Getting Hired

Terry Caesar

Minnesota Review, Number 45 & 46, Fall 1995 & Spring 1996 (New
Series), pp. 225-245 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/439249/summary

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 Terry Caesar
Getting Hired
In order to have a job, you've got to be hired. If you've got a
recent academic position, however, the process by which you were
hired is likely to have been one of the most interiorized, prolonged,
politically fraught, and severely rationalized it is possible to undergo
in any field. Getting hired for an academic position is not like business
where the interview is at the decisive center of the process. Indeed,
one of the curiosities of academic hiring is that it is consequent upon
a decision whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
nowhere. You're never sure precisely what will prove decisive even if
you get as far as the on-campus visit, meet with the graduate students
in order to ask them if they have to share office space with the facul-
ty, luxuriate throughout in some sort of minority status, and get a jolly
chuckle from everybody during the interview when you express relief
at not having been asked to pee into a bottle. How has the hiring
process changed, and how has it changed, in turn, the very idea of an
academic career?
I'm not sure it would be possible to determine exactly how getting
hired has changed during the last forty years. Take simply the matter
of expectations. A hiring, like a marriage, redefines a larger instuti-
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tional structure each time. Henry Wilbur begins his entry in The
Academic's Handbook, "On Getting a Job," with the following statement:
"The first task of the new Ph.D. is to obtain an academic position."
Then he refers to his own experience. His first paragraph concludes as
follows: "On the basis of that experience, I immediately qualify my
opening sentence: before you set out to obtain a job in a college or uni-
versity, you should do some frank and honest soul-searching" (63).
Forty years ago, would Wilbur have felt the need to make his qualifi-
cation? Thirty years ago? Twenty? When did academics begin to align
themselves with businessmen as wage-earners? When did it become
imperative to caution "entry-level" candidates about the rigors of
committee work? When, for that matter, did it become necessary for a
book to appear with a chapter such as Wilbur's? One feels that if he
turned any more of his skepticism on the very process he aims to elu-
cidate, he simply couldn't provide his wise counsel to leave hobbies off
your c.v. or to be sure to appear in business clothes if the department
has asked about your marital status. When did getting hired, one could
ask, become so thoroughly routinized that some attempt at detach-
ment from it now only appears to be idle or fatuous?
It's very difficult not to posit some point in time during which hir-
ing was easier, more humane, and on a more casual scale. Therefore
226 the minnesota review

historical perspective unavoidably becomes an exercise in idealization.

Let me consider in this regard B.L. Reid's charming memoir, First Acts,
which concludes with his working as a milkman in 1946, before an
employment agency in Chicago notifies him of a position at Iowa State
College. He and his wife are both offered jobs without interviews.
Although Reid mentions "an exchange of letters," presumably none of
them were letters of recommendation. I think we can further presume
that Reid didn't submit either a cover letter or a c.v., and it probably
would have been as inconceivable for his new employers to have
asked him to deliver a formal lecture as it would have been to check
their offer against affirmative action guidelines. We do not, in short,
understand Reid's situation today according to the one characterized
by Kafka in The Trial: "The verdict doesn't come all at once, the pro-
ceedings gradually merge into the verdict."
Nonetheless, idealization can be resisted insofar as proceedings
did obtain, which enable Reid's initial good fortune to be understood
as merely part of a more comprehensive sentence. Four years later,
while teaching at Mount Holyoke, the intelligence was discreetly
given to Reid that he would be fired because he lacked a Ph.D. It took
Reid until 1956 to get one—at age thirty-nine, from the University of
Virginia, while teaching as an instructor at Sweet Briar College. The
age at which Reid got his doctorate was perhaps more unusual then
than now, but I believe it's typical of how tempting it is to emphasize
discontinuities when one could just as justly stress continuities in the
professional narrative of getting hired. Rather like an astutely career-
minded grad student today, Reid sent off his course papers to the
Sewanee Review and the Kenyon Review. Furthermore, whether he
intended it or not (Reid doesn't say), Sweet Briar couldn't hold him,
for he was in a better bargaining position with a Ph.D. Mount
Holyoke duly offered not only more money but tenure. Back at Mount
Holyoke, Reid was secure. Eventually he published a few books, got
nominated for a Pulitzer for his biography of John Quinn, and was
named to an endowed chair some years before he retired in 1983. He
enjoyed a career, in other words, very much in line with contempo-
rary notions of success.
It's not at all clear that Reid would ever have benefited from
advice such as Wilbur's. It's not even very clear what Reid took the
profession to be, beyond one in which he was able to follow the schol-
arly logic of his own interests, generously conceived. Could he have
realized he was all along more specialized than he imagined if he had
had to subject himself to the elaborately credentialized and sequential-
ized process of getting hired as it exists today? Once again, hard to say.
What can someone about to undergo this process today make of a
Reid, who mentions that his academic career only came about in the
first place because of the need for teachers created by the G.I. Bill?
 Caesar 227

There's no comparable need for teachers anymore in higher education.

For decades there's even been too many institutions. S.S. Hanna men-
tions (the time is "the early seventies") that he got a letter from "a
small college in Nebraska" which gave his letter of inquiry the follow-
ing response: "Sorry, we have been forced to close down the college. If
we reopen and need you, we'll call you" (11).
How does a profession change when one seeks entry into it with
the knowledge that one is competing against hundreds? (And often
competing for positions at colleges one has barely heard of?) Reid sim-
ply indicates no historical awareness—not even by 1956—about being
one among many. The real clarity his experience provides us with has
to do with the one past phenomenon upon whose basis a clear differ-
ence is usually declared from the present: the fabled "old boy net-
work." This network is not a myth. Yet it can easily be enlisted to make
a myth. What gets lost is a career such as Reid's. He was not a product
of an old boy network. He appears to have made his way upward
through a succession of jobs pretty much on his own.
We may contrast Reid's career with that of the pseudonymous
Simon O'Toole, who at one point, after publishing an edition of
McPherson's letters while teaching at "Baraboo University," is invited
to take over the courses of a famous old editor of letters at "his famous
old university." O'Toole declines until things are spelled out: if he likes
it, he can stay—and thereby have a teaching load of four hours a week,
a handsome salary, an assistant to help correct papers, and a sure
Guggenheim. "Did I yield?" writes O'Toole. "I yielded" (67). It's a
measure of how shadowy and self-serving O'Toole feels the whole
careerist enterprise to be—Confessions ofan American Scholar is possibly
the strangest book ever written about academic life—that he gives no
specifics about when the great moment of his career took place. (It
seems to have been roughly about the time Reid got his Ph. D.) He
would probably want to emphasize how problematic was his own life-
long relation to any "network" rather than how certain it proved to be
in one crucial instance.
Nevertheless, O'Toole discloses enough about his own career to
reveal how profoundly implicated it was in the very rhythms of elite
affiliation, privilege, and mutual interest. It is apt that his account is
so muffled and painfully inward, as if the better to emphasize a pro-
fessional level where the significant moves are closed to outside influ-
ences. I take this to be fundamentally the same state of affairs that
continues to this day when top professors change jobs or even when
top institutions try to get senior faculty. Dolores Burke's research
study about faculty recruitment in the 80s quotes one senior person
who relates the following procedure: "I gave a seminar in the depart-
ment and they called me a couple of weeks later and asked me if I
wanted the job. I didn't even know there was a job" (72). Such agree-
 228 the minnesota review

