By Sasha Glim
The hiring climate across most university disciplines has become extremely harsh for adjunct professors, associate professors, grad students, and postdoctoral fellows, says UC Santa Barbara alumnus Max Jack, an ethnomusicologist.
“Every time I’ve gotten a position, luck was a massive aspect of it. Rejection is such a ubiquitous feature of so many aspects of being a postgraduate,” Jack told a UCSB audience. “In terms of job applications, grant applications, and submitting to journals, it feels a bit like being in a band where you’re just trying to get one break amidst a pile of rejections.”
Jack, a researcher and an alumnus of the Ethnomusicology Ph.D. program at UCSB, recently spoke to students about his experience navigating the academic job market in the United States and abroad. The event was hosted by the Music department.
Jack is now a writer and postdoctoral fellow with the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, researching the world of hardcore soccer fans known as “Ultras” in Dublin, Ireland. He is currently in the final stages of publishing his first book on hardcore fandom with Oxford University Press.
“Contrary to public perception, Ultras are not hooligans, they're in charge of cultivating the atmosphere in the arena. They are singing, banging drums, letting out pyrotechnics, and waving flags for the entirety of the match. So there is an entire performative aesthetic to that,” he said.
Max Jack, a researcher and an alumnus of the Ethnomusicology Ph.D. program at UCSB, recently spoke to a UCSB audience, advising flexibility in a highly competitive hiring climate.
After finishing his coursework at UCSB, Jack went abroad to Berlin, Germany. “I was particularly interested in the confluence of hardcore fandom and radical politics. There are a lot of stereotypes with right wing extremism and hardcore fandom, which is not false, but my personal interest was in radical left-wing politics,” he said.
In order to publish his research, Jack found ways to have his research appeal to different academic disciplines such as history and anthropology. “Nobody is going to care about soccer fans. In Ethnomusicology or Anthropology everyone has different interests so you always need to figure out ways to show them why they should care,” he said. “Always think about how you can embed your work in other preexisting lines of discourse.”
Jack said that the Ultras do much more than music and performance. The fans fight for better treatment, fair ticket pricing, and more.
“If you care about populism, then I have something to tell you about that. If you care about social movements, well actually Ultras are a social movement positioned against the commercialization and capitalization of professional sports. If you care about circulation of media and the ways media is appropriated into localized contexts, then you should care about Ultra fandom,” Jack said.
Jack’s research went beyond music, but that also confused his academic profile. “I started realizing I’ve gotten tenure track interviews but they're never in music departments. They’re in anthropology departments and sports studies departments,” he said, adding that interdisciplinary research has its pros and cons.
Jack gave advice on submitting work to academic journals, warning students to prepare for intense editing processes that ultimately benefit the work and the writer.
Writer and Ethnomusicology postdoctoral fellow Max Jack speaks at UCSB about his experience on the academic job market.
“Quality does not come from the first draft of anything, quality comes from layers and layers of revisions,” he said. “It’s that time that you take to sincerely engage with feedback and go through those growing pains. It does not always feel good. Other times reviewers aren’t nice so it just hurts your feelings, and sometimes reviewers are really supportive.”
It’s common to submit to several different journals before getting accepted, Jack said. “It's sort of part of the game — but obviously it's not a game, it's your life.”
He said looking at the accomplishments of others can also be discouraging. “There are more people that deserve these positions than there are positions,” Jack said.
Rejections don’t mean that the work is of bad quality and that you aren’t good enough, he added. “Everything you see on a CV is built on a mountain of rejections. The problematic aspect going through this is that you don’t know that,” Jack said. “You see other people’s academic profiles, and it looks really smooth and easy, but the actuality of it is that you're applying to 50 jobs a year.”
Jack believes academia is a “prestige economy” and the more prestige you accumulate, the easier it is to get the next position or promotion. “It’s not simply that you’ve gone to Harvard and so people give you the job,” he said. “It's that these prestigious positions give you the money and the time to make your work better. That's the biggest advantage.”
He believes that working as an adjunct professor while conducting research abroad helped him gain an advantage. “I think I would have been forced out of academia if I had stayed in the United States. I don’t think I would have gotten a job,” he said. “The research was good quality, but I just would have simply run out of money and needed to do something else.”
While in Germany, Jack also took a job teaching English in order to make ends meet. “There is a particular kind of shame that I felt in doing something that was not academic. That was not something I really wanted to share, and it wasn’t something that I talked about with my mentors,” he said. “But I think that is a more normal aspect of this adjuncting phase that doesn’t necessarily get talked about very much.”
Sasha Glim is a fourth year English major and Professional Writing minor at UC Santa Barbara. She is a Web and Social Media intern with the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.