First Person

See You In September

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person Dispatches From the First Interview Two Ph.D. candidates experience a brief and unexpected respite from the usual coldness and bad manners of the hiring process. Career News Not Ready to Die Yet Financial analysts predict that small, tuition-dependent colleges with modest endowments could close during this recession, but the president of one such college is counting on its strengths to help it survive. The Adjunct Track Let's Talk Equity -- Later When will we realize it's time to take advantage of the economic turmoil and restructure the faculty labor system? Career News Parting Words Much harder than leading a college is closing one. Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Ann Harpold

In September, I will be starting in a new position at a great little university, located in a small city within driving distance from my family and my husband's. The position sounds as if it was written for me: It melds my interdisciplinary interests, and allows me to teach highly specialized small seminars. And my new colleagues are friendly, warm, and intellectually engaged.

It is exactly what I was looking for when I went on the market, but I only got the job in spite of myself.

I began interviewing for positions in late October. At my first interview with University A, I met individually with members of the department and asked each these three questions: What do you love about the department and university? How would you describe the students? How would you characterize the intellectual life of the department?

In answer to the first question, one bewildered person answered, "Well (long pause), I guess I don't hate it here. I mean, I've been here 20 years. I haven't left." Another said, "Um. I like it OK." A third cited the benefits package, saying "we used to get crappy pay and terrific benefits; the pay is getting better."

Responding to my second question, three potential colleagues told me the students were "lazy." A fourth later clarified "they come in ready to do the work -- our freshmen are eager and bright. But by the time they are juniors or seniors, they just don't care anymore. There is something about the institutional culture here that doesn't reward hard work." And a fifth pointed to a Star Wars action figure on his desk and told me, "When they come in to complain about their grades, I just imagine this guy shooting them in the head."

Still I trudged on, asking about the intellectual life of the department. That is important to me, because I've enjoyed the brown bags and colloquia my department sponsors to share works in progress, and I'm interested in doing collaborative work and teaching. But when I asked my first interviewer if she collaborated with her colleagues, she replied, "Why would I want to do that?"

Later, the department head and I talked about potential tenure scenarios, should I be offered the position. I have reentered the job market with two articles in competitive interdisciplinary journals, and a book published by a well-regarded, discipline specific, press. The department head discounted the articles, telling me the journals weren't prestigious enough because they were interdisciplinary.

By the end of the interview day, even though my job talk had been well received, and the search-committee chair had told me "unofficially" that I was the "clear first choice" candidate, I was having serious doubts about my fit with the place.

The next week, my husband, son, and I flew to College B. My time there was quite pleasant. I thoroughly enjoyed the students and the department members. However, contrary to my impression during an earlier telephone interview, I discovered that the college offered scant support for scholarship. I also noticed that everyone was teaching five days a week, and often more than the official load of four classes each semester.

When I asked about the intellectual life of the department, the dean of the college said enthusiastically, "Oh, John is really raising the bar." When I asked how John was doing that, she replied, "He's finishing the dissertation."

The next day, my individual interviews began poorly, when one potential colleague said to me in earnest, "Ann, you have a great CV. When I look at it, I think you could get a job anywhere. Why would you settle for coming here?"

During my final interview, a junior faculty member literally pulled me aside -- though we were the only two in the office -- and said, "You should stop asking about research and publication here -- it's just not done. We don't put our CV's on the Web site, we don't talk about our work. There can be retribution."

Seriously, he said retribution. For talking about scholarship. I didn't know if he was right or crazy. Neither option made me want to take the job.

We flew home; I spent two days teaching, and then flew out again for interview three, at College C. I loved it there! The students were engaging and intelligent. The faculty members worked across disciplinary boundaries and had active research agendas; they were a warm, fun, interesting bunch of people. I thought the interview went extremely well and it seemed that the entire committee agreed.

On the way to the airport, I checked my cellphone messages and learned that two more departments wanted to interview me. I figured I should go, just in case College C fell through. That is where things got confusing: Two days after I got home from College C, I declined the offer from University A and got an offer from College B. On the same day that I was making travel arrangements to College D, I had a phone interview with University E.

University E offered some intriguing possibilities. I would be a faculty member in a purely interdisciplinary program; interdisciplinary work would be valued and required for tenure. On the phone, everyone sounded great -- they joked with one another and talked about one another's work and interests.

