S1E8: “Made-up Genres”

Hello everyone. This is Jo. I wanted to say thank you to our small, but phenomenal listenership for tuning into us this season. You’re going to hear that this is the final episode of season one, but not to worry season two with already in development. We’re changing some things up and taking over some of the audio editing and managing due to budgeting.

But I did want to say thank you to the folks at LAITS for helping us out this whole season. You’ll also note that this episode was recorded ahead of episode seven, but we publish them out of order. So you get a bit of a flashback to November of 2021 here. Um, I am rather fond of this episode. Here we discuss academia is made up genres from undergraduate assignments to dissertations, to job market documents.

We explore what their functions are, how we’ve adapted and responded to these sometimes unsettling and confusing discursive situations. And we offer some thoughts on what might change for these requirements to become more humane. So without further ado, here’s the final episode of season one. Welcome to unpack this where academic misfits unload their shit.

This is our episode on made up genres. I am Jo Hsu, one of your hosts,

and I am Constance Bailey the other half of the dynamic.

So, uh, the dynamic duo might be a little less dynamic this morning. It is November in, uh, academia, and we are all buried under correspondence and grading and,

and it is a wonderful time to be an academic.

It’s a rough time in the semester, but I do feel that we should let our audience know that there is good news. I felt their celebratory stuff. Are you going to share your news with.

Uh, okay. So our people, I officially have a production schedule for my book officially titled constellating home trans and queer Asian American rhetorics forthcoming with Ohio state university press fall 2022, hoping for a knock on wood end of August release state.

So that is. At the

end of that tunnel. Yes. Yes. Well, let’s see if we can put some fake applause or something in there, like, Ooh. Yeah, no, that’s exciting stuff because I think, and you’ll talk more about this, but we’re talking about made up academic genres and maybe the book proposal or the query letter.

Maybe that’s also a thing to add. So I think students just see us as professors and they don’t necessarily see the publishing or backside of it. At least undergrads don’t foresee. And so it, it feels very you and, or at least as a graduate student, I never thought about that process. And my, my professors didn’t talk to me about that process.

And so coming into academia, I was like, what is this thing we’re doing? What now? And so it felt really daunting and mysterious also like what the hell is, what are you talking about? So, yeah.

Yeah. I, I w one, I want to jump on that word. Mysterious. There’s this like cloud of mystery over. All the academic genres, which is, you know, in, in some way, a way of keeping it an elite club, right.

You’re supposed to know the rules instead of somebody giving you the rules. And that’s part of what makes it so alienating to enter. And I feel like that is from undergrad on you just get that in all sorts of academic settings. I’m fortunate in that one of my MFA advisors was Tony Johnson, who was my former colleague, your current colleague at the university of Arkansas, who at some point, when I sat down with her and said, I don’t, I don’t know what any of these genres are or why I’m supposed to be doing them or what is happening.

And I remember very distinctly her words is it’s hazing when it is, you know, it’s an initiation into this world that you’re supposed to enter. So yeah, I mean, the reason I wanted to start talking about it today was because it is November in academia and I am in the process of going through a first draft workshops with my undergrad classes.

And I’m thinking about how often. They have been taught to write final projects that in essence, perform their knowledge back to the professor of like, this is my rehearsal of what we’ve learned. And I actively try not to create those assignments. I try to create assignments that engage in intentional.

And try to affect that audience in some way. I don’t think that’s particularly unique to my, my teaching, but I, I do get the sense that that is new to a lot of students in my classroom. So that, that actual shift, right. Imagining an audience, who’s not your professor. It requires a step back to sort of think about what am I doing and why am I doing this?

And so I was, I guess I was starting there. I was thinking about. Undergraduate assignments. And the ways that from that beginning, where we’re taught to rehearse these, these genres that might not necessarily have to take that. Uh, the other caveat, I’ll say, when we go into this, is that I like to emphasize that, you know, academia is, is the real world.

Like, you know, we’re full of people. All of those people are real. And we talk to each other in ways that matter. It’s just that the ways that we talk to each other don’t have to be the ways that we are made to talk to each other. And so, so maybe that was one of the things that I’m thinking about too today, right?

The ways that our general are shaped and the ways they might be re-imagined so that they’re not shrouded in mystery or so different. I don’t know, boring to read

boring and intimidating. Right. And think that’s the other thing. So they don’t have to be so boring and intimidating. And you know, it, it’s really interesting when I taught composition many, many years ago, I would always, I think the analogy or the way that I would phrase it as don’t use a $10 word when a $2 word will do.

And I don’t know where I get that craft from, but it’s, but in my mind it made sense, but we say to students, or I say, Good. Academic writing is marked by clarity and conciseness and you should avoid jargon. And yet we seem to be in many of these genres doing the very things that we advise our students not to do.

We’re redundant because we’re asking for documents that. Say the same thing in different ways, or we using this very high brow, specialized language to mark ourselves as insiders, to your point, we survived the hazing process to use a analogy from black Greek letter organizations. We crossed the burning sands.

