The Other Candidate

By Ben Jackson

I often wondered about "the other candidate," the one who got the job offer when I didn't.

Why was he or she a better fit than I? What did I do wrong?

Even though I had mixed feelings last year about even applying for a position at a larger, more famous university than the one at which I work, and even if I do have a job that, on balance, I like, I still wanted to get the offer.

I didn't, and it hurt.

I felt that I was a good fit for the other university's needs. I have a varied publication record, excellent student evaluations, and a great deal of teaching and professional experience. I thought the interviews went pretty well. The department chairman was encouraging. We even talked money, which is always a good sign.

Of course, I wanted a higher salary than the department was offering. I was soon to be up for tenure at my current university, and my prospects there looked good for both tenure and promotion. I told all this to members of the search committee during the interview, and they seemed to respect that.

When I heard nothing for a month, I knew I hadn't gotten the job. The department chairman finally called me and said I was "overqualified." He also mentioned "intangibles." I wondered what that meant but didn't lose sleep over it at the time. Then recently I ran into a faculty member from that university who was visiting my campus. I just had to ask about the new hire.

When the question came up, my friend looked around furtively to make sure nobody would overhear him. "He's a black guy," he said. "You know how it is."

My colleague didn't discuss the other candidate's qualifications, background, teaching, or personality. Just saying "black guy" was apparently enough.

The nods, the eye rolls, the hushed tones that go with that statement are common among us white guys, even the so-called liberals among us. It all means, if you're a white guy, that you can tell yourself that your background and qualifications matter less than the other candidate's skin color. If there's a minority candidate, he or she will be highly favored. So, if you lose out, it's not like you did anything wrong.

For a moment, I was relieved. But then I began to feel guilty. I felt relieved because I could hold on to the idea that I had done nothing wrong in the interview process. They had to take the black guy.

I thought -- if only for a second -- that just because the other guy was African American, he was probably less qualified than me. My good-liberal superego tells me that it's wrong to even allow such a thought to enter my mind, but I am also a white male dealing with diversity issues in a very personal way. I wrestled with my feelings.

Was I an angry white male? A Rush Limbaugh "dittohead?" Was I about to register Republican?

I once heard that a neoconservative is a liberal who's been mugged. Have I been mugged? Is it racist to even ask that question?

I remember a sociology professor who worked at my university for a time. As a woman of color, she confronted her predominantly white classes with the admonition that white people can't say they're not racist until they compete against a black person in the job market. I thought it was an odd statement. Now I understood what she meant.

But I wanted to sort out what it meant for me. In order to do so, I needed to find out more about the other guy.

Naturally, I did an Internet search. The other candidate was a bit of a cipher. The university had made no major announcement about hiring him. I did find he had a Ph.D. from a good, mid-level research university, comparable to mine. He had served on his graduate school's student council representing his department, and he finished his doctorate last year.

That was all I could easily find. There was no listing of papers or presentations; no mentions of panels, publications, service or prior professional work. I did a search of my own name for comparison's sake and found more than 100 references to my scholarly and professional activities. While certainly not impressive, it was a lot more than the other guy. Then again, I have nearly 10 years as an instructor, assistant professor, and now associate professor at the university level. He's just starting. Of course, I might have missed a lot of things, and the Web sites might not have mentioned everything. Still, I found the lack of information on this man unusual.

I wonder how much time and effort I should spend finding out more about him. Part of me feels I should just assume he's a better fit for the other university's needs. It's probably healthier for me to leave the whole thing alone.

But I still have to deal with diversity issues, and I want to pay them more than lip service. Diversity comes up all the time, and it should. I want to know in my own white-male mind how to address it better. I served on one hiring committee recently and consulted on another. My university is very serious about diversifying its faculty. That's not the enactment of some politically correct philosophy; it's a necessity. Our student population is getting more black and Hispanic; so is the rest of the country. Our majority-white students have to be able to work in that environment, so they benefit by being confronted by diverse perspectives. I believe that wholeheartedly.

But how legitimately can I enact diversity initiatives when they might have hurt my own career? Is it wrong to wonder to what extent diversity played into the other guy's favor and against mine?

Three months after I found out about the other candidate, I still don't have answers to these questions. Indeed, it seems the whole country is asking related ones. Since I found out about the other candidate, the papers have been filled with news about the University of Michigan's affirmative-action cases, and about how Jayson Blair melted down at The New York Times, dragging down two top editors with him.

The questions aren't being resolved for academe, the news media, the nation, or me. All I can say is that I am still sorting it all out.