New APPS

36 responses to “A plea to end informal interviews at the APA reception”

1. 

   Craig

   December 4, 2011

   Of course some will be very good at reading social cues, at casually saying “hi” and determining whether a department wants you to stop by. But others will not. And again, this skill has nothing to do with being a good philosopher.

   Although everything else in this post seems quite forceful, this particular claim (which is probably unneeded) seems false for philosophy professors even if it might be true for philosophers.

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2. 

   John Schwenkler

   December 4, 2011

   Amen!

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3. 

   Michael Kremer

   December 4, 2011

   Convincing. I hope some APA organizers and department search committee chairs are reading.

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4. 

   Eric Winsberg

   December 4, 2011

   Yes. Whatever one thinks of the structured APA interviews themselves, this proposal seems like a no brainer to me. In general, the whole thing seems to persist for Russellian reasons: it’s “a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm.” In fact, most people persist at it only because they think their counter-parties expect it of them.

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5. 

   Kris McDaniel

   December 4, 2011

   completely agree.

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6. 

   Ingrid Robeyns

   December 4, 2011

   To add to the second bullet point: I’ve never been at ‘the Smoker’, but from all I’ve heard about it, it is also biased agains people with oversensitive senses – oversensitive hearing or sight. People with autism often have this, but so have people who do not have autism but do have a few ‘autistic traits’. I have autism in the family, I don’t have autism myself (at least: as far as I know, and there is no reason to think otherwise), but I do have a few of those ‘traits’, and one is that I can’t properly function in very noisy rooms. I find it very difficult to follow a conversation in such a room. It’s just too hard to filter out all the irrelevant background noise for my brain. So that’s just another argument against the smoker – both an efficiency and an equity argument: it’s biased against potentially highly qualified candidates who have a minor impairment which doesn’t affect their functioning as an academic at all. The employers are losing out on good candidates (inefficiency) and the candidates don’t get the chance they deserve (inequity).

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7. 

   Doctor J

   December 4, 2011

   A contribution to this discussion: The Philosophy Smoker Controversy

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8. 

   John Protevi

   December 4, 2011

   Thanks, Dr J, those are thoughtful comments in the linked post.

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9. 

   Mark Lance

   December 4, 2011

   Thanks Dr J. I don’t think I’m convinced though. first, I completely agree that you can’t effectively prevent all informal interviewing. There are too many contexts, and the line between informal and formal is too fuzzy. But most of the reasons I gave have to do specifically with the reception which is an unusually bad context.
   Second, changing the nature of the smoker wouldn’t eliminate that problem anyway. With or without it, people are able to have informal interviews in any other context.
   Third, I think the reception is a perfectly fine thing to have, if you cut out the interviewing. For those of us who have been in the profession for a while, it is a chance to catch up with old students, older teachers, old friends, new folks who we ought to meet – I met my current co-author Rebecca Kukla at a smoker when a teacher we had in common told us we should talk – and often it is the only chance for this in a typical year. Many of us value that, and I can’t see why we shouldn’t make use of the conference for this purpose. And anyway, cutting out the drinking wouldn’t make it an ok place for informal interviewing for all the reasons listed in the post and the thread.
   So I remain convinced that it is the interviewing that is the problem with the reception. We need to stop it.

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10. 

    Eric Schliesser

    December 4, 2011

    Mark, as you know, I have some sympathy with Dr. J’s argument that there may be unfortunate costs to a total ban on the smoker. The institution is sub-optimal, but maybe a systematic reform (day-time hours [4-7pm], no alcohol, etc) may be better than abolition? I am close to convinced by your arguments. But people are hiring a life-time colleague and minimizing social interaction may also be a bad idea.

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11. 

    Mark Lance

    December 4, 2011

    Eric:
    I suspect the time change is a non-starter. It would wreak havoc with the schedule of the conference.

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12. 

