- Thanks for the nice hotel. I've never been around so many whores
before!
- Thank you for telling me my hotel was within walking distance of the campus. What you failed to mention is that there are virtually no sidewalks anywhere between my hotel on the highway and the nice neighborhood were the school is. Plus, snow is piled up on most of those sidewalks, so I carried my briefcase and wore my dress shoes and climbed through snowdrifts until I hit the first cleared sidewalk 40 feet in front of the college.
- And, thanks for giving me the world's stupidest grad student
to show me around campus. I love the construction that is unfinished, the sculpture that had been vandalized, and the garbage that overflows every can in the quad. My favorite answer of the world's stupidest grad student was this one: "I don't know." He didn't know anything. He didn't know what was in any of the buildings I pointed at, or where most of the undergrad dorms were. After a while he admitted, "I'm just a first year student. I live in XXXXX. I'm only here 2 days a week."
- Thanks for scheduling my meetings so that there was no break between them for a drink or a bathroom break. And it was great how - when I did tell your junior faculty member that I had to pee - that she seemed keen to make it clear to me how "wildly anal" the waiting Dean was, and that if I could hurry, I should.
- At the departmental meeting, I was grateful that you put Duff and Biff next to each other and across from me, so that when they argued I had a ringside seat. I liked how the silverback next to me leaned in and said, "Don't get those 2 started."
- And generally, thanks for just not making me feel welcome at all. Giving me a map and showing me where the student union is is not the kind of lunch
I thought I'd be getting when I saw "12-12:45 Candidate Lunch" on the itinerary. At least I got a chance to pee!
- I also loved it when my ride back to the hotel left campus early, and "Would [I] be okay strolling back to my hotel?" Uh, no. Did you not already hear my story from the morning trek? It was snowing, too, but why bother getting someone to drive the candidate. I get it. You're all so hearty around here.
- Finally, thanks for picking a place in the bowels of the city for dinner where my cab driver had to search 20 minutes for in looping circles, through alleys. Of course I'm a fan of Thai food, why would I not be? What kind of boob could I be? And yes, it was smart of three of you to arrange to get there early so you'd be drunk when I arrived, because, after all, what could I possibly say at this point that mattered.
Oh, I took a cab to the airport, and left all the materials you gave me about the college, the position, the health benefits, tenure & promotion, in a bin in my hotel room.
I wish I were a candidate for a university job.
ReplyDeleteSanta Fe Sally....is this you? What is going on here with search committees? I think the surplus of candidates has made the on campus interview, a one way street.
ReplyDeleteSally and Lasse (though Lasse may have chosen his name to evoke Sally's) sent me the two campus visit posts from different email accounts at different colleges.
ReplyDelete- CM Moderator
PS: I'd love to read a positive campus visit post if anyone has one.
Listen, there are good and bad things that happen at campus visits, but as this is the College MISERY page, I think it makes sense that most of us are probably expecting bad stories...
ReplyDeleteThe happy events of campus visits could be shared, sure. I don't mind. But let us not deny the fact that a campus visit can be a pain for the candidate.
I've had positive experiences (despite rather negative outcomes):
ReplyDelete1. On a recent visit, the SC chair kept me plied with bottled water, since I was interviewing in a desert locale. It helped me so much, especially during those talks, where your mouth gets dry to begin with!
2. The first night of my visit, I had a pleasant dinner w/ two members of the SC. One told me that she knew how grueling these interviews can be, and gave me a hug.
3. At another campus visit, one of the SC members made certain to give me 30 minutes to myself in a quiet room. She even went so far as to tell the secretary not to bother me under any circumstances.
4. In my experiences, the departmental secretaries are some of the nicest, most competent people I've encountered. They've been responsive, helpful, and pleasant, and did wonders to make my visits smooth.
