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

[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.