So we are on the other side. And so we’re trying to mark ourselves as members of the cool kids club. It’s just interesting. I mean, I guess we have multiple categories that we’ll talk about, so I don’t want to go too far down that rabbit hole of just like reflecting on that. I do think your point about undergrad assignments is an interesting one because I only ever really taught or framed assignments with audience awareness, right?

Ask students to write to a specific audience when I was teaching writing classes. And I’m aware that that is an issue because real-world writing does not occur in a vacuum in the same way that. Imply that these academic essays do. And so I don’t know if it’s a matter of efficiency, like we do this because we’ve always done it and it’s easier.

And we’re sometimes overburdened this time as that semester. Like, it might be more useful to them, but I’m not going to modify this assignment. So I’m not really sure how much of it is habit or how much of it is really actually. I don’t want to say bad pedagogy, but maybe dated or something like that.

Cause I do think that at least when I started crafting assignments way back in grad school and a lot of the stuff I still craft is a hold over from grad school. And we were taught Bloom’s taxonomy and lower division. Students are able to do this. And even while I recognize that. In some ways are that is also an arbitrary construction.

I think in our mind, whatever particular information, if it was being or bloom or whoever we were introduced to, I think on some level we still maybe subconsciously. So that in terms of creating these assignments, but I don’t know. What do you think? I think you could speak better to undergrad assignments than I could.

I don’t have a better different,

um, I, cause I am thinking that that would be that pedagogical experience would be different if I taught literature, right. My courses are all rhetoric and writing. And so, so for me, I mean my podcasting class is. Really easy in this way. And that the genre is built in. We’re talking about the genre the whole time and they have this thing that they’re supposed to produce for an outside audience, but even my other course, transgender rhetorics.

And this is the thing I was reflecting on when I was looking over dress today. Is that what my goal is for them to take these ideas about gender and the way that gender functions in our every day and have them be able to apply it to outside settings, right? It’s going to be able to talk to other people.

What they can see about how gender is functioning in these spaces. And it’s, it’s less about having them engage with bodies of theory, but. I could see how literature courses have as a genre is that are essentially, you know, like the distilled version of almost an academic article, right. You’re applying the ideas, you’re applying the deep reading and I could see a use for that.

Right. Depending on your goals for that, that course. I think if I were teaching a literature course, literature course I’d have to sit back down and really think through like, Am I training people to be G junior members of this field, or am I training them to think critically about the cultural production around them and to speak to other lay people about it, you know, but I would have to revisit that question of what is, what is the goal of this course and how does this assignment fit into the goals of that course?

Yeah, but I mean, I think that process though, which is a recursive process, right. I, I don’t know that enough of us. Well, let me speak for myself. I’m not going to throw anybody else under the bus. I don’t do it enough. I changed my syllabus every semester, you know, try to keep it fresh. Not in the sense that, I mean, I know.

Teach a completely new texts. So I’m probably only changing out maybe one text or two, but just in terms of my approach or the types of assignments. So I’m changing a little bit, you know, again, trying to keep it fresh for myself and my students and trying to make it engaging, because I do think when you’re engaged, you’re more apt to learn the material.

But in terms of that actual syllabus as a contract and as a document, I mean, a lot of that is just wrote and it’s like, Copy and paste. Let me copy edited. Do these core skills, sound reasonable. Do these assignments sound reasonable? And then on some level I try to take a step back and say, okay, how are these going to be connected to the overall goals for the course?

But I don’t know that I ever. Articulate all of my goals for the course and that, which I often say some of our goals include. And so there are often things that I think are probably not really helping execute the stated goals, but some implied goals. And conversely, there are things that I think sometimes I’m just going to put it out there.

I’m just not busy work. I don’t like busy work, but sometimes with undergrad, particularly from teaching a lower division undergrad, There’s just an arbitrary reading quiz, just to keep people honest. Like, are you actually opening the book? Do you know who wrote this thing? And it really has no utility other than to guilt and shame people into doing the reading, at least as far as I can tell that’s his only function.

Right. I don’t know. There might be some other educational purpose that I have yet to see, but. So there are occasionally assignments like that. So yeah, I think that you’re right. Lit courses are different, but what I will say is that, and this is where I think it’s interesting. Cause we have some overlap since one of my, since I work in folklore and cultural studies, many of my classes do end up having what’s called a collection assignment where I’m asking them.

Go into the world. I don’t really, it’s not really field research and it’s not thorough enough to be truly considered ethnography, but it has that feel where you’re trying to look at some real world thing and write about and reflect on that thing. And so in that way, I do think that becomes a, that becomes difficult for me because my classes are literature classes.

It’s always exceedingly difficult for me to frame those classes and even to talk about their utility though, I know it has one it’s difficult for me to articulate how it fits in with the stated aims of the course. So, I mean, yeah. Undergrad assignments and grad assignments, you actually are. Yeah. There’s something nebulous and weird going on with those.

I think, I hope that at some point in the future, we’ll have a episode on pedagogy because I think revisiting how we approach that might be interesting. I have been playing around with a lot of different forms of assessment in my courses, because I mean, I think we all know that grading is one of the least desirable portions of our job for all of us.

