Farewell to the Eastern APA, Hello to Skype!

A young philosopher writes:

Given the on-going disaster at the Eastern APA, both in terms of the punishing weather and in terms of the brutal job market, I thought I would share my thoughts about a Skype interview I recently did.  As someone who is fortunate enough to have a tenure track job that I like very much, I am writing not out of bitterness or frustration but rather in the hopes that I might encourage others in my position to rethink the inexcusable circus that is the Eastern APA job market.   

Despite being happy with my present job, where I have served on a few search committees of my own, I applied for a position this year that would put me closer to extended family.  Given the sad state of the job market, I was very pleased and thankful to get a Skype interview.  Now that I have done the interview, I just wanted to point out that I know of no justification or excuse that would merit the continuation of the current practice of forcing graduate students, visiting and adjunct instructors, and untenured junior professors to endure the cost, stress, and humiliation that have become hallmarks of the job market circus at the APA.  Free technology has finally revealed that the emperor that is the job market simply has no clothes.  At this point, the *only* thing that speaks in favor of the APA facilitating the present practice is the inertia of tradition. 

The purpose of my note to you is to place the burden on the readers of your blog who would continue with the status quo.  Given the hardships caused by forcing job candidates to go to the APA, the burden is easy enough to shift to the interviewing departments as well as the APA policies that facilitate the decisions of these departments.   Keep in mind that the issue is not the old debate about the empirical data on face to face interviews and whether they introduce unwarranted biases into the hiring process or add any useful information.  Nor is the debate about whether phone interviews are adequate substitutes for traditional face to face interviews.  For present purposes, we can set those debates to one side.  The key issue I am highlighting is:  Given that every hiring department can simply use Skype to do video interviews at no cost to either themselves or the candidates, why would any departments continue to participate in the insanity that is the APA job market? 

Here are just some of the myriad benefits of Skype interviews over “face to face” APA interviews: (a) they are free for both the departments and the candidates (who often don’t have the money to attend conferences over the holidays in some of the country’s most expensive cities), (b) they are markedly less stressful for the candidates, who are able to do the interviews from the comfort of their homes or offices rather than having to navigate the stress-filled ballrooms, lobbies, hallways, and suites of hotels, (c) they enable both candidates and hiring committees to spend time with their families over the holidays rather than braving the cold and expense of compulsory mid-holiday “vacations” in the north east, (d) they can be scheduled much more flexibly, which not only benefits candidates but also makes it less stressful for the hiring committees themselves, (e) they minimize stress and fatigue as factors that influence hiring decisions by ensuring that candidates and search committees are much more at ease than they would otherwise be, (f) they save money for the departments so that departments have more funding to bring additional candidates to campus, (g) they make it possible for departments to spread out their interviews over a few weeks, making it possible for them to actually interview more candidates under more favorable conditions, and finally, (h) they send a welcomed message to candidates that the hiring department has the good practical and moral sense to set aside the irrational practices of tradition and embrace new methods and ideas that make life easier on everyone involved.  That is precisely the kind of department for which I would like to work.  So, regardless of whether I am lucky enough to get the job this year, I am committed to ensuring that whenever I serve on hiring committees in the future, I take a stand for progress and against the siren song of tradition.  My question for your readers is:  Who’s with me? 

Comments

[Kris mcdaniel]

I'm with you. Syracuse did Skype interviews this time around, and the decision to do them instead of the eastern was prior to the weather disaster. I haven't talked to all my colleagues about the experience, but my impression from those I have talked with is that there is no noticeable difference in the quality of information derived. (I was and am in no way involved in this year's searches, so I can't speak from personal experience.)

[David Sobel]

Overall I agree that APA interviews are not worth the costs and should be replaced. However, I am doubtful that Skype is just as good as as being in the same room, especially if there are several interviewers. Nonetheless, I think some combo of reading more papers, having more people out to campus, skype, phone interviews, e-mail exchanges, and such, will be less costly for everyone involved both in terms of time and money and as effective for searchers in selecting good job candidates.

[Ben Caplan]

Without addressing the issue of whether Skye interviews are adequate substitutes for face-to-face interviews, I would like to mention an obvious (i)th reason for switching to Skype: smaller carbon footprint.

[Leiter's "young philosopher" correspondent]

David,

I am curious why you're "doubtful that Skype is just as good as being in the same room, especially if there are several interviewers"? You can fit just as many people around a conference table facing a webcam as you can a table at the APA (without all the stress and distraction associated with the shark tank that is the ballroom experience or the awkwardness of hotel suites). Indeed, it seems to me that Skype (or more technologically sophisticated products like Marratech or Adobe Connect) would allow for more people from the hiring department to at least sit in on the interviews even if they don't ask any questions, etc. Moreover, you can have multiple parties involved in a web conference such that even members of the committee who may be out of town can log in and participate. So, it seems to me your doubts are unwarranted.

Perhaps your concerns are driven instead more by worries about the "feel" of the cyber-interaction itself more than the number of participants, etc. I certainly understand that concern. But I think the success of both Bloggingheads TV and Philosophy TV make it clear that very high level and engaging philosophy can be done with web-conferencing technology. If it's good enough for the top philosophers in the field to use for the purposes of educating and entertaining the philosophical masses, it ought to suffice for the purposes of first round job market interviewing, especially given the costs associated with "being in the same room."

[Holly Andersen]

As someone who has interviewed candidates using Skype, I can attest to the fact that they are surprisingly useful and helpful. They are much more like face-to-face interviews than they are like beefed-up phone interviews. It worked for us with four interviewers in the room on our end. I think a lot of doubts regarding Skype interviews stem from a lack of familiarity with currently available technology and software; it is not difficult to have one vaguely tech-proficient committee member set it up. One could even make the argument that this provides a better way to get a sense of candidates than the incredibly weird and artificial circumstances of the APA, where candidates wait around in hallways with other nervous candidates for a room door to open with one candidate walking out before they themselves walk in, or wade through a sea of tables to shout across a wide table over the din. Face to face interviews *as performed at the APA* are about the least useful kinds of face to face interviews one could conduct, and replacing them with Skype interviews sooner rather than later is sensible.

[V. Alan White]

I have participated in several Skype-style compressed video interviews in the last few years as a SC member. I was at first highly skeptical that they could be as good as face-to-face interviews but now I am quite enthusiastic about them. I have two excellent, newly-tenured colleagues as a result. One oddity of the process is that if there is an internal candidate involved they must be interviewed by the same means to keep the process fair. It's a little weird to interview someone over the internet who is sitting in the next room! But my own limited experience is that Skype is very close to in-person interviews in most relevant aspects and absolutely superior to phone interviews.

[Christopher Pynes]

Two frequently repeated comments about the Eastern APA strike me as not cogent: (i) the holiday/family time objection about the timing of the Eastern and (ii) the cost for job seekers. And claiming Skype is a sufficient replacement for the interview misses some of the other functions the professional meeting provides--I'll explain below.

Let me first say that I am sympathetic to all the job seekers out there. Looking for a job (starting a career), no matter what field you are in, is expensive to the unemployed (or under employed) job candidate. This is just a function of looking for a job (starting a career), and it will be expensive no matter where you do it. When my wife was looking for a job in our prior city, it took months. She had to drive places, get new clothes, send out hundreds of resumes and applications. It costs a lot of money to get a professional job, which is different than applying for a job as a pizza delivery person. The only difference for philosophy candidates is that it comes all at once instead of over a three or six month period.

As to the time of the Eastern APA. I think it is just fine. Academics who complain about family time and the Christmas holiday need to talk to their friends who don't live on the academic calendar. Most people go back to work during the week we go to the Eastern APA, and work far closer to Christmas than academics who's semesters end in the middle of December. Academics have more time for family than just about any other working group. Semesters are 17 weeks including finals. Quarters are 11 weeks including finals. That's 34 and 33 weeks a year we have to *work* or be on campus. Subtract that from 52 and you get 18 or 19 weeks of time you can schedule as you wish. That's more than 4 months of family time. I am just not convinced that family time is even close to a problem for the Eastern APA if you compare us with the rest of the working world. I was more sympathetic to the religious objections to the Pacific, but only just barely.

As for the Skype suggestion. Not a bad idea. But the professional meeting allows people to meet each other. They allow graduate students to see how good their competition really is, and go to some talks and get intellectually energized. You can meet people and learn how to be a professional academic. You will have access to publishers. You won't learn these things sitting in your one-room apartment waiting for the Skype interview. You need to get out there and learn how to deal with stress and other people. This is part of your professional development. You will have to meet people and deal with them for the rest of your professional career. These meetings are a lot more for job seekers than just the interviews, and those who think of it as more than that will, I am willing to bet, become successful.

So, yes getting a professional career started is expensive and stressful. The issue is: is it too much in philosophy relative to other careers? I don't really think so. Is the Eastern APA timing bad? Other than one bad storm in a long time, I don't think so, and I am willing to bet that the market goes on like this for a long time. And Skype might work for interviewing, but the professional meeting has a greater function for job seekers than just the interview. Plus, there is something nice about actually meeting people. I am sure I will have irritated someone with these comments. I'm ready; go ahead and start yelling at me.

Good luck job seekers and those of you stuck in Boston.

[Tim Schroeder]

I'd like to re-emphasize an earlier point: hiring committees place enormous financial burdens on those least able to afford it by requiring candidates to come to the Eastern APA. If Skype is close to as good as in-person interviews, then overall the reasons to favor Skype over in-person interviews become enormous.

I'd like to see the APA announce that it will no longer do anything (such as book ballrooms at hotels) to support in-person interviews at any APA conference, and also put out a helpful "best practices" guideline on how to shift to video interviews, appropriate etiquette for the clueless, etc.

[R. M. Farley]

I think Pynes' comparison between philosophy-job-seeking and other-professional-job-seeking is not terribly apt.

Given the new technological resources available to us, we, as a profession, could make the job search less burdensome. As the author of the initial message notes, the only thing that seems to be holding us back is adherence to tradition. That other professional job searchers accrue similar burdens is not a good reason for perpetuating avoidable harms in *our* profession. Who cares what bankers, marketing directors, or insurance agents do?

[Jeff H]

@ Christopher Pynes: Even granting that there are, unavoidably, considerable expenses involved in getting a professional job, I fail to see how that justifies the current process. It's one thing to claim this *is* true, and quite another to claim it *should* be. If you're only making the former claim, the argument seems like a non sequitur to me. If anything, this seems like a reason *not* to needlessly exacerbate these expenses - say, by holding the relevant conference in some of the most expensive cities in the country, at one of the most expensive times of year to travel. I simply don't see how that claim gives you any sort of argument against moving the interviews online (or failing that, at least to a different region and a different time of year).

And of course, if you're making the latter claim - that it *should* be very costly to get a professional job, that this expense is somehow a good thing - I'd like to see some justification for that, because I don't see what, besides an elitism you surely aren't actually advocating, could possibly be the thought behind that.

Somewhat similar arguments apply to the matter of family time. Even if it were true that we have it better than those in many other professions, this would not be a reason for avoidably worsening matters. But, when applied to typical graduate students, adjuncts, and untenured academics, the claim that we have it better is obviously false.

The comparisons to other professions would only be to the point if, as is typically true in those professions, we could live and work in a city of our choosing. A doctor or lawyer may not get as much time off work as we do, but can knock off work and visit his or her family and friends any day of the week. That is simply not an option for a graduate student in a city 1500 miles from those people. A few weeks with those people around Christmas are a welcome break from homesickness and I'd much rather cancel a couple of classes than cut that short, if those are the choices. (Of course, with the Skype suggestion, we wouldn't even have to face that dilemma.)

[Parezcoydigo]

The efficacy of Skype as a free and easy to use platform for interviewing candidates should increase with the reason of its next version, which will allow multiple accounts to call in with video. The search committee won't have to be crowded around a table.

I would also note that the financial burdens of starting a career in the humanities do not begin with the singular event of interviewing at a major yearly conference. They began many years earlier during the apprenticeship of underpaid assistantships, and maybe adjuncting. Forward thinking departments would do well to tune in and make available a computer their candidates know is trustworthy for the skype experience. Finally, while I'm sure it would harm the finances of our professional associations, I think it would be transformative in a good way to make the annual meetings about scholarly exchange, and not job desperation.

[P.D.]

I suspect that Skype interviews would be a good alternative to APA interviews, but I think that people protest too much to the present system. It is, in a lot of ways, rational and successful. There are many academic disciplines which do not have a single, central meeting for the job market and in which candidates can be forced to pay for more than one conference trip. Moreover, APA interviews force the philosophy job cycle to follow a standard calender. The period between Christmas and New Years is actually ideal, since it works both for institutions with Fall terms that run late and Spring terms that start early.

APA interviews are definitely stressful and expensive, and they entail the carbon footprint of flying everyone to the APA. Yet they have the advantaged of being a central standard, and it would be a shame for what replaces them just to be a mishmash of alternatives.

[Rebecca Kukla]

I'm totally convinced that IF we are going to do initial interviews at all (as opposed to just cutting straight to the on-campus interview, which I think might be the best plan), then skype is the way to go. Many excellent arguments have already been given.

