Confirming Racism

Barack Obama has had a difficult relationship with two (sometimes overlapping) constituencies within the Democratic Party: Latinos and the gays. He never really won over either group during the tense primary season. Despite that fact, both groups nonetheless voted overwhelmingly for him in the general election (Before Clinton apologists jump on this, it is important to note that her stated positions toward both groups were almost identical to Obama’s – I have serious doubts her administration would have acted any different in these issues).

One would have imagined that Obama would therefore be more mindful of Latinos and gay concerns so that they remained on his side. Turns out, not so much.

For the gays, his administration has decided that we are expendable and is more than happy to toss us aside. He recently allowed his administration to file a legal brief comparing gay marriage to incest. Not only won’t Obama support equal marriage rights, but he has even balked at upholding the right of queer folk to serve their nation’s military. In place of real justice, he invited a few select A-list gays to the White House for a cocktail party.

During the campaign, Obama pledged to be a good “friend” to the queer community. Apparently Mr. Obama doesn’t see friendship as being about recognizing our basic equality before the law. Friendship seems to mean serving some soggy appetizers and watered-down cocktails in the East Room.

Or maybe Obama wants us to be the equivalent of adolescent “secret friends.” It’s cool if we come over to his house and play video games, but he doesn’t want the popular kids at school knowing that we hang out. He has his reputation to consider.

Latinos have not fared much better under Mr. Obama. Political considerations prompted him to appoint the notoriously anti-immigrant Arizona governor Janet Napolitano to head Homeland Security (the bureau that currently controls immigration for the entire U.S.). Obama also largely ignores Latin America until an absolute crisis forces him to pay attention.

He was, however, willing to throw [straight] Latinos a bone by nominating Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Don’t get me wrong – That’s a pretty good bone. There is lots of meat on it and all the marrow is intact. We could be chewing on it for decades to come. Well, that’s assuming that Nepolitano doesn’t deport us all.

Merely being Latina, though, is not enough to draw the support of the Latino community. After all, the Bushie administration frequently floated Alberto Gonzales’s name as a potential nominee to the Supreme Court. Latinos rarely supported the idea, even before Gonzales contracted that crippling case of amnesia that seemed to tear his life apart.



Still, I generally like Sotomayor. By all accounts, she has been a remarkably thorough and deliberate judge. What really sealed the deal for me was when she broke her ankle while traveling to meet with the Senate. Not only did Sotomayor still make her flight, she hobbled her way up the steps of Capitol Hill without missing an appointment. There is a woman who wants a job! Well, who can blame her given how high the unemployment rate is these days? I hear that Supreme Court Justice gig comes with a nice benefits package, maybe even dental!

Sotomayor’s path from nomination to confirmation has exposed the general public’s ambivalence about discussing race in the nation. Republicans know that they are in a precarious position with the public. Voters appear to finally have had it after decades of Republican mismanagement, corruption, and a disregard for the welfare of the majority of citizens. Since most Republicans don’t actually want to change their positions, they see their best bet at victory as whipping up hate. Hey, it worked for Bushie in 2004. Despite having driven the nation into the ground (and spending most of his time on vacation), he could still build a winning reelection campaign based on homophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria, and unending war. Republicans see a prime chance to use common racism as a means to get back into the limelight (They also conveniently ignore that it was Bush I who appointed Sotomayor to the U.S. District Court).




At the instant of her nomination, Republicans attacked viciously. Newt Gingrich and the various pundits declared her a “racist.” Mitt Romney declared her nomination “troubling.” Religious zealot Mike Huckabee released a scathing statement slamming Sotomayor. Of course, Huckabee was a bit confused and called her “Maria” Sotomayor rather than her actual name, Sonia Sotomayor. Apparently Huckabee just assumes that all Latinas are named Maria. Yeah, but Sotomayor is the “racist.”

More than anything else, Republicans have seized on Sotomayor’s now infamous statement that “a wise Latina woman” might make decisions about the law differently than an individual of another race or gender. If we are to believe Republicans, apparently Sotomayor will use her seat on the Supreme Court to institute a bloody race war that will only end when Puerto Rico has triumphed and enslaved the rest of the world.

