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Being Bad

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By Darren Fite

I did a bad thing during a job interview for a faculty position in journalism. However, I didn't feel all that bad about it.

In fact, to guard against taking the wrong faculty job, I encourage you to be bad. Universities constantly plan circumstances to try to view candidates as they "really" are. Shouldn't candidates use that same technique? We tend to forget that the candidate is interviewing the department and the university, too.

So, I showed up seven minutes late for an appointment with the department head. I showed up seven minutes late on purpose.

I did that because I needed to know something crucial:

• Was the department head unduly fastidious (translation: manipulative and petty, likely to hover over the copy machine to see that I input the correct access code and did not make more copies than the maximum allowed by department fiat)?

• And if so, would his proclivity for the fastidious be so inveterate (translation: anal) that he would change his entire outlook toward me based on the fact that I was to pick him up at his home for a university-sponsored event but got lost?

• Would he suffer a seven-minute wait if he knew I was driving in the dark in a strange town for the first time?

He suffered all right. He suffered for the rest of the interview. Even though I had spent an entire day with this seemingly cheerful and accommodating person, and even though I could tell he liked me and what I had to offer the university, everything changed the night I did the bad thing.

No, I don't regret doing it.

That little stunt cost me the job, but I learned what I needed to learn: I did not want that job. Just as departmental personnel usher the candidate into a classroom or a dean's office and, in effect, say "perform," so the candidate has an obligation to assess the potential employer's performance, even if that performance has to be artificially induced.

Look, I am not advocating that you do anything drastic during the interview. It's not the time to pull a gun on the dean or kiss the human-resources rep on the lips to see how they react.

I am advocating what you might call proactive interviewing. Go ahead and discover what is essential to your prospective success -- or lack of it -- at the institution you may commit to. If that involves a bit of warranted prevarication (translation: lying) about getting temporarily lost, go ahead and prevaricate.

Given the cold post-pickup reception of my interviewer, and his even colder deportment during the rest of my stay, I realized that I could never work for the guy or work for anyone who reacted as childishly he had -- a personality trait that he was able to hide until I did the bad thing. You may accuse me of childish behavior, too, but even after my seven-minute delay, we arrived at the campus event 30 minutes before it started. And he was still ticked.

Some people use the first-date analogy to describe the faculty interview, and the comparison has merit. You only have a day or two to find out if an impending commitment will be the right one and, naturally, everyone is on their best behavior. Of course, in the real world of dating, over several months, one does discover idiosyncracies and little flaws and learns to love the potential beloved despite those shortcomings -- or not.

In the case of a faculty interview, however, the first date is about all you get before you have to make the commitment decision. Idiosyncracies will be tolerable during your tenure run with the university. However, deadly managerial fastidiousness and regularly scheduled fistfights during faculty meetings are the kind of thing you had better discover on that first-and-only interview.

Sometimes, you don't have to be overtly bad. The people you're interviewing with will do the work for you. Universities generally give candidates time to meet with a group of students without any member of the search committee present. The head of the search committee will tell you, "Ask the students anything you want."

The nice thing about that situation is that the candidate rarely has to ask anything. Students tend to open up and volunteer important information, even though the students who get asked to participate in these things are a group of carefully selected "ringers" who are not typical of the doofuses (doofi?) and slackers who make up most of the student body.

During my meeting with students, I didn't need to probe. I just listened. The students were happy to tell me what bothered them and what needed improving.

The truth is, the university has little to lose by choosing you. Just look at the circumstances: You are given a one-year contract on the tenure track. If you get hired, you will be regularly poked and prodded by colleagues eager to see if they made the right decision. Will you follow all the rules associated with faculty-fistfight etiquette and proper use of the copy machine? If you don't you are easily shoved out the door.

For you, much more is at stake. You may have just purchased a home and installed your kids in the local elementary school. Your spouse has uprooted and now needs to reroot. It is essential to make certain your gamble with the university has a good chance of paying off.

So consider doing a bad thing. Or two.

Which reminds me of another bad thing I did. The minute an administrator gives you his or her business card and tells you to "call or e-mail me anytime with any kind of question you have," make a mental note to tear up that card as soon as you get back to the hotel. Administrators do not want to hear from you. Their "call me" utterance is on par with "Let's get together" or "Stop in sometime."

OK, so I did e-mail an administrator to say that the interview process had left me with some concerns about how the department in question was run. Could we talk? Her response: "We can talk after the appropriate candidate is selected."

So much for stopping in sometime. She's just lucky I wasn't her ride to commencement.