Toxic Academic Career Advice and the Wrong Answers to ‘Why didn’t I get the job?’
It’s time to get real about the endless toxic career advice we give early career researchers (ECRs) in academia.
It’s that time of year when announcements are made about who was hired to fill the handful (quite literally) of academic positions posted last year. Every post that justifiably celebrates the miracle of someone actually getting a job inevitably evokes a sense of finality for the hundreds of scholars who applied for the position and now have it re-confirmed that they were not the ‘preferred candidate.’
So, this is also the time that hundreds of scholars ask themselves-
‘why didn’t I get the job?’
#AcademicTwitter, the growing cottage industry of podcasts and blogs dedicated to ‘helping’ PhD students and ECRs, and the endless ‘how to get a job’ or ‘how to be successful in academia’ zoom sessions seem to provide an exhausting list of reasons why you might not have gotten the job in the form of competing, unrealistic, and sometimes damaging advice.
A cursory review of some of these resources tells scholars they need:
X number of articles (this seems to range from 3-5 and also must be in ‘top’ journals),
a book contract (but only with certain presses),
a ‘super star’ supervisor,
an international network,
thousands of dollars in grant money,
a side hustle like a blog or podcast,
evidence of ‘engagement’ like op eds in top newspapers and policy reports,
a record of research presentations at conferences and other events,
I’m sure there’s more…but you get the picture.
The advice, quite simply, is staggering, unrealistic, and overwhelming. ECRs are left with the impression that getting a job depends on having some holy trifecta or quadfecta of these accomplishments.
What is often only implied, or spoken about in vague terms, is how ECRs are actually supposed to accomplish all this while doing their PhDs or in the early stages of the career. Here, the terrible slough of advice often includes:
Find space and time to write an unrealistic number of words per day,
Offer to ‘co-author’ with senior scholars,
Don’t ‘make waves’
Make sure your research is ‘marketable’ and ‘sexy’
Use your own funds, if necessary, to get to conferences,
Work all the time (one podcaster admitted she worked every day for months and celebrated taking Sundays off…sometimes)
None of this advice acknowledges how power operates in the academy, including how students who are first generation, racialized, and/or from low socioeconomic status (SES) communities face multiple obstacles to accessing and succeeding in higher education. There is clear research showing racialized prospective students face bias when applying to programs. Genevieve Fuji Johnson and Robert Howsam and Henry et al.’s work shows that the few racialized scholars entering the academy face the prospect of facing regular and systemic racism while likely having white supervisors, peers, and managers. An unspoken, but long-standing and realistic ‘tip’ to succeeding in academia is to come from a white, rich family with deep privileged networks- and to have attended private school. A recent Atlantic article on private schools pointed out that between 24-29% of grads coming out of Yale, Brown, Princeton, and Dartmouth went to private schools.
Toxic advice creates the impression that getting a job is simply about doing the right things, in the right order, at the right time, in the right way. Conversely, the message is if you don’t get a job, you’ve failed to do the right things, in the in the right order, at the right time, in the right way. This puts tremendous pressure on scholars and sets them up for a cycle of personal disappointment and sense of defeat every time they don’t get a job. It also creates the impression that individuals that do get jobs have just worked harder than those who didn’t, which- again- ignores both structural privileges and the ways that hiring committees work. All of this advice also sets unrealistic expectations for those who get entry level academic jobs. In other words, when people finally do get jobs, they still have to hustle and try to live up to toxic standards.
This leads to something that is missing from all the toxic advice: honest conversations about how selection committees make decisions and why some candidates are chosen over others. This is a sensitive topic, since hiring committees need to keep much of their work confidential. However, I’ve sat on hiring committees and job talks since I was a PhD student at several institutions, and I can tell you there are at least 99 reasons why you may not have got the job that don’t relate to the unrealistic ‘must have’ lists above. Sure, publications and accomplishments matter. But they aren’t everything and the number of lines on the cv are not directly proportional to the chances you’ll get a job. So, in case it’s helpful, here are a few reasons you might not have got the job that have nothing to do with you or whether you’ve hyper-performed. In no particular order:
The hiring committee/department had a clear idea of the expertise they needed and someone else simply had this and you don’t. This person may even have less publications or ‘lines’ on the cv.
