Thirteen: Job on the Market

There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and eschewed evil. 

The decade of the 1990s was an interesting time for the historian on the academic job market. And for no one was this more so than for the African-Americanist. Indeed, if someone wanted to understand many of the dynamics of race in the United States at that time there were few better ways of doing so than spending a few years searching for an African-Americanist position at a college or a university. Certainly, I am very grateful for having had this experience, regardless of its outcome. Had it turned out differently, had I been given a position at one of the many institutions to which I applied, I might well have lost as much as I would have gained. I wouldn’t be able to write what follows, for example.

When I was ending my graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and beginning the process of applying for a job, I was often told about the difficulty of getting such a position because I was not African American. Indeed, I had known this would be the case because my advisors had told me to rethink my thesis topic for this reason. But I had forged ahead with my thesis on Philadelphia’s African Methodists anyway, mainly because I remained under the illusion that I wasn’t really at graduate school for the purpose of getting a job. I had some rather dated and romantic notion that graduate school was about intellectual inquiry and that all of the students there were absorbed by their desire to understand ideas rather than preoccupied with crass material considerations like how to get a job. I had found a topic in which I was interested and that was good enough for me. 

But, if there had been some truth to this romantic picture of graduate schools in the early years of study, when it came close to time to consider what to do after graduate school everyone seemed to change, or at least I began to see that most students hadn’t really been that interested in the ideas per se, but rather in what those ideas might do for them, if they were suitably packaged and endorsed by the appropriate thesis advisor (one who had some pull on the dreaded market). Once I had recognized this change, I soon started to pick up on that constant banter relating to the job market. And what I heard most often from my white Americanist colleagues was that the deck had been stacked against them, or us. All the positions, they proclaimed loudly, almost shamelessly, were going to black candidates less qualified than they believed themselves to be. Interestingly, the ones I heard this from most frequently were all men, who, almost to a man, ended up in very good positions in solid research universities. Their white male patrons had made an extra effort on their behalf, seeing as how the deck had been so stacked against them.

I, however, either dissented from this opinion or listened to the banter from the sidelines. I had been studying race after all, and it seemed the height of hypocrisy, on my part at least, to seek a job teaching about African-American history and experiences and not recognize the realities of the market for which affirmative action was small compensation. I have never come to accept that affirmative action is reverse discrimination and even at this early stage of my quest for employment quietly reminded people that there may be a disconnect or disjuncture between what they (social historians all) taught and what they complained about. But in not joining this chorus of complaints, and in not endeavoring to resituate myself on the job market as an Americanist (though with my topic this was difficult, as one wasn’t supposed to think of African American history as American history), I ended up metaphorically on the outside looking in at the celebrations that would be held in honor of the complainants who secured their tenure-track positions. 

Nonetheless, one has to be prepared to face the fact, before simply lamenting the fates, that one contributes to this saga – we are not mere victims, we make our own history, we are not Job with God and Devil conspiring against us. There would be plenty of instances when I would make a misstep, when a choice was laid before me and I made the wrong one, or even refused to recognize the choice. I probably should not have made fun of cricket at my interview at Oxford University; and, constantly bringing gender issues into my analysis of migration was not calculated to endear me to members of my audiences who wanted me to confine myself to the issue of race. Sometimes writing a less than honest and more positive book review of a person who might have supported my candidacy would have been more judicious; and, ending presentations to historians with words from Toni Morrison’s Jazz, was ill-advised indeed. In short, one pays a price for appearing to be an arrogant bastard! I knew these things, but persisted in asking myself, “Can that which is unsavoury be eaten without salt?” Perhaps we are Job after all.

But, even with all these marks of my agency, I still had some bizarre experiences on the job market. I was lucky initially to secure a temporary position as a lecturer at Princeton University from 1989 to 1991, so even I had friends with a little influence. And during those two years I returned again to the job market with a book contract in hand and Princeton University emblazoned on my lapel. Quite consistently, therefore, I would get strong initial responses only then to receive the cold shoulder as prospective employers learned more about who I was. There was no doubt that white professors were treating me in this way (I rarely received these responses from black professors who seldom happened to be the ones in a position to decide whether to hire me). For example, there was one convention of the Organization of American Historians that I distinctly recall. A fellow student at the University of Pennsylvania came up to me and informed me that she had just had coffee with the chair of the Penn State history department. The chair had asked her whether she knew me and whether I was black. When given the negative response to the second question, the Comfy Chair replied, “That’s a shame. He would have been perfect for the position.” I received rejection letter number 47 (or thereabouts) later that spring after having heard nothing more from Penn State.

