It's getting to me

Okay, it was three weeks on Friday. The department chair said two to two-and-a-half weeks. She probably wasn't thinking about Spring Break. On Tuesday (day after tomorrow) we have a faculty meeting. Surely we'll be told something before then? I've spent my adult life waiting for one thing or another, and for the last couple of decades, it's been waiting about jobs that I don't ultimately get. Let's summarize:

1. I graduated with my master's in December 1988, and we moved to Georgia that summer. I began work as an adjunct for the English Department. I worked that fall, then sat home that spring, then taught again that fall. I applied for a full-time position, and it came down to me and another woman, a much younger woman. She was their own graduate (recent), in a program that favored literature. The chair of the search committee told me in confidence that they had recommended me for the job. The department chair told me that the younger (skinnier, cuter, blonder) woman had the job because "my grades were too high." (He believed that the hallmark of successful teaching was to have grades that resembled the bell curve. He'd never heard of process teaching.)


2. So after two years in the English department, I was hired as an adjunct to teach Business Communications by the Marketing Department. The pay was much higher, but I taught the same class, three times a day, three quarters a year, for three years. Nevertheless, when a full-time permanent position came open, I applied. (The "rule" was that after three years, adjuncts had to be unemployed for one semester before they could return to work, so that they would be unable to claim some sort of de facto tenurable status. I don't know whose myth that is, but it seems to be prevalent around the country in certain places.) A female colleague and I applied, as did the one man teaching BusComm. She and I both had years of experience; he had one year. He was an awful teacher and a really big lump of dumb. But he attended the same church as the dean. Guess who got the job.


3. We moved to Missouri, where my husband took his second tenure-track position. (He got his first tenure-track job when he was ABD, making more money then than I will ever make.) I applied to the grad school at Mizzou, believing that once I had a doctorate, I'd have the qualifications it took to get the job I wanted. For various reasons, I was not done with the doctorate when my husband (who had tenure in Missouri) decided the grass was greener in Michigan, and he accepted another tenure-track position up here.


4. I took a position at the community college, where most of the faculty were master's only. My being ABD was considered suspicious--not because the doctorate was incomplete, but because it made me one of "them"--the distrusted and disliked handful of faculty who did have Ph.D.s. Nevertheless, I applied for the first permanent job that came up. I wasn't even called for an interview. Then the next year, I applied for the second permanent job that came up. I did a campus presentation, the whole thing. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. I kept being given every excuse in the world for why no word was available. Finally, the Spring semester ended, and the Summer semester began. That's when I was told I didn't get the job, that it had gone to a young woman who was that very semester finishing a master's degree (in literature, of course). (The job ad was specific to composition specialists, but that seemed irrelevant to the Search Committee.) Clearly, they had been waiting to announce that she got the job when it seemed likely that she would indeed finish her master's degree that spring. And--again no surprise--she was young, attractive, and probably related to someone at the college.


5. I left the community college for a Visiting position at the local University, the place where my husband worked and where he once again had achieved tenure. Once again, I applied for a tenure-track position. I didn't even get to do a campus presentation. The job went to a man this time--young, go-getter, aggressive, good-looking. Students hated him, but hey, a candidate's being able to teach doesn't matter to Hiring Committees. I also applied again this year, but I didn't even get an acknowledgment of my application from the Writing Department.


6. While at this school, I applied for a tenure-track position at a small private school downtown. I was brought in for a campus visit and told I'd hear something soon. Finally, I emailed my contact person at that school and got the rudest email in response, basically insinuating that I wasn't qualified to dig ditches. It turns out that they never hired anyone at all for the position. Maybe they didn't get the funds. Whatever. The truth would have been nice, but truth is in short supply in hiring decisions. Candidates are constantly being accused of padding resumes, and the media make a big deal out of employee dishonesty, but no one ever looks at the dishonesty from the other side of the coin--the employer who lies and misleads and misrepresents.


7. And now here I am at another university, one a bit farther away (a 70-minute drive rather than a 45-minute drive). Once again, I am waiting. I know that one of the other three candidates is also already "in house." Her degree is English Education. One of the candidates is a man. Another candidate is another woman, and if it's the woman I saw on campus talking to the Associate Dean, she is a minority candidate. There are no minorities in the department, so of course, she could have the qualifications of Jessica Simpson, and it wouldn't matter. If there is pressure to increase the numbers of minority faculty, the job will be hers. I will once again be the bridesmaid, not the bride. (Instead of 27 Dresses, like the movie, mine will be 27 Job Interviews.)

I was talking to Spouse this morning (Sundays are our days for me to engage him in Deep, Serious Conversations, where I whine and get teary-eyed and he sits there with big sad eyes, saying next to nothing). He admits I've been treated badly, but he knows there is nothing I can do about it. When his university didn't hire me (even after a previous dean had used the promise of hiring me as an incentive to get my husband to commit to the school), and we protested, the new dean basically insulted me, and the Provost (whom we knew personally and whose own spouse had been hired as a spousal hire to get her to commit to the school) ignored us.

In four months, I will be 57 years old, and believe me, there are days when I feel much, much older. Mainly the reason I feel so old and decrepit is that I've been internalizing these messages about my lack of value to the educational world. I've thrown my heart and soul into teaching, been told time and time again that good teaching mattered, and been shown time and time again that what really mattered was something irrelevant to education entirely--age, physical attractiveness, gender, religious affiliation. If I don't get this position, I honestly don't think I can do this to myself again. I don't think I can put myself out there, leave myself open and vulnerable, only to be publicly gutted and skinned.

So, here I sit, waiting. Tomorrow I have a doctor's appointment at 11 a.m., and after I get to display my physical self in a vulnerable and embarrassing way, I'll rush back from the clinic to see whether the phone rang while I was gone. And then I'll sit and wait. Dr. S.