Victorianitas

There's a short version and a long version of what I've been up to for the past few weeks. The short version is just a row of exclamation marks, so moving on to the longer one:

I got a job.

An academic job.

A real, live, those-things-still-exist? academic job.

It's a fixed-term postdoc position (scientists, bear with me, you're far from home and things are different here) working on a big and fascinating project. The work will be really interesting, the people seem lovely, the job pays about two and a half times as much as all my existing jobs put together, and I could go on, but I'm still so stunned that they actually wanted to hire me that it's difficult enough to stop the confused blinking long enough to even type this.

It starts really soon. I'm hoping the confused blinking will have stopped by then.

I don't want to go into too many details about the project here - it's an unusual project that would be fairly easy to identify if I did - or about the university where I'll be working, although I don't think it'll give much away to say that their HR department could possibly get things moving re: contracts in a more timely and efficient manner than it's doing at the moment. Because, really, unless I'm holding that contract, I'm still not going to believe this is true.

I had a dream about a job interview in which:

a) one of my friends, it turned out, had an interview for the same position, except his was at eleven in the morning and mine was half-past five and that meant they were interviewing all day and oh my God I'm up against about fifteen other people and the panel will be so fed up by the time they get to me;
b) I had nothing to wear! Specifically, nothing that would go with a skirt which I wouldn't wear to an interview anyway in real life. (I have an interview suit. It might well not fit now.) And it took me from 11 till 5 to find a top to go with the skirt;
c) Just as they were about to call me into the interview room, some strange mutated monsters (think Predators) rose up to threaten people the world over, and humanity was evacuated into space.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Dear Professor So-and-so,

I am writing to apply for the lectureship in something vaguely close to my field, currently advertised on jobs.ac.uk. While I know you’re going to get several hundred applicants for this one alone, you should hire me ahead of all those people, and I’ll tell you why.

First, my research. I don’t exactly have a lot of time to work on this these days, what with the four jobs I’m juggling to pay the rent and the arrival of a computer that can actually play Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, but I’m still fairly good at it. They gave me a PhD and everything. I have some fancy-looking conference presentations on my c.v., and nobody ever falls asleep during mine, I promise you. Also, this really swanky journal just accepted one of my articles. And I have plans! Oh, I have plans. Great plans, wonderful plans, monograph-worthy plans. I can tell you all about them at an interview, or while weeping bitterly into a gin and tonic at closing time, whatever works for you. If you’re at all unsure about my ability to juggle teaching, research and administrative work in a new job, please bear in mind that I mostly finished my PhD thesis on the library circulation desk after teaching to the point of exhaustion all day. Pay me enough to spend all my library time actually reading the books, and I promise you I’ll bring in so many publications that they’ll create a whole new RAE/REF classification of ‘awesome’ just for your department.

Second, my teaching. I’ve taught everything from first-year introductory courses (‘Books and You: Don’t be afraid!’) to final-year honours classes, and everyone from precocious Foucault-reading school-leavers to sullen forty-year-olds with authority issues (and vice versa). I’ve taught tutorials, written lectures, put course handbooks together, refereed student flamewars on WebCT, and right now I’m supervising the dissertation of a student who chose her theoretical approach based on the nifty structure of a course I ran a couple of years ago. I KNOW! Anyway, being a hiring committee you’re no doubt going to hear a lot of bullshit about how people find the huge first-year classes so very rewarding and totally inspiring and not at all below their true station in academic life, so I won’t bore you with the Dead Poets Society spiel, but I will tell you that I mean what I say. If you want to hire someone who’s going to view their career path as one long march towards teaching a single postgraduate class in psychoanalytic representations of the (m)other in illustrated children’s poetry, 1921-1927, then go ahead and hire the twitchy-looking person who just used the word ‘rewarding’; if you want someone who can and will happily teach your first-years, hire me.

