.....What happens when you sit on a Hiring Committee Saturday and Sunday, all day — and know that, even then, you're not finished, it's not over?.....You have dreams.
.....Bad dreams.
.....In this dream, Rebel Girl asks the candidates the first question, which is, inexplicably: "How do you make a Spanish Tortilla?"
.....This doesn't make any sense because they are interviewing for a full-time position in English, a writing specialist, but there it is, the first question: "How do you make a Spanish Tortilla?" She watches the candidates react, then attempt an answer, invariably going in the sorry direction of a corn tortilla or flour.
.....All the questions are like this one, cooking-related. There has been some terrific screw-up but these are the questions they have. These are the questions that are taped to the table. These are the questions they must ask. Rebel Girl can't even imagine which position these questions are for, since the cafeteria isn't hiring and even if they were, they don't make food for this. (Describe the process of making a cassoulet.)
.....As far as she knows, the culinary institute proposal for ATEP went nowhere, but maybe these questions were designed for that ill-fated project. (How do you make a roux for a béchamel sauce? Explain the difference between garlic, shallots, and onions.) The committee decides that, instead of closing down the search and starting all over, they will ask the questions and try and discern the best candidate from the answers given......Rebel Girl tries to help one candidate who is obviously stumped, prepared to answer questions about how to teach grammar, how to teach writing in the community college classroom but not this.
....."Do I use a tomato?" the candidate asks.
....."No," Rebel Girl says helpfully.
.....Someone kicks her under the table. "You can't help them," a voice hisses.
.....Onward to the cooking demonstration!
(Rebel Girl, by the way, loves her hiring committee. And the food's been good too!)
13 comments:
This subject googles quite nicely into a video!. Too bad I can't eat eggs nowadays. Looks scrumchedelicious.
Blame affirmative action.
No, I think we blame an thoughtless administration that hasn't let us hire enough for years and now has to face up to the problem.
Affirmative Action ahs nothing to do with it.
Ask 'em about horse head soup. They'd better know.
I think it would be helpful for a new hire to to able to cook for us too!
There's only 36 hiring committees, not 100. It just seems like 100.
38 hires at once? This is no way to build our colleges.
Who's responsible for this fiasco?
Why the answer to all such questions is the same:
RAGHU P. MATHUR
Saturday and Sunday? Nobody can require that you spend all day working on those days. Why do you put up with it?
What kind of college are you running, anyway?
I hear that several committees have been forced to do work on weekends, owing mostly to scheduling problems and HR personnel being spread so thin.
Who's responsible for all of this?
And what if Saddleback is looking for a writing instructor at the same time that we (at IVC) are? Should the two colleges be competing for candidates?
Nothing's more important than new full-time faculty hires. But hiring en masse means that the quality of searches is minimized, not maximized.
That's what happens when you let the right wing of the GOP take over a community college district. Next, they'll ban Darwin.
Was HR able to hire extra people to take on the extra work that 38 hiring committees require?
Poor Reb. As you know, you make a bechamel with a roux of butter and flour, adding broth after the roux cooks for a bit.
Did I get the job?
You're hired!
No, Saddleback & IVC should not compete for hiring English faculty. IVC should let Saddleback have first pick.
OK, just kidding, but in some bizarre piece of micromanagement it was decided by no one will say whom that an English faculty hiring committee with only English faculty on it was somehow insufficiently diverse.
I loved the expressions the candidates gave me as I introduced myself as a Professor of Economics and they had a flash of wondering just what sort of weirdness they had walked into. I then said I was Co-Chair of the Honors Program so they'd think I had some reason to be there.
But, in conclusion, referring back to the first paragraph (as I learned how to do): I sat through what I calculate to be an entire semester's worth of developmental composition lectures. I heard the terms "topic sentence," "unity and coherence," "writing as a process," "comma splice," "diversity as a resource," and "I just love teaching" often enough that they are as familiar to me as the words of "It's A Small World." And I became increasingly amazed at the dedication of so many people who actually have the will and patience to teach composition so the rest of us have a prayer of being able to read a few more essays that don't cause us to bang our heads on our desks.
(But I, too, loved the committee members, and the food. Liberal-arts-type committees do come up with food; we social science types have always just disbanded to forage independently. And we're social?)
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