A Sense of Camaraderie

By George David Clark. November can be a long month for academic job seekers, perhaps the time when academe seems coldest. With several fields holding their national conferences shortly after the holidays, many applicants will know in these first weeks of December if they will have an opportunity to interview. Until then we wait and practice the morbid algebra of the market: x ads minus y internal candidates, divided by the number of qualified applicants equals … well, it’s not pretty. In the anonymous space of job wikis or the comments streams of The Chronicle’s blogs, job seekers seem suspicious, jaded, angry, arrogant, and entitled by turns, but more than anything else our worrying strikes me as deeply lonely, quick to pit the individual against a faceless system. It’s when I read our posts that I feel most isolated from my peers and colleagues.By contrast, I had a profound experience of community in my field this past July when I participated in the annual Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Read more...