Of course, Republicans also argue that Sotomayor is going to take away everybody’s guns. So, I guess it will be a race war fought with banana-cream pies.



What I find astounding about the whole debate is that we are seemingly expected to believe that the Supreme Court in the United States, up until this point, has been somehow “race blind.” If we accept what the Republicans are saying, then Sotomayor would radically alter the court because she *gasp* might be influenced in her interpretations of the law by her racial and gender identities.

Actually, the Supreme Court has often made decisions with racial implications (if not directly influenced by race). These were decisions that upheld a racial hierarchy within the United States by interpreting the Constitution in particular ways that benefited white men. They were also decisions made exclusively by white men.

Indeed, it was often cases involving race that helped solidify the Supreme Court’s authority within the U.S. Of course, there are the well-known ones: In Dred Scott v. Sandford, the Supreme Court ruled that the drafters of the Constitution considered African Americans “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” In Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled the forced separation of the races was just dandy. Other cases, though, are not as frequently discussed. In the 1831 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, the Supreme Court ruled that Native-American tribes existed in a type of legal limbo as “domestic dependent nations.”

As residents in Puerto Rico, Sotomayor’s family felt the implications of the Supreme Court’s power directly. In 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court case Downes v. Bidwell more-or-less defined that island (and other occupied U.S. territories) as a colony of this nation. While ostensibly about taxes, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not extend to Puerto Rico or its inhabitants because it was merely a “possession” of the United States.



The majority of justices couldn’t find a consensus about how the law permitted that to be true. Instead, they submitted five different opinions, none of which received a majority endorsement. The one with the most support explained that Puerto Rico “was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense.” In other words, Puerto Ricans just didn’t “fit in” with the rest of the U.S. They spoke a different language, looked different, and had different customs. As a result, the U.S. did not legally have to treat Puerto Rico as an equal part of the nation. One might hope that, had a Puerto Rican been on the Supreme Court in 1901, that ze might have objected to such logic (no matter how based in the “law” it was).

Such rulings, which certainly had racial implications, have had long-term implications that have yet to be resolved. The Pew Hispanic Center just recently released a report on Puerto Rican demographics in the fifty states. Today, more than four million Puerto Ricans live in the mainland United States, slightly more than live on the actual island of Puerto Rico (which, btw, is still a U.S. possession without a voting member of Congress – All Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens). Puerto Ricans are the second largest Latino population in the U.S., but are far overshadowed by Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Puerto Ricans account for only 9 percent of the total Latino population in the U.S., but Mexicans and Mexican Americans are a substantial majority (constituting 64 percent of the total Latino population). Puerto Ricans, like all Latinos, have less access to education and earn less than the general population. They also have lower rates of homeownership, lower than even the rate for Latinos overall.

So, it doesn’t surprise me that Sotomayor might have a particular take on the law based on her background. Of course, accusations that one’s racial and gender identities would bias their decisions is not something that seems to come up when white men are appointed to the court. The current Chief Justice, John Roberts, sailed through the confirmation process. Shortly thereafter, in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that Seattle, Washington’s defacto segregated school system did not violate the rights of minority students. The Court thus severely limited the ability of all the nation’s schools to consider race as a means to achieve integration. Roberts glibly promised that pretending that race doesn’t matter in this nation will make it so. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” he wrote, “is to stop discrimination on the basis of race.”



Did you hear that, people? Simply stop being racist and racism will be over. Why didn’t we think of that before? It’s all so simple! All these centuries and it took such a brilliant jurist to simply say, “stop discriminating based on race.” Oh, brave new world!

How can one not but conclude that Roberts’ naïve assumptions about racism are the result of his elite background and status as a middle-age white man? One guesses that he probably still believes that it was his clapping that brought Tinkerbell back to life.

The legal and social status quo means inequity for Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups (Not to mention women, other racial minorities, queer folk. . .) Existing injustices, some of which are written into our laws, are the legacy of racism in this nation. That can’t be wished away.

