More Gossip, Please

On Sept. 14, the MLA job list went up, so I am now diligently scrutizining every aspect of my life to figure out how I can apply for one of their 18th c. teaching jobs. Need someone on 18th c. British and can connect it to science? Well, my conference paper considers the scientific effects of eating dirt! Need someone with a "postcolonial" interest, eh? Well, I can talk about eating dirt in Jamaica! "Cultural studies?" Well, I do know a little something about how cultural differences shape the eating of dirt. I even tested the topic out on my advisor (not in the sense of eating dirt myself, of course) and got my advisor interested, too! It's odd: I thought I was padding my CV by applying on a lark for a conference, but this one bizarre topic actually serves to connect me to multiple scholarly trends and more marketable for jobs that are outside my normal specialization.

So, what will I do after I have sapped myself beyond all human endurance and sent in my application materials? Well, I know what a lot of people will be doing! They'll be surfing the web to find out their job prospects. I read an article on Chronicle of Higher Education which mentioned a large number of "rumor mills." There's one for international relations, American and comparative jobs, Middle East history, political theory and public law, and even theoretical particle physics. Astrophysics has two, yes, that's right, two rumor mills! And would you believe the article does not list one single English job rumor mill? What has become of us? We English people, who pride ourselves on only our ability to communicate: I ask you, if we're planning on reading fiction for a living, are we really supposed to be bothered by a few untruths about people on the job market? Sure, there may be some ethical problems with posting unsubstantiated rumors about job hires on the web, and I suppose it's possible that we don't have an English job rumor mill because English department people are ethically superior to all other forms of humanity. But ethics be danged, I want someone to start an English job rumor mill! So long as I only read it without repeating it, it's okay.