able astonishment could not be further from the earnest attentiveness

Wilbur entrusts to his young professor-to-be, who has first to be told
to look where positions are advertised. "The 'old boy network' is
more alive in some fields than others," states Wilbur (65). He can say
no more. He doesn't say this network doesn't advertise. Perhaps he
doesn't have to. You don't get hired within this field, not even start-
ing out. You get chosen.
A senior professor is quoted in Burke as follows about then and
now: "Back in the 50's it looked like an old boy network but it really
wasn't. There were just fewer of us. The American Astronomical
Society had 800 members when I was treasurer; now there are 3600.
When I became treasurer, I knew every graduate student in the coun-
try personally. It was a totally different world back then" (58). So all
that's changed is numbers? But this ignores how elites perpetuate
themselves. A general truth about professions is repeatedly demon-
strated in Magali Sarfatti Larson's fine study of professionalism: "a pro-
fession is always defined by its elites," as she puts it at one point (227; her
italics). The best way to enforce definition is not only to maintain inner
solidarity but to avoid visibility, especially concerning mundane pro-
cedures (old boys just pick up the phone to get something done) and
perhaps most especially of all concerning hiring. One looks in vain for
clear, detailed accounts of how old boys make good on the promise of
jobs. Perhaps such accounts would be too vulgar. Or perhaps there are
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no accounts because there is normally little to detail; vocabularies of

shared value and intellectual intimacy have the character of seeming
inherited, and therefore, say, your advisor at one worthy institution
passes you along through someone suitable to someplace equally wor-
thy as if you were a legacy.
I believe some of the pressure for what has widely come to be
termed "political correctness" can be explained as a displaced response
to the persistence of old boy networks. This response is the classic one
of legalism to traditionalism, in Max Weber's familiar typology of
authority. Traditional authority is, once again, characterized in terms of
its confident, thorough prejudices; the old boy network is taken to be
rotten with them. Whether these have to do with age, gender, physical
disability, or sexual orientation, they correspond point-by-point to the
ideological uniformity now summarized by a legalistic agenda against
all discrimination, which is simply repellent and socially retrograde.
Prejudices belong to the days when the chairman was always a man
and usually an autocrat, when academic stratification expressed a
broader, fixed social hierarchy, and when, only thirty years ago, almost
nine out of ten doctorates were awarded to men.
Or when religion represented still another basis for prejudice. I
have an old Jewish friend who tells the story of when she and her hus-
band were invited to the campus of a small midwestern liberal arts
 Caesar 229

college in order for him to be considered for the position of dean.

Things went very well. They liked the atmosphere. They even liked
the president. But on the last Sunday morning, while driving around
town and observing all the locals spilling out of churches, the presi-
dent's wife turned to my friend at one point and asked the fateful
question: "And which church would you attend?" She paused. They
needed this job. They were sure they already had it. Of course her
husband didn't get it after she told the president's wife that they
wouldn't, in fact, attend any church.
How could she be sure this proved to be the reason? Of course she
couldn't be. In a similar sense, I suppose, any woman or any black
can't be sure even today that gender or race, respectively, provided
the ultimate reason why an expected job offer was not forthcoming.
To each hiring procedure its own vanishing point. The difference,
however, is one of ideological climate, and it makes all the difference:
because an older hiring process, on the model of the old boy network,
functioned more informally, the exerise of prejudice was not subject to
the checks and texts of official opprobrium. Professionals had no great
need to distinguish themselves from bureaucrats and technocrats—a
story Larson tells very well—and so could afford to be either ideolog-
ically complacent or naive. Now, whether your c.v. contains requisite
professional service or one of your letters of recommendation is from
an eminent scholar appears to represent a far more objective measure
of your prospects than whether you might be a lesbian or confined to
a wheelchair.
But has offensive discrimination ceased to function? Ideological
sophistication may simply indicate a sophistication about the very cat-
egory of ideology—and not any one example of it, much less examples
which are nothing more than old-time prejudices dressed-up and
"empowered." One of the more uncomfortable moments of my pro-
fessional life occured some years ago while I sat watching a candidate
for a departmental position smoke cigaratte after cigarette during his
interview. He gave a poor performance. Nobody had to mention his
smoking. Yet I'm not sure anybody would have mentioned his smok-
ing if he'd given a brilliant performance. They just wouldn't have
voted for him, either way.
And so it goes, I would argue. Today's hiring process merely
allows the moment of prejudice to seem less decisive and to become
diffused amid legalistic criteria. One result is that an individual appli-
cant who is unsuccessful gets no knowledge at all about what the rea-
sons were, and knows that she won't. I know a woman whose con-
vention interview concluded with the interviewer stating quite fer-
vently, "I hope it's you." How could she not be fairly certain it would
indeed be—or at least that she'd be invited to campus? She wasn't.
Months passed before the letter came informing her that the position
230 the minnesota review

