The Professor Is In: The Essential Guide to Turning Your PhD Into a Job. Karen Kelsky. Three Rivers Press, 2015. pp. 448. $15. ISBN: 978-0-5534-1942-9
I met Karen Kelsky at a particularly difficult moment after getting my Ph.D. I’d gone through a one-year Visiting Professorship at the University of South Florida and was in the second of three years in a postdoctoral fellowship at Georgia Tech. Three years had passed since I finished my dissertation, and my job search had resulted in no offers, no interviews, and only one “request for more information.” I was panicking. However much my postdoctoral program prepared students for the job market, and we had professional development seminars in the Brittain Fellowship and constantly discussed job issues, I was convinced that I would never gain a tenure-track position — something that looked increasingly like a golden ticket to a metaphysical land.
This was 2010: two years after the financial crisis landed many Universities in hiring freezes. I’d emailed friends I knew in Seattle and was preparing to retool myself to compete with all of the newly-minted college graduates, some of whom were probably students in my own classes.
When I started reading Kelsky’s posts on TheProfessorIsIn, her honesty and sensitivity towards students facing a collapsing academic job market was quite the relief from the bipolar nihilism I found in many responses from other scholars. She knew about the neoliberal policies that animated the growing number of adjuncts on college campuses. She understood the way departments often made poor decisions based upon ridiculous reasons. And she didn’t blame me for thinking about pursuing a nonacademic position. I took many of her lessons to heart, wrote a couple of posts for her blog, and used her service on more than one occasion. Full disclosure: in addition to writing for her blog and using her services, I have talked with Karen on several occasions online and I’m mentioned in her acknowledgments.
Kelsky’s book, named after her blog and collecting many of the essential posts she’s subsequently produced since 2010, is a must read for anyone related in any way to graduate education in the United States. The Professor Is In is a mixture of advice, critique of the ideologies driving the academic labor market, and discussion of how the policies and structures of Universities make decisions. Her advice is simple, if stark and direct. “Peer reviewed journal articles are the gold standard. […] Do not be seduced by invitations to submit your research into edited collections.” “Pursue all the grants that you can, small to large.” “Get in the habit of going to your major disciplinary conference.” “Get solo-teaching experience before you go on the market if you can.” “Service doesn’t get people jobs.” Sometimes the advice is hard to take, and I admit that I don’t always follow what she says — because I, like too many other people in academia — am easily swayed by the promises of an easy publication, students who respect me, or being seen as a team player in my department. But, as Kelsky shows in this book time and time again, the very instincts and motivations that drew many of us into higher education in the first place make us ripe for exploitation by an institution looking for more and more ways to cut financial corners.
Her chapters illustrate Kelsky’s commitment to unveiling the oppressive power structures of academia while giving graduate students and job seekers the means to navigate those structures. For instance, chapter 44 “When You Feel Like You Don’t Belong,” discusses how academia “was a system created by elite white men and for elite white men, and elite white men continue to dominate its ranks, particularly at the level of full professor and administrator.” Yet she also shows candidates how to use diversity to their advantage. When arguing that candidates discuss diversity in terms of teaching and not research, Kelsky suggests discussing specific texts and projects that underline commitments to diversity. She says that “you can […] add a line such as, ‘[b]ecause of my background I am familiar with challenges faced by students of color/queer students/students with disabilities, and am committed to mentoring them for success in a university setting.'” Why does this work? Kelsky responds in her typically clear and pragmatic prose that “[y]ou are showing in concrete and evidence-based ways how your identity informs and enriches your pedagogy, and by extension the pedagogical offerings of the department as a whole.”
Perhaps not surprisingly in academia where everything seems to turn into a controversy, Kelsky’s blog has come under criticism. My colleagues have expressed distaste that she makes money off of graduate students seeking help on the job market. Sarah Kendzior echoed this critique by saying that it’s another example of “academia’s pay-to-play ethos.” A comment on Kendizior’s article mentioned that Kelsky was “constructing new norms for the academic job market — one search chair told me that he had never seen such standardized cover letters (in length AND style) before fall 2013, and now they all look the same.” On a recent Facebook thread discussing a quote from the book, the critiques ran the gamut. In addition to comments supporting Kelsky’s argument — one said that graduate school shouldn’t be completely about professionalization; another said she thought the statement was satirical and said she probably couldn’t succeed with such constraints; two others said that even following all of Kelsky’s advice hadn’t landed them in tenure track positions.
I empathize with all of these responses, which signify for me the various symptoms of our current historical moment in academia where landing a tenure-track job is nearly impossible. Kelsky is quite clear about the difficulty of the journey even if candidates follow her methods. In the book she says “most of you reading this book will likely have to seek non-academic work,” and in a recent interview with Colleen Flaherty of Inside Higher Ed, she emphasized that candidates should “[u]nderstand that the tenure track job is the ‘alternative’ career for Ph.D.s at this point. There is virtually no field in which the majority of new Ph.D.s achieve tenure-track positions.”
Above all, it is crucial that those of us who continue to participate in graduate programs give our candidates every chance to achieve their goals. Perhaps one of the most frustrating but enlightening anecdotes in the book comes from a Q&A session depicted in a blog post that Kelsky quotes from by former CUNY graduate student and higher education journalist Ann Larson. The link to Larson’s article seems broken, even though it is chronicled by Kelsky on her blog. In her account, Larson mentions two prominent scholars who identified as Marxist and worked in rhetoric and composition. After the presentation, a graduate student commented on the difficulty of the job market and asked for advice and hope. The response was underwhelming and all-too-typical:
To my dismay, Brereton responded by advising the student to stick with her program undaunted. ‘If you have a Composition and Rhetoric doctorate,’ he told her, ‘you will find a job.’ Some in the audience murmured in disagreement. As for me, I was shocked at the complete ignorance of Brereton’s response. It’s not that I expected him to tell this student to choose another profession. Nor did I expect him to express the unmitigated job-market gloom that many graduate students and new PhDs know all too well. I expected, simply, the truth. Even a sugarcoated version of the truth would have been preferable to (let me just say it) an outright lie about the rosy job prospects for Humanities graduates in any field.
I’ve heard these same lies trumpeted by my colleagues in many fields, and quite simply, they are not serving the best interests of our graduate students. At the bare minimum, graduate students need to understand the truth about academic labor: that, as Marc Bousquet argued in How the University Works, graduate students are produced to fill the cheap labor needs of an institution that can’t or won’t offer more tenure-track positions. For all of the complexities of this situation, Karen Kelsky is the best advocate and resource for graduate students anxious about their future.