Michael Schoenfeldt (English)

I have a feeling that the job search in the humanities is a very different animal, although one of the goals is to make it like it’s been in other fields, other fields that have tracks as well as the academic one available. English has been a little better than other fields in the humanities, but that’s only because of things like composition. It’s still been a very tough job market. It’s been for almost every one of our people a multi-year job search. And that – just going in – is something that needs to be confronted.

The absolute necessities that you have to have – in the humanities, at least – before going out on the job market would be two thirds of a dissertation completed. Your dissertation director must be able to say unequivocally – not just optatively – that this dissertation will be completed by June of the coming year. Anyone who goes out with less than that done I think is being foolish. There are people who think they can go out – send off a few letters, not get involved, maybe something will happen, maybe something won’t. I’ve seen that attempted probably 20 times over the last couple of years, and every time it has knocked the candidate for a loop. She has lost time that she would have put in on her dissertation to the lack of sleep and the anxieties involved. You are so much better off spending another year writing a better dissertation than trying to go out a year early. I cannot stress that enough.

In terms of the humanities job search, you would very likely be asked to produce two writing samples and do a job talk, so that’s already a chunk of a dissertation that they are going to have right in front of them. Those things have to be clean. They can’t be things with brackets and ellipses and “to be done later.” This is your best self that is being put forward, and the thing that I would tell you – having been on both sides of the table – they are looking for reasons to get rid of you. I mean, we average 500 applications per job in the English department. We would love to have somebody have a misspelling in the second line of a writing sample – I mean, you wouldn’t stop reading then, but it would already be nudging towards the negative. So, the cleanness of these documents I can’t stress enough.

You would need, of course, a cover letter, and I would urge you – without being cloying about it – to craft the cover letter to the kind of institution you’re talking about, as closely as possible. If it’s a teaching institution, don’t spend as much time talking about the dissertation. Spend a little bit more time talking about your teaching commitments, and weave even the research into the teaching into the teaching commitment. I think that can be extremely useful, in fact, for both kinds of institutions.

You certainly need a curriculum vita that lists the highlights of your career thus far. Don’t inflate it with meaningless things, but don’t leave off things that are important either. One thing we do in English is give out a packet of sample vitas of people who have gotten jobs, so they just get to see lots and see the way that people have portrayed themselves before. And we give out copies of letters and let them see those.

We also urge a dissertation description – a single page, single spaced description – which doesn’t just use the language of the letter and expand upon it. A tricky thing about this process is being able to say the same thing freshly in four different vocabularies. And it’s one of the things you need to practice. One way to practice is describing to your nonacademic relatives what you’re working on. And if you’re still having trouble doing that, you’re probably not ready to go out on the market. Learning to describe the project in a single soundbite for a nonacademic audience seems to me to be the thing that separates out the people who do well from the people who don’t.

We also urge people to do teaching portfolios. There’s a lot of teaching that’s involved in the process in the English department and people put together their own syllabi. They put together their own list of requirements and grading sheets and things like that. The more that you can offer that to people as part of your letter, you can offer that to people at your interview (if you get that far), and it can be a wonderfully helpful document if you’ve got a nice packet there that shows how committed you are as a teacher in different ways.

Another thing we do for people – and I would urge you to do this whether your own departments offer it or not – is mock interviews. We actually institutionalize it; we have a blind matching of faculty and job candidates and really do make it as much like the official convention interview as possible. We also tape them and watch the tape with the people if they have the courage to do that. We always look horrible in these things but it has been enormously useful to watch these tapes with people. There was one woman – this was two years ago but it’s just a wonderful story. She didn’t realize it but she… was… speaking… very… slowly. She started watching the tape with me and she said, “I am really talking slowly.” And I said, “Yeah, you are.” She sped it up, went from 33 to 45 rpm. She had four interviews and got three offers. I’m not sure that at least one or two of those wouldn’t have happened otherwise but it was the kind of cosmetic polishing that can be enormously important in this act of self-presentation.

