Three letters are known to strike terror into the hearts of all soon-to-be Ph.D.s in English, French, Spanish, Italian and the other languages. They are M, L and A – the acronym for the Modern Language Association, which holds its annual conference and a job fair, whose hazards are legend, every year just days after Christmas.
Last month’s MLA conference was held in the winter garden spot of Chicago. As if to make up for the ice-tipped winds roaring like a freight train off Lake Michigan, the convention hotels were located within tempting proximity to the Magnificent Mile. This happy hunting ground of after-Christmas bargains simply seethed with shoppers during my three days in Chicago – none of whom appeared to be attending the MLA convention. Indeed, the clearest measure of the single-minded intensity that the MLA seems to evoke in attendees is the fact that, in three days of attendance, every single person I heard say, “See you guys, I’m going shopping!” was, in fact, planning to visit the convention’s book fair.
This was not my first MLA, but it was the first MLA in which I was, in convention parlance, “on the job market.” It’s a singularly nerve-wracking process, much moreso, I believe, than the process one endures in seeking jobs in nonacademic fields. And the pressure is intensified by the fact that the number of jobs for English professors shrank last year.
According to the MLA’s own statistics, the number of jobs in English literature is down 4.1 percent, to 1,720, compared with an exciting 4.3 percent rise in the number of jobs in the foreign languages, to 1,660. And while this in no way compares to the crisis of 1993-94, when the number of jobs in English hovered around 1,100, or 60 percent below this year’s level, the competition for tenure-track jobs, both for the roughly 1,500 newly minted doctorates in English and the foreign languages produced in 2006 and the untold numbers from previous years who are assaying the process for the second or even third time, remains intense.In recognition of these pressures, Diverse’s handy dandy “tips for surviving the MLA” is intended as a light-hearted commentary on the process both for those who have endured it, or a similar one in a related field, and for those who are looking forward to (or dreading) embarking on such a process later in the year.
I hope I may be forgiven for donning the cloak of anonymity in offering this piece. As someone with active applications in process at three schools, I think the reasons are obvious. But to give you a better idea of who I am and where I stand as a job candidate, I’ll describe myself in a bit more detail. I am:
• An African-American woman
• A doctoral candidate at a flagship state school in the South
