How to get a job in an environmental studies program

A recent posting in the Tomorrow's Professor series gives some really useful advice on how universities make hiring decisions.

It explains that anyone seeking an academic position needs to understand that most job ads are the outcome of lengthy negotiations.  The department will have had to agree on which area is its top priority � balancing the need to replace retirements while responding to new areas of scholarship.  The Chair will have lobbied senior people (the Dean or the Provost, depending on the local institutional ecology), competing with other departments for permission to advertise a tenure-track position.  The hiring decision itself will reflect (it is hoped) a reasonable compromise between the department's assumptions about its "ideal" candidate, and the actual applicants.

This posting made me think of my own experience as Chair over the last five years, including my involvement in hiring decisions.  And it occurred to me that hiring in an interdisciplinary environmental program has some distinctive features.  Here are some of these features, framed as advice for those who hope to teach in environmental studies.

1) Environmental ads can often be deliberately vague.  Unlike a conventional discipline-based department, where hiring needs may be unambiguous (we must replace our retiring organic chemist, or our Shakespeare scholar�), an environmental program, because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, may not have a clear idea who it wants to hire.  The ad may therefore be open-ended, with the faculty seeking to find out "who's out there".  This has two key implications:

�      Don't assume in advance that a job description excludes your area of expertise.  (Personal story: the ad I responded to here at Trent twenty years ago specified legal or economic expertise.  I had neither, but managed to persuade the program that it needed to hire its first historian.)

�      Don't call the department, seeking more details about what it is looking for.  The job ad contains all the information it wants applicants to know -- and if it is vague, it is, as I noted above, vague for a reason.  I've received several such calls over the years; they are always awkward, because there is absolutely nothing I can say without risking the impartiality of the process.

2) Your letter must, of course, be tailored to the position advertised, but it must also be designed with careful attention to the department itself.  I've received many letters that don't indicate an understanding of what we do here � all of which is readily available on our website.

This includes understanding the intellectual position of the department within its university.  Every environmental studies department is different � the product of particular local institutional ecologies and histories.  A field of study central to environmental studies in one university may be entirely excluded in another university.  In my experience, some applicants don't understand how this works � and so have proposed, for example, that they teach courses in subject areas that we just don't do, because they are covered by a department elsewhere on campus; or conversely, they have proposed new courses in an area that may be a novelty where they were trained, but that we already cover very well.

3) Even though you are applying to an interdisciplinary department, you don't need to capture the full range of this interdisciplinarity within your own self.  The chemists, toxicologists, social scientists and everyone else in my program are there because they could demonstrate excellence in their own specific research field.  But you do need to demonstrate that you are open to working with, and learning from, your future colleagues.  If you're a scientist, be ready to acknowledge that environmental studies also involves humans; if you're in the social sciences or humanities, indicate an awareness of the roles of science in environmental studies.

4) Be sure to convey a clear idea about what you do, what kinds of research and teaching areas you find most compelling, what projects you are working on, and what you imagine yourself working on in the future.  In other words, you need to show that you have a personal intellectual agenda, that will guide your research, and constitute your distinctive contribution to the teaching program.  It's surprising how often applicants don't do this effectively � starting with the ability to express in just a few sentences one's position in the wider world of environmental science or studies.

This includes demonstrating some ability to think about where environmental studies should go in the future.  An environmental studies program doesn't have a "natural" place in the academy -- unlike, say, English or History or Physics departments, it is not a "must have" for any university.  Instead, its existence indicates that someone had the entrepreneurial imagination and energy to create it.  So go ahead and show that you have a little academic entrepreneurial imagination yourself.