Thirdly, my ability to play nicely with other children. Okay, take a look around your department. You have PhD students? You have a PhD student who always turns up to help with all the boring department tasks like clearing up after parties, who’s always there to fill in seats any time the ‘we look bad, get down here now’ mass e-mail goes around about poor staff attendance at department seminars, who will never cause you heartache? That was me. Admittedly, by now I think my department would pay you to take me away, but the fact that I coped so quietly and so sweetly for so long in a department that can simultaneously complain about PhD students not showing any kind of interest in the running of the department and about TAs having the temerity to speak during department meetings remains a mark in my favour, I think. Also, I’ve worked on a bunch of conferences, can make it across a whole building in 1.2 seconds with a data projector under one arm, am adept at the kind of networking that involves juggling comments like “Let me introduce you to someone who might be interested in that project” with comments like “And your wife doesn’t understand you, right?” at the same event, got the administration to Do Something about various things, and resisted the urge to punch someone in the throat for telling me, while I was doing four jobs and a PhD, that these would be the best days of my academic life because all I had to think about was my thesis. Also, I take up very little space and don’t mind having an office without a window.

Yours in begging, pleading, get-me-out-of-this-dysfunctional-snakepit despair,

September Blue.

Two and a half of my jobs are in the middle of a pay restructuring process. Still. I grow weary of this. Leaving aside all the fill-in-the-blanks griping about management and bureaucracies and The Problem With Higher Education Today etc etc, though, here's a thing: why can't it just be about the money?

No, I'm serious. I don't mean the work itself; I'm fine with not getting paid a fortune to do any of the things I do. I mean the discussions about the jobs, and what the pay is for the jobs, that come up two or three or sixteen times a year. The kind of discussions that involve me snapping at one of my bosses, for the first (and hopefully the last) time, when he responded to my "But you agree I've been underpaid for the last two years?" with "I think you're taking this a bit far - it's not like anyone deliberately set out to pay you less than you should have been." The kind that include every single discussion about teaching pay, which by unspoken academic law cannot take place without a litany of disavowal: it's really good experience and we need it for our cvs and really we should be grateful there's any teaching for us at all and of course we care about the students and we're not in this for the money and we know the university's budget is struggling and we know the department's doing all it can and we hate to even vaguely imply otherwise - so, um, will we be paid for office hours this semester? Sorry to ask so bluntly! Sorry to ask at all! Sorry to keep bringing this subject up when you've already said that you think it's a shame you can't pay us all as much as you'd like to!

Oh, now, look. Discussions about pay are just that - discussions about pay. It's not personal. I didn't complain about being underpaid for two years because I worried that everyone above me in the hierarchy was a evil moustache-twirling villain who went home and kicked their dog every night. I really don't care whether they underpaid me through malice or forgetfulness or accident or what. I complained because I wasn't getting paid what I should have been paid. Ditto, teaching, where I know that the department is operating under tough financial constraints and that the people responsible for budget allocations would pay TAs generously if they had all the money in the world to do it. I believe the sympathy, and I appreciate the sympathy, and continuing to haggle over pay does not mean I am rejecting the sympathy or calling anyone evil - it just means that I'd like to get paid, please, because I'm operating under tough financial constraints as well.

Yeah, a bit grumpy today. But, honestly. Here's the kind of pay issue I'm talking about here: in one of my jobs, which involves working quite closely with students (I was going to specify whether it's the teaching one or the non-teaching one, but I doubt it matters) , the pay restructuring has involved reclassifying something which was once paid work into something that's neither paid for nor on the contract. It's not essential for doing the job, but it is useful (both for me and my colleagues and for the students), and it's understood that people in my particular role will be spending a couple of hours a week doing this particular duty anyway, even under the restructured pay system.

Oh, I do not think so.

But do you know how difficult it is to have a conversation about this that doesn't turn into a) a debate about whether I naively misunderstand the pressures of university finance or b) a debate about whether I cruelly underestimate the purity of my boss's convictions in truly, madly, deeply wanting the situation to be otherwise? And that's not even getting into c), in which I struggle in vain to find a way to phrase my objections that doesn't come across as 'I don't care about the students - I'm in this for the cash.'

