This year's academic job market has pretty much come to a close, and neither Isabel or myself received any offers of employment.
It's like I'm watching the military evac helicopter fly off in the distance, while I can hear the horde of zombies shambling behind me.
One or two teaching gigs might open up in the spring, although these are usually high-labor, low-salary types. And, of course, we'd still be competing with everyone else who didn't get jobs.
Did I mention the zombie metaphor, yet?
According to several of the many, many rejection letters that we received, somewhere between 150-300 people were applying for about 20 positions -- just in our specialization. In other words, it would be possible to be in the top 10% of candidates in our field and still not make the cut for a job.
If outnumbered by zombies, how many zombies could the average person take out before becoming overwhelmed?
After twelve years of training to teach college, I feel a little bit foolish that I wasn't able to land a position teaching in one (and more foolish still for having turned down permanent jobs before now).
Do people who survive the first wave of a zombie outbreak ever feel as though they would have been better off if they had been infected with the others? Is it better to be a zombie than to be a zombie's dinner?
I've published. I've attended conferences. I've taught a heckuvalot of classes. My main weakness is perhaps that I still have not landed a book contract...but, of course, there was I time that I had been offered a tenure track position before I had even been published. In my classical tragic hubris, I suspected I would be more competitive with a longer c.v..
Who knew?
Actually...
When I was waiting in a hotel lobby for an interview last month, I was getting pretty agitated. It was going to be an ideal position, and I didn't want to blow it. I was also pretty exhausted. The transcontinental flight had left me jetlagged, Isabel and I had spent about eight hours going over interview questions and answers, and I had a throbbing headache from clenching my teach. About an hour before the interview, Isabel passed me a copy of Imitation of Christ that I had stuck in my luggage.
I'll never find the precise passage again, but it was precisely what I needed to read before the interview. I was still a little jittery, but the headache passed, and I was on the whole more at peace with whatever was about to happen.
What I do remember, however, is that it was one of those countless passages about surrendering oneself to God's will and the folly of human planning.
So that's where we are right now. Twelve years of planning according to worldly systems have abruptly proved fruitless; now we just have to buckle down, look at available means of putting food on the table, and trust that God puts me where the world needs me to bring Him most...even if that isn't in a college classroom.
Comments