Here's one that hasn't been mentioned; there's a gender issue here. Some time earlier this term there was an interesting and lively thread on this blog about interviewing in hotel rooms and its differential impact on women, and there was much talk about how neither hotel rooms nor tables in noisy ballrooms were ideal, how suites were too expensive, etc. Skype interviews completely eliminate that whole hornet's nest. (I'm assuming no department is going to turn the webcam on the faculty lounging about semi-clad in someone's bedroom.) This seems to me to be a pretty big advantage.

And here's another, perhaps more contentious gender consideration: There are lots of good reasons to think that women have it harder during interviews when it comes to appearance and self-presentation. We know that women get judged by their body type more than men do. At the same time, many people have suggested that women have no really good interview clothing options - we don't have a stock professional uniform like men do. It's really easy for women to come off as too femme, too dressy, too butch, too casual, too sexy, too dowdy, etc. during an interview.

In a skype interview, you only see someone's head and maybe their upper torso, typically. You have way less sense of their general body shape, and you don't really have much of a sense of their style. It's really not too hard to look neutrally professional from the shoulders up! Of course, at the on-campus stage, women will show up with their whole, clothed bodies on display. But then there is much more information to go on. These initial interviews are all about quick first impressions, which is just where we would expect there to be problems of the sort I am pointing towards.

The more I think about it, the more I find the idea of women might be interviewed without anyone really having a sense of their style or body shape totally exciting and liberating. And no more stupid uncomfortable, expensive interview shoes in the middle of winter! Woo-hoo! I know this sounds frivolous, but I suspect it may make a real difference to the fairness with which female candidates are assessed.

And look, these things may not be as big of an issue for men, but surely it is all to the good if there is less potential for one's judgments about ANY candidate to be biased by impressions of their style, height, fitness level, etc. And surely men don't especially love having to sit on someone's bed or in a noisy ballroom for their interviews either.

[Maureen Eckert]

It seems to me that, as Parezcoydigo notes, making the annual meeting about scholarly exchange--not job desperation--might not only be transformative but also better suited to Christopher Pynes' view about the professional purposes of attending such meetings. The only APA meetings in which I truly made the most of the meetings (attending sessions, meeting publishers and editors, networking and leaving the experience *energized*) were those I attended when I was *not* on the job market.

However, given the intense professionalization at large among graduate students presently-- the amount of publishing and conferencing necessary prior to going on the market in order to make the cut as candidates in job searches--it seems very unclear that the Eastern APA does serve as a fundamental introduction to the profession anymore in the way Pynes suggests. I agree very much with the idea that graduate students need to experience all the aspects of the profession Pynes discusses, yet, at this point, even my undergraduate students are far more familiar with professionalization (and, arguably, overly concerned with it) than I was as an undergrad. (They're probably reading this right now!)

Businesses are utilizing Skype for job interviews increasingly (http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1930838,00.html), and I see no reason that Skype cannot work for us just as well.

[Young Philosopher]

@ Christopher Pynes:

First, I would like to point out that your response to the "unnecessary financial burden" objection isn't cogent for the reasons already mentioned by R.M. Farley and Jeff H. That seeking a job in other professions is costly is irrelevant when it comes to whether it is justifiable that our profession, the purported lovers of wisdom, intentionally yet needlessly makes our own job market unnecessarily financially, environmentally, psychologically, and socially costly by forcing candidates to attend the Eastern APA. Even if it were normal for people to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars to find a job--which, I might add, I think is itself a spurious claim--that wouldn't justify holding the APA in some of the most expensive cities in the country in the middle of the most expensive holiday season for travel. Moreover, your own example makes it clear that you are comparing apples and oranges. After all, your wife, like most job seekers, presumably had the ability, however trying and time consuming, to look for a job locally. Are we really to believe that local job seekers spend so much on gas, resumes, and business attire that their expenses are comparable to graduate students who have to travel from California to Boston (in addition to having to spend money on gas, resumes, and business attire)? In short, you are simply wrong that the only difference between the financial burden placed on job candidates in philosophy and candidates in other non-pizza related fields is that we must take the financial hit all at once. Now, our own candidates’ trials and tribulations are much like those of other academic fields—but those fields have the good sense to not have their meetings between Christmas and New Year's. But that is a story for another day.

Second, and relatedly, I want to respond to your claims about the values of attending the APA that would be lost if job candidates were not forced to take winter vacations in Boston and New York in the dwindling and likely to be unfulfilled hopes of getting a job. On your view, part of the value of having the job market at the Eastern APA is that it allows people to meet one another, size up the competition, meet publishers, etc. While you are clearly correct that these are valuable things one can experience at the Eastern APA, these are things people can also experience by simply attending graduate student conferences, professional conferences, perusing philosophy department web pages to see the CVs of their graduate student peers, etc. That these are important experiences speaks for attending conferences more generally. However, these reasons provide no support whatsoever when it comes to the topic under discussion—namely, whether the first round of interviews ought to be conducted at what everyone admits is an otherwise interesting and important conference people should voluntarily attend if they have the money, time, and desire. No one is suggesting we should simply conduct philosophy by Skype and blogging and dispense entirely with live conferences. People are suggesting we use Skype to decouple two distinct enterprises that need not and should not be conjoined—namely, the job market and the APA. The only reason they are conjoined is because it was necessary long ago. But technology has undermined this necessity and unless and until better arguments are provided by you and others, we should do our part to act as if we are living in the 21st century rather than the 1950s (however grand things may have been back then).

Third, and finally, while I find it a bit galling that you would publicly announce that the timing and costs of the costly Eastern-APA-job-market-palooza are “just fine” during (a) this job market, (b) this winter storm, and (c), this economic recession, I don’t think your remarks on this front are relevant to the original post. The original post was trying to shift the burden to those who think the first round of interviews for the philosophy job market should be coupled with the Eastern APA. As far as I can tell, nothing you say directly meets this burden. Instead, while you make several observations that provide some support for both keeping the Eastern APA at its present time and attending the Eastern APA for the experiences it provides, you provided no reasons whatsoever for forcing people to go to the APA for interviews when Skype is a free alternative that provides all of the benefits that have already been mentioned while imposing none of the costs of the current system you laud.

@ P.D. The original post didn't propose replacing the Eastern APA job market with some loosely defined "mishmash of alternatives." It made a very specific proposal--namely, any and every hiring department should conduct first round interviews with Skype rather than forcing candidates, hiring committees, hiring departments, and hiring universities to continue to pay the costs of the Eastern APA job market. Given that you "suspect Skype would be a good alternative," I don't really understand what you were getting at with the rest of your remarks. Seems to me like you, too, should be on board. If not, why not?

[Anonymous Job Seeker]

I'm on the market this year, not for the first time, and I've noticed that there is already a noticeable increase in the number of departments interviewing by alternate means (Skype, or requesting additional materials, or simply skipping to campus visits) over years past. Of course, I'm in no position to debate the usefulness of one method over the other for the hiring department. (As for me, I don't like interviewing by Skype, but I hate going to the APA even more.)

There is, however, one thing that deserves mention. Without APA interviews, hiring timetables are all over the map. Some schools will likely be ready to make an offer in February, when other schools are just beginning to review applications. Other schools have made offers prior to the APA. At least when everyone went to the APA, there was some reasonable uniformity to the process. The danger here is that a candidate might be forced into a disadvantageous decision, and that's far more exploitative and damaging in the long term than forcing them to attend the APA.

If the profession does move toward a Skype-standard for interviews, the timetable of the APA should still be (somehow) enforced.

[Lisa Shapiro]

I find the enthusiasm for interviewing with Skype somewhat peculiar. My own experience interviewing job applicants with Skype was not bad, but I wouldn't say it was without issue. For one, there is always the threat of technical problems, and there need to be backup plans in place in case video or sound cuts out (which it can). In recent weeks Skype has had some problems, enough for some to speculate about whether the service will remain viable in a competitive environment. Of course, there is the google equivalent and other services, but the future is likely to make these either riddled with ads or a pay service. Second, while the interviewers do get a decent view of the applicant from the mid torso up, it is not clear that the applicant has it so easy. In discussing their experience of their Skype interviews with successful interviewees, I learned that they actually didn't have a very useful picture of the group doing the interview (there were 4 of us huddled at the end of the table). Many departments do like to have interviews with a substantial number of people (more than 2 or 3) and the larger the group doing the interviewing the harder it is to ensure that the conditions are such that the candidate can perform well. This sort of problem may be solvable if a real conference call capability gets built in, but my understanding is that that sort of capacity is not yet widely available, or at least affordable. Finally, part of the function of an interview, and the APA itself, is recruiting. It is hard for me to see how a Skype interview provides an opportunity for the kind of recruiting that does go on between departments and their favored candidates. Face to face interviews are not all bad, and there is all kinds of information that you get in person that you cannot get through a computer screen (smell and comportment come to mind, perhaps even responses to stressful situations) and while I am not sure that the benefits of a face to face interview outweigh the costs, I do think that it is a real mistake to rely to heavily on virtual human interactions.

[Julia]

I am a graduate student in my fourth year and I think it is not true that the Eastern APA plays a major role in helping graduate students get into the profession, meet other people, etc. Me and most of my fellow students attend several conferences every year do do that, but NOT the Eastern APA, for the obvious reasons: inconvenient timing, expensive to travel to, etc. Interviewing on Skype is the way to go!

[Gabriele Contessa]

Like many Canadian departments, my department doesn't conduct first-round interviews at the APA. We only invite shortlisted candidates on campus. I don't think anyone involved has ever thought that we or the candidates are the worse off for that. In fact, candidates seem to be happy with this arrangement (personally, I was when I was on the other side of the interviewing table) and so are we. Frankly, I really don't think that the benefits of conducting pre-interviews at the APA (whatever they might be) outweigh the costs.

I don't know if anyone mentioned this already but let me also add that some job seekers have to make special arrangements when traveling to attend interviews (believe it or not, among them, there are single parents and parents of children with all sorts of special needs just to make just two examples). Of course, this is a small price to pay for the opportunity to land a job, but conducting first-round interviews via Skype would make their lives much easier.

[L. A. Paul]

I use ichat and skype regularly, but I think they are a distant second-best option for in-person interviews. The network connection can be unreliable. The interactions and body-language issues are nontrivial. You have to look at the camera when you talk to the person on the screen or you will seem to be staring at the wrong spot when you reply. It is difficult to have more than a couple of people doing the interviewing, since it is hard to get them all in the screen and, unless the screen is turned when each one speaks (which adds its own difficulties), they won't be front and center when they are speaking. Etc.

This does not mean we should have APA interviews: we should abolish them. I think the main reason departments have them is that it makes hard decisions easier. In my view, this is not a good enough reason: they are an enormous waste of money and time for everyone, and many job candidates feel like they are undergoing some sort of hazing ritual (this by itself is reason to stop the practice).

[Ruth Sample]

I agree that the Eastern APA interviews are, given the existence of Skype, little more than expensive hazing. It is true that the those on the job market should have some conference experience, but interviewing at the E-APA isn't going to be a very good introduction to it. Also, many candidates have probably been to a conference or two before if they are at the point of being interviewed. I also agree with Rebecca that this would be more comfortable for women, although some of the same problems arise at the on-campus interview level. One other advantage is that people who have the cold or flu can do their interviews without making themselves completely exhausted. I know this may not seem like a huge problem, but I had twelve APA interviews while I had a very bad cold. I completed them on serious amounts of Nyquil, but it would have been better had I been able to stay at home and rest inbetween them. The air travel wasn't good for me--or for anyone I infected. (The interviewers were very understanding, but nevertheless.)

I say this just having missed the APA because of a strep infection with a fever etc.. Given my condition over the last 3 days, I wouldn't have been able to do a Skype interview, let alone a face-to-face hotel interview. But Skype can be rescheduled.

[2010 Job Seeker]

While it's not like the APA is at all receptive to our comments (I mean how long have we all been complaining about the website, about various arbitrary and expensive APA policies, and about the Eastern), I'll go ahead and chime in with one more issue. Before I get there, though, I want to just agree with all of the points raised thus far. Interviewing at the Eastern is totally unnecessary, and (primarily) a huge financial burden on everyone (not to mention the other points like being needlessly stressful and not at all superior to Skype interviews--I mean, the ballroom? Come on!).

One reason that I suspect this will not change any time soon is because the APA itself now has a monstrous bureaucracy, whose purpose seems to be, well, to support itself. I don't see the APA downsizing (and not interviewing at the APA would suggest either doing this or their employees suddenly gaining skills like website design, proper customer service, and so forth).

[Young Philosopher]

So we now have several reasons on the table for sticking with the current system of interviewing at the APA rather than using Skype (Option 1) and several for switching to Skype (Option 2). There have been several comments about the non-job market value as well as the timing of the Eastern APA, but since these aren't relevant to the issue at hand, I am going to set them aside. So, first, here are the grounds given in support of Option 1:

(a) Skype won't enable committees to determine whether candidates smell funny or badly;(b)Skype won't give committees as much insight into candidates' real world rather than mere cyber comportment; (c) Skype interviewed candidates are not stressed out enough to give hiring committees a good enough read on how well the candidates handle stress--which we all know is a key element of being an academic philosopher;(d) Skype won't allow the back room good ol' boy networking to take place as readily as the Eastern APA; (e) Skype can sometimes lead to technical difficulties; (f) Skype makes it more difficult for search committees to include more interviewers in the process, (g) if everyone switched to Skype, it would create chaos when it comes to the time-line of the job market, and (f) sometimes Skype will lead to awkward situations if internal candidates are involved.

