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In an earlier article in this series, we argued that new Ph.D. graduates entering the academic job market are often underprepared by their R1 institutions to consider roles at small liberal arts colleges. We made the case that these colleges offer enduring and exciting career opportunities for emerging faculty energized by the pursuit of teaching excellence and helping students succeed.
Given these differences, job seekers need to consider how their applications for a faculty job at a small liberal arts college should look different from an application they make elsewhere.
For a tenure-track hire at a small college, search committees are not looking to hire someone to teach a course or two a semester in their area of specialization or a publishing juggernaut; they want to hire a student-centered, well-rounded, teacher-scholar with the potential to be a good citizen of the university.
Customize Your Cover Letter: Why Here?
Search committees are under no illusion that you are only applying to one or two jobs. While you might be sending out dozens of applications, committees expect you to invest time customizing each letter. Consider the needs of your audience: they want to know how you will add value to this institution. Speak to the specific needs identified in the job ad to demonstrate your fit.
Broadly speaking, small liberal arts colleges put a lot of stock in their general education programs and curricular elements to support critical reading, writing, and thinking. Talk about how your teaching reflects those approaches. Doing your homework now — learning about the department’s structure, the college’s signature programs, and points of institutional distinction — will put you in the mindset to have a successful interview (the topic of our next article).
Lead With Your Teaching
At liberal arts colleges, faculty members are teachers first — so introduce yourself that way.
Describe the kind of teacher you are (or will be) and what being student-centered means to you. If you have past teaching experience and course evaluations, this is a good place to quote direct evidence from students. Share examples of trends or patterns in your course evaluations.
While there is no one way to be an excellent teacher, in general, at liberal arts colleges, we believe pedagogy is most effective when it goes beyond lecture and is active, creative, and inquiry-based. How would you give students opportunities to pose and explore ideas that interest them? What are examples of big questions you want to explore in your courses? What is a creative assignment you’ve used in the past? At this stage, it’s essential to show that for you, teaching is more than “delivering content.”
Convey your interest in teaching courses in the major, including introductory courses. While you will teach specialized seminars and upper-level courses occasionally, most of your time will be spent teaching surveys, writing-intensive courses, and general education courses to non-majors.
Articulate ways you might contribute beyond the department, such as first-year seminars, interdisciplinary programs, or engaging students in research. Regardless of discipline, you can distinguish yourself from the pack by speaking about your commitment to developing students’ durable skills like close reading, creative problem-solving, and critical thinking.
Put Your Research in Context
The search committee members will look for evidence that you have begun to develop a scholarly track record with some publications and presentations that will help you earn tenure one day. As we will discuss in a forthcoming piece in this series, scholarly activity may take different forms at a liberal arts college than R1 universities.
Put a liberal arts spin on your research by demonstrating how your research would be attractive to students and an asset to the college. What opportunities do you see to involve students in your work? How might you bring your interests into courses within or beyond the department? How might your research draw on the local area or regional community?
If relevant, put an interdisciplinary spin on your research by naming any programs you might contribute to, such as Women and Gender Studies or Environmental Studies. Ditto for interdepartmental service, committees, or student organizations with whom you share an affiliation.
Get the Little Things Right
Being on the job market and keeping track of various requirements and deadlines is overwhelming. In the flurry of applying for jobs while keeping up with the demands of life, it can be easy to forget to attach a required document or have a regrettable typo, such as a sloppy “find and replace” oversight. Search committees may interpret this as carelessness.
To expedite the review and to ensure fairness, it is a standard practice for a search committee to use a scoring rubric modeled on the job ad. Make it easy for readers to see how your experience aligns with their stated needs. Guide the reader by using bold section headers in your cover letter and adopt the same language used in the job ad. Make your qualifications explicit and clear.
Make sure your dossier is complete, we read it all. Some campuses may not review an application missing the required elements — so don’t invest all the effort just to disqualify yourself from consideration.
