Academic job market

[dr_whom]

I've been on the academic job market for a really long time now. I've been relatively lucky in that the short-term, part-time, and adjunct positions I've had have all been fairly well-paid ones, with good benefits, in cities I wanted to live in—I haven't been anywhere near the poverty-level adjunct horror stories one reads about. I'm fairly comfortable. But the precariousness of it all, and the repetitiveness of sending out job applications every year, is starting to wear on me a bit; the whole process has been a whole lot of work for very little benefit.

Here's a catalogue of my results on the academic job market for the past 7 academic years, to the best of my recollection:

2008–9 (before I defended my dissertation): 8 applications.
No bites.

2009–10 (during which I defended my dissertation): 11 applications.
Two telephone interviews.
One conference interview.

2010–11: 16 applications.
One telephone interview.
One Skype interview.
One on-campus interview.

2011–12: 7 applications.
Two Skype interviews.
Two on-campus job talks.

2012–13: 9 applications.
One Skype interview.
Two on-campus job talks.
Two non–tenure-track job offers (one accepted).

2013–14: 2 applications.
One Skype interview.

2014–15: 11 applications (one search canceled after I applied).
One Skype interview.
One on-campus interview invitation (declined because I decided to accept a different job first).
One on-campus job talk.

…I feel exhausted just writing that out. And it continues this fall!

Comments

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

Is this normal in linguistics? In math, because of MathJobs, people apply to far more jobs - I applied to 50 postdocs the first time, which was typical, and have applied to maybe 30 tenure-track jobs each year lately.

The endless postdocification is also an issue in math. Usually people are not called adjuncts unless they're semi-retired or definitively left research academia, but there are euphemisms like "visiting postdoc" and "visiting professor," plus standard postdocs.

[dr_whom]

Keep in mind that many more universities hire mathematicians than linguists! (And variationist sociolinguistics isn't a very big field within iinguistics, either.) There definitely haven't been 30 tenure-track jobs a year that I'm anything close to qualified for—for example, a search for sociolinguistics jobs at the Assistant Professor level advertised on Linguist List in the past year turns up nine results, approximately three of which I'm qualified for. If my background were in "Applied Linguistics" (which usually means ESL teaching) I would have a lot more to choose from.

I guess I tend to use "adjunct" loosely to mean 'non–tenure-track instructional staff', which is maybe not accurate; the more common meaning is someone hired on a per-course basis, I guess? Anyway, in the past six years I have been a "Visiting Assistant Professor (Part-Time)" paid per course, an Instructor paid per course, and an Assistant Professor with a full-time "Contractually Limited-Term Appointment". Next year I'll be an Assistant Professor with a part-time (but not per-course) appointment, and also a per-course "Sessional Lecturer".