Talk: Dear Search Committees

I've served on 8 search committees over the course of 17 years and would like to respond to some of these suggestions. 1. In my department's ads (history dept. at a research university), we ask for a CV, cover letter, a writing sample, and 3 recommendations. Obviously the recommendations help us in our initial deliberations, but they also help the applicant. Many grad students are still writing their dissertations when they apply and they sometimes are lost in the trees. The advisors and other letter writers help give us a clear understanding of the applicant's "forest," so to speak. Usually, it is the recommendation writers who give overburdened search committees the most effective explanation of the intellectual project and its potential impact on the field of research. The material we request makes for reasonably manageable reading and enables us to make an initial cut (for we obviously cannot read 150 dissertations). It enables us to assess-- in a preliminary way-- the scholarship of the candidate (that is what we care about at that stage. We only ask the 9-11 semi-finalists for their teaching portfolios). 2. In the ad, we prefer to keep our description of the search broad: we don't want to overdetermine our search; we want to learn "what's out there." Departments have multiple research agendas. If we need to hire, say, a historian of 19th-c US history, we might initially think it would be great to hire in, say, gender history, but we may also be interested in hiring in the history of science and, gee, international history is also on a rebound...... So we decide, "let's see what's out there." That is to say, we have a sense of what we want, but the applicant pool helps give us a sense of the trends in the field of 19th-c US history. We are usually looking for the best hire we can make in the field ("best" being defined as what 4 different committee members manage to agree is "best," and the majority of 40 dept. members are willing to concur is "best"). 3. We try to inform the people who did not make the initial cut as quickly as possible. But, I personally prefer to hold off telling the semi-finalists that we have invited others for campus interviews (some colleagues disagree with me here). Why? You invite 2 people (you wish you could invite 3-5 but that is financially impossible). But, as it turns out, the department doesn't like one of them (for whatever reason: "we already know that;" "he insulted me;" "snore;" etc.) and candidate 2 now has an offer from a "better" university. There is still time to invite 1-2 more people, but that is difficult to do if you're already told them they are out of the running (believe me, candidates do not appreciate being told that "well, we are bringing in the 2 people we like best but, if they bomb, hey, we'll look at you"). This has happened in only 2 of the 8 searches in which I've participated but, I can tell you, both colleagues are now tenured, thriving, and oblivious to the fact that we looked at others first. Let me close by saying that search committees are not the enemy. It is a HUGE amount of work to serve on a search committee. No one is trying to insult you or hurt your feelings. If a department is hiring in 2-3 fields in one year, that dept. is dealing with 200 to 500 applicants. With the limited resources of even well-funded departments, honest people are going to make mistakes. 75.28.178.11 17:45, July 23, 2010 (UTC)