The position in Britain sought me out, as it were. It certainly was not the other way around.
I had settled into a tenured post on a less-than-stellar American public university campus—not altogether happily, but resignedly, given the job market. I had yearnings to move, but they were growing fainter. None of my idle daydreams were about leaving America for England’s green and pleasant land—or Ireland’s or Scotland’s, for that matter.
One day a graduate-school mentor forwarded an e-mail message to me containing a British job announcement. He knew some people in the program there, having spent some time across the Atlantic. So I applied, thinking little of it. I had applied for many positions. I knew the odds.
Once the “school"—as departments are called in Britain—expressed interest in my candidacy, the pace of events unfolded with breathtaking rapidity. I traveled for an interview and, in a single compressed day, the search was over.
Britain really is another country. It can produce a sensation of irreducible foreignness. For me, that feeling did not hit until I was in an anteroom waiting to be called in for my interview.
I did not feel that sense of profound foreignness while standing in the queue at Heathrow. After all, one can stand in a long line with Jamaicans, Pakistanis, and Koreans at LaGuardia as well, whether or not it is called a “queue.” Nor did the feeling overtake me—although maybe it should have—when I found myself counting out the change in my hand as I struggled with the difference between a 10-pence piece and the inexplicably smaller 20-pence coin. Even when the underground train announcement intoned “Mind the gap,” I felt only bemusement.
At a counter in London, the ticket agent, a vestigial cockney, was unable to grasp my accent when I requested a train to my ultimate destination. I had to repeat myself three times. But that was more a case of him finding me incomprehensible than of me finding him odd. It confirmed the old truism that the main difference between England and America is the language.
I did not have the conviction that this was another world until I was seated in that anteroom. It was there that I realized that this academic search was completely different from any American one—for seated with me in the anteroom were the other three candidates for the job.
All four of us, in turn, had given presentations to the faculty that morning. Thankfully, we didn’t have to sit through one another’s talks. Our presentations were to last no more than 15 minutes, leaving another 10 minutes for questions. In the afternoon, when each of us was to be interviewed in succession by the hiring committee, we waited together in that anteroom.
In an American search, of course, you never see the other candidates. You don’t even know how many there are.
Nor does any search take merely one day. A candidate on an American campus visit must have conversations with countless potential colleagues, tour the library and grounds, meet with benefits staff members, converse at dinners, lunches, and breakfasts, meet students at the undergraduate and graduate level, give talks or teaching demos in sessions that often last more than an hour, and otherwise endure a surreal and draining 36 hours, more or less, of social contact lasting from flight to flight. Every gesture is scrutinized, and still American academics complain that they are not able to really get to “know” a person in the “brief time” accorded their campus visit.
Then job candidates in an American search wait for a month or two or three as all of the other candidates are brought in and the committee, department, dean, and provost deliberate. If you are lucky, an offer comes at the end. If less lucky, you hear news that confirms what your sinking heart thought all along: that another candidate, unnamed, better suited the needs of the university.
In British searches, every candidate is assessed in a single day, between 10 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon. Not only that, but every candidate meets every other candidate. The process is as transparent as glass.
There in the anteroom, sitting together, we candidates found solidarity in the teeth of competition. We were all in the same circumstance, all with the same odds. We traded accounts of our research, figured out who knew whom, swapped stories. We even speculated as to who among us would get the job. I bet on one of my competitors who won an award for an article he published in the top journal in our field—I had once assigned his article to my students. I liked meeting him and the others. Our banter was humane and convivial.
One by one we were pulled away to be interviewed by the search committee, the head of the school, and the dean. They asked rigorous, probing questions about the nature and direction of our work.
Back in my hotel, lying on the bed, contemplating the trans-Atlantic return flight to come, I watched television and lamented that British culture has become so Americanized, with Miley Cyrus, of all people, appearing on a BBC talk show. My mind wandered. I wondered how long it would be before I would know the outcome of the search.
Just then the phone rang. I thought it would be my family. But it was the head of the school offering me the position. The decision had been made by day’s end.
I wondered what it would have been like to be on the hiring committee, to make such a snap judgment. Then I realized that the people on the committee hadn’t made a snap judgment. They’d read my CV, my recommendations, and my scholarship. The search was merely meant to add a visual and interactive dimension and throw the other candidates into comparative relief. What appeared to take but a day was the endpoint of a long selection.
Graduate students and other academics in a tight job market might consider looking to Europe. My position came through international networks and word of mouth. The logical place to look for ads is in Times Higher Education, since British job notices all too rarely appear in American professional publications—although they really should if British universities want to cast a net broadly.
If you do find yourself making the cut in a British search, prepare yourself for the language—and for the anteroom. Cheers.
