academia

The Creative Writing Job Market 2011-12


When I was on the job market, my friends and I who were looking for faculty positions obsessively watched the academic jobs wiki, a comprehensive site with everything you could possibly need to know about going on the job market in nearly ever field. The site is rigorously updated by job searchers with dates of contact from universities, when interviews are scheduled, when offers are made and accepted or declined and even salary information for some fields. If there are tidbits of “inside information” those are shared. On the creative writing jobs page each year, industrious people track down who was hired in each position and make note of how many books they have. The site is very useful, very intimidating, and very revealing about the state of the academic job market. If you want to really see some frustration, the Venting Page, is well worth the look.

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Behind the Scenes / 39 Comments
September 8th, 2011 / 5:16 pm

The Academic Life Is Not Candy Land

Anytime I hear the rhetoric about the shelter of academia, I cannot help but think, “What the hell are you talking about?” A job is a job is a job. I have been really interested in some of the responses to Lily’s post about the utility of her MFA, where people have expressed that an academic job involves shelter from the “real world,” and that the simple solution to her very real and valid concerns is to extract herself from the warm and safe cocoon of academia so she might experience “reality.” This is actually a rather common, albeit sort of delusional sentiment, the idea that to know the “real world” one must suffer, toil in poverty, travel, work as a waitress or any other prescription you might have for where the real world is actually taking place.

While nothing is guaranteed, nor should it be, when you pursue a terminal degree and you want  to teach, it is frustrating to learn that you may not be able to do what you trained to do, or you might get an academic job without security, working for what amounts to less than minimum wage even though you have excellent credentials. Yes, life is unfair, but the solution here is not for Lily to “walk it off,” or “just write,” because, as I interpeted her post, Lily is not so much lamenting she doesn’t have time to write because she’s in a PhD program. She is lamenting she doesn’t have time to write because she cannot do what she trained to do by getting her MFA even though she has an impressive list of credentials. Hers is the frustration of being the best and having your best not be good enough. That’s a really bitter pill to swallow.

In the meantime, I just finished my first semester as a faculty member at a mid-sized Midwestern public university. I think a lot of these misperceptions about academia and its relationship to reality arise because people simply don’t know what faculty do when they’re not in the classroom or frolicking all summer, or what it takes to become a faculty member. Creative writing is only part of what I do, but I have colleagues who strictly teach creative writing and have the exact same workloads and tenure expectations.

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Random / 89 Comments
December 13th, 2010 / 3:45 pm

Does anyone here give a flying fuck about copyright when they make copies of _______ to teach students?