From many years ago:

No one from the interviewing department was at the airport to pick me up. Made my own way to the hotel, checked in, and had a nice dinner at their expense at the hotel restaurant. Received a chagrinned call the next morning when they realized what had happened (was back in the days when you had to stay over Saturday night to get a decent rate on flights so the interview wasn’t scheduled until Monday). Got the job.

At an on-campus visit I was taken to the beach by a prospective colleague. I found myself having to change into a swimsuit in an open locker room in front of my host. I was offered the job. Make of that what you will.

Fresh off the plane, the first question I was asked (by the wife of the chair) was whether I was married. Follow up: if you get this job, what is s/he going to do? I was also asked whether I planned to have kids by another faculty member. I stayed in a motel and the first night I was there (before the job talk in the morning) I was up half the night listening to a horrible drunken fight right outside my window in which a couple was discovering exactly when, and exactly how, they cheated on each other. New facts were coming to light every few minutes…I got the job.

Search committee chair asked me how old my twin brother is.

This story is from many years ago, in the era when APA interviews were usually conducted in hotel rooms, with female candidates sitting in a chair and mostly male interviewers sitting on hotel beds. I was invited to an on campus interview for a one year job. I had to make difficult flight connections, and arrived late in the evening before the interview. I discovered to my horror that the department had chosen to put me up in the home of a male faculty member. A single male faculty member. I had to spend the nights of the interview alone in his home, sharing a bathroom with him. Although nothing overt happened, I was extremely uncomfortable with this arrangement and with his presence.
I was offered the job, but turned it down and accepted a longer limited term job elsewhere.

I have had exactly one interview in my 34-year career. Here it is.

On the regional airline to my little interview city I looked across the aisle and saw another chap writing “Kant” on a legal pad. I asked–“Are you by chance interviewing for the half-time TT position at Manitowoc?” “Why yes!? Are you?”

And so we shared a ride to the campus with the business manager-driver, where we were introduced to a third candidate (years later I found out, an internal candidate). Two interviews–no talks or such–before lunch, and as it turned out I was last on the list afterwards.

The campus is on Lake Michigan, and while waiting out the first two interviews, I in my 3-piece suit walked down to the beach in late July, taking in that beautiful 65 degree breeze after having left (UT) Knoxville’s 90/90 temp/humidity. I picked up a smooth rock and slipped it in my pocket. I still have it–my philosopher’s stone.

We went to lunch at the local awful Chinese restaurant. (It’s still there!) And I mean WE–all three candidates sat interspersed among committee members. I thought what the hell and ordered a beer with lunch (just one). I talked with one guy in particular, who ordered the same Amstel as I, who turned out to be the last Wisconsin football player who played both on offense and defense (so he said) and went to the Rose Bowl (quite true).

We returned to campus, and that Rose Bowler took me aside and said “I have to leave–but I just want you to know you have my vote.”

The interview is a blur in my mind. The Dean afterward drove us around the area to see the Lake–doing 20 mph all the way and pissing off everyone else inside and outside the car. Caught the plane to get my transfer at Chicago. Pressed for time, I pushed through a huge press–of what I then realized was the Press–to literally run into John and Bo Derek, who were in town to promote their Tarzan flick.

Two days later, I got the call and offer. As I found out much later, the Rose Bowler’s vote gave me the nod over the Dean’s concern about my abilities for serious scholarship.

I still shake my head about that gloriously insane day.

a very small regional campus in the middle of nowhere, accessible by plane, but only the kind with propellers. two nice people from the multidisciplinary department picked me up, which created a false sense of acceptance; the rest of the department was openly hostile to me, both during the talk and during the door-knock. one particularly hostile professor told me that the principal reason they brought me there was to make the other guy look good. a half hour later then dean said that i was not the droid they were looking for. So, i began the job talk by saying “I’ve been told by both senior faculty and the dean that i have zero chance of getting this job because i’m here as a foil. But not a fool. Thank you for wasting all of our time and your money.” Then i got up and left. I didn’t get the job.

These stories are interesting, but I’d like to also see a thread on horror stories that occur in departments *after* people are hired.

Over lunch with the hiring committee, one of the members casually posed the question: “If you could travel back in time and strangle any of the great philosophers at birth, who would it be?” I was aghast, and momentarily silent. The questioner took advantage of this silence to suggest several potential candidates for strangulation.

I was flown out to a SLAC where excellence in teaching is emphasized. Before I was flown out, I was asked to prepare a teaching demonstration that would take place in one of the professor’s regularly scheduled Political Philosophy courses. I was given some options (after my offers to teach on Rawls OR Nozick were rejected), and I chose to present on a long chapter from Mill’s On Liberty (that I hadn’t read in years, incidentally). I figured the committee would want to see how I was at generating and managing discussions, so I spent hours preparing a series of questions that would challenge the students to think about Mill’s claims in light of contemporary issues and things relating to their own lives. I went into the class pretty confident. I asked my first (softball question): “What is Mill’s thesis?” The students sat there with blank stares. I waited awhile, then asked: “Alright… Let’s take a step back. What is the issue that Mill is discussing in this chapter?” Crickets. “Hint… it’s right in the title…” Silence. Needless to say, no one had read and I ended up having to spend most of the lecture bringing the students up to speed on the basic claims of the chapter. I think I got to ask one of my excellent, discussion generating questions before time was up. I was not offered the job.

I was once asked by the dean “you ARE a conservative, aren’t you?”

While traveling to the airport after an interview, the shuttle van hit black ice and went off the highway. The van rolled and was “totaled”. My glasses were smashed but, luckily, we landed in deep snow. The driver and I (the only people in the van) were bleeding but not seriously injured. After a brief stay in an emergency room, I was put up in the home of an old friend (an inside candidate who had also been interviewed for the job). He and the other members of the interviewing department were very nice to me. The next day I had to while away some time on campus before the next shuttle van departed. I remember sitting in a faculty lounge and overhearing professors from other departments talking about that philosophy job candidate who was injured in a highway accident. “The weather wasn’t that bad, was it?” “But it doesn’t have to be for there to be black ice.” I sat there wondering about the potential, unconscious influence that this ordeal would have on the committee’s opinions about me. I concluded it would be negative. I didn’t get the job (and neither did my old friend).

At another interview, the Dean asked me what my “network” was and to whom I was “connected”.

At another interview, the Dean spoke enthusiastically about the many new campus buildings. Looking out the window, he pointed at a quaint little building and explained that some nuns lived there but many of them had died in recent years. “There aren’t many of them left,” he said and added that when they were gone, he imagined that their former home would be demolished and replaced with a larger building for lecture halls and offices.

Interviewed for a job at a SLAC where I would be the only philosophy professor. At an interview with the campus P&T committee, whose practice it was to interview all job candidates for any faculty job, I was asked if I thought it was my role, as the only philosopher at the school, to be “the campus atheist”. Got the job.

Why aghast? It’s surely a rather interesting question!