Time to Change the SCS?

The numbers have not, I don’t think, been made available, but if I can make any conjectures based on my own social media and email correspondence, I would say that upwards of 1/3 of registered attendees never made it to Boston. And many more only made it late in the day on Friday, meaning that they missed half the conference. I’ve heard more people this year (even more than in the wake of the Polar Vortex Chicago Adventure of 2015) ask why on earth we still do this. I understand the rationale behind rotating the meeting around the country, so as to spread the travel burden out. But why do we have a meeting in January that occurs in a terribly wintry climate every other year or so?

The reasoning, as I understand it, is that we need to have the AIA/SCS in January because that’s when job candidates need to be interviewed. I’m hardly the first person to suggest this revolutionary concept, but we could avoid this annual storm-tossed pilgrimage to the meeting if we simply moved the meeting. If we didn’t hold the meeting in January, there would be a much lower chance of weather-related cancelations. What about job interviews, you ask? Well, we would have to change that too. Which, at the end of the day, is probably a very good thing. This is not an exhaustive list, I’m sure, but here are some problems with the way we do interviews at the annual meeting (quick sidebar: the SCS side of things is the only experience I can really speak to, so my numbers and argument will skew towards that side of things, but as far as I’m aware, a lot of this applies to the AIA side of things too).

1. The people least able to invest the excessive time and money required to get to the annual meeting are the people who most need to.

While some of these elements are changing, there is still a sense that people without secure employment need to be at the meeting to network, to get CV line items, and to attend interviews. More institutions are offering Skype interviews, but for people on the job market, there’s a lot of uncertainty about how much an in-person interview will increase our chances. Even with the best of intentions, can a search committee really compare two candidates fairly, between in person and Skype? Skype is an awkward experience. To start with, you never know where to look (if I look at the camera, so it looks like I’m making eye contact, I can’t see the people who are interviewing me. I can’t read their body language and judge if what I’m saying is being well received. But if I look at where they are on my screen, from their perspective it looks like I’m staring down at the ground). Technical difficulties are mortifying because even though we all know that no one would consciously hold technical difficulties against an applicant, it’s hard not to feel like the whole flow of conversation was interrupted. Imagine, if you will, already being a ball of anxiety about your interview (maybe it’s your only interview, which means it’s your only chance at a career in a field you’ve put your hopes and dreams and 10 years of your life into) and then spending the next month wondering if that Skype disconnection cost you the job, only to find out you didn’t get the job (probably not because of technical difficulties, right? But what if it was . . .). So, whether all this is accurate or not, you feel like you need to be at the meeting. Less can go wrong with an in-person interview, and maybe you’re giving a paper, so you can show off your academic chops while you’re there!

Registering for the annual meeting costs $153 ($197 if you don’t register early) if you are a member of the SCS. I appreciate that the SCS membership scales based on your annual income (I don’t know if that was always the case), but it still costs between $36 and $91 for the average non-TT member. Depending on the graduate student funding package or the precarity of someone’s employment, we’re already looking at a very daunting amount of money. If you aren’t a member, you pay $232 of $277 to register for the meeting. Students get discounts, but it still ranges from $51 to $126 depending on when you register and your membership status. To register for the placement service, if you aren’t an SCS member, it’s an additional $55. That’s a lot of money just to be able to attend the interviews that you’ve been offered. Then there’s travel – let’s throw out a conservative $400 estimate there – and hotel costs which will run you about $129 a night at the conference hotel (split between 2 and 4-ways). You’re lucky if you can attend the meeting without dropping at least $700.

With non-TT faculty making between $21,000 (for adjuncts) and $47,500 (for full-time contingent faculty) per year, that’s a lot of money. And it only goes up if the weather is terrible, and you need to frantically cancel and rebook travel and hope that you’ll get some of your money back.

On top of all that, depending on your employment status, missing a day or two of teaching may not be a viable option. So, if you can’t get home on time and have to cancel class on Monday, that could have real repercussions. Similarly, needing to be at the conference on Thursday or Friday means that you need to cancel more class.

This is a lot to put on graduate students and the under-employed. Maybe an unethical amount.

2. In-person interviews help with “fit” – and that’s a bad thing

I say this as someone who feels quite comfortable with in-person interviews. I think I’m better in person than on paper, so part of me doesn’t really want to make this change, but there are a lot of reasons that talking about how in-person interviews help determine the “fit” of a candidate is problematic. I’m basing a lot of this on a talk I attended, which stemmed from an article by Dr. Marybeth Gasman about why the professoriate isn’t more diverse. “Fit” is often a shorthand for “like me” – which becomes a way to sneakily maintain the status quo. I summarized Gasman’s points this way, when her talk was still fresh in my mind:

There’s this nebulous quality of “fit” — search committees want someone who will fit well in the department. And what’s wrong with that?

Well, we “fit” well with people who are like us. That isn’t always about race or ethnicity, but it correlates. Left to their own devices, people tend to have fairly homogeneous social circles — we gravitate toward people who are similar to us. And we’re more likely to find common ground with people who have similar backgrounds and who were shaped by similar cultural experiences. “Fit” ends up being a criterion that disadvantages the very people who would increase diversity.

If “fit” is the most compelling reason to keep the annual meeting and the interviews joined together, and in January, then maybe that’s not a good enough reason for the way we’ve always done things. Changing the way interviews are done would go a long ways towards making the job market more (fiscally and emotionally) bearable for job seekers. Changing the time and/or place of the meeting would remove a lot of the hassle. I value tradition and ritual as much as any good classicist, but maybe this is a tradition that we need to rethink.

Edit: I was thrilled to see that SCS President Joseph Farrell mentioned a lot of this in his letter today. Maybe this is a sign that we’re finally going to make some changes here, even if it’s 6-8 years down the road!