New Technology Makes for Old Ears

“Suffice to say [it's] the Blair Witch [Project] of academic jobs,” a comment about Zenith’s History department from the job wiki.

Whew!  And yowza.  That’s some strong stuff, TR.  (I might beg to differ, given my own personal experiences, but everyone’s got a sob story, don’t they?)

Wow, you are truly devoted! I commend you for showing the tenacity and patience to deal with academic hiring for so many years of commentary. The truth is, it’s a horrendous process and often where the academy shows its corruption and unprofessionalism most flagrantly.

I teach at a CSU, where our tradition (English dept) is to use our money to fly a contingent to the MLA and then have a department party on Saturday night, to which all the applicants are invited to attend and meet each other. There are currently different schools of thought about this; some people feel this is too uncomfortable to be fair (it is a bit like Academic Elimidate). Others think it shows whether a job candidate can deal with messy, awkward, and uncomfortable situations without getting prissy or weird. 

I have never done a Skype interview either as an applicant or interviewer. I have been on three search committees so far. Some of my colleagues think Skype is good; others have worries about fairness and also equal access to technology for applicants. Mostly we haven’t found a way to get Skype to pass the smell test at the Equity and Diversity office, so it’s not a go yet. But I’ll take your feedback to heart.

In honor of the holiday season here’s my yearly post on the English job fair:

http://criticalnewsscan.blogspot.com/2011/11/my-annual-academic-job-market-horror.html

Vive la difference!

Don’t even try, dude.  One bottle of Jameson’s, messengered over, tomorrow.

Well, reading the annals of horrible experiences is a great “what not to do” for search chairs (which I am).   Simple politeness is really a good idea!

It’s always the less desirable positions that–if they’re smart–make their offers early. Then they try to frighten the offeree into taking the offer before she receives any other more desirable offers by claiming they are going to rescind the offer. This is all just a strategy to try to fill less desirable positions with the best possible candidates.

The fact of the matter, however, is that if you receive a December offer, the offerer has decided that you are most likely good enough to receive more offers later, and this is their “hail mary” pass. So even if they say, “deadline to accept is January 5″, you can still almost certainly get them to extend the offer a few more times. This is because their best-case scenario is that you eventually do take the offer, and their worst-case scenario is that they make an offer to one of the people further down their list who isn’t going to get any other offers anyway, and will likely take the offer whenever it is made.

One of the arguments that the AHA would make about its system of convention interviews would be that it offers all the candidate real choices by making the process, and the timelines,  more uniform.  On the other hand, even when they adhere to interviews at AHA, schools move on very different schedules, and candidates are often in the position of making a choice without exactly knowing what the range of choices will be. Ultimately candidates who are only looking for academic jobs have very limited choices and have few opportunities to activate what they might want:  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the early searches only make that more obvious. 

One disadvantage of the traditional market, from my point of view, is that public unis are often dependent on a public budget that is decided early in the year, whereas the job market is geared to a budget year that begins July 1.  Hence, publics not infrequently advertise jobs they cannot ultimately fund, but they need to assemble a candidate pool in a conventional way to have any hope of getting a crack at the people they want should they be allowed to hire. The economic crash a couple of years ago made that true for a lot of privates too:  what might be better is if the spring market — usually for senior jobs, visitors and post-docs — was also seen as a viable market for beginning tenure stream jobs as well.

My department made an offer to our top candidate several years ago for a tenure track position, and he accepted. A month later he wrote back and withdrew his acceptance, citing serious family issues that made it impossible to leave the position he already had. We opted not to offer the position to anyone else on our short list, and re-opened the search a year later, with a happy outcome. There was not much that we could do about the first guy’s decision to turn us down after accepting. We were not even inclined to take any action, since we believed that his acceptance was sincere, and was withdrawn in response to issues beyond his control.

But it also reminded us that there’s not much a university can do if a job candidate is simply unethical enough to accept a position knowing that s/he will turn it down in a few months if a better one comes along. I don’t recommend this to my own students when they are on the market, but I’d have to acknowledge that it would be hard to prevent or stop. And if a department thinks that it can get the jump on the process by making offers months before other universities do, that department runs the risk of locking itself into a candidate who just might stick it to them a few months later.

Rock on!  Good luck with it.