Of the the 111 posts on The Professor Is In’s blog, which one, do you think, has the most comments?

The Six Ways You’re Acting Like a Grad Student (And How That’s Killing You on the Job Market?

Dr. Karen’s Rules of the Campus Visit?

Why Your Job Letter Sucks (And What You Can Do To Fix It)?

If you guessed one of these, as I would have, you’d be wrong. Although these have hefty numbers of comments (15, 30, and 62 respectively), they fall far, far short of the most-commented blog post on the site.

That honor, by a vast margin, goes to: Dr. Karen’s Rules of the Academic CV.

Seriously. Seriously? 121 comments on the post on CVs? Who woulda thought?

But why?

Well, I don’t know exactly why that post got such a dynamic and substantive response (the comment stream should indeed be read alongside the post itself—it’s that good). But I have suspicions. I suspect that it is because clear, reliable information on Cvs is ridiculously, insupportably hard to come by.

And that brings me to the topic of today’s post. In today’s issue of the Chronicle I found the most wonderful column. Called “The Rhetoric of the CV,” by Joshua E. Eyler, this column clarifies what I would be likely to call the “ethos” of the CV as a document, but which Eyler calls the “rhetoric.”* Whatever you call it, it is the meta-story that the CV tells about you as a candidate. Not just a static and dry list of facts, the CV is a dynamic and living document that tells a story in its taxonomies, orders of value, and silences, and in the style and economy of its wording. Through these extra-textual elements the CV communicates instantly, at a glance, the basic hireability of you, the candidate. And yet, too often it is completely neglected.

As Eyler writes,

The CV has a reputation for being purely utilitarian in nature and, as such, has less glamour than other application materials. I don’t think I am going too far, though, when I say that the CV may be the most frequently and closely read of all the documents that candidates send. For search-committee members who often must assess 100 applications in a short time, the CV offers the kind of holistic picture that few other documents can match. And it is always among those materials made available to other members of the department or to attendees at a job talk. In some cases, it may be the only part of the application available to those groups. Because of the frequency with which the CV will be read, then, it is important to note with care not simply the kinds of information that go into it, but also the order of information, the organization of facts, the section headings, and all the other seemingly minor details. In each section, and in the document as a whole, candidates must make an argument that moves from the most important evidence to the least important. All of that together makes up the rhetoric of the CV.

My real point in today’s post is actually, though, a cautionary one. The fact is, there is no one document about which misinformation is so rife, as the academic CV. And it is the Chronicle that is primarily responsible for this sad state of affairs. As I tweeted today, about the Eyler column, “Finally a good column about Cvs in the Chronicle!”

The culprits here are none other than the Chronicle’s regular columnists, The CV Doctors.

The CV Doctors are advisors in campus Career Services offices, and for many years in the Chronicle, and also in their book, answer questions and give advice about Cvs. And their advice is all too often outdated and painfully inaccurate.

The reason is, they are coming from a Career Services perspective, and not a hard-core academic one.

I don’t doubt that they are sincere. I don’t doubt that they take their job very seriously.

But anyone who has not, themselves, been responsible for the awful, painful task of evaluating 300-600 CVs for a single scholarly position in a department is not qualified to opine on the fine points of the CV. Because it is not the information on the CV that is at issue. It is the ETHOS/rhetoric of the CV—the aura of the CV that communicates that you, the candidate, are the real deal, the genuine article, a serious academic, a true pro, an insider, a member of the tribe— that must be spot-on, perfect, and flawless. And that is what people from Career Services, no matter the campus, no matter how well-intentioned, are not in a position to evaluate.

As I wrote at one point in reply to a query in the comment thread on the CV blog post,

“Are you aware of how much damage well-intentioned Career Services people do to poor, hapless Ph.D.s on the academic job market? Perhaps you are not. But I will tell you, because I see the outcome of their advice in my business every day. I don’t doubt that they are sincere, but they are *completely* ignorant of the biases and rigidities and unspoken norms and judgments that dominate Ph,.D. hiring. I know that they work closely with Ph.D.s. But they’re profoundly ‘off.’ Because they aren’t in the thick of it, fighting through 500 applications for one tenure track position. The wide variability that they permit and endorse, the vast wordiness of so many of their models, which in a ‘normal’ hiring context might be perfectly reasonable, are simply deadly in a context when search committees are harassed, overwhelmed, underslept, and forced by circumstances to be utterly unforgiving.”

Let me put this another way. Tenure track hiring is now the equivalent of the Olympics. What was good enough at local, city, state, and national levels is reduced to .001 second differences between winning Gold and not qualifying at all. Mistakes within the .001 realm in your job documents are enough to keep you from even being shortlisted.

I know this is discouraging, because in a context where the actual tenured faculty have almost entirely abdicated responsibility for providing reliable professionalization advice, Career Services is all that many Ph.D.s have left.

But don’t go there. Career Services offices are meant to serve the career needs of the undergraduates, and the MA students heading into professional fields—ie, the real-life job market. For those of you trapped in the purgatory of the tenure-track ACADEMIC job market, steer clear of Career Services offices, and make sure that your advice comes strictly from other members of the tribe, the ones who know the secret handshake.

*I was not aware that I am mentioned repeatedly in the comment stream of this Chronicle column when I wrote this post! I’m even accused of anonymously spamming the comment thread! As my 13 year old daughter would say: “Aaawkward….”

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