There's a good discussion going on over at Leiter's place about why the Pacific APA always seems to be held during the latter half of Easter week.
Many have taken the occasion to raise the age-old question of the timing of the Eastern meeting. Why hold a major professional conference between Christmas and New Year's? The typical reply is that there's no other time that's any better, especially given that the end of the calendar year seems a good time to begin the hiring process for faculty who are to begin the following fall.
Fair enough. Maybe the end of December is the least bad of all the available options. But I have a different question: Why hold a major professional meeting which involves the lion's share of job interviewing (and must take place in the last week of December) on the East Coast? Why hold it on either coast? Why not give travelers a break and hold such a meeting in a geographically central location?
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11 comments:
Given the number of PhD programs on the East coast, it's at least kind of central to a lot of people. Maybe it's not fair to the Western programs, but it's a consolation.
I think it should be held in the middle. Somewhere cheap and somewhere where it's not likely there will be weather issues. And, in early January.
Vegas baby! There are always cheap flights, and hotels in Vegas.
I don't mind at all the conferences being over holidays. It's a good excuse for many years for me to get away from family.
Don't forget that this isn't only an American event. The east coast is presumably much easier for those coming from Europe (not that I've ever been personally or have any really intention of coming). I'm not sure how many of those there are, relative to those from the west.
I completely agree with anonymous 12:33. Having it in the middle would bring down hotel costs, and would even out travel expenses/ travel fatigue among the job seeker population (and everyone else too, I imagine).
Also, I wonder whether rotating the main job meeting would also increase fairness for job candidates. East Coast faculty are a lot more likely to attend the Eastern meeting than West Coast faculty, so the east coast applicants often have more faculty 'lobbyists' pleading their case informally to search committee members.
Why should we even bother with these big conference interviews? (English and Philosophy do things similarly, as far as I can tell, except that English only has one big hiring conference every year.) No doubt there’s an answer to this question, but just at the moment I can’t see it. Conference interviews are, after all, costly both in time and in money to institutions, committee members, and job candidates. And the high costs aren’t really matched by much in the way of returns: how much insight can you really get in a 30 minute interview? If your candidate’s ambition is just to add a little nuance to a familiar position, then 30 minutes is fine. But if your candidate has, say, a devastating but complex argument against a widely-held position—if, in other words, it’s a more ambitious and potentially interesting candidate—30 minutes is going to be woefully inadequate. Anything that substantially innovates is going to be much more difficult to explain briefly, because brevity depends on having a shared body of assumptions that do not require explanation or examination. Here as elsewhere, concision filters out innovation. By contrast, a campus visit allows ample time to assess more sophisticated and ambitious arguments, and we already do campus visits (often several) on top of conference interviews. So the hiring process could instead go like this:
First Cut: The candidate submits only a cover letter and c.v. (including a list of referees), and the committee rejects anyone not basically appropriate for the job (appropriate AOS/AOC, etc.).
Second Cut: The candidate submits a writing sample and reference letters, and the committee selects a short list based mainly on research profile.
Third Cut: The top three candidates on the short list are invited to campus to give a research talk and to meet potential colleagues and students. The committee can then assess their ability to present and (in Philosophy) to defend their research in person, their plausibility in front of the classroom, and their capacity for collective deliberation of the sort normally required by service duties.
Then the committee makes an offer, or brings the next three in. It seems to me that this process would take less time and money but would accomplish everything the current process accomplishes. What am I missing?
English Jerk: this makes perfect sense to me. The only thing I would add is that for the second cut the candidate also submits evidence of teaching effectiveness too plus syllabi.
I wish we did it the way it was done in the U.K. Send in CV and writing sample. Send in some more info later upon request. Bring out 5 or 6 at once. Job talk, interview, send 'em packing. Better for everyone involved.
Anonymous 7.14
Yup. And the clever thing about that plan is that by *not actually hırıng anyone* cash strapped schools can save a whole year's salary expenses before starting the procedure all over again.
One problem I see with this 'get rid of first interviews' idea is that it really does not account for the kind of hiring done by teaching-intensive schools.
We do a great deal of eliminating/selecting based on our conversations with the candidates. Even someone who is a stellar researcher is not going to the top of our list unless we have a sense that this person can work with our students [and us].
Maybe Skyping is an alternative. But, after many many years of hiring, I really depend on those first interviews (ours are usually 45 minutes).
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