had been "terminated" because there were too many unfinished

searches for administrators. There was also something about "reexam-
ining institutional priorities." So what could she conclude about why
she wasn't hired? That there had been "proceedings" which were
already active at the time of her interview which excluded her, and any
relation she could have either to the position or the department was
already beside the point? But what sort of knowledge is this? How
does it enable one to improve one's chances in the future? In such cir-
cumstances, it seems to me, it is almost more consoling to feel that the
unexceptionable bureaucratic operations were actually a mask for
blunter and more personal prejudice of some sort.
In fact this woman chanced to know some gossip to the effect that
the most influential man in the above department wanted a senior
appointment for his old professor, and just threw up his hands at any
sort of position when the old professor decided to stay where he was.
I think she came to prefer this explanation to any other. Whether or not
it happened to be true in this particular case, I believe it stands for any
number of others, each of which bears traces of some sort of indeter-
minate, subterranean "network," but all of which must proceed to the
verdict according to impeccable professional standards and proper
affirmative action guidelines. What gets taken for granted, however, is
that because everything gets written up or spelled out, the process of
getting hired is far more fair, responsible, and progressive than it was
in the past. It's not. It's just more complicated, more problematized,
and more mystified.
Can there be anyone active in higher education during the past
twenty years who hasn't seen a routine hiring scenario play itself out,
faultlessly from any legalistic standpoint, which in fact was devised
purely for show? Prejudice on the part of key people, or the presence
of a local favorite —it hardly matters why. What does is that the very
factors consigned to the bad old days instead appear to flourish the
more deeply because all are agreed that they've been stamped out.
Why do people get hired today? If things are so much improved,
everybody ought to know, which means having that knowledge count
in specific instances. Instead, I'm not sure anybody knows very much
about general instances—which usually means it is a time for hand-
books, so that something can be summoned into existence, dissemi-
nated, and propounded. "The best preparation for professorhood,"
states Wilbur, "is rapid intellectual growth and productive scholar-
ship" (76). But we knew this already. We've always known it. What
we don't know is still why scholarship so often matters so little, or not
at all.
It would be very tempting to argue that things have gotten worse,
not better. In order to tease out such a contention, let me compare the
exercise of the same prejudice, this time against homosexuality, from
 Caesar 231

two separate academic moments. The first has to do with a story of a

former colleague, the product of another generation, about how he
lost a chance at his bestjob prospect once his Ph.D. was completed. He
had asked his dissertation director to write him a letter of recommen-
dation. The director did. In order to cinch the case as much as he
could, the director mentioned that my colleague's mother lived near
the institution in question, so her son would be especially pleased to
be there, since he was very close to his mother. The director, in addi-
tion, knew the chairman personally. My colleague was sure he'd get
his offer. He didn't. Only much later, through a series of events far too
complex to detail, did he learn why: the chair, on the basis of the direc-
tor's aside about his mother, had concluded that my colleague was
homosexual.
We may laugh. If we aren't emancipated from such absurd fears
today, at least we have procedures in place which require that we be
more circumspect, open, and just. Yet consider the recent account of Ed
Cohen, who went "on the market" in 1986. His hopes, he writes, were
high: awards, a few publications, the full support of an elite institution.
There was only one problem: he was gay and his dissertation title sug-
gested it. Of course Cohen can't be sure this explains why he received
not a single interview that year; his "deficiencies" ranged from the fact
that his publications were not yet in print to the fact that he refused to
waive his right to see his recommendations. All he can conclude,
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nonetheless, is that dropping "homo" from his dissertation title and

not using the word "gay" made all the difference from one year to the
next. In 1987 he got eleven MLA interviews and two job offers. "I
decided that what I needed to do was to represent my work in a way
that was respectful of the project I had undertaken and yet accessible
to people who might not necessarily be sympathetic to the undertak-
ing" (168). So ought we to regard Cohen's strategy as one fully autho-
rized by the conditions of getting hired, or as one subversive of those
same conditions?
At least, we could conclude, Cohen was considerably more know-
ing about the moment of his own hiring; my old colleague, alas, was
victimized by his. Perhaps. He never told this story as a victim,
though. He delighted in it each time. I think it spoke to him of the
exquisite comedy of academic life, whether its sheltered ignorances or
its formal entanglements. Interestingly, Cohen, in contrast, does tell his
story as a victim. About "the experience of my own self-silencing—
especially on a subject that it had taken me years to learn to speak and
write about publically," he declares it to be "acutely painful" (168). To
sharpen the contrast, we might say that to Cohen his experience is a
tragedy, because it speaks to him of essentially nothing except how
hollow the conditions are; there seems to be little pleasure even in
manipulating them to one's own advantage. So: the emptier the
232 the minnesota review

process, the more formal it is? Of course it could be conceded that

Cohen represents a special case. However, if the process of getting
hired at present cannot deal satisfactorily with special cases, one could
well ask exactly how it can be put forward as some sort of advance-
ment, especially when the special case is an example of the "identity
politics" that the rules were expected to arbitrate?
We believe that each of us, in our heart of hearts, is a special case.
We present ourselves as best we can on paper. We hope that we will be
even more triumphant, if we get the chance, in the flesh. Yet time after
time what the contemporary process of hiring seems to produce is can-
didates who, if unsuccessful, emerge with the feeling of having been
merely a structural feature of proceedings which didn't so much
exclude them as ignore them. For such people, even Cohen's despair
might seem like a kind of blessing. Let me relate the story of another
woman, for whom a position seemed more assured than anybody I've
ever known. Many of the reasons why had to do with her best friend,
the previous occupant of the position, who set it up for her. By the time
she went the on-campus visit seemed just a formality. It wasn't. She
didn't get the job. What had she done?
Since she'd gone through all the motions cleanly enough, she
could only guess. Had she offended one member of the department
by a jaunty remark about one of her former professors, possibly an
object of veneration to her colleague-to-be? Had she scandalized the
men by the incipient "feminism" of her presentation (she had been
warned), especially by being flippant over a translation of the word
"castration?" Could one of the senior men have somehow associated
her with bad luck because, after she met him, he discovered that he'd
lost his textbook? Or was it simply that she felt such an immediate,
visceral dislike of the chairman, and (she was certain) he to her,
although, like good academics both, not an antipathetic word was
exchanged? It would have made more sense if she had eaten a ham-
burger during the interview and learned afterwards that the depart-
ment was all vegetarian.
She'll never know. It is, in a sense, the job of the hiring procedures
under which she was considered is to prevent her from knowing, as
well as to protect the department from whatever she might find out.
A more acute question is: should she know? To consider what depart-
ments term "recruitment" from the candidate's point of view, as I've
been doing, prompts one to ask what could be the cost to the profes-
sion when so many who apply to enter it are not so much rejected as
cast aside? Being rejected at least has the virtue of preserving a per-
sonal relation, however unfortunate or inevitable, to authority. Being
ignored rebukes the very idea of such a relation. This might seem like,
well, an academic distinction; if one can't get a job because one is
Jewish or gay, then one is rejected because, in another sense, every-
 Caesar 233

