Under what democratic circumstances does a SCC make a "presentation" of someone's candidacy *to the rest of the committee*?
In some departments (including mine), the SCC makes a presentation of all three candidates to the department meeting (not the search committee)
after the campus visit. Then one sc member discusses why the committee has ranked the candidates is a particular order.
Our old provost was pushing for departments to increase their minority and underrepresented faculty. He once told me about a method of searching where the applications are divided up and each SC member then advocates for the candidates in his pile. Or maybe just for one person in his pile? (It was a casual chat.) The idea was that it would force the committee to consider candidate who otherwise get too quickly pushed aside in the usual tendency to hire people like ourselves.
I thought the idea was intriguing but perhaps not fully baked. In any case the provost was fired the next year and I don't know if any searches were run with this approach. But it would involve members of the SC presenting candidates to the committee as a whole.
