In my first column, I detailed the initial phase of a joint search conducted by an area-studies program and a traditional humanities department at a large research university in the East. In this installment, I'll discuss the next stage of the process: from scheduling and holding the campus interviews to deciding on our top candidate.
I am an assistant professor whose appointment is within a regular department, but I am unofficially affiliated with the area-studies program, which is how I ended up as one of the two heads of the joint search committee. My task was to represent the area-studies program on the committee.
After our panel had narrowed the list of candidates to three finalists -- I'll call them Barbara, Dan, and Christine -- we discussed how to go about scheduling their interviews.
Parity would be essential, we concluded, between the area-studies program and the traditional department. If the program was to maintain its claim to half of the successful candidate's time once hired, it had to manifest a commitment to an equal partnership from the outset. We achieved that in our negotiations with the department about the structure of the interviews.
Each candidate would give two presentations: a research seminar with the department as host (the traditional practice) and a teaching seminar with the program as host. Both seminars would be open to all interested parties from both the department and the program.
We defined the teaching seminar as a sample lecture in one of our program's core introductory surveys. The interview structure, we felt, would permit us to evaluate the candidate's potential as both a scholar and a contributor to the teaching component of our program.
In addition to the two public seminars, each candidate would be scheduled for a separate round of meetings with the professors and graduate students of both the department and the program. Armed with those overstuffed itineraries, we began calling the finalists.
Barbara was our first visitor to the campus. Her status as a finalist was the most tenuous of the three, but I was pleased that my instincts about her abilities (which were not as clearly emphasized in her application as they might have been) proved correct.
Her experience at a teaching institution served her well throughout her interview. She addressed mixed audiences with ease and grace, and demonstrated a knack for pitching complex technical evidence in terms that nonspecialists could understand.
Barbara persuaded everyone of her considerable abilities as a teacher. She had already worked up a highly impressive slate of course offerings, she engaged undergraduates in her research, and she described a number of creative assignments she employed in her classes. Her teaching presentation was everything we'd hoped to see in our candidates.
Her research presentation was also impressive, insofar as it demonstrated her passion and creativity as a scholar. During the question-and-answer period following her research presentation, however, it became clear that Barbara did not have an adequate appreciation of the significance of her own findings for the larger field. Although her work stood to revolutionize a longstanding and widely accepted theory in her discipline, she could not effectively relate her own conclusions to the broader literature.
Dan arrived on the campus next. He had been at or near the top of everyone's shortlist, and he did not disappoint.
His research talk set the tone for an impressive two-day visit. Despite a rather modest personal demeanor, Dan presented himself as an unabashed revisionist within his field. He wowed his audience by reeling off a catalog of his predecessors' methodological and interpretive assumptions, and then detonating them in succession with a carefully presented array of evidence.
Although some members of the department challenged the extent of his evidence, he impressed everyone as not only a thoughtful scholar but also one with the capacity to shake up his discipline.
Dan's teaching presentation served as a powerful encore performance. In it, he stepped far outside the range of his own research expertise and tackled one of the most vexing issues within our field of area studies. He challenged the popular stereotypes surrounding the issue in a highly effective manner, including an implicit but measured critique of one of our field's "founding fathers."
Also, out of all three finalists, Dan had the most experience with the population that our area-studies program served, and the best ideas for innovations.
Christine was our final visitor. Her research talk was highly detailed and interesting, yet difficult for nonspecialists to follow. She seemed to prefer drawing rather limited and cautious interpretive conclusions despite the rich nature of her body of evidence.
Christine's teaching presentation was very well organized and highly polished in its delivery, yet she appeared to have overreached her knowledge base at several points; for example, by including several outdated and erroneous concepts in her lecture without critical comment.
That provoked an unfortunately hostile series of questions from a faculty member, which Christine, much to her credit, handled very professionally. Yet the remainder of her interview indicated that she had lost interest in the position.
Immediately after Christine left, faculty members in the area-studies program met to decide which candidate we should support. Dan was everyone's first choice, but some senior professors thought Barbara represented a viable Plan B in the event that the department objected to Dan.
We knew through the grapevine that Dan's candidacy did not enjoy universal support in the department. In fact, at least two of its senior members opposed him. How could we best present the program's case for Dan in the rapidly approaching "summit" where a collective decision on an offer would be made?
I pointed out to my program colleagues that we were coming into the meeting at a considerable disadvantage for three key reasons:
First, the department would be the successful candidate's "tenure home" since we, as a program, did not have the power to offer tenure. Even though this was to be a joint appointment, the chosen candidate would have to satisfy the department on that front, and everyone knew it. That would limit, to no small extent, our authority in the process.
Second, after comparing notes, we realized to our collective shock that not a single member of the department had attended any of the candidates' teaching seminars for the program.
While we could lament their negligence on this front, it meant that our departmental partners would be basing their choice solely on each candidate's research seminars, as well as their own "in-house" interview process. Any evidence from the teaching seminars would amount to the sound of one hand clapping in the collective meeting.
Third, after a search of the official paperwork authorizing the search and discussing its process, it had dawned upon me that the nature of our "vote" was not mentioned. Could we pack as many of the program's faculty members as possible into the meeting and hope that our numbers, combined with those of our allies in the department, could carry the day? Would our vote be reduced to a single hand amidst the ranks of the department's faculty members? Or would the trick be to forge a consensus amidst a highly disparate assembly of academics?
I argued that if we wanted to hire Dan, we would have to play our cards very carefully. We had to present a formidable consensus on him as our exclusive choice. We could afford no cracks in our facade.
Several people in the program objected to my strategy as short-sighted, even reckless. After all, they argued, wasn't Barbara a close second? Couldn't we live with her?
They had a good point. Barbara clearly was a viable second choice. However, I felt that given the power dynamics inherent in this joint search, going into the summit meeting with a ranked list would inevitably lead to hiring the lowest common denominator, something we desperately hoped to avoid.
Dan had so far outperformed his competition that several junior members of the program joined me in contending that we make the case exclusively for Dan as our choice. Our senior colleagues ultimately agreed. They noted that we would have to walk a tightrope between expressing our support for Dan's candidacy on multiple levels (research, teaching, and contribution to the program) and appearing closed-minded and excessively hostile to the other candidates, doubtless a recipe for disaster in the summit meeting.
We reached an agreement among ourselves to keep the program's options open by proposing a fallback meeting on the matter of a second choice if Dan's candidacy failed at the summit. I'll tell how it all came out in my next column.