    Eric Schliesser

    December 4, 2011

    The schedule is sub-optimal, too, especially on first and last days (as a once quasi-regular speaker in the very last session on last day, I can attest too that). So, some creative re-thinking couldn’t hurt.

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13. 

    Doctor J

    December 4, 2011

    Mark,I’m not sure our positions are that far apart. I agree with you and the other signatories to the “Plea” that a total ban on informal interviewing is impractical (perhaps also undesirable) and that at any rate the Philosophy Smoker is a bad context for informal interviewing (esp inasmuch as it is “sanctioned” by the APA). And I agree that we should work to diminish the impression that “semi-formal” interviewing happens at the Smoker. My post was only to meant to acknowledge that most of the “informal” interactions that occur between interviewers and interviewees DO, whether we like it or not, have some bearing on hiring judgments. The aim of reforming the Smoker, it seems to me, ought to be to place as much distance as possible between what happens at the Smoker and what happens in the “formal” interview or the “totally informal” interactions outside of the interview.
    I don’t agree that the time-change is a non-starter. The schedule of the Eastern Division conference is perhaps the MOST amendable element of the hiring process.
    At any rate, for the record, I want to re-register my sympathy with this Plea.

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14. 

    Mark Lance

    December 4, 2011

    Well, you can’t avoid having a first and last session. (Yes, they could be identical if there was only one.) And whatever tinkering you do, moving the reception from night to day is going to make it conflict with more unless you want to consider moving lots of sessions to the 9pm – midnight slot. I just don’t see this happening. But anyway, it still doesn’t avoid lots of problems and it means that those of us who like a reception can’t have a reception. (Cause the reforms you want will remove all good aspects of it.) So why not just schedule a room from 4-7 and call it the “follow-up interview room” – it could perhaps be the same room as the interview room – and leave the reception for receiving?

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15. 

    Doctor J

    December 4, 2011

    It seems to me that if one wants to retain all of the “good aspects” of the Smoker (reuniting with colleagues, relaxing over drinks, making new professional connections, etc) while at the same time avoiding the Smoker’s deleterious effects that you’ve outlined in your “Plea,” then the only option is to ban job candidates from attending the Smoker. Maybe that should be considered as a real option, but it’s not my preference.

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16. 

    Kathryn J Norlock

    December 4, 2011

    Whoa, there, Doctor J. If one wants to avoid the deleterious effects, then banning the candidates is not the “only option.” Another option, if one really wants to avoid deleterious effects, is for one, whether an interviewer or a candidate, to voluntary abide by a new and better policy of not interviewing candidates at the Smoker. If candidates come, they are free to catch up with friends, get a drink, seek out that acquaintance who wrote a great article, etc. They just won’t be approaching their interviewers to say, “Get a load of ME,” and the interviewers won’t be approaching the candidates. This is definitely a better option! A real one, too, and my preferred one. (In any case, the Smoker is indeed such a zoo, in full swing, that I’ve seen candidates and interviewers already abide by this voluntarily with no problem. They just mingle with all the other shouty people instead of each other.)
    I know the following is not a perfect analogy, but imagine if one wished to avoid the deleterious effects of sexual harassment of job candidates at the Smoker; one could say the only option is to ban the job applicants, but how about if interviewers just don’t harass them sexually!

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17. 

    anonymous

    December 5, 2011

    Talking philosophy while standing rather than sitting is in my experience not good for shorter-than-average philosophers. One is less likely to be heard and people literally need to look down at one to talk to one (if they notice that one is there). Lots of women are shorter-than-average philosophers. The smoker involves a lot of talking philosophy while standing. So, if any of the above is true, the smoker is for this reason among many others not good for women.

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18. 

