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[Anonymous]

A while ago, I received a rejection call from a church-related liberal-arts college in New England that I was very much interested in.  

I knew from the previous calls from the search-committee chair that I was the English department's first choice.  However, the day the vice president was supposed to call me with the good news, I did not get a call. What happened was that the vice president had brought up a regulation that nobody had remembered, which said that the college first must offer the position to an American citizen before it could be offered to a foreign candidate.

While I understand that colleges who want to hire an international scholar must prove to the Immigration and Naturalization Service that their candidate is the best one and cannot be replaced by an American, I still wonder why the department's choice is not good enough.

[Csaba Istvan]

As an international candidate, I am intrigued about how search committees might judge research outcomes published in parochial scientific communities (in the non-English-speaking world). Do they assume they are low quality??