Professors for hire

I’m writing this in the “151 Bar”  of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago, to the accompaniment of a Diet Coke (an unusual tipple for Beard) and a chicken quesedilla (an equally unusual food). Apart from two brief cab-rides to restaurants, I haven’t left this hotel for three days. The only real glimpse of the Windy City for me has been from my bedroom window (thirtieth floor but still not particularly inspiring – being face to face with a yet taller office block).

The reason for being here is the annual APA conference, the biggest classical conference in the USA (and therefore the world). These vast American jamborees are strange affairs. There are literally thousands of punters, which means that “plenary sessions” are more or less impossible (you need a vast ballroom to fit in even half those who attend). Instead there are dozens of “parallel panel sessions”, four to six mini papers of 15 or 20 minutes, grouped (rather optimistically sometimes) around a single theme.

But like with most conferences, it’s not the lectures that you go for.

Nor is it just the socialising -- though there’s plenty of that. In fact, I have to say that hundreds of middle-aged classicists, self included, traipsing round a vast hotel in search of the best party is not always a pretty sight. (“The Harvard party’s serving Bourbon. . .”  someone says; so off we all rush. . .)

More than that,, one of the main purposes of the thing is the “job market”. It’s at the APA that most US universities looking to “hire” new academic staff do their preliminary interviews. You can easily spot the candidates. They are the ones you see in lift (aka elevator), looking a bit anxious and slightly too smartly dressed for young men and women. The senior Faculty doing the interviews are the ones you don’t see at all until the late night parties – because they are closeted in some elegant suite somewhere (the rules being that you cant interview in a room with a bed in it, so it cant be in a standard hotel room), grilling the unfortunate young  all day, every day.

This is actually only the start of the process of  hiring. Those of us used to the  British system (if you want to appoint someone, you advertise, short list, get all the short-listed candidates called for interview on the same day . . . then you make your mind up, there and then, end of story) find the whole business strangely protracted. The candidates who make it through the first round at the conference then get to go on campus visits (to give a lecture, meet the students, the Faculty etc … but never never overlap with the other candidates). All that takes weeks and weeks, which is then followed by more weeks and weeks during which (or this is how it seems from the outside) the Faculty battles with the Dean, to get the candidate they want; for some reason Deans always seem to want to appoint someone the Faculty doesn’t like (and vice versa).

I used to find this whole palaver rather puzzling. But I’ve now decided that it’s more than just a process of job selection, it’s a ritual of bonding; which is why US academics talk about "hiring" all the time. It's a unifying cultural discourse. It fulfils, in other words,  the same function as exams and grades in Cambridge -- about which most people in the outside world think that we are as ridiculously obsessed as the Americans are about who is going to get the advertised position in the University of wherever.

Whether some mark is b+++/a?- or ba/a--?- doesn’t honestly amount to a hill of beans, but discussion of such niceties is how we bond. Which is why we take it all so terribly seriously. Indeed my own Faculty in Cambridge used to have a "Plainman's Guide" to such systenms of evaluation (later, politically correctly, changed to a "Plainperson's Guide") explaining the intricacies of the b?+/??- - system to new staff. 

Different cultures, different rules.

Comments

[Michelle]

Of course those of us who have come to Britain from America find the process here equally mystifying, how can you decide to hire someone on the basis of no more than an hour of seeing them? A 30 minute talk and a 30 minute interview does not seem to me to be enough to differentiate between candidates. I suspect that goes along with the high rate of internal hires here at Cambridge.

[Paulo]

Yes, thanks Oliver. I didn't mean to suggest that Newman was corruptly appointed to Oriel. But he didn't exactly "bond", except with some individuals. Perhaps on canonisation, he will become the patron saint of persons with gravely disordered sexual tendencies, or has St Sebastian already got that one? Well, miracles do happen.

[E]

The UK academic hiring process made more sense to me after someone explained it as a power display by our university masters. Intended to show off their punch not just to the candidates, but also to existing staff. This seemed to explain a tendency to extend the time they keep an interviewee on site. And possibly explaining why hirers at the APA also demand a campus visit, so the whole process doesn't happen out of sight of their existing staff.

[Tony Francis]

There seems to be a group of scholars which travel about the land seeking a position. When I went back to grad school at Wichita State, the place was agog about a new woman dean of students. After innumerable meetings and committee sittings, she had gotten the name of the univeristy officially changed to: "THE Wichita State University." It was that way for awhile. Then she was gone, and the place reverted back to plain, old "Wichita State." There is another hurdle for the academic to overcome: tenure. Even after initial herd bonding accompanying the appointment, the new teacher must become tenured within a set time frame. There were several professors I liked in the Chemistry Department, but who were gone after a few years because they didn't blend in, and get tenure. I would like to hear more from OPN concerning his 20 year experience in the US educational system. It has been my impression that preserving seats for pre-selected faculty members, while carrying out a "search" would be met with great indignation in the US. I'm not sying it doens't happen. But it would be thought of as discriminatory.

[Oliver Nicholson]

The first stage of the 'bonding' Mary is talking about (which in my experience of the American system has absolutely nothing to do with corruption or log-rolling) comes with the communal effort of a department persuading their Dean to have the right to search at all.
The next stage is (like English examining) the quite incredible volume of work involved in the search - including but not limited to the reading of hundreds (sometimes) of dossiers. I have colleagues who have devoted as much time to the chair of a search committee as would have enabled them to complete a small book. Of course the system is humiliating while one is the toad beneath the harrow - I had a total of about four interviews at a total of a good half-dozen visits to the APA.
Unlike the British system, the US system at least gives the outsider an outside chance. Only in England have I ever been told (by a member of the appointing department - name on request, - or maybe not, on second thoughts) that I was a makeweight interviewee in a search where the outcome had been decided in advance - though that was in the 1970s.
I am not sure what Paulo's point is about Newman. His degree was indeed a Second 'below the line' (because he had read too hard), but he won the Oriel Fellowship through an open and competitive examination (and looks like winning sainthood through a miracle).