The strangest incident involved a two-year encounter with Bates College. After putting in my application one year, I received a hand-written letter on small Bates stationary from the chair of the history department.  It read thus:

Dear Mr. Gregg –

Thank you for your interest in Bates. Your teaching and scholarly interests suggest a very good fit with our opening.  I look forward to the complete dossier from Penn….We will attend the AHA in late December, and I’m already convinced by what you’ve sent so far that we shall want to meet you.

Good luck to us all.

OK, so this was not quite sufficient for me to immediately put down a deposit on a house in Lewiston, ME, but it certainly wasn’t your run-of-the-mill response to an application.

I happened to be visiting a friend up in Maine a couple of weeks later and so visited the college briefly, and wrote back to the chair mentioning him this. A similarly effusive letter returned, noting that he was “very pleased re apparent level of interest.” I duly received my phone call from the Chair and a meeting was arranged for the AHA convention in Chicago. Of course, when I entered the hotel room in which the interview was held I discerned that the Chair did a double-take – giving me the same look I receive from some students as I walk into my African American history courses on the first day of each semester. Nonetheless, the interview went well, I recall, and I left the room feeling that I had compensated for my deficiency.

Perhaps I ought not to have been quite so sanguine about my chances of getting the position after having received “the look”, especially after I heard a colleague mention at the convention that the chair of the Bates search had said in his interview that his (the chair’s) job had been made so difficult because so many candidates “looked black on paper.” But I persisted in my fantasies about this position even while I was getting nibbles at other colleges. By February, however, after having had a less than enjoyable experience at Harvard University, I thought I should contact the chair to find out what the status of the search was. I received another hand-written response back. It read:

Dear Rob

I wish I had better news for so strong a candidate and so attractive a person. But the first hard news of any sort for me won’t come before the first week in March, and the signals aren’t good. Perhaps this is all moot by now, and you are signed up elsewhere. For your sake, I hope so. For our sake, if we do not get better news in March, I’ll let you know. 

Needless to say, I heard no more from him. But I did learn that the college did not hire anyone that year.

The next September the college advertised the same position and once again I applied, though not under any illusion that I would be likely to get the job. I did not hear back from the college until I received a letter dated prior to the AHA convention that indicated that the college had already appointed someone to the position. In a two-page, single-spaced typed letter the new department chair wrote a very defensive piece accounting for the choice his colleagues had made (which ought to have been unnecessary), and explaining to a candidate such as myself (there must have been others), that I was too far along in my career and could no longer be considered “entry level.” Facing unemployment, one can still be too far along in one’s career.

Bates, it turned out, had learned from its debacle of the previous year. If the college was going to attract an African American to fill the position, especially because of the college’s location away from any major city, it would have to get into the market early and secure a person (someone who had not finished their dissertation) before another college came along to snatch her or him up. “Is there iniquity in my tongue?” I said to myself. “Cannot my taste discern perverse things?”

But, the most annoying aspect of this, which made me begin to sour quite considerably with the predicament I was in, was the fact that in the first year the college had deliberately not hired anyone, rather than fill the position with someone who wasn't black. This showed me that in many cases the departments were not really concerned about teaching African American history. Rather, they merely wanted to fill some kind of quota, often with very negative implications for the person who was eventually hired. That person would often be hired without the PhD degree, would be dragged onto every committee as the “token” black, and would be required to represent and cater to a whole community, all the while receiving very little sympathy and support from his or her colleagues. Few, it seemed to me, would end up getting tenure under such conditions, or achieving what they might do otherwise in terms of publishing. But life goes on, and the search for a job continues, for, after all, “Is there not an appointed time to man upon earth? Are not his days also like the days of an hireling?”

