Brian Leiter, one of the blogosphere's more blunt-spoken academics, whacks the AALS for charging him $400 to deliver an invited speech. That does seem more than a trifle tacky. On a related but not identical train of thought, it's probably far more profitable (if you'll pardon the choice of words) to critique the MLA for the sheer financial burden it places on job-hunting graduate students and adjuncts than to complain about papers you haven't bothered to go hear.* The problem is not so much registration--$100 to register, varying amounts to join the organization--as it is travel and hotels. For example, each time I was on the market I had to spend about $1000 just for the conference. Prices have gone up since then. Most graduate departments cannot afford to subsidize every student's trip, and, obviously, an adjunct doesn't even have that potential avenue of support. The obvious reply to this complaint, of course, is that geography mandates some sort of centralized hiring fair.
Are there more affordable alternatives? The most obvious alternative: telephone interviews. The most obvious objection there: telephone interviews are difficult for both the interviewers and the interviewees. Nuances get lost when you can't see each other. On the other hand, conference "conversations" (legally speaking, most MLA interviews are not "real" interviews) have so many kettles of their own worms that they don't necessarily constitute an improvement. Video conferencing? Possible, but you still can't rely on the equipment being available at both ends. No doubt some enterprising interview committee out there will suggest IM, or maybe a MUSH or MOO. (Given just how unreliable many university servers are, that's probably not a good idea.) While an en masse shift to telephone interviews as a screening measure wouldn't Fix the Job Market, it would alleviate some of the monetary pressures on both candidates and campuses.
*Like Jonathan Dresner, I've always had a good time at small "themed" conferences, where the papers ultimately add up to a reasonably diverse but usually still coherent conversation about a particular topic. By its very nature, the MLA--which has to be all things to all people--can't offer the same kind of experience. Dad the Graeco-Roman Egyptian historian tells me that the AHA has the same problem. It's often not even possible to judge whether or not a paper's subject matter is really as minor as it might sound to someone in the field. (Rather like a question I once asked at a mock-orals exam: "Tell me about trees in Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland." That sounds esoteric--unless you've actually read the Journey, which repeatedly analyzes what trees tell you about a given region's progress towards economic health. IIRC, Defoe has a similar obsession.)
Comments