A poster in The Chronicle’s Forums raised an important issue for candidates on campus visits. What topics, this poster wondered, should you discuss during lunch with your faculty interviewers? Class size? Teaching and research expectations? Student demographics? What other topics can “make you [look] more outstanding?”
That is not a trivial question. As I always emphasize in my talks on this issue, the point of a campus visit is primarily to demonstrate your collegiality. By the time you make it to this stage of the search, the department is quite convinced about your research, writing, and overall productivity. Now they want to know that you can talk about your research and teaching — and your potential colleagues’ research and teaching — in an engaging, productive and constructive way.
Note my phrasing there: I said you must be able to talk about yourself and others. The campus visit is about engagement and connection. You might think that point is obvious, but how much training does any doctoral student get in talking about other people’s work? Ph.D. programs systematically inculcate self-absorption and obsessiveness. Few are the Ph.D.s who leave this training with any kind of reasonable social skills intact.
Add to that the panic and (implicit or explicit) desperation of the job search, and the end result can be a lunch interview that easily devolves into endless, tedious monologues on your own accomplishments. There is no quicker way to alienate your hosts.
So it behooves all job seekers to spare some thought to what they might talk about while on the campus visit. And indeed, I have a popular blog post about this very subject from a few years back, How to Make Small Talk On Your Campus Visit. That post explores some nonacademic topics that candidates could discuss — which is not exactly what this Forum poster was asking — but the nonacademic topics are at least as important as the academic ones at this juncture. So let me repeat the main points of my blog post here.
The broad context is that professors as a group lean very liberal and cosmopolitan. A slew of recent studies have actually charted a leftward trend among the professoriate, with the percentage of professors describing themselves as liberal or far-left now at 60 percent (up from 42 percent in 1990). Liberals now outnumber conservatives in academe by about 5 to 1. In my years in the professoriate, that was very clear, and we all tended to share a common “language” that was based on a daily perusal of The New York Times and the Huffington Post, of commentary sites like Salon, of left-leaning blogs like Talking Points Memo, and a loose familiarity with current cosmopolitan cultural trends in independent film, theater, music, and art. Academics are widely traveled, and will often talk about their recent trips overseas. There tends to be a strong foodie bent as well, and a sure-fire topic of conversation might be to ask, “Can you get good sushi/Thai/gluten-free food in town?”
In my post, I recommend that job seekers take the time to read some recent issues of the Times — both the national news and the arts section (if you don’t already do that regularly) — and see a much-talked about recent film (if you haven’t already). I also recommend you study up on local politics, particularly any recent Republican assaults on higher education, which might be the overwhelming concern in states like Wisconsin, Illinois, North Carolina, Maine, Arizona, Florida, and so on (this list grows weekly, it seems).
But the Forum questioner specifically mentioned academic topics like student demographics and class size. Certainly these are also things that might come up on a campus visit. However, I want to reiterate that much of the lunch conversation you engage in will actually be on the themes I describe above — not on dry academic topics. Keep in mind a couple points:
- Over lunch the professors are likely to be grilling you on various topics, so it isn’t necessarily your job to come in with a list of questions about the job and the department/campus.
- The conversation over lunch may well be friendly and wide-ranging and touch only briefly on academic themes before going off on tangents about the latest campus political scandal or funding cut.
The fundamental point to remember here is: Different stages of the campus visit give rise to different kinds of conversations. You may well get into a discussion of student demographics during your formal sit-down interview with the search committee, or in a one-on-one meeting with the director of undergraduate studies.
But mealtime conversations may be more casual. Take your cue from your hosts. If they are kicking back with a bottle of wine over dinner and chatting about the amazing celeriac spiralizer Arrabiatta sauce they just made, don’t kill the mood by suddenly demanding to hear about enrollment trends. The point is to engage with their interests as well as to communicate your own.
Having said that, however, there are many moments on a campus visit — particularly toward the end — when you might be asked, “Do you have any questions for us?” You need to have a set of questions prepared to pull out when necessary, and class size and student demographics are excellent topics to raise.
The idea here is to ask open-ended questions — rather than yes/no questions — that allow the responder a wide scope of possible responses and encourage richer conversation. Make sure that your questions don’t cause anyone to lose face. Asking about “junior sabbatical” policies at a small, poorly funded college that could not possibly offer junior sabbaticals to its faculty will not win you friends or promote a warm and fuzzy interaction. Be sure that your questions are tailored to the type of campus and department you are visiting.
Lastly, remember your goal during this interview lunch is to engage. The Forum poster asked how to look “more outstanding,” and that is, in itself, a red flag for a candidate who is going to desperately and tiresomely pontificate about his or her own interests. Read this post by career coach Kellee Weinhold, for more on this problem.
What the faculty want to see, instead, is:
- Someone who will be a good colleague.
- Someone who will ask about other people’s research and teaching interests and find points of commonality.
- Someone who will make connections and engage in meaningful dialogue.
So as you contemplate the campus visit, remember that the goal is always conversation and connection.