And the fact that I have to assign a grade to these things is, I don’t know, somewhat objectionable to me. So I’ve been, I’ve been struggling with, you know, how do I approach this in a way that allows students freedom of exploration, the desire to take risks, the security to take risks while also.

Grounding us in the reality that I have to assign this letter at the end of this semester. And I’ve been doing specifications grading this semester, and it’s actually amazing. It’s the best, uh, approach that I’ve found so far. And part of it is that it requires you to articulate your goals in each assignment and what the students were trying, trying to

achieve.

That’s awesome. Well, what else do we think? So when I think of Meda academics, honors, man, well, there are so many do, do we want to talk about, cause we’ve kind of been talking generally about undergrad assignments, but in terms of students, I mean, comprehensive exams and the dissertation can look so different across disciplines and across institutions.

And I think that’s what, and even at the same institution, right where you have rules that people who are grandfathered in. Of course, some people start their dissertation and life happens and humanities, this dissertation is take a while to complete anyway. And I remember distinctly being like grandfathered in under old rules, but then there were new rules.

And so I was in this weird liminal space where I could use the old or new rules. Why don’t we think about just exams and comps as. An arbitrary construction anyway, as a way to assess knowledge, what are your thoughts about that? I’m really, I would love to know

my department is actually revisiting sort of what are the exams right now?

And I think, uh, an overarching question for this topic, as well as the undergrad topic is that departments all over are, are in this moment when. Asking ourselves, what is the, what are we training people for? Right. Both at the undergraduate level, but especially at the graduate level, when so many of our students are not going to enter the professoriate anymore, at least not in the traditional sense that this education was designed for.

And so that requires a rethinking of the exams and the dissertation kind of like what you were saying with the exams changing. When I went through my comprehensive exams in grad school, I had the. What Kafkaesque experience, where you’re locked in a room for three days with bar chocolate, and you answer all of these questions from memory and more and more including my own department, uh, more and more departments are moving away from that because realistically in life, nobody’s hopefully going to lock you in a room and make you perform your knowledge of 200 plus tags until you can come back out.

And so, so the question is, you know, what is the goal and the goal. In that occasion when I was locked in a room and doing my exam. That you are familiar with the scope of a field, right? And can perform your familiarity through a set of written texts. Unfortunately, the texts that you produce in 72 hours of no sleep and living on chocolate are not very good, right?

They’re not words that you get to use anywhere else because you were written, they were written under duress. So other departments, I think, including again, the Penn state department where I went for grad school are rethinking, how do we reshape the genres? Say, what they read for the exams can go into the proposal.

And how do we reshape the proposals that can go into a dissertation? Which leads me to the dissertation as a genre, and I’ll be interested in your opinion. So, okay. We’ll sidebar. The fact that people who are not going in academia should have options that are not necessarily a dissertation, because if you’re going to go into say, grant writing, maybe you should be working on a portfolio for such things.

Uh, but if you’re going into academia, the dissertation is an approximation of a book, right? Except that you yourself have not read enough and are not at the point in your education and career where you are, you know, most of you, there are some people who were much better at this than I was, but I was certainly not in a place to write a book.

Like I had no idea what I was doing, which is why

I stopped.

Yeah. Well, so, so part of what is so painful about trying to write the dissertation and what gives you that sense of like, I am not enough beyond the culture of academia and grad school is the fact that you are actively trying to do it on real that you are, at least I, at that stage could not do.

I was trying to approximate something that I did not have the education for and did not have the time. Honestly, a book is not written in a year. Um, for most people, again, there are people who do this better than I do. And so. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with that because the dissertation is a helpful step in teaching folks.

You know, how to write an extended piece of critical engagement, except that, you know, again, it is asking you to approximate a thing that you might not be fully ready to, to accomplish. What do you think?

Yeah, that’s so interesting, right? I think to your point, I do think that at large state institutions and you and I both attended though, where graduate students have.

A disproportionate burden of the teaching load. We’re teaching so much that we’re not probably as deeply immersed in our research as students who are, who have a research assistantship, as opposed to having to teach or who have just who we’re only teaching one class. I know I talked to every year that I was in grad school and I couldn’t afford not to.

So I think in terms of us being conversant in the scholarship of our field, I think you’re right. We haven’t read enough. So one thing I would say. In terms of this kind of male academic salary is that I do think you’re a committee and I always say this, I still say, they said, you know, students don’t fail themselves.

Your committee fails you. Cause I do think that when you produce a document that can. It’s not even about the quality of it, because generally speaking, I don’t think dissertations are all that good. Mine certainly was not Lord knows. And the fact that we imply that this is a book, I mean, yeah, you can work on turning your dissertation into and many people do, and it’s probably counterintuitive to not do that, which is what I did.

So whatever, but I think that your committee, they help not so much shape your thoughts or not even shape the form of, of your argument. Um, but they. I don’t know. I want to say they shape your philosophy or your approach to the dissertation, maybe in a way that can be healthy or unhealthy. And one of the things that I think to my committee credit, I think that as much as at times, it felt to me like academic hazing, I for sure know that they wanted to make sure that I was prepared, but you’re always going to have that sense of imposter syndrome.