The Best Show That You Probably Don't Get on Your Cable

One of the advantages of teaching classes on U.S. popular culture is that you can order the extra-extra extended cable package with little guilt. It’s part of my job to know how race, gender, and sexuality are presented on television. When I sit on the couch with a bag of baked Snapea Crisps^©, I am not being a lazy slug and a drain on society, I am actually working. These are the noble sacrifices that I make in the pursuit of knowledge. Too bad that I didn’t become a Professor of Media Studies, then I could have justified getting HBO!

If you’re like me – and I know that you want to be –, then you think of the Logo Channel as more or a less a failed enterprise. For those who don’t know, Logo (owned by Viacom) launched in 2005 as an all GLBT-content network. It’s located way, way up on your television dial. Well, if televisions still had dials -- and if those dials went up to channel 163. You know, it’s somewhere past the All Grouting Network and before the Fear Network. Logo might not be available in all cable markets, especially those ruled by a radical Christian theocracy.

Up until now, Logo mostly recycled mediocre GL(occasionally B&T) films and produced even more mediocre original programing. They have a sketch show that just isn’t funny; a news program that tackles hard hitting topics like the music careers of porn stars; and a trying-too-hard stop-action show with a cast of generic Legos. The only bright spot was the short-lived Noah’s Arc (which deserves it’s own post at some point). Inexplicably, that was canceled while Rick & Steve lives on and on. At one point, I began to wonder if the Christian Right had funded Logo as a secret program designed to bore the gay out of us.

Recently, though, Logo stepped out of their usual dead-end programing with television genius: RuPaul’s Drag Race. Okay, we aren’t talking about Cervantes here. Still, it’s more than a little entertaining.



If you have seen any other reality competition show, then you basically know the formulaic premise behind RuPaul’s Drag Race. Probably they borrowed mostly heavily from Project Runway (so much so that one of the former contestants, Santino, is one of RuPaul’s permanent (nonvoting) judges). The contestants, in this case aspiring Drag performers, are given a short time period to complete one or two challenges each week. They then exhibit their hard work in a runway show for RuPaul and the panel of (nonvoting) judges. The two lowest ranked contestants of the week must then “lip-sync for their life” in a final performance. RuPaul, after asking the advice of the judges and her housekeeper, then decides their fates. A winner of the week is declared, while a loser must give a teary goodbye.

Like most other exploitation t.v. reality competition shows, the producers clearly hope that the time constraints and close working conditions will lead to dramatic tensions between the contestants. Like Project Runway, they have also abandoned any pretense of subtlety in their product placements. From Drag Race, we learn that serious Drag Queens only use Mac Cosmetics! And Absolut Vodka has been clinically shown to make you even gayer!

Despite copycat borrowing and corporate shilling, RuPaul’s Drag Race offers a bit more than most. First, it is probably the most racially diverse cast in any television program, reality or scripted, on the air today. The show’s nonwhite-majority cast includes African Americans, a Cameroon national, a Filipino American, and multiple Puerto Rican contestants. What other show can you think of that draws that much from the real diversity of this nation?



This isn’t to say, of course, that other scholars would agree with my rosy view of the show. There is actually a lot we could critique. In other contexts, bell hooks has been remarkably critical of representations of African-American drag queens, particularly RuPaul. While hooks acknowledges the potential for drag to subvert assumptions about gender, in her critique of Paris is Burning, she nonetheless states that “the subversive power of those images is radically altered when informed by a racialized fictional construction of the ‘feminine’ that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender.” In other words, she worries that the representations of African American drag queens more often shows them to be fetishizing whiteness than longing to impersonate black women. She has also offered a stiff critique of RuPaul in particular, stating “It’s a deep thing to live in a culture where folks get off on the image of a big black man trying to look and act like a little white woman (a version of Dolly Parton’s petite retrograde femininity complete with big blond hair).”

