August Research Update

It is now September!  And jeepers, it has been a month!

First off, your ranks continue to swell!  I know I did this bit last month but there are (as I write this) now 311 of you, which is very roughly 310 more than I expected when I started this.  I really am amazed and grateful at the level of support y'all have shown.

Upcoming on the Blog, I've got a 3-post series on Iron production planned, I'm musing out a series on the Dothraki as compared to historical horse-cultures (both steppe and great plains) and I've lined up the first five or so folks for the 'Meet a Historian' series.  I'm not sure when the 'Meet a Historian' posts will start up since it is dependent on the writing schedules of the folks I've talked to (always a bit rough this time of year).  The iron production posts might also be a bit delayed; I'm having a touch of trouble getting some of the books I want to look over for it from the library, because they are in storage annexes that still aren't open due to COVID.

On to the Updates!

First, I wrote a piece about the plight of higher education in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/why-state-universities-have-no-other-choice-but-to-reopen/615565/ .  That's a byline I've been absolutely thrilled to have (I've been an Atlantic reader for years) and it has generated quite a conversation, bouncing around the faculty listserv at both institutions I am currently affiliated with.  Long term patrons will of course note that it draws on some of the themes in my June Research Update.

The main difference of course is that in June, I was predicting, whereas in The Atlantic in August, I am mostly offering a post-mortem on an in-person semester that was already collapsing a week ago and has now mostly collapsed.  I want to talk about what that's been like.

That collapse has produced quite a lot of disruption this month.  I am teaching at a different institution this year (technically my contract is only for the fall semester, but there's a decent enough chance that the department will also have teaching for me to do in the spring), so the month opened with doing the paperwork as a new hire, complicated by COVID meaning that key university services were slow in opening and finalizing the plan for my teaching, as I discussed last month.

Classes started on 10th - that was earlier than usual due to a compressed semester designed to try to avoid winter-flu-season and Thanksgiving Break in order to reduce the risk of campus outbreaks (look how well it worked!).  Starting classes meant learning to wrangle new technology to deliver lectures via zoom and do discussions online; my new institution uses a different course-website program, so I had to learn that.

The university had its first 'cluster' of COVID-cases on the 18th, two more on the 19th, two more on the 20th, four more on the 21st; each cluster is at least five COVID-19 cases in a single building (dorm, frat, off-campus apartment, etc).  The university took classes all-online (while keeping students on campus) on the 20th, which didn't impact me so much because my class was already online; by then I had already fielded my first email from a student who had contracted COVID-19 though.

2 more clusters on the 22nd, then 3 more on the 24th, plus one more on the 25th and the university finally saw the writing on the wall (UNC, just down the highway, had already crumpled by this point) and on August 26th declared that students would be moving off campus starting...August 27th (and continuing for about a week).  Which I just want to stress that, at 1pm, 2 hours before my Wednesday lecture, the university told everyone that students would begin moving off campus the next day.  Instructors and departments received no advanced warning.  So I scrambled to make arrangements so that students weren't having assignments due while they were evacuating campus.

And then on the 27th, we get the announcement that classes would be cancelled on the 31st and the 1st, with two more days added to the back of the semester to make up for it.  Which sent me scrambling back to my syllabus again to try to restructure things, since shifting all of the lectures back one class desynchonized them from the discussion readings for each week.

That chaos has meant disruption in the research schedule, as you might imagine.  I've gotten back comments on article 2 from the friends I sent it to (the last one came through just a week ago, but with very detailed and helpful comments, so all is forgiven), so I need to find time to make some revisions and also probably secure some image permissions.  I'm honestly not sure when that is going to happen, since the COVID-chaos absorbed a lot of my early-semester time before the first wave of papers and tests I'll need to grade.

And limping over the horizon is another annual task...

The Job Market

I wanted to talk this month a bit about what the academic job market looks like and how one goes about getting an academic job (after, you know, earning a PhD in the relevant field; we can talk another month about what *that* process looks like, but let me tell you my first response to every student who says "I want to go to graduate school" is "Have you tried wanting something else?").

Academic jobs are, like farming, strongly seasonal - they move with the flow of the academic year, in two phases.

