transition

No, it's not going to stop

so just give up

--Aimee Mann

Some kids want to be firemen or astronauts. Both options never really appealed to me...they both required more energy and physicality than I had. I was always a fairly sedentary child. My parents love to tell how I would always rather read a book rather than go outside and play.

It wasn't that I was lazy, per se. It's just that, given a choice, books always won out over running around. I would prefer to sit around, read, and think about what I had just read. Thinking was about figuring stuff out. It was about entering other words. It was about letting my mind go farther than my body ever could travel. The first books I can remember reading were the "Classics Illustrated" kid's versions of classic books. Then I graduated to the actual classics themselves (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was particularly vivid). Then it was on to detective fiction. I started science fiction and fantasy upon stumbling across Lord of the Rings in my middle school library. Then a friend introduced me to horror. Eventually, it was just any book, any story, any genre...as long as it transported me somewhere or let me think, it was where I wanted to be.

Somewhere in high school, my reading became subsumed by events...mostly work, guitar, and partying. Class took some of my time, but I got sucked into a job which occupied many more of my hours. I moved from part-time job to part-time job. Eventually, I found myself selling water as an operator-standing-by. When we were slow, we had permission to read, and it prompted a bit of a resurgence in my readings...I actually went through my local library's entire science fiction section.

Reading became important to me again...I found myself diving back into thinking, exploring, learning. There was, however, an unexpected result: I found myself increasingly aware of exactly how dead-end my series of menial crap jobs had become. I would like to say that I realized how little impact my various occupations (whether water seller, pizza maker, rat killer, or warehouse worker) made on anyone, and that I decided I wanted to move on to a career where I would make the world a better place, but the truth was nowhere so noble. Simply put, reading made me realize that I was tired of not feeling smart.

So I quit my water-selling job and went back to school. From the beginning, I wanted to figure out a way I could make reading and thinking my career, and pretty much from the start, this meant going to school long enough to become a teacher...in essence, I wanted to enter the university and never leave it. I wanted to become a professional thinker, someone who worked with ideas, explored theory, created knowledge. This implied teaching, but although I became very good at, enjoyed, and ultimately found teaching to be very rewarding, it was always about thinking for me, first and foremost.

I did everything I could think of to become a professional thinker. I studied night and day. I became a graduate assistant. I wrote. I read. I started my own literary journal. I wrote articles and published as many as I could. I expanded my vita as much as possible. Becoming a professional thinker--that is, getting a tenure-track professor's job--has pretty much been my focus since I went back to school in 1994. It has been the reason why I've read more than I ever thought I would, taught myself discipline after discipline, and spent my summers reading, writing, and thinking.

Unfortunately, my grand plan didn't work.

I got my Ph.D., entered the job market, and...nothing happened. I sent out over 500 applications in my time, and these did lead to a few phone interviews. The ones I wanted the most, though, I never heard back from the universities. I did get two campus interviews, but they were both at schools (including the community college I , and actually attended) where I really didn't want to work. I published more and more, but it's paid off less and less. It's been years since I've even heard back from any school where I've applied. No one, it seems, is interested in hiring me as a professional thinker.

Yesterday, I deleted all of the job announcement e-mail alerts in my in-box. Some time this week, I will unsubscribe to all my academic job feeds.

It's not, for the record, all bad. I do have a full-time job (albeit in a different field). I have published a lot of my writing, and when I last checked (which was a few years ago--in spite of my ego, I don't really sit around and google myself), some of them were used in classes and in other scholars' dissertations. But ultimately, thinking is not my career...and, as I will not be able to be on the job market for the next two years, there's little hope of me ever becoming a professional thinker.

Why did I not succeed? It's actually not a surprise to me. In an attempt to be different, I picked a topic that no one else was doing. Instead of being cutting-edge, though, my topic was just dramatically unhip. This prevented me from getting work doing anything other than part-time work for the first two years after graduation, and part-time teaching leaves utterly no time or mental energy for thinking or writing. Then, when I finally realized my dissertation was unhip, I rebranded myself...into something else that was also unhip. Then the economy imploded. Then many state governments decided that educators were the problem and that schools could survive without funding.

So it is officially time to give up on the job market. I wish my friends on the market the absolute best of luck, particularly since they're no longer my competition. I envy them: they still live in the world of ideas.

Me, though, not so much. I still have my dissertation-to-book project to write, and I still have three papers in circulation. I might still send out some apps when, in 2013, I'm able to reenter the job market, but I don't really have much hope. If I am honest, I've known for quite some time that I will never be a professor.

There is still tons to do, though. I have become a performing musician. I have pretenses of just being a writer...maybe an essayist, maybe a writer. And I still have article ideas, so the academic world isn't done hearing from me.

It's time, though, to admit that I'm transitioning into being a hobbyist thinker.

work and respect

My name is Mike DuBose. The worker's rights that my government and many of its citizens are actively trying to destroy? They are mine. This is my story.

My first job was summer employment. I got a position alongside my brother, who was working at a pavement marking company. We painted the lines on parking lots, school tracks, parking garages, and so forth. This was in Florida, in the summer, and we were almost always working on freshly-laid asphalt. As a result, the working conditions were awful. The heat was enormous...on top of the standard 95-100 degree highs, we also had to contend with radiant heat from the asphalt, which boosted everything by 20-30 degrees. Then there were the surely toxic fumes: paint, mineral spirits, and asphalt...even over twenty years later, the merest whiff of a new parking lot turns my stomach. I have no doubt that had I stayed in this line of work, I would today have serious health issues just from inhaling all the chemicals.

Our boss was a really fun and nice guy. However, he only really cared about working us as hard and as fast as possible. When he would run to the store, he would bring us (fairly awful) coffee--if we gave him money, that is--but he refused to bring us sugar or cream because it took too long for him to grab some packets. When we would break for lunch, he would eat as fast as possible before yelling at us to hurry up so we could get back to work. He loved to yell and berate us if we were not flying at our jobs.

My boss wanted to push us, but he never really reciprocated with any loyalty. I was the summer guy, and, as a result, I was never taught any skills which would increase my future hireability. I never, for instance, got to run the striping machine; this meant that the only real thing I could bring from the experience was the ability to sweep, to carry stuff, and to wait on my other workers who were given the big tasks. However, even the workers who were taught skills were unvalued. One weekend during the next fall, he called me and asked me to help him with a job. I went, because I honestly did like the guy...and also, I could use the cash. When we left for the job, I asked where all the co-workers were, but apparently, my boss had "let everyone go" because he wanted to raise his income.

This led to my first two lessons about work. First, you are only a tool for bosses to use as they sees fit. Second, you have no rights; you are instead a machine cog. Third, it doesn't really matter how nice your bosses are...they are never looking out for you.

My next job was working at a pizza chain. I was a good employee...I would do anything I was asked, I would come in whenever called, I tried very hard to learn, and I worked as hard as possible whenever I was on the clock. Eventually, I became an assistant manager. When this happened, my mindset clicked. I started to demand everyone work as hard as I did. I ran my stores with a maniacal focus. I kept a very close eye on labor and food costs, and I would rather work everyone as hard as possible than treat my employees well if it meant I could bring in good numbers for my bosses (who, I assumed, I could make appreciate me through sheer force of will).