I like my jobs. I do. I'm just not doing them for free.

The person who's worked out a fluent and convincing way of saying 'Okay, so your job specification asks for someone who can do X, and while I don't exactly have any experience of doing X, I totally could! Hire me and see!'

If you haven't yet read what Sisyphus has to say on the subject of how undergrads' education is affected when they're taught by those of us with eighteen jobs, no money, and a complete absence of job security in whatever teaching position(s) we've got, then you should. A sample:

Students don’t want rigor or quality even if they know that’s what they should want. It takes not only time and effort and experience as a teacher to push them to what they really can achieve rather than what they want to get away with ---- not only these qualities but also a certain sense of security, a willingness to be tough, to be respected rather than loved. And that’s not going to happen if next quarter’s employment rests on getting great evaluations and next year’s rests on getting out another article and 50 more applications out this month.

She's right, and it's something I've been thinking about a bit recently, trying to shuffle my teaching and my various other jobs around so that all of them get done to a passable standard. And 'passable' would be the word. I'm not saying that my students are getting completely screwed over, but they're not getting the same kind of deal that they used to, either. And there is nothing like working alongside this year's new TAs to have this brought home to you, believe me.

(Here, I'll go a little way towards defending myself by pointing out that some teaching-related corners could do with cutting once in a while. There's definitely a law of diminishing returns when it comes to teaching prep, and after a certain point, spending even more time preparing for your class can actually work against you; I know I've fallen into the 'damn it, I spent ages reading all this vaguely relevant secondary material, and if you eighteen-year-old first-years aren't going to come up with the same insights all by yourselves, you'll just have to sit here and listen while I lecture at you for three-quarters of a discussion class!' trap, back in the past. There's a happy medium. As for whether I'm currently hitting that medium, though, well... maybe. Possibly. No.)

But at least my teaching's getting done, to a point that's definitely a lot more... pointy... than some of my other stuff. If I cut too many corners on teaching, it'll have an immediate effect on my students; if I cut too many corners on job applications or working on publications or getting my damn PhD thesis hardbound and handed over to Registry, then that only affects me, and the effects won't become visible for a while. And it's the same way with the rewards: teaching can pay off instantly with a good, talkative class, and lets me actually feel like I'm doing fairly well at some part of academia; applying for jobs and working on publications and looking at my PhD ever ever again, on the other hand, is just misery-inducing. So when I do have spare time, it's... not exactly going towards advancing my research profile, if you see what I mean.

Anyway, I seem to have got off-track. Where I wanted to go with this is a conversation I had a few weeks ago with one of my friends, a TA who's nearly finished her PhD. Because there are some weighty staff shortages in her department, and because she's really good at (and enthusiastic about) teaching a particular part of her field that's notoriously difficult for students to get a grip on - let's say, French theory, although it's not - my friend's ended up with quite the teaching load. Quite the teaching load. Lectures, classes and sciencey-related lab things in large number. She's been happy with this so far, but now that she's close to done with her thesis - and now that her funding's close to gone - she's thinking about some other plans.

So, my friend speaks to her head of department, after he e-mails to let her know that she'll be given the same teaching load for the next academic year too. Says, well, you know I love teaching, but my funding's running out, and this won't cover my rent. So, here's an idea. You were vaguely talking about hiring a teaching fellow for next year if I left, right? Why don't you hire me at pro-rata teaching fellow pay for, well, let's call this part-time?

Splutters, worried-looking frowns, &c. Listen, he says, I know you're a great teacher, and I agree with you - the workload you've got here is easily what I'd class as 0.5 part-time for a teaching fellow. But I really don't think we can afford that at the moment. The students love you, though, and we don't have anybody who can teach the [French theory] stuff, definitely not as well as you can... how about you stay on your current pay for next semester, and we'll maybe think again the semester after that?

