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[Dirty]

Dr. Clean,

Fantastic suggestions. All are right on the mark.

[Dirty]

Junior Faculty,

You're not quite on safe ground here. Table manners are very different in different parts of the country: what counts as in California does not count as rude in New York. In addition, there are also international considerations: if the committee consists entirely of Europeans (as is not uncommon in my field), then we Americans do not stand a chance against their table manners. Therefore, it would be best for everyone to lighten up.

[Junior Faculty]

As someone who took a State Department course in diplomatic protocol, which included dining, I think I am on very safe ground.  There are some universals to table manners, even amongst Europeans, and things that will disgust just about everybody when done in front of people interviewing you and mark you as someone they do not want to watch as you eat during occasions stretching off into the tenurable future.

[Junior Faculty]

Dirty is right--manners do vary across the country, which seems like an even more compelling argument to cultivate the most conservative, inoffensive set of habits that you can, rather than attempting to test the limits of acceptability with the people that you encounter--with jobs at stake, isn't that just too big a gamble?

[Just interviewed]

I was interviewed recently and had what I consider a very odd question posed to me by a committee member.

"What do you think about racial diversity in the classroom?"

Background: The university was somewhat racially/ethnically diverse. The committee was obviously diverse. AND from my application packet, they should have been able to see that my research and past experience included a huge amount of "diversity"

Not only did the question seem odd...as if each committee member was told to come with three questions and this was the best he/she could do, but it seems to me that there can be only one type of answer to this question: "It should be encouraged."

How should one answer a question such as this? I must say, it really turned me off of wanting to accept an offer from them.

[Consultant]

Well-intentioned search committees sometimes lack the skills to do a search--even though members might describe themselves as "experienced." As some posts indicate, they may perform this important part of their jobs wretchedly.

Are hiring/interviewing processes well-defined for them? Are they familiar with current literature/practices on the "how to" of hiring? What kinds of support, help, mentoring does the institution provide committees? Do committees reflect on their own practice? Are selection criteria clear?  (These are often lost in deliberations.) Are objective observers ever present to evaluate the performance of  interviewers? Are rules for decision-making clearly defined and followed? Too often, I've seen faculty make choices based on finding "more people like us" as against meeting the future needs of the institution's students and programs.

[anon]

In an interview setting not long ago, I was booked as the interviewee from 8am breakfast through dinner in the evening.  Each session was with a different collection of people and lasted about an hour.  At about 3 in the afternoon I began to feel like I was having an out of body experience.  Each group of people were mainly looking at my resume and repeating the same questions.  This quickly got boring for me and by mid-afternoon I felt like I really didn't want to be there any longer.  At the end of the day, I met with the insitution's President.  He was a very nice guy and in our 30 minute discussion he never repeated any of the questions asked of me all day.  This was refreshing.  But it was already too late.  I was not going to be working with the Prez, but with many of the interviewers.  I remained polite but I had made my decision: if offered the position I would politely decline.  I was never offered the position, but the person who got it lasted only a year and a half.  She left (so the buzz tells it) because she was bored.

[Junior Faculty]

At least in our search, we had to come up with questions in advance and have them approved by the whole food chain, up to the AA/EEO officer.  Most of those questions, to be approved, had so come almost verbatim from the ad we posted.  In that ad, the AA/EEO officer had inserted a phrase about "being able to teach and work with a diverse population", so, voila, that had to be a question.  A good answer might have been one noting your experience with a diverse student population, what a non-homogeneous group brings to the classroom, how you have taught material to a diverse group.  We had little pre-printed scoresheets for how each candidate fit our critera that way, so be prepared to answer any eccentric thing stemming from the ad language.

Also, remember that unless someone was on the search committee, they may not have been allowed to see your c.v.--at our university, it is illegal for non-committee members to look at the files or be told much more than your name, so each person may have genuinely not known anything about you.  It may be boring to you, but each of them is hearing the answer for the first time, and you being bored is a huge turn-off.  

As I noted in the "should I withdraw" thread further up, a lot of the time the things candidates find annoying are things meant for their protection by AA/EEO procedure, state law, or concern for their privacy.  Also, a lot of the time our hands are tied by bureaucratic details.  

However, a key skill for a professor is remaining engaged-looking in the face of "did we do anything important whilo I was gone?/can I turn it in later?/can we leave early?"--questions you will hear 10,000 times more than questions on your resume.  Learn to fake it sincerely and you have a skill for a lifetime.

[Gene Preuss]

Why should you NOT ask someone repeatedly, "what do you teach?"
 Because if you do have to ask repeatedly what someone teaches it shows two weaknesses:

     1. Either you did not bother to do your research and attempt to find out anything about your potential colleagues, or
     2. You weren’t interested in their reply when you asked them the first time, or
     3. Even worse, you don’t listen, or
     4. Even worse, you don’t care, or
     5. Worst of all, all of the above.

[%sig%]

[Almostnew]

Our full faculty just turned down a major-deal-big-time-hot-shot that got voted yes by the smaller search committee 6-1.  Here was the "anti" evidence that was presented:

1) He addressed all of his comments to the senior faculty on the committee - and the person most bothered by this was a senior faculty member.
2) When asked about his vision for the graduate program (the position was at least 1/2 curriculum development), he didn't address it at all and talked about the new center he would build
3) He bragged about having solved a "huge" problem in a subspeciality (not his own!) to someone who checked that out with a big name in the subspeciality - and it seemed the candidate had overstated his contribution.
4) He pulled out his cell phone at lunch and took several calls.

All of this was enough to cast doubt - and the full faculty didn't vote him in.  So even the big experienced candidates can be shot down by this kind of behavior.