FIRST PERSON

The Welcome Mat

On his first day on the job, an assistant professor is handed an unusual gift

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By JOHN LEMUEL

"I just want to remind you," my department chair said to me, smiling, "you're not interviewing anymore. We hired you. The job is yours, so settle into it."

It was September. Classes had already started. And I was still walking on eggshells around my new colleagues, choosing my words delicately, wary of displeasing anyone. I was still in interview mode, not that I was aware of it, but my chair could see my unease.

Her words helped the reality sink in: The search was over, for now at least. I had a tenure-track job and needed to change my outlook from job seeker to job holder. The applicant is a supplicant, walking a fine line between being powerless and bold. Getting hired should change things. But it hadn't for me yet.

Her words were the kindest she could have offered at that moment. She might just as easily have preyed upon my pretenure anxiety and convinced me I would still be interviewing for the next six years. Instead she urged me to have confidence and take ownership, which was profoundly liberating.

It was a pivotal moment, one of several during my first month on the job.

On my first day on the job, my chair handed me the keys to my office. I had come from a temporary position where my office was in a classroom converted into a cubicle farm for visiting faculty members. It was spacious enough but soul-less, impossible to personalize, with no hint of privacy. I had interviewed by phone for several jobs in that office with two cube-mates listening in. They always told me (what else?) that I had done well.

Now I had the one thing I had longed for then: an office door. I closed it behind me just to bask in the privilege. A few moments later came a knock, and I opened the door to see my department chair with a stack of papers in her hand.

"I thought you should have these," she said pleasantly. "They're the evaluations of your presentation during your interview." I thanked her and took them inside. Putting off the thousands of things begging to be done to prepare for the fall semester, I started to read them.

The first one gave me a mixed review, some praise interlaced with misgivings. In the bottom margin, it ranked me second of the three candidates. I chuckled dismissively because I had been the committee's first choice, offered the job a day after my campus interview. The second sheet rated me positively overall. The third sheet not so much. Not at all, in fact. A close reading revealed that this reviewer found fault with me in every respect, in downright nasty terms. Dismissive and caustic, the author obviously had no concept that I might ever actually see it.

Or did he? She? I found myself resorting to "they" like an undergraduate, unsure which pronoun to use. The form identified the author as a faculty colleague, and the handwriting was distinctly sloppy. The rest seemed anyone's guess.

Scanning the remainder of the stack revealed evaluations in the vaguely positive to highly enthusiastic range, but I found myself stuck on the one scathing review. Some kind of welcome mat, I grumped.

My thoughts turned to my chair: What were her motives in giving me the evaluations? Wouldn't I be better off knowing only the simple outcome, not the messy process that got us there? Did the minority report really matter? Could it be hers? That would be downright twisted, considering how warm and courteous she had been.

Calm and common sense returned with the memory that she had not managed to attend my presentation, so could not have lambasted it in such detail. Now I strained to recall who had been there, conjuring up a room full of people who were mostly strangers to me.

The few I had met personally came first to mind. One was my departing predecessor. His presence at my interview had struck me as inappropriate at the time and left a lingering bad taste. It eluded me why he should have a say in who replaced him.

He had met with me briefly before my presentation, to assure me he loved the job and would happily keep it had some once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not come through. He hadn't seemed spiteful, but now I wondered if what I recalled as a thoughtful expression during my talk might have been more of a frown.

Silly mind games played out in my head as I hunkered down in my new office, which had taken on the feeling of an armed bunker. An enemy lay somewhere outside it, but I had no fix on the location. Opening a drawer revealed hanging files labeled by my predecessor. The handwriting matched the first evaluation, the ambivalent review ranking me as his second choice.

My parents called that evening to see how things were going. I mentioned the evaluations and my mixed emotions about reading them. My father was more perceptive. "She's done you a favor," he said, referring to my chair. "She's just giving you the lay of the land." More like a map of the minefield, I realized, if I could decipher it.

I hadn't thought twice about my presentation since being offered the job; now I ransacked my memory to profile a suspect. The sourest face in the room gradually returned to me: a spousal hire in an administrative post who taught a couple of classes part time. I had met her in her administrative capacity later in the day of my interview.

No telling what she disliked about my talk, but her face was an open book. I recall qualifying a couple of statements when her brow suddenly furrowed. But I played to the whole audience, and the more she frowned the more I smiled at the rest (and got mostly pleasant expressions back). If you can't turn a critic, play for the majority and force the critic to turn the crowd.

At some presemester reception, I bumped into my suspected critic and introduced myself as the new hire. "Yes, I remember you," she said flatly, feigning no pleasure. I still needed conclusive proof that she had written the awful evaluation, but I obtained it a week or so later when, stopping by her desk to ask a question, she wrote down some information for me and handed me the paper. Her telltale scrawl told all.

It was a relief to identify my harshest critic, knowing she would always be a safe distance away, in a position with little bearing on my career. But working on a small campus meant crossing her path regularly, sharing committee assignments, or even needing some form of assistance from her. Avoidance was not an option.

Others had run afoul of this person and not come off so well. It's easy to end up on her bad side, and there's apparently nothing to be done about it. Becoming defensive just perpetuates the sniping.

Having a record of her thoughts without her knowledge made rebutting them that much easier. Slowly but steadily she thawed toward me. And oddly enough I came to appreciate her contribution to my career.

From the whole stack of evaluations, hers was the only one to raise the bar for me. As I tell my students, if everyone always says you're perfect, how will you ever know how to improve? Setting out to prove her wrong put me on a more ambitious agenda of scholarship, grant writing, and committee service than I otherwise might have adopted — and it bore fruitful results.

Predictably I have won no actual praise from her, nor has she hinted at being wrong about me, but the criticisms she expressed in that initial evaluation have never resurfaced. I have apparently leveraged some degree of respect from her, however grudgingly. It's probably a sign of my good standing that she occasionally complains about others to me.

My department chair took me to lunch after my first month on the job. She wanted to see how I was adjusting, and whether I needed help or had questions. I asked about her own adjustment during her first years on the job, and she was reassuring.

The stack of evaluations never came up. By then I realized it was a Rorschach pattern, there for me to make of it what I would.

I like to think I made the best of it.

John Lemuel is the pseudonym of an assistant professor in the social sciences at a small liberal-arts college in the Midwest.