While I might quibble about some of hooks’ assumptions, it is worth pausing to wonder why that same racial diversity that I celebrated earlier seems to only be possible on a show about Drag Queens. Race, gender, and sexuality are at play here and I have little faith that Logo’s programming managers have spent much time pondering critical theory.

Still, even though I worship at the altar of bell hooks (and I am totally onboard with her critique of the voyeuristic Paris is Burning), I can’t help but see Drag Race as offering a bit more. Of course, I also think Dolly Parton herself offers a bit more than “retrograde femininity,” but that might be why bell hooks is bell hooks and GayProf is just some obscure (though totally hot) guy with a blog.



Certainly Drag Race draws on voyeuristic impulses to see a supposedly “hidden” drag culture. The show includes pop-up definitions of terms and phrases that the drag contestants use throughout the show (e.g. “Ki Ki – When two drag queens have sex”). As mentioned, it also veers uncomfortably around questions of race, including a near miss that might have escalated into a black face performance.

Even with the producers' baiting for cattiness and the unexplored racial dynamics between the contestants, there are also unexpected messages about remembering a sense of community and maintaining your self respect. The contestants often offer each other advice, show their affection for each other, and support each other more than any other reality show that I have ever seen. RuPaul frequently reminds contestants “If you can’t love yourself, then how the hell are you going to love someone else?” Drag Queens’ reputation for sliding into Drama Queens is not shown in force here. There has been relatively little catfighting so far (I am sure to the chagrin of the producers). Moreover, I think that the drag performances can offer a challenge to assumptions about gender and race, too.

Yes, I am going to have to drag out (no pun intended) the ol’ Judith Butler (Not since Susan Sontag made her name off of “camp” has another scholar rode gay culture so hard to make themselves famous). Butler’s now famous argument is that all gender is performance and, therefore, drag performance reveals the disjunctions between anatomy, gender, and gender performance. “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself – as well as its contingency,” Butler writes, “Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary.” Or, cutting through the academic clutter, RuPaul put it more succinctly: “You’re born naked, the rest is drag.”



For me, there is more at play with RuPaul and Drag Race than a fetish over whiteness. Instead, I see the mixing and matching of racial and gender signs as intentional play and potentially challenging (btw, this isn’t to say that I have agreed with everything RuPaul has ever said about race and gender, either). Rather than fetishizing whiteness, RuPaul merges together multiple symbols of racial and gender difference in unexpected ways that many would expect to be impossible. At the site (sight?) of that impossibility, the performer then demands acknowledgment of their unexpected beauty. Indeed, RuPaul moves between various drag personas, wearing either the blond wig and high-heels, or appearing bald and in a stiff suit and tie.

In the end, it is RuPaul who necessarily makes Drag Race something to watch. She controls all aspects of the show in true diva fashion. RuPaul (in woman drag) serves as the Heidi Klum figure who introduces the challenge; (in man drag) as the Tim Gunn figure who offers kindly advice as the contestants work on the challenge; and (in diva drag) as the only judge with an actual vote on the show. RuPaul is so much the center of the show, that her face even serves as the clock in the workroom.

Mixed between zingers and critiques, RuPaul also seems to genuinely care about all of the contestants. She sets an unusual tone for such a competition, recently reminding the divias-in-training, “You all are sisters. We are family. If one of us is in pain, we are all in pain, we are all in trouble.” Even when drag- diva RuPaul tells a losing candidate “to sashay, away,” there are words of encouragement and a reflection on the unique attributes of the parting contestant.

Like the best drag performance, Drag Race offers an entertaining spectacle that also happens to expose the artifice of all reality television. My hope is that RuPaul will “chantez and stay” to make Logo a network that we will actually want to watch.

Hire with Wisdom

*Gasp* *Cough* *Wheeze* Greetings on the New Year from your cold-stricken GayProf. One of the strangers on my return flight to Midwestern Funky Town kindly passed along hir rhinovirus to me. Most of the past few days have been spent cursing the meth addicts who prompted NyQuil to remove pseudoephedrine, thus changing the life-saving formula into something inert and useless. Instead of my plans of attending a local New Year’s party, I cuddled up with a box of Puffs+. I knew that I should have taken the invisible jet home, but I thought it might send the wrong message to Congress about the economic needs of my state.

