American Emotions and Reverse Culture Shock
On contradictory instructions regarding academic job applications
Last year I started applying to academic jobs. One of my best friends, a fellow historian, had recommended a job to me, saying I’d be perfect. I applied on a Friday. I was rejected the next Monday.
A little surprised at the quick turnaround (especially for an academic job), I wrote the professor in charge of the committee to ask what I had done wrong to merit such a quick rejection. (Especially since my good friend, who knew him, thought I’d be well qualified).
He was nice enough to provide me several paragraphs of feedback with a nice long list of things I could do better. Here’s his final point:
Finally, I would drop both the “I am well placed/prepared” phrasing and the “It would be very exciting/I would love” language from the final paragraph. Both of those formulations will undermine committees' perception of you as a serious applicant. In the first instance, the content of your letter and CV should make it obvious that you’re qualified, and then you should let the committee decide that for themselves rather than telling them what to think. Meanwhile, terms like “exciting” and “love” don’t have the ring of serious scholarship. You might on occasion go so far as to say “I am excited about the prospect of…”, but always err on the side of restraint and emotional seriousness in such letters.
Fast forward to today. I’m now in what I can only imagine is the last throes of my attempts to apply to academic jobs before I lose all patience for it. I was actually pretty excited about this teaching fellow position in the core program at a liberal arts school that an acquaintance had recommended for me. However, in following the feedback I received last year, I made sure to err on the side of restraint and emotional seriousness.
I sent my application materials to the professor I know who is not on the hiring committee. And here’s the feedback I got this time around:
The main thing I would suggest has less to do with substance than tone. You are likely very aware of the difference in US vs UK letters of recommendation / referee letters -- we in the US have a tendency to write rather over-the-top recommendations, whereas UK letters tend to be rather understated. I just read a large number of job applications for our tenure-track line in Ancient history, and the generally tone was far more emotive than your cover letter, which feels very professional and restrained (in a British style voice) more than the American-style voice. As far as you are comfortable, I would encourage you to consider adding some emotive words in the letter -- express how you may be eager, or keen, or passionate, or excited, etc. You are clearly qualified, so coming across as eager to join the university and to work with our students would help your application.
You might be able to imagine how this made me feel.
I don’t emote enough! I am not American enough!
Of course, she attributes this tone to my time in Europe, and in the UK in particular. Which is partially true. I still can’t stand it when waiters come around and act like my best friend here in this country. It all seems so fake and unnecessary to me. That’s what a decade in Europe will do to you.
I think I felt some variant of that emotion before I ever moved to Europe, but it is much more pronounced now. Which made me wonder if one of the reasons I felt so comfortable in Europe was that people felt so much less fake there. And I never felt obligated to fake emotions I didn’t have.
This is the observe side of the phenomenon where American tourists think French waiters are rude. I am inclined to think those waiters are living out the truth that they are not my best friend but rather the person who takes my order and brings my food (and then leaves me to enjoy it peacefully in the company of the people who actually are my friends). American waiters are the ones who are being forced to live a lie.
But, to come back to the subject at hand, I did tone down whatever excitement about academic jobs that I expressed in my applications because I had been told to be more professional and more serious. And I was told to write in that way by an American academic. Which I then did for dozens of applications, before finally getting this feedback.
So allow me to say: this pisses me off.
One of the worst things about being a writer is dealing with people who help themselves to words like 'passionate' while seeming to have no grasp of what even tepid interest would look like - there's something about statements claiming passion, enthusiasm and so on that seems to undermine the claim. What comes across as genuine is something I see in the writing of Michael Lewis and Edward Tufte (in almost every other respect so radically different): both have a capacity to be OUTRAGED by stupidity (Tufte, famously, coined the term 'chartjunk' for a raft of deplorable design practices), and both exult in examples of ingenuity and intelligence (Lewis on the career of Bill James, the development of Bill Walsh's passing game has the capacity to enthrall someone (me) with zero interest not only in baseball and football but all forms of organised sport). I don't actually know whether this approach would work in an application (maybe the kind of people who expect passion to be displayed by 'I' statements would find it lacklustre, while those put off by such statements of affect would consider this equally unprofessional). I suppose it *might* stand out if no one in either camp is doing it.
But of course I would be exasperated and infuriated to get such conflicting advice on applications.