thing else about oneself is being ignored. Nevertheless, for people

such as the woman above, the distinction is crucial, because at stake
is the possibility of finding the hiring process to have some meaning
beyond its legalistic character. I've suggested, indeed, that the current
emphasis on political correctness participates in the hiring process
once the process is understood as an attempt, from the bottom up, to
will meaning into the proceedings.
This attempt proceeds in two ways. First, by insisting that the ver-
dict preserve the character of a relation, and then, second, by keeping
open the notion that any one verdict has in fact come about because a
relation has been abused. The trouble with this isn't that willing it so is
at best only some compensation for the terminal consequences of an
exquisitely formalized system. The trouble is that a more "personal-
ized" logic really proceeds on the basis of the very traditional model of
authority which the legalistic one aims to replace; in fact the tradition-
al one remains in place, now, paradoxically, in order to redress the injus-
tices of the new legalistic one. Political correctness is actually at cross-
purposes with itself, and hence its imperatives can't be neatly, coher-
ently explained either as agreeing with a liberal social agenda or con-
servatively reacting against one. Arguably, those under the sway of the
academic hiring process have no coherent politics in response. They just
don't have any power, and so they insist that they have been personal-
ly, irrationally alienated from the profession itself at the very point of
entry. Meanwhile, elites respond, from the top down, by trying to refine
the very criteria which have been responsible for the abuse.
So now the most readily available handbooks urge candidates for
the job interview, under "Do's," to "shake hands firmly and stand until
offered a chair" or, under "Don't's," not to "hang around after the
interview." Meanwhile hundreds of candidates get regretful letters
each year about how worthy they are—although not quite adequately
so considering the hundreds of other candidates. I have a friend who
told me that her year's rejections were much more bearable because
one place wrote her a lovely letter. She showed me the sentence that
moved her most: "The profession needs many, many more persons of
your skills, dedication, and love for our discipline." What to say? That
it's a formula nonetheless? I didn't. What should a candidate think
after reading several of these letters? That they are all designed to con-
ceal how total is the evacuattion of any personal connection? Or
should these candidates wonder instead if they sat down too soon at
the interview? Or if they should have shown up at all? The cost to the
profession is a widespread cynicism about the hiring process, which
by now, I believe, is essential to the continuation of the process.
The clearest examples of this cynicism are textual ones, despite
the fact the the verdict—i.e. its justification, not its announcement—is
not required by the proceedings to be epitomized in textual form. The
 234 the minnesota review

statement that so-and-so university is "an Affirmative Action/ Equal

Opportunity employer" (sometimes followed by some statement to
the effect that minorities are urged to apply) is in fact a code, and a
bad one, because there's no way to accurately decipher it as meaning
necessarily that a position is for minorities only. Letters of recommen-
dation are possibly even more deceitful, with even less reason. A
pseudoanonymous piece on a real affirmative action search in the new
academic journal, Lingua Franca, records the following result of the
interview round at the national convention: "Virtually everybody was
worse in person than on paper, which was inevitable, given the
implausibility of their letters of recommendation: every applicant was
the 'best in years.' (This was true, in one professor's letter, for each of
three candidates he was recommending.)" (23)
Let me not linger over the curious intricacies of either of these two
texts alone. One could assess them by saying that it's one thing to
claim such textual practices continue because no better ones have
been found. It's quite another to maintain that the practices continue
because nobody much cares about them anymore, except as phases
through which the verdict has to proceed. Because, furthermore, no
definitive text is necessary for the verdict—at the end, administrations
may inform departments that positions have been disallowed and
departments are free to inform candidates or not that searches have
been aborted—everybody can feel that the real action is going on off
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the page anyway.

Is it? What is going on? Let me now consider getting hired aside
from the traditional and legalistic framework I've been discussing. The
first thing to say is possibly the only thing: there may be no adequate
way to describe "the real action" when it finally issues in the form of a
verdict. Burke, describing the various facets of the visit to campus and
noting the importance of "collegiality," then makes a somewhat sur-
prising point: "Yet the basis of choice—the clincher that gets the job—
was rarely described in personal terms by the chairpersons inter-
viewed" (64). Instead it seems the terms were pretty much what
obtained before the visit, from quality of research to "style," although
of course such things as poise or warmth were also mentioned as fac-
tors, and there is never any substitute for "personal dynamism." If
chairs are reluctant to mention "personal terms," it may not be because
they're more comfortable with standardized, objective criteria but
because "the clincher" is, at root, most often the result of factors that
no one fully comprehends. The clincher may even be the result of fac-
tors no one cares to comprehend, for it has been the burden of all
which preceded it to make the clincher appear inevitable and logical.
"At the gates of the professional world," writes Larson, "the pro-
fessional minorities who control a field do not receive an undifferenti-
ated mass of entrants, but a super-filtered, super-classified, special-
 Caesar 235