Here was the problem: I had already committed to interview at College D. I was physically and emotionally exhausted. I was strapped for cash after paying my husband's tickets to three interviews. His plane ticket to University E would cost more than $600. And it was actually physically impossible to get from point D to point E in the time frame the committee at University E sought.

University E was in a city a bit bigger than we had hoped to live in, and I feared it would just be the same sort of urban sprawl that we were fleeing. I turned down the campus interview at University E. So, off we went to College D.

The visit started inauspiciously. I met a member of the search committee in the hotel restaurant for dinner the night we arrived. It was an awkward evening; he held my file in his hand and perused it before we ordered, then spent dinner quizzing me on various aspects of my background.

I held my ground, until the coffee came. I put creamer in the cup, and it curdled. Rather than drink it, I planned to wait until our waiter came back to ask for a new cup. The committee member poked his finger at it and told me "Just drink it." When I explained that the milk was bad, he said that it wasn't. When I showed him the curdles in the cup, he said that the taste wouldn't be much affected. When I politely refused to drink it, he took a sip of it himself, to prove his point. Then he rose from the table and told me to wait for the bill, add a small tip, and sign for it; he had to get some sleep.

My interview day was even stranger. I had at least four hours of completely dead time in the middle of it. While I certainly appreciate a humane schedule, I was a little surprised that I had no personal meetings with any search committee members, and no time scheduled with any of the people I had specifically requested to meet, among them students, and a faculty member in another department doing work in a field related to mine.

During my teaching demonstration, I had planned an interactive introductory class. It would not require the students to have any particular prior knowledge of the topic, just a good faith willingness to participate. I use the topic routinely on the first day of a class I teach every semester, and it has never failed. Until College D.

I struggled to get the students to participate for 20 minutes, until finally a woman in the second row raised her hand and she told me, with apology in her voice, "I thought you should know, the audience doesn't usually participate."

The audience. That about sums it up, I thought, and switched to lecture mode.

With four hours to kill before my job talk, I took matters into my own hands and tracked down that professor I had wanted to meet who worked in a related field. He ushered me into his office, shut the door, asked if he could be blunt. Then he called the college an "intellectual dead zone" and begged me not to take the job.

On the dangerous drive to the airport -- a three-hour trip in blizzard conditions -- my husband and I discussed our options. I had turned down University A; College C had not extended me an offer; and it didn't look like College D would be offering me a position. I had no huge objections to College B, but I was concerned about research support and scholarly life there, and we weren't sold on the area as a good place for our family to settle down. It seemed wiser to just stay in my current position for another year.

While we sat on the tarmac waiting for the snow to lighten up, I called the dean at College B to decline the offer there. As we flew into Los Angeles very late that night, and I saw the sprawl of lights and traffic, I cried a bit. Even the news, waiting at home, that College D wanted to hire me didn't cheer me up.

Then I got a surprise phone call from the folks at University E. They had been unable to make a hire and wondered if I was still interested. Funny, I said, I had been unable to accept a position and agreed to come for an interview. I told my husband that if no one mentioned the words "intellectual dead zone," I would take the job.

They did better than that. A human-resources officer sent a packet of information about the university and the city via overnight mail; the professor in whose class I would do a guest lecture e-mailed me her syllabus; the head of the committee kept up a nice, light, e-mail banter about the weather, the students, and my job-talk plans. The interview day was carefully crafted so that I had ample one-on-one time with each committee member, in both formal and casual settings.

When I asked faculty members what they loved about the place, they had ready answers; my favorite was "the autonomy in my work, blended with the community I feel here." My journal articles would not only count toward a tenure decision, they would be valued; and the courses I would teach (small, seminar-style, interdisciplinary) met every hope I had going onto the market.

Even the city surprised me. It wasn't full of sprawl and rampant development. Housing was affordable and convenient to the campus, and buying acreage in the country might even be possible. There seemed to be great educational opportunities for my son, and job opportunities for my husband.

I went back to the hotel room on the second day of the interview with an offer in hand, and finished salary negotiations before we flew home. For a week or so, I only felt relieved and exhausted. Then I began to feel elated. And amazed that, despite the fact that I originally turned down an interview, I ended up at the perfect place.