So I’m glad that they didn’t let me get to. Caught up in my sense of inadequacy, which graduate students will do. You’re, you’re going to always, there’s always a book you haven’t read. There is always a scholar that, you know, you can have the best education in the world and someone’s going to slip through the cracks.

You know, I think about now, like I try to do a great job when I teach black feminine. And woman is texts, but I looked at an old syllabus and I was like, oh my God, bill hooks. Isn’t on here. What the hell was I thinking about? Like, but you can’t do it all. And you have to accept that and your students have to accept that.

And also there are some communities who are very much of the mind. This should be a public, like the quality of this thing should be good or should be ready to go to press when graduate centers don’t even know what that means. As we said at the beginning, like, we don’t have a clue most of us because there’s this shroud of mystery over the publication process.

Even those of us who plan to go into the profession. So for me, I was really thankful that my committee and my director. Thought of, or helped me think about the dissertation as a beginning of my academic career, rather than as a finished product, because had he not done that shout out to Dr. , um, had he not done that?

I would still be writing that thing because we often get, I mean, academics. Especially in the humanities words matter to us. And that’s why, you know, in our editing, we have to edit out all these us and Oz because we’re trying to say something just so, and we know that there’s a perfect word. And, and especially me because I got kids in life and too much other crap, it takes me awhile to sometimes get that perfect word.

And so we can agonize. Over my new HSA and get caught up in our own minds or ever right into perpetuity. And when he finally just had to have a come to Jesus meeting with me and say, listen, you to have to pray to the Orishas or whoever burn some Sage or whatever you need to do. You have a vibrant career ahead of.

But she just got to finish the dissertation. It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be done, which we’ve heard variations of that over the years. And it’s, it’s true, man. It just has to be done.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I, I really, I really love the framing of as the beginning of your academic career, rather than the culmination of your, of your graduate school, because that is one of the things that’s, that’s paralyzing about it.

And I also liked your point about, you know, the committee. Playing such a role in framing how the student approaches that document. And I was thinking about how you were saying you’re right. There’s always a book you haven’t read even. I mean, every project I work on, I will submit the thing and be like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I didn’t read this thing before I got there.

Not only in your own field, but there are so many other fields that also talk about similar things. And, and, and in those fields, there’ll be astounded that you don’t know these people who talk about those things and. W one of the things that I think fosters that perhaps in an unhealthy way is that academics do that.

Sometimes I’ve had classes where an a professor would say to the entire class, I can’t believe none of you have read this thing or been told this thing and it’s well, okay. So can we learn about the thing now and why you think it’s important? Because there are, you know, there’s a universe of knowledge out there and.

In fact, there’s a ton of knowledge. That’s not even in the academy right now. That would be astounding that you don’t know. That would be really important. So I mean, treating knowledge as, I guess, more generously, right? Acknowledging the diversity of experiences through which we come to knowledge the.

Histories of inequity through which knowledge has been valued and distributed thinking about these things rather than wielding knowledge as a form of assessment or as a hierarchy through which we eliminate people for not having already been part of this club.

Yeah. I mean, I do that sometimes too, but I try to do it in that pretentious way because sometimes I’m genuinely astonished, but also we.

And this is, I guess, maybe a pedagogy conversation. Most of the time with grad students, we’re not doing the type of formative assessment that we might be doing with undergrads. When they come into our class, we assume that they have some tech and a lot of times they’re taking a class that’s not really in their field and they’re taking a class because you do have to have some sense of coverage.

So they’re not, they don’t have the same background. And so I try to do this performance of shocked mortification, like, oh my gosh, do you never read Alice? Walker’s everyday use. Well, that’s a great story. Let me tell you about it. We’ll give you some spoilers, but you still need to go read it. And so as it’s not to shame them, because you can’t have read everything in, most of them aren’t even in my field.

So it really is that fair to them. And it’s not. But thinking about, I guess, going back to this idea of like audience awareness and how we’re framing. Certain tasks. I do want us to kind of shift because I think part of what we’re doing with the podcast is to maybe hopefully be, um, surveys. Yeah. I don’t know about career preparation, but provide some of the loose informal guidance for grad students.

And so I guess I’m thinking, you know, about academic, like about job documents and how those are. Man, intimidating, confusing, mysterious. What the hell? What has been your experience? Is there any particular job document that you can wax on about that?

Yeah, I mean, it’s also, I guess I should mention, it’s also deepen a job season for the job seekers this year.

Every time, every year during that period, I feel it’d be. The for folks. I tell my students the year, the first year that I was on the job market, I applied to 67, uh, jobs, maybe 64 60 something. And that was just literally anything I was remotely qualified for because I needed, I needed a job. And those documents, like you’re saying are completely made up.

And they’re also, you don’t know the rules behind them. Right? So, so with cover letters, every type of cover letter, it sort of, you know, how much do I perform? The things that I am good at, at what point does that sound overly boastful or am I making claims that seem unjustified? You know, how do I talk about myself awkwardly in the Shara that will sound appealing to other human beings?