It certainly sounds like either (a) they really didn't have much enthusiasm for your candidacy or (b) they have no idea how to woo a candidate (or, yes, feel they don't need to bother given market conditions). If it's (a), then presumably they favor another candidate, and were just (barely) going through the motions. If (b), then you probably don't want a job with them. Either way, it sucks to waste a day that way, and leaving the materials in the wastebasket sounds like a rational response (reading between the lines, I don't get the sense you went into this one thinking it was your dream job anyway, but maybe I'm wrong about that). I hope the next one goes better (and that there is a next one coming up).
ReplyDeleteP.S. I, too, wouldn't mind hearing happier, or at least mixed, campus-visit stories. I could easily imagine a campus visit where 1/2 or more of things above happened, and it was still a positive experience. Looking through the list, I don't see any one that would immediately lead me to write off the possibility of the visit leading to a job I wouldn't mind having, though the business of sending the candidate off for lunch on his own without any explanation (I'm assuming there was no explanation) and the complete lack of consideration for the difficulties of dealing with snowy sidewalks in interview costume stand out for me as bigger red flags than the rest.
I've had a mixed bag of campus visits in the past, but all of the things in Lasse's litany have happened to me in some sort of way.
ReplyDeleteIn my own work on search committees I've tried to keep all of that in mind, especially the idea that the day for that person is a real misery of meetings and tours and meals and very real panic.
After all these MIGHT be the people who will join us and be our colleagues, pals, lovers(?), mates, etc. Why not start the first date well?
I had a really good campus visit, but I really don't want to jinx myself by crowing about it. They were incredibly awesome, I love the school, and I didn't really want to go home.
ReplyDeleteI concur with ELS. Let that shit fly, my friends, let it fly.
ReplyDeleteOh in a similar vein...Golden Boy got an on-campus interview at Western SLAC where I did not. And he APOLOGIZED TO ME and I said, from the bottom of my heart..."Wow, that's really kind of you. I've thought a lot about it, though, and you know what? I'm not really a 'West Coast' person. My glasses are too big (ie--bigger than dimes) and I think that I really made them angry when I said something about not really believing that each student is a beautiful and unique snowflake. If you want to teach in a place where you need to...oh...yodel part of your lectures because little Hansel (who is not actually from wherever it is that they yodel) prefers that and his feng shui consultant agrees to it, that is YOUR business, buddy."
Okay, I didn't call him buddy. But that was the gist of what I said.
I understand that in this shitty market, I should be at home slitting my wrists with a broken Scotch bottle while contemplating how to trounce the job market next year if I live through the bleeding. In fact, I am thanking my lucky stars that I've seemingly cobbled together a set of work for the coming year based on goodwill, nepotism, and my crowd-control abilities. I'm thankful to Atom Smasher, who is supportive of me taking jobs at places that will not put me back in the funny farm, rather than simply jobs that happen anywhere. And I'm thankful to the Misery...for reminding me that it could well be worse.
/end Pollyanna/
Ah, yes, the campus visit where you feel more like an interloper than a candidate. I wish I could say this were a factor of market conditions, but your story reminds me very much of some visits I went on in the 90s when things were tough but not nearly as bad as today. Two visits in particular stand out:
ReplyDelete1. An interview at a college in a certain Mormon-heavy state at which I was met at the airport by someone from the search committee. His job was to tell me where the shuttle was that would take me back and forth to campus for activities the next day. No one wanted to eat with me either that evening or the next day on the interview. No one took me on a campus tour. I was simply given a schedule of events, a map, and instructions to take the hotel shuttle and save my receipts. When I got a popped blister during the course of the day and went by the department office to ask where I could find a Band-Aid and some antibiotic cream, the secretary acted as if I were trying to steal her lunch money.