My personal woes aside, the period between Christmas and the first week of January is of sacred importance to those who worship at the altar of Athena. It is that special time of year when academics in Modern Languages, History, Economics, and others start interviewing potential new colleagues for jobs in their departments.

Fortunately for me, I am neither on the market for a new job nor on a hiring committee. Very few people outside of academia know what a pain in the ass it is to get a job as a professor. It's such a pain, in fact, that some opt to die in a job that they hate rather than return to the market once again. Yet, the mysteries of the academic job market are hard to convey to anybody who hasn't lived it. Heck, after being out of grad school for six years and having landed an excellent position in my field, I still can’t quite explain to my parents why I don’t “just put an application into the local university down the block so that they will have it on file when they have an opening.” Like most people, they imagine that obtaining a job at a university as somewhere between applying for a primary school teacher position and a civil-servant-for-life job. In terms of the job itself, that's probably true. In terms of getting that job, alas there is an overabundance of humanities Ph.D.’s out there. This makes getting a professor job about as easy as winning a tour of the Wonka Factory.



I don’t bring this up to elicit sympathy for poor, misunderstood academics. Trust me – It’s a pretty cushy job if you can get it. Being a professor most definitely beats shoveling coal or being a secretary (my pre-prof gig). Nonetheless, actually becoming a prof means that you give up a great deal of flexibility about where you might live. You must go where the jobs are.

So, in a nutshell, here is the process of obtaining a tenure-track position in the humanities. Sometime in the Fall, all the universities and colleges that are hiring post ads to academic journals. For reference, a typical job advertisement for “[General] U.S. History” or “Modern Europe” can easily yield 150 applications. More specialized fields, like Latino/a History or African American History, can still result in 50-75 applications. Thus, one’s chances of obtaining any particular job is around 1:100. Those odds are better than playing the lotto, but still nothing on which to bank (I go to great lengths to avoid ending sentences in prepositions). Like the lotto, it also means that luck plays a critical role in one’s success. On average, it takes a newly minted Ph.D. a minimum of two years of searching to obtain hir first job.

After the ad is posted, the hiring department will form a committee (known as the “search committee”) of between four and (hopefully no more than) six people. This committee has the unenviable task of reading all the files submitted and narrowing the list down to ten or twelve people for a “conference interview.” If selected for a conference interview, a candidate’s chances of landing a job has now increased to 1:10.

At the end of the year/start of the new year, many of the major academic disciplines host an annual convention/conference. Modern Languages hosts theirs during the dreaded week between Christmas and New Year’s. So, if you celebrate both/either, you are forced to cut your plans short in order to attend. History and Economics and others host their conference in the very first week of January. Why such a dreaded time of year? It’s all about the cheapness of hotels. Tourists are not likely to want to trot through four inches of muck and ice on January 4. Thus, hotels give bargains to academic associations to keep their rooms filled.

During these conventions, the ten or twelve candidates selected by the search committee will interview for twenty or thirty minutes each. That time is spent grilling asking about each job candidate’s research and teaching. Once the convention has ended, the search committee will narrow the list down again to three or four people who will be invited for a “campus interview.” If given an on-campus interview, the chances of getting a job are pretty good at 1:3.

Most campus interviews occur between early January and the end of February. The time on campus is spent meeting the rest of the department, giving formal presentation(s), and learning more about the climate of a particular institution. Once all of that is completed, the department will vote on one person to offer the job. Like the Highlander, in the end, there can be only one.

Because of the intensity of academic hiring, many bloggers are offering valuable advice to graduate students "on the market." If you are on the market, take this advice seriously.