[dr venables preller]

Paolo: It would be surprising, would it not, if those appointing a candidate were to approach that task always with a completely blank canvas?

Given the wide range of possible objectives, from the pursuit of excellence to limitation of undesired change, a selection process with over-emphasis on the most thorough evaluation of candidates not necessarily best suited may be not only a wasteful use of a limited time resource of selection personnel, but might needlessly raise hopes more widely to an extent impossible to fulfill.

The choice between competing candidates can sometimes be best achieved by not dicarding all methods which have worked well in the past

[anonymous]

I suspect this type of observation can only be made by someone with a tenured job. I'll try to take comfort in knowing that the AIA/APA is just a "ritual of bonding" when I am next huddled in the interview room hoping that I'm not about to doom all of my hard work and the years I've devoted to this discipline.

[abc]

I think my mentor is more like a pharoah than a mummy, or may be not. We are opposed in values anyway, but that is how we work the most productively. I'd be scared if I thought I knew him completely. His brilliance would eradicate itself somehow and that would be my internal loss, to be without him. I'm lucky to have had many mentors who have tried to make me work and a lot of them are special. The strict ones, particularly so, because life is far from easy for those who can and do survive the tough calls. Being able to go in for the piss kind of becomes impossible in the end and, as a friend of mine said, whose brother committed suicide in her sister's apartment, "It hurts, you know". I advised her against more tough performance and told her to quit.

[Paulo]

What you blithely call "bonding" (i.e I take it that academic interviewers know perfectly well who they want to appoint, but subject several or a lot of other hopefuls to the sometimes immense trouble and expense of preparing for and attending an interview, (because that's the law) would in Africa be called "corruption".

But would A E Houseman have got his professorship (Cantab) otherwise? Would Harold Wilson have been appointed to ChristChurch (Oxon)instead of Lord Pakenham? Could Colin MacLeod with his Second have been appointed to that same institution, or three generations of Bhuttos? Or John Henry Newman to Oriel, or well, you name them.

Paulo

[R.B. Gold]

Hi Mary,
I enjoyed meeting you and reading your book. I think that you're right on about the whole "right of passage" thing, which also occurs with the system of oral examinations. In some respects the whole process seems Byzantine to me as a young scholar, but it's the way it has always been.
I mostly enjoyed the going to the parties at the APA..though it was a bit disarming seeing my profs get tipsy!
Ciao!

[abc]

Lesson 1 : don't piss the chair off - don't annoy Mary Beard! x

[Xjy]

Ties in a bit with the Labouring Classicists blog - how to spot and nourish the bright young things and turn them into replicas of yourself - a kind of institutional immortality. The pharaohs had mummies, we have mentors. The problems start when you have so many excellent candidates that the dike can´t be saved with just one finger.

The story of the OED and its exo-academic creators is instructive, perhaps.

Did you get a chance to sit in on any of these interviews? Or would it have been regarded as poaching?

Now, how about your own paper?

And what was the pulse like - feeble, ticking over, resurgent, triumphant? Any meetings conducted in Latin? Any wave of papers about the impact of the Net on Classics?

Any nightmares reflecting the events of the day ;-)

[Candadai Tirumalai]

My experience in academia is that the Dean or "the Administration" sometimes brings in a new Head of the Department who is not particularly acceptable to its members. That can leave a legacy of bitterness which takes years to resolve.

[abc]

And, funnily enough, someone can spend their life reading books and spray painting cars and be more latently "intelligent" than a person who has performed with top marks throughout. Different assessments, as you say.

[Oliver Nicholson]

After 20 years in the U.S. of A. I would agree that Mary is dead right about 'searches' being a bonding exercise for an American 'faculty'.
The advantage of the American Way of Jobs, though, is that because it is thorough it really does give all candidates a fair chance, In Britain one scholar can dominate a field right across the country and (in a terribly nice way, of course) permanently destroy a young person's chances of ever being employed in any British university. America gives candidates lashings of rope to hang themselves with. In particular the 'campus job talk' often makes or breaks an applicant's chances, and if it fails, it is the responsibility of the applicant.
The serious obstacle for the entry level applicant to America from Britain is, of course, that the university which makes an offer to a foreigner has to look forward to many months of correspondence with the Immigration and Naturalisation Service trying to prove that it could find no American equally qualified for the post - this is not hard when the foreigner is a senior scholar, but a bit more difficult when he is a freshly-minted Ph.D..
Years ago, to supplement my (American) salary, I wrote a piece for the Education Grauniad about how to get a job in American Classics. Perhaps it is time for someone to repeat it.

[abc]

It's bollocks. I've seen appraisals go tits up despite consistent performance. Now for those who die in Iraq, that's a separate point, calling for the right intellectual level of reflection.

[JIW]

Dear Mary,
You might enjoy tales from the other APA and the philosophy job market at this excellent blog:
http://philosophyjobmarket.blogspot.com/
In particular, it points out just how expensive the job market is once you've shelled out for registration, posted off all your dossiers and found yourself a flight and somewhere to stay at the APA... Luck those whose universities can subsidise the search.