Here are the grounds that have been given in support of Option 2:

(a) they are free for both the departments and the candidates (who often don’t have the money to attend conferences over the holidays in some of the country’s most expensive cities), (b) they are markedly less stressful for the candidates, who are able to do the interviews from the comfort of their homes or offices rather than having to navigate the stress-filled ballrooms, lobbies, hallways, and suites of hotels, (c) they enable both candidates and hiring committees to spend time with their families over the holidays rather than braving the cold and expense of compulsory mid-holiday “vacations” in the north east, (d) they can be scheduled much more flexibly, which not only benefits candidates but also makes it less stressful for the hiring committees themselves, (e) they minimize stress and fatigue as factors that influence hiring decisions by ensuring that candidates and search committees are much more at ease than they would otherwise be, (f) they save money for the departments so that departments have more funding to bring additional candidates to campus, (g) they make it possible for departments to spread out their interviews over a few weeks, making it possible for them to actually interview more candidates under more favorable conditions, and finally, (h) they send a welcomed message to candidates that the hiring department has the good practical and moral sense to set aside the irrational practices of tradition and embrace new methods and ideas that make life easier on everyone involved; (i) they greatly reduce our profession's carbon footprint; (j) they minimize the gender-related issues raised by Kukla and others; and (k) they make the job market less punishing and burdensome on single parents and the parents of special needs children.

For my part, it is hard for me to compare these two lists and take the debate about Option 1 and Option 2 seriously since it seems clear to me that the evidence favoring Option 2 is simply overwhelming. But since the worry about technical difficulties and the awkwardness of the Skype interaction when several people are involved has been raised several times and since it is a legitimate worry (even if I don't think it is sufficient to outweigh the reasons given for decoupling the first round interviews from the Eastern APA), I just wanted to point out that there is an obvious solution to one of the recurring themes in this thread--namely, that it is awkward for applicants and committee members when the committee is huddled around a single web cam. In short, Skype is already offering a beta version of Group Conferencing, which would allow several people to log on at once. This is a feature I have used in the past with the now-defunct Marratech (which was purchased and is being redesigned by Google). Each individual has his own "box" on the screen and users can arrange the boxes as they see fit. I have also used the admittedly expensive service offered by Adobe--namely, Adobe Connect. It is simply amazing. And while it is expensive, it would still be cheaper than flying committee members to New York or Boston. Moreover, some universities already subscribe to the service--especially the business and law schools. Now, none of these solutions eliminate the problems raised by Shapiro and Paul mentioned above--namely, that network connections can be an issue. But I simply don't find this concern compelling when considered in light of the myriad reasons that speak against relying on the Eastern APA as the vehicle for conducting first round interviews. Another problem highlighted above with switching to Skype that merits closer attention is that it creates a time-line/coordination problem. On the one hand, I think this might be a good thing since it would mean committee members wouldn't be under such a serious time constraint when reviewing applications. On the other hand, departments could try to use this to their advantage to leverage candidates earlier and earlier in the year. This is a real worry. It seems to me the solution is for the APA to release a formal "best policies" document for video-interviewing that specifies that these interviews should occur within a specified time frame--e.g., between November and February. This wouldn't ensure that all departments play by the rules, but that's the case with the present rules in place for APA interviews.

In short, while there are several legitimate issues that would collectively need to be addressed if our profession decided to make the switch to video-interviewing for the first round of the job market, I think they both can and should be addressed since I think the arguments for the switch are compelling. The real question is how to nudge everyone in the right direction. Here's a suggestion: The graduate students and faculty at the top PhD granting philosophy institutions--e.g., the departments listed in the PGR--can collectively and formally agree that their graduate students will not participate in APA interviews. With no top candidates to be interviewed at the Eastern APA, departments will simply be forced to switch to video-interviewing at the APA. Another possibility is trying to convince the Eastern APA to discontinue the facilitation of the job market. But since this affects their bottom-line, I don't have much confidence that they could be persuaded to go this route even if doing so would, as Parezcoydigo notes, have the added virtue of being "transformative in a good way to make the annual meetings about scholarly exchange, and not job desperation." Finally, someone could start an on-line petition which would allow philosophy departments to publicly commit to switching to video-interviews for the first round of the job market. If people think this latter strategy might be helpful in breaking the inertia of tradition, just say so in this thread and I will create the webpage! Like I said before, who's with me?!

p.s. I do not mean to suggest that any of the people who raised the worries I give in support of Option 1 actually support Option 1. For instance, Paul raised the network connection concern but nevertheless thinks we should get rid of APA interviews. Similarly, White raised the concern about internal candidates even though he, too, favors Option 2 over Option 1. My goal was merely to compile any of the possible concerns that had been raised about Skype that could be used in an argument to support Option 1.

[john doris]

Tim's argument about costs and benefits seems exactly right, and generalizes beyond a comparison of convention interviews and Skype:

The practice of convention interviews places unquestionably large burdens on job seekers (and perhaps also on hiring departments). To justify these burdens, the practice must be shown to (1) have unquestionably large benefits to hiring departments (and perhaps also to the most burdened parties, the job seekers). Further, it must be shown that these unquestionably large benefits (2) cannot be realized in other, less costly, ways. Neither (1) nor (2) has been demonstrated. If (1) and (2) cannot be demonstrated, the practice of convention interviews is morally and prudentially suspect, and should be abolished.

The existence of Skype as a plausibly comparable alternative raises the burden of proof for the "traditionalist" claiming large and singularly realizable benefits for convention interviews. Of course, widespread transition from the convention model will requite technological and cultural changes that will engender glitches. The events of this week indicate that the traditional approach is also subject to glitches.

--doris

[Anonymous Graduate Student]

A few additional thoughts:

-Even if Skype interviews are imperfect, let's not forget that it's just the initial interview to assist in deciding whom to fly out. There's still the intensive, fly-out interview where candidates can be fully observed (smelled, etc.) in person.

-Might the abolishment of the APA interviews be a positive thing for the APA itself? I have no doubt that much organizational energy is expended orchestrating this massive event each year. Might doing away with it free them up to work on other pressing needs of the profession? (Is the APA making a profit from the event?)

-As one who plans to go on the job market next year, I am *extremely pleased* by this discussion and the prospect of not having the dreaded APA experience. It just sounds horrible, frankly, and stresses me out just to think about it.

-To add one more response to the Pynes' point about the benefits of meeting people and networking at the APA: the APA meetings and hundreds of other conference opportunities are still there!

[Roberta Millstein]

For those who are worried that switching to Skype interviews will lead to interviews at different times of the year, or universities holding earlier and earlier interviews: The genie is already out of the bottle. There is nothing to stop universities from doing Skype interviews now (and some have already done so), and there is nothing to prevent more universities from doing so in the future. Indeed, it's not clear to me that this is, or needs to be, an APA decision at all. If more universities recognized the value of switching to Skype or similar technology (as people above have articulated well already, so I won't repeat their arguments), the in-person interviews at the APA Eastern would die their own natural death.

I suppose there is a worry that we create an even harder decision for applicants if only a few holdouts were doing APA Eastern interviews. But again, I'm not sure how we prevent that. Universities are at liberty to hold their first round interviews on the phone, over Skype, in person, or not at all.

Instead, I am hopeful that we come to agreement about some sort of "best practices," as has been suggested above, and end the frustration and expense of APA Eastern interviews.

[another anonymous job seeker]

We've had several people report on the experience of being on an SC using Skype, but fewer reporting on the experience of being a candidate using Skype. I'm one of the latter, so let me register a mildly dissenting voice.

The basic problem with Skype is one others have noted above - in its current incarnation, it permits only one camera on each side. So the SC sees a job candidate taking up the whole screen, while the candidate sees an entire committee, spread out around a conference table. This produces some awkward distortions for the candidate.

At my Skype interview, two of the interviewers weren't even on camera. When they asked questions they would lean in sideways, but otherwise I couldn't see them at all, and so had no information (e.g. facial expression) about how they might be responding to my answers. As for the other interviewers, their faces appeared so small on screen that I was never really sure just what expressions they were showing.

As others have mentioned, there is the oddity of eye contact - you only appear to make eye contact if you stare directly into the camera, but then you can't see what anyone is doing on screen. Audio is also a problem. At one point while I was talking someone laughed, but I couldn't figure out who it was, or even if it was a friendly or dismissive laugh.

A lot of these things aren't big problems, so long as the SC appreciates their existence. But I worry a bit about the asymmetry of the experience - since the SC sees only one large, clearly detailed face with unambiguous audio, for them the experience feels not too different from being in the same room with the candidate. In that (perhaps unconscious) context, it's easy to erroneously attribute oddities of the candidate's behavior to the candidate, rather than to the peculiar distortions of the medium. (Note that, in this regard, Skype is actually worse than ordinary telephone conferencing.)

Of course, there are tricks a candidate can employ to get around at least some of these problems. But not everyone will be equally aware of these tricks, or able to master them. And then we've just added 'ability to work around the eccentricities of Skype' as a central prerequisite for getting a job in philosophy - which (arguably unlike the skills of a face-to-face interview) bears no relation to the job itself.

For everything I've said, I'm still inclined to agree with the central point of this thread. Skype has problems, but the APA interview format has far worse problems. If the choice must be between these two, Skype interviews are preferable. It would be good, however, if all SC members had some practice being on the other side of a group Skype session, to get a feel for the abnormality of the candidate's experience. And hopefully the next version of Skype (or another program) addresses some of these problems.

[Lisa Shapiro]

The very helpful remarks from another anonymous job seeks (@11:55am) were precisely the sorts of worries that the candidates we interviewed through Skype (and hired) expressed. And I think our SC was trying to be attentive to the potential issues with the technology. I might add that inability to determine who is laughing, not being able to discriminate facial expressions, these kinds of things can actually really change the quality of an interview and so distort information. While I don't want to be read as implicitly defending APA interviews (my department doesn't do them for cost-related reasons), I don't think Skype interviews are the quick fix that at least some seem to assume they are. They are far from problem free.

[Mike Valdman]

The most important reason against moving to Skype is getting insufficient attention. If interviews were conducted over Skype, the APA would be cut out of the loop. And without the APA playing central broker, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to force departments to honor the standard timetable. It would take only a few prominent defectors before other departments felt compelled to interview before the holidays, and then again before that. Job seeking would be chaotic, and candidates would be significantly disadvantaged. They would be forced to accept or decline offers even before having conducted all their first round interviews. All this might happen anyway, but I think this outcome is far more likely if the APA is cut out of the process.

Despite all that, I'm not opposed to Skype interviews. But I think we need to think seriously about how to keep departments on the straight and narrow. If there is no mechanism for doing so, I'd grudgingly endorse the current system.

[A totally different anonymous job seeker from the previous one]

I was one of the candidates who had to rely on the good graces of interviewing departments to set up skype interviews this year. Neither of my skype sessions seemed to work terribly well. The first was a three-way call through Skype and it was often impossible to hear what the questions were. For a good three minutes, it sounded like someone was flushing a very loud toilet. Still, I could eventually work out what the questions were and they could work out what my answers were. We gave up on the second skype interview after multiple disconnections and went to a conference call. In spite of these difficulties, it seems that the skype interview is at worst as bad as a conference call. At best, it is nearly indistinguishable from a face to face interview. My skype sessions were as bad as they could get, but they still seemed good enough as initial screening interviews. At least, that was my impression and the impression of some members of one of the committees. (Haven't heard from the other committee, so I can't speak for them.)

It's hard to believe that there's information lost in these exchanges that would justify requiring candidates to pay the traditional interview at the Eastern. Not to pick on commentators up-thread, but I think I can say that there's some very poor practical reasoning being offered in support of the traditional interview. We never know ahead of time whether the skype interview will be as bad as a conference call or nearly as good as a face to face interview. If the former, the benefits still outweigh the costs to all parties. If the latter, the benefits still outweigh the costs to all parties. This sort of argument for moving away from the traditional format is not defeated by the additional consideration that people outside of philosophy are foolish enough to cleave to a model on which candidates are required to fork out vast sums of money to make it to a face to face interview.

[Tina Shoebb]

A couple of practical points on how to improve the quality of Skype interviews (particularly given the problems raised by AAJS).

1) I’ve been at a conference where one of the speakers appeared via skype. His picture was projected onto a screen so he was large enough for the room to see. If similar technology could be used by the candidate (hopefully lent to them by their department) then having the large screen would enable the search committee to be seen in sufficient detail. Alternatively, getting the picture up on a large TV screen would also be a big improvement over a laptop screen.
2) The sound quality was not good though, because the conference organisers used ten or twenty dollar plastic computer speakers. The speaker’s voice came over as tinny, unattractive and less expressive than usual (in real life he has a pleasant voice). This would doubtless affect the interviewer’s judgement. Moreover, some voices will be affected worse than others. For example, women’s voices, tending to be higher pitched, would probably come across worse; someone with a loud laugh, like me, would come across as raucous, and so on. Given all the money that departments would be saving by Skype interviewing, they should invest a couple of hundred dollars in decent hifi quality amp and speakers.