2. An interview in my home state at which the committee was composed of the biggest collection of freaks I'd encountered to date. The committee chair and I went to the same grad school, and he hated Professor X. I spent all day listening to him trash this guy and politely just listened until he finally said, "You don't actually LIKE Professor X, do you?" I barely knew the man and had never taken a class with him. Said committee chair also had bitter relations with his ex-wife and ranted about her repeatedly. All this was when he wasn't busy quizzing me about certain books he thought I should have read (mostly not even in the field) and music he thought I should like. When I didn't answer to his satisfaction, he looked at me as if I'd walked in from cleaning barn stalls. The college president asked me about my dissertation and then said, "I really don't care. I was just asking to be polite." Then there was the guy who, at lunch, asked my husband if I had other interviews lined up. When he replied that I was a finalist at four other colleges, the guy stated, "Oh good, then I guess she's not going to have a problem finding a job someplace else." I hadn't even done the teaching demo or interview yet!
EnglishDoc - my jaw drops.
ReplyDeleteI might take it a mite easy on the stupidest grad student ever. Chances are he's not dumb--merely unwashed, self-absorbed, overtasked, and disengaged from campus life. In other words, an average grad student.
ReplyDeleteWell, I've had mostly good interviews, interspersed with the weird and bad - sometimes my bad, sometimes theirs, usually a combo - but I can tell you that when it's right, it feels like a slow dance with someone you've been thinking you could fall for. You think they've got nice eyes and are sharp as hell, and you wish they'd notice you; they make you feel funny and pretty and smart. (And you look down, and think: BOO-yah!)
ReplyDeleteSorry it didn't work out for you this time, Lasse...
There was once a job competition where the search committee, in its infinite wisdom, decided to be belligerent to all the shortlisted candidates during their 2-day interview to see if they dealt well with stress and confrontation. Hm, what kind of workplace requires such abilities to be important for consideration as a potential hire? All of the candidates found t-t positions elsewhere, and they're glad for it, as the job interview so poisoned the place for them that they had no desire to work there anymore.
ReplyDeleteSorry, Lasse... Sounds like you and Sally had some very similar job interview experiences. And yes, even before the current decade, there were some doozies of an interview that I went on with thoughtless Search Committees that I figured just decided it was someone else's job to make sure I was comfy or fed or appropriately escorted. Most community college interviews felt like a treasure hunt where I was just told a date & time to show up for both an interview and teaching demo. And that was IT. I often had no idea where to park or how to get to campus (pre-googlemaps)... Or sometimes whether I should stick around or leave... Or if there was even a bathroom on campus!
ReplyDeleteMy most memorable and hilarious job interview took place a few years ago when half of the SC acted like English Language Learners DURING my interview, as well as during the practice lesson/teaching demo I had to present... just to see how I would react when confronted with "diversity." This was even more insane because I was the only English-Language Learner in a room full of native English-speaking Caucasians. And yes, I still teach there and mock them from time to time for their completely essentialist behavior during my campus visit.
This was at a small local school, so I didn't have to deal with flights, hotels, etc.
ReplyDelete1. Applied.
2. One month later, got a call for an on-the-spot phone interview. It was with an admin. assistant who was awesome.
3. Face-to-face interview. I was told it would be 45 minutes. It was barely 30, and I was rushed out the door because the interviewer had a conference call. I didn't have time to ask questions or anything.
4. Teaching demo. This was fine -- technology worked, etc. But one of the main people who was supposed to watch me came in about 5 minutes before I finished. That person thought my demo was at a different time.
5. Drug test. Yes, I had to take a drug test. I've since found out you're not supposed to take one unless you've been made an offer. Grrr.
6. Abrupt phone call in which I was told that the position was put on hold.
I have had some awful experiences. By far the worst was at Hoity-Toity U. :
ReplyDelete1. They flew me into a nearby city to save money. I was told to take a shuttle bus to the hotel. It took 4 hours to get to my hotel.
2. I get to the hotel and let them know I have arrived. Fully expecting that I would be having dinner with them that evening, I was told that I was scheduled to be on campus at 8AM. I was on my own for dinner. At this point I started to feel like this was a waste of time.
3. Next day, they ran me ragged all day, no breaks, etc. and had me give my job talk at 4PM -- low blood sugar time for most people, including me. Not one break.
