As promised, I’d like to touch briefly on the wiggedy little thread posted o’er at The Chronicle. As The Unknown Adjunct has noted, the reasoning, such as it is, has taken on a peculiar complexion. There are some intimations that job seekers still searching in the spring must be damaged goods; there are other indications that search committees operate under a number of self-defeating assumptions, routinely discarding applicants out of hand because they just might be too good for the job. I can’t speak for all job seekers or all search committees, but I’d offer a coupla responses.
First, the supposition that folks still searching in the spring must be flawed in some fundamental way is laughable; I’m stunned that The Chronicle of all places would prompt a thread with the insinuation that those who came up empty-handed in the search might be “weird or anti-social.” (For fun, search the web for the author of the prompt; there’s some interesting material out there, especially regarding the use of university letterhead. Biases come in all shapes and sizes.) The idea that a candidate who somehow goes unhired in the fall season might be “too good to be true” is equally laughable. There are plenty of reasons a highly-qualified candidate might find themselves scouring job ads in the spring, not the least of which is the lopsided ratio of applicants to available positions. While it would be somehow life-affirming (in a schadenfreudian kind of way) to believe that, in a typical search, 75-125 candidates were fundamentally screwed up and accordingly unemployable based on trenchant personality defects, that ratio of existential defectiveness probably only applies on VH1. Today’s job market odds dictate that a great many pedigreed, prepared, personable searchers will go wanting. There’s nothing mysterious about that.
As for search committee practice, I do not doubt that some folks endowed with hiring power bring subjective criteria to the table; I also do not doubt that some of those folks might rule out very fine, fitting candidates based on anxieties about hiring and retention. By the same token, there are also people in the world who really want to date Bret Michaels. Let’s just suspend judgment for the time being.
Part of me doesn’t want to pop this particular bubble, since I think those folks who came up empty-handed this season could probably sleep pretty well believing that they weren’t hired because they were simply too brilliant. Reference to reality (or my version thereof), however, tells me that all the usual variables are likely to come into play long before a search committee member ventures to discard an application based on superfluous awesome.
Does it happen from time to time? I’m afraid that it does, and savvy web surfers can probably find me foaming at the mouth in response to a few accounts of search committee adventures in which the final decision (in my estimation) involved some unconscionable concession to such “pragmatics.” The phenomenon is, I believe, exceedingly rare, but as the Chronicle thread suggests, at least some folks think that thought.
That line of thinking seems to assume that a school is wise to turn down a few spectacular candidates: they’ll just leave in a year or two, or they will spend all their time looking down on their pitiful lowbrow colleagues, or they will otherwise reveal some fundamental form of maladjustment that stems from an excess of scholarly self-esteem.
For my part, I’ll assume that the allegedly overqualified candidate would be fortunate to be turned down by such a search committee. All questions of her professional self-concept aside, I cannot help but think that spending a career growing acclimated to their institutional self-concept is the kind of condescension that job seekers ought to be reckoning.