For my part, I want to offer advice to the other side of the table. Maybe I have fantasies of being the Gordon Ramsey of the academic world. I could come to dysfunctional academic departments, yell at people for a week, probably get food poisoning somewhere in the middle, and then put them on the right path with a teary goodbye. Until Bravo calls about that show-pitch, here are some things to keep in mind if you are a member of a search committee:

1. Ask yourself if you are a gatekeeper or a future colleague. If you answer the former, think again. It’s not your job to decide whether or not an entire academic field is worthy of existence nor are you really in a place to decide the future potential of any individual scholar (though it might seem that way). Don’t go into the interview with an ax to grind or looking to prove to your colleagues that candidate “X” is really a poser who should never have made it on the shortlist.



Instead, consider your job to be one of finding a new partner to build and expand your academic unit. Sure, some candidates aren’t going to fit your unit or needs and can be ruled out (I would suggest, though, if their work is a different type of scholarship and teaching than exists in your department, it might be a good thing to hire a fresh perspective).

Yes, some other candidates do bomb particular interviews and/or aren’t ready to be on the market. But academics who smell blood in the water can go to a really bad place of attack and destroy. Maybe the candidate had a bad day. Maybe they got bad advice about how to prepare for an interview. Maybe they really are a poser. It’s impossible to say based on 20 minutes of conversation. Whatever the case, don’t be mean spirited. Ask yourself, What Would Jacqueline Kennedy Do? Answer: She would always be gracious -- and she would marry rich.




Also ask yourself if being hired into your department will benefit the candidate. Every unit has its own expectations for tenure, but have you considered how (if) that unit will help a particular candidate meet that goal? If you are hiring a historian of Asia to work in the middle of Nebraska, what will that mean for hir research? Are there funds to allow this person to travel? Other colleagues with whom to chat (even if they aren’t other people working in Asian history per se)? What about time away from teaching? Obviously, many of these things depend upon the cash available at a particular institution. Some (most?) SLACs simply can’t afford leave or travel funds, so how will working at your particular institution help that candidate’s career? I firmly believe that anybody can flourish almost anywhere, but it requires the creative help of the people around hir.

It is important to remember that, as colleagues (not gatekeepers), it’s the responsibility of senior folk to continue to mentor junior professors. This will mean taking the time to read work, set up support, and simply check in on them from time to time in a friendly way. It might also mean that you are going to need learn a bit about Asia.

2. At least pretend like you enjoy the company of the other committee members. Unfortunately, many administrators make the mistake of creating search committees out of warring factions within departments. The theory seems to be that if everybody is miserable, than nobody “wins.” Let me say, this is a terrible way to run a department and does not work. Instead, it just means that those larger wars are played out on the microlevel of the committee.

Job candidates, however, don’t want to step into a battlefield. Going to an interview with sparring committee members is a lot like spending Thanksgiving with drunken in-laws. When Uncle Ted starts yelling at Aunt Alice about her crummy stuffing, everybody wants to slide under the table and die. As a visitor, you can’t really do anything but stare intently at your mashed potatoes and hope to Jesus that they will stop fighting.

One feels a lot better if it seems like people with serious disagreements are still collegial. If this means hiding Uncle Ted’s liquor before the interview, do so.



3. Dress professionally. We expect job candidates to dress in a professional manner, why should you show up looking like you just rolled out of bed and scrounged your outfit from the hotel dumpster? I am not sayin’ you have to dress like you work at the Pentagon, but you should show that you care enough about the position being hired that you combed your hair and thought two minutes about matching your socks. Leave the sweatpants at home.



4. Only interview people that you think have a serious chance for the job. Oddly enough, I have been on committees where people felt that they had to have a perfect number of ten candidates for the AHA interviews. To get that number, though, they sometimes included people whose work clearly didn’t match the job description. This just wastes everybody’s time. If you get 150 applications, but only eight seem like they match the department’s needs, interview eight. Don’t interview two more people who you know will never make the cut.

My personal worst story about interviewing at the AHA involves just such an instance. My first time on the job market, I was still in graduate school and applied to a variety of schools. Among the places that interviewed me at the AHA was a small college in the West. To this day, I still think of that department as totally unprofessional and a place to be avoided at all costs. First, they didn’t bother to get a hotel suite or a table to interview. Instead, they wanted to conduct interviews in the middle of the hotel lobby. Yes, I had to compete with the sound of roller bags going across the tile floor and other job candidates swarming about the lobby.



