Our department has a healthy mix of teachers and scholars. Some of us publish regularly and teach 2/2 loads, and others are on a sort of teacher track, with 3/3 loads. It's all friendly. Usually.We're in the job market this year, and had 12 Skype or phone interviews in mid December. We pulled 3 from that list for campus interviews and we just finished our first visit yesterday. It was a perfectly pleasant visit for a long while. The candidate is in his 40s, friendly, smart, funny, and knew enough about the regular world and the academic world for most of us to fall in love with him immediately - in that platonic, academic way!
Our last event with him was a dinner with the full department faculty. At that meeting was Dr. OldFart, a perfectly nice man who has been here for 30+ years, who is normally a pleasant - albeit cranky - part of our group. He's a good teacher, a good pal, and has been chair here 2-3 times over the years. He hadn't been involved in the search this year as we have a large department, but he was at the dinner.
20 of us gathered at 2 large tables at a local steak house and the night was quite festive and relaxed. The chair ordered wine for both tables - easing the panic that most candidates usually feel, I'd bet - and conversation and collegiality flowed.
Until Dr. OldFart made his way over to the candidate, took an empty chair, and started this conversation, of which about half of us heard in its entirety. (Some details and phrases have been modified to protect the, well, protect us all.)
OldFart: I notice on your vita that you've published 3 books on [the field]. But I also see that your last one came out in 2007. That's a pretty long stretch without any scholarship. Have you given up on writing?
Candidate: Uh, well, no, not at all. In fact I have 1 book completely finished that I've been showing around, and I'm half way through a new one. The publishing market has really been a mess since the downturn.
OldFart: Well, that's quite a pickle you're in, because this is a teaching school mostly, and if you've finished publishing, then I don't know what role you're supposed to fill.
Candidate: Well, I like to think that I'm a good teacher, too, and I haven't stopped publishing or writing.
OldFart: Your RateMyProfessors scores would indicate otherwise. As for the publishing, I guess the proof is in the pudding there.
Candidate: You looked up my RateMyProfessors page?
OldFart: Of course. I Googled all of our candidates. The one coming next week has very high scores, a lot like mine own.
Candidate: You know, of course, that I have official student evaluations from my last college that you could review, if you really want to know what my students think of me.
OldFart: Yes, but on RateMyProfessors they can tell the truth anonymously. You should look up some of the people at this table. You'd really see what you're up against.
Candidate: I can't imagine....
At that point the department chair, who heard the last bit, but who was drawn to us by a few nods and waves and alarmed faces, came over and extracted OldFart from the mix.
The candidate looked down at his glass of wine and then up at the rest of us.
"I'm a good teacher, really."
I'm going to be ageist here for a minute, but my experiences with elderly faculty members have led me to this observation: Many have a hard time separating fact from fiction on the interwebs. They come from a time when if it's published somewhere, well then it must be true.
ReplyDeleteI bet OldFart sends out email forwards too.
I couldn't reply until I changed browsers, and I'm trying to be charitable by imagining that Bison's statement--"[OldFarts] come from a time when if it's published somewhere, well then it must be true"--was merely sarcastic hyperbole, but jeeesus . . .
DeleteTry to imagine a time (and it wasn't that long ago) when our main source of information was print media. Do you think that there was a difference between what was published in "The Nation" and "The New Republic" or a difference in publications from the John Birch Society and Communist Party of the United States and that we-who-were-going-to-be-OldFarts-twenty-years-down-the-road couldn't see these differences? We thought EVERYTHING was true? Or is it that we used to be able to evaluate sources of information, but now we're somehow befuddled by the internet and we can't distinguish between a credible source of information and one that's not? WTF?
Louise from Little Rock and her department don't have a problem unless OldFart is on the hiring committee. If he is, his using RMP to evaluate job candidates should be reported to the chair of the committee or to the school's hiring compliance officer, if there is one. Using hearsay evidence to evaluate a candidate is 'way out-of-bounds and could result in a lawsuit. If OldFart's is not on the hiring committee, then his comments don't matter.
I'll bet that OldFart feels threatened by the candidate and this incident was the beginning of what could become a vicious mud-slinging campaign should that person get the job.
ReplyDeleteI hope some people on the committee rush to the candidate before he leaves. It's important for some context to the OldFart. If OldFart is in charge of a lot of stuff, then it's good the candidate learns this. If OldFart is just cranky, and he's the only one who feels like he does, the rest of the department can make up for it.
ReplyDeletePS: Has "comments" changed?
Wow.
ReplyDeleteWhat Darla said.
Last year, my outgoing chair, also a member of the OldFart constituency, actually told every single one of us during our faculty evaluation interviews that we should look up our evaluations on The Site That Shall Not Be Named so we could learn the "truth" about our teaching. Never mind that she had a stack of student evaluations in front of her, as well as all our statistics for retention and pass rates.