That said, I do think even the best Skype interviews are nothing like as good as face to face interviews. Watching a computer screen is not the same as being in the presence of a person. One of my strengths as a person, philosopher and teacher is building up a rapport with people. This is much more difficult over Skype than in the flesh, so I would be relatively disadvantaged by Skype interviews.

However the Skype interviews only have to be *good enough* to confirm the shortlist. This raises the question of how much difference first round interviews really make. Do departments already have a pretty good idea of who will be on the short list, so it is only a bad interview which will get you kicked off the shortlist, or a great interview which will lever you on? Or are they really open minded, and largely making up their minds on the interview?

[Young Philosopher]

Lisa,

First and foremost, I just want to point out that I don't think anyone has suggested that Skype interviews are problem free. The issue is whether the problems associated with Skype are less burdensome than the one's associated with APA interviews. As Doris and others have pointed out, it seems pretty clear that Skype interviews are indeed far less problematic. So, the real focus should be on how to minimize the problems associated with the practice that nearly everyone seems to think is preferable to the one we currently utilize at great financial and psychological expense. In my earlier comment, I noted that video-conferencing software is not only improving, but the improvements allay the kinds of concerns you and others have raised. Skype's newly available Group Video Calling beta software is just one example. They have some information and a video posted here:

http://www.skype.com/intl/en-us/features/allfeatures/group-video-calls/

Adobe Connect is yet another viable (albeit more costly) option. See here for details:

http://www.adobe.com/products/adobeconnect.html

In both cases, each conference/interview participant would have a dedicated video image so that each person is front and center within their own frame. This greatly minimizes the sorts of issues you and others have raised. If someone laughs, I would be able to notice who it is, their expression, etc. So, if we're going to have a conversation about the problems associated with video-interviewing, I think we would do well not to focus on problems that can already be minimized with new and improved technologies. This is not to suggest that video-interviewing is some utopic solution. It's merely to suggest that given the costs associated with APA interviewing and given recent (and likely future) advances in video-conferencing technology, it is becomingly increasingly obvious to me and others that it is time for a change--a change your own department has already laudably made, I might add (so, kudos for that)! Keep in mind, my own positive experience with a recent video-interview prompted me to write Leiter about this issue in the first place. Indeed, it was clearly more positive than the 10+ traditional APA interviews I had back when I was on the market. That's partly why I committed to ensuring that when I serve on hiring committees in the future, I insist we utilize new technologies rather that outdated and very costly practices.

Mike, I take it one way of minimizing the worry you and others have raised about time-lines and unfair leveraging of applicants, etc. is to continue with the practice of not running JFP ads until late fall so that schools don't have sufficient time to engage in underhanded practices. If candidates can't submit their dossiers until mid-to-late fall, it would be hard for departments to do interviews much earlier than December anyway--whether they use Skype or not. So, while I sympathize with the concern you raise, I don't think it is likely to be as problematic as you suggest. For instance, my own Skype interview was a week before the APA this year. And since they won't be making decisions about on-campus interviews until after the new year, I don't feel leveraged or disadvantaged in the least. Indeed, if anything, I feel blessed that I wasn't forced to attend the Eastern APA during a nasty winter storm!

[Neal Tognazzini]

As someone who has been on both sides of a Skype interview, I am wholeheartedly in favor of them. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that there are better and worse ways of conducting a Skype interview. The way that we do things at William & Mary largely eliminates the worries that Lisa Shapiro and Another Anonymous Job Seeker (11:55am) note: our hiring committee sits around a round table and passes a laptop around from person to person, so that the candidate is only seeing "one large, clearly detailed face with unambiguous audio" at a time, but the laptop is plugged into a projector so that the members of the hiring committee who aren't currently holding the laptop can still see and hear both sides of the conversation.

The only drawback to this way of doing things, so far as I can see, is that the interview feels less like a conversation with everyone involved, and more like a series of one-on-one conversations. I grant that this is less than ideal, but in the end I don't think it's that big of a deal. The candidates don't get to see how other members of the SC react to what they are saying, but then again, they also don't have to worry that an inadvertent yawn from someone off-screen means something deeper.

[Franklin Frankly]

I'm warming up a bit to this newfangled Skype idea, but let me offer a couple of remarks in defense of the tradition.

First, I acknowledge that when it comes to most of the activities that professional philosophers can expect to carry out, the Eastern APA does not provide much in the way of preparation. But there is one uniquely horrible professional experience that it does prepare one for, namely the Eastern APA itself. If the Eastern APA meeting goes by the wayside, how else will young supplicants learn to deal with the stress, fatigue, self-doubt, and undeserved humiliation they will surely face during the single most important professional event in their young lives -- the Eastern APA? And how else will hiring departments ascertain how candidates will fare at that event?

Secondly, I do think it's extremely important for departments to determine the precise scent of a candidate. It ought, for instance, to be beyond controversy that of two equally qualified candidates, the one that doesn't reek of paint thinner is a hands-down winner. I grant that the issue of candidate odor could be addressed in other ways -- candidates could specify their scent and its usual strength on their CVs, and letters of recommendation could address the issue. ("My endorsement of Joe is unequivocal. His work on Leibniz is first-rate. He smells like shoe polish and peanut butter, on weekday afternoons at least. Finally, he's an inspiring teacher.") But I think departments are entitled to learn of such important matters by acquaintance.

[2010 Job Seeker]

Mike -

Job seeking is *already* chaotic. So that's a moot point, really. The APA does nothing to keep departments on the "straight and narrow" -- it's us who do (or don't do) it. You really think the APA has ever *stopped* a department from making an early offer? The APA is barely able to censure departments that don't conform to its own policies (e.g. anti-discrimination ones).

Look, you have *candidates* (such as myself, but plenty of others on this thread) telling you that there is no reason to conduct interviews at the APA...why not listen to them instead of trying "grudgingly" to endorse the current system?

[Rebecca Kukla]

On timetables: I agree that the standardized timetable is important. Right now the APA is still the arbiter of JFP. Why not just say that you can only list your job in JFP if you commit to a certain timetable that meets some APA no-earlier-than guidelines? This would actually enforce the timetable better than relying on fallout from dependence on the Eastern meeting. Who polices the reasonably standardized grad school admittance timetable? Maybe we should just do that, whatever that is.

More generally: Honestly, I just don't get why we do initial interviews. I really don't. I've served on six or seven search committees. I can count on one hand the times that initial interview (be it at the APA or on the phone) has substantially changed my opinion about who deserves an on campus interview - i.e. who is among the 3 or 4 really top candidates. And, I think without exception, when my mind has been changed, I've changed it back again at the on-campus stage if there's been one. (I.e. people I wasn't that into on the basis of the file, who sparkled at the initial interview and got on-campus interviews, turned out to be not that great after all upon sustained contact.) I was speaking to another philosophy friend about this and he's had the same experience. I suspect that to whatever extent the initial interview makes a difference to a candidate's ranking (and it rarely does), it makes the ranking less rather than more reliable. I've never heard anyone give me a single good example of something you need to learn from an initial interview rather than an on-campus interview, nor a single good reason why search committees can't pick their top 3 or 4 candidates on the basis of the dossiers.

[A grad who prefers anonymity]

Whatever the disadvantages of Skype interviews, don't they disadvantage candidates equally?

[Steven Hales]

Rebecca-- I have certainly changed my mind about the top 3 or 4 candidates on the basis of 1st round interviews. People I had at the top of my list turned out to be, in person, boring beyond belief, incomprehensible, arrogant, manifestly not suited by temperament or communication skills for our kind of university, etc. Yes, I could have learned those things with an on-campus interview. But I was glad we didn't waste a valuable on-campus slot on a nonstarter candidate. So I have to disagree about the relevance of initial interviews for final decision-making. My department is planning to use Skype interviews for our next hire, but we're all reserving judgment about its efficacy until then.

Interviewing issues aside, Christopher Pynes is absolutely right about the collateral value of attending major professional conferences like the Eastern APA. Networking, meeting people, finding (and learning about) your niche in the field is vital for professional success, not only in philosophy. Those who refuse to (attempt to) network out of shyness, fear, or self-righteousness about the whole process, well, good luck to you.

[Young Philosopher]

@ Steven Hales,

You claim, "Networking, meeting people, finding (and learning about) your niche in the field is vital for professional success, not only in philosophy. Those who refuse to (attempt to) network out of shyness, fear, or self-righteousness about the whole process, well, good luck to you." As I and others have already pointed out, no one in this thread (or any other thread I know of) has suggested that there is no collateral value in attending the Eastern APA for job interviews. As has already been noted, there are ample benefits to be gleaned from attending conferences. The value of attending conferences--the Eastern APA or otherwise--is not the issue under discussion. The issue is whether the collateral value of being forced to attend the Eastern APA for interviews outweigh the collateral costs. So, I am puzzled by your suggestion that people don't want to be forced to go to the Eastern APA in order to seek gainful employment because they're shy, afraid, self-righteous, etc. Many don't want to go simply because it's unnecessarily burdensome financially and emotionally--especially given that there are less burdensome means of interviewing available. Conferencing is a great way to network, meet people, find your niche in the field, etc. No one is disputing that. Conferences are good--which is why no one is objecting to attending conferences per se. What people are questioning is the practicality of coupling conferencing with job marketing when it's unnecessary and outdated. The issue is collateral damage vs. collateral value. As such, what you and others need, as has been pointed out multiple times in this thread, is good grounds for thinking that the latter outweigh the former. As far as I can tell, this burden has simply not been met by you or anyone else.

[Mike Otsuka]

I never found an APA interview a useful source of information regarding the merits of hiring a candidate. It provides too little opportunity to discuss the candidate’s work and philosophical thoughts at anything other than a superficial level. Given the artificiality and brevity of the interview format, it doesn’t even provide a very good sense of how good a teacher the candidate will be or what he or she is like as a person. If Skype interviews are conducted along the same lines as an APA interview, they’d inherit these flaws. If, however, departments that moved over to teleconferencing took advantage of the liberation from the constraints of the number of hours available for interviews at an APA, and turned these interviews into something more like a proper philosophical talk followed by discussion (i.e., more like an on campus job talk), perhaps followed by an APA-interview-like discussion of teaching, that would be an improvement – provided that the technology is there to support such extended teleconferencing.

The one thing I did find useful about the Eastern APA (and I’m speaking in the past tense because I now teach in the UK) was the opportunity it provided to have more extended, one-on-one philosophical conversations, face to face, with the shortlisted job candidates at the mixers and at other opportune moments. These conversations approximate the sort of worthwhile philosophical exchanges one can have during the intervals between sessions at conferences, or during a reception following a colloquium. They involve ‘doing philosophy’ in the ordinary sense to a much greater extent than an APA interview. Of course, job candidates are stressed out and fatigued at the mixers, but I think they’re more like their ordinary selves in this setting than at an interview in a hotel suite. It’s more like the sort of thing they’re already familiar with from conferences and departmental colloquia.

I grant that it is somewhat perverse to claim that the Eastern APA is justified by the mixers, and I’m not claiming that! But I think Skype evangelists upthread should acknowledge that the opportunity for face-to-face philosophical conversations of a fairly familiar sort with a greater number of job candidates than it’s feasible to fly out is something that will be lost if departments abandon the Eastern APA and move over to Skype. This will be a loss for good philosophers on the job market who are sharp and interesting in philosophical conversation.

Granted one can have one-on-one philosophical conversations via Skype, or over the phone. But, for whatever reason, something significant is missing, when compared with a face-to-face meeting. (A rhetorical question for Skype evangelizing job candidates: Would you have been just as happy to have your meetings with the chair of your dissertation committee to discuss your work remotely by telephone or over Skype, rather than face to face?)

I’m co-editing work with a colleague. We entertained the idea of discussing this over Skype or the phone when I was away for Christmas break. But we decided to wait until I was back in town. We met up earlier today to discuss things. The venue we chose was a hotel bar! Not so different from an APA, then, except for the dark wood panelling and the comfortable leather chairs, this being a more traditional London hotel than the normal APA meeting site.

[Roberta Millstein]

It is absolutely true that budding philosophers need to attend major conferences for the reasons stated. The question is whether they would be get these experiences at the APA Eastern when they are interviewing. They might have better experiences at other conferences: APA Pacific, APA Central, or conferences that are more local or in their area of specialization. (These can still be "major" conferences, like the biennial PSA conference). Furthermore, they might have better professional experiences at the APA Eastern if they were not interviewing. Aside from the distractions of preparation, stress, etc., the interviews themselves take time away from attending sessions of interest, meeting people, etc. Finally, we shouldn't need to "force" people to go to the APA Eastern just to get these experiences. If they are truly interested in becoming academic philosophers, they will go to conferences anyway (and hopefully, their advisors are telling them this), and their CVs should reflect that participation.

