Job Market Flashback: Part 10

Welcome back to my semi-regular attempt to wrestle with what it has been like to be on the academic job market.  If you want to read the whole saga, you can treat yourself to a few thousand words of distraction here.

The alarm came earlier than I’d prefer, but I wasn’t sleeping soundly anyway. I was in a strange town and nervously excited for my final interview with Mid-Sized Regional University (MRU). Without snoozing the alarm, I rolled out of bed and readied myself for the day-long gauntlet otherwise known as the campus visit.  

At 7:30AM, I made my way down to the lobby to meet the faculty member tasked with making sure I ate something and got to campus.  We had breakfast at a cool little diner a short walk from the hotel that covered its basic diner bones with a chic facade of pop art and off-beat menu items—andouille sausage gravy, anyone?  My chaperone and I chatted about the department and curriculum between bites of omelet—the interview starts early, even if you haven’t had a proper cup of coffee yet.  After about an hour, we gathered our things to head to campus.

My first official meeting that day was with the department chair.  He was warm and welcoming and although he had my CV in his hand, it wasn’t clear to me that he’d read past the line with my name on it.  Even so, his job was to sell the department and university—and sell it he did.  Although this was, technically, an interview, he spent more time extolling the virtues of MRU than asking questions about my teaching, research, and service.  Having been on the other side things now, I know that this is a really, really important part of the process.  Just as the department wants to select the best candidate, they need to make sure that the candidate is sufficiently smitten to accept an offer.  I wish, in hindsight, that I’d spent more time poking and prodding at some of the issues that were clearly hang-ups for the department—such as the extension campus that was assured I “would not be compelled” to teach at and the status of the basic course in the general education curriculum.  Even so, I felt like I left a pretty good impression and ended the meeting with quite a bit more information about MRU and the department than I scrounged from the website.

From there I bounced around faculty offices for 15 minute meetings with one or two members of the department.  These conversations were cordial, get-to-know-you-type affairs and mostly focused on a combination of the “what will you teach here” question and folks hyping the university and the town/region.  All good.  By mid-morning, I’d pinballed around almost all of faculty offices and found myself settling in nicely.

The day’s major event, the teaching demonstration, came next.  I had thirty minutes or so to prep—in the department chair’s office—before teaching.  Or at least, I was scheduled to have thirty minutes to prep.  As it turned out, a faculty member with whom I was not scheduled to meet because of teaching conflicts opted to use my prep time as their own personal impromptu meeting.  The chat was friendly, but it took almost the entire block of prep time that was on my schedule—and lasted longer than any of my scheduled meetings with the other faculty members.  In all, I ended up with a couple minutes to click through my slides and make sure my media worked before the search chair came to escort me to the classroom to set up.  You can’t count on down time, even when it’s on the official itinerary.

The teaching demonstration at MRU was a combination research talk and teaching demo.  My task was to teach something, anything really, about my research.  My audience was a lower-level Small Group Communication class, about ten faculty members, and the department chair.  My plan was to teach the concept of “persona” using a few examples of George Carlin’s progression from suit-and-tie jokester to counter-culture comedy icon from my dissertation.  I had more compelling examples from Richard Pryor’s comedy, but couldn’t justify bringing the n-word into conversations with a cold audience on an interview.  Discretion, I’m told, is the better part of valor.  The Carlin jokes did the job.

George Carlin

NOT George Carlin

A couple things stand out in my memory of this teaching demonstration.  First, as I introduced my examples, I asked “does anyone know who George Carlin is?”  Nowadays, students are less and less likely to recognize the George, but I figured I had enough faculty in the audience that someone would hit that softball into the bleachers.  After an awkwardly long pause, a faculty member, the only member of the search committee I’d yet to meet, answered, “he’s the comedian who smashes watermelons.”  I waited a beat.  And then another.  “Um, that’s Gallagher, not George Carlin,” I corrected, gently, deferentially, almost apologetically.  I eyed the class with caution as the faculty member’s face reddened with embarrassment with each passing heartbeat.  Thankfully, another faculty member raised his hand before things got any more awkward, “Carlin is the guy who did the seven words you can’t say on TV.”  Tension broken.  Teaching demo saved.  I was ready (able) to move on.  In a public setting—like a research talk or teaching demo—everyone, even the department faculty, are in the pressure cooker with you.

Once we got past the awkward embarrassing Gallagher/Carlin gaffe and watched a little comedy (two different performances of Carlin’s “hippy dippy weatherman”), the discussion really took off.  The lesson worked well enough and the handful of students participating in the conversation were really engaged.  Not bad for coming off the bench cold.  Discussion has long been my preferred teaching method and, as a result, I’m pretty good at getting and keeping the conversation going.  