ized, and hierarchicized cohort" (204). Precisely. So once a gate swings

open it makes no sense to think that a newly-authorized professional
strides through for reasons which were accidentally formed, deeply
biased, and fundamentally undifferentiated. Hence it may be that the
entire hiring process as it exists in academic life today constitutes a
massive effort not so much to produce "the clincher" but to create it, as
if, somehow, a group of human beings can consistently evaluate other
human beings on an individual basis which is perfectly reasonable and
just. No wonder, we might say, that those who are evaluated are just as
consistently incredulous.
I believe that at the center of the hiring process, especially when it
is legally mandated to have no center, is mystery. "The cincher" is a
profoundly mysterious thing. There are those who are in touch with
the mystery, and those who are not. Those who are can at present pur-
chase their intimacy with an affective vocabulary of victimization,
while those who are not preserve their distance with a bureaucratized
vocabulary of ideological rectitude. At bottom what separates these
two groups is not a vision of a profession, but of human relations. You
don't necessarily have to be on one side of the hiring line or the other.
Let me illustrate with another example from my own experience. One
of the loveliest moments I ever witnessed during an interview
occurred some years ago while my department was undergoing its
annual search for someone to fill a position in linguistics. Everybody
knew it was only for show. We continued to wait for the local favorite
to get a Ph.D. This particular year yielded one of the most impressive
candidates I'd ever seen. Even on paper it was obvious she had to be
invited to campus.
On the search committee that year was our most vexatious mem-
ber, who at the time was smitten by composition theory, especially one
particular theorist whom she made a point of asking every candidate
about at a crucial moment in the interview. None so far had heard of
him; she was content. When she asked the fateful question to an
unusually poised and articulate linguist, however, the woman just
turned to her, smiled, and replied: "No, I haven't heard of him. Could
you tell me something about him?" The member was so startled she
forgot one of the main things he was known for; a colleague had to
intercede in order to finish what she had fumbled.
The superb reply was wasted, of course. Participate in a hiring
process even for a year and you're likely to see—or imagine—enough
waste to last a career, especially when what goes under the name of
"scholarship" has gotten sorted out among the candidates and you are
down to human cases. The faction for the local favorite held firm that
year and the department rolled the search over for another. I never had
a chance to vote for the above woman. What I realized, perhaps
because I knew the verdict was foreclosed, is that I'd have voted for
236 the minnesota review

her solely on the basis of her reply. Of course I thought it epitomized

everything about her, on paper as well as in person. I could have made
a perfectly reasonable case had I been called upon to do so. Yet what
seems to me especially compelling is that I didn't care. Her reply
clinched things for me because it simply transcended the pointless
occasion. Moreover, the contrast was just too garish between the shab-
by departmental stage and the radiant human actor. I wanted—what?
Justice? Revenge? I couldn't say. I still can't. Perhaps I wanted an
entirely different hiring process. Or maybe I was suddenly shocked at
how cynical I'd become about it, and then longed to vote as if the posi-
tion were a lost belief still not too late to affirm.
Writing about it now, I make the power of my feelings less myste-
rious. Feelings are misleading, after all. So are words about them. This
is why hiring has procedures and these procedures have guidelines.
But this is also why procedures and guidelines are continually in dan-
ger of being overcome with stray thoughts, irrelevant considerations,
symbolic possibilities, and deep-seated fears. Because of tenure, acad-
emics—uniquely among other professionals—have to make decisions
about new people who could be colleagues for the rest of the lifetimes
of all concerned. At stake isn't merely evaulating the relative merit of
submitted examples of scholarship. (It needs to be emphasized that
this sort of thing only goes on at elite institutions, which is to say that
it doesn't go on at most colleges and universities in the country.) It isn't
even weighing years of experience. (Just about the only category left
no one is going to take immediate exception to.) What's at stake, each
time, is deciding how old you want someone to be whom you hire, or
how aggressive you want someone to be whom you interview.
I know people who only seem to care if a person will "fit in,"
which essentially means a ready smile at the departmental coffeepot
rather than a quick excursion into the theoretical frontiers of the dis-
cipline. And, come to that, shouldn't people care about smooth pas-
sages across their daily surfaces? How can they be prevented from
caring, or from getting the ceremonies of the coffeepot mixed up with
the imperatives of multicultural pluralism? In a sense, if a candidate
is black or female, the waywardness or indeterminacy of a negative
judgment a group of people can make is too easily explicable as a prej-
udicial one; surely this is one reason why it continues to be insisted
upon—the sheer mystery of getting hired is as unendurable from the
standpoint of someone who receives the verdict as from someone who
delivers it.
Or someone in the position of feeling responsible for the whole
system. Wayne Booth begins The Vocation ofa Teacher by telling a famil-
iar horror story: a former Ph.D. student reports that in her only inter-
view at the national convention (one response to twenty-nine letters of
inquiry sent), the six people there hadn't read her dossier, repeatedly
 Caesar 237

misunderstood one of the main points she emphasized about her dis-
sertation, and got both her name and marital designation wrong.
Booth is outraged. Now, some years later, he imagines a protest letter
to the main offender, with the following postscript: "Your victim recov-
ered; she now teaches and publishes—brilliantly, as you could have
predicted if you had taken the trouble to see her" (4). Is it conceivable,
nevertheless, that his student didn't get her ideas out fast enough, or
lacked the poise to deal adroitly with stupid objections? Is it too appro-
priate, furthermore, that Booth tells a story which has a happy ending?
The waste of the hiring process isn't really waste if it can be recuperat-
ed as success. Its injustice isn't mysterious if it's always the result of
rudeness and routinization. Getting hired in horror stories just isn't
mysterious—by which I mean, in part, that losing a job doesn't always
make sense, and probably shouldn't be continually recreated as if it
ought to make sense, even if now there's every ideological reason or
every professional good that it do so.
Let me give another kind of story. Alexander Theroux has a little
essay in which he maintains, to his own venerable credit, that "trying
to survive by means of one's pen is a noble but precarious alternative"
to teaching. So what to do? "Many an autumn I've found myself stand-
ing cap in hand in some English department or other where various
poke-nosed officials and subheads—often without my experience,
sometimes without my degrees, almost always without my compe-
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tence—gathered together, peevishly took my measurements, and gen-

erally regarding me as an outlaw or a mongrel or both, grudgingly
threw a course my way" (36). Reading Theroux, one thinks that getting
hired is so little written about because, like writing a dissertation, it is
something to get over with. Theroux, however, defiantly remote from
the tenure track, can excoriate academics with rare gusto. Therefore,
we wonder, since he still needs a job, how does he get one? I'd like to
suggest one reason: academics like him. It makes some sense: who else
could appreciate the gusto? It doesn't make enough. But there it is.
Theroux might be embarrassed. He likes to snarl, and he'd rather be
thought a cur than just another animal in his cage. Yet how can even
Theroux himself readily explain that he comes across, on the page any-
way, as instead just the sort of fire-in-his-eyes being, the subcategory
of creative writer, who makes everybody glow?
Why does anybody get hired? What's the clincher? It may be unre-
coverable in most cases today. Legal narratives don't deliver the
clincher; they just set up a storyline. The clincher is probably a fiction
anytime, and better ones which from which legality falls away like an
encumberance are always available. There is a hiring story of unusual
resonance and beauty contained in Bernard Malamud's A New Life
(1961). The first thing to say, however, is that there hardly seems any
hiring process to be described; the hero, S. Levin, merely recalls at one
238 the minnesota review