    Karen Stohr

    December 5, 2011

    I don’t think the issue is the ability to employ social skills per se. (And I agree that philosophy professors should try to cultivate a bare minimum of them.) One big problem with the smoker is that the relevant social norms in play are both opaque and, in some cases, conflicting. Is it a professional event? A giant reunion of old friends? A bar full of random, inebriated strangers? Or all those things?
    Just consider that the current smoker practice often requires young women to approach a table full of older men, some of whom may be drunk, in order to engage in a professional interaction. There are, for better or worse, strong norms against young women approaching tables of drunk men in bars. Women candidates who find themselves needing to wander up to a table at the smoker in order to “finish” an interview do not have a straightforward set of norms on which to operate. Moreover, some of the men at those tables may (consciously or not) respond in accordance with the norms of being approached by a woman in a bar, rather than the norms of being approached by a woman in a professional context. Of course not all women candidates run into problems at the smoker, and this is not the only kind of problem that arises. But it’s certainly one of them.
    I, for one, am delighted that my department (Georgetown) has decided not to have a table at the smoker. I hope that we are thus relieving all of our interviewees–male and female–from one small part of the enormous anxiety of the APA.

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19. 

    Julie Klein

    December 5, 2011

    Amen, NewApps Bloggers.

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20. 

    James Rocha

    December 5, 2011

    I have feared little more in life than I feared the Smoker…

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21. 

    Bill Vanderburgh

    December 12, 2011

    I think there is a big class problem, too. For many candidates who are first-generation college-goers and/or from low income backgrounds, the “smoker” is their first reception in dress clothes that is not a wedding. It is not just a new and awkward situation: they have likely maxed their credit cards to buy the dress clothes, flight and hotel room. Knowing no one, they are expected not just to insert themselves into conversations with big names in their fields, but to impress those bigwigs enough to earn a job in a very tight economy.
    All that said, my recollection was that the current situation (where most hiring departments have official tables and all candidates are invited to stop by) was a more-equitable response to the “old boys network” back in the days when the smoker involved actual smoking.

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22. 