Before continuing on to our denouement at Columbia, I should digress and tell you about pleasantries at Harvard University, since it was here (as well as at Oxford University, courtesy of an Empire scholar) that I learned of the clear need for affirmative action; I shall elaborate on this briefly because this is germane to the main point I wish to make, that for all its problems a system of racial and gender preference is necessary to counter the prejudices of many people, who, left to their own devices, would only hire people who resemble themselves. 

For some reason, unbeknownst to anyone but himself, the chair of the Harvard search committee, decided it was perfectly appropriate to express his opinions on all issues in front of all candidates. In the process of doing so, he quite openly declared to me (and his search committee) that there had not been any good black or women candidates for the position to which I was applying; the women’s topics in particular had all been rather “silly” and the candidates’ self-presentation in the interviews left a lot to be desired – apparently they were less forceful than the men, and he didn’t like the way they dressed. If he hadn’t done so already, he soon proved to me that his opinion was not worth listening to when at our on-campus lunch he turned to his colleague, who happened to be the one professor who taught about gender in his department (I had expressed interest in her courses, having been involved in teaching the same courses at Princeton), and said, “well, I suppose, that at the first class you ask the students who’s a feminist, and you give an A to all those who put up their hands.” I later learned that the Chair in question had been censured as a result of his behavior. But that didn’t stop the department placing him in charge of another African American search the following year (though this may have been his punishment, so low did they hold the position in the first place). Once again, note, a department hadn’t filled the position when it had failed to locate an African American candidate.

The year I was at Mount Holyoke, 1991-92, a position opened up in African American history at Columbia University. On my inquiring about the position, the chair of the committee was up front about the search, and for this I was very grateful. He did not want me to have high hopes of securing the position. But, he insisted, even if there were no qualified African American candidates Columbia University would definitely be making an appointment. He knew well (as I had told him) what I had been through during the previous year with Harvard, Bates, and some other colleges that I don’t remember anymore, and he did not want to be party to a search that ended in the same way.

But things don’t always turn out as we would wish. I made the short-list of three and was invited to an interview on campus. I spent many days leading up to the interview trying to get my presentation just right. This was made more difficult when, a few days before the interview, I broke my finger attempting to make a steal in basketball. But, as is the case with all such papers, it got written, and while it had some rough spots, I felt quite confident about it. The day before the interview, then, I drove down with my family to New York City to stay with my in-laws. The only problem was that, in grabbing all the accoutrements connected with toddlers necessary to bring my son to stay at his grandparents’ apartment, I had neglected to place my own workbag in the trunk of the car. It was sitting by the back door where it wasn’t going to do anyone any good, least of all myself who was sitting three hours away in a New York City apartment staring down on 1^st Avenue wondering what I should do.

There was in fact only one thing to do, rewrite the paper. This I did, hand writing on lined paper an outline and some notes for a forty-minute paper. In some ways, this was fortuitous. While I might have been trying to overcome a case of nervous anxiety, and unable to sleep, I was busily rewriting a paper. I may have slept very little in the end, but in the morning I went uptown on the bus towards Columbia feeling almost elated, sensing that everything which could have gone wrong had done so, and that I now had nothing to lose. I should just try to enjoy myself, let the French Fries fall where they may.

And the day turned out to be an absolute triumph for me. The paper I gave, entitled “Invisible Migration, Invisible Church: Gender and Religion in the Great Migration,” seemed to benefit from being presented from my notes. I seemed to communicate better with the audience than I no doubt would have done in reading from a text, and some of the potential deficiencies of the paper could be glossed over with flights of fancy. It was a great success. The question period was animated and I was warmly congratulated as we left the room by scholars, who seemed astonished when they learned the conditions under which the paper was created. I would hear several weeks later from a graduate student I knew at Princeton, that she had heard great things about this paper – especially regarding my comments about the relationship between gender and the study of migration. I even seemed to make a connection with the students. A week or so after the outcome of the search, I received a letter (which I still have) from one of them enclosing a paper he had written, saying how much he and the other graduate students had enjoyed meeting with me, and that the general consensus among them was that I should be given the job. 

