So You Think You Want to Be a Historian - The Campus Visit

[The following post is a composite picture of on-campus interviews drawn from the author’s four years on the academic job market. It is not an accurate description of his most recent interview below the Mason-Dixon line: to post about an interview whose results are as yet unknown is not only bad luck, it is also extremely poor form. And the author is nothing if not attentive to form.]

Let’s say you have a PhD in history. Never mind why, how, or where you acquired this PhD. You wrote a pretty good dissertation, have a book coming out with a pretty good press, and have been riding the postdoctoral carousel for a few years while attempting to find a steady, tenure-track position at an accredited college or university. You’re not picky, but you’d rather not end up somewhere like Shreveport. Sometimes the idea enters your head to chuck the whole thing and just go to law school or take a job with the State Department, but you haven’t given up yet.

Unless you are a complete basket case (and you’re not), you will at some point be offered what’s known as an on-campus interview at a school that’s hiring someone who does roughly what you do. Let’s say it’s British history. Or Irish. Or both. Really, they’re pretty much the same place. Anyway, the offer of this interview will normally have come after a preliminary interview either via telephone or at the annual historian party in January. Let’s say it happened after a phone interview.

The first challenge you will face in preparing for this on-campus interview will be to explain to your civilian friends and family (that is, people who are not academics) why it is that you have to travel across the country and spend anywhere from 24 to 72 hours interviewing for this position. They will scratch their heads when you explain that, apart from the hours when you will be asleep, you will be interviewing almost the entire time you are away. This includes trips to and from the airport, meals, informational sessions, coffee breaks, bathroom breaks, and informal presentations. They will insist that surely this is excessive – what’s wrong with a normal interview in which you sit across a table from a person or group of people for an hour or so and talk about your qualifications and experience? You will reply that there are several reasons for this: the people hiring you will potentially be your colleagues (and, in most cases, an important part of your social circle) for decades, so they want to be sure that you have that elusive quality known as “collegiality,” that you are not only qualified but also someone who will be a good “fit” for the department. You will also point out that academia is much different than the corporate world: the people running the search are not professional human resources managers but mostly shlubby, brainy people like yourself who have no business training and, in most cases, fairly idiosyncratic interpersonal skills. As a last resort, you will explain that, for the people running the job search, on-campus interviews are not only about hiring new people but also about getting a sense of what younger historians are up to these days – they are, moreover, opportunities for these faculty members to have some pretty expensive meals on someone else’s dime.

Your next task will be to decide what to wear. This should be easy, but many of your peers will begin going astray at precisely this point. They will overdress, digging out their ill-fitting weddings-and-funerals-only attire, and end up looking like depressed bankers. The important thing to bear in mind when packing for your interview is that you will, almost without exception, be better-dressed than the people interviewing you. Because these are historians and it is winter, this means you will be seeing lots of sweaters and tweed, often worn over slightly threadbare blouses and shirts. All you have to do is dress at a slightly higher level, throw in perhaps a bit of youthful flare, and you will be fine. If you are a man, consider not wearing a tie, at least on the second day. If you are a woman, consider primary colors.

Because you will be nervous about not getting enough sleep the night before the interview, you will not get enough sleep the night before the interview. This is normal. Let's say your interview is far away and you are flying there. You will be greeted at the baggage claim by someone whose picture you weren't able to find on the department's website. You will, nevertheless, be able to spot this person easily because s/he will be looking just as nervous about meeting you as you are about meeting them. Let's say your airport greeter is a man. He will immediately begin telling you in great detail everything he can think of about the airport, local tax laws, local politics, zoning codes, and the economic/demographic/social conditions of the city you are visiting. Do not be alarmed - you will not be required to remember all of this information and, should you take this job, you will not be required to acquire it. This is largely a maneuver intended to break the ice and to avoid talking too soon about the position, the department, etc. See if there's something in what your guide is telling you that you can latch onto or expand upon. Offer similar or contrasting information about places you have lived or spent time in. Be creative!

