Nov. 2, 2005

A Cinematic Critique as Public Humanities

Characters from 9interviews.com

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By Brandy Parris and Spencer Schaffner

This time last year, we released 9interviews.com, a collaborative bundle of Web films commenting on Modern Language Association interviews in particular and the process of landing a job within higher education more broadly. At the time, we were finishing our Ph.D.s and preparing to go on the faculty job market for the first time. So much about the process seemed silly and absurd, but no one seemed to be laughing about it.

Our main goals with the films were to make people laugh, demystify the tenure-track hiring process a bit, and take pressure off ourselves and other job seekers. 9interviews was intended to good-humoredly agitate for change to entrenched practices of sorting, judging, and hiring academic workers.

The project also functions as work in public humanities that involves the application of ideas generated in academic contexts to other environments and audiences. As new media, it uses the Web to make our work in public humanities accessible and far-reaching.

We initiated the project in exasperation at the laborious and anxiety-producing nature of the job market, a system that overburdens job applicants and search committees alike. As graduate students wanting tenure-track jobs, humor seemed a safe and effective approach to launch such a critique while possibly allaying or even transforming job-search anxieties into more productive emotions.

When you tell anyone outside the academy that the process of getting a tenure-track job takes six to eight months, and that you can only apply for jobs once a year, they respond with disbelief. In addition, the multitude of anxiety-producing steps that comprise “going on the market” in academia each have their own brands of absurdity.

Applications to schools are different, and professional organizations have done little to standardize, centralize, and coordinate the distribution of materials. It can cost applicants over $1,000 merely to prepare and send out applications, not to mention the expense of attending the annual conference (in our field, this occurs during peak travel times between Christmas and New Year’s). Several protracted waiting games ensue at different stages in the process, and during each, institutions respond at different times and in different ways: some call sooner, some call later, others request telephone interviews attempting to preempt face-to-face meetings.

Overly specific job ads seek to fit real humans with a wealth of intellectual experience and potential into narrowly imagined scholar/teacher categories, and perceived or misperceived departmental needs pressure candidates and search teams into presenting partial truths. Hotel-room screenings, our focus for 9interviews, are perhaps one of the more unusual stages in this whole affair, and as one of the culminating steps in the process, they lend themselves to the sound-biting of intellectual work and simultaneous rewarding of slickly produced marketable personae.

In light of our critique, we planned the project with certain considerations in mind: This would have to be a set of films that made light of the potential for inappropriateness and interpersonal misunderstanding in hotel interviews; it would feature our inaccessible jargons, affinity for opaque ideas, and niche specializations; and it would assert that rigorous academic training does little to rein in scholars’ multiple eccentricities.

As all ideas should, 9interviews began at a brewpub with characters sketched out on a soggy napkin. When it came time to film, we presented our actor/collaborators with a basic sketch of the scenarios and roles they might try out, but improvisation was the mode, and the 10 other people who worked on the films (noted on the “credits” page, some pseudonymously) created 9interviews as much as we did.

This was composition as a joint effort, composition as an assemblage of mutual authorship, composition as a moving extemporaneous creation. This type of collaboration itself reminded us of what we can create when we step out of our isolated research roles and jointly apply our critical skills to a broader set of practices.

If 9interviews.com was going to enact multiple purposes of humor, critique, demystification, and support for job seekers, it needed to be more than a collection of Web films. So we devised and annotated a page of “useful links” including testimonials, advice, and job postings. To these we added a list of resources for jobs outside of academia. Forces of cultural reproduction in Ph.D. programs celebrate tenure-track positions above all else, and in the questioning/critical spirit of 9interviews, we wanted to offer alternatives.

Regarding a Ph.D.-holder with a non-tenure-track job as a failure is informed by the same logic that perceives public scholarship as non-scholarly. We have heard repeatedly in recent years from administrations, grants foundations, state politicians, and faculty alike that if universities cannot make themselves relevant beyond their walls, they will be sucked down the funding vortex. Why then, have institutions been so resistant to recognizing the public achievements of their faculty, students, and staff? Why is public scholarship in its various forms treated as just another hobby?

9interviews is an example of how work in public humanities can activate academic concerns and ideas, mobilizing them through new media applications to trans-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary audiences.

This project helped us move to locations of emotional comfort during our job searches, and for others, as we’ve heard through e-mail and read on blogs, it opened one of the more intense stages of the process to critical examination of the best kind: parody. The collaborative venture that is 9interviews taught us that we can indeed do a lot in service to the profession, exceeding typified expectations of what “scholarship” is while bringing fellow practitioners together in a spirit of critique.

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