Get Appropriate Letters of Recommendation

Many graduate advisors do not write the right type of recommendation letter for a liberal arts job. Their institutional perspective, working at a Ph.D.-granting institution, makes it difficult for them to share the mindset of undergraduate schools. Additionally, many hope to see their advisees become top researchers themselves, and may see a teaching job as a failure. This comes through clearly in letters of recommendation that praise an applicant's intelligence, scholarly capacity, and likelihood of producing abundant publications, but make no mention of their teaching ability or interactions with undergraduates. While we recognized this institutional bias at work, and didn't consciously hold this against the candidates, it made it more difficult to assess how well they would fit at our college. If you can get your advisor to write a letter targeted toward the liberal arts job, you'll gain some advantage over the competition.

Emphasize Your Teaching

In writing your own cover letter, keep in mind the central place of teaching at small colleges, and don't write a letter that contains five paragraphs about your research and one about teaching. Our committee read many letters in which the candidate discussed his or her research in lengthy detail, then concluded with the functional equivalent of a postscript: “Oh, by the way, I like teaching, too.” Not good enough. You must give some indication that you really understand what a liberal arts college is about. We want to know that you get it, and that you won't be resentful of the extensive demand that classes and students make on your time. That does not mean you should ignore your research, for three reasons: (1) the committee members do want to know that you're reasonably interesting and have something important to say, (2) they need to know that your interests and worldview match what they are looking for, and (3) most liberal arts institutions do have expectations that faculty will continue to engage in some research. While there is wide variation between top- and lower-tier institutions, the trend is toward requiring some scholarly activity to qualify for tenure. Nevertheless, in these schools teaching comes first, and that priority should be reflected in your application.

Give Them What They Want

Keep in mind that each job announcement reflects a discrete audience, so you should tailor your application to each one individually. Like one-size-fits-all shirts, one-size-fits-all application packets are guaranteed to be a poor fit for most. In particular, your application letter is your tool for appropriate tailoring, so in it you should make an effort to touch on everything the job announcement asks for, if possible. Of course any job announcement is something of a wish list, and you may get the job without being a match for all the items, but don't hide your light under a bushel—if you possibly can do something listed, let them know.

For example, our job announcement explicitly stated that international experience was desirable. Some applicants had traveled extensively in Europe or Asia, as I learned from scanning their curriculum vitae carefully, but never mentioned it in the cover letter. Now that is shooting yourself in the foot. We also wanted someone to teach an introductory course in political philosophy, perhaps democratic theory. One applicant had taken several courses in democratic theory, and had a research area in democratization, yet the application letter did not reveal an interest in teaching the subject! Did this person not get an interview because of a mistake? Absolutely—at the very least it showed a lack of attention to detail. Another applicant had also taken multiple graduate courses in political philosophy but did not indicate an interest in teaching it. Had this person grown sick of political philosophy, or was it just an oversight? With numerous other well-qualified candidates to choose from, finding out wasn't a valuable use of our time.

So have you taken any courses on the subjects they want someone to teach? Then say you can teach it, because the winning candidates are the ones who are willing to stretch and teach courses in which they're not (yet) expert. Of course, if you really aren't willing to teach a particular course, then by all means don't say you are. But in that case you might reconsider whether it makes sense to pay postage on such a long-shot application.

Be Broad; Be Very, Very Broad

As a corollary to the previous point, be broad! A narrow range of teaching interests may be appropriate for a school with more than a handful of political scientists, but most liberal arts institutions have departments of two to five members, so they have an unquestionable need for someone who can cross over and cover subjects outside their specialty. If the portfolio of courses you list in your cover letter consists of international relations, U.S. foreign policy, international political economy, and globalization, then it had better be addressed to a large department. Those courses are all arguably in the same general field while liberal arts schools need people who can cover a broader range within the discipline. Be willing to teach political philosophy, or environmental politics, or campaigns and elections, or a region of the world you haven't previously studied in-depth. Our winning applicant, a Europeanist, discovered the Model Arab League after arriving here and quickly arranged to teach a course that would prepare students to participate in it, despite having had little background on the Arab world. That's the spirit needed at a small college. Anyway, why shouldn't a well-educated international relations scholar know democratic theory, be conversant with classical political philosophy, or capable of teaching an introductory course in American government? And going the other direction, why shouldn't someone who specializes in American politics know the basics of international relations, or be able to teach introduction to political science?

