Because I'm long-winded: more on jr faculty changing jobs

Jessica at Monomorado left a comment on my last post about junior faculty changing jobs, a comment that she then expanded into a post on her blog. You should take a look at both, but her main point is that junior faculty who change jobs make it harder for people right out of grad school to get tenure-track positions, because someone right out of grad school can't compete with someone who has a few years of experience teaching on the tenure-track, and presumably more publications to boot. I had seen her comment, and meant to respond, but, well, you know, life intervenes... so I thought I'd come back to it now.*

Jessica's certainly right that the practice of junior faculty moving around definitely changes the dynamic for new folks trying to break into the market. But I think there are some other things to take into account: first, a lot of the people who are moving (myself included) have already done their time in one or two or more years of non-tenure-track positions, to get that experience and those publications, to put them in the position to get the tenure-track (TT)  job. In some ways they're not so much competitors with or taking those jobs away from new grad students, as much as they're just a little further ahead in the same process. It does seem less and less likely that new grad students (at least in history, my and Jessica's field) will get a tenure-track job right out of grad school; instead, they have to do the humanities equivalent of a "post-doc" or two of moving around for a couple of years first. A little bit of anecdotal evidence: In my current department of 12ish people (with degrees from the mid-late 80s on), 8 had at least one, and usually two temporary positions before getting on the TT track. When we did a search last year for a TT position, 3 of the 4 finalists were in temporary positions, one of whom we hired. This seems more and more common. I don't really think that this is just about competition between junior faculty and new grads, though - I think both are offshoots of the glutted market in the humanities.

Of course, the problem with the unofficial "post-doc" situation is that not everyone can afford to move each year for a few years before getting something permanent. It's particularly difficult  for people with families or spouses who can't/won't uproot regularly. (And why should they? When I taught in a temporary position for a year, LDH lived about 2400 miles away from me. A friend of mine had two one-year positions before getting her TT job; in the first, she was 1250 miles away from her husband, and in her second - which also entailed moving all the way across country - she was 1750 miles away from him. Unsurprisingly, most people do not want to do this! And they shouldn't be penalized on the job market because they won't, or can't. However, we all know the job market is heartless.)

Second, this is somewhat speculative, but I suspect that there's more danger of a department losing a line/converting it to an adjunct when a longtime faculty member retires than when a junior faculty person moves on after two-three years (and here, I mean converting that position permanently to adjunct, not just turning it into a one-year until they do the TT search). If, when that first junior faculty person got hired, the department had the line and felt they needed the position, they probably still do three years later. Obviously this is no guarantee - things can change from one hire to the next - but I think the line is less likely to vanish under these circumstances than when someone who's been in the same position for thirty years retires, by which point opinions may well have changed significantly about what areas the department needs. All the positions that I know of being vacated by junior faculty moving on have been replaced with new tenure-track faculty, which isn't the case when a long-time faculty member retires. (Again, I realize there are no guarantees here, and that lines can go *poof!* at any time.)

Third, departments don't generally directly compare candidates who are applying at different stages in their careers. Although it may seem like they do and although it may seem like a no-brainer as to which a department will prefer, departments vary a lot in this. Departments know that someone who's been out for a few years has more teaching experience (and usually more pubs) than a new graduate, just by the nature of the beast; they really don't judge new folks according to the same standards. It's true that some schools will prefer someone who's been tested with lots of full-time teaching experience over a relative newbie, or will be more comfortable hiring someone who has a book contract in hand (and thus is more likely to get tenure) than someone who's not yet at that stage. But not all schools do - my first job had a penchant for hiring people right out of school, and in fact hired a lot of ABDs. When I was on a search committee there, my colleagues actually looked slightly askance at people who wanted to move from other TT jobs - they weren't convinced that they wanted to come to our school so much as they wanted to flee a not-very-good situation, and they didn't find that appealing. Sometimes, people who've been out a few years have "lost their luster" in a committee's eyes, even if they've been in a TT position (especially if the position is at a not-very-"good" school) - I have definitely seen people prefer a spanking new graduate from Totally Awesome U, all shiny with potential, rather than someone who graduated from Totally Awesome U a few years before and spent the interim working at Podunk School with Students Unlike Ours (who therefore presumably hasn't lived up to their potential?). Other times, schools worry that someone who's been out a few years will demand a higher salary than a new graduate. And some departments like the idea of training someone up from scratch in their own ethos, rather than coping with a junior faculty's preconceptions from somewhere else. I won't claim (because I can't) that these departments outnumber those that prefer the more experienced candidate, but they are out there.

So,  all this is a convoluted way of saying that I think the impact on new grad students of junior faculty changing jobs depends on a lot of different factors. I suspect that people who've been out a couple of years but aren't in tenure-track positions are more competition than people switching tenure-track jobs, actually.

And this isn't meant to tromp all over Jessica's point, either - it's an important issue to raise. I wanted to throw a few more things into the conversation (without clogging up her comments box!).

