Why yes, it is difficult

In the comments to a post at Pharyngula, someone asked, "     Okay... but is it really just as hard to get a job at a liberal arts college than at a research university?" 

No job applicant in his or her reasonably right mind will apply to just one type of position; search pools at wildly different institutions will still share a large number of candidates.  Some of our searches have pulled in over 300 applicants! One may be the proud possessor of a doctorate in English from Yale, but that doctorate will not necessarily prove helpful when it comes to obtaining a tenure-track job.  Ivy League Ph.D.s now regularly wind up at both public and private liberal arts colleges, often with teaching loads rather higher than one might like to contemplate. 

As a result, we now have more research-oriented faculty at teaching-oriented institutions.  Granted, it may be necessary to pursue different kinds of research projects, as Chad Orzel notes, but still, many younger faculty can find something liberating in the more relaxed publishing requirements of a liberal arts college.  Unfortunately, it's hard to dispel the belief that faculty at teaching campuses are somehow "also-rans," even when those faculty outpublish their brothers and sisters at Research I and IIs! 

At the same time, it's true that  Ph.D.s from private research institutions who apply to teaching  campuses often have one mark against them: little or no teaching experience. Moreover, some of these Ph.D.s have not been trained to think in terms of life without TAs, let alone life with freshman composition.    (My first job search was a botch for precisely this reason: the sum total of my experience consisted of two once-a-week discussion sections.)  ) At a campus like mine, say, you cannot flub the teaching segment of your interview.  You simply cannot.  It may be necessary to offer informed hypotheses instead of answers from experience, but any way you slice and dice it, a flat "I don't know" will never be the right answer to a teaching question.  Similarly, even if the college has an MA program, it's not a good idea to ask questions only about the graduate students; the undergraduates are everyone's primary responsibility.  And don't even think about writing a cover letter in which you expend large quantities of ink on some esoteric theoretical issue, only to casually toss off a paragraph about teaching at the end!!

Comments

[Chad Orzel]

In the comments to a post at Pharyngula, someone asked, " Okay... but is it really just as hard to get a job at a liberal arts college than at a research university?"

No job applicant in his or her reasonably right mind will apply to just one type of position; search pools at wildly different institutions will still share a large number of candidates.

This is really a Two Cultures sort of moment-- the sciences and the humanities are really radically different in this. In the sciences, you really do have to pick one or the other type of institution, because you simply can't do the same things at a small college that you would do at a large research university. Particularly if you're an experimental scientist, as small colleges frequently don't provide the financial resources you would need to think of setting up a research-university lab-- my start-up funds were probably a tenth of what a person at a large research university would expect to get.

In the sciences, you need to do more than change your cover letter when applying to a small school-- you need to change your entire research program.

[ceresina]

I'm a PhD student in a research-oriented program. The commentary about Research I & II schools, vs. teaching schools... means nothing to me (beyond what I can infer from the entry.) Could you recommend a resource for learning more about this stratification?

[Miriam]

Chad: I see what you mean. Humanities professors actually have a lesser version of this problem--library access determines what we can and can't do. (Or, of course, you can just buy everything you work on *cough*).

Ceresina: see the Carnegie Classifications for an explanation of terms. I teach at a Master's College/University I.

[ceresina]

Thank you for the link!