The basic assumption is that you're well-educated enough in the basics of the discipline to be able to learn a new topic quickly enough to teach it at an undergraduate level. So take some time to ponder how a small department can reasonably divvy up the world of political science to offer a satisfactory range of courses to their students, and how you could contribute to that. Take some time to look at the department's web site to see how many people they have and what their interests are. If you've learned anything in graduate school, it's how to do research, so search committees are understandably not impressed if it appears you haven't done your homework.

Keep in mind that if you get the job, over time you will have some power to change the set of courses you teach. If you find you dislike teaching, for example, Law and Society or State and Local Government (as I did), you may eventually be able to replace it with something for which you have more enthusiasm. This should not be taken as an absolute rule. Some courses simply must be offered, specifically service courses (for example, those required for Teacher Education certification) or those that meet an institution's distributional requirements. And if there is one course for which they have specifically chosen you, you should plan on teaching that course for some years to come. But recognize also that most of the existing course offerings were created by your predecessors to suit their own interests, and you can expect that, over the years, you will have that same opportunity.

If You Want to Work at a Liberal Arts School, Just Say So

Almost nothing needs to be added to the title of this subsection, but the story of one unfortunate applicant should drive home the point. Our committee considered a candidate who had an exceptional background that included substantial international travel, whose research was timely and interesting, and who was then a visiting professor at a liberal arts college. But this person made no mention of wanting to teach at a liberal arts college in the cover letter. Reluctantly, we excluded this candidate, the last applicant to be cut from our interview list. Less than a week after the conclusion of our search, the chair of that person's current department called to make a verbal pitch for the applicant. In a brief discussion it became clear that this candidate did indeed enjoy teaching at a small institution, and wanted to continue doing so. If we had that information ahead of time, we absolutely would have offered that person an interview.

A case can be made that we ought to have contacted the candidate, since we were so interested. But we had other equally qualified candidates who did express an interest in being at a liberal arts college, so it wasn't necessary for us to do so. The point is that candidates can't afford to hope that search committees will go the extra mile. They might, or might not, so rather than put yourself at the mercy of others, you should assume that committee members dislike the hiring process, have other time-consuming obligations, and would prefer spending time on other, more personally and professional rewarding, matters. If you make it too easy for them to underestimate you, they will do so.

Go Ahead and Extol the Delights of Living in East St. Nowhere

Many liberal arts colleges are in small towns or medium-sized cities, which, admittedly, tend to be culturally limited. We know full well that our town cannot compete with Los Angeles or Boston in the cultural amenities many academics like. So if your entire educational experience has been at (a) large public universities, and/or (b) in large urban areas, you need to convince us that you are, in fact, dying to get out of the big city and experience the quiet life at a small institution in a small town. A candidate whose undergraduate and graduate institutions are in the same large eastern city, and who gives no indication of recognizing where we are located, is a risky gamble for us because a mismatched candidate is a lose-lose-lose situation. Our faculty loses, from having a disenchanted and disinterested colleague whose sole interest is finding a different job; our students lose, for the same reason; and the unhappy person also loses, because time spent applying for new jobs is time not available for other scholarly activity, and simply because no one should have to be miserable.

But does this mean we'd never consider interviewing a candidate from an urban area? Of course we would, if the candidate let us knew it would be worthwhile. Granted I may be skeptical if you tell me that my town, a small midwestern city with a declining industrial base, is your dream locale, but many of these places are reasonably proximate to larger cities or universities. In our case, we're less than an hour from an R1 university (with access to its research library), and just more than an hour from a major city with excellent museums, theaters, professional sports, and a major airport. So take the time to look at a map—you can improve your chances of getting an interview by showing the search committee that you've taken the effort to find out where they are. And you might be pleasantly surprised by what the area has to offer.

One advantage of small towns and cities is the opportunity to quickly get engaged in the local community. The mobile life of Americans today means most small communities are not so insular as they were a generation ago, and newcomers are often eagerly welcomed to participate in the life of the community. For political scientists, particularly, the ease of observing or participating in local politics or community organizations may be one of the attractions of life outside the urban core.