But here I want to talk about the canines – the teeth with deep roots, which grasp and tear, the teeth which hurt and leave marks. For me, currently, the biggest of these are feelings of rejection, and they come in many different forms from many different sources, some intentional and some not.

Perhaps the least intentional is the feeling of rejection which occurs when you leave a department and a community you have been a part of for a long time. It’s an almost inevitable part of finishing a PhD, and an important way of moving on and growing as an academic. My advisor always encouraged me to adventure elsewhere after my PhD; it would develop my personal skills and knowledge, and take my own work outside the enclosed world of my department. I’d come to terms with the idea of leaving sometime late last year, and the idea of venturing further afield was an appealing one. But now that I have begun that process, I’ve realised how much that community meant – and still means – to me. Even though it was inevitable that my PhD would end, I never quite imagined how that would feel; and actually, it’s a very specific kind of rejection and loneliness.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not lonely through want of company, having a great partner and wonderful family and friends. It isn’t as though I have been ostracised; I still see many of my friends from my old department on a social basis. But I am no longer a part of that specific community, that very particular set of people going through similar experiences and working on projects in an environment that is, it seems, quite hermetically sealed. And that separation produces its very own, quite dully painful and chronic sense of solitude.

But there’s a form of rejection which is more acute and specific – that which occurs when job applications are turned down. Since submitting in December, I have had one job interview (unsuccessful), and multiple rejections without interview. Opening every rejection email, no matter how nicely it is phrased, brings with it all the nerves, all the disappointment and then all the numbness that I remember from when, aged ten, I opened the letter that informed me that I had failed my grammar school exam. I’m not that different now from that child, and every rejection still makes a toothmark on my sense of self-esteem. I wonder if I am valuable outside my previous academic context, if I do have anything to offer to that wider world about which my supervisor used to speak, whether that wider world is at all interested in anything I have to say and how I say it.

But this is something it is necessary to get used to. With so many applicants for every academic and postdoctoral position and a worryingly low number of successful applicants gaining permanent posts in the end, it doesn’t look like life as a post PhD, pre-academic-career individual is going to get easier any time soon. But in the end, you just have to keep trying, and using your available time whilst job hunting to keep your academic hand in and make yourself as attractive as possible. It’s something I’ve yet to learn to do successfully and fully.

Rejection bites for many different reasons, not all of which the person rejected can understand or know. As someone who takes dismissal quite personally, I can’t legitimately tell you to not take it to heart. But I can tell you to constantly evaluate how much this kind of career is worth to you – and that if it is the thing you most want in the world to do, then no matter what, you simply have to persevere: and know that it can take months, even years, to get there. However, you should also know that, in the meantime, there are things that you can do.

The situation in the US is slightly different to the UK.  For example, PhDs take longer to complete, meaning that many scholars entering full time work are approaching forty and only one third of them are not guaranteed tenure track (i.e. permanent) positions. This is a problem that I have raised in my blog many times, there simply aren’t enough permanent academic jobs out there for PhD students to enjoy the employment security many of them need after 7-plus years in education.

However, Bousquet makes another interesting point. That this trend means that tenured, permanent members of staff end up as managers and administrators rather than scholars. This means that both temporary and permanent staff are discontented because they are unable to achieve the sort of working life that they had hoped for. He puts this down to an increasing privatization of education and the development of what he calls ‘the managed university’. He sees this trend as infecting not only US universities, but institutions worldwide.

It is tempting to see academic life as a game of ‘us and them’ between those seeking work and those who already have a permanent job. However, Bousquet shows an alternative model where structural problems have caused universal dissatisfaction with university jobs. While I am not as pessimistic as Bousquet, I do acknowledge that he certainly offers some food for thought.

The authors of the article put this development down to the emergence of an increased number of researchers. Although they are primarily talking about scientific disciplines, anecdotally in my own field of the humanities, there have been concerns that universities are churning out more PhDs than will ever have academic jobs.

Much of the material published is ignored or goes to waste, they say. It is neither groundbreaking nor influential and merely contributes to the workload of everyone else because it has to be peer reviewed and then reviewed on its publication. This increases the demands on senior colleagues who spend all their time reviewing, while the bar is raised ever higher for junior scholars who have to ‘publish or perish’. It also leads to the impression that anything published more than a few years ago is out of date and irrelevant.

The authors suggest promotions and hiring committees should focus on the citation figures of an individual’s work, not merely the number of articles they have in publication. I think we would all agree that it is important to discriminate between the most and least prestigious publications. However, to me and many colleagues, going down the pure citations route seems dangerous and could undervalue extremely important pieces of research. It is always a dilemma when and where to publish in order to boost your reputation and job prospects, but this article challenging the notion that work must always be rushed into print has to be a good thing for our profession.