*Ah, the amorphous etiquette of blogging - it feels a little weird to put this response in a post of my own, because it feels like I'm sort of trying to one-up someone, or make what is really a comment to Jessica's post look more all important 'n' shit, because it's, like, a great big post of it's own, yeah, that's it! It's just that I go on and on, and hate to do that in someone's comment box.

Comments

[Tiruncula]

FWIW, my experience is the same as NK's, that different institutions have different cultures and expectations about whether they prefer people freshly degreed (or even ABD), or with a few years' experience. The place I started out had a definite local tradition of hiring ABDs as, effectively, tenure-track lecturers, to be promoted to ass't prof upon completion. That's how I started out. My sense is that they felt they had a better chance of snagging promising candidates if they got them early. The place I moved to, on the other hand, shortlisted exclusively people who had already been in t-t positions for a few years.

[Tiruncula]

Oh, I wanted to add something else. Sorry for commenting twice.

I think there's probably also some variation among sub-fields as to whether movement by junior faculty enhances or restricts opportunities for other junior people. In my field, each college or university tends to have exactly one of us. When I was in my undergrad and early grad school years, my sense is that that one slot in each institution tended to get occupied by a single, career-long hire, and there was never any movement at all until death or retirement. There was a complete lock on the market. Then - happily timed for me - a bunch of deaths and retirements coincided with the newer trend for junior people to have more "starter" jobs, and the result was not just one set of replacement hires, but movement throughout the seniority levels in the field. That butterfly effect is still flapping. A related phenomenon is that lots of top-tier state-funded research universities with constrained budgets are now making mid-career, associate-level hires, trying to catch up-and-comers at reasonable costs, where they would once have hired very senior big names. The result is more movement at the advanced assistant and associate prof levels.

[Anastasia]

my institution seems to collect people who are fleeing bad situations and/or scandals. I have to say, this is not a very good thing.

[Ancrene Wiseass]

It does seem less and less likely that new grad students (at least in history, my and Jessica's field) will get a tenure-track job right out of grad school; instead, they have to do the humanities equivalent of a "post-doc" or two of moving around for a couple of years first.

I know you're absolutely right about this, but may I confess that it fills me with a sense of dread and exhaustion? Seriously, I want to get the hell out of grad school and get a job with some degree of permanence so I can actually settle down and have something resembling a life. You know? The kind where you can consider buying a house, building a community, meeting a partner, and settling down to have (or adopt, if my eggs quit on me first) kids? Are we just not supposed to do things like that as (female) academics?

God. I feel like the academic job market has been hanging over me like some tweed-encased Grim Reaper since I started filling out grad-school applications.

Whinge.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

AW - I completely don't blame you! Yes, it sucks, and I know exactly what you mean (I was DYING for that "settled" feeling by the time I was done with grad school). I think one of the things that helped was that I took my temporary position before I finished my dissertation, so it felt a little bit like just another part of grad school rather than extending it, exactly. Not that I necessarily recommend having a full-time position while dissertating, either!

But I do want to point out that I do know a number of people who HAVE got TT jobs right out of finishing - it's not impossible. There's absolutely NO reason to be ashamed of this not happening (I'm thinking of Medieval Woman, who's written recently about feeling like a failure for not having got a TT job yet), but it is possible.

Anyway. I know this is a pointless thing to say, but don't worry about it right now - just focus on your work!

And Tiruncula, yeah, your comments make sense. There are so many factors that come into play with this whole employment thing...

[Undine]

NK, I posted about this after reading your first entry on it. I'd agree with this one, too: having t-t faculty moving after a year or two doesn't necessarily mean that the bar has just been raised for getting a job right out of grad school, since some departments may prefer the shiny new grad in any case.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

I commented at Jessica's, and I'm glad you wrote this, because you hit a lot of really important points. I think that the one thing that bothers me about this line of thought is that it's similar to the one about how moving on hurts departments. It assumes a kind of mutual responsibility for our colleagues that doesn't exist. We all say we want to stay forever (or ten or so years) in our interviews. And I believe completely that most candidates really are looking for permanence when they are on the market. None of us want to go through that again.

Yeah, there are people who get and take jobs because the one they want isn't there quite yet. They are the almost-hot-shot careerists, but you know? If a candidate from Toop School, with papers and pubs, but relatively little teaching, applies for a job at Teaching College, and Teaching College hires that person and expects them to stay???

[Jessica]

D'oh! I had a long-winded comment here last night that carefully addressed your points, where did it go? This is going to be the rushed and abbreviated re-response.

I think a lot of people are wanting to read more into my comment than is really there. I'm not saying, with fist shaking, "gosh darn these job changers, always robbing humble hard-working grad students of the meager t-t jobs in the humanities".

My experience has been the following: My husband and a bunch of his friends were on short lists with people who had been out in academia for a year or two already (who did not have one years but were in t-t positions). In the overwhelming majority of those cases, the "veteran" got the job. Now sure, maybe my friends weren't as competitive as they thought, but it sure looked like departments were favoring the job-changers. I only speak from about 8 cases, though.

I am definately saying that the bar has been raised in many job searches. In the end though, i'm talking about what I've seen, just as everyone else is talking about what they've seen. And since, go figure, we're not all the same person, we haven't all seen the same things.