More importantly, though, the interview started with the search committee chair stating that I had more-or-less been ruled out of the running before the interview even started. He noted that they were only going to consider candidates who already had a Ph.D. in hand, but had decided to meet with me anyway. Since I was still in grad school, I was left wondering why I was there.

After that bad start, it only went down hill. Two of the search committee members whispered to each other throughout the time I was speaking. Then, out of the blue, one of the members simply got up and left without explanation in the middle of the interview. The committee never offered me a chance to ask them questions. As it turned out, of course, I didn’t need that job. It still felt pretty icky, though.

Committees should make key choices to narrow the pool of applicants (like deciding they only want candidates who have been out of grad school a couple of years). Nonetheless, if a committee has determined a set of criteria, don’t create bad scenes with “pretend” interviews that you know won’t lead anywhere.

5. Consider abandoning the conference interviews altogether. As a village, can’t we agree that the age of the conference interview is passing? It is unpopular with the AHA bureaucrats (I am guessing with MLA and AEA too), but many departments are skipping the middle step of conference interviews, not passing Go, and forfeiting their $200. Instead, they go directly to on-campus interviews. To be honest, this seems like a smart saving of resources. I have never, ever seen a conference interview ultimately nail a candidate’s position as number 1 (Unlike campus interviews). I have, however, occasionally seen conference interviews become a means for candidates to eliminate themselves. Still, it always seemed to me that the top three or four candidates going into the conference remained the top three or four going out of the conference.

6. Read the Damn Files. No, you don’t have to read every word of all 150 applications. By the time you get to the top ten, however, you should be familiar with all of the contents of each file. For the on-campus, you should know their work better than the candidate. Why? Unless your department is totally dysfunctional unusual, they will almost always follow the advice of the search committee. They do this because it is assumed the committee did the work of knowing the candidate’s full strengths and weaknesses in both writing and presentation.



I would also add for those who aren’t on the search committee, but end up on the itinerary of a candidate’s on-campus interview, it is your responsibility to familiarize yourself with the candidate’s letter of application and c.v. as a minimum. I have been shocked – SHOCKED – by colleagues who are in a candidate’s specific field (and thus the people they are most likely to interact with over the long term) who had not bothered to find out even the title of their dissertation. Nothing sends the message that your unit is disinterested in junior professors than having future colleagues ask things like, “So, why did we choose to interview you?”

7. Refresh yourself on local, state, and federal employment laws. For reasons that I have never fully understood (though I do have some theories), the academic world is often far behind the business world in understanding what is actually legal and illegal to ask during job interviews. In almost all circumstances, it is totally illegal to consider a candidate’s marital status, sex, age, race, religion (unless you work at a religious institution), parental status, disability status, or national origin in hiring.



Twenty states (Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, Wisconsin, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington) and the District of Columbia also explicitly forbid discrimination based on sexual orientation. Thirteen states (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Iowa, Illinois, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington) and the District of Columbia have specific laws prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity.

Despite these laws, I have personally been asked whether I am [heterosexually] married or not (and often if I have children) on every single on-campus interview that I have ever attended. Every.Single.One. Now it should have been obvious if one read my c.v. that I am gay (See #6), but nonetheless this is an illegal question in almost all circumstances (In places that recognize same-sex marriage or civil unions, it is still illegal because marital status has no baring on one’s ability to do the job). All of the times that I have been asked, it has never been with animus as far as I can tell. Usually it’s because faculty confuse an interview with a social gathering.

The problem, though, is that these “innocent” questions can become illegal ammunition that scuttles a candidate (e.g. At my former Texas university, mean-spirited faculty attempted to thwart one candidate’s hiring based on an argument that hir spouse’s career was clearly the more important one (There was no evidence that this was true based on what the candidate had told us)). I have also known members of some units who have protested against hiring “another gay person” when they felt the unit had “enough already.”

