Monday, October 22
A common mistake during a job interview is to focus your attention on the faculty and ignore everyone else. You need to listen to the students. Are they smart? Mature? Demoralized? Excited about their work? Engaged in a rebellion? Just punching the clock until they get their credential? What are their complaints? What agendas do they bring to the hiring process? Are you only hearing from the activists and complainers, or are you hearing representative views? Try to talk with a group of students without any faculty present. Very often the most vocal segment of students, who may or may not represent a majority, have definite ideas about what sort of faculty are needed -- basically, faculty who can teach the things that they want to learn and that the current faculty can't teach. If you can teach those things then by all means get conversation going on that topic. If not then elicit a broader range of issues and concerns to discover whether that particular topic is the only important one. In addition, graduate students will often have elaborate views about the politics of their department. You can listen to these views as anthropological data, but in practice students' political analyses are wildly uneven in quality; some are very astute -- these are smart people, after all -- but in other cases they just don't have enough information to develop informed ideas. So listen to them, but don't automatically believe or act on what you hear from them.
