During an interview with the Dean, she made a memorable comment: “You are short. I usually don’t trust short people, but you seem okay.”

During an on-campus interview, I was at lunch with graduate students when it was announced that there was an active shooter. I was then ushered into a basement with a few hundred other people. The situation ended after like an hour, and then I went right to my job talk.

The department didn’t do anything wrong. Everyone’s nerves were understandably frayed, and there was a schedule to keep to enable them to compare candidates. Not a lot you can do in that situation. I didn’t get the job.

Not so much a horror story as it is a story about an ethically questionable search.

About a decade ago, I had an on-campus visit in a small liberal arts college just outside a major Southeast city. Given the composition of the college, there was not a philosophy department proper. The search committee was composed of a variety of humanities professors, none of whom taught philosophy. I knew going into the visit that there was a temporary instructor in philosophy at this college, who also happened to be the spouse of a then tenure-track (TT) assistant professor. The TT assistant professor was not on the search committee. I figured that the instructor must then be a candidate and that he likely had the inside track on the position, given that his spouse was THE philosophy professor in the college but was not on the committee.

The visit began with dinner with the search committee. Much to my surprise and initial delight, the TT assistant professor was at the dinner, and the chair of the committee wanted her to sit next to me to discuss philosophy, teaching strategies, etc. I figured that, if the TT assistant professor was at the dinner and had an opportunity to meet with me, that her spouse was NOT a candidate for the position after all. Otherwise, this would have been a clear conflict of interest.

The next morning as I was driving with the search committee chair to campus for the full-day visit, the chair mentioned that she received very positive feedback from the TT assistant professor about the previous evening’s conversation and that the committee was very “impressed” (later echoed by another member of the search committee). The chair also told me, unsolicited, that the TT assistant professor was not on the search committee, because it would be a significant burden for an assistant professor to serve on a search committee. I thought that this was a strange arrangement, given the circumstances.

The TT assistant professor ended up giving me a 1-hour campus tour (just the two of us), allowed me to use her office for downtime, and arranged for me to give a teaching demonstration for her class. After the demonstration, she asked me if I would send her my slides and some literature referenced in the class. I spent more time with the TT assistant professor during the visit than any individual search committee member.

Later at the “job talk,” the TT assistant professor asked a couple of questions, in front of a few dozen professors and students at the college. Her spouse (the other philosopher at the college) was not in attendance. Unsolicited (again), one of the search committee members told me that he would not be attendance because he “had something else to do.”

At the conclusion of the visit, each search committee member wished me well. One told me that I had given the best job talk out of all of the candidates. Another came up to me and said – “Your parents live in [major Southeast city], right? I really hope this works out for you.” I’ve been through many on-campus job visits; I’ve never encountered a search committee (as a job seeker and as a committee member!) that worked so hard to convey directly to a candidate how impressed they were with a visit, let alone expressing a “hope” that the candidate both gets the job and would end up so close to family. I had wanted the position before the visit. But such comments from search committee members seriously kicked up my emotionally investment and hope.

I didn’t get the job. Instead, the offer was made to the spouse of the TT assistant professor. After not hearing this news for a length of time, I contacted the search committee chair, who identified the successful candidate by name and wrote that it was a difficult search and decision. I then replied by asking how the TT assistant professor’s participation in the visit was not a clear conflict of interest, given that she is married to the successful candidate. The chair forwarded my email to the dean, who replied that the decision was made and that the matter was closed. Neither acknowledged that there might be something ethically problematic about the spouse of one candidate participating in the campus visit of the other candidates, being alone with those candidates for long stretches of time, and having an opportunity to provide feedback to the search committee about those candidates. My doctoral advisor thought I should report the matter to the APA. I consulted with other well-established folks in the field, who agreed that this was really bad behavior by the college. I simply moved on.

I ended up concluding was the search was a just a charade rather than that the college was absolutely oblivious to what would be an egregious COI (had the search been sincere, the committee would be positioning a candidate’s spouse possibly to sabotage the other candidates). The goal was to hire the spouse of the TT assistant professor all along, under the guise of an official search. Now, spousal hires through sham-like searches are not uncommon, and I have no objection in general to spouses getting hired to help retain or secure the other professor. I suspect that the search committee kept the TT assistant professor off the search committee to avoid a COI “on paper,” so to speak. But, to throw candidates off the scent, she was allowed to participate unofficially in the full candidate visits (otherwise, it would seem odd that the one TT philosophy professor at the college was not involved in a search for another TT philosophy professor). Since the plan was to hire her spouse all along, there were no concerns among the committee or dean that her participation would affect adversely other candidates in favor of her spouse. Moreover, I don’t think the committee or dean worried that her participation would signal to candidates that the spouse was not a candidate. He and the TT assistant professor had different last names, and I suspect that the candidates selected for on-campus visits were presumed to be ignorant of the fact that they were married (I only knew they were married because a friend of mine was in the same graduate program as they, and he mentioned it to me when I got the call). The constant praise from the search committee members, I also suspect, was to make the search appear legitimate to the other candidates. An overcorrection, of sorts, since it played a bit with emotions during already stressful situation for them.

I look back at the situation with some humor now, mostly because it’s hard to believe that so much effort was put into covering up the intent of the search, inadvertently risking the appearance of a serious COI. The college could have just taken the TT assistant professor out of the equation altogether, hire her spouse (who was qualified), and be done with it. 

Present at my talk was a distinguished senior professor who edited what is still a premier journal. He arrived with a large pile of manuscripts, which he proceeded to read and mark up as I spoke. When I was done, he asked the first question. It was: “Would you please write your argument on the board.”

I work in a pretty under represented sub-field and once visited a uni that advertised one of three jobs in that subfield that year. Got to campus, and was stuck in an office for a morning of “drop in hours” where I was told that faculty would stop by to chat. No one did. Then the search committee members took me to the faculty club for lunch. I was standing in the salad bar line several people behind one of the search committee members who was explaining to someone else in the line that he was there because of “that stupid ‘niche area’ search we’re doing.” From the conversation with the Dean, it was clear that there was administrative pressure to hire in this sub-field. Needless to say, the department voted that none of the finalists met their exacting standards and didn’t hire anyone.

About a year of so ago, after an online interview, I was invited for a campus visit with interview and two teaching demonstrations (teaching demos for which I had prepared for weeks). The chair of the search committee was quite cold and unpleasant the whole time (making jokes during my teaching demo, for instance). After the interview they told me I will hear from them in a week. I then left (emailing the chair thanking them for the invitation to which I received no reply). After a while i emailed asking for an update. Sorry, there’s a delay. After maybe another two weeks I asked again, at that point they stopped replying. A month and a half later the chair of the search committee emails me to tell me I didn’t get the job. Out of curiosity, I checked who did: somebody with a local PhD who coauthored several papers with the chair of the search committee.