Now to be perfectly fair, my school (different from my husband's) has hired two new PhDs in the past year and I can't remember a single student in the past three years who moved on to anything but a t-t job. So sure, I've got some evidence to the contrary. That's why you'll notice (if anyone bothers to read what I actually wrote without approaching it with the immediate need to go on the defensive) that I'm not making some big claim that my husband's scenario is what happens in every case nor that this should dissuade people from changing jobs, nor that it's even a primary issue in the whole debate.

So if you're trying to find my actual, positive point in all this, it's that I think, in many cases, job-changers raise the bar for new PhDs, which makes it harder for them to get t-t jobs right out of grad school (and i'll add - unless they come out of the top of the top tier). Sure, people don't have a lot of sympathy for that, because it's what they had to do and they survived the ordeal, but that doesn't mean it should become the norm.

Finally, New Kid, you mention that people who have been doing post-docs and one years are probably tougher competition for new PhDs than people who had been in t-t positions. True, it's not what I've seen, but that does make a lot of sense to me. I think in a lot of cases, you're right.

[New Kid on the Hallway]

Hi Jessica,

Thanks for your comment! And I hope I didn't sound defensive. I didn't mean to sound like I thought you were shaking your fist at me or anything like that - it was an important comment to raise.

I should clarify something I said above - I think the "post-doc" people are tougher competition for the new PhDs not so much because they're being compared in the same way, but just because I think there are more of them out there than there are people moving from one TT position to another. But as you point out, this is all anecdotal evidence, so I don't have proof or anything. ;-)

And I certainly don't mean to suggest that there aren't any departments that favor job changers - some definitely do. I just think that the raising the bar isn't done so much by job changers as much as by the glut in the market in general, which raises the bar all over the place. But in the immediate case, I'm sure job changing has an impact.

[Jessica]

Oops, should have been more clear. I wasn't saying that you, New Kid, were sounding defensive or completely negating my point.

I think what you've said makes sense.

[dhawhee]

Having read Jessica's post, and this one with the comments, I'd like to throw something else into the mix here: in these tight pursestring times, oftentimes an assistant level position is what a department gets when an advanced assistant or associate or even full professor leaves (not all the time, of course, but often). In those cases, it makes sense that the search committee would eye somebody with more experience, and it's less about raising the bar for phds than about the economy of academics and the zany shell game that is the academic job market.

The only quibble I have with Jessica's post is the stress placed on "job changers." They are not the problem: economic issues such as overproduction of phds and an increasing reliance on adjunct labor (jessica hints at this too), seem to me like more likely the problem. It may seem like a whole other can of worms, but it's really the same big wormy can.

[Philosophy Factory]

And... it seems like having more people moving around makes for a wider variety of positions being open. Sure, the hot-shot may not want to go to teaching U -- but others may, and stay.... so, if a department hires the hot shot this year, three years later they may look more carefully at the 'warm-shot' with teaching experience, which will be the new grad this year.

More mobility = good.

Also, having sat on a couple of Community College hiring committees, teaching experience was important, but it wasn't really a quantitiative thing -- much more important was the sense that the person we were hiring WASN'T settling for us or coming to us because it was clear they weren't going to get tenure at their hot-shot U.

[StyleyGeek]

I agree with Tiruncula and Philosophy Factory. I wish there WAS some mobility in the academic job market in my field. Most academics I know in this field (especially in this country) have been in their position for ever and ever, and I have never heard of any schools in my country actually hiring for Tenure Track positions in my field (or my husbands). At all.

You have to wait for someone to die. And then they replace their job with a temporary appointee who has to reapply year after year after year.

And you can ignore this next paragraph, as I'm not trying to make any particular point, but just whining. My husband is further along in his academic career than I am. He has DONE the postdoc/adjunct thing and I have trailed around while he has had six temporary contracts in three different countries (some of them for only 6 months). When I finish my PhD next year, I don't feel I can ask him to do the same thing again (nor do I want to). Another six years of our lives as nomads? No thanks.

So what are we supposed to do?

[marcelle proust]

I wound up putting my two cents over on my blog. From the perspective of the one who gets left but doesn't mind, FWIW.

[Kelly in Kansas]

Another factor to consider - most of the "movement" in academic jobs is either by those relatively new (less than 5 years) or those that are considered senior level and have published/performed at a high enough level to be noticed by others who will actively pursue them for positions. Remember, there are no rules to this game. It's not as more jobs will be created if relatively new faculty don't move. There are so many factors at play and administrators rarely see the situation in the same way we do as faculty. Additionally, we're often given the choice of accept this particular type of position (year-to-year, adjunct, etc.) or absolutely none at all. Our university, for example, actively created at least one year-to-year (non-tenuring-earning) position in almost every department with the idea that in any time of budget cuts, they could easily cut a faculty line with no tenure-related ramifications. This points to another issue in the larger picture - what about those senior faculty who are only there because of tenure and are no longer productive? Aren't they at least somewhat culpable here?

[mmdk1u]

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