The hiring committee/department disagreed on what they needed, things changed since the ad was generated and so did the department needs/wants, so they ended up hiring someone who had expertise unrelated to the job ad or not hiring anyone at all.
There was someone already ‘shoulder tapped,’ encouraged to apply, or well-known to the department or member of the hiring committee and they were given an advantage (yes, this happens- hiring committees are just made up of people and people don’t always act without bias).
Some institutions buy into/perpetuate ‘prestige politics’ or ‘pedigree (🤢) politics’ and, in this case, a well-connected ivy league grad with next to nothing on their cv will often get the job over someone from a less prestigious institution, with lots of publications. It sucks, but it’s true.
Someone may have applied for an early career job even though they are well-established but wanted to change institutions or had been denied tenure. In other words, someone with many more years of experience got the job.
The truth is most hiring committees- in my experience- do their best to hire the best candidate for their unit. The way they make this decision does NOT include getting out a calculator and counting how many publications, presentations, books, grants, networks, or followers candidates have and simply awarding the job to the person with the most points. That’s just not how it works.
That’s why the advice we are giving ECRs is not only inaccurate, but also harmful, fostering a culture of overwork that seems to assume/celebrate burnout and welcome theatrical performativity of productivity on Twitter. This needs to stop.
The final point about toxic career advice for ECRs is that it ignores the elephant in the room: there are almost no academic jobs, and there are fewer every year. Individuals who are still classified as ‘ECRs’ might be many years post-PhD and have had multiple years of sessional work, post-docs, or other forms of casual underpaid labour. This means that the pool of candidates applying for ‘entry level’ jobs include candidates with a vast range of credentials.
It’s good to encourage scholars, compliment their work, and provide opportunities, where possible. However, it’s simply not helpful or honest to give the impression that an academic job is a guaranteed outcome of excellent and hard work. Maybe the kindest advice we can give ECRs is ‘yes, your work is amazing and you still will likely not get an academic job.’ Why does that feel so hard to say?
Also, we should have honest and supportive conversations about when and how to leave academia, which for some involves giving up a ‘dream’ of a tenure track job. So many ECRs I know and work with face feelings of shame when they decide to leave academia. Again, I think this is primarily because toxic productivity advice gives the impression that failing to get a job is a personal failure, rather than the product of multiple systemic limitations within academia that individuals have little control over. Oh, and PhD programs that don’t include dedicated and systematic advice and training for students that help them envision and get jobs outside of academia are doing a disservice to their students.
Last year I was invited to sit on a panel offering career advice to ECR women. One of the panelists began with an impassioned speech about how ‘junior’ scholars had to ‘want it’ enough and really think about whether they are really willing to make sacrifices to ‘make it.’ I followed up meekly with advice that essentially amounted to: make meaningful friendships and actually have each other’s back, don’t compare yourself to others, do work that is meaningful to you and hopefully others, and only take career advice from people that are living a life you want. The gap between our advice was stark.
I also began my contribution with my usual disclaimers: 1. I’m not really an expert on how to get a job and thrive in academia right now (or maybe ever) and I have structural privileges that create huge blind spots I can only try to address. 2. Although I was a first-generation university student with no understanding of the academy, I am honest with myself and others that when I managed (to my total shock) to get a post doc at an ivy league institution, it gave me legitimacy and privileges that made my career possible. Those of us with jobs and power in academia need to reflect on the position from which we give advice, and consider the gap between our experience as ECRs and the lived experiences of current ECRs and what they are up against in this job market.
Let’s stop with toxic career advice that ignores privilege, structural power dynamics in the institution, and the state of the neo-liberal academy. Let’s also stop with the frenzied and overzealous celebrations of productivity on social media. After last week, more than ever, it’s clear that toxic ‘mentorship’ and panic-inducing career advice is just one of the many overlapping facets to dysfunction in higher education. Academic relationships and early career advice can and should be supportive, realistic, and centered on integrity, ethics, and building community.