After a tour of the area, during which you will have been offered much new information but retained little, you will be brought to your hotel. The hotel may or may not offer you a free cookie upon checking in. Should you be offered a cookie, resist the urge to eat it immediately. You may need it later - you will undoubtedly be well fed during your stay, but not always on the schedule to which you are accustomed (remember, every second of your stay is very tightly scheduled), so it's not a bad idea to have some snacks tucked away for emergencies. In fact, instead of rolling around in bed the night before and being unable to sleep, you would be wise to use that time locating and packing power bars, trail mix, cheesy crackers, and fruit for your visit, being sure to place these items strategically in different bags, briefcases, and pockets.

Once you get checked into your room, you may have anywhere from 10 to 40 minutes to yourself before you are to be picked up for dinner. Use this time to sit quietly and enjoy not being evaluated.

You will then be taken to dinner by a different faculty member than the one who picked you up at the airport. This person will tell you pretty much the same things, often in the same words, as your airport ride told you about the city, local politics, zoning codes, etc. Having already practiced responding to this information once today, you will be well prepared for this conversation - this time your responses will come out much more smoothly and quickly than they did before.

Dinner will be at a nice restaurant that members of the faculty only visit when they are hosting job candidates. There will be seven or eight of them present when you arrive. If the university is picking up the entire tab, then many of them will be drinking expensive drinks, and some may already be drunk. They will, of course, all know one another and will be talking about things/people/places that you don't know anything about - principally departmental politics, but there may be other local topics thrown in from time to time. The people you are dining with will normally fit one of the following descriptions: a) they will all be substantially older than you, leading you to reflect that these people seem more like your grandparents than potential colleages; b) there will be a mix of ages, but for some reason the younger ones seem scarier than the older ones; c) they will remind you of the minor characters that appear in many Coen Brothers movies - you know, the quirky local shopkeepers and hairdressers who, if they're in a funny Coen Brothers movie, get some pretty good one-liners, but who, if they're in a violent Coen Brothers movie, get murdered; d) they will be perfectly warm and lovely and interested and welcoming.

During dinner you will not have to say much, since everyone else will be talking to one another about those things that they have in common and you will have nothing to contribute. At some point, however, the conversation will die and someone - usually the one designated, officially or unofficially, as the attack dog - will ask you something for which you are completely unprepared. You will probably be slurping soup at this time or chewing a large piece of pork, and so you will splutter a bit before coughing out an answer that neither you, your guests, nor the waitstaff could possibly find remotely satisfactory. Things will continue in this vein for a little while before the conversation drifts back to those topics to which you can't contribute. You will then be free to complete your meal and begin thinking about dessert. Dessert will, in fact, be offered, and - even if you are completely stuffed - you will order some. Because, hey, free dessert!

After dinner you will be taken back to your hotel, where you will fail to sleep soundly for a second night.

The next day will be the big day. You will be picked up at a very early hour by yet another faculty member, who will proceed to tell you exactly the same things about local politics, zoning codes, demographics, etc, that you have heard at least twice already. Anticipating the topics that will come up, you will now be able to ask leading questions that will prompt this person to continue talking at some length, while you sit silently and try to wake up. Around this time you will become extremely grateful that so many people in your chosen profession are incorrigible talkers, and that the kind of talking they do (i.e., lecturing) requires very little in the way of two-way interaction. In fact, they seem to prefer it that way.