When I got promoted, I read it as a sign that my hard work was paying off, that my bosses were taking care of me. I believed this in spite of getting only about a dollar above minimum wage and working most weekend nights. However, about two months after a major car accident, and while still suffering the effects of broken ribs, I got a call that I was fired. I wasn't even given a good reason, but later, I found out that my manager fired me so she could promote her 17 year-old cousin. Turns out the lesson I should've learned was that promotions and such were not signs you were becoming a valued employee; they were just ways to extract more work out of you.

I then worked at a major package delivery service. My job was to load two 60' semi trailers. These trailers would then be picked up, moved to the other side of the building, unloaded, and moved onto small local delivery trucks. I had two types of interactions with my bosses. They might try to trick me by throwing in packages that were supposed to go to Jacksonville AL or Jacksonville NC rather than Jacksonville FL. Then, when one of these slipped through, they would come and yell at me. Their other method of interactions was to just skip to yelling: first, that I wasn't packing the truck efficiently, then that I had to tear down my truck and start over, and then that, while I was rebuilding the wall of packages, I was falling behind on incoming packages. Finally, they would send over someone to help me get caught up, but only after giving me a "I can't believe how awful you are" look. Eventually, they quit calling me in and, after a few weeks, called me to tell me I was laid off. The only real lesson I got out of this was that even working hard was no real guarantee you would be treated with even a superficial level of respect.

After a while, I started work for a temporary service agency, where most of my work was in warehouses and such...although it occasionally got much worse. As a temp worker, I learned that no matter what I did, I was invisible. Hell, even the other workers wouldn't learn your names...so why would the bosses not treat you with the same respect they would give to a disposable toilet seat cover?

I went to work for another pizza franchise, promising myself I would be just a worker bee, completely uninvested in my work. Only my boss (a supervisor at my old pizza place) forced me into management...and soon, I was back to killing myself every day. I did rise to a valued position...I actually got traded back and forth between the supervisors and ended up working in about ten different stores during my time there. This, however, was by no means a sign they were looking after my best interests, and I eventually quit when my manager kept ignoring my hours requests. This was, I learned, the only real power I had...to walk away.

I worked in telemarketing sales for a while. Again, I worked hard, and again, I did a really good job, but the other shoe dropped when one of my colleagues got a job in the company mail room. He was overly excited about this, because it was actually a full-time job, unlike our sales work, which was all through a temp agency...and his excitement just depressed me further.

I decided to go back to school, because college, I assumed, would lead to a job where I was treated with some level of respect. I figured that if I became a teacher, if I dedicated my life to the public at large, if I just worked at helping people and hopefully making the world a little bit better of a place, things would work out. I never had any hope for fame and riches. I just wanted a job where I could sleep well at night, knowing I made a difference in some small way. Surely that will be respected in some small way...right?

To pay my bills, I went back to work for the pizza place, only because I was good enough to work a morning shift and get all my prep work done by opening. I would wait on customers through lunch and then study. Later, I got a job as graduate assistant for my department (which meant being a glorified office boy); one professor in particular enjoyed dumping piles of photocopying on my desk when I had ten minutes left in my shift. Eventually, I also started working for another professor's teacher-training project, but this prof, I am convinced, was essentially unable to even pick me out of a lineup; when I cut off my long metal hair, she didn't even notice.

I moved to Ohio and became a graduate teaching assistant. I wanted to teach as much of a range of classes as possible (thus expanding my skills and hireability), but my first department refused to give me their film class. I was then transferred to another department, where, although I was a doctoral candidate, my work was analyzed, reviewed, and critiqued by an MA student with years less experience than I, and the decision on whether my students passed or failed was made by someone else. I did one research assistantship where my prof wanted me to write a research paper and him to put his name on it, and another assistantship where I got a spot on a couch rather than an office.

I was then thrust into the world of part-time work, where I was treated even lower, paid less, and remained invisible to my bosses (save one at the lowest-paying community college, who, even though they paid me half of my other schools, still wanted me to wear a suit to teach). I then had to take a part-time job at the local zoo to make ends meet. My bosses there liked me, but only because the rest of the workforce was so lackluster...I still had no rights.

Throughout it all, I remained a good worker. Wherever I have been employed (even at the lowliest of places), I have honestly given my all to my job. When I was doing temp work, I would bust my ass...not because the bosses might see my effort and like me (I knew they usually didn't know who I was) but because that's what you're supposed to do at work. I gave my rural low-paying community college my A game, and my students got a taste of top-level college teaching...even if it was unappreciated to do so. I killed myself at the zoo. I was an awesome employee wherever I worked. It's just, I always thought, how you are supposed to be....and, if you keep doing it (the entirety of American culture tells us), someone will notice.

For my current job, I'm an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English Language and Literature at University of Toledo. I teach composition, business writing, technical writing, and literature classes. The subject matter really is outside my training, but I have worked hard to become a good, pedagogically sound teacher.

I meticulously plan my classes for maximum student learning. For instance, I put in long hours conferencing with students, discussing their writing, giving them the personal educational experience which I never had. I've had colleagues tell me "you're a badass teacher." My departmental evaluations are good, and my boss has expressed admiration at my reach and scope in the classroom.

All I want from work is to be allowed to do my job to the best of my ability, in an atmosphere of relative stability. While I by no means thought I would be a writing teacher, I honestly would be quite happy doing this work, at this school, until the day I die. I like my school, like my colleagues, like my students, like the work. As long as I am at this job, I will give my university as much of me as I can.

Unfortunately, I have learned recently that all the lessons from my previous job still hold true to this day. I might be good at my job, and yes, my bosses might like me. Ultimately, though, I am just a cog in a machine, and those who hold ultimate authority over my labor are not looking out at all for my best interests. Instead, they see me as the enemy.

My state elected a governor who ran on a platform to, among other things, raid my retirement. Now, my governor and legislators are ramming through a bill which will eliminate my right to collectively bargain. This means that my university president, who is already deeply engaged in efforts to undermine my college, will be able to do with me pretty much whatever he pleases. I am a soon-to-be father who is now probably going to have my family leave taken away. I am soon going to suffer a big financial hit when my take-home pay drops when the university administration quits contributing to my health care. I would not be at all surprised if my actual salary gets cut. These, though, are far from the worst thing that can happen. If the current anti-collective bargaining movement passes (as it surely will), my university could fire all us lecturers and replace us with part-timers. And because I wouldn't have the ability to collective bargain, and because the union wouldn't have the power to strike, there's absolutely nothing I or any of my colleagues could do about it.

Aside from my personal doom, the most disturbing thing about all this is that, if they gut my job (as I suspect they will), it will lead to worse teaching. You take away my job security, and I will be a much more panicked teacher. You increase my workload, and that's less time I can spend with my students. You take away my benefits or salary, and I will do my best to leave the business of teaching altogether (assuming, of course, there's anywhere else for me to go...I've even given thought to going back to the restaurant world). Moreover, you will teach me and everyone who does what I do that our work is unvalued...and although we really want to care about our job, there's only so far we can go when that consideration is constantly unreciprocated.