4. While I was giving my talk, the committee and others whispered to each other. I wanted to stop and ask if they had anything they would like to share with the class, but I didn't.
5. After the talk they had arranged a dinner at an Indian resturant. I love Indian food, but I was truely done with this group of hyenas. I thought about just saying no thanks, but I didn't think it a good idea, and besides I like Indian food. They verbally tortured me. I lost my appetite and my dinner just sat on my plate uneaten. I truely had never been treated like this, not ever.
6. Duh, I thought, they have no interest in you. In fact they seem to actively hate you. Now I was really done. I knew that what I was about to do might give me a bad rep, but I just did not care. I looked around the table at these losers and said, "I do not know what I did to offend you, except perhaps to exist, but I am done." I got up and left. Not once looking back. I did not say "withdraw my application" because that would make it too easy for them. I just left.
Yeah, I did not get the job. When they called to tell me thanks, but no thanks, I just hung up on them. I just didn't care at that point. And, yes, they did try to trash talk me at the next national conference. But I am smarter, I got my narrative out there first. That is the way to deal with mean girls (yes I am female so I knew the school yard games they were playing).
In fact I started calling people when I got to the hotel to tell them how I had been treated-- I charged the calls to them.
I do have a job now and I am tenured. Those creeps run for cover when they see me at meetings. But most importantly, I did learn something from this experience, never give away your power and when you are in a position of power always treat the job canidate with the respect and caring they deserve.
I will be yelled at by Angry Archie, but I think that everybody who was screwed with by a search committee should write up their experiences over at the Academic Jobs Wiki "Universities to Fear" page. They don't want names, only the university, the date of the visit and what department it was for. Also they've rearranged the site for recent hiring searches, searches from the last few years, and undated searches. This stuff does matter and it has had something of a shaming effect on the schools/departments written about.
ReplyDeleteI won't yell. My main problem is that nothing that gets posted anywhere on the wiki is verifiable. How do you distinguish between real problems with a department and the sour grapes and general sense of entitlement that often characterize the academic job market? The answer is, of course, that you can't. Therefore, you can't really believe much that is on there. I was a member of a committee that was savaged in very personal and ad hominem ways by the denizens of wikiland. Nothing, but nothing that was posted there was true except for the evident disappointment of the candidates who got passed over in one way or another. Likewise, Mrs Archie's department chair was personally attacked on the wiki in truly dishonest fashion.
ReplyDeleteThere are always two sides to the story Angry Archie. While many hireing committees feel that their behavior is on point, well...I will say that I have watched my colleagues make complete asses of themselves in job searches. When called on it, they often act clueless. IMHO, it is worse to be a clueless snake, than an openly nasty junk-yard dog.
ReplyDelete@Angry Archie
ReplyDeleteI agree that the entire wiki is built on trust and that "caveat lector" should be the motto of everyone that deals with AJW; that written, it should be said that on two occasions people from two seperate colleges deleted information about their schools from the page. In fact, the last time that happened it screwed up the margins so badly they had to rebuild the page from scratch. Also they do have a "Universities to Love" page, so it isn't all negative. In the end, however, this is all just opinion and you have to weigh it against any objective facts about College X or University Y that you can find.
I appreciate the notion that one should be even-handed. But in the specific instances I am referring to, the wiki contained blatant falsehoods. In one case I was in the room for each and every interaction, and the things that wiki posters were claiming were said and done simply were not. End of story. No two sides to it, no mitigating circumstances, nothing. Just bullshit born of sour grapes.
ReplyDeleteBut sure, lots of people behave badly in lots of ways. I've had the misfortune to be sitting on the applicant's side of the room when some really stupid things were said and done. There's one story in particular that I still enjoy telling over a beer more than a decade after the fact because it is so unbelievable. But I also suspect that these are for the most part sins born of cluelessness, or in a lot of cases from a failure to communicate with the candidate--in the case of whether one is alone for dinner, for example. Maybe one or two of the people involved are actually malicious, but I believe that they represent the exception. When you force complete strangers to interact in a highly fraught context for a day or two, it is a dead cinch that someone will say something silly at some point. Throw in the social awkwardness of the average academic, and you can be sure at least a little nonsense will transpire.