point that he's relieved a new colleague, the director of composition,

apparently doesn't know he, Levin, applied to over fifty other places,
included the more prestigous rival of the one which accepted him.
(The novel takes place in the mid-50s—when Reid, it will be recalled,
got his dissertation and when O'Toole got his ascension. These three
examples illustrate, I think, the difficulty of historicizing the hiring
process. "We've been hearing from people from every state in the
Union," muses the director. "For next year I already have a pile of
applications half a foot high" [12]. He could be speaking in 1995. The
difference is that it's clear to him this pile constitutes recognition, not
work—and certainly not work for a committee.) Perhaps we would
have thought no more about why Levin was chosen, had he not asked
another colleague, because he suddenly fears he accepted a cheaper
salary than anybody else would have ($3,000). At least at this point the
question comes to exert a shaping force in the novel.
Much later, when the director has learned that Levin is refusing to
support his candidacy for chairman, he exclaims, "Sometimes I curse
the day I brought you here" (284). He refuses to answer Levin about
why. Not until very late in the novel does Levin learn that in fact he was
chosen because the director's wife, with whom he is having an affair,
was engaged by his picture, which he chanced to include with his appli-
cation. He knows he didn't have to. "It was an old picture. I wanted
them to know what I looked like." "You looked as though you needed
a friend," says the woman. "Was that the reason?" "I needed one,"
replies his lover, "Your picture reminded me of a Jewish boy I knew in
college who was very kind to me during a trying time in my life" (331).
From among a number of ways to interpret this story, I would like
to emphasize two: first, getting hired as a manifestation of human
presence, and, second, getting hired as an amorous relation. Perhaps
the second is more scandalous, but the first is bad enough. One thinks
no further than how haunting the absence of a real human being is in
letters of recommendation, or how grimly ironic actual presence may
be (as in the affirmative action search above) in terms of these texts. It
seems by the mid-50s that the inclusion of pictures with one's applica-
tion was already somewhat unusual; certainly in our own depreju-
diced and undiscriminated day a real photograph could only be quite
literally seen as providing far too provocative grounds for all sorts of
retrograde judgments. Levin's lover-to-be makes one. Of course his
attractiveness to her has, in one sense, absolutely nothing to do with
his performance as a potential member of an English department
teaching composition. In another sense, however, and a richer one
which the novel explores, the qualities of sympathy, concern, and vul-
nerability which Pauline intuits are precisely those which Levin sub-
sequently demonstrates effectively even in his professional capacity.
There is a very real sense in which he was right for the job.
 Caesar 239

I take it that Malamud's text constitutes a rebuke to any process of

getting hired, insofar as it is predicated upon voiding all but the most
abstract, impersonal registers of human presence. The more one
restores this presence, the more unreasonable, subjective, and irra-
tional one's response is likely to be—which is only an argument
against such responsiveness if one has a conception of human relations
in which much of what is human simply is not to be trusted. One thing
is trust itself. What is the basis for it? Does Pauline, looking at Levin's
picture, trust her response? What should she have other than a vision
of remembered love or a conviction of human need in order to trust?
Of course no hiring procedure can satisfactorily answer these ques-
tions. My argument has been that the one currently in place conducts
itself as if the questions didn't exist. In fact actual human beings are
moved by answers to them anyway, because some sort of trust must be
summoned, and will be, whether or not a few live candidates will
eventually fly in. Much of the rest of my argument has been that these
live ones appear too late, at least just as often to unsettle as to cinch the
proceedings from which they have emerged.
They don't offer themselves to be loved. Nevertheless,
Malamud's narrative is one of love—the love that, so to speak, is
embedded in the "calling" of a profession, or of the profession as a
calling. No matter that love can't express itself as such in this context
and can only justify itself in another context. Levin presents himself
as someone in need of love; the narrative provides someone to love
him just as it provides him with a job. This is of course not exactly the
same state of affairs expressed by any candidate in search of a college
teaching position. But it's close enough. Many things about getting
hired are clarified by its correspondence to an amorous relation.
There are, for example, many of the feelings unsuccessful candidates
are left with once the fateful letter comes, thanking them for their
interest, mentioning the multitude of other candidates, and wishing
them luck in the future: one feels envy at those chosen instead, bit-
terness over one's own unworthiness, baffled desire, lost innocence,
blunt rejection. The illicit convertability of hiring into loving, and
back again, also explains why an objectified hiring process has to
exist, with so many measures taken to insure against some "person-
al" connection, much less against some sexual advantage being
gained by any party in the affair. Yet it remains an affair with more
than one connotation, and so many amorous overtones abide (from
how either party "woos" the other to how certain sorts of contracts
are modeled on prénuptial agreements) that it would be tedious to list
them. "Nobody wants me!" I heard a desperate friend with a disser-
tation nearly "in hand" cry awhile ago. She's a woman. In the erotics
of hiring, is the candidate always in the feminized position? Of the
two above whose prospects first seemed so good, it was as if the first
 240 the minnesota review

