37, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 33-35 To the Editor Search

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IT’S been exactly ten years since my last job-seeking MLA convention. I had a number of interviews that year and ended up getting several on-campus interviews and two offers. Interestingly, the two offers were at very similar kinds of institutions. In fact, they were in the same consortium, with the same religious affiliation, and in the same state—none of which had been on my personal radar up to that point. Oh, sure, I had heard of Minnesota, and I knew that Lutherans probably had something to do with Martin Luther. But that was about the extent of it, and from my perspective as someone who was teaching in Memphis at the time and had, let’s say, a spotty relationship with the church over the years, I was puzzled by the job offers. I, perhaps like most candidates, had deployed my dossier in every conceivable direction: toward research institutions, liberal arts colleges, community colleges; and I had responded to ads where it was clear to me (but maybe they wouldn’t notice) that I was stretching my qualifications and my orientation as a teacher-scholar. Still, there was something about my application letter or my c.v. that convinced two quite similar colleges that I would be a good person to welcome into their community.

I took the offer at Gustavus Adolphus College, which is a nationally ranked liberal arts institution associated with the Lutheran Church. Thirty years ago, it was a regional comprehensive campus, with a local, more vocationally oriented mission to serve the children of Swedish immigrants in the upper Midwest. This transition from local to national and from comprehensive to strictly liberal arts accounts for the institutional culture into which I was hired. It was, and is, a culture with three distinct generations of faculty members: those from the comprehensive days, those in the transition generation, and those who have been hired in the last fifteen years or so, all of whom have different notions about what our common project is or should be. It is an institutional culture that has retained an ethos of service and of community, while expecting of its junior faculty members a commitment to research and scholarship, which will help increase its national profile. And every institution to which each season’s job candidates apply has equally interesting surprises in its political climate, its history, and in its generational make-up.

The German program at Gustavus, housed in a large department of modern languages, literatures, and cultures, has dwindled from a four-position to a two-position program over the years. As enrollments in German have shrunk, those positions have been reallocated to other languages. The department as a whole has undergone curriculum revisions in each of its language sections but German, and it has also made a major commitment to the use of technology and language teaching, after opening a state-of-the-art multimedia language center.

So what did my department really want when they hired me? What was it about me that appealed to the Lutherans? The job description called for someone beyond entry level, who could teach broadly in contemporary German studies, had specific interest in cultural studies and an interest in interdisciplinary work in the other established programs of the college: Women’s Studies, Peace Studies, Environmental Studies, First Term Seminar, and Curriculum II (which is the core curriculum program). The successful candidate would need to be committed to language teaching and at least be sympathetic to the use of technology in language teaching. Certainly, that I had several years of teaching in liberal arts colleges and that my scholarly interest was in film helped me. I had been involved in women’s studies and had a history of contributing to the life of the colleges where I had been employed, through extensive committee service. But ultimately, the reason I was offered my job is that the members of my department and the administration felt that I “fit.” This word causes job seekers considerable grief, because it feels beyond one’s control and unquantifiable. There is no slot on the academic c.v. for “fit.” Yet it is the single category cited most often for why candidates have or have not been hired at institutions like mine. At Gustavus in 1994, fit meant that I was seen as someone who could negotiate the competing claims and tensions in the three-generation culture, and it meant that my letter had been very specific about who I was and what values I embodied in addition to being about what I had done and would do.

My department was hiring not only someone to fill a teaching area or a research void but also a colleague for the long haul. They were thinking about the dailiness of working together, the shared responsibility for admissions recruiting, for offering January-term courses and first-term seminars, for drafting proposals for a language requirement, and for representing the department at luncheons with trustees. My dean was hiring someone to balance a small program with one senior colleague whose interests did not include German studies, to provide enough enthusiastic teaching, hands-on advising, and extracurricular programming to help stop hemorrhaging enrollments, to help ensure that we would meet external pressures regarding “assessments” and “outcomes,” to contribute to the institutional mission of providing interdisciplinary programs, and to get Gustavus’s name out by way of publications and conference participation. Both my department and my dean wanted someone who would be an active member of the larger Gustavus community—indeed, one of the unspoken criteria for tenure is the degree to which one is “known at the coffee table.”

By contrast, when I left graduate school, I expected to go off somewhere to do nothing but teach highly motivated and articulate students about German cinema by day and write erudite articles by night in a cluttered, yet cozy little salon. I and my students would be tragically hip and would no doubt wear mostly black and would sip espresso while debating the finer points of the real implications of the Oberhausen Manifesto.

