First Person

My Credentials Gap

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By Dewey James

So, am I prepared to prosper on the tenure-track market for historians this year? Let's go over the CV:

• Doctorate in hand? Check.

• Excellent teaching evaluations? Check. University teaching award? Check.

• Other awards, including a national fellowship? Check.

• Publications in reputable, peer-reviewed journals? Check.

• Book contract with a well-regarded scholarly press? Check.

• Currently holding a visiting position at a good university? Check.

And let's not forget one important factor that the CV does not reveal:

• Generally nice guy who gets along well with people and interviews well? Check.

I should be golden on the job market, right? Can search committees honestly expect a whole lot more from a 2004 Ph.D.?

Oh yes.

The problem is that my CV has one gaping, glaring, career-hampering hole, one that can't easily be patched over.

My Ph.D., you see, is from, well, let's call it AMU: Average Midwestern University. You know, a big state university from the agricultural heartland, the sort of place that Ivy Leaguers might teach at, but would never actually earn a Ph.D. from.

When it comes to attracting job offers, Ivy League credentials beat AMU credentials most every time, despite whatever else might be on the CV. A recent study from the American Historical Association demonstrates that the "top" programs admit graduate students from a very narrow range of mostly private institutions, and hire from a similarly narrow pool. All of which is bad news for those of us from AMU's.

I was almost among the haves.

My adviser, a hotshot in my specialty -- and the reason I attended AMU in the first place -- recently turned down an offer to become a professor at an Ivy League university. At first I was relieved. I quite liked AMU and found my colleagues there to be mostly excellent, but without my "famous" (among humanities academics, anyway) adviser, it didn't hold any special significance for me.

"Well, I'm glad you didn't take the job at Ivy U," I said to him, happily. "It's sure better for me this way."

"I would have taken you with me, Dewey," my adviser replied. "We probably could have gotten you some dissertation fellowship money."

In other words, I came close to having both decent research support and an Ivy League stamp on my CV. (Besides prestige, money is something that AMU has had precious little to offer.) Suddenly I was wishing he had taken the job.

I know that I am as good a scholar and teacher as I would be if my degree was from the Ivy League; I have strengths and weaknesses just like everybody else. I also know that big-name universities are not particularly strong in my specialty; the other departments that boast the top programs are at, you guessed it, AMU's.

But in the name game -- the "glance quickly at the conference badge to see whether this person is worth talking to" academic culture -- I'm at a decided disadvantage, even against those candidates who can't match my teaching and research credentials. People in the humanities may like to pretend that it's the quality of scholarship that matters, but the open secret is that the prestige accorded to one's doctoral institution counts for a great deal.

In some ways this whole hiring process is irrational. At its worst, it reminds me of what I hated about high school: It's the cool kids reproducing their privileged social status. It's not that I don't recognize that Ivy Leaguers are nearly always very good; it's just that many of us from other institutions are very good as well.

The job market isn't easy on anybody, but the dearth of tenure-track positions means hiring committees rely even more heavily these days on status credentialing. With so few positions available, hiring committees are under great pressure not to make a bad hire; after all, the dean might very well give the next space to a different department if the process doesn't go well. And search committees can imagine themselves explaining, "Hey, he was from Harvard -- who knew it wouldn't work out?" But they cringe at trying to rationalize to administrators why they would take someone from AMU in the first place.

Despite my credentials gap, I'm somewhat optimistic but not delusional as I begin my third year on the job market. I know that having my Ph.D. from AMU means that some departments will never see me as a good fit for their program. And no matter how strong my CV is otherwise, AMU is right there at the top of it, giving search committees a ready excuse to place me in the reject pile.

I probably shouldn't even bother applying to the big-name institutions, but I might be able to secure a position from a university at the same level as AMU. And I can only hope that a few jobs that fit my qualifications open from the sort of departments where research is part of professional life, where teaching and service are emphasized as well, and where job candidates aren't automatically cut from the pool purely on the basis of institutional name recognition.

I'm going to give it my best shot: AMU was great to me while I was there, and I can only hope it won't keep me from landing the type of job I want.