Once you arrive on campus you will muster your strength and embark on an extensive series of meetings, tours, and presentations. You will meet with the department chair, graduate students, and deans. You will act professional and ask all the right questions of the department chair, but you will feel more comfortable with the graduate students, with whom you will share one or two off-color jokes and maybe drop an f-bomb. The dean may or may not look like Paul Newman, he may or may not have memorized all of your personal details before your meeting (up to and including your current address), and he may or may not be a priest - but at least one of these three variables will undoubtedly be present, and you would do well to prepare for any of them. If the university has a religious mission then you will express great interest in that mission and a desire to carry it forward through every means at your disposal, up to and including sacrificing yourself on a cross, should it come to that. If the university is a state school you will extol the virtues of providing affordable education and the excitment you feel when you have a chance to teach less-privileged students. If the university is an elite liberal arts institution, you will tell the dean how grateful you are not to have to teach poor kids or religious kids.

At some point during the day you will have lunch, probably at the university dining facility. This will be less satisfying than your dinner last night, but there will be fewer opportunities for you to choke on your soup, principally because the soup that day looks really gross.

You will now be expected to give one or maybe two presentations. The so-called "job talk" consists of a vastly oversimplified description of your dissertation, and is best done with the help of colorful pictures and Power Point images of historical figures with little cartoon speech bubbles containing important quotations coming out of the mouths. The so-called "teaching demonstration" will either involve you standing in a room full of faculty and pretending they are students while you deliver a lecture on the Irish Famine, say, or it will involve you teaching an actual class full of actual students about, say, the Irish Famine. In either case the situation will be completely contrived and nothing like what it's like when you're actually teaching, but you'll be too worried about the upcoming question and answer period to focus too much on that. The question and answer period, it goes without saying, will be much more easily handled if you are teaching an actual class than if you're pretending to teach a classroom full of faculty.

By now you will be ready for a little alone time, but nothing along those lines has been written into your schedule. You will then have the brilliant idea of excusing yourself and going to the restroom. You will sit on the toilet for fully 10 minutes, not talking and not being evaluated, and that will make all the difference.

At some point during your visit the administrative assistant who has been coordinating much of your visit, a youngish person of the opposite sex who is obviously too smart for his or her job and feels it, may develop something of a crush on you. S/he will begin flirting with you and suggesting ways s/he might sabotage the other applicants to ensure that you are offered the position. Whatever you do, DO NOT DISCOURAGE THIS. The administrative assistant might not have any real power over who gets hired, but you could use all the allies you can get. And besides, should you get the job, you never know...

The remainder of your day will consist of a tour of campus (given by another faculty member who will begin telling you all about local politics, demographics, zoning codes, etc - by this point you can safely tune them out), another meeting or two to fill out some paperwork, maybe a visit to the library, and another dinner. This second dinner will be smaller and less intense than last night's dinner. By now you will have dropped all pretense of professionalism or maturity - after handily dispatching the stock questions asked by your dinner companions (who will not be the same people you had dinner with the night before), you will proceed to treat them like graduate students, telling the occasional off-color joke and dropping more than a few f-bombs. You will drink a little too much wine and begin a subdued but steady tirade about the evils of a) college sports; b) public schools; c) Republicans; d) Freemasons; or e) all of the above. Your dinner companions will begin gossiping about the other members of the department, letting slip vital clues about the internal workings of the search committee, the high-handedness of the department chair, the shortcomings of the other candidates they've interviewed, and the difficulties of getting some of the older codgers to just give up and retire already. You will form a special bond with this second group of dinner companions that will convince you that they, at least, will be in your corner when the time comes to decide whom to offer the job to. You may or may not be right about this.

Finally you will be brought back to the hotel where you will sleep the sleep of the angels for about 12 hours before waking up without an alarm, springing out of bed, feeling sharper and more focused than you have all week. Unfortunately, these qualities will be completely wasted as you are shuttled to the airport by the one remaining faculty member you have not yet met, who will tell you for the thousandth effing time everything you already know about local politics, zoning codes, economics, etc. You will spend the rest of the day traveling back home, and then the next 4-12 weeks waiting for the phone to ring - and maybe secretly hoping it won't.

While you wait to learn your fate, you will at least be able to take comfort in the fact that you are not applying for a job in the Obama administration.