No deal, she says. Sorry, and you know I do love teaching, but on that workload I can't fit in enough hours elsewhere to get paid enough to live off when it's all added up.

Please, he says.

Sorry, she says.

An aggrieved sigh. Think about your students, he says.

No, she says. Your students.

She's my current TA hero for saying it, but it's a bleak, bleak world where such is the case.

My little brother's looking for a job in one of the sciences, which means that a) I might finally have to acknowledge that he's no longer six years old and b) I no longer need to go through the Academic Job Markets Are Scary And Mean Seriously I Am Doing Everything I Can Do You Think I Like Working All These Minion Jobs? talk with my parents every phone call, because Baby Brother is living at home again and can do it for me. And is, presumably, because now they're reminding me to work on my publications. Huh. I would say that I didn't need telling that, but given that I was spending my finally-a-day-for-my-own-research! day off playing Escape Velocity when my brother phoned me, maybe I do. Anyway.

I don't know enough about the academic job market in my brother's branch of the sciences - or in the sciences at all, come to think of it - to say much in detail about the kind of jobs he's looking for. Some kind of research assistantship thing? Or maybe a PhD? Or maybe one of those margins-of-academia jobs in government or industry that are lot more numerous in his field than mine? While he's got a lot more flexibility than I have in terms of what to do with his Masters degree that actually requires the use of his Masters degree, though, he's dealing with a lot of the same job market questions that I am. Namely: where the hell is this post-RAE jobs boom? And why did I have to click through five pages of 'further details' to discover that this apparently open position is not so open after all? And did I really just see a job advert for Iraq?

The first of these is another question for another day (and maybe another post, although last time I tried to write about the mechanics of the UK academic hiring system it only made me cry). The last of these could end up as an interesting point about the arts/sciences divide, because the job advert my brother read out to me phrased the living-in-a-war-zone aspect as a reason why the candidate might not want the job ("while based in a relatively peaceful area, the job still carries some risk of possible kidnapping, injury or death"), whereas the one I read for English a while ago saw it more as a reason why the hiring panel might not want the candidate ("MUST be adventurous, innovative and able to deal with unexpected changes to schedule and workload"). But the middle of these, the complete inability of whoever's in charge of this stuff at many universities to write a decent and useful job advert, is the kind of thing we can fix right now.

All we need to do, academic job-seekers of the world, is convince the universities to adopt a set template for their job adverts. We could even make it multiple-choice. Think how much easier life would be for everyone if job adverts read like this:

[permanent/temporary] [post rank] in [field] at [university]
Salary (please circle): Decent - fair - will just about cover the rent - hourly paid
How specific is this in terms of field?: Entirely open - Slight preference for area stated, but not a large deciding factor - Strong preferance for area stated, but we're willing to consider people outside that if circumstances are right - Stated area, or close to stated area, only - That specific thing, no compromises
Teaching load: Hell - Purgatory - Heaven
Current department atmosphere: Clear as a blue mountain sky - Mostly clear, with occasional grey skies and downpours - Perpetually overcast and stormy - Utterly toxic
Do you have an inside candidate (be honest)?: Yes - No

So much easier.

Hardbound thesis: 2x (£17.50 for printing + approx. £20.95 for binding) = £76.90
Graduation fee: £45
Gown hire (like hell I'm buying them): around £40
Approximate cost of graduation: £161.90

Anybody want to buy a kidney?

Mr Sandman, bring me a dream
Some sweet department, a good salary scheme,
Give them a vacancy for a Lecturer A,
And put it up on jobs.ac.uk
Sandman, I'm so alone,
Don't have no office to call my own,
Please turn on your magic beam
And Mr Sandman, bring me a dream

Mr Sandman, bring me a dream
With the cutest teaching load that I've ever seen,
Give them my word that I'm not a rover,
And tell them that their lengthy search is over
Sandman, I'm so damn broke
My overdraft has gone beyond a joke,
We're two months past the RAE,
So Mr Sandman, melt that hiring freeze

Mr Sandman, bring us a dream,
We can't live forever on toast and baked beans,
We'll publish like rabbits, we'll teach Lacan to yobs,
We'll even move to London if you'll give us a job
Mr Sandman, tell us you don't agree
That we've remortgaged our lives for a useless degree,
And boost our flagging self-esteeeeeeeeeem
Mr Sandman, bring us,
Please, please, please,
Mr Sandman, bring us a dream.

