Forty meetings in 48 hours. That was our first campus interview experience as an academic couple, and the beginning of the end of a search process we've chronicled in two previous installments.
In our first column, we outlined what we thought would be some of the major obstacles facing us as we hit the market as a nonromantically involved (at least, not with each other) dual hire: money for two tenure-track positions, space for our large and growing research archive, fear of (and even a little disgust at) hiring not one but two scholars in the field of game studies, and so on.
In our second column, we talked about how preparing application materials as a team proved to be even more difficult than if we were going on the market individually. The cover letter had to convey twice as much information in only slightly more space, and had to show both the advantages of hiring two game-studies scholars, as well as indicate that we each could stand on our own merits as professors in media and cultural studies (Judd) and rhetoric and technology (Ken).
We've been on several campus interviews, and in the process collected enough stories (from the ridiculous to the sublime) so that we're now actually contemplating ditching the whole game-studies thing and working on a novel instead. But we'll have to see how the search concludes before we give in to temptation.
Given that it's February as we write this, we know that there are now several thousand more people in the world with personal experience of the campus interview, and so we thought it would be good to tell you what it's like to perform this gantlet as a team rather than all by your lonesome.
Having both done a fair number of individual campus interviews, we pretty much knew what to expect. There's the airport pickup by the person who doesn't know what you look like or how to spell your name. There are the research talks and invasive teaching obligations (you know, the ones where the students seem torn between being annoyed by your presence and grateful for the novelty). And of course there's the meeting with the dean and the department head in which the topic of salary is clumsily danced around, promotion and tenure requirements nonchalantly laid out, and a veritable leprechaun's pot o' gold worth of undocumentable perks are mentioned which, while they can't be put in an offer letter (should one be drafted for you), are nonetheless absolutely assured -- more or less.
The best thing about most interviews, however, is meeting all the interesting people who wind up on college campuses: physicists who study toys, folklorists who collect beautiful frog art, computer programmers who only read books written before 1750. And for some reason, having two interviewees instead of just one seems to have increased the number of really interesting people we met, probably because such folks wanted to come see the weirdoes trying to land a dual hire in game studies.
On the flip side, we met more than our fair share of folks we would just as soon have avoided. There was the extremely friendly anti-Semite, the married couple who hated each other almost more than they seemed to hate us (and weren't shy about telling us so), and the human-computer-interaction specialist who seemed expert only in the least desirable human characteristics: rudeness, egocentrism, and narrow-mindedness.
Of course, campus interviews also allow you to meet the folks who ask tough but really interesting questions -- questions you wouldn't have thought of asking yourself -- and the folks who ask questions to trap you or to force you to inadvertently weigh in on some local feud. Ask anyone -- from the greenest Ph.D. to the oldest emeritus professor -- about their job search and they'll all be able to amaze and horrify you with tales from their campus visits.
With a dual interview, however, many of these campus-interview-story tropes take on new psycho-social dynamics, some of them positive and some of them not. On the plus side, being part of a team means that the barrage of questions that fall upon prospective hires can be divided between the two candidates, giving each person a chance to rest briefly before taking on another question.
Campus interviews are notoriously grueling -- some lasting two or three days and planned out without so much as a bathroom break or pre-research-talk downtime built in to the itinerary -- so being able to let your trusted colleague field inquiries for even a minute or two can give you a much-needed chance to take a quick mental break and refocus your thoughts. The advantage of this is that the barrage of questions can be met with an equal barrage of well-informed, thoughtful, and energetic answers (or so we'd like to think, anyway).
Two people on the interview also means a greater ability to size up an institution and discern PR from reality. Moving to a new place, geographically and institutionally, is rarely an easy decision because it requires giving up certain comforts and routines (even if those "comforts" are little more than knowing where the bodies are buried at one's current institution) in the hope that better ones will materialize elsewhere.
Having someone who's living through the experience of being vetted for a role in a new community right there along with you helps tremendously in the process of evaluating the job offers that may subsequently follow. On more than one occasion we've gone back to our hotel rooms after a day full of interviews, lectures, discussions, insults, debates, and sales pitches and compared notes: yes, he doesn't appreciate cultural studies; no, we haven't done enough quantitative research to be attractive to this faculty; yes, we'd die a slow and painful death in this tiny little town, that is, if our wives, Justine and Rachel, didn't kill us first for persuading them to move here.
The downside of dual interviews is that most people don't know how to arrange such things, including us. As a consequence, gaffes such as the one we mention at the start of this essay -- being scheduled for 40 meetings in 48 hours -- are more the rule rather than the exception.
Two people seems to mean to interview organizers twice as many opportunities to put the candidates through their paces: multiple research talks and teaching demonstrations, discussions with faculties from several departments, and a steely resolve to work the candidates from sun up until late into the night.
At one interview, and despite our protest several days in advance, we were scheduled for a breakfast meeting at 7 a.m. -- bad enough for night owls like us, but made far worse by the fact that the campus was in a time zone three hours earlier than Tucson, where we live. For us, then, our first meeting was at 4 a.m., and we were not dropped back off at our hotel until 8 p.m. That is a long day even by workaholic academic standards.
There's also the problem of administrators who don't know how to think about a team hire, especially when they begin imagining how these two people will move through the typically individualistic tenure and promotion process.
People have said that we're like Penn and Teller doing an infomercial. That kind of weird but thrilling faculty interaction comes naturally to us but catches some people off guard, especially those who expect researchers to stand upon their carefully chosen métiers as if they were stone foundations.
In our next (and likely last) essay documenting our search for a dual hire, we'll let you know the results, as well as tell you about the tiny subculture that has emerged as a consequence of our series. It turns out that even more than speculating if we're lovers (we're not -- we skipped over the love part and went right to the petty bickering), people want to know if it is in fact possible to build academic careers in the humanities based on collaboration.
