First Person

Turn and Face the Strange

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By Philip Rubin

The other day on the radio I heard a cover of "Ziggy Stardust" by the Austin band The Gourds. I felt a little sick to my stomach.

I feel that way every time I hear David Bowie. This aversion may not be quite as forceful as Alex's conditioned response to Beethoven in A Clockwork Orange, but Bowie does trigger an unpleasant association for me with the academic job market. The queasiness is a somatic reminder of my unfortunate tendency to speak freely in high-stakes situations and then choke on my words in retrospect.

"David Bowie" spilled from my lips in April 2004, near the close of my first season on the market. I was sitting with the director and the assistant to the director of a brand new graduate program at an elite Northeastern liberal-arts college. I had concluded the formal part of a visit that the graduate dean, in a subsequent encouraging e-mail, described as "a big success." They had taken me to a lovely, impressively cosmopolitan restaurant.

The place had evidently seen a lot of traffic during that job-market season as I was among the last in a long parade of candidates for multiple positions. My two companions scarcely needed to look at the menu. I was reminded, as I often have been throughout the hiring process, of dating: specifically, I thought of my friends who do online dating and always have their first dates meet them at the same restaurant, their home court.

Somehow, I avoided articulating that particular association to my dinner companions. Someone must have spoken of something else before I could get to the vocalization stage of my thought process.

But I was feeling precariously relaxed. I was drinking a beer. I liked these people, and I felt they were inviting me to set aside all the circumstances of the job search, as they themselves seemed to have done. We talked about the assistant's upcoming wedding, and reminisced about the director's youth. He mentioned attending a David Bowie concert. In a flash, I saw it, and then spoke it: "You know, you bear more than a passing resemblance to David Bowie."

Generally, is it advisable to comment on the physical appearance of a prospective employer? Specifically, is it a good idea for the applicant to tell the principle decision-maker in the hiring process that he looks like an aging, androgynous, cross-dressing rock star?

The director frowned. I've seen such frowns since, during convention interviews, when my response to a question wasn't quite what the interviewer had hoped for.

"That's not very flattering," the program director said.

The assistant attempted a rescue: "I think David Bowie is handsome!" she said. I agreed. But the director wasn't convinced.

Our conversation moved on, and it might well have been just as casual as before, but it was no longer the same for me, because I was stuck thinking, did I really just say that? I maintained that split consciousness -- lighthearted conversation and panicked thoughts -- for about 10 minutes, and then I said: "You know, I was thinking it over, and you really don't look like David Bowie." He frowned again.

When he got the check, I thanked them for the dinner, and he was gracious. "It gives us a chance to unwind."

"I just wouldn't want to unwind too much," I said. A third and final frown.

At home, I Googled up some images of David Bowie, and found them startlingly ghoulish. I agonized about our conversation for the next couple weeks, as I waited (in vain, it turned out) for the director to call.

But I tried to counsel myself that my anxiety was misplaced. Lost a job because of David Bowie? Ridiculous! My visit had been a "big success"! (Had the dean conferred with the director before sending that e-mail?) If I didn't get an offer, it must be because of factors beyond my control.

Yet it is not only the predilections of the department members and the qualifications of the other candidates that are beyond our control. There are also the vagaries of discourse.

As scripted as job-market interactions can seem, we can never fully anticipate our cues -- much less the thoughts they will bring to mind. One tangential question may lead straight to an obscure pocket of expertise; another may expose an embarrassing lacuna in our training. Certain associations may be the stuff of skillful improvisation; others are perhaps better left unsaid. But there isn't time to consider the ramifications of every utterance. We rely upon equivocal safeguards -- our intuition and inhibitions.

The same season, I had another interview at a state university on the West Coast. This time, my own perceived misstep was overshadowed by an astonishing remark from a professor during the Q&A following my research presentation.

He seemed concerned that my research focus, and my emphasis on form over content in my statements about pedagogy, devalued literature. He wanted to know: What about literature as vehicle of enrichment, a mirror of the human condition, a repository of values?

Instead of simply admitting to my unadulterated love of literature, I followed an impulse and described an essay I had written over a decade earlier, before graduate school, after a stint teaching literature in a high school in Costa Rica. In it, I had compared my work to that of the many evangelical missionaries I had encountered. I was an apostle of secular humanism. But now, I told my interviewers, I felt that such a teaching philosophy was problematic, at best. The title of that essay, I mentioned, was "The Literary Mission."

"Missionary position," my questioner blurted.

Is it appropriate for a faculty member to call out the name of a sexual position during a job talk? (It really happened. I have witnesses; his colleagues seemed more aghast than I was.) Is it a good strategy, for a job candidate, to offer a condescending response to a potential senior colleague that compares his ideological position to one the applicant had held in his youth but now considered naïve?

I reached a point during my first turn on the market where I wanted a job not for its own sake but so that I wouldn't have to endure the market again. It wasn't the so-called face time that I dreaded; I actually enjoyed the interviews, job talks, campus tours, and meals.

Indeed, I enjoyed them too much: The combination of attention, sleep deprivation, and adrenaline produced something like euphoria. But when the high faded, none of it seemed so good in retrospect. The aftermath was miserable: endless second-guessing, waiting, a mounting sense of rejection. I wasn't satisfied with the rationalizations that I had done well for my first time out, that the attention I had received as an A.B.D. was encouraging, and that I had gained valuable experience.

By the time fall 2004 came around, though, I felt ready for another go. I had landed in a prestigious postdoc -- an excellent position from which to apply for jobs. Moreover, it was a bonanza year within my subfield: scads of attractive opportunities. There was even an opening at a public research university that I had in my sights before the listings came out.

With my experience from the previous year, I felt more practiced, more composed, and more emotionally prepared. I had a better idea of what to expect; I wasn't going to take things personally.

"Be more reserved," my wife coached me. I agreed. I wanted to apply the central lesson of my first turn on the market, but I couldn't quite manage it. I couldn't handle an extra level of self-consciousness in situations where I had to think quickly and flexibly and be at ease in socializing with strangers. I couldn't act natural.

So there I was, on the night before the official part of my visit for the position I coveted, in the back seat of a Volvo. The driver was a prospective colleague; in the passenger seat was her husband, the department chairman. It was also just before Valentine's Day, and surprisingly, my hosts had made much of that fact. They have a young child, and if I hadn't given them the pretext to hire a babysitter and go out to a fancy French restaurant, they wouldn't have had a Valentine's date. That was less a joke than a continuing conceit. We were having a candidate dinner, thoroughly enjoyable; they were having a Valentine's date, surpassingly lovely.

My inn was along their route home, but she accidentally drove right past it. "We just enjoyed this so much," she said, "that you felt like part of the family; we were bringing you home with us."

"I think it was the Valentine's date," I said, "This was kind of the logical conclusion."

What had I meant by that? In the car my thoughts had been inchoate, but in my hotel room I began to reflect on how my remark had sounded. I called my wife to consult and she, alarmingly, agreed: Not good.

Is it professional to joke about forming a ménage à trois with one's hosts on a campus visit?

I couldn't afford to spend the night puzzling out such matters of etiquette. I took a sleeping pill. The next day, I felt reassured by everyone's demeanor. I felt fine about my performance at the job talk. By dinnertime, when I was entertained by two faculty members in a restaurant filled with amorous couples, I had long since peaked, but I came away with only my usual fodder for anxiety.

Back home, the wait was difficult, and my nerves were completely frayed by the time I got the department's decision, but the decision itself was just the balm I needed.