I’ve corrected my exams and turned in my grades. I read the names of the English majors at the humanities commencement ceremony. Another academic year is over. By Mother’s Day, the students were gone. The faculty members have packed up their laptops and headed off to archives, to lakes and oceans, to that little £200 B&B near the British Museum. Or they are holed up at home, cultivating their gardens and tinkering with their Volvos (only deans drive Beemers; only finance professors drive Jags). Except for some summer courses and a variety of music and sports camps, the university is a ghost town for the summer, and those of us who remain at our desks can catch up on some work.
But catching up will have to wait, because the hiring season ends later every year. I have one job offer just out to a senior candidate; two counteroffers newly fielded to keep faculty stars home; and two professors have suddenly requested leaves of absence, making fall staffing even more tenuous than usual. Plus the state’s deficit grows daily. So while we might be paying the English department’s bills next year with Enron stock instead of cash, my next task is to gather the department’s advisory committee members -- who thought their summer had actually begun -- and spec out our recruiting needs on the off chance that we might actually be allowed to hire next year.
The meeting won’t last long: We are so short-staffed in every area that we may just decide to ask the dean for one faculty position in each area, and then adjourn. Since our recruiting cycle doesn’t really end, but just lurches forward from one hiring season to the next, I thought I’d devote my last column in this series to answering some of the e-mail messages and letters I’ve gotten from happy and not-so-happy readers.
A colleague of mine in math regularly receives missives from people claiming to have solved Fermat’s next-to-last theorem, proving that light really goes a little faster than c, or revealing what the government is really hiding in Area 51. Answering such mail can be a mistake. My letters are never that intriguing, but still I resist personal responses. I have learned the hard way that such replies -- even a polite thank you -- can be read as an invitation to write again, this time to dwell at length on my personal faults, my massive ignorance, and my general inability to suffer correction.
Most of the responses I received to my columns took the form, “Loved your column, copied it to all my colleagues and students.” Other letters were a little less pleasant. One dissatisfied reader chided me because the interview process I described in one column is “more subjective than objective.” He insisted that candidates should be asked only questions where one answer is more scientifically valid than another. He closed with a quote from the movie Jaws: “Well this proves one thing Mr. Hooper. Even with all your education, you college boys still don’t know enough to know when you are wrong.”
I cannot attest to the accuracy of this quote, but I seem to remember that in “Jaws” the Richard Dreyfus/Hooper “college boy” character is the one who is right about the shark. I don’t think the job search can be quantified, but I do agree that the job interview is subjective. That is its great value, for as Woody Allen’s character Boris says in Love and Death, “Subjectivity is objective.” Here are some answers to other questions I’ve received.
Question: Why did you only discuss hiring at Research I universities? What about all the other kinds of colleges?
Answer: We tell our writing students, “Write what you know.” I know about hiring at Research I universities, and I tried to make it clear in my columns that my perspective is a limited one. Some of what I say can be generalized, but certainly not all of it. It would be foolish of me to guess what goes on at liberal-arts colleges, second-tier publics, community colleges, faith-based institutions, for-profit computer-repair schools, distance-education schools with no campus but a big advertising budget, and the like. My advice to that reader: Read what I write, but remember, “Your mileage may vary.”
Question: Should every faculty member get to serve on search committees?
Answer: At the risk of sounding undemocratic and elitist, not all faculty members should be involved in the search committee. It goes without saying that committee members should have up-to-date disciplinary expertise. They should be doing important research. They should also have some talent at talent searching. Some professors judge candidates too harshly; others are too lax; and others still seem clueless when it comes to ranking candidates. These are valuable faculty members who perform important departmental service. Certainly they must have input into the search process, providing feedback and interacting with candidates on campus visits. However, they should not be on search committees.
Question: How do you choose between two equally qualified candidates, one of whom is the partner of a faculty member, and the other is not?