So, so I guess the first one was the cover letter that I had to learn as a genre. When I worked with my grad students on those. Now I tell them to think about it as the thing that tells your story in a way that your CV and your other documents will not, right. This is your chance to create a narrative that is who you are as a scholar teacher.

And you know how that fits into how the department sees themselves.

Yeah, your rights, all of them have been deeply shrouded in mystery. I think I do want to go to maybe next the diversity statement, just because I think it was you all right. Well, it’s probably you and someone else to write this hilarious, um, observation that we made about diversity statements.

Maybe we saw it on like Twitter or something where. Um, where someone remarked that the, to ask people of color for a diversity statement is an act of violence and that you should be providing us with diversity statements. Like, what is that about? It’s that to me is the one that’s most vexing for me, the cover letter.

You’re right. I mean, the rules have, that’s the other thing that rules constantly change. Like I was sold and grad school and grad school. Apply for everything that you’re remotely qualified for. And so the narrative of who you are like to your point, I agree the cover letter is telling your story, right.

And it’s presenting who you are, but then that’s constantly shifting. It’s like, oh, if you’re applying for a teaching institution, you need to flip, you know, and put the teaching stuff first and put your research second or vice versa. And then at first I was told, like, do not go over two pages under no circumstances.

And the last time I was talking with someone about it, they were like, oh, I don’t care. Like my cover letter was like four pages. I’m like what? And so, so that’s kind of interesting. So I agree with all of your observations about that, but, but the diversity statement is one that always confuses me because.

It’s often, it doesn’t indicate a link. Very few of them do. Um, I saw, I have sometimes seen like a two page research statement, but for graduate students, who’ve never done this. None of them say the length. So it’s like these unspoken rules that you can’t violate in the diversity. Is always to me slightly different when I, when I was on the market and I would look at different institutions, some of them would, some of them seem to want DEI and administrative ideas about diversity, which faculty don’t really control others.

To me seem like they want to know that you have a multicultural curriculum and that’s your, um, And that’s your, uh, your classroom is inclusive and accessible. And that to me speaks almost an ADA, like it’s, it can run the gamut and it never really is clear what an institution wants. And I think in part, because the people on search committees are people like us and we don’t know what the hell we’re, we’re just, we’re just replicating a process that, you know, we’ve been told.

Where we might need to revisit some of that, because I’ve certainly been honest on a search committee and we have asked that, and I also did not know how to assess what the hell I was reading. Cause I didn’t know what the expectation of that document was. So,

yeah. So, okay. It’s talking about tomato genres.

I sort of made a weird career out of being on job search committee. I don’t know how that became my thing, but I was on like five of them at Arkansas and then immediately went on one when I got to Texas and. One of the things about the diversity statement is that the institutions often require them almost as a rhetorical performance, right?

Like we care about diversity. So we’re going to ask you for diversity statements and that you see, we care about diversity, except that then it becomes this weird burden on the person that you’re trying to show that you care about diversity. And like you were saying, As somebody who was on the search committee for me, if that person technically fulfilled the role of that diversity statement, that is if their body of work reflected a commitment to diversifying the academy.

I didn’t mean that statement. Right. I could see in their research, I could see in their curriculum, I could see in their record of service, that they’d been doing things to actively revise who we think of as academics and the students, and as you know, intellectual achievers. But if they hadn’t done that work, then it became.

A painful document to read, you know, either something that fundamentally misunderstood sort of how to approach a structural change in the academy or something that seemed completely incongruous with the rest of the candidates CV. Right. So it seems redundant either way. What do you think?

Yeah, I love that you mentioned, you know, it becomes a way to perform these ideas.

And so to me it seems like a document that is poised to. To either create redundancy or to create missteps for candidates who might actually be doing the work, but don’t fundamentally understand the function and form of that thing. And so you could just botch it, right. You could be doing some really great work, not know what the heck, the statement, as opposed to a test too, and then create a document.

Yeah. Doesn’t do you justice as a candidate? I don’t know. I could be wrong about that. I haven’t been on that many search committees, but you’re right. I think it is an institutional requirement more so than, and, and, you know, At the departmental level more so than the committee itself is really invested, especially to your point.

Like when we can see that here’s a person who is embodying this in their day to day and the CV speaks to the courses they teach and all of that, and that their identity speaks to their experience with issues of diversity and equity. Right. Yeah. It’s I guess, a necessary evil maybe for the world that we live in, but yeah, I don’t know about it.

What do you think about the research statement is that sometimes that feels redundant to me, but sometimes they all feel redundant because to me, especially at the preliminary level, I sometimes feel like the CV and the cover letter. Yeah. So

for the number of CA can jog unit is any job gets these days.

I think it would be much kinder to ask for the CV and letter. And then at the next stage request, the letters of rec all of the research, Siemens, whatever, whatever Siemens you want, but in that initial level, just CV and cover letter and, you know, cause there’s so many people who are going to be eliminated at that stage for whatever reason, but yeah.

