September, 2022 Research Update

Amici!  It is now October!  Apologies that this is delayed a bit; we lost power on Friday and only got it back Saturday evening, which delayed this and a few other things.

September has been something of a short month, since PDXCON ate the first week and there's also been a bit of life going on in the background.  Nevertheless, alongside the blog, I've had two main professional preoccupations this month.

The first has been work on the book project.  The main task there I have been doing is retooling a farming model that I use in the first full chapter.  That model in particular is a part I expect I'll probably share with you all in November (where, as you recall, I am planning to take a month-long break from the blog to direct all of my efforts at book-work).  

The purpose of that farming model in the broader argument is to establish some key features in the ancient economy which then supported military action, in particular that because of the way it was structured, ancient smallholder agriculture tended to produce a lot of 'extra' labor(ers) but not a lot of agricultural surplus because the farms were essentially long on workers and short on land.  That in turn meant that getting people (men, in particular) to do warfare was a lot easier than getting surplus stuff (in the form of equipment, money for wages, food for soldiers and so on) to do so, a conclusion which then informs the subsequent chapter's focus on the 'stuff of war' (what we call materiel).

Alongside that I've had a few small things that are still forthcoming, but I'll be sure to announce when they appear.  But my main other focus has been on academic job applications, which are once again upon us.

I thought it might be worthwhile going over what the opening stages of the job season process look like.  We actually did this way back in August 2020, but there were a lot fewer of you then and maybe you haven't clambered back through the Patreon archives and in any case I think I can do a better job of explaining the process now.

Unlike most professions where job openings crop up all around the year, hiring in academia is seasonal.  Permanent positions are posted in August and September (stretching into October), with applications due in October and November, initial interviews in November and December and then campus visits in January, with final decisions coming after that.  Then temporary positions are posted in the Spring (usually February and March) and move through an abbreviated version of this process through the spring semester.

That calendar has, by the by, slowly compressed and sped up over the years.  Traditionally, all of the first-round interviews were done at the annual meetings of the major professional societies which tend to be in the first week in January, which anchored the system.  The last gasps of that old system were fading when I came into graduate school and once that chronological tether broke, the whole system shifted earlier (because that makes the administrative side of hiring easier).

Being on the job market year after year is a bit of a frustration for me because it means I lose a month every year updating all of the application materials one needs on the market.  Academic job application materials are quite particular and somewhat disconnected from their normal equivalents.  The common elements are:

 - A cover letter.  The format is standard, down to what paragraphs do what (intro, your book's argument, that argument's impact, other research, teaching experience, teaching excellence, sign off), with the only major structural question being the order these elements are in (research first or teaching first, which signals your focus; I am a 'research first' academic).  That said for a busy hiring committee, if the cover letter is bad they won't read any further, so you spend a lot of time trying to craft and hone this document.

- CV (curriculum vitae), the academic equivalent of a resume.  It's structured purely as a list of accomplishments (a CV should have no complete sentences that aren't titles).  You can see mine on the About the Pedant page.  Every academic keeps a continuously updated CV.

- A Teaching Portfolio.  The full version of this includes a teaching 'statement' (or a 'statement of teaching philosophy'), a 2-3 page document detailing your teaching goals and methods, plus several sample syllabi of courses you have taught (or would teach), with sample assignments and then a section providing evidence of teaching effectiveness.  This last section is generally a mix of student testimonials and student evaluations, along with any teaching awards you may have won.  Jobs only rarely ask for the full portfolio, but rather will often ask for pieces of it, such as only the teaching statement or only a few sample syllabi.  Still, the easiest thing to do is to keep a full version of the portfolio which you can then trim down to whatever is asked for.

- A Research Statement.  Like the teaching statement, this is a 2-3 page (I keep all of my statements to a strict 2-pages-and-no-more-limit) document detailing your current major project, other research projects recently finished or on-going, and to lay out briefly your overall research focus and methods.