The reason I object to the wiki-reportage of these events is that they get transformed into global conspiracies. So a solo-dinner is evidence that your candidacy is not being taken seriously. Or some nerd's off-key joke becomes the moment when the whole secret agenda of the search is revealed, and the truly vile conspiracies underpinning the process are brought into the light of day. It is a Dan Brown novel where the stakes of the conspiracy are so abysmally low, that only the truly paranoid could ever evince interest in it. Most of all, it ain't all about you sunshine.
Job candidates say and do some really stupid and inappropriate shit too, whether it is in their cover letters or in the interview room, or during the campus visit. Since I too have egregiously flubbed questions in interviews, I usually try to be understanding when that happens. Of course just as I sometimes self-eliminated in those instances, so too do they. But I don't necessarily think that someone's self-eliminating flub means that they are total fuckwits in every possible respect. They had a fuckwitted moment that cost them, nothing more. And if they have any self-awareness, they probably realize it later on. But they are surely smarter than that most of the time.
Unfortunately, because the wiki allows people to vent their frustrations immediately, anonymously, and without reasonable reflection about what happened, every flub that someone on the committee makes becomes evidence of malice, disinterest, insincerity, laziness, stupidity, racism, sexism, anti-dentism, and so on. I'm sure that all those factors are present out there in interview land--and I say that without sarcasm--but I suspect that the ratio of actual assholery to wiki-reported assholery is nowhere near 1:1 or even 1:2. In that respect, the wiki is more or less the same as that other site we dare not name.
And finally there is the outright and pointless lying. In every search with which I've been involved since the advent of the wiki, at least one poster claimed to have been contacted for an interview well before we had even drawn up a short list. I have no idea what advantage these fucksticks imagine they are gaining from doing this, but they insist on doing it anyway. Maybe fucking with other people's heads helps them get through a stressful process, I couldn't say. But the wiki can only work, however imperfectly, if one assumes total honesty on the part of posters. Since you can't assume that at all, the whole thing becomes more or less pointless.
@Strelnikov
ReplyDeleteWell, the lies about my committee are still there in the wiki for that year. We didn't care enough to actually go erase them. Although, because one of my colleagues was called out by name in a false and disingenuous fashion, we would have been well within our rights to do so.
As for the Universities to Love section, I note that in many instances the same exact departments appear in both the love and hate lists. What that suggests to me is that the Wiki is a combination of Rate My Professor and C-Net. The raw emotions are evident and only the truly disappointed or the truly overjoyed care enough to post. You are certainly not seeing anything like the "typical" applicant's experience.
Most of my war stories are pretty old (early-mid '90s vintage), and typical of the time: departments that advertised for someone who could do both minority/women's and canonical literatures, then exhibited various signs of anxiety, disappointment, and/or disapproval when I gave teaching or research presentations that combined the canonical and the non-canonical. It was a good thing that my classwork and generals list were both pretty comprehensive, since I don't think I've ever encountered so many questions about marginally-canonical white male authors before or since (unless you count the reader of my undergraduate thesis who was clearly deeply disturbed that I had focused on a woman writer whom he considered as a sidekick and/or protege of the male writer he studied, and not on the Great Man himself).