Okay. So before I move on to the research statement, one last thing about the diversity statement. Cause I don’t want to leave listeners with just the. Oh, it’s totally nebulous and totally confusing. And nobody knows what it is. I will say that the most effective diversity statements that is the ones that I’ve seen, you know, search committees really light up about are ones that, uh, sort of go deeper into the iceberg about the things that are already on that person’s CV.

So, you know, it says that I did these things, but here are the values driving that, and here are those how those values connect to what I do and say, research and teaching or what I hope to do at your institution, but it helps gives a. Bigger picture of, you know, what is the world that you were looking to make in your role in this institution?

And, you know, how does that fit into our space? So I will say that about it. Um, and, and I’ve, I’ve read some that are like truly very effective in, in doing that, right. This is what I care about, and this is how I’ve, how I’ve turned that care into action in ways that are substantive. So it’s, it’s proven both in that narrative and on the seat.

Oh, yeah. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah. I, I, I definitely didn’t mean to come off as dismissive of it, but I just don’t understand it enough. And I think because you’ve been on more search committees, you’ve seen more effective examples. So that’s great. I appreciate you for bringing that home.

Oh yeah.

Thanks for letting me, um, so, so research statements, um, Yeah, for me, it does feel redundant because your heart, I love her. We’ll touch on a lot of your research, especially for research oriented jobs. You’ll have said a lot of the important things to you. So for me, kind of like with the diversity, same as a way to.

Peel back, further layers. So, um, you’ve, you’ve gotten the brief abstract of my book or my dissertation, and you’d find a summary or like the names of the articles that I’ve written. Here’s how it fits into who I see myself as a researcher where I feel like I’m going. And then it’s a way to, again, sort of create a.

Uh, persona for yourself. Um, one of the things that I thought about a lot on the job market was that, you know, people looking at hundreds of applications are not going to remember a ton about all of the things that they see. You’re going to, you almost need like a sound bite for yourself. You need an elevator pitch or who you are.

And so all of these documents become an opportunity to start tight, tighten up that, that elevator pitch. Right? So to reemphasize, this is who I am. This is what I do. This is how it shows up in research. This is how it shows up in my actions on diversity. How have you approached.

You know, that’s funny that you say that I’m thinking we don’t even have, you know, we’re like 10 episodes in and we don’t have an elevator pitch for this podcast.

We’re supposed to articulate. Yeah. I would agree with that, I guess for me. And I haven’t really been on. Well, I guess neither of us, neither one of us have had a ton of academic jobs. Right. So we might not have the most experience talking about or thinking about these things, but

I’ll be out about this show.

We might not have not had the most experience of, of anything that

discretion. Yes, yes. Please. Don’t cite us and don’t add us on a phone. So yeah. I I distinctly remember when I was applying well, I, so I applied earlier. I got, I was on the market early. So before I was finished with the dissertation, which is ill advised, they tell you.

And the reality is if you have the luxury, right. If you’re not providing for young children or caring for. Parents or anything like that. If you have the luxury to stay in school, stay in school kids, and also whatever don’t do drugs or something. I’m trying to like invoke the eighties here unless they’re medicinal or whatever we anyway, because what happens is if you take a position, especially at a teaching institution, you’re going to have a heavy teaching burden.

It’s going to be really hard to finish your research. And so for me talking about. A process that I was still deeply immersed in was difficult. But I, what I will say is that people consistently have said, at least people moving from either contingent faculty to assistant prof or grad school to assistant prof.

Is that the expectation now? I don’t know that this is true, but what people have always said is that they want you to basically elaborate on your dissertation. I wonder now. Is that as much the case as it was, let’s say, well, it wasn’t 10 years ago, but almost a decade ago when I was getting like job market advice, because I think you find.

And maybe I’m wrong about this more movement among early career academics? Cause it used to be the thing that you landed a gig and then you tried to Polish and then I don’t know, I didn’t see movement as much maybe. And I don’t know if that’s my imagination. I don’t know if the job security. Yeah. I’m not too sure about that, but I do think, I guess the point I want to make is.

It’s less now a statement of what your dissertation is about and more about your research trajectory and your identity as a researcher. So I think that’s the big takeaway that I want to say, but I feel strongly. Initially, I was told, basically expand on your description of your dissertation, which at least in my experience on such committees has not been the thing that, that we’ve wanted to see maybe.

So. Yeah,

I think that’s an important note in, and I think you’re right in that the job market has shifted in that people are expected to either be more advanced or perform that they’re more advanced so that the language of dissertation is pretty much dropped out of the job application altogether. I was told don’t use dissertation.

He gives me a new script so that it seems like. You know, on the next step, basically of what this is. So while we’re on job documents, I did want to, I saw you put down letters of recommendation and I really wanted to talk about, I thought that was a great idea, um, in part, because it’s very strange that there are no sort of open standards for this document and it is a real disservice to candidates.

You might have recommenders who are just less enthusiastic than other records, they might feel equally strongly about you, but it might be that their approach to the genre is less laudatory than somebody else’s. And because there’s no like even standard across their board, there’s no way to know, you know, does this, does this person just sound like this?

