To Live or Die at MLA

In Philadelphia this year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soon to be unemployed academics, meet at the MLA (Modern Language Association) conference in the hope of finding academic employment in the coming year. Wanna-be-jean-wearers like me are forced to re-discover inventions such as the "comb" and the "business suit." No matter how counter-cultural and anti-big business English studies becomes, it shall still reward people who dress like CEOs. No matter how Marxist English studies gets, it still prizes intellectual property above all, especially that lovely little thing called the published article. And at MLA, scores of English departments interview prospective applicants to determine which candidates are worthy enough to receive that glittering gee gaw, the on-campus visit.

This year, my wife and I are both on the job market for the first time. Finally, we are no longer "MLA virgins." That's right. I have now officially had to prostitute myself at job interviews: "Hey baby, you want an 18th centurist who can also teach the classics? You bring your Longus, I'll bring the Apuleius."

Notably, the word "hypocrite" comes from the Greek word for "actor." Going out on the job market has attuned me to just how slippery the categories of "hypocrite" and "actor" can be: where does the "acting" end and the "flat-out lying" begin (especially when asked how much of your dissertation is left to write)?

Although the conference is scheduled for four days (in this case, Dec. 27-30), most schools schedule their interviews on just two days: the 28th and 29th (Thursday and Friday).
Anyway, I have a couple of comments that might have been mildly helpful to me if I had thought of them beforehand.

1. Know what time it is. I don't just mean that you ought to know when your interview is scheduled; I mean, you need to have a readily accessible way of knowing the time at a given moment. The way most interviews work is that a school conducts interviews in a hotel room. Promptly, at the time the interview is scheduled, the interviewee is supposed to knock on the door. If he/she does not knock on time, it means that he/she is undependable scum. If he/she knocks early, it means that he/she is trying to cause trouble and must be punished by being offered no job. It was only as I was about to knock on the door for my first interview that I began thinking, "I haven't called the talking clock for several years now ... what if my watch is too fast? Or, what if a Modernist is in there right now thinking, 'Hurry up, please, it's time?'" So, set your watch before you leave, so that you can be anxiety-ridden about more important matters than whether your watch conforms to that eternal, objective thingy, Time with a capital T. No chrono-relativism here!

2. Schedule the schools you are most excited about on the second day, rather than the first. Of course, you often don't know which one this will be until it's too late anyway ("Sorry, you can't have that time; Harvard's going to call any day now"), but if your scheduling powers have not dwindled into comic impotence, see what you can do.

Keep in mind that on the first day of interviews, you will probably fail miserably to answer a question, and you can spend the entire night in bed thinking about what you should have said and how thoroughly jobless you are. This means that, on the second day, after you take something to get rid of the bloodshot eyes (get rid of the bloodshot part, of course; it's probably best not to remove the eyes themselves), you will have another interview, this time with a school you really want to go to. Now, initially, you may be thinking, "I am so tired! Why didn't I sleep? I hate myself!" But then, serendipity strikes: The school asks you the very same question you figured out how to answer at 3 am last night! Insomnia deserves a much better rap than it gets in the popular literature.

3.Come up with practice questions that are actually germane to the schools with which you will be interviewing. One of the really cool things about my graduate program in English here at "Anonymous University" is that we get to do a mock job interview where our faculty give us a sense of the sort of questions we might be asked. The difficulty is that, since our mock interviewers were asking the sort of questions that a search committee at prestigious "Anonymous University" would ask, we don't necessarily learn what a search committee at "Joe College" would ask. I spent hours preparing for questions about my dissertation or about describing current trends in 18th century studies, but such topics didn't really come up much at my interviews. Since I do not yet have a doctorate or a book contract or exude mad smarty-pants skills, "Anonymous University" schools are not the type to be interested in me at this point.

4. Bring extra materials. Someone advised me I should bring along a sample syllabus or a writing sample, and I did. I didn't really think they would be of much use, but whenever I offered them at the end of an interview, the committee members' faces visibly brightened, like, "How nice, I am happy now." In retrospect, it's actually a little scary--I mean, if I brought them homemade cookies, I'd understand the excitement, but--a syllabus? If only my students got that happy.

5. Elevators are Slow; or, Hotels are Tall. Keep in mind that Philadelphia hotels tend to have a lot of floors, and elevators often work long hours without adequate compensation. They often go on strike, around floor 25 or so. As a result, you might spend ten minutes before your interview shaking your fist in impotent rage at the elevator that taunts you by not coming down to the ground floor. It's like a scene from Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," where you are ever chasing the job, but never landing it: "Bold interviewer, never, never canst thou go up,/Though winning near the 'vator--yet, do not grieve;/It cannot arrive, and thou hast no more time,/For ever wilt thou be jobless, and stuck down here!" When people told me to leave a lot of time, I assumed it was just to make sure I wouldn't get lost on the way to a hotel--not that I would spend ten minutes waiting for the elevator! Just remember not to underestimate the elevator wait.

6. Have back-up questions. One of the ways most interviews end is with the committees asking, "Do you have any questions for us?" The right answer is, "Yes." But to get ruthlessly pragmatic for a second, how do you answer the follow-up question, "Well, what are they?" That one is trickier to answer. One person recommended asking, "Tell me about your master's program," especially because smaller universities are often proud of their graduate students. Now, it might be a no-brainer that this question only works for schools that actually have a master's program. What you might not have realized is the subtle point that this question also only works if the school has not already mentioned their master's program earlier in the interview. In one of my interviews, I went in without much to ask (I didn't really want to ask, "So, what's the salary? So, when's the sabbatical?"--one must ask questions that aren't too intrusive). I was planning to showcase how incredibly carefully I'd researched the school, such as that I knew they had a master's program. I thus felt rather cheated when one of the people interviewing me introduced the topic, "We have a great master's program," and then proceeded to describe it before my questioning period. I wanted to yell at her, "You stinker! That was going to be my question for you, do you hear me? You have taken something precious and meaningful and turned it into nothingness. I was supposed to get points for knowing you had a master's program!" So, then I had to come up with a substitute question, and it just wasn't as good. I really hate that portion of the interview. I don't have any practical advice about questions to ask. I just want you to know that it's okay to let yourself give in to the hate.