I don't really want much. While I think I deserve it, I have absolutely no expectations for a salary reasonable to my level of training and my work performance. I have no desire for awards, publicity, or accolades. All I want really is to be treated with a little respect and be allowed to keep trying to help the future generation become a bit smarter and better at critical thinking, in hopes that they can make this world a slightly better place. I also want to not be treated as the enemy.

That, during a time where you say we need increased job growth, and that the key to such growth is an educated citizenry capable of doing the work, this is the time you decide to rip the top off education, make all the workers devalued, and try your hardest to drive out the dedicated professionals who teach is frankly befuddling, counter intuitive, and more than a little sad.

lessons from the world of work

For the two or three people in the world who haven't heard this story from my past:

I had just left Little Caesars in a confused state, because I was recovering from a car accident when I was fired. However, nobody could agree on who fired me, or why. Eventually, though, I learned that my manager at the time wanted to promote her cousin but had to get rid of someone first...and that someone was me. She never admitted this, however.

It was a period where there was a really horrible economy, and jobs (especially ones that would work around my college schedule) were scarce. Anyway, I swore that I would never go back to food service after this. I was tired of working stupidly long hours, smelling of food, and being the only person I knew who did not have weekends free. There were very few options, so I innocently applied at a temporary service agency.

For the next few months, I would get random phone calls sending me to a different place about twice a week. The first job they sent me to was at the Revlon plant. I was working on an assembly line. My job was to take a pre-cut sheet of cardboard, fold it into a box, and hand it to the next person...for eight solid hours. Gee, it was exciting.

Most of the time, it was warehouse work...moving boxes, cleaning up, that sort of stuff. I did work at a plastics shop recycling waste material by throwing their scraps into an industrial mulcher. I worked at a meat packing plant with a few other temps, most of whom were fresh out of Navy stints; our job was taking old inventory out of the freezer, painting over the 3+ year old expiration date, and moving the boxes onto a truck bound for a homeless shelter.

One day, I got a call sending me to a dairy packaging plant. I showed up in jeans and tee-shirt. My boss (for the day) looked at me.

"Didn't they tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

"You're working in the cooler today."

Naturally, I had no jacket...it was June in Florida, after all. They found a windbreaker for me, and I worked until I lost feeling in my limbs, wandered around outside until I regained feeling, then went back into the cooler.

Obviously, this level of work impressed them in some way, because they invited me back the next day. I pulled up to the plant with jacket in tow, but this day, my boss informed me, I wouldn't be working in the cooler. Instead, I:

• swept the place
  
• moved some boxes
  
• swept the place
  
• mowed some grass out front
  
• swept the place
  
• moved some more boxes
  
• swept the place yet again
  

After the final sweeping, I asked my boss what he wanted me to do next. He showed me the rat traps which they placed around the perimeter of the yard. I was given a bag for any decaying bodies I might find. I was given a box of poison in case the little buggers just grabbed the bait and split. I then made my biggest mistake of the day when I asked, smirking slightly, what I did if there were any live rats in the traps.

The boss, however, thought I was asking a serious question and, without changing expression, reached into a closet and pulled out a broom handle with a nail on the end. Apparently, my job also entailed braining wild rodents. But lest you think this was the worst part of the experience, it was not.

Naturally, I performed my task with the zeal exhibited by any temp...I wandered around outside pointlessly, smoked five cigarettes, and came back in claiming to have found no evidence of rats at all. The boss then told me I had to go in the break room, take a fifteen minute break, and then go home. When I asked if I could just go home and skip the break, the boss yelled at me.

So I went to the break room, where the true horror of the day lay in wait. I sat down next to another temp (we had mowed grass earlier), and we talked a bit. This guy was really, really excited, because they had already asked him back for the next day...which would make four days in a row...which, in his logic, meant he was very close to being offered a full-time job.

This was the worst part of the day. This guy, seemingly intelligent, was thrilled beyond measure that he might get a full-time job where one of the duties was to brain rats with a nail on the end of a broomstick.

Soon after, I said "the hell with it" and went back to work in the food service industry, where I would stay for several more years...through Master's school, in fact. I am eternally grateful for the temp work, however, especially the dairy job. As well as providing me with plenty of exciting repartee for cocktail parties, future book jackets, and such, it taught me an infinitely valuable lesson.

What was that lesson, you might ask? I truly learned exactly how bad things can get.

cotton head

Yesterday, I had a full day of online student conferences. By and large, the students were fairly good (only minimal horror/humor stories to tell colleagues at the bar), but online conferences are de-facto annoying. They take twice as long...because there are these dead spaces between me typing in a comment, student reading said comment, and student typing response. This means I can't actually do any multitasking and be productive on something else while awaiting responses. Hell, I can't even get good traction on a game of Spider Solitaire, for Bob's sake!

Day before, I was running in-class conferences and teaching two classes (one of which really enlightened me into the state of American education in a way I really can't explain in a public forum)....so I got no real work done that day either. Wednesday was spent doing more online conferences. Tuesday was a snow day, so I spent most of the time trying to get caught up on a million little things (bills and my scary income tax situation among them) that pile up while I'm doing other things (such as....you guessed it...conferences) when I wasn't outside freeing cars from 37" of snow. I did much the same thing on Monday.

What's the result of such a work week? For starters, my head feels like cotton. Conferences generally do that to me, but this round was did it just a bit more than usual...it was tech writing, which, although I do a decent job at it, just does not critically engage me as much as I would like. Online makes it worse, because I get the lack of critical engagement on top of throbbing eyeballs from staring at my monitor for eight-plus hours.

If only I didn't still have these ideas, theories, and articles floating in my head and no time to start researching them, let alone write them down.

I guess that's why I drink.

living in a Mad Max world

Gatherings of friends bring joy, yes, but they also bring insecurities, fears, tears, doubts, self-loathing...but at least these are things we're able to share rather than being forced to carry alone.

Flash back to those wonderfully awkward days of junior high school. It was still a few years before people started peppering me with the obligatory "what are you going to do when you graduate?"...questions that would come years later, but that was alright by me. I was young, but in my youthful arrogance, I had began to suspect even at that age that long term work-till-you-die plans would probably never come with any conviction. But while I lacked a real career path, I did already have an option which was more a calling, more an identity than a career, and even that contained a significant element of delusion and fantasy.

I wanted to be a musician.

I had already worked through a bout of being a violinist. The story is actually kind of amusing. My 5th grade teacher told my parents that I was probably mentally challenged (nice lady), and I should probably be tested. So I was shuffled to the guidance counselor's office for an IQ test. When the results came in, my teacher was quite upset to find out that I was not in fact mentally retarded. While I never got to see my scores, I do know that for my next year of school, I was enrolled in an academically gifted program.

The counselor told my parents that I needed more mental stimulation that school (in particular, my 5th grade teacher's craptastic class) could provide...hence the academically gifted program. He also recommended that I take up a musical instrument, and since my dad had a violin from the days he was forced to take up an instrument, the decision was made for me.