ReplyDeleteThe strangest job-market encounter I've had, however, came in the form of a phone call from a Community College department chair to whom I'd sent an unsolicited c.v. and a letter inquiring about adjunct work. Her college had a large minority population, and, as gradually became clear in the course of the conversation, she had mistakenly assumed that I belonged to one of the minority groups whose literatures I studied (on no basis, as far as I could tell, other than the fact that I studied that literature). This was at a time when many, many colleges and universities were actively trying to increase the diversity of their departments, and the supply of minority Ph.D.s just wasn't keeping up with the demand; in fact, some minority graduate students at my very selective and quite prestigious graduate institution actually found themselves having to explain to potential employers (and sometimes their own advisors) why accepting an unsolicited TT job offer when they'd barely finished a dissertation proposal (and well before they'd run out of graduate-school funding) was not a good idea -- all the more so in light of the probability that they, like the few minority assistant professors they saw at our own institution, would find themselves expected to sit on at least twice the usual number of committees and to mentor at least twice as many advisees, undergraduate and graduate, as the average assistant professor. In short, the likelihood that there was a stray minority ABD from my institution out trolling for adjunct work was just about nil, and the woman who called me had to be incredibly out of touch with the job market -- or just in touch with her own needs to the exclusion of anything else -- to imagine such a scenario. I assumed she had to realize that I was almost certainly white, she apparently hadn't even considered the possibility, and it took me quite a while to realize that she wasn't even probing, she was just assuming, and to say "you probably should know that I'm white" -- at which point she actually said "oh, then we aren't interested." That, of course, was illegal, but at that point I didn't care, since I definitely didn't want to navigate the shoals of teaching literature written by members of a minority group to members of that minority group even though I wasn't a member of the group myself (and at a level and during a historical period when ethnic/racial identity and expertise were likely to be conflated, by students and perhaps also by colleagues) under her leadership.
As I said at the beginning, these stories are definitely dated; I wouldn't expect to encounter the first situation at all these days (except perhaps in the persons of one or two grumpy silverbacks whose opinions wouldn't matter to the majority of the department as long as I showed I knew how to handle them politely but firmly), and I think the sophistication with which scholars handle intersections (and non-intersections) of academic specialty and ethnic/racial/sexual identity has improved considerably (as has, to some extent, the supply of minority Ph.D.s).
The wiki is, of course, a new development since then. I have to admit I'm intrigued, but also cautious, for all the reasons mentioned above. If and when I go on the market again, I'm very glad that it will be as a Ph.D. with a somewhat satisfactory if not ideal job and a fairly full life outside of academe, not a graduate student mostly in touch with other graduate students whose lives are presently consumed -- and understandably so -- by the job search.
ReplyDelete@Angry Archie
ReplyDeleteI never took everything at face value at AJW; sometimes it was possible to find correlations about colleges from other websites but not always, and I was always aware that people do lie or exaggerate on the Internet. I think you want too much from an anonymous webpage; if people could name names and say who they really are it would be completely different (maybe.) People fear being blacklisted or fired, so they write these things anonymously - hell, WE are being anonymous while writing about an anonymous website!
@AA, if the accusations are false why do you care so much? Most of us know that AJW is merely a place to vent. Never a bad thing.
ReplyDeleteAs for being left alone for dinner, I guess I think it is rude, and rude, at least for me, at the start of any relationship is a red flag. I value myself too much to allow common people to unbalance me with their common behavior.
Y'all have a lovely evening, Snarkygirl (aka, Sunshine).
Snarkygirl, I love what you did.
ReplyDeleteHmmmm. Perhaps I lack your self-esteem, but I've been offered and accepted jobs where I was left alone for a meal during the campus visit. Didn't seem that important to me--indeed I was happy for the break--but maybe I'm just common like that. What can I say?
ReplyDeleteAs far as what’s wrong with the sometimes false and malicious venting, I would think it would be self-evident. Personally, I don’t care that much about the anonymous insults to my integrity, although it can sometimes be irritating at conferences when some acquaintance says “so I hear that you and your colleagues behaved in such and such an unprofessional manner.” I can roll my eyes at that with the best of them.