Or, or does this actually indicate something? I was on a search committee and this honestly had no bearing in how the search turned out. I was on a search committee where we were looking over applications and somebody observed how a letter didn’t sound particularly enthused. And I knew the person who’d written the letter.

And so I, you know, I said, the person kind of just sounds like, wait, did I write that letter?

Oh my God. But yeah, but the reason I put that though, is that I got wind, you know, the academic world is small and I’d tell you, I got to win that, that someone, a former graduate student. I felt that I did not write them a strong letter and that they felt slighted because of that.

And I was deeply hurt because I’m not going to agree to write a letter. If I don’t think I can write a strong letter, I have enough fortitude to say, no, I don’t think you or someone else would be, would be able to write you a stronger letter. And so I was really thinking about sort of tone right. In my, uh, perpetual cool or the fact that I’m so nonchalant or however it is that you all describe my, my.

Overall character, which is consistent across, you know, like friends and family, I’m just described as very laid back, very chill. And so, and I don’t and sometimes to me, and again, you’re right. There is no there’s, there should be a universal template for academics, but. ’cause I, I feel like being, especially effusively might sound like I’m lying or like I’m exaggerating, and I don’t want to do that.

I want to be very candid because that’s also a part of my personality. So I’m sort of known for being very chill and very candid. And so I thought, and I looked back at the learner. I was thinking, wow. I wonder how I did this person, a disservice, but one process that I do appreciate, and this didn’t happen for me when I was in grad school.

So I don’t know if it’s a thing that, you know, once you’re a colleague, I do know, like if I’ve applied for research fellowships and things like that, recommenders more and more send me documents to, to edit or, you know, to give it a once. And I didn’t think I would appreciate that process, but I really did.

I thought this is too, like, this is too laudatory. You need to take some, but again, that’s my idea about tone, like, and take some of that out. I was like, that’s not relevant to making, but the other thing that I will say, and I don’t know if you found this advice to be true. And I also don’t know, moving from, you know, junior to associate and like how this changes, but certainly as they graduate.

The advice that I received was that, you know, you want at least one teaching and one, um, research letter. So be sure that you invite someone in to observe your teaching so that they can have strong things to say about you. And so I think my question is, do you know, is that still your sense? And then also with junior faculty or early career people.

How does that change? Because you’re not, it’s not your first job is what I’m saying. So what are your thoughts about?

Yeah, so as a grad student, I definitely had the recommendation that you have someone write a teaching letter. I had somebody come in and watch my class and do that. And I, I think for the grad students who I’ve been a committee member, uh, for, that has been true for them as well.

When I went back on the job market when I was already, um, I’m an assistant professor. I still had that actually. I still had a colleague who was at, uh, in part I, I wanted that colleague sister to just. Speak to me as a colleague in general. So I think she addressed both teaching and, uh, just sort of me in, in the department.

I don’t know. I didn’t read this letter so I, they I’m guessing, but I will say that the search committees I’ve been on for very senior roles, like post tenure roles. I don’t know that any of them have really talked about much about teaching that they’re mostly like this person is a tightened in the field.

This is all of the things that they have done. So, so that it feels, it does feel like that at that stage. I guess they assume that the committee will also assume that this person. You know, teaches relatively decently, which may not be true. And also

we, we may not care, right? If we’re being, if we’re being at, like, if you are a fellow research, many institutions will not.

I mean, not that we are trying to actively do our students a disservice, but we also know that like, cause that’s the other thing you know about, um, Academic genres. And I’m thinking to sort of transition in which we can go back if we need to, but in thinking about letters of recommendation and a teaching letter, it makes me also think about the demonstration of excellence in teaching or demonstration of teaching effectiveness with.

Again, very nebulous because sometimes I translate that or understand that as a teaching philosophy, but some institutions will just explicitly say your teaching philosophy. And so when we talk about demonstration of teaching excellence, that always is confusing to me because we know. Like the research bears out that people of color women that you can’t really use numbers or, or you shouldn’t maybe let me not say you can’t because those are just going to be generally lower.

Like I’ve won departmental teaching awards, but yet my evaluation numbers are lower than the departmental average. Which is like, you could throw a rock and hit someone. That’s like, oh my gosh, Dr. Bailey’s classes are uniformly and this is not like an arrogance thing, you know, but, but they’re considered to be now.

I’m not saying they are, but consider it to be some of the most interesting. Um, for that, I taught in the same department, not just interesting, but that students learn a lot and that they, they feel like they have value from experience. But if I had to look at my evaluations, I’m like Joan, from, uh, from the chairs, like last time you looked at your evaluation in 1984, I try not to look at it because I know that they are not representative on some level, but I never know how to, when you’re feeling the market, what should people put in that?

Packet of random thing.

Yeah, that’s a good, that’s a good point. Um, usually I think if I’m writing a statement that I can use to demonstrate teaching effectiveness than it is sort of more story-based about, you know, how I, I tried certain things, like, for example, this, this, you know, shift in my grading practices and how it led to more student participation or how students have reflected on this being like the most encouraging form of grading that they’ve, you know, experience.

