For lucky academic job hunters, this is the season of the campus visit. You’ve made it past the first-round cut and now you get to buy interview clothes you can’t afford, analyze menus for the “most professional” meal choice, remove your wedding ring so as to avoid the (correct) suspicion of a trailing spouse, and other joys. This year, at several recent conferences, I’ve heard senior professors cheerily herald the return of the in-person campus interview — but it’s a view that baffles me as someone who was just on the academic job market.
Is that a normal we really want to return to?
Having experienced both in-person and virtual campus interviews in the past few years, I am here to make the case for the virtues of virtual visits. They are a small step that any department can take to make the faculty job market slightly less ghastly and far more equitable for everyone. Here are a few of the reasons virtual visits are an improvement over the in-person format:
They are more accessible. For candidates with disabilities or health issues, it is easier to expect and request an accommodation when you (a) know what the setting is, and (b) have control of your surroundings.
An example: In 2019, a month before a campus visit, I underwent emergency surgery for a detached retina. By the time of the interview, I was mostly recovered; the stitches in my eyeball had dissolved and I was only having intermittent vision disruptions. It seemed like I would be able to pull off the trip. I didn’t have a problem until I arrived at the site of my job talk, and learned that it would take place in a black-box theater. The room’s harsh overhead lighting triggered dramatic flashers in my affected eye and made it almost impossible for me to read my talk (unsurprisingly, it didn’t go well). No one had told me the location — my institution didn’t have a black-box theater, so it wasn’t even on my radar as a possibility — and it would never have occurred to me to request that my talk not take place in such a venue.
By definition, in-person campus visits create these kinds of accommodation predicaments. As a candidate, you are on unfamiliar terrain, and unable to anticipate what kind of accommodations you may require in that environment. By contrast, virtual campus visits allow you to anticipate accessibility issues and to work with the search committee to come up with equitable resolutions in advance.
They limit the risk of discrimination, and protect institutions from liability. In that same year, I also had the dubious honor of going on the job market while seven months pregnant, and the comments I received about the potential impact of my pregnancy on my academic output would make any administrator blush, and then immediately call the legal team.
It is worth noting that all of these (often well-meaning) comments occurred in casual conversations — during the walks around the campus, the chatter before lunch, the moments when faculty members relaxed and made offhand remarks. They were often delivered in a confessional tone — parent to expectant parent — about “how hard it is to get any work done with a newborn” or “you won’t get anything done for a year, at least.” These were moments of humanity, and having now raised a newborn, I understand the impulse to share realistic expectations of that stage of life. But because of the inherent power imbalance present between a search-committee member and a job candidate, such comments were inappropriate and made me wonder whether my pregnancy would hurt my candidacy.
By contrast, the virtual visit doesn’t have a lot of off-the-cuff moments — everything happens in video-interview mode. There are no quick walks across the quad when someone might feel free to drop the professional posture. In my experience, the number of off-hand, overly personal comments went from too-many-to-count to zero.
It is also worth noting that, in many cases, virtual visits give applicants with various ability statuses the choice of disclosing disabilities — or not — in a way that in-person visits simply don’t allow for. No amount of billowy scarves could have hidden the fact that I was seven months pregnant, but I could have arranged my camera’s view to stop at my shoulders.
They are more equitable. Historically, I’ve heard search-committee members cite campus visits as an important opportunity to evaluate candidates for “cultural fit.” But if you listen to stories about the academic job market for too long, you start hearing admonishing anecdotes about the candidate who slurped soup, who wore a short skirt, who had “never heard of Yo-Yo Ma.” Such incidents are trotted out as examples of someone failing the “fit” question, though it is easy to see that they also perpetuate biases.
Even when the remarks are intended to be supportive — “This candidate knits/hikes/listens to NPR/listens to Rammstein! They’ll fit right in!” — their unstated, underlying premise is that the preferred candidate should be “just like us.”
Of course, cultural affiliation is a powerful human instinct, but by virtue of the format of virtual campus visits — there are no car rides to the hotel in which to have the NPR/Rammstein revelation — they help keep the focus on the applicant’s research and teaching. Search committees do need to ask important cultural questions: “Share your strategies for creating an accessible and inclusive classroom dynamic.” But such questions should be given center stage as a part of the interview itself, not mentioned in passing on the way to dinner.
They are kinder. Perhaps this reason will be less persuasive to HR, but it should be persuasive to any faculty members who have ever wrung their hands about the cruelty of today’s tenure-track job market. Deep down, we can all recognize that it isn’t a kindness to invite candidates to your wonderful town, show them adorable houses, spar with them intellectually at trendy brew-pub lunches, and parade them around their maybe-future office — if they aren’t going to be offered the job.
By all means, fly out the person who is actually going to be offered the position. The top candidate should have a funded opportunity to see the institution and place, and do the important work of exploring housing, asking about health-care policies, touring local schools, etc., without seeming presumptuous.
But spare the emotional labor and anguish of the two or three other people who aren’t going to be offered the position. If you are feeling particularly hospitable, send everyone a gift box with local goodies as a thank-you. (My partner once had a virtual visit at a small Wisconsin college and it mailed him a kringle, the locally renowned coffee cake. The gesture was sweet, and so was the pastry.)
They are cheaper for institutions. Instead of flying in, housing, and wining and dining three or four finalists, do all of that for the candidate to whom you offer the job. Reallocate the remainder of your schmoozing budget to your graduate students or adjuncts. They need it more.
They are cheaper for applicants. Institutions tend to present the campus visit as if it were a gesture of great largesse to pay for a flight and a hotel room, yet they ignore the real cost of the trip to the candidate. For in-person visits, applicants must, for example, buy clothing suitable for the climate of the institution they are visiting, which may be very different from their daily wardrobe. They may have to hire 24-hour child-care or elder-care support while they’re traveling. And some institutions may not fully reimburse candidates for all of their trip expenses (such as the cost of a taxi ride — or a rental car, for rural candidates — needed to reach the airport). For many applicants, those auxiliary expenses constitute real barriers, and unless departments are willing to pay the true cost of a campus visit for every candidate, they should offer virtual visits, which would either completely eliminate or greatly mitigate the costs listed above.
Full disclosure: I might be a little biased. I had several in-person campus visits that didn’t end in an offer, and a virtual visit that did. Mostly, of course, those outcomes had to do with the extent to which my research and teaching profile matched the respective positions. But I think the format did play a role in helping me land my job.
During my virtual campus visit, the entire focus was on the interview. My performance wasn’t affected by logistical challenges, financial hardships, or unforeseen accessibility hurdles. As a humanities scholar who is generally nostalgic for analog modalities of all sorts, I nonetheless see the virtual campus interview as a real improvement over its predecessor.
Short of being able to magically conjure more tenure lines, we owe it to academic job seekers to make the process of applying for faculty jobs more equitable, more accessible, cheaper, and less exhausting — emotionally and otherwise.