    Patrick Lee Miller

    December 16, 2013

    I’m late to the party, and, like Alcibiades, have a different sort of speech than the ones above. Because there hasn’t been any criticism of the Plea, or suppoort of the Smoker, I thought it worthwhile to adapt something I wrote elsewhere and paste it here.
    The basic argument of the Plea, as I understand it, is as follows: there are implicit biases in the hiring process, the Smoker exacerbates them, and so it should be eliminated. I won’t question the truth of its premises in this comment, although I have my doubts about how they are being used in this debate. I wish here instead to question the validity of the argument. For even if both of its premises were true, they would warrant eliminating the Smoker only if there were no good to be lost with it, or at least no good more valuable than the one that would supposedly be gained once it’s gone (i.e., a more egalitarian profession). The Plea mentions this good, but only in passing: “interesting conversation.” A candidate’s ability to have an interesting conversation in such a context (the Smoker), is said to be “an ability that has nothing at all to do with how good they are at philosophy.”
    On the contrary, it seems to me, whether a candidate has this ability is paramount. I recognize that I am in the minority here, and am swimming against the tide of the profession. My philosophical heroes are Socrates and Plato; I measure trends in our profession against the portrait of philosophy we read in the dialogues. I don’t know exactly what philosophy is, and I’m not sure either of them did either, but when it comes down to it I want to do—and I want colleagues who want to do—whatever it is they are doing there. In his encounters with interlocutors, especially Sophists, Socrates insists repeatedly on two things: first, he wants to speak with an individual person, one-on-one, caring more about what that person believes than what that person has learned or done; second, he prefers and sometimes even insists on, unscripted conversation, the brief back and forth of questions and answers, not the long and scripted speeches with which they are more comfortable. Personal conversation makes them anxious, but only there, Socrates thinks, will philosophy (whatever it is) happen.
    I’m not saying that the context of the Smoker is ideal for that kind of conversation; then again, neither was the agora. It was noisy, bustling, and sometimes dangerous. There were drunkards and criminals, not unlike the Smoker! For, of course, some of the thousand philosophers present this year, as in past years, will get drunk and embarrass themselves while hurting others. Just because a liberty will be abused by some, however, it does not follow that it should be denied from all. Frankly, this concern seems to me reminiscent of the temperance movement and its mentality: something is risky, so it should be forbidden, regardless of the potential for good it has when the danger is not actualized. The point about alcohol is minor, but is nonetheless a microcosm of my larger concern. The Smoker will not survive the decade; I am writing not to save it, which would be quixotic. Rather, I wish to call attention to what I see as disappearing from our profession, drip by drip, without our noticing it.
    What matters more and more in academia, not just philosophy, is the “impersonal,” “objective,” and even quantifiable work that appears on a CV. That’s certainly what administrators care about. It helps them manage us according to corporate models. Our thoughts become commodities. How much better, in their eyes, if these commodities can be traded over Skype, saving the over-head costs of a visit to a conference where we meet face-to-face and unscripted things can happen. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of philosophy. Aristotle distinguished between “poiesis” (production), “praxis” (practice), and “theoria” (contemplation). The first is alone in seeking only a good beyond itself, the second and third are alike inasmuch as they are to some extent the good that they seek. In other words, the first is merely a means; the second and third are to some extent ends in themselves. Whether Aristotle understood philosophy as the second or the third, he knew it was not the first. He wrote treatises, sure, but those treatises testify that they are not philosophy, but only its image. We the faculty—who are usually so critical of administrative strategies to turn academia into a corporation—have been unwittingly co-operating with them for decades now.
    The manifest reasons for co-operation in this case are egalitarian, and I do not wish here to challenge them. I wish only to observe how much else is going on. I believe Nietzsche was right, for example, that the motive for rendering philosophy impersonal has deep and pernicious roots in our intellectual history. Whatever its historical origin, however, I also think he was right to identify its psychological source as an ascetic impulse that must render itself meaningless in the end. In my view, it already has. That’s a long story, and I would not expect anyone to accept it, or even find it intelligible, who was not already a sympathetic reader of that insightful critic of our philosophical culture. I mention him only to hint at the kind of perspective from which one can see this minor question—whether philosophers choose their colleagues in a smoke-free ballroom or not, in the evening or the afternoon, etc. Although the manifest arguments are egalitarian, and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, I see the tectonic forces of austerity, commodification, and nihilism at work.
    Wherever I choose colleagues, then, I try to engage an individual person in an unscripted conversation, looking for something-I-know-not-what to emerge. I want to learn something about the candidate and philosophy itself that cannot be written down. Candidates are full of surprises, and I have been pleasantly surprised by them both at Smokers and in on-campus visits. (Aren’t most of the arguments against the Smoker effective against on-campus visits? And won’t the administrators smile when we propose to eliminate them too? “I thought you’d never ask!”) I believe my hiring decisions would have been worse for the absence of these surprises.
    This is as close as I can come to describing the good that will be diminished if we continue to make the hiring process safe from biases by constricting opportunities for personal and unscripted encounters. Ultimately, I favor the Smoker because it seems to me one of the few remaining parts of the hiring process that preserves the pre-professional core of philosophy, the one-on-one encounter between two people who claim to love wisdom.

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23. 

    Nicole Wyatt

    December 16, 2013

    The real solution to this problem is to simply stop interviews at the APA. Canadian departments have been managing to hire excellent philosophers with one round of on campus interviews for as long as anyone in my department can remember. And lo and behold, our annual professional meeting is generally a lot of fun rather than a source of misery and internet angst*.
    *Mohan’s arguments for the irrelevance of the CPA are a notable exception. But I’ll take irrelevance over evil.

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24. 

    Mark Lance

    December 16, 2013

    I agree that we should eliminate the short one hour interviews altogether, and if one has them do it by skype. But this is a longer term argument, and not something that can be forced on departments I think.
    Informal interviewing at the smoker, however, seems so obviously unethical that it should be banned and immediately end.
    At least that’s how I see it.

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25. 