[Bennett Gilbert]

I am certainly not a young philosopher, but I am new to the academic profession of philosophy. This profession often defines itself by exclusion (of content or method) and in this country struggles to maintain itself in academic relevance, especially in its relations to other disciplines. A greatg many philosophers have dis-used the academic version and practice it in other fields or departments because of this. Why should academic philosophy deepen this problem by adding exclusions through monetizing and ritualizing the entry into humanities careers" in arbitrary, discriminatory, impractical and harmful ways. On this board I find little resistance to change in the APA interview system and mostly thoughtful discussion of ways to change it, but the resistance by some and the doddering behavior of the APA is headache-making.
I gather that the purpose of the current system was to put the hiring process in philosophy on the same calendar for all departments. I imagine this was a difficult accomplishment and a beneficial one. But I do not know why the same problem does not affect geology and history and every other discipline, since more or less everyone is on the same academic calendar. Does the MLA hold its critical job market on 28 December in NY? Does everyone else? Does anyone else? If not, why not? What do other organizations of disciplinary professionals do to assist the academic job market? Surely there is some solution other than requiring everyone to show up in NYC and only NYC just before New Year's Eve and only then?

[Steven Hales]

@ Young philosopher: in your enthusiasm to depict me as a staunch defender of the status quo, you may have overlooked my statement that "My department is planning to use Skype interviews for our next hire, but we're all reserving judgment about its efficacy until then." I did, however, appreciate your rebuttal that people are not shy or afraid to attend the conference, but instead the problem is its emotional burden.

I don't deny the costs, economic and otherwise, of the tradition of interviewing at conferences. I think exploring other options has merit. That doesn't mean that Skype or any of the other proposed solutions is the holy grail; experimenting with various approaches is a good idea.

[interviewed at the 2010 Eastern]

Suppose the job-market timeline stayed as it is presently, and suppose it became standard to use Skype for first-round interviews. Still, I think job candidates would feel compelled to go to the Eastern APA, for a chance at schmoozing potential employers who are in the midst of making hiring decisions. So I'm not convinced that Skype could save candidates the expenses of the Eastern APA.

In addition, I'm not convinced that Skype interviews are normally less stressful for job candidates, as was suggested earlier. The difficulties in Skyping (not seeing all the interviewers or their body language, tech problems, etc.) could seriously disrupt the candidate's rhythm during the interview. And that would seem more problematic than the circumstances surrounding an APA interview.

Having said all that, I'm slightly in favor of Skype interviews (assuming the job market timeline would be unaffected). The benefits to departmental budgets seem to trump other concerns. But let's be clear on which reasons are good reasons for Skype.

[Longtime TT job seeker]

I was another one of those forced to reschedule interviews via Skype. My experiences were not nearly as smooth as Young Philosopher, but much better it sounds then Job Seeker 1:09 PM. I found the Skype interview (in theory) to be superior to past phone interviews for the reasons given by others above. And I think we need to encourage people to consider using videoconferencing (I'm not wedded to it being Skype) in place of phone interviews. However, the technical glitches can be maddening and it would be best if institutions of higher ed developed rooms dedicated to reliable videoconferencing on various platforms and made them available for interviews (and to adjuncts and even those who are in the area who were not able to score a job that year - it's a bit idealistic, but otherwise it does create an unfair situation for those who can't afford top of the line webcams and/or internet connections).

Given that the economic climate has created more job candidates like myself, who hold visiting positions and may attend multiple APAs in one year over the course of several years in search of a TT job, it does seem that Skype should be an option open to job candidates (yearly trips to multiple APAs is financially draining even if you have a travel budget, as most schools will not cover trips if you are not presenting; and there are only so many Christmases, Easters, and New Years you can miss before the family takes offense). However, as others have enumerated there are clear effects on the decision-making process that occur at the APA outside the interview. We could institute some "understanding" about that (and when interviews and offers should occur), but, given the perceived scarcity of what is at stake, most candidates will feel pressured to go to forego the Skype option and go to the APA instead. It's the same logic which so many students use to justify cheating - nobody else will abide by these informal rules, so I will be a chump if I do so. And I don't see a ban on APA interviews as an option, because it would not stop people from interacting informally at the APA (nor would it stop a large number of candidates from heading to the APA in the hopes of informal contact). As long as APAs exist and job candidates continue to see the market as a war of all against all, the APA interviews will be the default equilibria for this coordination problem.

Still, we should decouple the question of Skype vs. APA from Skype vs. Phone and recognize that more departments will feel economic pressure to forego the APA (without needing a ban to make it so). The move to Skype is already happening in the latter cases, but more should be done to encourage it and embrace it (and the development of equipment to make it as bug-free as possible).

Technology is rapidly being created that lowers the cost on job seekers and SC, which I as someone who has been on the market for a while welcome. I do fear though that the one thing we aren't discussing is instituting a clear etiquette for these new technologies. It would have helped me to know of any established practices about how to handle Skype feed interruptions rather than to try and figure something out when it happens (or try and ignore the glitches as I did) which undoubtedly affects the energy of the interview. It also would help if we had some standard practices established for electronic dossier submissions. Some SC rely on jobs.edu upload programs, others have a dedicated email address and some use a faculty address. We take for granted that email works, but I learned (way too late) that my emails with attachments were being captured by spam filters (and not bounced back). I like using email as it cuts costs, removes the vagaries of postal and campus mail delivery, and if I use PDFs it guarantees that the documents arrive as I intended. And I don't want to further jam SC emailboxes with inquiries about receipt of materials. Perhaps there is an APA committee whose charge it is to address best practices in issues such as these and come up with some guidelines for conduct in electronic submission and Skype interviews. I know some standard practices will eventually arise through the same process as English Common Law did, but wouldn't it be better to get ahead of the curve before practices develop that might not be ideal (or ideal from some subset of all those involved). I'd rather not see another system of etiquette develop informally in the virtual world that resembles Smoker etiquette - i.e., some set of expectations that people are not equally aware of, esp. those who didn't go to the depts that taught those rules.

[Matt Weiner]

To Tina Shoebb's suggestion that the candidate use a large screen preferably leant by their department, I think there'd be a danger that this could give an unfair advantage to candidates who are at departments that can lend them large screens. Some candidates may be teaching in temporary positions at departments that won't be directing resources to their job interviews.

This is just a minor point; this year's fiasco is certainly bringing me around to the position that interviews at the Eastern are a bad idea. (Though I think the concerns about trying to enforce a uniform schedule are very serious; the suggestion that the APA make advertising in the JFP conditional on adhering to a schedule seems like a good one.)

To Mike Otsuka, I always found the forced attempts to strike up conversation at the mixers the most horrible aspect of the APA Eastern. For one thing, they're so brutally unsystematic that I can't see how they provide any sort of fair comparison among candidates; there's no control over who may be at the department's table when you wander over, whether they're someone with whom you can easily strike up an extended conversation (yes, you ought to be able to engage people who work in other fields, but it's certainly easier to engage people who work in yours), whether they're eager to talk to you or whether you're interrupting a conversation with a friend they haven't seen for a year, whether you have to subtly cut out some other desperate job seeker or hover around their elbow -- all this can affect whether a decent extended one-on-one conversation takes place. Not to mention how much stress these factors can put on the candidate.

And the code of exactly what to do at the mixer can be impenetrable; someone once told my placement director that I hadn't been flown out for a visit partly because I hadn't visited that department's table, when I'd had a fifteen-minute conversation with someone from that department at a mixer. I think that the problem might have been that the conversation didn't take place at the table, or perhaps it was that it was at the mixer the night after my interview rather than the night of it, or maybe I just talked to the wrong person. I still don't know.

[Future Job Applicant]

As a grad student who will be on the market in a couple years, I very much hope that interviews continue to be held at the APA. And as someone who routinely uses Skype to communicate with family and friends, I would prefer not to interview by that medium. I would gladly pay for an expensive cross-country trip during the holidays to have the opportunity to meet my interviewers in person.

Presumably I am not alone in having such sentiments.

[helen]

I've just had my first Skype interview, and for me it was a very positive experience. Apart from the eye contact thing, which is a bit unnerving, and the fact that the SC was obviously packed a bit too closely together to be comfortable. I found it an excellent opportunity to discuss my writing samples with the SC, who are all experts in my area of specialization. They had read my two papers in depth and I enjoyed our discussion.
My earlier experiences in face-to-face interviews (mainly in Europe, where I am stationed) in fact included almost no in-depth philosophical discussion, and were mainly limited to practical matters (e.g., how will you combine research with teaching, how are you going to attract funding, etc.). While such factors are undoubtedly also play a part in the suitability of a candidate, philosophical competence is still I think the most crucial, at least for research-oriented schools. So I do not agree that face to face contact is essential for in-depth discussion.

[Mike Otsuka]

Matt Weiner,

I agree with you about the randomness and the awkwardness of mixers. But, without them, we're left with the happenstance of which job candidate happens to have had the opportunity to make a similar impression at some other conference or philosophical event that the job candidate and the member of the hiring department happen to have jointly attended. That seems even more arbitrary. (I would not, for example, have got my first tenure-track job were it not for the fact that someone in the department that ended up hiring me visited the university where I was a graduate student for a term and attended seminars that I was attending.) Opportunities for job candidates to make an impression are made somewhat less unequal than they would otherwise be by the mixers.

[David Velleman]

@Mike Otsuka: I have advised a dissertation over video-chat and found that method to be more productive than in-person meetings. Although video chat does not allow for eye contact, it does allow for conversation that is genuinely face-to-face, whereas parties to an in-person meeting in a faculty office rarely face one another directly. In video chat, the parties focus on one another more consistently, and see one another's facial expressions more clearly, than when speaking in person.

Of course, this feature of video chat won't help when one side of the conversation is occupied by several people sitting around a table, but multi-party video-chat will soon solve that problem.

Another advantage of video-chat interviews. At the APA, hiring departments cannot readily modify their interviewing strategy as the process unfolds. It's difficult, for example, to schedule interviews with additional candidates if the initial interviews are disappointing. It's difficult to hold a meeting in order to decide whether to conduct additional interviews, or to modify the direction of the search.

Also. At the APA, who attends an interview on the hiring side often depends on who is participating in a session at the same time, who was able to attend the meetings, who arrived at the meetings late or had to leave early, and so on. Video-chat interviews can be scheduled when all of the relevant members of the hiring department are available. The makeup of the interviewing committee may change from one interview to another, but it can change on the basis of expertise and interest rather than random factors.

[Young Philosopher]

Steven Hales,

First, I merely focused on your claims about the collateral value of attending conferences and what I took to be your flippant remarks impugning the motives of those who would prefer not to be forced to take compulsory mid-winter "job-seeking vacations" in some of the most expensive cities in the country--e.g., telling people who you uncharitably dismiss as "shy, afraid, and self-righteous," "well, good luck to you" in the midst of what is already a punishing market. The emotional costs I referenced were not the weak-kneed costs paid only by those tender people who are too shy and afraid to attend a philosophy conference, but rather the emotional costs associated with the unnecessary financial costs, personal stress, and familial burdens associated with forcing people to choose between a vacation they can't afford for jobs they likely won't get and the chance to spend some time with their loved ones during the holidays. So, while I am delighted your department is opting to try Skype--which helps fuel by own self-righteousness, of course--I nevertheless found some of your remarks to be misguided.

To those of you who had either bad or suboptimal experiences with Skype interviews this year,

I think there have already been several suggestions made by me, Neal, and others for improving these experiences in the future. I know that the department that interviewed me sent me very detailed and helpful guidelines for setting up the interview, checking to make sure I have optimal video and audio enabled, what to do in the event there were technical difficulties, etc. One obvious way of improving everyone's experiences with video-interviewing is to get the IT folks from both the candidates and the hiring committees universities/colleges involved since they will happily help ensure that students and employees have the best technological resources available for interviewing. One very important item that both the candidate and the hiring committees both need is a microphone that has echo-cancelling capabilities. This simple feature greatly reduces some of the audio problems mentioned in this thread. Also, it's worth pointing out that while I focused on Skype in the original post, I didn't mean to suggest it is the only or even the best option. For while I do think the new group video capability of Skype will further improve the video-interviewing experience, I am convinced that if hiring committees have access to Adobe Connect, they should use that instead since it is a much more reliable and sophisticated tool. Either way, I think the focus at this point should be not on whether departments should conduct APA interviews or Skype interviews, but rather how we make the transition to first round video-interviewing as smooth as possible both in terms of the technology/experience and in terms of the time-line. In my own mind, at least, the video-interviewing train has already slowly started leaving the station. The question is how best to lay down the tracks moving forward.

[Philip Robinson]

First a confession: I'm not an academic of any stripe so I'm not really familiar with the purpose or set up of the APA thingymabob and from the looks of it, it's not efficient or popular.

I work in the commercial private sector and have both interviewed and been interviewed of several occasions, and since I've already read the candidates CV, checked references, googled them and examined their portfolio of work... the interview is left to deal with a few other issues. The Skype call can replace most of them - like agreeing specifics about the contract and so on, but a massive purpose of the interview is to make sure this person isn't pulling the wool over my eyes. Did they really work on all those projects? Or did their housemate or workmate help them out every step of the way? Are they as sharp as they look on paper, do they know the things they claim to do when they don't have notes their friend is providing them with? Can they really present themselves well? And pressure in an interview isn't just for fun - it's *meant* to be a little stressful (and lets not over dramatise this - it's not really *that* traumatic) so they can get at the things the candidate have not put on their record. The things they're hiding.