[The original, of course...]

When my friend L was redecorating her spare room, a lengthy and tiring job that required large amounts of furniture-moving, spider-chasing and junk removal, she told me she wanted the whole thing to happen in a montage. Painting done a chunk at a time to the sound of some chirpy pop number, interspersed with shots of L and her boyfriend wiping sweat from their foreheads, sorting old shoes into pairs, polishing floors, laughingly flicking paint at each other - and the whole thing over and done by the final bars.

So I've decided: I'd like the next few months of my life (post-PhD, pre-finally getting a job please God please) to go by in a montage, too. This is not a particularly productive or interesting time, I'm fairly sure all the important stuff could be crammed into four minutes or so, and it'd be much less tedious and much more cheerful to watch in light-hearted, quirky montage form.

It'd have to start off with applying for jobs, of course (chin in hands, staring miserably at CV?). Coffee cups building up around the computer. Running for the bus in the rain, umbrella flipping inside-out in comical manner; scrabbling between sofa cushions for change; marking student work with my eyes closed; ringing the closing bells at the library (which could also connote 'Gradual Dissatisfaction With Minion Job and Minimal Pay', so there could be a few of these - first time, ringing bells after carefully reading time-list and checking watch against main clock; second time, ringing bells after glancing at watch and rolling eyes; third time, ringing bells without looking up from a book); flipping through depressing 'There have been no jobs matching your chosen search criteria' e-mails from jobs.ac.uk; dancing round the living room in pyjamas to the tune from Flashdance (I don't do this, but what the hell, it's a montage, I could); washing dishes; throwing away bank statements unread; turning sofa upside down and thumping it to see if it'll dislodge any more coins; staring glumly at the goldfish; typing madly away at an article, then deleting 17 out of the last 18 sentences; shaking head at CV in sad, resigned manner.

The tune should be the Fratellis' 'Whistle for the Choir', which gets the mood just right, and also fits really nicely for the job application process ('Is it out of line / if I was to be bold and say would you be mine? / Because I may be a beggar, and you may be the Queen / And though I may be on a downer, I'm still ready to dream...')

A few people in my department have been warning me recently about teaching fellowships. "They'll exploit you!" is the refrain. "Get one as a temporary thing while you're looking for a Lecturer A post, but watch out, because they'll really exploit you!"

I'm torn.

See, on one hand, they're right. Teaching fellowships carry a heavy, heavy teaching load. I know this already, but it's sweet and good of them to warn me. They want me to do well; they want me to go into the job market with my eyes wide open. They care, and this is good.

On the other hand, 'exploit' is a funny word coming from the people who currently pay me TA rates.

I have learnt to nod, smile, thank them, and then rapidly change the subject. It goes down better than what I want to say, which is, yes, teaching fellowships are exploitative, but, people, they are salaried posts, and I've just spent the past semester writing lectures for advanced classes on what works out as the same pay I got for babysitting when I was fifteen. And babysitters, unlike your TAs, typically get access to the fridge.

Dear Hiring Panel of Wonderful People who are a Credit to the Profession and no doubt Lovely In and Of Themselves As Human Beings Too:

I would like that job you are advertising. Please.

My PhD, which is nearly completed - no.

My PhD, which was completed in - no. No, that's a lie.

I have almost completed a PhD in - no. Never say 'almost'. 'Almost' means 'not.'

My PhD, which is finished in the sense that I have written it and given it to the examiners, and there is nothing more I can do, people, I swear, but I haven't had the viva yet so I don't count as 'passed', but I SWEAR to you I will, I swear, I swear....