Here is my reality: I’m a department chair! an administrator! But even when I’m teaching a full load, it’s a far cry from my training. I might teach two sections of beginning or intermediate language and one literature course a semester—for example, Novelle or Classical German Drama—for which I have to reach back to my first semester of graduate training. Postwar cinema, my area of scholarship, is taught infrequently. I have worked on a curriculum revision for the German section, and I have directed the International House. I have overseen the teaching assistants from Germany, and I have baked advent cookies for Kaffeestunde. I have gone to German Table on Wednesday nights, and I make regular calls to prospective students who have indicated an interest in German in the evening. I help maintain the departmental Web page and have learned how to author multimedia applications for Beginning German. I have led assessment retreats and have worked to revise the college’s general education curriculum. I serve on a committee of the Board of Trustees to think about the college’s mission, and I have designed and led a mission-based study-abroad semester in the Lutheran centers of eastern Germany. I’ve been a hard worker in the field of service, and I’ve shared in the rights and responsibilities of faculty governance.

As one might guess, this is not my graduate adviser’s automobile. His dream for me was to follow in his footsteps and work with graduate students at a Research I institution. That’s what I was trained for, it’s what I expected, and it was everyone’s wish for me. The life I now lead is not the life I envisioned, but it has turned out to be the right life for me. In many ways, the daily routine of life at an institution like Gustavus reflects the reasons I went into academics in the first place, some of which I had forgotten, but which had evidently bled through in my application letters: I wanted to be an active part of a larger ongoing intellectual conversation and to make a difference in the real lives of real students. And while I was trained very specifically in the content of a discipline, my success in the profession has depended on my flexibility—and even enthusiasm—regarding the multiple and sometimes contradictory challenges dotting the landscape of small liberal arts institutions at the advent of the twenty-first century. As my lens has gotten wider and wider—encompassing not only my research but also my profession and the life of liberal arts colleges and even higher education in general—I’ve received more and more satisfaction. I never would have guessed this.

When I look back at the fears I had about Gustavus, I find them completely unfounded. I was suspicious of a church-related institution and was afraid that my academic freedom would be compromised. Instead, I’ve found a place where the tools of reason are used to challenge and be in conversation with religion and where the life of the spirit is not closeted. But it’s all on the level of invitation and never obligation. I was afraid that being at a liberal arts college would mean that I would be selling out as a scholar. And yet I am surrounded by productive and engaging scholars. When we layer the intimacy of a small community onto that, we end up with the possibility of true dialogue on a daily basis: at the lunch table, in afternoon work-in-progress presentations over wine and cheese, in one another’s homes.

So what about you? How are you entering this job search? Who are you? Not what was your dissertation about? Not what courses are you prepared to teach? Not what is your plan for your next research project? All those things are important, and you’ll need to be able to talk about them at your interviews. But who are you in the world? How do you want to present yourself to potential colleagues? If you get a job, what kind of person will that institution think it has hired, on the basis of your interview? If you have put all your money on what you think they were looking for, will you be able to sustain that persona? Will you want to? Most of us are pretty smart people, and we’re good enough actors to mold ourselves into any role for the duration of a thirty-minute interview—and perhaps even an on-campus interview. But sustaining that over a career is stressful work. So this notion of “fit” is really about “match.” In a small liberal arts college, you are entering a community and multiple relationships, and as eager as you are right now to get a job, it’s imperative for your long-term mental, emotional, and intellectual health that you feel that you have presented yourself honestly in your interviews and that you can espouse the mission of the institution that hires you.

I was lucky to land at Gustavus, because we match. I was welcomed and challenged by the community, and I challenged right back. Gustavus is not the same as it was when I arrived, in part because I and other faculty members hired since then altered the chemistry of the place over the years. That’s what I love most about small colleges—ideally, because of faculty governance, you, not the legislators, get to help shape, sustain, and sometimes push the academic program to meet the evolution of higher education, of your student population, and of society. You and your colleagues will fight bitterly sometimes, and it will be because—despite your differences—you’re more or less on the same page about the mission of your institution.

As someone who regularly hires candidates in my department, I can promise you that I will be looking not only at your credentials but also at your commitments. You don’t have to pass a test—I’m not looking for you to demonstrate that you espouse everything I do—but I do want to get a sense of who you are as a professional, as a contributor to the life of my college, and as a fellow citizen. Because I will want to do more than pass you on the way to class or the library. I will want to bounce ideas about some interpretive dilemma off of you; I will want to work with you to decide what a new curriculum should look like; I will want to get your best sense of how to deal with a student with a learning disability. And I will want to do the same for you.

Good luck.

© 2005 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.

ADFL Bulletin 37, no. 1 (Fall 2005): 33-35

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