ReplyDeleteDepending on the candidate's circumstances, he may not even want the job after that encounter. OldFart's tirade reminds me very much of a couple of bizarre interviews I went on where one or two people's behavior was so egregious that I wouldn't have taken the job even if it had been offered to me.
Our departmental narcissistic personality disorder tried to pull RMP scores on a candidate, and I threatened her life if she ever tried anything that unprofessional again. But that was not in front of the candidate. This dude will probably run for the hills.
ReplyDeleteIf I'd been there, I would have just smiled sympathetically at the candidate and said, "Don't worry, he'll be dead soon..."nnVariants of that could definitely be communicated by other sympathetic faculty.
ReplyDeleteIt's not as much of a disaster as it seems, really, if the rest of the campus visit went well. It would be much more of a disaster if a far younger current chair did that. Or if there was a cabal of people with four or five middle-aged faculty that set upon him. As it stands, the offender is old, and not likely to be around when the candidate comes up for tenure.
The only problem is if the candidate is offered a job somewhere else, and this incident becomes the deciding factor in which job he accepts.
Is this Old Fart's first "infraction" of such a nature? Do let us know what he does next week with the candidate he really likes.
ReplyDeleteI've reluctantly concluded that, although it shouldn't be the case, it's probably wisest for anyone who is searching for a job (or up for tenure, or regularly up for renewal of a non-TT position) to monitor hir RMP page, and intervene if necessary by doing a bit of posting of hir own. I've been keeping an eye on mine for a year or so now, and have transformed roughly paraphrased versions of a few mostly-positive student comments from my "real" evaluations (flawed though those, too, may be) into RMP comments (and have gotten close enough to the student "voice" that I have to consult my notes to remember which ones I wrote, and which ones actual students did). Since RMP ratings often include advice to other students, I've also taken the opportunity to add some advice for coping with problems that a number of students seem to be having (mostly variations on RTFS and keep up with deadlines). In creating numerical ratings, I try to balance out the tendency of some students who liked my class to rate it as "easy," which is not a reputation I want to have, by pretty consistently rating myself "hard" (I vary helpfulness and clarity between the two higher options; I believe those are the ones that generate the overall rating). I feel a bit uncomfortable doing it, but I'm not aiming for outstanding ratings, just some version of a "tough but fair" reputation. I also don't think most of our students use RMP much anymore anyway. It does, however, tend to show up on google results for a name + institution search, which potential employers probably should do as part of due diligence, and that increases the temptation for them to peek. As far as they (and current colleagues and administrators) go, I figure it's a case of caveat lector. And sometimes it isn't necessary to intervene; I just checked, and the most recent comment on my page -- not one I wrote, though I've been meaning to add one or two -- is a positive one. That's another reason to check and, if it seems wise, add something: there's definitely a tendency for the comments to echo and build on one another, and it seems to be possible to some degree to steer the evolving consensus.
ReplyDeleteP.S. Old Fart should be directed the RMP page of Martin Bell, and then to the associated CM Post. If his head explodes, well, that would be another way to solve the problem.
I'd be careful about posting fake reviews to your own (or anyone else's) page on Hate My Prof. The way the world seems to work, students can post whatever horse-shit they want trashing professors, and nobody will ever question it. But if it ever comes to light that a proffie wrote something positive on their own page?! Jeebus jumpin junebugs in a jockstrap, it'll be a five-alarm national emergency! An outrage! A disgrace! A [fill in your own hyperbole here]! They'll probably re-convene the Salem witch trials.
DeleteSweet Motherfucking Christ, the frigging student evaluations ARE ANONYMOUS. I gather OF doesn't seem to realize that any fool can go on the Crap Site We Don't Name, slander a professor and skip away knowing damn well that they will never be called on it. I'm guessing the student evaluations had spaces for students to write, and you could possibly tell who was whom from their handwriting, but STILL...
ReplyDeleteLook, I certainly get it that CM is a place for exaggeration and overstatement. That's why it's fun.
ReplyDeleteBut why are folks allowed a whole lot of ageism, maybe a little bit of sexism, and absolutely no racism in their comments?
Substitute a racial or sexist term for OldFart and see what you get. I realize that there are plenty of older people in academia, some still good teaches and colleagues and some not, but there are plenty of N's and C's and P's and D's and L's out there, too, some good teachers and colleagues and some not.
All of y'all are gonna get old some day--if you're lucky. And you'll still probably have a house payment to make, a kid to put through college, and all of the rest. An early retirement might not be an option.
A little perspective might be helpful, too. If you're only 40, you're still "old" to your students' eyes. I'm 64, and "OldFart" won't apply to me for at least another ten years.