After two campus visits this past week (and four full days of cross-country travel) I am completely exhausted, but also encouraged and energized by the whole experience. It’s true that when a search committee brings you to town they do so because something has seriously attracted them to you as a candidate. My hosts at both schools made me feel like a star: We ate at excellent local restaurants, my hotel rooms had king-size beds, and everywhere I went someone wanted to talk about my research. On the whole, it was clear that the search committees were doing their best to limit the stresses of a demanding schedule.
That said, I was surprised (though, of course, I shouldn’t have been) to realize that not everyone liked me or even wanted to. At one point I gave a job talk to a group of faculty representatives from other departments. One professor planted herself in the center of the second row and scowled at me throughout my presentation. It probably would have been distracting, but I had noticed the anger on her face when she first walked into the room and I convinced myself that it had nothing to do with me. As it turns out, I was wrong. When the time came for questions, she accused me of sexism and asked how in the world I expected to effectively teach women.
Apparently, somewhere in the hundred-odd pages of application materials I submitted, I had used the word “man” as a synonym for “humankind.” I felt falsely accused and misrepresented by the quotation she lifted out of context, but more than anything else I was caught off guard by her animosity. I think I was able to explain that the fault lay in my phrasing and that I certainly didn’t intend to exclude women, but I was flustered. In hindsight, I should have cited examples of particularly productive relationships I have had with female students and pointed this professor to their evaluations in my teaching portfolio, but I hadn’t gone into the interview thinking I would need to prove my respect for women.
In the dozens of interviews I have had these last few months on the job market, this was my first openly hostile question. I am glad it happened because it allowed me to recognize what a mistake it can be to think of ourselves as interviewing “at a university” or “with a search committee,” in other words before an impersonal unit. We’re dealing with individuals, each with their own baggage and agenda, and that’s quite a bit messier. Given how much talking and writing goes into job seekers’ self-presentation, even the most politically nimble are likely to step on someone’s toes. While our host introduces us with accolades, someone else is grumbling.
My question then, is how do we gracefully respond to our detractors when we meet them? In this case, the interviewer in question left still angry. I obviously failed to set her at ease. After the event was over, several of her colleagues apologized for her treatment of me, but I never saw her again and never had another chance to set things right between us. Have other job seekers had similar experiences? What can you do to address the concerns of that professor who you suspect didn’t want you to visit in the first place? If they don’t explicitly voice their hesitations, how do you spot and answer them? Or is that exactly what our advisers are preparing us to do when they say, “just be yourself”?
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