was stood up (he had promised to call) and the second was aban-
doned at the altar (it was all a mistake).
I want to insist upon getting hired as an amorous proceeding
(Kafka's characterization about the verdict is so acute because it could
just as easily apply to falling in love) because for some decades now
a teaching job in American higher education has meant a job in the
same place for the duration of one's career. It's become quite common
to read about how some fields such as health science or business are
already experiencing a lack of qualified faculty and during the rest of
this decade as many as two-thirds of the present faculty in all fields
will be retiring. How much mobility have these people had? Apart
from the upper echelons, very little, I believe, in the past twenty
years. Reid or O'Toole each appear to have assumed far more, and got
it. My impression is that they were from the last generation to enjoy
substantial job mobility in their discipline.
Impressions count for much in this area: the lament that "I can't
get out" is seldom based on statistics, and easily becomes a self-con-
firming one. Of course this applies to tenured professors only, not
those who've had, by default, careers trying to get tenure or those
who've never been able to get on the right track. The hiring procedures
perfected during the last two decades were not designed for those with
security and senority; recruitment procedures are designed to con-
verge upon those seeking their first job. Yet there have been conse-
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quences for tenured people, and the most crucial one can be put in the
following way: they have had professional marriages from which there
was, effectively, no chance for divorce. Can it be any coincidence,
therefore, that the specific amorous correspondence that has shaped
the hiring process during recent decades has been the one of a fateful,
dutiful, and perhaps even loveless marriage?
Susan Sontag has an essay on Camus which she begins in the fol-
lowing way: "Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writ-
ers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, gen-
erosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes the gifts
of a lover, gifts of temperament rather than of moral goodness.
Notoriously, women tolerate qualities in a lover—moodiness, selfish-
ness, unreliability, brutality—that they would never countenance in a
husband, in return for excitement, an infusion of intense feeling" (52).
In precisely the same way, candidates for a job are either husbands or
lovers. What has happened in recent decades is that a hiring process
has evolved in order to solicit husbands. Of course it hasn't happened
in any deliberate way and it's happened for a wide variety of rea-
sons—lately, because of downsizing, for example, or earlier, as a
response to the threatening presence of women. Furthermore, it hasn't
developed because of any systematic discrimination against lovers. As
Sontag concludes, "It's a great pity when one is forced to choose
 Caesar 241

between them"; even academics can be presumed to be not entirely

without regret in this area. Nonetheless, in both love and recruitment
one is forced to choose. Husbands have been consistently chosen for
college teaching because the people doing the choosing have been get-
ting older and more conservative; there's simply been no reason to risk
the secure pleasures of the civil coffeepot for the unknown ones of
flashy candidates who probably won't stay or witty ones who some-
how look as if they might not want to volunteer to head the curricu-
lum committee. "He won't stay," I heard from more than one member
about a particular candidate during my department's recent search.
Translation: he'll be unfaithful. Getting hired in the academic world
during recent decades has been for life.
That is to say, nobody even gets fired anymore. What's the relation
between getting hired and getting fired? What's the relation, that is,
when, as an associate professor in another department remarked to me
awhile ago, once you have tenure you couldn't even get fired if, while
you were having sex with a dog outside the president's office, she
came out and tripped over you? Few things other than the rarity of a
tenured firing (or even a non-tenured one) demonstrate how perma-
nent the fact of a job in the academic world has come to seem—and
therefore, I would argue, to invoke Weber again, how bereft of charis-
ma the sources of authority which legitimize the claim to a position.
Lately, we might say, things have changed somewhat. To continue
with an amorous model: lovers have been insisting that they be regard-
ed as husbands, while husbands have taken to lamenting that there are
suddenly not enough lovers—or too many. But getting hired remains a
pretty resigned business because the peculiar kind of marriage it has
represented has not been infused by fresh energies, much less eroti-
cized ones. The point of getting hired continues to be to pledge young
Ph.D.'s (who have themselves been getting steadily older) to the sta-
ble, permanent virtues of the tenure track. It is as if the point of falling
in love were to get married. Teaching off the tenure track has, there-
fore, not been quite respectable—like being a single person looking for
sex in a room full of married couples who don't smoke, drink, or dis-
parage each other's children.
To put it another way, teaching off the tenure track has not been to
have a career. What has it meant to have a career during recent
decades? In a sense, nothing more than to get tenure. Fixed, not to say
fixated, at the moment of entry, it is as if the very imagination of the
profession has gotten very intricate about what it means to be hired in
proportion to how it has gotten very slack about what it means to have
a career. A career is not of course convertible into the conditions of its
beginning. It is not even convertible into tenure. What has occurred
instead is that these conditions have effectively converted the whole
notion of a career into themselves. The project of what to do after
242 the minnesota review

tenure can be left to take care of itself once the imperative of what to
do before tenure is substituted for it. Perhaps with so many competing
for so few jobs this substitution was inescapable; no career, after all,
without tenure first, and so the most attractive feature of a college
teaching position more urgently becomes the occupational stability it
promises. What this has meant in practice, however, is a transforma-
tion of an older conception of the academic profession as a "calling."
The idea of a "calling" is, I think, a charismatic one. Its very force
is enshrined in academic lore by the professor whose way with learn-
ing is so vivid, or challenging, or maddening, that the student—and
eventual professor-to-be—is enchanted. "Calling" has religious roots,
as recalled memorably at one point in Lionel Trilling's story, "Of That
Time, Of That Place," when the tortured student, Tertan, says the fol-
lowing in a letter to the Dean about his Professor Howe: "To him more
than another I give my gratitude ... a noble man, but merely dedicat-
ed, not consecrated." To be called into a profession is not to be reduced
to a mere motive. Perhaps Wilbur, in his handbook entry, marks the
venerable conception when he forebears treating the question of why
anyone would want to enter college teaching in the first place.
His own treatment, however, cannot avoid evoking a quite differ-
ent, far more disabused, realistic, and instrumental conception. In the
same way, I would argue, any hiring process recreates in its own image
those whom it would solicit. In Larson's remarks upon a profession as
representing a "calling, "she stresses that, no matter how the calling
comes to constitute, as it must, "an essential dimension of the self," it
remains for her an ideologically constructed notion. Therefore, she
continues, the more instrumental its choice becomes, or the more mate-
rial, the less peer esteem matters, and the more the idea of calling is
eroded (227). I take it as obvious now that in the professional narrative
of college teaching any conception of it as a calling is so submerged
and domesticated as to be effaced. I read somewhere that intelligence
agencies the world over measure a potential agent's vulnerability
according to an American acronym known as MICE, for money, ideol-
ogy, compromise and ego. Departments in American institutions of
higher education are not yet so ruthless. But I think it is widely under-
stood that, for hiring purposes, noble ideals are beside the point,
unless the occasion requires some judgment about how well a candi-
date can manipulate a rhetorical vocabulary.
Indeed, the discursive idiom these days in higher education
appears to be to emphasize what one's job has in common with those
in other professions, or even those which are not professions at all. At a
concluding moment in his recent study, Work Time, for example, Evan
Watkins invokes the experience of an old junior-high friend, a baker,
and his previous pages are filled with comparisons of English depart-
ments to advertising agencies or of Hamlet to a Wheaties commerical.
 Caesar 243