Several years on the instrument made me realize I wasn't a bad violin player. I had good technical skills, and I was particularly adept at sight-reading. I even won a superior ranking in some music competition. However, I had absolutely no feel for the music. While I was good at it, I felt no passion. The most heart-wrenching symphonies were merely challenges. I was only someone who played violin, never a violinist. The instrument never became part of who I was.

After a family move to Florida, my folks never found me another violin teacher, and the instrument kind of remained in the closet. However, much to my parent's chagrin, I started to really listen to hard rock and roll and heavy metal, and instead of violin, I now wanted to be a guitarist. For reasons I couldn't fathom at the time, my folks refused to buy me an instrument...so instead I saved up my lunch money for a Chicago-brand Les Paul copy. Of course, I sucked on it for a long period of time, but I loved it.

My folks were less than supportive of my new music obsession. While my Dad would occasionally pick me up a pack of strings, they refused to buy me anything else. When I saved up more lunch money and holiday gift money and wanted a real guitar, my folks made me sell my first guitar (I was told I did not need two). Whenever I left to play with friends, I would be reminded "this is only a hobby. You can't make a living at this." Eventually, I started working so I could buy more music stuff, but even then, I had to be careful. When I bought my honest-to-goodness real vintage Gibson Les Paul, I had to hide it from my mom for a while and lie about how much money I spent. But I didn't care...because I was a guitar player. The music was within me, a part of me. It was who I was.

There came a time where I realized that although I needed a job to buy musical equipment, that work kept me from actually playing. If I wanted the means to become a musician, I had to work at a job that kept me from playing music...and thus prevented me from becoming a musician.

There were many trials and tribulations, many stories of music, failed bands, and stoners passing around unsalted pretzels, but there is a larger point here beyond my doomed teenage music career. Suffice to say, after many failures on my part, I decided that being a musician probably wasn't, for various reasons, in my cards. I went back to school, got a couple of degrees, and eventually moved away to doctoral school.

Moving away from everyone I knew, from everything familiar, was the most significant thing I had ever done. I developed friends, and they became colleagues. We could talk about our lives, our interests, yes, but we could also talk about ideas, theories, concepts, important stuff. We could talk about the best way to reach our students. We could discuss the best ways to refine and present our ideas. We became academics in every sense of the word, because the learning, the thinking, the process of discovery began to pervade everything we did. "Academic," for us, was not our career...it became our identity.

And yet...

One day in particular of Ohio year one, I was sitting in my apartment, where, after hours fighting with some heavy critical theorist or something, I needed to clear my head. I turned on my 19" television to Star Trek: The Next Generation or something, picked up my acoustic, and began to run through some chords. Before long, I was working my way through some Son Volt, some Stones, some Neil Young.

I wasn't thinking about much except for maybe how my voice had, a few years after quitting smoking, become viable as an instrument. I could sing and play, and I actually sounded passable. This was also after I abandoned guitar picks for my acoustic, so I was able to provide much better rhythm and dynamics on the acoustic than ever before.

I finished the song I was playing, but before I could launch into anything else, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, there was a young girl in the hallway--she must've been around twelve. She said "I just wanted to tell you I think you're good." She smiled at me, turned, and left my hallway. I think about this an awful lot. Years after giving up being a guitar player, I realized, I became a much better player than when I thought I was a guitarist, even if I now thought of myself as an academic.

Nowadays, I'm still playing guitar. I have several great instruments. I have a moderate DIY effects pedal board. Hell, I'm in a band, and we're in discussions for gigs. And this all happened after I gave up hope being a guitar player.

It's very easy to get caught up in expectations...your friends, your families, your superiors. It's even easier to get caught up in your own expectations...of success, of justice, of right and wrong, of "what we deserve." Expectations, however, are all poisonous and will do you in if you pay them heed. A promise of a big reward can in fact be a lie. Any hope of cosmic justice, if it's your main motivating factor, has the opportunity to do you in. The true test of character is how you operate after giving up all hope. If everything is crashing down, will you still fight?

Personally, I have a habit of mentally writing things off as hopeless just because all evidence tells me so. Take my status as an academic, for instance. Will I ever get to be a tenure-track faculty? It doesn't matter how hard I work, how much stuff I produce, how many classes I teach. Things are so bad in the academic job market these days, and my friends are so much better at this and more deserving than am I, that I just know I can't compete, that I will probably always be where I am. It would be illogical to think otherwise, and the sooner I just accept this (says the little voice in my head), the better off I will be.

I know I'm not the only one. There's always the danger that, when you ask academics how they are doing, they might in fact tell you (and most of my friends are academics). Me and my friends, we are in a career that is at its historical low point. The signs of the academic collapse have been chronicled so often, I certainly don't need to recount them here. And you can't go to a bar, go to a party, run into someone on the street without hearing it in someone's voice.

How do we handle it? How do you go on when, instead of having your back against the wall, you have that wall pulled down on top of you? How do you handle knowing that there is no order, no justice, no logic? That things very well might not work out after all? That your current effort do go beyond the call of duty, of reason, of logic probably will not pay off? When there is no hope left, when the world has, for all intensive purposes, ended...what do you do then? How do you survive when survival no longer makes sense? Should you even bother trying to fight? As some struggling musicians I like say, "would you keep on going if you couldn't make it through?"

I hope so. Personally, I don't know if I will ever be a successful academic, but then I have to remind myself: I became a much better guitar player after I gave up being a musician.

Hope is overrated. Work is much more important.

has anyone seen my rage?

Usually, my winter break moods are a more sure sign of the seasons than eggnog recipes, visiting relatives, or the slew of rabid shoppers. Xmas comes, I have one week of tremendously bad behavior, visit some family, and then turn into a the bleakest, meanest, most curmudgeonly person you've ever met. Yes, even more so than usual.

This is mostly because the end of Fall semester represents a very special time in the cycle that is the academic job search. If you're going for one of the major jobs, this is when someone will contact you for an interview if you've made the cut. The big English organization is, as we speak, holding its annual conference. This also serves as the meat market for those hoping to get Literature-esque jobs, so if you're one of these fateful people, you're either de-linting your suit and practicing interview-speak, coming to a new level of understanding of the true ramifications of the current job market, or you're just...becoming one of the bleakest, meanest, most curmudgeonly person anyone's ever met.

I'm on the job market again myself. And, as I can see the vast Fratboy-hell BG apartment complexes from my study window as I type this post, you can guess where I fall in the continuum of employment-seekers.

This is (as long-time and therefore long-suffering readers of this blog can attest) not my first time on the market. I have been going pretty steadily since graduating sometime way back in the pleistocene epoch. During this time, I have paid thousands of dollars postage for countless application packets, received some of the most frightfully inept rejection letters (including one beauty that introduced the person they hired in a long, flowing, worship-filled paragraph before adding "Needless to say, we are no longer considering your application"), had several unusual phone interviews (one told me "your skills are exactly what we were thinking of when we wrote the job description"...but those same skills apparently weren't strong enough to land me a campus visit), and even finagled a few on-campus interviews (which were equally strange; one school asked me to do a 20 minute lecture on some point of grammar or mechanics). However, a tenure-track job has, for reasons only Osiris himself understands, thus far eluded me.

