Before the 1960s, American colleges were mostly for “our kind,” not for the masses. Although the G.I. Bill opened college to many a (male) veteran who might not otherwise have attended, there were still few graduate schools. Many colleges kept blacks out entirely; most colleges also had quotas on Jews and women (who might be restricted to 20 to 40 percent of the student body), and most women students did not finish college. According to Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963)—a book that Ms. Mentor still highly recommends—some 60 percent of women college students in the 1950s dropped out to marry. Many, presumably, were pregnant, in those days before the Pill (1960) or Roe vs. Wade (1973).
When Stephen Ambrose, later to be the biographer of Richard Nixon and the major historian of D-Day and much more, was finishing his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, he received twenty-five job offers.
Today, a Stephanie Ambrose would be delighted with one.
Ms. Mentor wants women to grow and learn and thrive and share their knowledge—but academic women also need to be realists. There are very few jobs, and the job market for professors has been in an almost continuous slump for a quarter-century. Yet applications to grad schools continue to rise, especially from adults who've been out of school for some years. Often they give their all as teachers and graders and scholars-in-training—and then, there are no permanent positions for them.
The job hunt itself is now a full-time pursuit, for which graduate students need to budget hundreds of dollars for photocopies, dossiers, postage, telephone calls, and travel to the academic conventions where “job markets” are held. There, crammed into overheated hotel rooms, new Ph.D.s may have just thirty minutes with an interviewing committee—half an hour to sell themselves and their life's dream.
Later, in on-campus interviews, would-be assistant professors must be neat, smart, personable, good-humored, thoroughly knowledgeable, and fully alert and engaging, sometimes for two full twelve-hour days that may include meeting up to fifty different people. And even then, offers may be long in coming—or positions may be canceled, thanks to acts of God or state legislatures.
And so aspiring academics are also mortgaging their psyches. They must consider living apart from loved ones who also have careers; they must be willing to be academic gypsies.
In the humanities, it is not uncommon for Ph.D.s to spend five years or more as part-timers or adjuncts or temporary replacements before they finally get on the blessed tenure track. The same is true for post-Ph.D. scientists who spend years moving about as “post-docs.” In 1995, for instance, the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science, Engineering and Public Policy revealed that among chemistry Ph.D.s only about one in five—21 percent—held an academic job.
Although she has many marvelous powers, Ms. Mentor cannot change the American economy, nor conjure up jobs where there are none. But she can help bright new academics—those wise enough to read her—to use their talents effectively. She also recommends that they read and study Mary Morris Heiberger and Julie Miller Vick's excellent book, The Academic Job Search Handbook (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992, 1996).
Then Ms. Mentor will advise them, as in the following exchanges.
Wow! A Clown!
Q: I've been told that vitas and job applications need a “WOW” factor—something with a unique flair. My grad school classmate who wrote her dissertation on the Marquis de Sade plans to wear leather to interviews; another who wrote on menstruation swears she'll have the nerve to wear a white dress with red spots.
My dissertation, though, is just on Elizabethan comedy. I've been a school grind and library rat all my life, except for the crazy summer I spent as Bozo the Clown at an amusement park, where I learned to smoke marijuana and finally got fired when I was found half-dressed and dazed underneath the Thunder Coaster.
How can I wow a hiring committee?
A: Ms. Mentor would say that you do have a wow factor, right under your nose (right where you wore your Bozo honker). She suggests that you delete the part about the dope and the Thunder Coaster, but keep the rest: it's the funny little bit that will make your application letter stand out.
Hiring committees these days have to be ruthless. With five hundred to a thousand people or more applying for each spot, the first screeners—who may be temporary contract employees—have to throw out the dull, the unsigned, the misspelled, the mal-addressed, and the indecipherable, as well as the cringing, the flaky, the morbid, the fanatical, and the psychopathic.
Then hiring committees start their serious reading.
They're hoping desperately to be entertained, entranced, or tricked out of the misery of reading hundreds of letters that sound alike. “I am applying for…,” “I have studied…,” “My dissertation attempts a synthesis…,” “I argue that, contrary to previous theorists…,” “I would be happy to meet with you….”
And so Ms. Mentor advises you to announce early in your letter that you have a special something for the job. For instance: “My field is Elizabethan comedy, which I've studied in theory—through my academic work—and in practice, in my summer job as Bozo the Clown. I've found that being Bozo helped me understand the performativity…” (“performativity” being one of the chic buzz words for the lit crit crowd…).
You can state that playing Bozo the Clown taught you about teaching, which is, after all, a lot like standup comedy. Through your Bozo work, you learned a kind of public polish that aided you when you taught first-year composition…And helped you with acting out scenes when you taught Introduction to Literature…. (Did it help? Well, say that it did: you'll sound like an engaging teacher.)
A good application letter is a performance with one goal: seducing your audience into interviewing you. Candidates who've sent letters on perfumed or hot pink paper or with words cut out of the newspaper also do get attention—but they're often regarded as unprofessional, and their efforts get posted on mailroom bulletin boards. (Some are even turned over to the police.)
Your letter, though, has a good chance of getting you the coveted interview, whereupon Bozo will help once more. Most academic interviews can be dry: “Tell us about your dissertation”; “What would you like to teach at our university?”; “What are your research plans?”; “What do you see yourself doing five years from now?” Especially after a day of convention interviews, hiring committees will be wiggy with fatigue—at which point someone who can make them laugh may make them weep with relief.
You can be the dashing-but-dignified young woman who amuses and delights even the most jaded codgers with tales of Bozo, the commedia dell'arte, and Shakespeare. And be sure to mention A Midsummer Night's Dream. To most English Department academics, the character Bottom represents their greatest fear as they stand before a class of adolescents, trying to teach: What if they notice that I'm wearing the head of an ass?
In short, Ms. Mentor congratulates you on having a genuine wow factor, on being able to produce the humor and entertainment that are so lacking, and so wildly appreciated, in these difficult academic times.
Were Ms. Mentor on a hiring committee, you'd undoubtedly be her first choice.
That Old Soft Shoe—Will Nothing Else Do?
Q: Once I finish my Ph.D. (in the social sciences), I figure I'll have spent twenty-two years in school, working up to a first job as a university professor. Yet most hiring is done first by letters (most candidates are screened out), and then with half-hour interviews at our major organization's annual meeting.
I figure I can write a super standout letter that can nab me an interview. But then my whole academic future—including whether I even have an academic future—hinges on my “performance” for, say, twenty-eight minutes. Isn't this like being a standup comic (or a bank