Contra Larson, it is as if to Watkins what matters most in his profession

is what it has in common with the larger labor market. At one point, he
states, "English is not a workplace in the same way as a GM plant, but
it governs the designation of work just as surely" (12). This sort of hedg-
ing occurs repeatedly. It seems to me to disclose that college teachers
are no longer certain about what professional story to tell themselves.
A stronger claim would be, since a career is not just the story we tell
ourselves but the story we are told, that the old narratives have been
exhausted. That one emphasizing the Calling may be especially embar-
rassing. Watkins would find it appallingly naive, even if he appears to
have no better, or even any at all, with which to replace it.
This is why hiring is so important. Through it we are initiated not
only into the "ideological solidarity" of a profession, but into the pro-
fession as the basis for a life plan. But the legalism which authorizes hir-
ing today proposes no plan at all. Its concern is merely that minority or
disadvantaged groups get the opportunity to have a career in the first
place. Fair enough. Yet I have been maintaining that, no matter how
laudable the goal, the process is vitiated by unacknowledged tensions
and misplaced consequences. Not only have prejudices not been elimi-
nated. They have not even been understood. It's perhaps debatable
who understands them less—those who support the ideological recti-
tude of the legalistic agenda, or those who oppose it as mystified. No
one understands them at all who will not acknowledge that this agen-
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da has become so oppressive it threatens to transform the whole notion

of a career in college teaching, which need not be as circumspect, placid,
or even free from prejudice as the present profile suggests.
The traditional model of authority, when it was unchallenged,
may not have countenanced wayward, eccentric, or deviant energies
any better. All that may be claimed for it is that it was more intimate
with some more charismatic license—the very license which today's
legalistic model has to efface in order to enjoy any authority at all.
There are of course many reasons for getting hired. Some of them may
actually be more aberrant than the rules stipulate. A Theroux, after all,
does get his bone, and there may be more Reids managing to thread
their own ways than anybody imagines. Furthermore, there may still
be just as many reasons for not getting hired, and some of these may
be much better than the rules indicate. None of this will console my
friends above, who would probably want to reply that they themselves
are better than the rules. The trouble is, in any case, nobody's telling.
Confidentiality reigns. Getting hired is not entering into a dialogue
with anybody about it, but instead listening to what you need to know.
I have claimed that ultimately there may be very little to know that
will prove decisive. Another way to put this would be to state that, at
the end, getting hired is always very difficult to separate from getting
chosen. You get chosen because you're exceptional. How do you
244 the minnesota review

know? On what basis? You only really know when you're chosen—
and then, if you're adequate to the moment, you receive the knowl-
edge as something to celebrate, as a confirmation of yourself. The
moment is therefore nothing if not a fictional one, and I want to resort
to a last fiction in order to illustrate it.
There is a lovely passage early in E.L. Doctorow's BiZZy Bathgate
after Billy, juggling, has been rewarded a ten-dollar bill along with the
judgment that he's "a capable boy" by Dutch Schultz. Dutch and
entourage proceed to leave. Billy is suddenly surrounded by a gang of
jealous boys, but he slips away and delivers the following exultation:
Oh you miserable fucking louts, that I ever needed to attach my orphan
self to your wretched company . . . you dumb-bells, that you could aspire
to a genius life of crime, with your dead witless eyes, your slack chins, and
the simian slouch of your spines—fuck you forever, I consign you to ten-
ement rooms and bawling infants, and sluggish wives and a slow death of
incredible subjugation, I condemn you to petty crimes and mean rewards
and vistas of cell block to the end of your days. (41)
Is it conceivable that a professor of English—Ed Cohen, say—
could direct such words to the hundreds above whom he is about
ascend now that he rather than they has been hired? Probably not. It's
hard to feel exceptional against a background of hundreds; the point
about getting hired today is that you're simply not entitled to feel that
you've been, in a profound sense, chosen. But among many other rea-
sons Billy's exultation would not be appropriate, let me conclude with
one more: Billy himself would most likely have long ago been exclud-
ed from consideration. Or rather he would have excluded himself. His
notion of a career is that it sponsors a "genius" life. But this repre-
sents, in turn, another profession entirely. For the profession as it actu-
ally determines itself at the point of entry, the life to which Billy con-
demns his fellows, is precisely the same slow life with which every-
one is presented.
Works Cited
Booth, Wayne. The Vocation ofa Teacher. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1988.
Burke, Dolores. A New Academic Marketplace. New York: Greenwood, 1988.
Cohen, Ed. "Are We (Not) What We Are Becoming? 'Gay Identity/ 'Gay
Studies/ and the Disciplining of Knowledge." Engendering Men. Ed.
Joseph Boone and Michael Cadden. New York: Routledge, 1990. 161-75.
Doctorow, E. L. Billy Bathgate. New York: Harper & Row, 1989.
Hanna, S.S. The Gypsy Scholar. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1987.
Kindrow, G. "The Candidate." Linguafranca. 1.4 (1991): 21-25.
Larson, Magali Sarfatti. The Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Malamud, Bernard. A New Life. New York: Dell, 1963.
 Caesar 245

Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View ofthe Profession. New York:
Oxford UP, 1976.
O'Toole, Simon. Confessions of an American Scholar. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1970.
Reid, B.L. First Acts. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. New York: Dell, 1967.
Theroux, Alexander. "The Detours of Art." The Review of Contemporary Fiction
11.1 (1991): 36-40.
Trilling, Lionel. "Of This Time, Of That Place." Stones of Modern America. Ed.
Herbert Gold and David Stevenson. New York: St. Martins, 1961.
Watkins, Evan. WorJfc Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural
Value. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989.
Wilbur, Henry. "On Getting a Job." The Academic's Handbook. Ed. A. Leigh
Deneef, Craufurd Goodwin, and Ellen Stern McCrate. Durham: Duke UP,
1988.