If you are hiring, remember that you must comply with the local and federal law during all periods of a candidate’s interview process (including dinners and/or receptions) or face potential litigation. If you are the chair of a search committee, it is your duty to remind the committee members of these responsibilities. Don’t allow the candidate to be placed in an awkward situation of having to tell faculty that they are violating their basic legal protections.



8. Do ask questions that push the candidate outside of their research zone. If they have made it to the point of being interviewed, it’s clear that their research project is exciting and unique. Be sure, though, that the candidate has not simply focused entirely on their narrow subject. It is especially important that departments think strategically about the future relevance of our discipline to a changing college-aged population.

I highly recommend that every search in U.S. history ask candidates about key books in Latino/a History. Yes, this is partly my personal hobby-horse. But that horse has a silky mane and a gold saddle worthy of all our attention. Let me explain:

Significant Latino communities have been part of this nation for 160 years. In 2003, Latino/as become the largest minority group in the U.S. Today, one-in-five school aged children in the nation are of Latino/a descent. Within a decade, we will start to see the first wave of those students move into universities. If an applicant for U.S. history can’t name a couple of books that touch on at least part of that 160-year tenure (I am not sayin’ they need to be an expert (unless the position advertised was for Latino/a Studies)), their graduate program has failed to prepare them for this future. If they really fumble in trying to address Latino/as’ roles within the U.S., it is also entirely likely that you will be hiring a candidate who has not thought much about the actual diversity that exists in contemporary classrooms.

History is already failing to attract minority students as majors across the nation. If departments hire faculty without any sense of the history of Latino/as in the U.S., this will become substantially worse (BTW, if you are at a university that still doesn’t have a Latino/a Historian (I am looking at you, Harvard and Princeton), you are out-of-step with the reality of the nation and need to catch up).

Beyond knowing about Latino/as, all candidates should be asked about broader works in their field. Hiring a candidate who works on Japan? Ask if they can speak about Japanese imperialism in Korea. If their work focuses on economic history, are they aware of key books in cultural studies?

One of the most important things that I think should come out of an interview is knowing whether a job candidate can talk about another sub-discipline without being disdainful or dismissive (Something that is surprisingly really hard for most grad students). Like the Ghost of Christmas Future, it says a lot about whether they will be colleagues or gatekeepers themselves.

9. Think about the strengths of your department and remember to sell them. Even when I was in the totally hostile department in Texas, there were still many good elements about that program that could make it attractive. Many of the key members of the department were actively pushing for a re-invention of the unit, which was resulting in exciting (if snail-paced slow) change (and, yes, it was that same change that was also at the core of the hostility). That unit definitely had an extremely exciting crew of young, hip junior faculty. That was (and is) a selling point of that program.




Nobody wants to interview with a place and hear about how miserable it is to work there. I am not saying that one has to lie, but chances are the problems will become obvious on their own. Unique strengths, however, need highlighting.

During one interview that I had, a disgruntled faculty member spent a huge part of the time railing against his own institution (Hello, boozy Uncle Ted). It made me wonder, if it was that bad, why wasn’t he on the market?

10. Until told otherwise, presume that the candidate really does want to work for your university. When I worked in Texas, I was often surprised that some colleagues wanted to rule out really exciting people based on the premise that “they would never come here.” True, we did interview a few (very few) people who spent most of the time on-campus talking about how they could never imagine living in Texas. While I was sympathetic, it made me think of them as unprofessional as the search committee from #4. Why waste everybody’s time? Don’t want to live in Texas? I can’t blame you, but don’t apply in the first place.

Other candidates, however, who were almost prematurely ruled out turned out to have family in the area or other relationships nearby. None of that information was apparent in their file, but ultimately played into their decision to come. I have also heard that some SLACs won’t even interview candidates from ivy league institutions because they imagine that they all want to work at Research Ones. That really isn’t true and suggests more about the committee's insecurities than any particular candidate. Why rule out people for no reason?

Lastly, remember to play nice. You don’t want to end up as the committee that becomes a dreadful story on a future academic blog.