Usually, at this time of year, I am irrepressibly bitter and mean. I hate everyone and everything. I am insanely jealous of thousands of interviewing Ph.Ds and ABDs whom I've never met and want to stab them in the neck with the celery from their airport bloody mary. I feel utterly no hope for my future and utterly no confidence in any of my past decisions.

This year? I'm surprisingly non-committal about the whole process. It's one of my deepest fears that I might be simply resigned to my fate.

To be fair, I did end up in a fairly comfortable instructorship. It's outside of my field of expertise, I work entirely too much (16 credit hours in the Fall, 12 in the Spring), and I'm inextricably consigned to freshman classes, but I do get paid okay. I even have my own office with a window...it's a window onto the hallway, but still.... Overall, I'm doing quite well, particularly when compared to my friends, who are either smarter, more charming, better published (up to and including books), or have higher "perfect colleague" potential.

Normally, though, this "it could be worse...you could be lying dead in a ditch" mentality (a favorite aphorism of my otherwise awesome Nana) is of utterly no comfort; in truth, it generally just makes me that much more brittle. And to tell the truth, it's not really a factor in my current yet puzzling lack of rage.

It's my next-to-last year on the job market for many reasons (general tiredness, age, coalescing unwillingness to continue to put off my "real life"), and I'm getting utterly no traction on the tenure job search. And even though the stakes might be higher for some of my friends than for I, my personal career failure has been longer and more spectacular to date. So why am I resigned? Where is the rage?

I kind of miss it, to be honest.

Anyway. Back to writing...I've got two articles to polish and submit if I want to improve my situation for next year's search.

the obligatory depressing post, courtesy of a certain conservative newspaper suppliment

In case you missed it, this weekend's newspaper contained that very special issue of Parade which throws me into fits of melancholy on an annual basis: the "What People Earn" issue.

Now, I'm actually way past moaning about celebrities making exponentially more than me, even those talentless hacks like the Hilton or Simpson sisters. Doesn't bother me. The secret? I just took to heart Jimmy Carter's dictum "life ain't fair."

No, what I'm bummed about this time are the stupid and illogical jobs that get paid more than me, a Ph.D. in a full-time university teaching position:

• psychic
  
• bounty hunter
  
• tow truck driver
  
• locksmith
  
• screen printer
  
• dental assistant
  
• casino dealer
  
• massage therapist
  
• Branson MO singer
  
• rodeo steer wrestler
  

Yes, it's bad. Of course, with our current contract negotiations, there's a good chance that my earnings will plummet. But it could be worse; I still earn more than a hospital clown or a competitive eater.

But if the pro lacrosse mascot overtakes me next year, I will be mighty ticked off.

2007-2008 job decap

Last year, I spend the better part of the summer writing, because I was quite clear that the number one thing I could do to improve my chances on the job market was to increase my publications. I got several articles and a book proposal revision finished. I felt good.

I also decided to revise my letter and vitae format significantly, so I sought advice from several sources. The cv is now 100% better...nice font, nice format, much tighter and more professional.

The letter, however, suffered some growing pains. I took it to a professor who, although I had only very limited experience with her, came highly recommended. The draft of my letter that she wrote (while I sat and watched...I swear, it's great being excluded from writing your own job process) bordered on science fiction...and not the good kind. Apparently, I use my classes as "inversion portals" or something like that. I have no idea exactly what an "inversion portal" is; it sounds like something off of Star Trek, but how that might fit in with my teaching, I have no idea.

So I tried a draft that combined whatever good elements existed in this sci-fi letter with my normal letter and took it to a co-worker. She liked it, so I went with it, and used it on my first 13 jobs. The results? Some trees died. Some woodland creatures had to find somewhere else to live. That's about it. I even bought some of the most expensive deluxe resume paper, hoping that might set me above the crowd, but the $25 per half ream paper also yielded no results.

Finally, I went to my work department office and grabbed a handful of job packets. We were running a search, and I figured out that the best advice I could get would be to see how actual job candidates were doing their stuff...why not, since they were my direct competition?

This was truly enlightening. For one, no one ever told me to use letterhead. Can you believe that? In all the people I asked for advice, this simple bit never came up. Also, research was always the second paragraph and took up 35% of the paper's length. I, after being told that I'd end up with a teaching position instead of a research job, minimized my research.

These are just two of the things that I had been doing wrong and no one had ever told me about. I wonder how many jobs I had lost because of no letterhead and minimal discussion of research.

The job market has been really tough for me, mostly because I've been doing a lot of the work completely on my own. My dissertation chair did a great job getting my diss through committee, but I never got much help on the job process from her...and now, I hardly see her and feel a bit abandoned. My department chair has been wonderful, but he has entirely too much stuff on his plate to really dedicate any consistent amount of attention to me. So everything has been trial and error, and I fear that the errors have cost me on more than one occasion.

I know I can be a great professor and a wonderful colleague. I like teaching, especially when I am allowed to get more involved in the subject and in my student's work than the business writing I currently teach allows. I feel I do good scholarship that will eventually earn a notable place in the academic arena, once I get a job which more greatly allows me to write. And in spite of the limitations of being a full time 5/4 teacher in a field outside my own, I think I've done a great job of everything, even above and beyond.

Making this all the more stressful is that I don't easily fit into an established field. I do the eighties, and this is not a standard academic field...or even area of concentration...or, for that matter, a topic...yet, that is. I have been told by many that the eighties will eventually end up being a hot academic area someday. It should...there's way too much fascinating stuff, and with the intersection of identity politics, postmodernism, and Reaganism, we should be talking about this stuff. As of now, we haven't got there yet. Soon, I hope.

I also do media studies, but there's not a tremendous number of those jobs out there. Many are film studies gigs, and for those, I just can't compete against film studies scholars. Others require production skills, and I don't have them. What's left is a small percentage of jobs where I can apply. I could also do Culture Studies jobs (and it is my preferred area), but there are even less of them. This means that in any given year, there's 15-20 good jobs out there. The odds are stacked against me. And although I applied for 21 this year, I only got a single phone interview.

In spite of this, I am very optimistic. There's a really good university press who's requested a book manuscript, and I have high hopes for that, ideally thinking I can get a contract by next October if all goes well. I have great ideas on how to revise several articles. I have several good articles on the go. One of these is a guaranteed publication. If even 10% of the irons I currently have in the fire work, I will be in great shape for next year's run.

On top of that, this past year has really taught me how to do a good resume and letter, even if that instruction came the hard way. My materials are now dynamite. I feel fully at ease with my application packet.

Get ready, world. 2008-2009 will be my year.

this time, maybe I'll get it right

I walked to the post office today and boldly mailed out a job application. It's the first of yet another year on the job market...search number 5 (or possibly 6). Naturally, this mailing came with mixed emotions.

During my time trying to get a tenure track job, I have sent out possibly over 500 applications, and I have seen a lot of weird stuff in that time. I've gotten numerous one sentence rejections. I've gotten campus interviews without phone interviews. I had one rejection notice that started out with a paragraph on the candidate they did hire and her wonderful qualifications before saying "needless to say, this means we will not be considering your application." On the same day that one arrived, I had one rejection notice that was a five paragraph explanation of the process, and it was the nicest letter I've ever seen. I've been told in interviews that my skills were exactly what the institution was looking for, only to be passed over for a campus visit without notice.

