5 days notice for a cross-country interview? The debate about naming and shaming a search committee....

[Canis]

Has anyone else been following this latest heated debate about job searches, PhDs, adjuncts and the job market?

 

To sum up:

 

On Dec. 20, Rebecca Schuman wrote the post “Naming and Shaming: UC Riverside Gives Candidates 5 Days Notice” shaming the UC Riverside English department for notifying candidates only 5 days before they would need to fly to Chicago for job interviews for a Tenure Track position.

 

Then, a blogger who teaches at the New School (Tenured Radical) wrote a critique of Schuman’s complaint called ‘Job Market Rage Redux,” on her Chronicle of Higher Education blog in which she basically says 'stop whining, if you're good enough you'll get a job.'

 

Schuman replied here with a scathing critique: “A Radical Defense of the Status Quo.”

Tenured Radical retorted with an update to her post.

 

Then Tenured Radical went on a rant about internet civility in a post called: “Click (Dis)Like: Why Social Media Use is Now a Professional Issue.”

 

"The Professor Is In" blogger and career consultant called out Tenured Radical for being oblivious to the power and privilege of the tenure tracked faculty in a post (unfortunately) titled "How the Tenured are to the Job Market as White People are to Racism." She apologized for the race analogy here. Seems like it was really just link-baiting, and we can move on from that. At any rate the link baiting worked and twitter is ablaze with discussions about how Tenured faculty are also to blame for not changing the broken system - and in cases like UC Riverside, doing absolutely absurd things.

 

Personally I thought it was about time to see a search committee called out for this nonsense. I wonder what everyone else thinks - is it OK for places like UC Riverside to act from such privileged position in job searches? Can they expect that anyone suitable for the job would either be going to MLA anyway, or would have no problem flying across the country last minute?

 

In another gem, the chair of the department at UCR has this incredibly tone deaf bit to say in an interview with Inside Higher Education:

 

"Deborah Willis, chair of English at Riverside, said via email that she was surprised by the concern over the issue. "When I was on the job market years back, I can recall getting an interview invitation on Christmas Eve -- and that's when MLA was on the weekend right after Christmas. (I also recall being thrilled to get the request.) I've heard of other people being contacted a day or two before MLA," she said.

Added Willis: "The job search is, especially for entry-level positions, a stressful, challenging, exhausting process, and I can understand why job seekers would be upset about anything that makes it more stressful. We all have a lot of sympathy for our applicants -- especially since we've all been through it ourselves. But the big problems are the things that make the job market so terrible in the first place -- budget cuts, dwindling support for public universities, the increasing reliance on adjunct faculty, etc. The timing of an interview request seems pretty minor in the great scheme of things."

[St Andrews Lynx]

I have seen this happen in industry as well: short notice for a job interview, on the logic that "If they're serious about getting this position, they will come." I imagine that the search committee uses it as another weed-out filter: invite a short-list of 10 candidates at very short notice, then you'll only probably need to interview 7 of them. 

 

Can they expect people suitable for the job will come at such short notice? Of course! That's the economics behind this approach: if you can get away with it, you can bet somebody is busy doing it. 

 

Of course it favours the people who are able to make such a short-notice trip: adjuncts, people with families/dependants, those who don't have a spare $1000 floating in their account aren't.  

[NoSleepTilBreuckelen]

I had not been aware of this series of articles until you posted - thanks for brining this up! And wow do those posts get heated quick!

 

I'm glad this topic is being debated and I really hope some constructive changes happen because of this (both in tenure-track interview scheduling and also higher education blogging demeanor...).

 

One point that wasn't elaborated on in the posts, but that I think would be great to talk about (and maybe people here have ideas…) is how to navigate such a system, where candidates for academic positions are up against steep competition and just getting to the interviews can be daunting. While I'm no expert, I will say that at the program where I am currently a master's student, there is an open tenure track position, and the department interviewed the candidates at a national conference. They did this to try and make it easier for the candidates, so that they didn't have to make a separate trip to the city where the university is to interview. Our department even sent several professors and students who weren't presenting at the conference there just to conduct the interviews. I wonder if a candidate had not been able to make the conference, would they have been allowed to visit the university? From being on the inside of this department (i.e. a student there) I'm pretty sure that would have been okay, but I bet a lot of job seekers would be hesitant to ask for such accommodations. I'm definitely glad to see committees getting called out for short-turn arounds and other moves that are inconsiderate of applicants, but I hope that the impassioned posts on the blogs mentioned above aren't the end of this conversation. I would love to see articles and blogs advising job seekers on what they can and can't ask for and expect in these situations.

