At a dinner, a faculty member made horrifically racist and classist comments about the neighborhood I grew up in, and kept marveling at how it was possible that I had gotten a PhD.

I had a flyout, coming from the west coast, with a department in the central time zone. What I knew coming in: it was a four-day-three-night visit, arriving late the first day, with a teaching demo the second day, a job talk the third day, I’d fly out the fourth. Keep in mind, in what follows, that this was my first ever flyout.

I was acquainted with one of the faculty members in the department, who picked me up at the airport at roughly dinner time, took me to a nice enough pub in my hotel. As we were parting, he says: “see you at 7:30!”. My reply: “wha – what?” “Yeah, you know, the interview.” “There’s an interview?” “Didn’t you know? Over breakfast at 7:30 in the hotel restaurant. The entire faculty will be there. See you then!” Keep in mind that, given the time, 7:30 CST felt like 5:30 am to me.

So I drag myself up and go to the interview. It went not particularly well but I felt I acquitted myself as well as could have been reasonably expected. Following the interview, another faculty member said: “I’m looking forward to your presentation to the undergraduate philosophy club.” My reply: “wha – what?” “Yeah, you know, the presentation to the undergrads, before your teaching demonstration.” “Um, OK. I’ll have to prepare something.” “Weren’t you given an itinerary?” “Um, no.” “Oh, sorry about that. Well, see you there!” In the interim, I was shown around town and campus, not paying attention, desperately trying to come up with something to say to the undergraduate philosophy club. (I did, eventually.)

Teaching demo goes fine, next day the lunch with the honors undergrads (which I also didn’t know about) goes fine, job talk goes fine. Now, typically after a job talk a department will invite you out to dinner. Instead, I was invited to a “pot luck” at the department chair’s house. Fine by me, but of course I didn’t have access to meal preparation equipment, so we thought it right and proper that instead of bringing a dish, my host and I (my acquaintance) would stop at a liquor store and bring a six pack of local beer.

Now, the chair lived in an enormous house, which he shared with several groups of undergraduate men, who he apparently rented out the upper floors to. We are the first to arrive at the house. We enter through the kitchen, put the beer in the fridge, and venture into the living room. The first thing that anyone would notice about this living room is that there is a life-size photograph of a fully nude woman in a rather suggestive pose hung on the wall. We venture back into the kitchen.

Faculty members and their partners gradually stream in. One by one they bring in: beer. Every one of them. None of them bring in any food whatsoever. Now, I’m not generally a person with a huge appetite, but I happen to be a type-1 diabetic, and nursing a beer without the opportunity to take any insulin, after having just given a job talk was starting to make me a little nervous (which of course I tried to cover up while making jovial conversation with the department members, as one does during a flyout). Eventually someone notices that there is not any actual food, and they decide to go out to the grocery store to pick up something to eat. The return with: *one rotisserie chicken*. So I eat a couple of bites of chicken, which doesn’t really do much to calm my nervous temper.

Meanwhile, some of the undergraduates who inhabit the upper floors are milling around the kitchen, attracted by the copious amounts of beer that have arrived. Apparently they are the only ones who seem to notice what’s going on: an out-of-town visitor who has been run through the campus visit ringer and not fed adequately. So they start milling around in the cupboards for something to make, and eventually come across a box of falafel mix, which they gamely prepare on the stove. So that was nice.

I did not get the job.

My laptop died a couple days before I had a flyout at Cornell. Luckily Generous Party X offered to loan me a spare, and even FedEx it to me overnight. Twist: when it arrived I found it covered in… stickers.
Generous Party X had two loves in their life at the time: hand guns and pornography. There were four stickers advertising Salacious Website Y in the corners, and a huge Glock sticker in the center.

As the laptop booted, I found the desktop wallpaper was a closeup of a pearl handled Colt 45. Tons of files started to load onto the desktop, partly obscuring it, but twist again: they were all porn as the the filenames made very plain.

So I got some duct tape to cover the stickers. I created a fresh user account with a blank desktop. And I headed off to Cornell.

When it came time for my talk I plugged my laptop into the projector, but this was the olden days when you often had to reboot to get the projector and computer to find one another. I rebooted, and… didn’t account for Generous Party X’s account being the default one. Up came the Colt 45 on the seminar room wall, and the OS busied itself frantically trying to cover it with hundreds of offensively named files.

I stammered something about it not being my laptop and stumbled through my talk red-faced. Afterward the grad students took me out for lunch and, rightly, teased me mercilessly. I did not get the job.

I’ve been at a conference where somebody tells the story about the guns-and-porn guy who tanked his Cornell job talk. I just raise my hand and take the L.

Not so horrible for me, but super embarrassing: I interviewed at a small college for a non-TT renewable teaching position. Campus visit went fine, everyone was nice. On the way to the airport, the faculty member driving me starts talking shit about some of the other people they interviewed. He didn’t say their names, but since I knew most of them, I could figure out who they were from the little information he was giving me. I had to stop him eventually by gently pointing out that I knew who he was talking about. Ouch. He really seemed to have no clue that I might know some people in the profession, and that people talk to each other. I am not sure if I got the job, got a different one soon after the visit, and called them to let them know I was no longer interested.

The best part of this thread has been people saying “I didn’t get the job”. It adds such an amazing element to the stories.

Visit one: person escorting me around campus is drink at 8am telling me his colleagues are “semi-literate,” other lady tells me she has a gun her purse, junior faculty person starts crying when i ask what the students are like, department chair sits me on the stoop and says “honey, do you really wanna come here”? I was offered the job and would still have considered it if the cab driver to the airport hadn’t told me what utter spoilt brats the students are.

Years ago, I had an interview with a business school while I was already working as an assistant professor my current job. Interviews with faculty, etc., were all great. I was pissed off at GTown for doing some bad shit, and was seriously considering leaving. (They’ve since fixed the problem.)

But then I had to meet with the deputy dean of the business school. He looked over my CV (which included already a few books, a bunch of articles, etc.). He said, “Well, you have a large number of publications, but nothing in *Academy of Management* or other business journals. I think we could give you a 7-year clock and have you start over.”

I said, “Oh, no, I think there’s a misunderstanding here. I already have a much better publication record than anyone in the department that would hire me. This is not a lateral move for me. I’d have to come in with tenure and a big raise. Now, I understand that some business schools only focus on core business, though yours doesn’t. But if this is really your expectation, that’s good to know. We can just end the interview right now and I can go home early.”

He said, “No, no, you’re right, and I understand and agree. Of course you would come in tenured.”