Frankly, it's weird, and I hate the whole process. The worst part is that I have a hard time getting honest, straight advice from people as to why the hell I don't have a tenured position yet. One year, after getting passed over for 100+ jobs, I had three different people tell me my application material "looked fine." Um, obviously not, fellas, but thanks for the effort.

Putting yourself on the job market is such a risk to the ego. You are judged on your abilities, intelligence, and potential for a future career on the basis of five pages of written material. Suddenly, the stupidest things become major concerns because they might kill your chances for a job. Did I use the wrong font? Do they want me to use a breezy tone or look like a gearhead? Should I go out and buy expensive woven paper with watermarks? Will they dump my application if I use a Darth Vader stamp on the envelope?

I knew I'd be facing all these dilemmas and heartaches, but I really need to move my career forward. While I have possibly the best Lectureship I could hope for, it is still a non-tenure job, and I spend so much time grading (especially in the fall) that I have to struggle to do research. So many of my friends have moved away, and I don't have the money to see them. I have to go to conferences to be an active scholar, but each one puts me a grand or so in debt. I love teaching, but I get more value from the writing and research I don't seem to have the time to do. So I need to either move on or figure out another career path.

This summer, I did everything I could think of to increase my chances of success. I finished a book proposal (which looks very solid, if I might say so myself) and started shopping it around to several publishers. I got an article on class structure within the academy accepted for publication, and I was able to persuade a journal to fast-track my already-accepted article. I wrote two new articles and shipped them out to journals, and I recycled an old paper for a third possible publication. I have enough stuff on the go to make me look like a serious scholar as well...and if this doesn't help, I might have to scream or listen to Motorhead.

I've also undertaken a vast revision of all my job material, and my cv now looks fun and shiny. I'm currently debating between two basic job letters. I'm scouring the web for job postings. I've gotten a ton of great advice and help from friends and colleagues. Overall, I am in full "let's get Mike a job" mode, and I have high hopes.

It's the final step to becoming a grown-up (at least in some ways), and I'm ready to take it...now, let's hope I don't screw up.

sum...sum...summertime

For the last number of years, I have had a strange relationship with summers. When I was an undergrad/MA student, I generally took classes...so there was no real distinction between summer and anytime else. This continued when I took a class after my first year as a Ph.D. student. The summer after that was a full-out cram for the standard pre-dissertation exams, so again, it really wasn't a break.

After that, I've mostly spent summers either working on my writing or procrastinating by drinking and watching too much television. I can never seem to do them both, and I know that I desperately need to balance teh two.

The thing is, I tend to need deadlines to work, and I find it hard to take my self-imposed deadlines seriously. I finished my dissertation because I made my glorious dissertation advisor give me absolute deadlines (which I needed, as I was starting part-time work the next year). The summer after I finished my diss, I took off in an attempt to write a lot...but without deadlines, this just turned into a decompression summer. The summer after that, I did the zoo thing (previously chronicled here) rather than write. Last summer was supposed to be writing but became decompression instead.

So this summer is weird in that I have to work. I have a full agenda. I just have to get to it. If I want any success on the job market, I have to dramatically up the number of publications I have, and summer is the only time I can do that (a 5/4 load doesn't lend itself to research). I'm beginning to get afraid that if I do not find a tenure-track job soon, I'm gonna be typecast as a writing instructor rather than as a media scholar, which is what I want. So, I have to find discipline.

In summertime, there are (as always) distractions, both good and bad...especially when one is tied to the college life. Already, I have a few friends who will be leaving for jobs elsewhere. Cookouts and drinking bouts tend to happen with a much greater frequency. As is the case with many friends, the spousal unit and I will be doing an inevitable family visit to the sunshine state. After that, we get to concentrate on finding her a new job (especially as she will be, shortly after the summer's up, laid off thanks to a bank merger).

But I think I can balance the work and fun sides this time around. After all, I have a job waiting for me in the fall. I can largely recycle teaching material for my Fall classes. Everyone around me is fairly healthy for a change. So I think I can still write and have fun.

I just need to get all taoist on this. Harmony. Balance.

Maybe I can achieve this by an intense combination of chanting and destroying my TiVo.

it's official!

In a faculty meeting today, one of my bosses leaned over to me and whispered "You might be the meanest bastard in this department."

recap of the decap, academic version

This year, I reentered the academic job market in a limited way. I currently have a lectureship, and as non-tenure positions go, it's about as good as one can expect. I have zero interference in the classroom, great colleagues, and I'm fully comfortable with the college and the surroundings. However, it's still a non-tenured job, and I still only get to teach intro classes.

I want more. I want to deal with students doing in-depth research. I want to be able to build on their previous knowledge. I want to do courses which aren't general overviews or skills courses.

So, this year, I sent out some applications. It was much more relaxing than my previous searches, because I could ignore any job with a high workload, low pay, bad location, community college, or anything that didn't actually fit in with my skills. I only sent out twenty apps, but they were good ones, and I thought that I would honestly fit in with any of these institutions...unlike in my previous searches, where I would try to argue my way into anything at all.

There was one college that wanted more material, but they never contacted me after I sent a huge packet of writings. However, I did get a phone interview for a very nice looking job.

The interview itself went better than I could imagine. When I was asked to describe a course I'd like to teach, one faculty told me my class was something he would want to take. When I explained what I could add to their department, another told me "that's what we had in mind when we wrote the job description." Plus, in research and in talking to the faculty, the job itself looked marvelous, the kind of thing that I could stay at forever. I finished the phone interview really wanting this position.

I have, unfortunately, heard nothing back from them. I'm well aware that academic departments are tremendously busy and backlogged, and that just because I haven't heard anything doesn't mean that I'm out of the running. However, although I would still jump at the opportunity for a campus interview, I have come to the conclusion that I need to proceed as if I will be here next year...it's a better motivator than wondering what one might've done wrong.

I'm working on better positioning myself for another job market run. Last time around, I found myself without an expected book contract, which would've really helped my publication record. Now, I've been concentrating on getting a lot of article submissions sent. I finished the adjunct article already, and I'm deep into my House article. I have a full research agenda on-tap for the summer. I will be nicely positioned next year. I will think positive thoughts.

Of course, the phone interview institution might still want me...I hope so. I'll keep you informed.

specialized Mike vocabulary

I'm trying to start a movement to get people to incorporate more colorful language in their daily lives. The first work I'd like you to use is "squadoosh," meaning nothing, nada, zip. In a (true, unfortunately) sentence:

"Even though I've had several bites, leads, and promises in my 2006-2007 tenure-track job search, so far they have come to exactly squadoosh."

C'mon, use it in your own conversations!

I suck less than I thought!

I am online at my house, where, instead of the spiffy high-speed campus connection I have at work, I instead have dial-up. It is pretty good dial-up...dirt cheap, from a cool local non-profit, and pretty fast for a phone line...but from my work computer, this is still dreadfully slow. So, when I'm online, I tend to be here for ages.

