Tenure Tracker

For the past seven years, Kelly Kennington Ph.D. '09 has kept her mind planted firmly in the 1800s. As a doctoral candidate in Duke's history department, she has immersed herself in records from Missouri's St. Louis Circuit Court, where hundreds of slaves sued for their freedom in the decades leading up to the Civil War.

Hers is more than an academic interest: Studying slave legal history represents Kennington's awakening about the nation's legacy of racial injustice. "As a child, I wasn't taught much about slavery, and I didn't know the founding fathers owned slaves," says the twenty-nine-year-old white Ohioan, whose studious, meticulous style masks a fierce passion for her subject matter. As an undergraduate at Tulane University, Kennington read Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northrup's account of being abducted in Washington in 1841 and sold into slavery in Louisiana. Northrup was a free man and an accomplished violinist until his early thirties. Then came his encounter with slave dealer James H. Burch and "lackey" Ebenezer Radburn:

"As soon as these formidable whips appeared, I was seized by both of them, and roughly divested of my clothing. My feet…were fastened to the floor. Drawing me over the bench, face downwards, Radburn placed his heavy foot upon the fetters, between my wrists, holding them painfully to the floor. With the paddle, Burch commenced beating me."

But on this warm winter day in Durham, Kennington is firmly back in the present. Fewer than four months away from earning her Ph.D., she is thinking about the challenge every doctoral candidate is pondering right now: how to land a tenure-track teaching post during one of the worst academic job markets in memory.

Under the best of circumstances, finding an assistant-professor job is a harrowing process, as colleges and universities shift toward non-tenure-track and part-time instructors. But the last year has been even worse. The nation's recession has forced many departments to cancel new faculty searches. In addition, fewer older professors are leaving their jobs, says Robert Townsend, assistant director of research and publications at the American Historical Association (AHA). "A lot of faculty members who've looked at their retirement portfolios have said, 'On second thought, let me stay around for a bit longer,' " he explains. Academic job listings for historians are down 20 percent over last year, even though the number of undergraduates majoring in history has reached a thirty-year high.

Other fields are experiencing similarly sagging job markets. The Modern Language Association reports a 25 percent drop in English and contemporary foreign-language positions for newly minted Ph.D.s. Even the sciences, considered more robust than the humanities, have seen a slowdown, according to Paula Stephan, a professor of economics at Georgia State University who studies the careers of scientists and engineers.

Kennington, whose vita bulges with academic honors, has approached this brutal market with a strategy that is both comprehensive and precise. In August 2008, she met with her adviser, professor of history Laura Edwards, to map out her strategy, then wrote seven drafts of a cover letter that she would adapt for each job. She created a complex spreadsheet listing—among other things—deadlines, academic subspecialties, and status updates. She produced writing samples and model syllabi customized for each prospective employer. She lined up three letters of reference, which she placed on the online dossier service Interfolio.com. With this infrastructure in place, Kennington applied for fifty-four tenure-track assistant professorships and ten post-doctoral fellowships.

She knows this might seem like overkill. "Not everyone I know who's on the market this year is applying to that many," she says with typical understatement. "So, yes, I think mine is a little excessive perhaps. I want to make sure I get a job."

So do her mentors. "We have our fingers crossed for Kelly in this job market," says Edwards. "She's extraordinarily good at what she does. Her work has become so ingrained in her life that it is her life." Kennington, who is compact and professional looking, with short brown hair and glasses, doesn't emote very much when talking about her topic, but Edwards says this is often true of the best academic historians. "They're engaged twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, but in a way that's quiet," Edwards says. "To me, Kelly's ability to do this all the time speaks volumes."

The early responses to Kennington's applications have been decidedly mixed. By Christmas time, she had already gone on one campus visit to Florida Atlantic University, and, more recently had a telephone interview with Texas Tech University. On the other hand, nine of the fifty-four tenure-track searches have been discontinued for lack of funding. These cancellations are typical of 2008-09, says the AHA's Townsend.

Now Kennington is getting ready for the AHA's annual meeting in New York, which Duke professor John Thompson calls the "meat market for historians looking for their first academic jobs." Kennington has twelve interviews scheduled, compared with a handful apiece for some of her friends. Thompson, who is the history department's director of graduate studies, attributes Kennington's first-round success to "her diligence, her persistence, and her never-flagging enthusiasm." Kennington is, characteristically, more modest.

"Nineteenth-century U.S. history is a much easier field to get a job in than twentieth century," she says, largely because of "supply and demand. But twelve is on the higher side. It's a good problem to have. I've been telling myself that during the last few days as I try not to tear my hair out with nerves and stress." If she does land a job, Kennington says, "I just hope the one that I get doesn't have to cancel."

Down to the last detail: excerpt from Kennington's spreadsheet documenting her job search.

 

January 2009

After an outing to the Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition of Van Gogh night scenes, Kennington returns to her New York hotel room. It is New Year's weekend. The museum trip was a reward for surviving the interviewing frenzy at the American Historical Association's annual meeting. For three days she kept a regimented schedule, frequently consulting the stack of index cards she had prepared to keep names and job descriptions straight. "I expected to be pretty nervous and anxious the whole time," she says. "But it was exhilarating, running from one to the other and getting to talk to so many different people. I didn't expect to feel that way."