But, it was not to be. A few days after returning to Mount Holyoke, I received a call from the chair of the search during which he indicated that he was extremely disappointed, but that the Provost had decided to close down the search, and that Columbia would not, after all, be making an appointment that year. I learned later from a member of the department, via a mutual connection, that the History faculty had in fact taken a vote and had decided to appoint me to the position, but when they had gone to present my name to the Provost he balked at hiring a white man for the job. Naturally, the search was reopened the next year, and my credentials were now insufficient to warrant an invitation to the university. I never received a token of their gratitude for my performance that day. It would be long forgotten, never to be repeated, except here. “My skin is [not] black upon me, [but] my bones are burned with heat.”

With so many departments coming up empty in their attempts to hire African-American African Americanists, colleges and universities devised some pretty interesting ways of ensuring that they would be able to hire the candidates they wanted. Just as Bates had done, they started to offer positions earlier and earlier in the year. I learned this again to my displeasure in another experience while I was still at Mount Holyoke. I came down to an AHA convention and was invited to meet with two professors from Hamilton College for breakfast. This was not to be a real interview, because they had already offered the position to someone else. However, they wanted to keep their options open and talk to several other candidates because, while they had made their offer very early in the season, they hadn’t been able to persuade their appointee to accept the position. Eventually, the members of this breakfast club would learn that their efforts had indeed been in vain.

The “free” breakfast was a bit of a farce, of course, and all I remember really about it was the concern that one of these two professors, a prominent white Africanist, had with the idea of white people teaching African American history. The political climate was such, he felt, that it was no longer possible for a white person to reach an African American student. He gave me a hypothetical, asking me how I would deal with the situation if a black student refused to accept the idea that Columbus discovered the New World, and argued that Africans had preceded him. I no doubt quipped in response that the New World had been discovered by someone from my neck of the woods, Bristol (I didn’t yet know about the Basques and the Chinese), and questioned whether this was in fact as much of a problem as he felt it was. The cantaloupe was nice; and in eating “the fruits thereof without money,” I noticed the “thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley.”

And this question about the kinds of people who were required to teach particular kinds of history was the central question of that moment. Could white people actually teach African American history? In the following years there would be articles in Perspectives – coming both from white professors, like my breakfast companions (who were throwing up their hands at the prospect of being confronted by militant black students), and from a few more Afrocentric professors – basically suggesting that it was not possible for white scholars to teach African American history courses.[1] This was also at the time that Leonard Jeffries had made certain pronouncements and had been removed from his position at CUNY, and at a time when Asante was beginning to make his mark at Temple University. While I have endorsed Anthony Appiah’s impression of the latter as an “Egyptianist” elsewhere, I nevertheless did not find all of Asante’s and Jeffries’ work particularly upsetting. It didn’t seem to be necessarily qualitatively different from the “propaganda of history” emanating from the mouths of their antagonists.

But could I teach African American history? Interestingly enough, I have always enjoyed teaching African American history courses more than others. It is true that I always look forward to it with some trepidation, as it is always uncharted to some degree. But, once under way, I always get a sense that I am alive and learning something when I am in front of a class of students who want to learn about African American history. Seldom are students in the class because it fulfills some requirement; they are there because they are intrigued by the subject matter, and they seem to be as alive as I feel. In addition, I have always had very mixed classes, racially, so that wherever I have been, Mount Holyoke, University of Pennsylvania (as a visiting professor), or at Richard Stockton College, my African American classes have been some of the most integrated on the campus. 

And generally the feedback has been very positive. I don’t really want to flesh this out too much, because after all I am not trying to get a job here. But suffice it to say that my evaluations have not been lower in African American courses than others that I have taught; rather the contrary, they have been higher. Of course, the question might remain, can an Englishman teach American history? Probably not – but I’m an American.

In the end, as we contemplate our experiences and ultimate good fortune, we are left with the nagging question, “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?” The racial code was a leviathan and it was as clearly present in the liberal academy during the 1990s as anywhere else in American society – perhaps more so. Does it remain in place today? I would have trouble imagining that it isn’t the same for those entering the market today. For, have you seen anyone drawing out leviathan with a hook? Ai, there she blows! The doubloon is mine. Fate reserved the doubloon for me.