Answer: If I could answer that, I’d hang out a shingle. Departments, including my own, can be torn apart by searches involving partners. Our provost’s office instructs us that any partner hire must enhance the quality of the unit and the institution. Partners must have the record of accomplishment and future potential that we look for in any addition to the faculty. Hewing to this line brings us partners who won’t be tagged as “trailing spouse.” It also means that we may pass over a partner for someone else, which leads to bad feelings. Once a partner came in second in a search, and we got two hires. Other times, this hasn’t been an option. Plus you inevitably wind up hiring some partners and not others, which leads to resentment, sulking, and the occasional lawsuit.
Question: How fair is your screening process? Can one committee member kill a candidate’s chances?
Answer: Here’s how we screen applications: Every search committee member reads every application. Each search committee member has the authority to ask for dossier and writing sample. All committee members read all dossiers, and all applicants are considered by the entire committee when it meets to select interviewees. In searches that bring several hundred applicants, we may simplify the first pass by dividing the committee and giving each group one half of the alphabet to cover. Even after we select interview candidates, we ask ourselves if there’s anyone who should be brought back on the table for further consideration. Our selection is rigorous, but it is also fair.
Question: You discount open recommendations, ones where the candidate has seen the letter. But my partner’s job chances were killed by closed letters of reference that unfairly and perhaps illegally characterized a disability.
Answer: I still prefer closed to open recommendations, but the writer has a serious concern. I have occasionally seen a letter that does a candidate more harm than good, but in years of reading what may be thousands of letters of recommendation, I can safely say that I have seen no more than a handful that assassinated the person under review, or revealed information that could bias a committee against a candidate. (That’s actually more of a problem in promotion letters, but maybe I’ll write a column about that next year.) Candidates should select referees who will treat them fairly -- but you can’t always know who will do that. And search committees should discount letters that are patently biased. If we find a promising candidate with a damaging letter, we call a dissertation director or a colleague at the candidate’s institution to get some background. Then we make our own decisions. Letters of recommendation are only a small part of the picture we develop of each finalist.
Question: I applied for a job with your department, and with many others as well. But despite having a strong record, I received no interviews. Can you look at my vita and tell me my “fatal flaw”?
Answer: I got a number of requests like this. I’m not really an employment counselor. I can tell why a particular candidate might not fit our needs, but with several hundred applicants for our positions, I’m not able to give individual analyses. I can’t generalize about how other search committees make decisions, either, since I don’t know the circumstances of their searches. I do know that there are many more qualified candidates than there are positions available, and sometimes catching a job is a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Excellent candidates may tire of the endless turndowns and move out of academe. They may persist and eventually succeed. They may hang in there and never find academic jobs appropriate to their talents. That is the shame of our profession. I remember the 1950s, when engineers were unemployable. Then came Sputnik, and suddenly we couldn’t have enough engineers. Alas, I don’t foresee a comparable event that will open up jobs for English teachers.
Question: How can you condone postcolonialism or the resurgence of area studies?
Answer: The profession changes; get over it.
Question: What about all those departments that never acknowledge applications or fail to notify candidates that someone else has been hired?
Answer: I’m still waiting to hear that I haven’t gotten jobs I applied to 30 years ago. We acknowledge all applications and notify people about our searches as soon as we are able to. Other institutions should do the same. If they can’t afford the postage, they should use e-mail. To those who would claim e-mail is too impersonal, I point out that e-mail is surely no worse than a form letter.
Many of us have had bad experiences with job searches. To some unsuccessful job seekers the whole process may seem a sham. There are many job practices that I find reprehensible, and I did allude to some, either directly or indirectly. But that was not my subject. Instead, I just wanted to tell a little about hiring practices in one department to show how we try, not always successfully, to get things done. The system is flawed, but it is better than it was a generation ago, when I started looking for work. All in all, I think departments want to hire the best candidates, and they try to go about it in the best way they know how.
I for one will be only too happy to start hiring again next fall.
Dennis Baron is chairman of the English department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been writing a regular column this academic year on how the academic job search process works from the hiring side of the table.