That's how interviews go in commerce anyway. Would a Skype call not be susceptible to... well... cheating this element? Or perhaps there are no frauds in academia - in which case fair enough.

[Jamie Dreier]

I think Skype interviews will be a waste of time, but they will waste less time and be much less expensive than convention interviews (counting costs both in dollars and candidate anxiety). So although they will still be useless (or slightly worse than useless), I am in favor of them.

Also, I'd like to point out that in the Inside Higher Ed article, Schrader says that the organization will be conducting a new survey on the timing of the Eastern meetings. That would be a good moment to raise the possibility of other, more revolutionary changes. I hope the self-described young philosophers commenting here will take this opportunity. The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like the sun at eight or nine in the morning.

[Brian Weatherson]

I don't understand the claim that Skype interviews could abolish the regimented timeline for job searches. Such a (mythical) timeline only exists if one assumes away the existence of Europe, Asia, Australia etc etc. Perhaps there is a benefit to having the majority of USA searches on a single timeline, but unless the rest of the world plays along (i.e., Americans get their way again), those benefits seem fairly small to me.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Rather than re-hashing a bunch of arguments that I think have convincing been made above for replacing in-person interviews with Skype interviews, I will just I will just describe what I think would be the most effective system for hiring in philosophy:

1. Departments advertise positions in the JFP (make it all online only?), and in doing so, they agree to abide by APA's best practices, which would include a timeline for interviews (see below), in addition to the rules governing offers, etc.

2. Departments would do Skype interviews no earlier than the week after Thanksgiving and no later than mid-January. No one would be allowed to interview in person. APA would create suggestions for how best to do Skype interviews (some suggestions in this thread are useful; based on my experiences doing many APA interviews in past and doing Skype interviews this year, I think the advantages of Skype clearly outweigh the disadvantages). Of course, departments could skip these interviews and go straight to on-campus interviews. (Personally, I think that decision depends on the pool of candidates--sometimes 3-4 obvious ones rise to the top, but sometimes it's more like 10-15 and the extra information, minor though it might be, from interviews could help people find the best ones to bring to campus.)

3. Departments would not be allowed to invite candidates for junior positions to on-campus interviews before January. Ideally, people would also be required to wait until Feb. 1 to start making offers, but enforcing that may be tough.

4. Grad students at all levels, but especially those on the market, would be encouraged to attend lots of conferences (not just APAs), submitting papers to present when possible, and to network and interact with people at these conferences. I agree with those above who have suggested that we don't want to lose in-person philosophical conversations (e.g., I wouldn't advocate replacing all conferences with online conferences!). And I think I would get rid of mixers.

5. The APA Eastern could try to create many more slots for grad students and others on the market (e.g., it could make at least half the talks open only to people who indicate that they are on the market that year). Since people would not be doing interviews, they could spend more of their time going to these talks (and other ones). If this were to happen, it would be important to make the refereeing process as fair as possible. If it were up to me, the APA Eastern would occur Jan 2-3 to Jan 5-6, but I won't open up that can of worm again here, and that move might conflict a bit with the time some depts would want to do Skype interviews.

I'm sure there are some problems with the suggestions I've made, but I think that we will see transition from APA interviews to Skype by many depts, so it'd be best to make the changes coordinated to maximize consistency.

[Amy Lara]

I won't rehash the arguments, but I can't let Steven Hales' comment slide: "Those who refuse to (attempt to) network out of shyness, fear, or self-righteousness about the whole process, well, good luck to you." This strikes me as rather callous and able-ist (if unintentionally so). Social anxiety is a genuine psychological disorder. I agree that sufferers should at least try to get help with it, but those who are fortunate enough not to suffer from it should show some compassion. If we held APAs in 10-story hotels with no elevators, we certainly wouldn't tell people with limited mobility: "good luck with that".

BL COMMENT: Not everyone who is shy suffers from social anxiety disorder, and I expect Professor Hales did not mean to be singling out only the latter.

[LS]

I don't have a strong opinion about Skype interviews (not having ever done them). But I do want to add that some kinds of creepy sexist behaviors can be detected at APA interviews, which may not be evident via Skype. As a junior faculty member (and as the only woman) on a seach committee, I had two distrubing experiences at the APA that sent up red flags about the candidate. In one case, whenever I asked the candidate a question, he would look only at the men (not at me) while answering my question. And in a second case, when my male colleagues asked a question (actually throughout the interview) the candidate started at *me* when answering. Both of these experiences made me uncomfortable and led me--and my colleagues--to question the job candidate's ability to interact effectively with women.

Of course, there are other ways to gain this kind of information about candidates (and for candidates to learn about the attitudes and behaviors of the members of hiring departments), I do think there are some subtle ways of interacting with others that become obvious in person, but may be less obvious over Skype.

In any case, I'm not suggesting that this means the current practice of APA interviews should be continued (there are many, many disadvantages to this current process, as others note above).

[Rebecca Kukla]

@ Eddy N: you can't pose a no-later-than date because schools can't help it if they get approved for positions late in the year (hence the routine smattering of Central and Pacific interviews and even summer interviews). Anyhow, the concern is the race to earlier timetables, not later. No candidate minds a surprise late interview if he or she is still available. Of course it would be in schools' interest, as it already is, not to be doing things much later than is standard.

[Tad Brennan]

In the autumn of 1996, one good but not top-tier research university (let's call it a Leiter 30, plus or minus 5) called me out for a campus interview on about December 5. During the course of the campus visit, I was offered a job.

I learned that this department was having trouble competing for the top candidates, and viewed the early-offer strategy as a way of picking up bargains, i.e. plausible candidates whom they might lose to better schools. They were offering escape from the downside risk of the general job-market, in exchange for forgoing the possibility of more attractive jobs.

I declined, on the grounds that I could not predict what other offers might be forthcoming at the normal dates. I was flattered by the offer, of course, and tempted by the security, but also somewhat irritated at the pressure, and at the attempt to game the system.

I mention this piece of ancient history in order to say: the race to earlier timetables began at least 14 years ago. Skype may exacerbate it, but it was always a possibility.

A generally accepted timetable would be a good thing, but it need not be tied to the APA Eastern convention. And neither a timetable nor the convention can prevent violations of the norm.

[Margaret Atherton]

Early timetables are of course undesirable but those of us who work at public universities are at the mercy of governors, legislatures, etc., and the threat of a job freeze can mandate a time table that is earlier than would be otherwise desirable. Early time tables, that is, can be motivated by something quite different from a desire to scoop the competition. From my experience this year I can add that other disciplines seem to find this practice less unusual than does philosophy, suggesting that other disciplines are less subject to the tyranny of Eastern APA.

[Christopher Pynes]

Several people objected to my claims, and I want to reply to a few by name, and then make some general remarks about the hiring process and the profession of philosophy in general.

Tim Schroeder wrote: “hiring committees place enormous financial burdens on those least able to afford it by requiring candidates to come to the Eastern APA.”

R.M. Farley wrote: “I think Pynes' comparison between philosophy-job-seeking and other-professional-job-seeking is not terribly apt.”

I would like to ask some simple questions of these two and others since these were in response to my cost comments: How much should it cost you to find a job in philosophy? How much should you have to spend to get a job? Not what are you willing to pay, but what should it cost? The entry cost into the profession is quite high to begin with, right! You have to have an undergraduate degree and then get multiple graduate degrees. Those costs keep the vast majority of people out of the profession, and I didn’t even mention opportunity costs. This is an expensive profession to get into, but the rewards are quite high for those who make it. Lots of “time off” if you want to take it, and a fairly good salary relative to the rest of the country. An associate professor at my university makes more than 65K a year. That’s a top 25% income in the US for households. (I just read this relating to tax burdens or something on CNN or the Chronicle). And let’s be honest, the APA does make it less expensive for graduate students. Adjuncts have to pay the full membership dues and the cost of the conference. That’s a big difference. Plus, I don’t think the burdens of attending the APA are *enormous* for those interviewing given all the other activities and services that are provided. The costs can be significant, but they aren’t enormous, and it isn’t like these costs aren’t known to people ahead of time. Just like you know you will need a suit for interviewing and a completed dissertation. This is what is normally expected of job candidates: that they attend the Eastern APA. You know this years in advance.

But neither of you have explained why starting a career in philosophy is different than other careers. Farley just claims my analogy isn’t apt? Why? And to Schroeder those who don’t have jobs have the biggest burden in every field. But relative to your entire career, the cost of the conference is a small part of the overall start up costs. Those are just the facts of how people get jobs. It costs money to get a job. A friend of mine who wanted to be a consultant in DC had to pay to fly from CA to DC for interviews, buy nice suits, and stay in a hotel. Often it just is the cost of getting into the business, which leads me to Jeff H and one of the young philosophers.

To Jeff H and Young Philosopher, I don’t think it should be more expensive than necessary, and the APA does reduce the cost for graduate students. But to complain that you are homesick, and the process is burdensome and stressful, makes me want to say to you: “welcome to adulthood.” Part of this process is going to be just that (stressful, expensive, a pain in the ass, and you might get homesick) and there isn’t much you can do about it. And those who handle these stresses the best are, in my view, more likely to be employed. Is that fair and just?

Doris wrote that the burden of proof should be on the traditionalist or defender of the current process of APA interviews. I don’t think so. If a department wants to conduct in person interviews at the APA, then they have the right to set that standard. (Of course having 15 people fly to Stanford or any other city for a half hour interview wouldn’t be right and would be an unjust burden – but that’s the point of the conference.) If you want to work with them at their university, then you have to be willing to meet them at the APA and take your shot. If departments want to do Skype or phone interviews, then fine, they have that right. I don’t even have a problem with no interviews and cutting to the top three or five for campus visits. It is, ultimately, up to the judgment of the hiring department since it is their hire. If you want to get hired by a department, then you have to meet their requirements. It doesn’t mean you need to stay in the APA conference hotel. It doesn’t mean you have to have a solo room or eat out at the expensive restaurants. You really can do APA trips on a serious budget. I know of lots of people who have done it, including myself.

If I were a job candidate, I would rather most of my competition interview via Skype while I was at the APA interviewing in person. I think I would be at a serious advantage. I might see them at a talk (yes I went to them while I was interviewing). I might see them at the book exhibit, Starbucks, and the smoker. Ultimately, fit will come into play, and I would like to know more about them as much as they want to know more about me. In person interviews are really important. And having everyone together at one place at a set time makes it more efficient for everyone.

From my point of view, I think job candidates should want to go to the APA, they should want to meet their potential colleagues in person, they should want to have access to others in the field, and they should want to do everything in their power to get a job. And going to the Eastern is part of that everything—end of story.

Instead of complaining about the Eastern APA and the stress of interviewing, here are things I think could help graduate students and others on the job market far more than Skype.

(i) Have the APA and other public philosophers advocate for the profession. We need people explaining publically why philosophy is important, why we need more of it, and why we need more people teaching it. We have a terrible image publically, and after reading some comments on this thread, it doesn’t seem unwarranted.

(ii) Work to increase graduate stipends so that graduate students have more money form year one of their graduate education. Remember there are a lot of people who didn’t make it to the interview stage.

(iii) Increase the acceptance rate of Eastern APA papers. This would mean that more people would attend the conference and thus help bring the cost down. We are a small group. The more who go, the better rates we will get. I have heard that we don’t drink nearly as much as the historians.

(iv) Work on getting more travel grants for graduate students – maybe another box to check and add $10 for a fund when we pay dues. Work to have graduate programs set aside funds to help pay for people on the job market. (This last one, however, seems a bit much to me. How much should others, grad programs and professionals in the field, pay so that their graduates and potential colleagues can get a job? What is the financial burden you should have to lay out to get a job?)

To me, it seem like not much to the former, and quite a bit to the latter. I don't think people are going to abandon meeting other people in person when it comes to hiring. Some will for various reasons, but overall, I think the Eastern APA job market is going to be around for awhile. So, job seekers, should be ready and learn how to handle the stresses of the job market as best they can. No one has convinced me that the interview process is unreasonable in its expectations in the least.

[Young Philosopher]

Christopher Pynes,

Let’s try this again. For starters, we should be very clear about what I, Doris, and others have suggested: the issue really isn’t whether the costs of forcing candidates to interview at the APA are enormous, foreseen, or even unreasonable. The issue is whether the costs are necessary when less costly means of interviewing have been invented since the conception of the Eastern APA job market. It’s that simple. So, even if I concede all of your claims about the reasonableness, foreseeability, and lack of enormity of the financial and personal costs of APA interviewing relative to other professions, to the extent that there are markedly less costly methods available, the onus is on you and other defenders of APA interviewing to show that enough is lost by adopting these alternative methods such that while they are less costly than APA interviewing, they are nevertheless less valuable. Pointing out the benefits of attending conferences more generally or pointing out that getting professional jobs in any field can be costly more generally simply don’t adequately meet this burden. And, whether you like it or not, when two individuals are arguing over two policies or actions—one of which is less costly than the other (financially, environmentally, and emotionally)—then the person lobbying for the prima facie more costly option bears the burden of argumentative proof (unless we allow fallacious appeals to tradition to play a role).