This is best done with a parable.

There was once, in some entirely fictional department in some entirely fictional university, at the end of a long, dark corridor, an office with 'Teaching Assistants' on the door (printed, incidentally, on a sign so old that I don't think the font used even exists any more). This office had several desks. 'Several' is the word here.

TAs who were also PhD students still working on their theses used the office, but only for their scheduled office hours. It was, after all, a cold, dark place, and PhD students had their own desks in a much nicer office down the corridor. TAs only relocated there permanently once their PhDs were finished, in what we'll generously call the 'gap stage' between the end of the PhD and the start of the first job that pays you enough to live off.

With the job market being the way it is, and with university finances being the way they were, the department's TA numbers crept higher. The desks in the TA office filled up, and other people's office hours involved a carefully-choreographed pantomime of eyebrow signals and coffee breaks when a student turned up.

Desks in the PhD office needed to be Officially Assigned to new students, and thus students at the other end of their PhD life - preparing for the viva, making post-viva corrections - had to be dislodged. Where to put them? The department did not want any of its young to go deskless, but space was short, and, well, they were still students, so - ah! Most of them teach, don't they? And even if they don't, there's loads of space in that TA office! Problem solved.

Except for the evictees, who turned up, box-files in hand, to discover that a) there were indeed several desks in the TA office, and b) 'several' meant 'four', and those four were full.

The department meant well. It's just that they didn't have much cause to take the long walk down the dismal corridor to the less-than-pleasant TA office themselves. Why would you, unless you're a TA or a student looking for one? The currents of academic promotion had long since carried them away to better rooms on nicer corridors and the TA office had become in their minds a grand and limitless place, with desks for all and ample shelving. It's not as good as having your own office, of course - they knew that much - but beggars can't be choosers, and so when TAs and end-stage PhD students began sentences with "But I don't have a desk," they smiled in a collective, avuncular way and reminded their young charges that there was "always the TA office." Really, they meant well. They just didn't know that by 'no desks', the students meant 'no desks, anywhere, including the less desirable ones in the TA office, which we would still take, because they're better than no desks at all.'

And all of this is what went through my head during the three versions, I am not kidding, of the following conversation which I found myself having this week:

DR. HELPFUL (in various guises): So, how's the job hunt going?
ME: Eh. Miserable. There's been nothing advertised for weeks.
DR. HELPFUL: Well, you know what you should do? You should start applying for temporary one-year posts. And you should start looking for jobs all over the country, not just in the places you want to live.

No, see, when I said no jobs...

There is a post about the Many Woes of Being the Lowest Rung on the Academic Ladder* coming up (c'mon, you know the blogosphere needs another one). Consider this a trailer. Voiceover: "Somewhere, in the gutters of academia..."

SCENE: Library desk, late at night.

FRIENDLY LIBRARY PATRON: Don't they ever let you two go home?

DR K: If they're not watching the doors.

ME: We're only here until ten.

DR K: They appreciate us really. In a non-financial sense.

FRIENDLY LIBRARY PATRON: Surely you've got enough experience for a promotion now.

DR K: It's worse than you think. I've actually got a PhD.

ME: I only have a Masters, so I get the computer with the broken keyboard.

FRIENDLY LIBRARY PATRON: Well, they should let you be lecturers!

ME: Yes! Yes, they should!

DR K: To be fair, this is a lecture I'm writing now. For which I'm getting paid - oh wait, I'm not.

FRIENDLY LIBRARY PATRON: You need fresh air and sunshine, both of you. Like they used to do with pit ponies. You should get taken out to gambol on the grass once a year.

ME: I like this idea.

FRIENDLY LIBRARY PATRON: Maybe they can let you have a day off for the London Olympics.

DR K: If we're still doing this in 2012, I am actually going to kill myself.

(* - 'Being the rung', not 'being on the rung'. Those on the rung step on us. It is the way of things.)