    Ed Kazarian

    December 16, 2013

    Adding my voice in support of this.

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26. 

    Philip Kremer

    December 16, 2013

    There should be “like” buttons on blogs!

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27. 

    Lynne Tirrell

    December 16, 2013

    Karen– great comment. I’m not sure the age of the men really matters, certainly not as much as their being in a group and drunk. These are such basic issues. When there is an age difference, though, that will surely be a power-factor in a variety of ways. Thanks for posting this comment. Lynne

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28. 

    Mark Lance

    December 17, 2013

    Patrick,
    You say “I’m not saying that the context of the Smoker is ideal for that kind of conversation;”.
    Surely this is the understatement of the year. It is a terrible context for determining someone’s ability to have a philosophical conversation with colleagues or students. Really, terrible. And one that obviously does not provide a “level playing field,” partly because of the usual implicit biases, partly because as Karen notes people are differentially comfortable approaching drunk strangers, because some have trouble hearing in that context – Jonathan Bennett could not go into the smoker because he had hearing issues that made the background noise intolerable; reflect on what that says about this as a selection criterion. And there are ample opportunities to look at someone’s ability to converse on a campus visit. So all in, it is really hard to take seriously a suggestion that we need the smoker because we need to see if one can converse.
    Also, I did not call for an end to the smoker. I rather like a big party where I can find old friends. Just take the hiring process out of it.

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29. 

    Rachel McKinnon

    December 17, 2013

    I only attended the first reception of last year’s E-APA when I was on the market. My reaction was that it was barbaric. I can’t believe that our profession does this. Many search committees are sitting at their assigned table, and candidates have to decide whether to sit down and engage, and when. If each committee member is already paired off with a candidate, then does one just simply plop oneself down and insert oneself into a conversation? I didn’t go back the second night and instead went to a great party with a bunch of really great women philosophers.

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30. 

    Mark Lance

    December 17, 2013

    Rachel:
    Exactly. And there is this constructed assumption that hiring departments really want people to come over. A couple years ago I was trying to catch up with a bunch of old friends that I hadn’t seen in years. Interviewees kept coming over and “saying hi.” It was enormously awkward. I didn’t want them to, both for selfish and professional reasons. But it was very awkward to tell them to go away. How can you do this without making them feel bad, even if you go into a long explanation of why you oppose this sort of informal engagement with job candidates. And then do I harm their overall chances on the market by having an uncomfortably conversation? But of course in the absence of anything, everyone has to assume that this is expected.
    This just seems like a paradigm case in which we need a rule that settles this for everyone. I really hope the APA will get on it.

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31. 

    Jon Cogburn

    December 17, 2013

    These are all excellent points.
    Is there some way we can push the APA on this? If so, what can the APA do? Can we introduce a proposal at the business meeting that outlines the reasons you have given above and then states that it is official APA policy that departments hiring with the APA not conduct interviews during the smoker? Something like that?

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32. 

    Mark Lance

    December 17, 2013

    Jon:
    Sure we could. I don’t know that they can really police it, but they could put out a statement against the practice, much as they did against interviews in hotel rooms some years ago. And that would give everyone ammunition, and I suspect pretty much kill the practice in short order.
    I also presume this would not be a hard vote to win.
    Mark

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33. 

    Jon Cogburn

    December 17, 2013

    I’ll be at the Central and Pacific this year.
    Let’s take this offline (or rather still online but via e-mail) after grades are due, try to figure something out, and then report back with another post.

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34. 

    Luke Maring

    December 18, 2013

    Eliminating the expectation that candidates finish their interviews at the smoker is just obviously the right move. The petition against all-male conference lineups seemed to get some traction; do you think a petition on this matter would be similarly effective? I’d sign it…

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35. 

