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Fallow, the Yellow Brick Road

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By Norman D. Plummer

"I don't like this forest. It's dark and creepy."

Dorothy's words from The Wizard of Oz came to mind the other day when a fourth straight journal rejected my submission, the article apparently unread. The only indication that human hands other than my own had ever touched the manuscript was the fact that the wire-and-plastic clip I had used to bind the pages together was missing. In its place was a boilerplate "does not suit our needs at the present time" rejection letter.

Lousy trade. I'd rather have the clip back.

But the rejection led me to telephone a mentor, asking what it might say about the odds of my ever getting a tenure-track job. His answer: "Nothing."

At some level, that was exactly what I wanted to hear. While my dissertation committee has had only positive things to say about my research, the wider research world has said nothing about my work to date: no marginalia, no excoriating rebuttal, just "no."

On another level, though, my mentor's remark was the last thing I wanted to hear. Because, I wondered, if publications don't vouchsafe a tenure-track job, what does? My mentor's answer: "Nothing."

Since then, I've been seeking advice from tenure-track faculty members on what we -- the graduate students, the adjuncts, the part-timers, and the visiting instructors -- need to do to break on through to the other side.

What I have been told reads much like a journey to Oz, except in this case, you, the applicant, and your application materials are playing all the characters in the story.

First, there's the cover letter. Without the right one, your application is like the Scarecrow. It lacks a central nervous system. A good cover letter makes all the other parts of your application work in harmony. With enough drafts, and the right reader suggestions, it will earn its brain.

Then there's your writing sample: the Cowardly Lion. It was probably born of a stuttering seminar report, supplicant to the course's professor and slavishly dedicated to the research that came before it. Your writing sample may have grown into a dissertation chapter, with more fat, but no more of the fight. With the right redrafts, though, it can make your case, both as a scholar and as an applicant.

But a weak introduction or conclusion, even a misplaced comma, could lead to your being snatched up by those creepy apple trees, your career never to be seen again.

Naturally, there's the Tin Man problem: evidence of excellence in teaching. Yes, here's where you show your heart. Problem is, much like a heart, teaching excellence is something you know you have, but it's very hard to prove.

You can point to the obvious things, like walking and talking, but even the stiffest academics can do that. You can ask others to press the stethoscope to your chest and tell the world that your heart is big and red and beating loud, but those people are your references, and your placement boosts their program rating. Meanwhile, teaching awards are fantastic, but hard to come by.

What's left, then? Student evaluations of teaching? How do you choose among the glowing reviews that are riddled with sentence fragments, the astute assessments hand-scrawled in indecipherable hieroglyphs, and the prose masterpieces that damn with faint (if helpful) praise? Make the wrong choice, and you're left frozen, out in the snow.

You yourself are Dorothy -- you just want to find a home, a place where checks keep coming in, checks you don't have to pay back. Home means a collegial department, one in which your yearly course load can be represented by the throw of one die. And it means having a department head who can run a quick meeting and still get things done.

While the career advice offered by my advisers has been consistent in its general form, it is wildly diverse in its particulars. So for the intrepid job marketeer, the Wizard of Oz story starts to feel markedly more like a "choose your own adventure" tale. Every decision you make has a predetermined outcome, leading you to another complicated stage in the saga, or else to its disappointing end.

My favorite set of circumstances is one in which two equally valued counselors provide directly contradictory advice. Take the question of the dissertation synopsis. In the now hundreds of applications I have sent out for a tenure-track position in contemporary American literature, search committees have requested that curious synopsis only a handful of times.

Now the placement director at my large state university advises everyone to include such a synopsis in every application. Why? Because it can be ignored very easily, but it can also be a rich indicator of the breadth and quality of your work.

Meanwhile, my most active dissertation committee member insists just the opposite: A synopsis only means more information that a fickle reader might use to dismiss you. And that's really what search committees are looking for anyway, given the reality of so many qualified applicants and so few jobs.

So which path do I take? One of those choices, I imagine, leads to you being carried away, screaming, in the clutches of the flying monkeys. They deposit you on the dead grass outside the Emerald City (read: the ivory tower), while the Wicked Witch cackles over a smoldering pile of your dissertation.

Having chosen wisely, you may find that the next page in your job-market adventure leads to yet another choice. This time, a plurality of mentors are offering very different advice about how to fine-tune (or worse, restructure) your cover letter, your writing sample, or even your CV.

At this point you are in a hypertext adventure with many possible outcomes. One approach could lead you to a private liberal-arts college, another to a satellite campus of a state university system, another to a large research university, and so on. And one may land you on that dismal dead grass.

But here's what I have concluded: Neither the Oz metaphor nor the choose-your-own-adventure version is truly representative of the case.

Those who have found a home in academe are giving you a map of the yellow brick road that leads to their own front door, because that is how they got to where they are. But those highly specific maps won't necessarily lead you to the same place. The choices you make have no preordained outcome, as attractive as that fiction is.

Rather, I think there are as many yellow brick roads as there are jobs. At the end of each is someone's Emerald City. Once there, behind the wizard's curtain is not one man, roughly Dorothy's size, but instead a half-dozen-or-so souls who make up the hiring committee. They aren't looking for the ideal application, or even the ideal applicant. They're simply looking for the best person for their job.

The best application, then, is only ever seen in retrospect, once those half-dozen-or-so souls have read through a pile of applications.

The best application is the one that finds its way through the witch's castle (i.e., the department's expectations and needs). It's the one that leads you to a campus interview, where you are able to bolster your case that you always had the brain, the courage, and the heart to get home ... or at least to a campus visit there.

Whether you're wearing the right shoes and surviving all the other pitfalls of the interview process are for another article.