- A Diversity Statement.  A bit of a chameleon document, generally the same length as the other two statements, which should both capture how your research furthers the cause of diversity and how you encourage diversity in your teaching.  As you may imagine, this document - frequently requested - ranges from bureaucratic box-checking to an actually important part of the application package (and in some cases serves the purpose of eliciting information from candidates which the hiring committee cannot legally ask about), but you will never know in advance which and so must take it seriously.

- A Writing Sample.  Typically a chapter or article length (sub-30 page) sample of your academic writing.  For very fresh PhDs, this might be a dissertation chapter, but it really ought to be a recently published article or book chapter.  Unfortunately the days when a fresh PhD could get a job with just their dissertation are mostly over.  For most applicants, however, the writing sample is just a task of selecting the appropriate publication.

- Three Letters of Recommendation, from other academics.  A lot of application strategy goes into the selection of letter-writers, whose prestige can matter significantly in getting you to the interview stage.  You also want the letters together to create a positive composite picture of you as a whole academic: researcher, teacher, colleague.  My 'letter team' varies a fair bit depending on the type of job I am applying to and so of course that means at the beginning of each job season going to each person and asking them to write letters and then coordinating with them to do so.  Letters are sent directly to committees (they never touch the applicant's hands), which means you need to ride herd on letter writers to make sure everything gets in on time.

Each search is going to ask for a different combination of those basic elements (everyone asks for CV and cover letter), so generally at the beginning of the season one sits down and updates a 'common' version of each, to be revised and tailored further for each job as it comes up.  Because I am applying both to jobs teaching at traditional civilian universities and military institutions (both the service academies and professional military education), I have two versions of a lot of these, since the military institutions often want quite different things (and job applications going through the USAJobs platform often require very specific tailoring).

This year's job market is going to be an unusual one for a lot of reasons.  The (fall) 2020 academic job market was practically non-existant due to universities hunkering down for COVID.  The (fall) 2021 market was somewhat better for history as a field generally, but not even really a true 'bounce back' to the already quite poor levels of the pre-COVID years.  According to the AHA's job report numbers (https://www.historians.org/ahajobsreport2022), the job market pre-COVID had stabilized at around 310-or-so tenure-track job offerings per year.  While 2021 was marginally above this, it wasn't nearly enough to even make up for 2020, much less reflect some kind of general improvement.  In essence we 'lost' around 150 openings in 2020, and 'got back' just 40 or so in 2021; that of course doesn't reflect academics thrown back on to the job market as a result of department shrinking or closures during COVID.

Even if postings are elevated again this year the season is likely to be rough, since those 100 'missing' openings from the last two years are going to materialize as job applicants (like me) trying again, while at the same time a full new class of graduate students shows up.  As has been well documented, search committees often prefer new PhDs with thinner CVs over candidates who have been on the market for a year or two (sometimes called 'hiring for 'promise''), so this isn't a first-in, first-out system.  Departments are beginning to recognize they need to trim graduate admissions, but of course those decisions are made about incoming graduate classes, and so won't have any impact on the job market for half a decade at least.

On the flip side, while I can't speak to the total number of positions this year, the composition of the jobs at least so far seems favorable to me - ancient history is unusually well represented (both history departments looking for an ancient and classics departments looking for a historian).  That said there is also a bit of renewed urgency: at long last the department I orbit and frequently teach for is replacing their retired Roman historian (my PhD advisor, whose shoes I have been filling on-and-off).  The good news is that means another job posting I can apply for, though competition for this posting will be fierce given the prestige of it; my application - despite knowing the department - will be the longest of very long shots.

The bad news of that is that it means that my slow orbit of the department, which has been pretty valuable both professionally and also in this venture (for the library access) is likely now to come to an end this Summer.  Doing proper research without access to a university library is very difficult (one can buy a library card, but that often doesn't come with full access to online collections which are sometimes the most important).  Fortunately, as noted, there are a number of opportunities coming up this year for a permanent academic home; the way this works is that every last one of them is its own form of long shot, but if you take enough long shots, you will eventually hit.

Let's hope this year is, at long last, my year.