I'm in front of the computer now to do my standard daily web stuff and to work on syllabi (I have my boss coming to observe me teach in week 3, so I need to have everything really buttoned up), and I have the MP3s going. A little while ago, I was listening to My Chemical Romance, and I thought I might've heard some new sonic layers I've missed in the past. Then I realized I might want to check my cell phone, because the sound could've been my crappy little ringtone.

Long story short? I got my first interview of the job hunt year. I am, of course, tremendously excited that someone knows I exist and still wants to talk to me. Of course, it's only a phone interview, so I don't want to get my hopes up at this point, but it's a positive sign...and I went so long between positives in my early job search years, so this is nice.

Anyway, back to work. I have two courses to design, a book to review, and an article to write, and I have to get these done by the end of the break...so sorry if I'm not more in-touch.

and they start...

I just got my first rejection from a Canadian university, so the job
market search is progressing much as expected...

In grading/end of semester hell. Updates coming, including on the
student who wanted to write about why we fight wars...in 6 pages.

where are the top tens?

For those of you who remember, I currently do a spot on a friend of mine's weekly radio program "Off The Record," now on every Friday from 10 to noon, which you can listen to in real time here. My normal segment is a top ten, and I have, in the past, posted several of them here.

I would like to do so again. However, I am on the job market, and one of the things that's been in the news (at least in the academic circles) is the use of candidate's personal blogs as a tool in job searches.

This is where the top tens might be a problem. My main goal in writing these lists is to make my friends laugh. As such, I consider them comedy first and foremost, so issues such as taste or correctness are not really in my mind. Yes, they can tow the line of crudeness, but that's the type of humor the show strives for, so that's how I've been writing them.

However, I realize that they might give potential employers the wrong impression. So, it is with great regret, that I have decided to pull them from my blog. I'm very proud of them, so I don't want to do this, but they might work against me in the job market...so they gotta go.

I am still going to do the lists. You can still hear them on "Off The Record," every Friday from 10 to noon, which you can listen to in real time here. As far as I understand, they will be podcasted. And who knows? A link to a blog dedicated to these top tens might appear on the right of this page...you never know...

job stuff on the web

If anyone's curious, I have recently revised my web page for potential employers. I've got some pdfs of some articles up there, if you ever wanted to see my scholarship. I am also taking advice, if anyone has any.

pressure buildup and release

For the last few weeks, I've mostly been focusing on my classes. There's a lot to do...fix the plethora of stupid errors that seem to endlessly creep up in my web material, battle with the bookstore, battle with technology (or lack thereof), answer e-mail questions from people who obviously haven't read the syllabus (or anything else, for that matter), deal with the droves of dropped students...so I haven't given a lot of attention to the myriad of other things that have come up (including, as some of you particularly know, answering e-mails...soon, I promise).

One of the biggest things that has been simmering away is the Great Academic Job Search 2006-2007. I've been thumbing through the postings and such, but I haven't actually sent anything out yet. The teaching work has been one big reason, but perhaps the most important excuse for this procrastination was that I was waiting for a response from a university press who expressed interest in working with me.

Flashback: In 2003, I was finishing up my dissertation. I was lucky enough to get into the American Studies Association. For those of you unfamiliar with this group, they hold what is undeniably the Mac Daddy of all culture studies-oriented academic conferences. I was fortunate in that the panel which accepted me was chaired by uber-scholar Janice Radway and also included Lawrence Levine, also a heavyweight in the field.

It was quite a rush to get regular e-mails from two people who are very influential in my field. The conference itself was magnificent...there was always an interesting panel to go see, and those of you who've gone to lesser conferences know how unique that is. The panel I was on went swimmingly...and no one laughed at me. There was plenty of stuff which covered professional development. Most important for me, however, I recieved a letter from a major university press (who shall remain nameless) who was interested in meeting me...and if this worked, it would be an academic coup.

I pulled out my vita. I polished off the best chapter of my still-in-committee dissertation. I wore a nice tie. And the meeting itself went swimmingly...the assistant editor of the press seemed genuinely excited about my work and the possibility of it fitting in their press. A few weeks later, I was asked for a copy of the full dissertation and a book revision plan.

It took me a little while to get the revision plan to them because my funding had run out, and I was adjuncting at several institutions...in disciplines with which I had no experience....but I eventually got it done and mailed off.

Now, I've never written a book before, so I naturally assumed that the revision plan would cover how I planned to revise the manuscript...and that the press would read both of them. When I finally heard from the press, they were confused about the proposal...and it was very clear, from talking to the editor in chief, that no one had actually read the manuscript. Admittedly, since I wrote the proposal as a companion piece to the dissertation, reading it without reading my big chunk o' work would be a bit puzzling...so I told them I would take another swack at it, now that I (supposedly) knew what they wanted.

The next draft went through several iterations, and it did take a while...I adjuncted for another year before landing my current job, and it took a long time to cope with the heavy grading load that accompanies a 5/4 load in composition (in which I've had very little formal training, so I was behind from the git-go). But when I finished, I was very pleased with the results. It showed a tremendous growth in my thinking. It spelled out my research questions in explicit detail. It was solid and had real potential to make an impact. So, last April, I sent the thing to the press.

Now, as I knew I would be getting back on the job market, I really wanted to hear positive things from the press. My heavy teaching load since the dissertation had kind of put a crimp on the amount of research I could do, and as a result, I haven't published as much as I should. A book contract, however, would be pure gold. It would show that I had some research potential, and it would show that I could put out stuff. Pretty much, it would have, if not guaranteed me a job, then at least really bumped me up in most school's "potential hiree" stack.

So I waited. And then I waited some more. The press's 12 week deadline passed. I waited. After 4 months, I sent a polite inquisitive e-mail. And then I waited. I sent another e-mail. And then I waited some more. I sent another e-mail, cc'd to the press's editor in chief.

Today I got the reply. They do not want to work with me. The story, as the e-mail tells it, is that they couldn't figure out what my research focus was. When I read this, I immediately resisted the urge to grab a whiskey sour (it was, after all, 10:30 this morning) and opened my file of the revision plan I sent them...and in the third paragraph, starting on the first page, was the paragraph that explicitly spelled out my agenda.

If they just didn't like my work and thought I sucked as a scholar, that would be bearable. If they didn't think I fit into their press, that would be understandable. But it was clear to me that they only browsed my proposal and never put real thought into my project. I am going to take great delight in deleting these people from my e-mail address book.

I guess it's a fact of life for me as an academic, but I think I have to start assuming that no one I will encounter will be professional. In my 3+ years on the job market, I've seen some unbelievably rude and amature behavior, and my first university press experience just backs it up. I would be happy if people would just take their job seriously and realize it had severe implications in the lives of others.

I know that if any of my ex-students are reading this, they might giggle...I have, after all, taught while wearing Hawaiian shirts...but that's just mode of dress. In my actions, both in the classroom and in other academic settings, I've always made it a point to take whatever I was doing very seriously. I wish others would do the same. I'm hoping to find out differently, and I really want a future employer and a university press (anyone have any leads on either?) to prove me wrong.