But I will. I want to echo what you said about evaluations, because I, it really, um, irks me that just across academia, there’s this perfunctory statement, and we understand that these aren’t discriminatory. Also turn all of them in any way. Like we’re still gonna use them to evaluate, you know, what’s the point of acknowledging that they’re discriminatory.

I would prefer it to not have that perfunctory statement since you’re going to use them anyway, because it just feels like it feels disingenuous. Like. Clearly, they matter to you on some level or you would not still be collecting them. We

understand that there’s discriminatory. So we’re going to discriminate against you.

We’re going to discriminate in a different way. Oh man. They are pretty hilarious. I have to say, but yeah, I just, so yeah, back to the letter letters of rec, it really sort of haunts me to this day like that. I feel like I wrote someone, a quote unquote. That it could have been stronger. So now I really feel committed to one I’ve doubled down on.

I’m not going to say I can write it if I can’t write a strong one, but two. If it’s something that does not require confidentiality, which I have not seen as much lately. I think that’s the kind of largely removed from the project. People don’t really expect that, but then I would like to send it to the candidate or whoever, just one that they can copy, edit that sucker because I might miss something, but two, are there things that I should talk about?

That I haven’t, and that’s really important to me too, as an exercise and collegiality, but also respect, right. If we’re grooming people to go into the field and I really want to be able to render a service that I know that at some point in the future, I will need people to render on my behalf. So.

Yeah.

Yeah. I’ve done that as well for all grad students who ask me for it to write for them on the job market. I’m like, this is what I wrote it. I don’t want to misrepresent your research or anything. And if I’m missing anything, you want me to emphasize anything, let me know. But also I think there’s something really gratifying in that too.

And that we don’t really get that many opportunities to tell these people, you know, like how. In, I am of how you’ve developed as a scholar and how excited I am for what you’re going to do in this field. And so I’ve actually quite enjoyed being able to share those thoughts with people. Um, and I think that also practice holds people accountable, right?

Like, don’t write something about somebody that you wouldn’t be willing to say to them. You know, if, if that’s the case, just don’t write the letter, you know,

And that’s hard. It is especially hard for people. I don’t identify as a people pleaser. I don’t think people would say that about me, but I’m Southern.

I’m this exceptionally nice. Right. And so it is very hard for me to, to say to someone, no, but I don’t think it would be fair to the student or to a colleague. If I. So like I can write them a really strong and glowing letter, but again, to return to this point, my idea of glowing is not the same as other people.

So I have to just be mindful of that. And I might have to just sort of be myself times 1.5 or something, because apparently I am not abusive. And that’s what

I think to myself because like, I don’t, I don’t know how people see me to be honest, but I’m guessing that I am slightly more reserved than some other folks, um, or more measured with my words.

But when I write letters I have in the back of my head, they’re going to be a few of very excited people, writing letters. And I want people to know that this person is just as worthy of excitement and effusiveness. So I like trying to channel, you know, as emphatic a wording as I can.

Okay. That’s good to know then because yeah, I think you do have a similar tool vibe, but that you’re able to rhetorically perform excitement in a better way.

I have, I have to copy one of your letters, like, can that transparency,

like this is how I write for

people. Yeah, no, that’s a really, really good point. I think one thing that I feel like is a returning threat, and I know at one point we were going to talk about academic articles, but we probably have to do that as a whole separate episode.

But so one thing I think that’s a through line I think, is performing and how we perform our academic identity on paper. It can be an extension of ourselves and maybe in a document like the research statement or the diversity statement, we want it to be an extension of our best practices and who we are and how our identity intersects with our research and our pedagogy.

But the caveat is. When you’re writing a letter of recommendation, you might need to perform your identity differently depending on

not, it’s not you being assessed. Right. It’s somebody else.

That is correct. So that’s excellent. Right? It’s the question of who’s being assessed, right? Exactly. I think that

since we’re going to through lines and continuity, I’m going to pull this full circle all the way back to the underground assignments we talked about at the beginning.

I think all of us would benefit a lot from sitting down with what is the point of this genre? What is its goal and what do we ask of it and how do we be more transparent about that to the people who have to create this genre? Like, I think this would be much kinder place if we could manage to do that.

Yeah, I am all for a more kinder places, especially this time of the semester. Like we might need to do a pause even before these final papers and say, you know, what is the point? Maybe I can, maybe it doesn’t need to be 30 pages. Maybe 20 is sufficient, you know, or whatever the case. So, yeah. Okay. Well, any final thoughts we want to leave the people with.

No, I think, I think that’s it. I’m kind of impressed that meetup genres wound up being one of our longer episodes.

One of the listen, we could probably go a whole hour talking about these things, but we won’t, we won’t do it to you today. But, um, so, well, if you have questions or comments, you know, hit us up at the unpack this podcast on Twitter, or email us@theunpackthispodcastatgmail.com.

All right. Thanks for tuning in, you know, All right, folks, that’s going to do it for a season one, Joe and I are going to take a short break so that we can come up with a list of pop culture, things insecure, some other movies, films, other academic discussions that you want us to unpack. So we’ll compile that list.

We’ll work on our editing skills so that we can be back better than ever for you all. A

thank you for

listening to .