So, that’s why you and others who are defending sticking with APA interviewing have the burden. And as I have tried to make clear from the start, the burden is very specific. Once you (a) set aside the benefits of attending conferences more generally (which is orthogonal to the issue at hand), (b) set aside the costs of getting jobs in other fields (which is irrelevant to the issue at hand), and (c) concede that video-interviewing is far less costly (which no one seems to deny), what justifies continuing with the present practice of APA interviewing—i.e., what is lost by video-interviewing that is not made up for by its obvious savings? Do I feel like I was done some grave moral injustice by being forced to attend the APA to get my present job? No, of course not! I nevertheless feel like at this point technology has made it possible to do first round interviews in a more financially, environmentally, and socially responsible manner that will actually make things easier and better on both job candidates and hiring committees. Nothing you or anyone else in this thread has said thus far has convinced me otherwise. Moreover, neither you nor anyone else has met the burden I tried to place on your shoulders in the original post. Have you made some helpful suggestions concerning ways we might make the *less* reasonable option of APA interviewing *more* reasonable? Yes, and I applaud your suggestions. Have you shown that even if the profession instituted your suggested changes that APA interviewing would make more sense than video-interviewing? No, at least as far as I am concerned.

So, while you are clearly right that at least as things presently stand, "going to the Eastern is part of that everything" when it comes to getting a job in a philosophy, that is not the end of the story. The story continues as soon as someone like me asks whether going to the Eastern *should* be part of the everything. And pointing out that it presently is simply doesn't shed any light on that normative issue--which, by the way, was precisely the issue I was trying to highlight from the start.

[Eliza D.]

As I’ve followed this debate, I’ve become increasingly irritated with those arguing in favor of Skype interviews. Most of my objections have been thoroughly dealt with by Hales and Pynes, but I would like to add a few comments (a disclaimer: I’m not a philosopher, but I am married to one).

Those of you arguing in favor of Skype interviews, specifically Young Philosopher, are on dangerous ground and in danger of sliding down a slippery slope. YP claims Skype interviews are as good as in-person, more convenient, economical, and environmentally friendly. Uh-huh. If one feels that way, then I’m assuming one would not be opposed to teaching classes that way. Right? Imagine the money that could be saved if new buildings weren’t erected, the convenience of teaching from your study, (or taking classes from your bedroom), imagine a smaller carbon footprint because people wouldn’t drive or ride busses to, and…well, hell, we should just do away with classrooms altogether. Yeah, doesn’t sound quite right, does it, because something would be lost---the opportunity to interact with your students face-to-face, to gauge their interest, understanding, etc. by reading their faces, looking at their body language and offering them the opportunity to develop RELATIONSHIPS with you.

It’s the same thing for the APA interviews. Sure, you can stay home and do the Skype interview; it’s an hour at most, so why should you travel? Your fellow job seeker, on the other hand, will be happily attending the conference interviewing for 3 DAYS. Oh sure, the formal interview is only an hour, but you’re essentially interviewing the entire time. By the way, your fellow job seeker who traveled to the APA may not get the job, but, during the smoker, she made a great impression on a senior faculty member at another department. Next year when a job becomes available in that department, she’ll have a leg up, while you sit at home waiting for Skype to ring.

Tell me, YP, how can the Skype interview allow a candidate the same opportunities as in-person attendance over the course of the conference? That’s YOUR burden of proof, and I don’t think you can meet it.

[L. A. Paul]

I think some people may be overestimating the virtues of multiuser chat (ichat has a multi-chat option, and I see from the comments that skype has a beta version). It will help with the crowding-around-a-table problem, but brings its own difficulties. For example, it exacerbates the problem of where to look when speaking and listening, since more people are looking in the wrong direction, which makes interaction even weirder. More importantly, there can be problems with speakers talking over each other or interrupting or getting confused about who said what unless there is a rigid system governing speaker order.

Again, the point is not that we should continue in-person APA interviews. And I agree that skype or its alternatives are a better choice for schools that insist on doing these sorts of preliminary interviews. But I see little reason for continuing the preliminary interviews at all. Many other disciplines simply review dossiers and then fly 3-4 candidates out for on-campus interviews. Sometimes they have informal chats with potential candidates (via phone or at a national meeting held in the summer or early fall). Why shouldn't we use the same system?

One last point: the only way APA interviewing will change is by a change in departmental culture, perhaps brought on by a change in disciplinary culture. We can't force departments to give up APA interviews. So, I urge my tenured colleagues to push their departments to give up in-person APA interviews. Bring the issue up now, at the first meeting of the new year, when you vote on the short list. Rely heavily on the argument that the department will save thousands of dollars on travel costs, and bring up the problems discussed here on the blog. The department may not want to make a decision about future interviewing right now, but you can plant the seed.

This is our chance to make a change for the better.

[Future job applicant]

Having followed this debate, I'd be intrigued to see another one of Leiter's polls to see where the majority situate themselves. I sure hope the consensus is with maintaining the current structure of things, for the reasons pointed out by Pynes and Eliza D (and others, thank you all). As a future, different, job applicant then the one who posted before, I'm simply not interested in cheap "easy" solutions. I want the optimal solution to problems, and there is nothing more optimal than meeting with people face-to-face to discuss my ideas. Yes, that's right, a job interview is just another venue to get that cherished feedback on one's work or thoughts. That is precisely why I'm simply not concerned with any hostility that might be encountered during the APA interviews. I'll treat them, should the opportunity present itself, like I treat hostile freshmen. I'll answer the questions as best I can, ignoring the superfluous. If at the end of the day I get a job, great. If I don't, I can either try again next time around or go home packing with the helpful feedback I expect I'll have acquired along the way.

I've been preparing for the APA and its interviews for a while now, and when the time comes, I'll treat it like the best vacation I can have. 3 days of intense philosophy, getting to know a bunch of interesting people whose work ranges far more broadly than I am likely to have encountered at any other conference. The so called "skype" solution is downright appalling. After having put this much effort into this entire process already, knowing from the beginning of the risks of my potentially not getting a job at the end of the road, I sincerely hope that at the very least I can be given the curtesy to be treated like a human being, by being interviewed in person when that option is possible, even if it is only an initial pre-selection interview. My first encounter with any prospective colleagues will be an important factor in determining my future relationships with them. I really hope they are not going to be cheap about it.

[Matt Weiner]

Brian Weatherson is right to point out that jobs outside North America (or is it just the US?) are already on different timetables. But that's still a problem for people looking at both kinds of jobs, and it'd be bad to multiply the problem.

That said, as Tad Brennan points out this has no necessary connection to the APA Eastern, and maybe Margaret Atherton's point about the caprices of state government is decisive anyway. (Her university has caught both sides of that; one year the state legislature slashed the university's budget for the upcoming year in between the flyouts and the offer, and the next they made an offer very quickly.)

[also on the 2010 job market]

To add to the views of those with experience doing skype interviews, here is my take: I would absolutely 100% choose a skype interview from my home or office scheduled at my convenience over an APA interview across the country which requires $1000 each year in travel expenses and makes it nearly impossible for me to have an enjoyable holiday with friends and family given the timing. I prefer the skype interviews *despite* the technical problems I did experience--not great sound quality, interviewees spread around a table and me not being able to see individual faces well or them passing a laptop around (I thought the latter worked out very well actually), and the lack of eye contact.

I prefer the skype interviews for many of the reasons already mentioned by others: it is much easier to manage stress when not in the APA environment with anxious job seekers everywhere, it is free, it doesn't interrupt holiday plans, scheduling convenience, and are possibly better for women regarding issues of body size and dress etc.

I am surprised by the suggestions made by some that one is "interviewing all of the time" at the APA since last year when I attended for interviews I had about 25 faculty members on search committees who conducted my interviews. Not once did I just "run into them" in Starbucks or elsewhere. I, like everyone else I know from my department, attended no conference sessions at all. (This is the official advice of my department--to spend one's free time relaxing away from the conference hotel rather than going to sessions. Also since many people from my dept. have significant numbers of interviews--4+ in one day--attending conference sessions seems impossible unless one intends to run to a session, stay for 40 minutes, and run out again to make it to the next interview.

I am puzzled by Eliza's slippery slope argument. It essentially takes two things that are not at all alike and says if you think skype is okay for the first then you must also accept that it is okay for the second. This sounds awfully similar to the "if we allow gay marriage, then we also have to allow people to marry their dogs" argument. (I don't know of any "classes" which involve less than 1 hour of total class time, which involve numerous people flying across the country and spending upwards of $1000 on travel, which take place Dec 27th to 30th in cities prone to winter weather, and in which the goal of the class is to cut down a list of 10 or 15 amazing candidates to 3 or 4 amazing candidates based on 20-40 minutes of artificial discussion of their research and teaching.) Classes and interviews are simply nothing alike. (Though I have to say if a particular class did involve multiple people flying across the country and spending thousands of dollars to do so I would absolutely favor using skype to teach it.)

Also, the suggestion that people who use skype will be disadvantaged when others have APA interviews clearly can't be an argument against using skype *for everyone*. Eliza also seems to assume that only positive things can come out of the interactions at the smoker with her example of a person at the APA who has made a good impression on an interviewing school and will have a leg up when the next job opens up while a skype interviewee has made no such impression. But isn't it just as possible that the interviewee at the smoker has just made a bad impression and now the skype interviewee has a leg up? Personally I left at least one conversation last year thinking that their impression of me might very well have been worse than if I had not spoken to them at all when I was asked about "controversial" areas of philosophy like feminist philosophy and implied that perhaps they were worried about that area of my work. (Of course one might think that perhaps that department was not the best place for a person who does that sort of work, but surely unemployed grad students who are paying over $1000 each year trying to get a job--any job--can't afford to be picky!)

[Harry B]

Why are early timetables undesirable, Margaret? The two other disciplines I know well have unregulated job markets in North America and seem to do fine. There is no real race to the bottom -- jib are advertised throughout the summer and Fall, and candidates are flown out (no preliminary interviews usually, as LA Paul and Jamie Dreier recommend, and I'm with them on that) and risk averse candidates (unlike Tad Brennan) can secure themselves a less-than optimal job, allowing departments that want to raise their profile to get candidates they wouldn't otherwise get, and, of course, allowing some candidates to get jobs they wouldn't otherwise get. If we are comparing with the private sector, that is how markets work in that sector. I don't really see it being so bad.

As to LS's and Philip Robinson's points, those can be sorted out in on-campus visits. I actually think LS's point illustrates the weakness of preliminary interviews of any kind, not their strengths -- we are not at all systematic in the way we use those interviews, and a lot of false information comes out and real information is concealed (suppose you'd not been there, as you might well not have -- and in many other preliminary interviews that candidate had there were no women).

[Tim Schroeder]

L.A. Paul writes "We can't force departments to give up APA interviews."

I agree, and agree with others that we shouldn't try to make them. Departments have the right to conduct interviews when and where they like, including at the Eastern, and I wouldn't like to see them strong-armed into doing anything in particular.

We CAN force the APA to cease providing institutional support for the current interview system. There is no good reason for the APA to continue renting ballrooms for interviews or doing anything else to support the system as it stands. And we CAN force the APA to do something helpful to assist departments wishing to switch from in-person preliminary interviews to electronic preliminary interviews. (A simple pamphlet about best practices isn't much to ask.) And we CAN force the APA to do a little promotion of the new suggested best practices.

I'd love it if the APA would do all these things. At this point, the APA is acting - in this one respect - contrary to the interests of its members, on balance. We should really stop it from doing that.

[David Sobel]

Yes, I see Skype interviews as part of a package which would be all things considered better than APA interviews. But that package includes bringing at least one extra person to campus, spending the time you save by not going to the APA reading an extra paper from the 4 or so candidates who are on the borderline of making it to a campus interview, perhaps sending a candidate an e-mail asking a follow up question, and such. While some are heroically sticking to the claim that Skype interviews are just as good as APA interviews, I think the case against APA interviews does not stand or fall on that issue. If we can find a package such as the above which is cheaper for all, less time consuming for all, and as good at assessing candidates, then we should opt for that package over the APA package.

[John Alexander]

Eliza D.
Slippery Slope arguments are fallacious; if we use Skype to interview it does not follow that we will use Skype to teach anymore then if we do not use Skype to interview that we will not use Skype to teach. Besides, why not use Skype to teach? Courses in philosophy are already being taught on-line with no apparent harm to students and increasing the opportunity to learn to those who might not be able to take advantage of more ‘traditional’ means. Of course that might decrease the demand for teachers over time, but that is the price others have paid in advancing technologies where machines have taken the place of workers, etc. Why should education be immune to these changes especially if the technology expands the opportunity to learn (as well as educate)? I have taught both traditional and online course in intro to philosophy and I was amazed at how interactive the on-line teaching actually became and how engaged the students became with the material, the discussions, and each other.

