I enjoyed a little time-travel this morning by dipping into the 2012 issue of MLA's Profession, which this year reprints representative articles published during the journal's 35-year history. It's interesting to see which issues remain unresolved after so many years and which ones have been overtaken by events, but I was especially interested in the spate of articles bemoaning the sorry state of the job market, the most dire dating from 1994--the year I returned to grad school to work on a Ph.D.
Now I'll admit that I was a little naive about the state of the job market at the time. I'd been happily pursuing the Earth Mother track for seven years since finishing my M.A., so I wasn't reading Profession or The Chronicle of Higher Education or anything else that might have opened my eyes. I recall some anguished hand-wringing around the English department at BGSU when the state de-funded the Ph.D. program, a clear sign that this might not be the best time to enter academe, but as long as I had journalism to fall back on, why would I worry?
Did anyone every try to discourage me from pursuing a Ph.D.? I don't remember, but if they did, I wouldn't have listened anyway. I was a nontraditional student: employed as a journalist, taking grad-school classes part time, taking no part in any of the professional activities likely to boost my chances of finding an academic job. By the time I finished my Ph.D. in December of 2000, I had presented exactly one conference paper and published exactly zero scholarly articles; my vita featured plenty of journalistic experience but only five semesters of part-time teaching. Twelve years later I'm on the verge of becoming a full professor at a college I love.
Good thing no one ever told me I was unemployable.
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