Kennington did have unsettling moments. During her first interview, for a job teaching Southern history at The Citadel, someone asked what books she would assign for a course on the antebellum South. It was a reasonable question—but not one for which she had rehearsed an answer. "I completely blanked on it," she says, annoyed at herself. "It was as if all the books I knew just jumped right out of my brain. I fumbled around a little bit and eventually came up with a few things, but not the list I would give them if we had the conversation again. That was a little horrifying."

Things went more smoothly after that. As the weekend rolled on, Kennington spent less time consulting the note cards. She grew more confident each time she answered a familiar question. When an interviewer from the University of California at Riverside threw a provocative curveball—asking whether nineteenth-century U.S. history can be considered its own field, or whether the Civil War created an unbreachable divide—she set aside her panic long enough to craft a deft "yes and no" answer.

Tougher, though, was figuring out how the interviewers felt about her. "Usually, the committees were very nice," she says. "It seemed like everything I was saying, they were just eating up. They were smiling, laughing, joking around with me. Ultimately, I think that that has nothing to do with the outcome of the interviews. You could easily think that you did great and, in fact, you didn't."

Back in her room after the Van Gogh exhibition, Kennington checks her e-mail. There's a message from Larry Schweikart, a history professor at the University of Dayton, one of the schools that interviewed her this weekend. Schweikart has been trying to call Kennington to tell her she's one of three finalists for a teaching position in African-American history. He wants her to come to Ohio later this month.

That'll mean two campus visits in a single week. Besides Dayton, Kennington has been invited to Auburn University on January 21 to interview for what she calls her "dream job": teaching U.S. Southern history from 1800 to 1850. Preparing for these visits will take considerable work. Kennington doesn't know when she'll find the time.

"My greatest stress right now is trying to write an undergraduate lecture that I'm supposed to present at Auburn," she says. "One thing I don't do a lot in my own classes is lecture; I mostly do interactive activities. They made it pretty clear that they don't want interactive activities. They want to see me lecture."

As she prepares for these visits, and finishes the first draft of her dissertation, Kennington also waits to hear the results of her other AHA interviews. "I'm checking my e-mail about every five seconds right now," she says.

Late January 2009

The Auburn visit starts off awkwardly. Shortly after Kennington checks into her hotel, an assistant professor arrives to give her a tour. "The poor guy had a horrendous cold," she would recall afterward. "And he was fairly new to the area. The other thing, too, is that it's Auburn, Alabama. There really isn't that much to see. I think he wanted me to tell him what I wanted to see, and I'm thinking, 'I don't know what's here.'" The two historians drive past the football stadium, the art museum, and Auburn's small downtown. Kennington keeps a lookout for upscale restaurants: Her husband waits tables at the Washington Duke Inn, and she wonders whether he could find similar employment here.

The answer becomes apparent that evening, when the search committee takes her to Yellowhammer, a fine-dining restaurant in nearby Waverly. She expects casual dinner chat, but instead the professors ask detailed questions about her research. "Which is fine," Kennington says. "My tendency is to be shy for a little while and get comfortable with people, and then let my personality shine through and be more talkative. But on these interviews, you don't have time for that. You're trying to get them to want to hire you right away." She worries that she seemed unprepared to discuss the research and therefore made a poor first impression.

That night Kennington develops a headache and fever. (Getting sick will become a recurrent theme on her interview trips.) She barely sleeps. The next morning, she wakes up with a headache, wondering how she'll survive the long day.

Stop 1: Coffee and bagels in the department office—a casual meet-and-greet with prospective colleagues. Stop 2: A fifty-minute lecture attended by thirty-five undergraduates and various faculty members. Kennington has prepared a PowerPoint presentation organized around the story of a Virginia slave who successfully sued for her freedom in the seventeenth century on the grounds that, among other things, she was a Christian convert and the daughter of an Englishman. Just before Kennington walks into the classroom, she learns the lecture will be recorded for a search-committee member who can't attend. "That was a little unnerving," she says. Still, the lecture goes well, even if some of the questions Kennington poses to the students fall flat.

Stop 3: A lively lunch with more queries about her research. Stop 4: A meeting with the department chair, who explains Auburn's unusual workload: In exchange for teachingiiii a few extra courses, all faculty members get one classroom-free semester every three years. "It's a great system," Kennington says. "They want to encourage you to get your research done." Stop 5: A job talk with professors and graduate students, who pepper her with questions about her teaching style, prospective courses, and—most challenging—whether the data from her St. Louis courthouse research really support her conclusions. Even when the inquiries get tough, Kennington is impressed by the collegiality. She realizes how much Southern graciousness appeals to her. She really wants this job. "I like that they encourage you to continue to be a productive scholar," she says. "Teaching is important, certainly, but I want a balance in my career."

Later, at dinner with two professors, Kennington permits herself a glass of wine. She makes a mental note: "I really need to learn how to relax faster."