The academic job market is soul crushing and unsustainable in terms of basic economics. Speaking as a veteran, I’ll share some accumulated experience in the spirit of confirming that what you think happened is actually happening. You did not imagine it. It’s not because of anything you did. If you were of the finalists but didn’t get the job, here are some possible scenarios that explain what happened.
1. You had an excellent campus interview. There was no negative feedback. The search committee chair specifically told that it was an excellent campus interview. Search committee members were very enthusiastic during the interview. But senior faculty members have been working behind the scenes to get their preferred candidate hired; e.g., the chair of the department wanted someone different than the dean of humanities. There was absolutely nothing that you said or did that left a poor impression, nothing about your research or teaching that was inferior to the chosen candidate. The decision had nothing to do with you.
2. Search committee members think they desire cutting edge research but when they see a drag queen in a video you play during a music theory lesson, serious frowns form on their faces and it’s over. Faculty have absolutely no idea how their expectations are reproducing structural privilege, and the chair says at one point, “there are no black students here” (literally false, but he spoke his truth).
3. Search committee member calls the avant-garde music of a global modernist composer “noise.”
4. Your teaching on your area of global expertise is considered by the white search committee to be “incorrect.”
5. There was a specific person who they felt was essential for the “strategic development” of the department—read: that other candidate brings in grant money and commercial popular music.
6. They want a candidate who has already graduated as opposed to ABD and you never stood a chance, but they needed a certain number of candidates for the campus interviews.
7. You simplified your conceptual framework from peer feedback, but your research was then deemed not theoretical enough.
8. You revert to a more sophisticated theoretical framework and the research talk was not fully comprehended.
9. COVID-19 hit and work visas were banned.
10. They were never going to sponsor a work visa in the first place, but it would not look good for them to announce that.