So, if you are torn between going out or not at a particular point, I would say that it’s better to wait. Make that dissertation better. Get a better hold of it. Figure it out. Know how you are going to pitch it. Go to conferences. One of things that I think is the absolute best preparation for this is going to conferences and giving pieces of your work and watching people’s eyes light up and watching brows furrow. Getting some sense of the response and getting some sense of the questions that the profession will begin to ask you as you emerge into the world. What really seems to work for people is when they learn that the profession is a conversation that they are entering and that they’ve deserved the right to enter because of this work that they’ve been doing. There’s maybe a small thing that they know more about than all but 5 or 10 people in the country. And it’s not just knowing that small thing, but make what’s important about knowing that small thing available to people who don’t know that small thing. Make them understand that. In the job letter, in the dissertation description, and again in the interview. If they can come off as collegial. If they can come off as somebody they’d want to have around. Somebody they’d want to be stuck in an elevator with, or somebody you wouldn’t mind being stuck in an elevator with if the elevators broke on campus, or sitting by at an interminable dinner party. Committees don’t talk about these things, but these are the kinds of things at that late stage in the process that do recur.

The other thing I would just throw out here that I’ve seen has helped our people immensely is when they had a kind of confidence that even if they didn’t get a job in academia, they would get a great job and they would have a great and interesting and exciting career. They didn’t go into that interview looking desperate – “I’ve gotta have this job!” That is not your best and most attractive demeanor when you’re that way. However you can get your mind around it. A friend of mine is now running the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and they’ve been assembling all kinds of resources, and I see you’ve got a panel later on alternate careers for Ph.D.s. I think it is so important. The danger is that you see somebody like me – sitting in a nice job at the University of Michigan – saying this. And you say, “Yeah, right.” In 1985 when I got my Michigan job, I was very lucky, and I was ready to do other things. I had taken my law boards and I’d even taken my MCATs. I wasn’t quite sure which way I was going to go at the time, but I knew there’d be something else I could do. I knew there’d be something else I’d want to do and that I would make interesting. This is what I most wanted, but I think that sense of confidence – that “Gosh, if this didn’t work, my life would be over, that it would have been a waste” – I had none of that sense, and I really think that helped. And I’ve seen that in so many of our people. I mean, one of our people last year had to choose between – I mean, the salaries were very incommensurate – between teaching at a small college and working for Microsoft. And he went for the small college, but it was a life decision rather than just a panicked, “Boy, I’m lucky I got one thing.” And it makes all the difference in the world, about yourself, the way you behave in the world. So, that’s actually pretty much what I have to say in terms of general principles, general warnings. 

Questions

Question about the difference between cover letters in the academic and business worlds.

Michael Schoenfeldt: I think they are different animals. One thing I’ve noticed is that people who’ve been used to presenting themselves in nonacademic environments quite often come off as overdoing certain elements of enthusiasm. We’re in this sort of funny profession that understates things, that wears tweed, that doesn’t want to look too outlandish. And so I’ve noticed whenever we’ve had people like yourself who’ve gone out on the market...quite often their way of doing things is saying, “I’m this kind of person. I do this. I do that. I take charge.” And that’s not really the way the academic letter works. It’s more like a sonnet. There’s a narrow little form that you have to play with and develop in certain ways.

Normally, it starts off with just a description of who you are, where you’re doing your work. My name is Mike X. I’m currently completing a dissertation at the University of California, Berkeley under the supervision of Stephen Greenblatt. I and my committee are confident that I’ll be finished in June.

And then a new paragraph. This is just the template. My dissertation explores blah, blah, blah. Where people have read, you know, Herbert this way, I do it this way.

My teaching, too, is involved – a new paragraph – is involved in issues of the social locations of literature. In courses that I’ve taught at Berkeley, and on and on. The teaching paragraph is a tricky one to write. Again, it’s a place where people start sounding like some very bad violins are starting to play in the background. “I believe in students as individuals.” People say things where no one would take the contrary viewpoint. And they say them with great conviction, but it just doesn’t carry. Being specific usually is the best thing. My paragraph wasn’t good on that, so I can tell a bad one when I see it. I have read some really good ones. I’ve been really impressed at the way people can articulate their classroom presence – what’s important to them about the classroom. Veering from the ideal towards the pragmatic seems to be advice I would give.

And then just normally in my field you conclude by saying – you can see how many of these I’ve read, I can sort of do it in my sleep. “I will be attending the big convention in my field” – in our case, it’s the Modern Language Association convention in Washington – “and would be available then for an interview or at other times if you would like. My credentials are available from The Career Center at the University of Michigan” and conclude the letter. That’s the standard letter, and you can see that it does have quite a different format – quite a different feel in fact – from the one that one would use out in the business world.

Question about whether you should mention specific faculty in the department to which you are applying.

