Comments on: Ah, That’s Better

By: Anastasia

Anastasia — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:36:31 +0000

I agree. Mid-semester has it’s problems but missing the first day of class (as somehow here mentioned) is just not an option. And the rest of my point is that family commitments aren’t an excuse for most of this stuff. I was at a conference on Halloween this year while my little ones were trick or treating and I and other parents complained to one another about it but really, what are you going to do? It seems more important to me that a professional conference be held at a time that makes it as easy as possible for professionals in the field to meet their other professional commitments (like uhh teaching classes) and still attend regularly than it does to accommodate amorphous “family” commitments around the so-called holidays.

By: renaissance girl

renaissance girl — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:56:23 +0000

Sympathy from one end-of-sabbaticaller to another.

I would like to see our institution move to phone interviews for that first round, but I don’t expect it to happen any time soon. It makes better sense, especially for the poor grad students who are spending a bank of money they don’t have, at a point when they are financially most vulnerable, to travel to a conference to hit a few interviews. But if we all moved to phone interviews, I’m betting MLA would shrink–I know lots of folks (grad students and profs alike) who’ve only proposed MLA papers so that they’ll get funding help for their interviewing trips….

By: bardiac

bardiac — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:27:17 +0000

I was going to second the yak tracks thing

I think in the past couple of years we’ve moved away from MLA interviews. Part of it is the cost to us, and part is that we somehow want to get things done early, and phone interviews work well and are less exhausting.

A couple of years ago, we had a committee complete their hire in December for a job. We had two other committees working on their hires in January, when the dean cancelled all searches (though we had a verbal commitment with one person, how sucky is THAT?) The whole department has been antsy and worried that the same thing will happen again this year, so most folks were pretty much done with phone interviews by the end of December.

We start late in January, and have often felt that was a disadvantage in hiring because people had been on campus visits and gotten offers before we were back making calls for campus visits.