After the demo, I gathered my stuff and offered my thanks to the students and faculty shuffling out of the room afterward.  None of this is remarkable.  As I followed the crowd of people from the classroom to lunch, however, I overheard a few variations on the following: “did you notice that he learned all of their names?” This I did not expect.  I’m as good at learning names as the next person, but I’m not especially good—a friend of mine literally gets all of her students names on day 1… she’s good.  I do, however, make a conscious effort to ask for and then use students’ names until I know them.  This behavior is so engrained in my teaching that I do it almost by reflex—“that’s right! What your name, again? Thanks, Anna.”  This little tic, as I learned on my way to lunch, is apparently impressive.  At lunch—with a bunch of faculty, many of whom attended my teaching demo—no one asked me about the content of my class, but more than one person asked me directly, almost defensively, if was “good with names.” The lesson, how you interact with the students during a teaching demo is always more important than whatever you teach them--as long as you teach them something. 

After lunch, it was time to pinball to a few more faculty meetings—which included an incredibly helpful fifteen minute crash course on the union contract at MRU—and then a meeting with the Dean.  Well, not with the Dean, but with an Associate Dean who apologized for having to stand in for the Dean.  Where I was pretty sure that the chair hadn’t read my CV, I was certain that the Associate Dean had printed it moments before I walked in.  And that makes sense.  Unless the administrator—Dean, Provost, VP, Chancellor, whomever—interviewing you is from the department for which you are interviewing, they assume that the department did its homework on your scholarship and teaching bona fides.  Their role is to figure out what draws you to the University, the area, or the department and to make sure you won’t be an obvious liability to the University.  

In this case, my interest was all about the curriculum—which I discussed at length—and that it was a better job than the one I had—but, of course, I left that bit out.  That response went over well enough, but it did slow our conversation a bit because the Associate Dean wasn’t prepared to address the department’s curriculum in anything other than broadest strokes.  Nevertheless, apart from mixing up some Greek satirists with some Roman satirists, which like four people on the planet would catch let alone call me on, the administrative portion of my interview went just fine. 

By this time, it was mid-afternoon and I was starting to feel the wear and tear of a full day of being “switched on” in interview mode.  Thankfully, there was only one more item on my dance card.  Of course, other than the teaching demonstration, it was probably the most important meeting of the day: the official interview with the search committee.

Honestly, I don’t remember much about how this conversation went down.  It was later in the afternoon, maybe 4PM, and my brain was mush.  I remember being at a total loss for an answer to the question “which theories do you emphasize when teaching public speaking?” I answered, but my answer was not good. It was so not good that one committee member supplied the example of “like, Monroe’s Motivated Sequence”—which I teach on the regular—and I said something articulate like, “Oh, yeah.  I do that.”  Not my best moment.  Otherwise, I used my time at the end of the interview to compliment the committee for organizing my visit and extolling the virtue’s of MRU based on what I’d learned that day—it seemed like a good place to work and, contrary to some of the other places I’d interviewed, it wasn’t riddled with red flags.  Of course it helps that it was a massive step up from the gig I had, but let’s not sweat those details…

The campus visit came to close around 5PM and I was shuttled back to my hotel to relax a bit before dinner.  A couple of hours later, two of the search committee members, including the one who mixed up George Carlin & Gallagher, picked me up to get some dinner at a swanky restaurant in town.  I was totally exhausted, so I spent most of the time trying not to put my foot in my mouth—which I often fail at—and staying attentive enough to track the conversation.  The food was great—although I’ll never understand why folks insist on serving a beautiful piece of fish with mashed potatoes (soft on soft… ugh)—and the conversation was easy.  After a good meal, glass of wine, and a complimentary digestif from the bar (which I slugged down like a shot because I’m classy like that…), I was ready to call home and crash.

My visit technically extended to the next day, but my agenda was open—no meals, meetings, or demonstrations.  Instead, I used the time to grab a nice breakfast at place recommended by one of the committee members and explored the town (on foot) while searching for an ATM so that I’d have some cash to tip the car service for my ride back to the airport.  

Pro-tip: Always tip the car service.  Always.  In some cases, the driver might have driven all of the finalists back and forth from the airport.  They’re a great source of information for candidates—and search chairs.

The town was great, but its East Coast claustrophobia was quite a bit different from the spread out Midwest open spaces that I was used to.  I remember calling my spouse at least once while traversing the little town saying things like, “all the houses are connected” and “the houses are all tall and narrow.”  After walking a few miles and taking in as much of the town and campus (I walked back down there, too) as I could on my own, I packed up and met the car service at the hotel for a shuttle back to the airport for my midday flight home.

I arrived back in Ohio that evening exhausted and also stoked.  I wanted this job, and I wanted it bad.