Michael Schoenfeldt: You can also overdo this. I’ve had students say, “It would be such a thrill to work on the faculty with X.” And I will tell you that comes off as bootlicking flattery that will not do you any good – unless X is on the hiring committee and is incredibly vain, which is possible. So you don’t want to be too specific. You instead want to think about niches, the kind of institution this is. You would send a different letter to Harvard than to Oberlin, to Oberlin than to Central Michigan. You figure out the niche of the university, what kind of person it might be wanting to attract and try to pitch to that, without being too cloying. It can be useful, though, on the websites, to look at the way the major is organized in your specific field. And they will probably, in an interview, ask you about what you would teach for them, and you could say, “Well, I noticed on your website that you offer this survey. I would love to do it, and I would do it this way.” That kind of engagement can be very useful. But it is easy to overdo the closeness, the intimate knowledge of a department in that regard. You might say that [that you are interested in being a colleague of a specific faculty member], and that person will have just left or who knows what but there’s just all kinds of ways in which that could go awry.

Denise Kirschner: I would also say that there’s not an expectation – at least when we interview job candidates that they know everything about the department, the ins and outs. They are coming to Michigan, to our department, for a particular reason – maybe our faculty has a focus in a certain area – but we don’t expect them to know the vita of everyone in the department. So, the expectation really isn’t even there.

Michael Schoenfeldt: That’s good. One of the things we have to tell our people, though, is that so frequently in our field – I think this isn’t true of either of these [scientific] fields – people aren’t going to be getting a job at an institution like Michigan, simply because that’s not where most of the jobs exist in my field. I was just reminded of that point.

Question about what you should do if you decide to delay going on the market.

Michael Schoenfeldt: How could you best use that year? I would say going to a couple of conferences, submitting one or two pieces for publication to the major journals in your field. All of that would serve you much better. People get turned down at all stages of the job search for not being finished. So, if you could hit that fully armed in terms of your academic accomplishments: an article or two published, a couple of major conference presentations, that would be so much better than to hit it early and relatively empty-handed.

Question about the expectations for the statement of teaching philosophy.

Michael Schoenfeldt: I’d say what you expect to see is evidence that this person is committed to teaching, has clearly thought about her teaching, and that her teaching is connected to the same part of her brain that produced this smashing dissertation of the candidate that your thinking about hiring. And beyond that it’s really hard to say. We don’t require the full statement but I know that people do and our people have produced them and they are enormously difficult documents to write. Again, I would try to ground whatever generalities seem necessary to produce this particular statement of commitment in as many particulars as possible, and actually then that page can go by rather quickly for both the writer and the reader.

Question about the extent to which you want to present yourself as an individual or as a company man (or departmental woman). 

Michael Schoenfeldt: This is an area where you have to make the call yourself. You have to figure out how far you are willing to play the chameleon who adapts to the environment in order to hide successfully in it. And I’m not sure – it was funny, two years ago I was doing the placement with Valerie Traub in English and I was telling people, “Tone it down. Be more adaptable. Be available.” She was saying, “No. You have to figure out where you’re going to draw the line.” And I think both are legitimate. I would remember always that this is not a confessional moment. This is a rhetorical moment. The whole point is not in you scouring the truth of your being, but in making that being attractive to others, and where then you draw the line between those two potentially contrary goals, I think it’s a tricky one. If it’s a job you would do anything for – your partner would thrive in this place and otherwise, he’ll leave you, you know – you’ll draw the line lower than you would if it were in some Godforsaken part of the country, that no one wants to go to. Although even there, I would ask you to reconsider deeply and think hard. I’m from one of those places.

Question about whether you should submit an application to a department which is not advertising a position.

Michael Schoenfeldt: About the only thing that might come from that, at least in my experience, is the possibility of an exploitative lectureship, when somebody gets sick. So, it’s kind of how things used to work about thirty years ago, and at least in the humanities to my knowledge really doesn’t work that way at all. Now, I do know one person who worked her way through an exploitative lectureship into a tenure-track line. Six years later. They relied on her and she became an important part of the department. I know lots of people who thought that would happen and it never did. After a while, the department got a tenure-track hire and that person was immediately disposable. So, it doesn’t work very often. I mean, I know people have geographic limitations and sometimes have to think hard in those terms. Unfortunately, this market is so darn tight – where you could do that in law, where you could do that in lots of other fields – the academic market is so rarely open in that regard. I’m sorry to say.