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Groundhog Day on the Market

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By Dexter Coisson

The alarm clock radio goes off. Dawn is breaking over another guest house, another three-star chain hotel. I look out the window over another crowded city, or sprawling suburb, or country backwater. Suddenly I recognize the tune coming from the radio: It's Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe."

With horror, I realize that I've seen this movie before. It's the academic version of Groundhog Day, and I have another on-campus interview for a tenure-track job.

It's another day in my months-long quest for employment back in North America, the groundhog's native continent. Each day is the same. I am stuck in the same college town, doomed to repeat the same job talk, the same sit-down with a faceless dean, the same conversation about reimbursement with the kindly office administrator. There is plenty of boredom, with yawning two-hour gaps between meetings spread over two days.

I will have the same three square meals a day with folks in every specialty but my own, and I will repeatedly attempt to answer the question, "So how would you teach the survey course?" while trying not to choke on my omelet or rack of lamb. For all I know, the whole endeavor is pointless, since they've been leaning toward their inside candidate all along.

• "Do you have any questions for us?"
• "Do you have any questions for me?"
• "What can I tell you about the school, or the area?"

Like Bill Murray's Phil Connors, I give an artificial "weather report" on my research (sometimes in the form of teaching a sample class). Meanwhile, in the real world, my classes remain untaught and my writing unfinished.

Every time the alarm goes off, I grow more cynical and filled with self-loathing, hating the job-search process for the Kabuki dance that it rapidly seems to become. After eight on-campus interviews, I can no longer tell myself it's "good practice."

The purpose of all of it is to please the department groundhog chasing its ephemeral shadow: the candidate who will be a perfect "fit." If the groundhog doesn't see its shadow, well, that's countless more weeks on the market for me.

This year I had four interviews in 22 days, and three of them within seven days. At one point I had a plane flight in between job talks that were 24 hours apart. The best way to illustrate the psychic exhaustion of this futile process is to look at Bill Murray's face when his character wakes up another morning to Sonny and Cher. His hopes of making it to "tomorrow," like my hopes of making it to a tenure-track job, are crushed in that instant of wakeful awareness.

Eventually, like Phil Connors, I feel like I know the question to every Jeopardy! answer in advance. I find myself discussing life insurance with the local administrator. I fantasize about saying completely inappropriate things just to see how people will react. "French history? What a waste of time!"

There are benefits to the repetitive pattern. Job seekers often try updated forms of the same tricks that Phil uses to get women into bed: We Google the committee members, read their books, or try find out who their graduate advisers were, just so we can formulate a bond. Then when we arrive on the campus -- presto! -- instant colleague.

I begin to wish that hiring committees would just send the following request:

Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association's annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can't decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight to the death for our amusement.

I wonder how many job seekers would agree to that.

In the movie, Phil becomes reflective, even metaphysical. He wonders what larger forces beyond his control are pulling the wires, forcing him to repeat this day again and again.

I wonder the same thing: Who is calling my colleagues right now, and asking them whether I am a good colleague? Are my interviewers getting a good impression, or hearsay and malignant gossip, snipes and gripes?

At two different departments, members of the committee have pulled me aside and told me that I was their preferred candidate, and then made the offer to someone else. The reasoning behind the groundhog's search for its shadow remains a miserable mystery.

I have been stuck in this pattern for so long that at times I forget why I subjected myself to it in the first place. Then, like Phil, I realize I have to move beyond my solipsism. The alarm goes off again and my reasons for going on the market come back to me in a rush. I give my job talk with genuine feeling that day. The audience responds to my heartfelt desire to celebrate the joys of scholarship and teaching. I meet the students and I want to catch them before they fall out of trees: I want to help change their tires and apply the Heimlich maneuver when necessary.

Maybe I've got Stockholm syndrome, because here I am embracing my captors, the search-committee wardens who determine everything from my yard time to my bathroom breaks. I look around and realize they're a nice community of folks. I really do want to wake up in Punxsutawney every day -- but with a contract.

After the interview is over, the alarm clock keeps waking me to day after day of anguished waiting. I tell friends and family to stop calling my cellphone during business hours -- it frays my nerves every time it rings.

Then suddenly, the groundhog sees its shadow.

An offer comes. There will be a tomorrow after all. Not only that, but it's an excellent university in my preferred geographic region.

I'm still shaking my head in disbelief. "You must be so proud," says a friend, but if anything I've been humbled. Heck, I've been twisting in the wind for so long that I've forgotten how to leap in the air in celebration. I have no illusions that I earned this job or deserved it more than anyone else. I was this close to another winter as Phil Connors -- a mere two days away from certain knowledge that I would have to do this all over again next year.

Every interview but one ended in rejection ("toughest fight over a hire I've seen in all my years here," said one chair, as if that was any consolation), and the last one was a long shot. I beat the odds, but it was a near miss.

The tragedy of the job market is that the Groundhog Days are often endless. Isn't there a way we can compress the agony? I would hesitate to suggest that we take a page from the National Resident Matching Program for medical doctors and have a computer match candidates up with the committees' preferences. But at the very least, we could confine the interviews to a day or an afternoon, or encourage departments to speed up their decision-making.

Sonny and Cher are a very old act, after all. I can't be the only one who wishes the alarm clock would play us a new song.