The first wave starts in August and really gets going in September, with available jobs being posted to the websites of the major professional associations for each field (so places like the Society for Classical Studies or the American Historical Association); of course for the hiring department that process starts much earlier - typically at the beginning of summer - getting approval for a hire, lining up funding and writing the posting.  The first wave are generally for tenure-track jobs and good post-docs.  The jobs get posted in August/September (with a few stragglers appearing in October) with deadlines to turn in materials in September/October/November.

Materials vary a lot by posting and the preference of the department.  Effectively every job will ask for a cover letter, 3 letters of recommendation and a C.V. (the academic version of a resume, you can see my sad excuse for a C.V. here: https://history.ncsu.edu/people/faculty_staff/bcdevere ).  The cover letter is a tricky thing to write, because it is both bound by formula (always 2 pages, never more, with each paragraph doing a specific thing in a specific order), but also needs to be interesting and grab attention because most job committees are looking at way too many applications, so you have very little time to make a good impression.

In addition to those, many jobs require additional documents.  Research and Diversity statements are very common, typically a 2-3 page document detailing your research agenda or your approach to diversity.  While the former is a fairly established document, the latter is very nebulous and expectations for it after often left very unclear; it is an open secret that some job committees use it as a way to get candidates to reveal things about themselves that job committees are otherwise legally barred from asking about, but at other institutions, it is a heartfelt effort to ensure that candidates are going to be comfortable teaching diverse classes.  International students, first generation students, students coming from limited means often do benefit from a level of understanding and alternative teaching approaches, so it's not entirely unreasonable.

The other set of documents are typically a writing sample (that's an easy one, since I have an article forthcoming, I just use that) and teaching documents.  Sometimes that means a 'statement of teaching philosophy,' sometimes it means records of student evaluations, sometimes it means a full portfolio that includes both of those things along with sample syllabi and assignments.  I keep a full teaching portfolio (around 70 pages long) which I edit down to whatever is requested, tailoring the sample syllabi to what I'm likely to teach.

You submit those documents, tailored for each job (in a good year, I might apply to 20+ positions; competition is intense, so you apply to everything, which of course makes the competition more intense), for deadlines in October and November.  It used to be that departments would then interview at the big conventions in January; pretty much no one does this anymore and instead interviews are done by Skype and Zoom in November and December.  Some jobs will do a single interview, some will do a two-stage interview, with a 'long short-list' of interview candidates getting 10-20 minute interviews in November before a 'short short-list' get hour-long interviews in December.

Finally, three finalists (it is almost always three) are selected for campus visits in January or February.  The campus visit is essentially a multi-day interview where you are being interviewed literally at all times from when you get off the plane to when you go home, except when you are sleeping.  Profoundly exhausting process, let me tell you.

To give a sense of the odds that are against you in all of this, one job I know of, which seemed broadly typical, went from 200 applications, to a short-short list of 15, to 3 finalists, to one person offered the job.  The odds are against you at every stage.

Then, right as the on-campus visits are ending (assuming you got any; many candidates go an entire year fall-market cycle without even getting to the on-campus stage) the spring-cycle job market starts up for adjunct positions and the less attractive post-docs (which are often adjunct positions in disguise).  It works the same way, with postings in February and March, interviews in May or June; often there is no on-campus visit for short-term adjunct positions.

This year, alas, will be a very, very bad year for the job market.  We're still early on, but it's clear that posting will be extremely thin.  There's almost nothing in history from any of the major state public schools (who, between them, have about half of the positions); most of what is appearing are small private schools less vulnerable to shifting enrollment (but those tend to be heavier teaching positions with less opportunity for research and also generally lower paid).  But the deep-freeze that shut down last year's spring-cycle job market, combined with the fact that the number of newly minted PhDs won't have decreased (since people graduating in 2020 probably started their programs in 2014 or 2015), so it's a full field of candidates up for a tiny, shriveled field of jobs.  We're on track to have a quarter of the jobs available this year as last year in history...and last year was not particularly good.

And to be honest, hiring never quite made up for the bad years after the 08/09 recession, for reasons I discuss in the above-linked Atlantic article.

It's not a good place to be, but it is where we are.  Again, I want to thank you all for your support, which helps me to keep writing and teaching and doing my thing, even in the face of the dismal situation in the field.  Y'all give me a tiny measure of security in what are truly uncertain times.