First Person

Learning to Follow Directions

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By Grant Greene

The call finally came: a campus interview for a one-year replacement position in Christianity. I was close to earning my Ph.D. in religious studies from an Ivy League university, and this was my first invitation to interview on a campus. At this point in the year (two months after the religious-studies conference) it was probably my only shot at academic employment. I was ecstatic.

Frankly, I had applied only on a whim. The position itself sounded like an unlikely bet, a temporary teaching job at an elite New England liberal-arts college in the field of "The Christian Tradition" or in "Religion in America." Since I have proficiency in only one of the two fields (Christian Tradition) and only ancient Christianity at that, it seemed that they would be looking for someone else, a modernist probably.

My initial pessimism seemed justified. The search committee interviewed candidates at the conference but I was not among them. Two months later I got the call.

The department wanted me to give a sample lecture for an introductory course to the Christian tradition, followed by a half-hour Q&A on "meta-issues" in teaching (whatever that means). No presentation of my research. Lunch with the chairman. Three 20-minute interviews with individual faculty members. Dinner.

If hired, I would be required to teach the introductory Christian-tradition course. But otherwise I could teach some of the courses normally taught by the professor on leave, perhaps augmented by one or two "experimental" courses of my own design. It all sounded reasonable, and while a one-year appointment was not ideal, it seemed the most I could hope for.

But when I got an e-mail message from the chairman listing the courses that the department would like me to teach, things started to seem weird. Beyond the survey of Christianity (well within my range as a specialist in the early church) he suggested that I teach seminars in modern Christianity, contemporary Christianity, and the theology of Thomas Aquinas. I was baffled. I have no experience or expertise in any of these areas. What was going on?

Reflexively I blamed myself first: Did I fraudulently claim in my cover letter to have some sort of facility in medieval scholasticism and contemporary religious thought? I checked my cover letter. Nope.

Other possibilities ran through my mind. Are the committee members so out of touch with the historical fields of religious studies that they really don't know the difference between early Christianity and medieval scholasticism? Or did they not read my materials? If they didn't, then why are they even interviewing me?

Regardless, I wasn't going to refuse a campus interview, so I put my reservations aside and got my lecture ready. The only question was the 30 minutes of Q&A on "meta-issues." I just couldn't imagine how my lecture would spark a half-hour discussion on teaching issues. But hey, I thought, Iíll give it a shot.

Unfortunately, six days before my interview, while I should have been preparing my lecture, I was leveled by influenza: six days of intermittent fevers, uncontrollable chills, a sore throat, and an immeasurable volume of morbid humors (mainly phlegm) amassed in my upper chest and head. This made breathing, and thus sleep, painfully difficult. By the day of the interview I was on the mend, but barely so. And buoyed by various decongestants and stimulants I made my way to the interview, having barely slept and barely practiced my lecture.

At lunch with the chairman I immediately realized that the department was not a good fit. Its approach to religion was wholly comparative -- which was completely alien to me, trained in a department of historians. The chairman wanted my feedback to his morning's lecture on apocalypticism in his "Introduction to the Religious Experience." His lecture could have been straight from Joseph Campbell's musings with Bill Moyers: He drew heavily on theorists like Mircea Eliade, whom I have never read and whose name only comes up in derisive comments in my neck of the woods. The next week I told one of my professors about this conversation and he said, "Did you tell him that we all think Eliade is shit?" (I didn't.)

After lunch we toured campus in the snow and ice. The whole time my attention was divided evenly between not slipping on the ice (my dress shoes lacked tread), and controlling the flow of mucus from my nose. I didn't come off as particularly engaging.

I then began a string of 20-minute interviews. I shared common research interests with the first professor, so we had a pleasant conversation, in which I learned that she didn't particularly like the department. The second professor was also friendly, and used the interview to ask me all the questions about Christianity that he had come across in his own research, mostly about the finery of medieval Christian liturgy, which I know nothing about. He also didn't like the department.

The third professor (who had nothing particularly negative to say about the department) used the time to tell me about his philosophy of teaching. I responded with polite nods and approving grunts. He then told me about his interview at the college. "When I interviewed," he began, "they asked me to do the impossible: to condense into one hour the essence of Judaism. It was a fantastic exercise -- what we really need is for someone to do that in Christianity."

It suddenly hit me. This was the lecture that I was supposed to deliver in one hour. I had misunderstood the assignment. I was not to deliver a lecture in an "Introduction to Christianity" class. I was to deliver the introductory lecture to "Introduction to Christianity." Suddenly the whole 30-minute Q&A on "meta-issues" made sense. They were going to ask me how I would organize the course, my philosophy of teaching, my holistic understanding of the theological and historical essence of Christianity. I had simply heard what I wanted to hear: an introductory lecture, which took me much less time to prepare than a one-hour epitome of the Christian religion. In short, I was screwed.

Somehow I remained calm. I already knew that the department and I were a bad fit. I already had a strong feeling that I wouldn't get the job, so what did it matter? The only thing to do was to fess up, and try to make light of it.

The chairman didn't make things any easier for me by spelling out in his introduction exactly what I was not going to do. He told the audience that I was going to give the introductory lecture to "Introduction to Christianity" and outline the general scope of the course, during which time I could step out and comment on the methods that I was using. I wish that he had been that explicit when he gave me the instructions.

I sucked it up, humorously gave my apologies, and delivered my lecture. And I was right: It was hard to fill a half hour with questions about my lecture. Eighty awkward minutes later the chairman thanked me and the room emptied.

I had an hour to kill between my lecture and dinner. I sat in my hotel room replaying the day's events. I considered simply packing up and heading home. The last thing I wanted to do was sit through a dinner after this embarrassment. But by that point I was so tired that I would never make the drive home. I'd surely die of hypothermia in a Vermont snowbank. So I popped a couple more Advil Cold and Sinus and resigned myself to dinner.

It was actually not insufferable. Since I knew I was not getting the job, I relaxed. And for the first time I actually had the chance to discuss something that I knew, early Christianity. When I expressed interest in teaching New Testament (which would be far easier for me than "modern Christianity"), one committee member said, "Oh, you would be interested in teaching New Testament?" She clearly had not read any of my supporting materials either.

Dinner concluded and we said goodbye. Another committee member shook my hand and said, "So I suppose you met everyone else at the [religious studies] conference in Denver?"

"No," I said, confused. "I didn't interview at the conference." She too had a puzzled look on her face that I couldn't read. Not knowing what else to say, I returned to my room, watched Animal Planet, and fell asleep.

The whole situation still confuses me: Why wasn't I interviewed at the conference? Why was I interviewed at all? Why did most of the committee members have no idea who I was? And how did I manage to completely garble the lecture instructions (which seemed crystal clear in the chairman's mind)?

Most of all, why was I ultimately offered the job a few weeks later? At least I learned enough during the interview to know not to take it.