    Susan

    December 21, 2013

    I found it unpleasant to interview at the Eastern APA and one of the most unpleasant parts was the inevitably awkward attempt to socialize with interviewers at the smoker. I was given to understand that such attempts at informal discussion were an important part of the interview process and we interviewees were encouraged to extend ourselves in this way. In a few cases one of my mentors introduced me to a colleague at the interviewing department’s table; other times I had to walk up and begin a conversation cold.
    As unpleasant as this process is, the attempt to “ban” it strikes me as potentially far more unpleasant. How could it be policed, even as a voluntary best practice? What if a candidate has “legitimate” non-job-related reasons to talk to someone in a hiring department – should this be discouraged? And why are we philosophers so afraid of informal social contact of this sort, when it’s quite normal during the hiring process in other professions? Do our concerns about things like the smoker stem largely from our lack of experience in non-academic jobs? Try attending a hiring reception at a large law firm sometime; see how it compares!
    I also disagree with the reasons given above for the ban. The fact that some people behave poorly after drinking does not mean that we should prevent everyone else from having social contact; rather, we should disapprove publicly and emphatically of people behaving poorly. The fact that a loud room full of people is not the best place to have a meaningful conversation doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be attempted. The social skills required to comfortably navigate the smoker may not be prerequisite to being a good philosopher, but it’s not a bad thing to possess and demonstrate them, either. Faculty members will be called upon to socialize in all sorts of potentially tiring, awkward ways during the rest of their professional lives. If so, it might even be helpful to see how candidates react in a more social situation, and it’s not clear why this particular social event must have a different character.
    An obvious solution also presents itself: as it becomes easier for departments to cull the list of on-campus interviewees via Skype interviews, perhaps we will finally do away with the bulk of EAPA hiring. The only mystery is why it hasn’t happened already.

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36. 

