Academic Job Hopping

Nosce te ipsum

It's campus visit season, and seeing the performances of our job candidates and listening to conversation as our faculty try to suss out precise motivations and long-term goals has reminded me of the brief tempest (aka the “Unicorn Gumdrop Kerfuffle”) that started when posters at Reassigned Time criticized Dr. Crazy for wanting to leave a TT position (see here, e.g.) Is it okay for junior faculty to job shop, or do they owe something to the departments that have put so much time and effort into their recruitment?

One of Crazy's most straightforward justifications for job hopping: “My institution has not yet made a lifetime commitment to me, and so I'm not certain I understand why I'm supposed already to have made a lifetime commitment to it.” True, but to be consistent, one would also have to concede that accepting tenure would carry with it the ethical responsibility to remain at that school for the rest of one's career. I doubt many people who see no problem with job hopping would grant that.

But I do think that this rationale (and the ensuing discussions in her threads) gets at a broader problem that, even amidst all the job search angst and focused preparation for the job search that's now de rigueur in doctoral programs, is rarely addressed head on. And I think it helps to explain why job hopping really is justified from the vantage of the job searcher. Among the problems with the current underemployment of PhDs is the way it forces all new faculty (yours truly included) to act in bad faith. I don't mean this in a simple way of hiding one's real motivation or ambition (“Your university is perfect for me! [to publish my way out of.]”) It's something more existential.

I.

Imagine an ideal job market, where everyone would be guaranteed a job that matched their primary desires. Geographical location your number one criterion? You can be assured that you'll get a position within a 100 mile radius of your chosen location. Is your primary preference the right balance between research, teaching, service expectations and pay/benefits: you'll get something close to what you want. Do you really want to work at a SLAC, community college, research university? You'll have your choice. Is your primary concern to work in a department with a certain mix of personalities, or find a job for a significant other, or work with a certain type of student population, or . . .? Whatever it is, whatever is the thing you most want, you'll get it (though you may have to give up other things.)

Even in this kind of semi-ideal situation, how many recently-minted PhDs would be able to make the right choice? Who can say what they really want from their careers? Life is a long and funny thing, and knowing oneself, in my experience, is really hard. Dr. Crazy's been remarkably open about her own questions about what she wants. I've found this salutary. In an ideal world, graduate programs would be able to invest some time and energy into helping students think through questions about what kind of professional life we really want as we move into the later stages of our apprenticeship. Even then, though, there would be no guarantee, because self-honesty (perhaps I am projecting) is a rare and precious.

II.

But we don't live in an ideal world. There's no time or point in having anyone really try to think about the question of what we want with our careers in a job market where it is a stroke of luck just to land a full-time job, let alone one in a tenure-earning position. The kind of bad faith this job market forces us into, then, is a kind of self-deception or self-ignorance. To wonder what kind of position I really want, or for a graduate program to lead students through this question systematically, would waste precious resource (psychic, temporal, material) that just aren't available considering this competitive market. No wonder people only begin to ask this question once they've landed the job. And since there's still no real guidance for understanding this question even then (perhaps especially then) no wonder so many junior faculty these days feel a kind of chronic restlessness. Furthermore, to ask that question honestly and openly after the fact almost inevitably involves a certain level of guilt, a guilt partly assuaged through the “angry huff” that I've seen a few people work themselves into at universities where I've worked to justify leaving for greener pastures.

So I do think it's okay for junior faculty to leave. But it's not because a school hasn't made a permanent commitment to them. Rather, it's because the structural problems with the job market don't allow people to wonder what kind of job they want. At the same time, I think it's important to find a way to ask, meaningfully, honestly, what kind of a career and personal life I really do want. When I'm sixty and moving into the last stages of my career, what do I want to be able to savor about my experiences as a college professor? Who am I?