All in the Game

The Golden Rule, Part 2

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

A year ago, the first column in this series announced the golden rule of administration: Always tell the truth, always tell more of the truth than you have to, and always tell the truth before anyone asks you to.

Now in the inaugural column of the second year, just before the fall season gets under way, I want to offer the golden rule of recruiting, which is, in fact, the golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is to say, at any point in the recruiting process, ask yourself, "If I were the searchee rather than the searcher, how would I like to be treated? What would I want?" Here are some of the things you wouldn't want.

• You wouldn't want the majority of your contacts to be with a staff member who couldn't quite pronounce your name and hadn't the slightest idea about, or interest in, your work.

• You wouldn't want weeks, never mind months, to go by without some acknowledgement of your existence as either a petitioner or as a designated object of desire.

• You wouldn't want to be wondering whether the supporting materials you had sent in had been received.

• You wouldn't want to find that out via a postcard or a form letter.

• You wouldn't want to be interviewed at a professional meeting by people who hadn't read your work.

• You wouldn't want to be interviewed in a hotel room with too few seats and people sitting on a bed.

• You wouldn't want to be scheduled for a one-day campus interview with back-to-back meetings from dawn to the red-eye flight.

• You wouldn't want to be without a schedule and left to the dubious pleasures of surprise.

• You wouldn't want either to not be met at the airport, or to be met by a graduate student, or to be met by the newest kid on the block (last year's you) who knows almost as little as you do.

• You wouldn't want to be put up at a nondescript, cookie-cutter, low-amenity hotel or at a dreary student union because it was on or close to campus or because all your perhaps-future colleagues had been put up there, too. (The fact that it's a part of their unhappy history is no reason to make it a part of yours.)

• You wouldn't want to be left on your own to make your way to appointments in buildings even the natives have trouble finding.

• You wouldn't want to give your presentation to a near empty room and be told something about a schedule conflict, or a bad time of the afternoon, or people on leave, or an out-of-the-way location, or a failure on the part of those who were supposed to put up the posters.

• You wouldn't want to be forced by an embarrassing silence to ask yourself the first question.

• You wouldn't want to be told that the next event is a casual lunch -- "no pressure" -- and then find that everyone (but you) is loaded for bear.

• You wouldn't want to run the gantlet on a hall of offices occupied by persons vying for the honor of taking your head off and displaying it as a trophy.

• You wouldn't want to be the guest of "honor" at a party where almost no one spoke to you and very few showed any sign of ever having spoken to each other.

• You wouldn't want to spend two days without being asked anything about your nonacademic life -- your interests, your spouse's interests, your hobbies, your passions.

• You wouldn't want to wait by the phone for weeks before someone told you that you either got the job or didn't.

Unfortunately, all these things you wouldn't want (and many more than I have listed) are what your departments will likely visit on those who either are invited to apply or petition to apply for membership in the magic circle. The reason is simple but mysterious: Academics, most of whom can claim to be human beings, do not typically display the behavior of human beings, and seem especially incapable of recognizing job candidates as fellow human beings.

It is not so much that they try and fail to follow the golden rule; it simply never occurs to them, although all they would have to do is imagine the role reversal urged in my first paragraph, and act accordingly by performing the positive acts of my negative examples. That is, heads of search committees would be "hands on" at all times, resisting the temptation to delegate. Every communication would be answered promptly, personally, and in a thoroughly professional manner. Anyone in contact with a job candidate would have taken care to become familiar with his or her work. Campus visits would be designed with the comfort and needs of the candidate in mind.

Faculty members would be given training sessions in which they would learn not to bad-mouth the competition or their colleagues or the university or the dean (this is especially important), or to talk interminably about their own work. Faculty members would not be allowed to think of the recruiting process as something that only others were involved in; that is, they would be told that they have to show up. (Generating an audience is part of the job; it can't be left to fate.) Graduate students would be given a parallel training suited to their station; most of them haven't the slightest idea of what it means to behave professionally.

All reservations -- plane, hotel, restaurants, lecture rooms -- would be double and triple checked up to within an hour of the appointed time. The rule in making reservations would be, "Now where would I want to eat, or stay, or talk?" (It is at this point that someone will say that the costs will be prohibitive, but given the Internet, it's easy to find a good hotel or restaurant no more expensive than the bad ones you patronize through habit.)

Those assigned to introduce the candidate would be instructed to take the job seriously (which doesn't mean being overserious; there's a difference between informal and slipshod). Everyone would do his or her homework and be prepared to ask relevant questions, give helpful information, and in general treat the candidate as one would treat an honored guest in one's home.

Now that all sounds like common sense, the natural consequence of realizing that in a recruiting situation the wooing goes both ways; sure, you are assessing them, but they are also assessing you, and you'd better remember it. Why is it so hard? Well, it isn't so hard, but it is hard work, and academics tend to be lazy with respect to matters not directly related to their own careers, narrowly conceived.

But I doubt that laziness is the whole story, or even a large part of it. Rather, I suspect that behind the generally abysmal performance of academics involved in recruiting is a set of rationalizations masquerading as principles. First, the principle of tough love: "It's a tough world out there and in here, and you might as well not come in with any illusions; by treating you badly or with indifference, we're really doing you a favor."

This is closely allied to the principle of realism: "We are scholars dedicated to the finding of facts, and the facts about the profession in general and this piece of it in particular are pretty distressing, and it would be wrong for us to sugarcoat them."

And finally, there is the master principle of higher values: "Our province is the life of the mind, not the base province of material goods and creature comforts; by disdaining these inferior concerns, we prove ourselves worthy of this priesthood and introduce you to its (strange) glories."

Now there may even be people who believe this nonsense, in addition to those who lean on it in an effort to avoid their responsibilities. But whenever these attitudes (or their near relatives) are found, they should be countered and ridiculed, and those who harbor them should be reminded that months and even years have been spent petitioning the administration for the opportunity that may now be frittered away if the golden rule is sacrificed to the academic obsession with, and desire for, failure.