    noregreblem

    December 29, 2013

    I second this. There can be no denying that there are some genuine concerns here, e.g., Karen Stohr’s comment from the original thread, describes some of the worries quite nicely. But are those really problems having to do primarily with the Smoker or with philosophy generally? Is the crusty old coot who gets drunk and (presumably consequently) inappropriate with interviewees only susceptible to this behavior while in one of the EAPA cities, in a stunningly large, arrestingly loud room? Is the sexist double standard of judging (even if nonconsciously) a women for approaching the Power Gang only operative in that setting? (Are short folks less short once employed?)
    Flippancy aside, the criticisms of the Smoker presume that it is a net disadvantage to interviewees, especially when things go wrong. Is it? If the alpha dog on the committee gets drunk and grabby, say, is that not useful information to have? If we think of this as the attempt to secure the position you will hold for the balance of your career (true of many, even if not all), is it irrelevant how your candidate-colleagues behave? If the inclination for truly bad behavior is there (in the person), then I’m not sure that finding out then, rather than several years into a hellish TT position, is such a bad thing in the grander scheme of things. (A better thing, of course, is that people don’t behave in these ways or if the do are called out by their peers.)
    Here I confess my ignorance. It never occurred to me that interviewers really thought of this as “an interview” on par with, you know, the interview any more than dinner with the faculty (or grads, or lunch with the majors) at an on-campus visit strikes me as “an interview.” It is one more opportunity to interact with someone who might be a close colleague for the balance of one’s career. Notice that this statement is true whether we think of the observer as the interviewer or interviewee. Suppose (implausible, I should think, but who knows) that it is the interviewee who behaves badly? Why isn’t that something a committee might legitimately want to know (and indeed factor into hiring decisions)? Is it unreasonable to worry that someone who tells inappropriate jokes or swears like a drunken pirate might be a problem in a position of power over young adults who are (a) in a time of transition and (b) the weaker party in a power relation?
    Now for the insistence that what happens at the Smoker has nothing to do with being a good philosopher. Hmm. Not my intuition. But I’ll stipulate. Do we think that it is also irrelevant to being a good teacher of philosophy? Definitely not my intuition. How much of what we discuss in intro classes cuts close to the bone for the students? I’ve had students come out to me, confess all manner of challenges and hardships, and–most importantly–turn on another student for the latter’s “unacceptable” (sinful, simplistic, racist, stupid, ignorant, insulting, whatever) views. In terms of pure awkwardness, give me the drunk old coot any day. In terms of hard things we do that matter, adjudicating and facilitating the classroom discussion is a golden opportunity for philosophy to work it’s magic … and you couldn’t ask for something more real/relevant/applicable. That requires no small measure of social savvy. I don’t think someone without this sucks as a philosophy teacher, but I’d unapologetically prefer someone who can navigate those waters successfully.
    So, if I had three candidates who were equally good, but also very different–and with this buyer’s market, it’s hard to imagine there isn’t an embarrassment of riches–and one of them was just amazing in unscripted situations (like happen at the smoker). In the course of 45min, say, I see the candidate express enthusiasm upon meeting a philosopher whose work the candidate greatly admires without seeming like a groupie. I see the candidate confess lack of familiarity with the work (person/institution/event) under discussion, without anxiety, without getting squirrelly (really importantly, not faking it). I see the person manage an inappropriate colleague, without coming unglued. There are a variety of skills (call them social if you wish, but note that they are not merely social) that might surface at the Smoker that do have relevance for our profession.
    And if I were to say in the committee, “boy, that candidate X was awfully likable and professional at the Smoker … very approachable,” would that be a bad thing? If I think that X, Y, and Z are all equally good scholars (so far as we can tell), with similar teaching experience, etc., why is it unacceptable to prefer that person? How is it unfair to the person who doesn’t perform well in such settings that I glean insight regrading the person who does? The “formal” interview is also in a very loud, often too warm/cold, sometimes stuffy, malodorous, hanger-size room too. Does that constitute unfair advantage/disadvantage? Campus interviews can be very stressful in exactly the same ways. Are there any that don’t involve some evening event, like dinner, usually with alcohol and not in an especially intimate setting? As for the socio-economic worry, campus interviews double down, now with big fork/little fork concerns, attire choices, general etiquette, etc.
    I’m not actually a fan of the Smoker, which I’ll be forcing myself to attend when I finish this. But I’m not persuaded that the problem is unique to the Smoker (it’s just on such a scale that it’s hard to miss/ignore). It saddens me that some of us are only a drink or two away from being a dick. But, you know … hate the dick, not the Smoker, I always say.
    I had an interview (more than a decade ago) with a committee of one, who asked if we could “chat” over lunch, since his interviews ran over and he missed it (my interview was after lunch). For lack of better-seeming options (and because I genuinely wanted to be accommodating), I agreed. There was no alcohol involved, but I suspect that the casual setting made him chattier. Indeed, he didn’t ask me much, certainly not when compared to the other interviews. But he revealed plenty. And he shared his views. It was nothing so gobsmacking as to warrant police intervention, but almost 100% was, in my fledging judgment, unprofessional. He expressed concerns about “old fashioned” notions regarding profs dating their students (grad and undergrad: I asked). He wanted to warn me that teaching in the “rural South” meant that there wouldn’t be people “like you and me.” This was part of his reasoning in the whole dating your students rap. I gather he thought that Southerners are too stupid to bed. I ended the interview, thanked him for his time, but told him that I didn’t think that we’d be a good fit.
    Would he have let slip his offensive ideas had he stayed in the ballroom? Maybe, but I doubt it. But his inappropriate conduct was valuable information for me. Now this is not a perfect comparison insofar as this was supposed to be the formal interview and so should have been in sanctioned spaces. The point is that in rank-ordering the desirability of outcomes I first want for our colleagues to be professional (minimally … I’d actually like them to be nice too). If not that, then I want to know that the folks who might have significant influence over the quality of my life and my professional prospects are not particularly respectful. True, I don’t want to be exposed to that nonsense. But I’d rather be exposed to it there, than in the first year of employment. Banning the social component at the Smoker would be like instituting a speech code, I think; it would just drive the nastiness underground.

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