ReplyDeleteWhat concerns me is something else. I have grad students on the market who read the wiki. In the B.W.E. (before wiki era), when one had a bad market experience, one would vent to friends and possibly to advisors. You might say to your advisor, “nobody wants underwater basket-weaving specialists anymore. Now you have to do near earth orbit basket weaving to get anywhere.” And your advisor might nod and sympathize, and then maybe say, “it might not be so dire. Let’s sit down and think about what you might have done differently in the interview or on campus.”
In other words, venting—which is entirely normal and sometimes healthy—sometimes creates false narratives about what happened. In the past these false narratives were ephemeral, and ultimately transitory. But the wiki reinforces these narratives, because like so many on-line communities, only certain perspectives—in this case the perspectives of unsuccessful job seekers—are represented, with no countervailing perspectives that might help those same aspirants in the future.
So now when I say to my grad students, “I understand your disappointment. I’ve been there. Let’s think about what you could do differently next time.” I can see the gears turning in their heads as they think “Yeah, right, old man. You can spout your platitudes, but everyone on the wiki agrees with me that the committee was just a bunch of assholes bent on fucking us over and treating us like sub-human scum.”
So the venting on the wiki reinforces bad habits of mind, which is why I tell my students to steer clear, even though I know full well they won’t.
There are other problems, including the way that the wiki assumes that searches should all work according to a particular pattern, which also contributes to these false, but powerful narratives in which all responsibility is shifted to the committees.
I also see a lot of contradictory desires expressed on the wiki and in the discussions here. “I wish they’d leave me some alone time so I can pee and collect myself,” followed closely by “I can’t believe those fuckers left me alone and unsupervised that time.” Not that venting needs to be coherent, exactly, but if I were to chair a search next year and point my colleagues to this page or the wiki for a moment of self-reflection on our own conduct in the search to come, I would imagine we’d be left confused about what exactly the aspirants really want.
@F&T Thanks, I love what I did too. I have never regretted my actions and love the she-does-not-suffer-fools-gladly rep it gave me. A very powerful postionality.
ReplyDelete@AA, I was not calling you common...only the people at Hoity Toity U. I descibed above. It would be common of me to call someone I never met common. Yes, I have great self-esteem. I actually like myself, that is why I really couldn't care less what people say about me.
I agree about the job wiki, I also tell my grad students to stay clear, but they still look. So I look, so we can discuss what is being said.
We do mock interviews in my department when a grad student gets an on-campus visit. We role play, one of us being the a-hole sexist, the other sweet little Suzy Cream Cheese, you get my drift. We put them through a hellish interview. I also make myself available by text to my students on interviews. If something comes up and they do not know how to deal with it, assuming they can text me without being detected, I am there to offer advise. If the SC is nice/professional they are thrilled even when they do not get the job. Our students have been successful because they are prepared.
I think Archie's right about the potential self-reinforcing echo-chamber effect of the wiki; interestingly, campus visits seem to be a hot button issue on this blog precisely because participants on both sides of the table are present.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that different candidates want different things. I wouldn't mind some time to myself the night before an on-campus interview, but I would hope it would be offered and/or explained to me in that way, and that the department would be picking up the tab for a reasonably-priced but decent meal somewhere convenient to my hotel; in other words, don't dump me in a hotel on the highway with a choice between McDonalds and Burger King, or somewhere fancier but equally isolated wondering whether it's appropriate to charge a mid-priced room service meal to the interviewing department. The same would be true for lunch on my own (and no, I wouldn't mind the student union, or the local coffee shop). I would expect to have some meals with the committee -- and I'd make no attempt to avoid having all my meals with the committee, since I realize that's pretty common -- but I wouldn't be insulted at being left alone, as long as there was some warning and a reasonable explanation for the choice, and some attempt to provide me with suggestions and a budget for taking care of myself.
Basically, I assume that my job during a campus visit is to help the committee make things go as smoothly as possible for everyone involved, while keeping my eyes open for signs that the department as a whole does or doesn't function well. No one event or person is likely to tell me much about the department as a whole; the accumulation of events and interactions during the entire application process probably will.