Harkness Tower on the Yale University campus in New Haven, Conn., on June 12, 2015. By Colin Dickey Colin Dickey is the author of "Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places", along with two other books of nonfiction. He is currently writing a book on conspiracy theories and other delusions,"The Unidentified," forthcoming in 2020. April 15 at 12:38 PM Ben Wurgaft started applying for full-time, tenure-track academic jobs in 2009.
The result — as Wurgaft’s experiences reveal — is a second, unpaid job: seasonal part- to full-time work for academics every fall, all during what is often a young scholar’s most productive period. It’s a mandatory distraction that rarely results in a job but still eats up time that might be better spent in research or writing.
“Mostly what I hate,” said one graduate student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so as not to hurt her chances of getting a job, “is how much dissertation writing time this has eaten up. I lost basically all of September and October to prepping job materials, which was time I needed for writing.”
Faculty who have served on search committees respond that academic hiring is high-stakes: If someone doesn’t work out, the department may be stuck with a bad fit; if they don’t get tenure, the department may not get the line renewed. So committees want to do everything they can to make informed decisions — and usually that means documents.
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