Review of “On the Market: Strategies for a Successful Academic Job Search”
B
y Greg Beatty
Sandra Barnes’ On the Market: Strategies for a Successful Academic Job Search is a useful, fascinating, and at times markedly depressing book. Let me address each of the volume’s qualities in turn.
The utility of On the Market is unmistakable. No, I’ll go further. I wish I’d been given a copy of this book when I was considering graduate school. Granted, I would not have gone— it would have scared me away— but if I had gone anyway, I would have been much more prepared. This is because On the Market is above all a professional handbook. It addresses the quality of one’s scholarship only in the most peripheral terms, and addresses larger questions about the nature of truth or the scholar’s role in society not at all.
Instead, Barnes assumes that readers are attending graduate school as a conscious stage in professional development. Inherent in this assumption are a cluster of other assumptions, both professional and personal. Barnes assumes readers know their field and think in terms of long term goals. She assumes readers have a base level of self-knowledge and self-control. Finally, she assumes readers have a considerable understanding of graduate school and academia before one entering graduate school.
Readers for whom these assumptions are true will find On the Market an immediately applicable tool. Readers who want any of these things to be true about themselves (but know they are not) will find On the Market just as useful. Readers who enter graduate school in a stage of exploration or idealism may find On the Market the most useful of all readers, but more as a kind of wake-up call than anything else.
Barnes leads readers through a systematic discussion of how to best land one’s best academic position. After a brief discussion of the volatile nature of the academic job market and the general qualities needed to succeed in it, Barnes dedicates a chapter at a time to graduate school, applying for jobs, developing a teaching portfolio, and the actual interview process for academic positions. Each of these chapters is highly pragmatic, and Barnes seems quite aware of contemporary job search lore. By that I mean, one fascinating element of this book is that at times there is little indication of just what the suggestions are based on. For example, Figure 3.1 guides readers through an “Academic Writing Flowchart,” explaining what goes into a standard academic paper, what the different components do and contain, and what each should do. I would have paid for this outline in gold when I first entered graduate school…but I don’t know what is based on. Did Barnes analyze 1000 papers taken from a range of academic disciplines? Work from someone else’s data? From an internalized feel?
Don’t get me wrong: I would have wept in gratitude to have been given this sort of guideline early in my graduate career. I still remember entering my first seminar and being told that this semester we’d be writing “a standard seminar paper.” When I asked what that mean, I was told “Oh, you know. A standard paper, of appropriate length and quality for a seminar level course.” No, I didn’t know, and I suspect— no, I know— other graduate students didn’t know either. The concrete and specific steps On the Market provides would be invaluable to any student who was, like me, baffled by the at-times insular academic culture of graduate education.
Likewise, the timelines provided for professional positioning, the suggestions for how to select and appraise positions, and the numerous annotated examples of things like job listings and application letters would be invaluable to both individuals and institutions. One can readily imagine a graduate program distributing On the Market to their students early in the first year of their program, then building workshops around each major stage in the process. Doing so would both help equip graduate students for the traditional job market and provide a structure for demystifying the culture into which they’ve been plunged.
On the other hand, doing so would also provide opportunities for addressing the gaps between an idealized process of professionalization and the process of truth-seeking and self-exploration that defines graduate school for many students. To address a related concern, at times Barnes writes as if the graduate student operated in a fairly stable matrix of courses and support personnel: as if all classes needed were available in a given program, as if faculty didn’t leave on sabbatical, and so on. Students sometimes depart from their planned paths— and serendipity is sometimes the result. New research interests emerge, sometimes explosively, and fitting that with the process of job preparation needs attention, both from academic institutions and from books like this one.
Later chapters address topics that are vaguer and/or more personalized, but no less important. There’s a chapter discussing one’s “personal fit” with specific institutions, another focusing on the needs of “nontraditional and underrepresented groups,” and two on other elements of the job market (specialized positions and re-entering the market). Of these, the chapters on personal fit and minority groups are necessarily general, but they do acknowledge the personal and cultural elements involved realistically.
Chapters 7 and 10, on non-tenure track positions and re-entering the job market, work hard to be as realistic as the other chapters. However, simply put, they fail. They fail because they ignore the realities of the academic job market. The simplest clue as to how Barnes does so? The term “adjunct” does not appear in the index. One portion of Chapter 7 does address visiting positions, and accurately warns that such positions may carry heavy teaching loads and require instructors to relocate for only a year of employment. Barnes does discuss disappointment in the initial job search, and choosing to either take a less than ideal position or stay at one’s graduate institution while seeking a more desirable tenure track position.
However, there is really no discussion of the array of issues facing the adjunct. Chapters on everything from how to shape a career as an adjunct to how to change career paths from adjunct to tenure track are desperately needed. On a more basic level, simply addressing the growing role of the adjunct with a similarly attentive eye is necessary to complete a realistic picture of the academic job search. That it is absent from On the Market is both fascinating and depressing.
