First Person

Losing My Religion

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By Andy Jackson

I am convinced that were it not for affirmative-action surveys, a great many academic applications would go unacknowledged.

Some time after casting our bread upon the waters, we are rewarded with an official-looking envelope containing a mild request that we complete the voluntary affirmative-action survey and return it to the appropriate office on the campus.

Although it is all very routine, we are secretly delighted to see our name on university letterhead, and we complete all of the enclosed forms, hopeful that this will be the next step in a long affair of affectionate missives and requests bonding us to a new employer. But that doesn't mean it's entirely comfortable sharing private information with people we've never met.

In conversations with strangers, there are a few lines of propriety we all usually respect: no talk of politics or religion, and no personal information except when necessary to advance the immediate topic at hand. Such pedestrian commonplaces are, unfortunately, difficult to adhere to in the construction of an academic persona -- at least as it exists on paper. Even apart from affirmative-action surveys, there are many places in a standard application packet where you have to decide what protected information you are willing to disclose.

As an applicant, you get one shot to present yourself. There's no room for subtlety, delayed disclosure, or any of the normal proprieties that might keep us from blurting out enticing details about our life and beliefs to passing strangers. A CV is exhibitionism, pure and simple. Alas, I am not so given to performance as I ought to be.

My struggle to represent myself on paper became particularly evident to me during my first year on the job market in the fall of 2003. Although I found ways to shoehorn the numerous overseas exchange programs that I had directed onto my CV, I generally left off my years of communications work at educational, arts, and religious nonprofit organizations. On five applications, however, I chose to express what is, for me, a unity: the relationship between my academic pursuits and my religious convictions.

I sent those five applications to religious colleges that I believed would look kindly upon my back story. In those applications, gaps in my employment history were filled in, a half-dozen nonacademic magazine articles took their place in a section following my more traditional publications, and I was better able to articulate how and why my academic career has unfolded as it has.

Those five applications resulted in three job offers, but I reluctantly turned down each in turn. I had my heart set on teaching at an institution with a graduate program, which none of the three had. So, it was back on the market in the fall of 2004.

This time, I decided to look for ways to convey to secular colleges and universities the same energy and coherence that had enlivened my applications to religious colleges. The challenge was to include relevant facts about my background and accomplishments without appearing to make an issue of my religious convictions.

Like any good scholar, I did a lot of research on the topic. I learned that I could legally redact part of an employer's name when it revealed personal information that hiring committees were not allowed to use in evaluating my candidacy. So, for instance, I could have left "Christian" or "Baptist" out of the names of two of my past employers.

However, such redactions incite curiosity when they are apparent. And when the omissions are discovered by a scrupulous evaluator, they might leave the impression that I had something to hide. I chose not to avail myself of that option.

Instead, I streamlined the description of my academic employers on my CV, de-emphasizing the employer's name in order to focus on the titles of courses I had taught. I hoped that hiring committees would be more interested in the range of my teaching experience than in the fact that some of the courses were taught at Christian colleges.

I also chose to exclude nonacademic articles with patently religious titles so as to avoid the appearance of padding my CV with works that weren't strictly relevant.

That left me with two issues: what to do about listing an essay I had written for a book collection with a religious affiliation and what to do about nonacademic employers with revealing names and job descriptions. To answer those questions, I did research of a more qualitative nature: I asked around.

One of my advisers argued that publishing trumps all other concerns. "Do the work," he said, "and no one will think twice about where you've been collecting a paycheck."

Another adviser encouraged me to "list all the Christian colleges you've taught at and all your publications in Christian collections. This is who you are. Covering them over in any way would look like you're embarrassed about them, which would not be appealing to readers of any persuasion."

Another bit of advice came from a search-committee chairman at an institution where I did not make the final cut. After its search was concluded, I contacted him to ask how the job materials I had submitted could be improved. His advice on the topic of religious employers and publications on my CV was to be "transparent and upfront" about my convictions and work history because "people are not as bigoted as we worry they are."

In the course of soliciting and receiving all of that good advice, I had to confront the real issue behind my concern about self-presentation. It's the same fear that all of us on the market have had to face -- the possibility of rejection on the basis of criteria beyond our control. Once I had named that universal bugaboo, I was able to consider my actions more carefully.

In hindsight, it seems that the various strategies I pondered to avoid bigotry were unnecessary and spiritually unwise. My two years on the market have convinced me that, at the application stage, the fear of bigotry is worse than the bigotry itself. After all, you never really know why a search committee rejects you at the initial stage.

At any rate, I couldn't see myself happy at an institution where colleagues secretly or openly believed that religious convictions made someone a less interesting and capable human being.

So where did that leave me? My reasons for going on the market had more to do with a sense of calling than anything else -- in this case, a calling to work at an institution with a graduate program. Furthermore, the surest way to know that you have conquered a fear is to face it head on, and for me, that meant trying the market one last time. That quest paid off: This fall, I will be an assistant professor of English at a public institution in the West.

As it turned out, all of the good advice I received was on the mark; I guess my academic advisers would make good spiritual counselors as well. With one more fear behind me, I'm now ready to face the unknown challenges of the tenure track.