepping more madly than ever before. And indeed, as I found out later, I was perfect, or pretty good, because my name got forwarded by the committee for a campus visit. But my name, and the names of all the other topically qualified candidates were shot down by the Provost, who was in a struggle with the department and used the search as a weapon. Her office only OK'd candidates who were clearly NOT qualified (i.e., they did specialty X not Y, and the search, of course, was tanked. My suit was perfect, my lipstick magnificent, my answers quick and lively, I even managed to surpress a panic attack with nary a nauseous look, but in the end none of that mattered.

Ergo, the larger point about chaos/chance/la chance being an equal player in the process is important coda to the sometimes relentless suffering candidates put themselves through.

[Flavia]

I'm coming to this so late as to make my remarks pointless, but my first reaction (which appears to be a unique one among your readers) was YES, EXACTLY.

I agree with all the qualifications that have been made--that it's not that those who get jobs are *un*qualified, just that they're likely no more qualified than those who don't get jobs or don't even get interviews--but that's what I understood you to mean in the first place.

For my current job, I not only wasn't among the initial candidates flown out, but I didn't even receive an MLA interview--I got called late in March for a phone interview and then a fly-out. I don't know precisely what went on with that search, but I both simultaneously believe that I'm the best damn person for this job. . . and that my getting it was utterly random. I have no difficulty holding those two beliefs simultaneously: that I'm smart and deserve to be successful AND that any job I get isn't exactly the result of that desert.

Because here's the thing: Rich Pulasky says:

So, some people start out with innate advantages, and some people get lucky, but over time, those with innate advantages tend to win out.

In a perfect world, that's true, and I know that the institution I attended, my advisor's name, and my publications would have held value through several searches. But this isn't a perfect world, and people drop out of the profession after two or three unsuccessful searches in order to feed their families, be close to their partners, or whatever the case may be. I do believe that there are many, many things that can improve one's odds on the job market (some of which are in one's control, most of which, by the time one is on the market, are not). . . but none of them will guarantee you a job, much less the job that you (in whatever sense one means it) truly "deserve."

[adjunct whore]

i agree with flavia and is what i have been fumbling toward saying far less clearly: both are true, you can deserve the job and part of the process is up for grabs.

the provost stepping in to cancel a search or pick his/her own candidate, however, is not random; it is very specifically how and why the system is broken.

[Karl Steel]

I mean, I don't think Karl felt like I attacked him, nor should he
Nope, didn't feel attacked. Finding out the music tastes of members of the younger members of the search committee is simple in the age of Web 2.0. As someone said above, the same skills that make us good researchers make us good stalkers. We do what we can to keep our head above water in a system that's systemically fuckedup. And I think any meritocratic noise (which I'm surprised to hear coming from Rich) distracts us from the systemic critique in which we really ought to be engaged so long as we're given any thoughts to the condition of our employment, regardless of what job we're in.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Not exactly meritocratic, insofar as "merit" is supposed to be due to hard work and effort and so on. But it's hard to deny that some people are better at some things than other people are, whether that difference is inborn, developmental, or whatever. If you really want to deny this entirely, then it seems reasonable to say that if anyone could do academic professorship if they had the time and opportunity for the appropriate education, then adjuncts really have nothing to complain about -- they were already much luckier than most people, who never even got to get that far.

[k8]

Wow. The post and comments are fascinating, but I think I'm still finding the whole English market depressingly absurd.

[SEK]

Oso Raro,

Your story has truly horrified me. I lack words. (stares agog)

Flavia,

that it's not that those who get jobs are *un*qualified, just that they're likely no more qualified than those who don't get jobs or don't even get interviews--but that's what I understood you to mean in the first place.

Yes! That's what I meant! Had I only not buried it beneath a few unfortunate metaphors and some wonky prose, it'd have probably been more clear.

That said, Karl and adjunct whore have a damn sound point: that ire ought to be focused on the system, not its beneficiaries, who no more deserve opprobrium than the rest of us.

I've actually spent the better part of the weekend -- when I'm not revising my dissertation -- thinking about ways to make this point more clear, while at the same time more forceful. So, yes, a rewrite of this post, only without the muddle.

Expect it shortly.

[Karl Steel]

If you really want to deny this entirely
Well, yeah, that'd be silly.

[Rich Puchalsky]

If you don't want to deny it entirely, then I think it leads in a different direction than the meritocratic narrative. It leads towards a Rawlsian way of considering the situation.