more starkly and somehow more
convincingly. But in person, those
conversations went less smoothly:
She asked me over and over to be-
lieve in her, and grew teary when I
told her that serving as her thesis
adviser wasn’t a matter of belief.
It was clear that I needed to
take action. I looked into the pro-
cedures for dismissing a gradu-
Like so many departments,
mine has a culture of expecting
that faculty members will make
every effort to get students
the support they need to do well.
ate student. But as it turned out,
the student would need a warning
with specific goals to attain and a
whole semester to meet them, so
dismissal was certainly no fast-
track to relief.
As I considered the 40 some
hours I had already devoted to
my vampire student, with no end
in sight, I felt my blood pressure
mounting. This student might be
with me for another semester and
would require continued thesis
advising. Plus, she was now ask-
ing for weekly meetings to help
her prepare for the (as yet distant)
third sitting of her exam—a re-
quest I was deflecting. At times,
mostly in secret and to my shame,
I imagined resigning as her chair.
One day I let slip that wish to a
colleague who looked horrified
and begged me not to.
Anne Herbert is the pseudonym
of an associate professor in the
humanities at a public university
in the West.
Treating Candidates Like Supplicants,
and 9 Other Recruiting Mistakes
Top 10 missteps that backfire on administrative search committees
DENNIS M. BARDEN
AS search con- sultants, my colleagues and I regularly observe candidates doing counterproduc-
tive things during a preliminary
(yes, I mean “airport”) interview,
in the mistaken belief that they
are scoring points with the hiring
committee. But search committee
have their own set of gaffes.
Last week’s column focused
on the 10 most common mis-
steps made by would-be presi-
dents, provosts, and deans. In
the spirit of turnabout being fair
play—and with continuing props
to David Letterman as master
of the form—I offer here the top
10 things that search-commit-
tee members do (or don’t do) in
interviews that backfire.
of the latter have no interest in
becoming the former. Yet all too
many people conducting inter-
views have little or no idea of
the day-to-day responsibilities
and accountabilities of these
positions. That simple dearth of
information does not stop com-
mittee members from deciding
a whole that does not prepare
for the environment of a group
interview. It is difficult for a
group of people to conduct a
focused, productive conversation
without agreeing in advance on
some sort of structure and guid-
ing principles. Group interviews
too frequently devolve into a
for every candidate (though not
rigidly so; more on this later),
thus providing common ground
for a hiring decision.
After sitting in on several hundred
hiring interviews, I am convinced
that they are more productive
when there is laughter in the room.
8. Forget the objective.
Search committees too often
cut to the last bar—they forget
early in the process that there
are several steps to take before
a hiring decision is made.
When committee members in
a preliminary interview think
that their job is to find the one
person who will be hired, they
forfeit the opportunity to use
their imaginations, to think dif-
ferently, and to encounter the
unexpected. Group processes
have plenty of time and op-
portunity to find the common
denominator; the preliminary
interview is a time to take an
expansive view of possibilities.
10. Don’t understand the
job. Ironically, this happens
all the time. The nature of
higher-education leadership has
changed radically over recent
years. The jobs of president/
chancellor and provost/vice
president, for example, have be-
come so distinct that a majority
who is and is not capable of
doing a job that they don’t know
or understand.
9. Don’t prepare. That can
be as simple as not reading the
candidate’s materials before
the interview. More frequently,
however, it is the committee as
series of individual questions and
answers—or worse, into a single
conversation that digresses into
irrelevant or tangential topics.
Group interviews work better
when the panel agrees on a line
of questioning that is intended to
elicit substantive, useful respons-
es and that can be replicated
7. Act as representatives of
interest groups. Most search
committees are assembled in
the expectation that their mem-
bers will come to represent not a
specific constituency but the entire
institution. It is important that
the views of various constituencies