 

In the end I hope that search committees could learn from these debates to provide candidates with options - for example, offering either a conference interviews or one at the university. I also hope that all of us in the academic community, whether we're not at the job search part yet, whether we're way past it, or whether we're in the mist of it, can support job seekers with advice, insights, and solidarity. That's the way the system is going to change - if we're working together. 

Edited January 2, 2014 by NoSleepTilBreuckelen

[AdjunctOverload]

This kind of practice is unfair to the potential candidates--even when the interviews are scheduled weeks in advance.  MLA interviews sessions, depending on the school, are routinely for 40+ applicants.  Usually you get 5-15 minutes to make your case, with applicants coming one right after another, and with search committees in various states of exhaustion.  There are also the situations where search committees already have someone in mind, but they need to make the search look legitimate for the department/school or HR.  Is it worth $600+ dollars and traveling hundreds or thousands of miles for this "opportunity"?  Can you do this every year until you find a job/the perfect job? Probably not.

 

This practice also seems detrimental to the hiring institutions by excluding the qualified candidates that can't or won't drop everything and travel to the MLA conference.

 

Phone or Skype interviews would work just as well for this type of initial/first round interview.

[rising_star]

This whole controversy makes me continually grateful that I am not in a MLA field. My field's conference isn't associated at all with hiring, which means people really can decide whether or not to go each year. I've gone every year that I've been in grad school because I believe it's an important part of my professional development. But I understand that it can be difficult, especially given the expense of flights and hotels these days.

 

What I think all of this misses is the large expense that applicants, especially in MLA and AHA fields, have already undertaken before they even get that email from UCR or some other school. MLA and AHA job applications tend to require the use of Interfolio at the applicant's expense. Take a look here at the costs. Even if a school forces you to use their system to apply, you may still need to have confidential rec letters sent, at the cost of $4 per letter to the applicant. That adds up pretty quickly, even if, as this year, you get a free Interfolio membership (which AHA provided to everyone). To be fair, some schools pay for Interfolio so that there is no charge to the applicant, though this is not universal afaik. No one seems to be talking about the ridiculous cost of applying that faces those in some fields. By contrast, in my social sciences areas, pretty much all of the applications are submitted either via the school's HR website or via email directly to the search committee. This costs me nothing. My letter writers dislike Interfolio (not because I think they personalize every letter but I'm pretty sure it's the cost of it that they loathe) so they send out letters as needed, though many schools are now only requiring a reference list initially. My application costs are much lower than those of my friends getting PhDs in English or History because of this and I'm grateful.

[juilletmercredi]

Yeah, I caught up with the rage online.  It is definitely terrible for a big department like UCR to expect their interviewees to make plans in 5 days' time to go to MLA, and their excuses were terrible.  The department chair replied in one of the threads and basically said that they screwed up their distribution system and realized they hadn't read some applicants' files, so instead of pushing their interviews back or pulling all-nighters to get through them quicker (as people in other fields do when on tight deadlines) they shifted the consequences onto their applicants.

 

Most amusing to me was how many tenured professors began circling the wagons after Schuman posted her piece - not only Tenured Radical but in the comment sections of both CHE and IHE.  One kept insisting that graduate students should stop feeling entitled to things like beds to sleep in, and should maybe drive round trip and sleep on someone's floor to keep costs down (although I think that would still cost around $500, especially if you are driving far.  The gas alone from NYC to Chicago would cost around $200).  It was kind of amusing to see so many self-proclaimed post-modernist Marxists group up to protect themselves and make the argument about their needs...I'm aware that job searches are, inherently, about the needs of the departments, but many SCs are acting like applicants should worship the ground they walk on and be glad that they are deigning to consider applicants for their positions.

 

I'm not in an MLA field either; one of my fields' major conference is in August and the other is in early November, so neither is really good for interviewing (although sometimes departments have meet and greets or information sessions if they have a TT job open).  Usually first-round interviews are done by phone or Skype.  My field is similar to rising_star's in that all materials are submitted electronically via email or the school's HR website.  I really don't understand the point of Interfolio when email works just as well; I can store my own damn materials on the cloud.

 

I've been to several conferences large and small, and IMO the small conferences are the best for networking.  The best networking I've done was at a very small conference which all took place in one room and only had one session at a time.  I was specifically invited to this conference and it was concentrated in my field, so all of the attendees were people I was citing in my work and had read a lot about.  The biggest conference in my field I only like because the exhibition hall is large and sometimes I can chase down people in the non-academic careers I've been interested in (non-academics rarely go to the small ones) or program officers, but if you want an academic job it's far easier at least in my field to network at the smaller disciplinary/field-specific conferences.  So I think it's silly to say that if applicants are really serious about academia they will always attend the big conference.  My advisor (a TT professor at an Ivy League) doesn't even attend our big conference every year.