So, granted, I'm feeling a little pressure now. Without a book contract, my application packet might look research-light. Is it worth while to bother with the job market? Do I try to rush out some stuff and neglect the teaching? Do I stare at the wall and listen to Motorhead entirely too loudly?

Thank goodness the Black Swamp Arts Festival is back! Tomorrow, we go see The Reverend Horton Heat. The spousal unit and I are volunteering Saturday afternoon, and then we're back up for several bands I don't really care about...but friends will be there, and the beer tent will be open, so it's all good.

Don't you wish you were in BG?

random news and a new season of posting

School is back in session, so I have been spending most of my time working on related issues. As you know, I am now a Lecturer at University of Toledo. I have been trying to deal with the usual array of student concerns (which I really don't want to get into here), but I have also been trying to get my office together. The plus side? I have an amazing computer...new Dell, fast as all git-out, big monitor, laser printer. Unfortunately, though, it does make my home machine seem ancient.

The only down sides to my new office are (1) the ugliness of this old place and (2) lack of shelving. Both will be corected eventually when building maintenance can get here, but who knows when that will be. I'm going with wall mount shelving, but I gotta store the shelves in my office lest another faculty lay claim...and some of these boards are long. I have to move chairs over stacks of boards when a student comes by. But, I suppose, there are worse tragedies.

Now that I have an actual office out of which to work, I find that (1) I feel much more professional, and (2) I seem to be more organized over my workload....to do lists and everything. I hope this means that I will get back to writing once I finish with the first stack of papers (which is, groan, already here). I should also have more time to blog while I'm at it.

This all leads me, however, to one scary thought: I think that I might be becoming an adult. My friend Jamie got me referring to my "adult salary," and I have been putting it to adult uses (paying off bills and restocking the liquor cabinet with good stuff...it is, by the way, really fun to buy five bottles at the liquor store). The responsibility at work also seems adult, as does the fact that the office staff now actually knows who I am. Hell, I'm even planning when I can afford to buy a new car, which is really weird...as my newest one was about ten years old when I got it.

Is dressing formally really that far behind? Will I quit drinking too much? How about getting mad at the young whippersnappers across the street who make noise to all hours of the night? Will I start complaining about how today's music doesn't have melody like it did in my age? Who can indeed understand these kids today?

Somebody give me a comic, quick!

blogs as a job killer?

As an educator and academic, I am a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education...it's a professionably viable thing to do, and they often have intriguing articles. Case in point: in the job section of this week's edition, they had an article written (anonymously) by a member of search committees called "Bloggers Need Not Apply."

The basic slant of this article was that whenever they've been able to dig up a blog of a job candidate, it has usually somehow worked against the potential hire. The article (as well as the author's searches) seems based on the assumption that the blog, in order to be anything other than a drawback, has to be an attempt to bring the author's scholarship to the masses. If it is not, the article argues, you should eliminate your blog from the ether.

There are a few really weird assumptions that result from this argument. First, one candidate's blog worked against him because it "revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica." The underlying assumption here is that in order to be an academic, your teaching and field of research have to pervade every mote of your being. To show that you have interests outside your work is to show that you are not a viable professional academic.

This of course means that academics is only for the totally obsessed among us...at least in this article's view of the world. I've got to wonder. My brother is an electrician, and a damn good one at that. Still, he has hobbies other than electricity, and he doesn't think of running wires every minute he's away from the job site. If he wrote a blog about his rabid love for music, would he be considered less of an elecrician? This example, incidentally, is not going to happen; not that he doesn't love music, but he's too much of a technophobe to have a blog.

Anyway, is being an academic really so far different from any other job that you cannot be good and it and have a life and outside interests? Personally, I've known a lot of academics who do nothing outside their research. They are not fun people. They can't hold a normal conversation, they're ill at ease with people, and they can't talk about research without (a) looking at the conversation as an excuse to dominate or argue with their position, (b) steal potential ideas from those with which they converse, or (c) use the talk as a tool to intellectually rank and compare their colleagues. Is this really the type of person that you want as a colleague?

When I was going after my MA, I was pretty much a school/work hermit, and I don't know if I did anything significant other than those two. When I started my PhD, I promised myself I would still have a life, I would converse, make friends. Guess what? I found that having some kind of existance outside of academics, rather than distracting from my work, actually allowed me a type of perspective and awareness that I could not get when thinking about scholarship was all I did. Knowing other parts of the real world allows academics to better relate their work to that real world...strange but true.

In many ways, many academics want to have their field dominate all existance...both within the university and without. I understand this...it's largely tied up with the struggle to stake out ground for your discipline in general and your research in particular. However, outside perspective, I would argue, is also something you might want.

Later in the article, another serious point came out, one that I feel the need to quote at length.

Part One: "it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process. It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It's not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order."

Part Two: "More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible. We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction."

If the people writing the blogs have nutso politics, then yes, maybe they might not want to advertise that fact. But the idea that you should squeltch your personality entirely to do a successful interview? That I have problems with.

Why, as an interviewer, would you not want to get to know any of your interviewees and in fact encourage them to hide this stuff? On what basis then are you hiring? A CV/resume? Some candidates have a great cv and look good on paper but would make awful candidates as they have no character or social skill. The very strength of other candidates is exactly in how they work with others, how they would work with your students, how they would work with your department, and if these things are not matters of character and personality...the very thing the article recommends squeltching...what are they? I've been reading Kitchen Confidential, and Chef Bourdain argues (I'm paraphrasing here) that when hiring, character is the very thing you want to look for, as everything else can be taught but character cannot. I've also hired in my past, and Bourdain hits it on the head.

The artice continues: "Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know "the real them" -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more." Should I mention that I find the whole idea that reading a blog and assuming you now "know" the person is just slightly presumtuous?

This isn't the first time I've seen someone questioning the logic behind doing a blog, and although I don't fancy myself a blog apologist, I have had to answer the question "why do/would you do the blog thing?" Lotsa possible answers. For me, the first reason is that I needed to have an outlet for non-academic writing. Writing scholarship requires an ultimate intensity...I'm glad I do it, and I do enjoy the process and the results, but it isn't always what one would call "fun." The writing style that I apply to the blog is much different in form; it can be fun, breezy, light, artistic, needlessly caustic, or any other mood that fits my whim. It is an artistic outlet more than anything else, and having it lets me be a more confident writer in all areas, including academics.

Of course, there are other reasons...I have lotsa friends all over, and it's nice to be available in some sense to them. I like the idea of having a body of work that I created, that other people enjoy, without having to go through the "submit/reject" cycle.

I also have serious ideas as to what goes here and what does not. This is not an academic blog, so I do not chronicle my research. I think of myself as a professional educator, so I do not go into specifics on individual students. My job search (except in broad, general strokes) is off-limit because the decorum of such a quest demands it.

To take the approach that a blog is inherently a bad thing for jobseekers seems shortsighted and assumes a relatively narrow view both about what a blog is supposed to do and about appropriate potential employee behavior. Of course, if someone was to read this blog specifically and directly tell me "you are a crazy person and will never get hired unless you hide your insanity from the world at large," then I might consider differently...