As to the advantages of being at the APA conference, I think others have adequately met your objections. We are all agreed that people ought to go to conferences to interact and network with others. People on the job market should be giving papers, etc. at conferences, colloquiums, etc. However, given the increased number of blogs and other Internet technologies available, candidates can, and should, become more creative in marketing themselves. Besides, don’t we already know 'thru the grapevine’ who’s who before the Eastern APA? Change is coming whether or not one likes it (and Skyping is only the tip of the iceberg) and the APA should be at the forefront of change instead of trying to act as if it can be avoided.

[Michael Weisberg]

To those raising technical objections against Skype, I just wanted to point out that Skype interviews using personal computers are not the only way to do video chats. As others have pointed out, Skype and iChat can be vastly improved on more serious gear (real video camera, speakers, and screen) and there are non-free alternatives to the service itself.

I know that Universities differ in their technological sophistication, but I have seen many classrooms over the years that are equipped with some of these things ... especially in professional schools and science departments. At Penn, the library and another "media" group within Arts and Sciences can provide these services. Many Kinkos and similar stores have the goods too.

Even if a department had to pay a bit for one of these services, it would still be drastically cheaper then renting a suite and getting faculty to the APA. And there is probably no need for departments to own their own gear.

[Paul S.]

Eliza D. writes:

"By the way, your fellow job seeker who traveled to the APA may not get the job, but, during the smoker, she made a great impression on a senior faculty member at another department. Next year when a job becomes available in that department, she’ll have a leg up, while you sit at home waiting for Skype to ring.Tell me, YP, how can the Skype interview allow a candidate the same opportunities as in-person attendance over the course of the conference? That’s YOUR burden of proof, and I don’t think you can meet it."

I haven't followed this entire thread, but I didn't think the issue was about whether people who interview in-person have a comparative advantage over those who use Skype. Rather, I thought the issue was about whether the whole profession would be better off substituting first-round APA interviews for Skype interviews. In fact, haven't some people suggested that it would be important for departments, in the name of fairness, to conduct all interviews via Skype if they conduct any via Skype?

Eliza D. also writes:

"If one feels that way, then I’m assuming one would not be opposed to teaching classes that way. Right? Imagine the money that could be saved if new buildings weren’t erected, the convenience of teaching from your study, (or taking classes from your bedroom), imagine a smaller carbon footprint because people wouldn’t drive or ride busses to, and…well, hell, we should just do away with classrooms altogether. Yeah, doesn’t sound quite right, does it, because something would be lost---the opportunity to interact with your students face-to-face, to gauge their interest, understanding, etc. by reading their faces, looking at their body language and offering them the opportunity to develop RELATIONSHIPS with you."

I agree that conducting classes via Skype would pose problems, for the reason you mention. But is the institutional purpose of the first round APA interviews really to encourage people to develop relationships? Of course, trying to connect with people at the APA is a good strategy for an individual, seeking employment. But I'm not sure that the profession should be worried about the loss of valuable relationships should we move from one hour lives interviews to one hour Skype interviews.

[Young Philosopher]

Eliza,

First, as to your claims about the slippery slope, I don't find your argument especially compelling since there are important/essential features of teaching a course that don't apply in the context of first round interviewing. For instance, a first round interview is a one-off meeting not a series of meetings over a long period of time. Additionally, classes depend on more sustained discussions between far more participants than first round interviews. So, I would need to see a bit more from you before I am convinced the slope I am on really is slippery. In short, I don't think anything I have said about the debate about APA interviewing and video-interviewing commits me to taking a particular side in the debate about brick and mortar vs. cyber-class rooms. In each case such as these where there are competing policies on the table, one needs to weigh the respective costs and benefits to see which policy makes the most sense (or, at least, that's how I approach these kinds of issues). Just because I think the value lost by video-interviewing is outweighed by the costs saved it doesn't follow that my position on this front commits me to anything when it comes to the orthogonal issue you raise.

Second, as to your scenario involving two job candidates vying for a position--one who waits at home and interviews via Skype and the other who goes to the APA--I think it is based on a misunderstanding of both my proposal and the way the implementation of my proposal would likely work. For instance, the Skype interview I had this year was with a department that has switched to Skype for first round interviewing. Consequently, had you bothered to to go to the APA, you wouldn't have gotten an "in person" interview with the department since they skipped the conference. That's the whole point. The plan is not that departments should continue to do some first round interviews at the APA while allowing those candidates who are disinterested in attending the APA to Skype it in. Skype and other technologies would replace the first round interviews at the APA not work in conjunction with them. So, the situation you present wouldn't arise. Indeed, I am not even sure it would legally be possible for departments to allow for that kind of differential interviewing absent extraordinary circumstances--which is why, for instance, White pointed out earlier that they had to Skype interview an internal candidate to be consistent across the interviews.

L.A. Paul,

First, I agree that the group video-conferencing is not without its problems. So, we're on the same side of that issue even if I may think these new tools are less problematic than you do. But we both agree in principle that they're sufficiently good at this point to outweigh the reasons for continuing with APA interviewing. Second, I hope I was never taken to be committing myself to the view that we should be doing first round interviews at all. You, Jamie Dreier, and others have made strong arguments against them both in this thread and previous threads here on LR that departments would be better off skipping straight to campus interviews. Since I think it would be even more difficult to convince departments to go that route en masse, I focussed instead on an intermediary step--namely, doing what we can as a discipline to make the potentially unnecessary and undeniably costly first round interviews less punishing for everyone involved. Finally, I entirely agree with your suggestions concerning disciplinary culture as the route through which to make the incremental changes on the table. I, for one, am already on board with making the case you suggest we need to make at our home institutions. I also hope to post a survey in the next few days where job candidates, department chairs, and hiring committee members can provide data concerning not only the costs associated with their trip to the APA but also data concerning everyone's attitudes, worries, and concerns about switching to video-interviewing. I suspect this argument will be even easier once we have a more accurate picture concerning how much the APA interviews really cost everyone involved. Hopefully, Leiter will post a link once I have had time to put the survey together.

In the meantime, happy new year to everyone! I greatly appreciate everyone's input in this thread thus far--especially the input from those of you with whom I disagree! The goal is to strike upon a path moving forward that is as unproblematic as possible while still being sufficiently useful to make it easy to convince departments to change their ways. This requires input from all sides. So, thanks again to those of you participated in the thread.

[Aeon J. Skoble]

The APA meeting isn’t about hiring. It’s supposed to be a chance for philosophers to share their work in public sessions, meet other philosophers, and see the latest in books. It’s because we’re all coming to the meeting for these reasons that it has also become a convenient opportunity to do first-round interviews. One commenter upthread said this was unfair to women because they don’t have a default professional uniform analogous to a suit. But you’ll have to figure out how to dress appropriately for the fly-out, for the job itself, and for other professional appearances. Another commenter suggested it’s unfair because it’s expensive. But if you have interviews, this is surely an expense worth bearing, and even if you don’t, it’s still worthwhile, both for networking and for the actual content of the sessions. Of course, one can choose not to attend if no interviews are scheduled. Another commenter said the APA interview round is unnecessary because you should be able to narrow it down to 3 or 4 just from dossiers. In my experience that’s false, but in any case, your top three might turn out to be unavailable. If you pick a top 10 or 12, not only does it make it possible to learn that your initial impression was mistaken, but it also allows you to know more about more people. My institution doesn’t allow us to do first-round interviews at the APA (don’t ask), so we have to phone interviews with the top 10, but we’d much rather do it at the APA. As to skype, I think it would be preferable to our speakerphone interviews, but not nearly as good as real interaction.

[Eliza D.]

YP: You claim Skype and face-to-face interviews are the same; I was simply trying to point out that they are not the same by giving another example that traditionally relies on face-to-face interactions (i.e. classrooms). If you are using the following criteria (cost savings, convenience, and reduction of carbon footprint) to determine the value of Skype interviews, why wouldn't you also apply that same criteria to any other situation where technology could be used to the same effect? It seems to me you are cherry picking, because all the reasons you gave for Skype interviews are the SAME reasons given for online classes. You haven't convinced me they're different enough to warrant the distinction you've made.

To all: make no mistake, when you attend the APA you are SELLING yourself--something you may not be able to do over Skype. If you squander the opportunities to network, you're doing yourself a disservice. When I attended the APA with my husband (then boyfriend) he spent his time at the smoker chatting up the schools with whom he interviewed and making connections with other departments. If you're smart, you'll do the same--there are hundreds of applicants for every job, many of them all equally qualified. Do NOT underestimate the value of a personal connections--it could be just the thing to put you over the top.

[Kris mcdaniel]

http://peasoup.typepad.com/peasoup/2007/01/is_the_eastern_.html

Awhile back I tried to come up with rough estimates of the financial costs for deparments to Interview at the apa, based on the costs typical for my department. See above for details and discussion. The figures were conservative then, and are probably are too conservative now.

I'm on the fence on the value of first-round interviews. I don't think they have much informational value, and so I would rather my department not spend the money. Skype interviews are free though.

Purely from the perspective of the interviewing department, there is a good case to be made against interviewing at the eastern. And I agree with many of the people above that it's a bad idea to impose unnecessary costs on our graduate students, especially as the job market continues to shrink.

[Not So Young Philosopher]

A number of respondents to Young Philosopher's challenge appear to be assuming that YP's views are motivated by immaturity, a lack of experience, or resistance to doing what 's necessary to succeed (e.g., Pynes, 12/31@5:51; Eliza D, 1/1@1:37). I see nothing to justify these assumptions. They appear to be both unwarranted and unfair.

[Paul S.]

Eliza D. seems to be having a different discussion than the rest of us are having. She's giving advice for selling yourself as a candidate, and I don't really hear anyone else on the thread contradicting it. But as I understand it, this conversation is about which interview policies are the best for the profession.

As far as I can tell, the pro-Skype crowd here is arguing:

1. It would be best for the profession to do away with face to face first-round interviews.

and Eliza D. is arguing:

2. So long as some people are selling themselves via face-to-face interviews, you, as a candidate, do yourself a disservice by choosing to interview via Skype.

(1) and (2) are not inconsistent.

But what Eliza D. says isn't necessarily irrelevant, even if her argument is off-target. It might be that the person schmoozing at the smoker is more likely to get a job than others. If the schmoozer is more likely to be a better colleague or to be a better philosopher, then the profession should definitely work to keep the smoker in place. But, if the schmoozing introduces irrelevant noise into the hiring process, then this might be all the more reason to embrace Skype.

[C. Sistare]

I have been following this conversation and related ones at other sites. I finally have some views, though nothing like a position.

1) I do not think video interviews are ‘equal to’ in-person interviews in character. But, that does not mean that they cannot work well enough, and, given the costs involved, they might be a good replacement option. (Although, differences in IT support might be greater than some imagine.)

2) My own department will never want to give up one first round interviews. Perhaps it is a matter of our being in a small liberal arts college, but we do not ‘know’ who our top 4 or 5 are before the interviews. We usually have some expectations, to be sure, but we have often found ourselves disabused of them by the interviews.

3) I’m intrigued by the idea that the APA should not ‘support’ the on-site interview system. What might the resulting situation look like? More in-room interviews? No thanks; as an older female philosopher, I never want to see anyone go through that again.

University systems renting spaces to interview while smaller places – like my own – send their SCs searching for a place to do whatever interviews they would like to do? Hmm.

I assume that we would, at least, still want the APA to help the candidates by managing files, advertising unexpected positions, conveying messages, and so forth – at least until no one was doing interviews or any job-related business at the meetings of any division? So, there might still be quite a bit of APA involvement in the near future.

4) It does seem to me that the crux of the problem is the timing and expense of the Eastern meetings as the first – hence, most important – hiring meeting.

Skype or other video interviews at the same time of year will not resolve all of the temporal issues. Picture the scene 10 years from now with all interviews done by such methods: candidates will feel they cannot leave their institutions’ locale for fear of not being able to do the interviews via internet. If they are near family and have access to the required technology, they and their families will still feel that the holidays are ruined by the tensions surrounding the job market.

A different time for the major interviewing and less expensive locations for the conference are the best solution, in my opinion. Of course, programs that prefer to use video interviewing can and will do so. For everyone else, much of the misery and cost could be reduced.

5) I’m horrified to read that we do not drink as much as the historians. Perhaps we have more discriminating tastes?

[a graduate student]

L.A. Paul writes, "But I see little reason for continuing the preliminary interviews at all. Many other disciplines simply review dossiers and then fly 3-4 candidates out for on-campus interviews. Sometimes they have informal chats with potential candidates (via phone or at a national meeting held in the summer or early fall). Why shouldn't we use the same system?"

I don't see the benefit of replacing interviews with "informal chats" and I see some potential flaws. (I am also not sure I understand the difference between a phone interview and a phone informal chat.) I can see potential sexual harassment concerns with having such meetings in person, due to the informal nature and a lack of regulation or norm. I also worry that this practice would unduly benefit those with the means to travel, come from academic centers (e.g. New York, Boston), or are otherwise well-connected.

It's a small bone to pick, but I would hope that if departments were to abolish first-round interviews---which I believe they should---they would not replace them with something rather similar but with a different name.

[L. A. Paul]

@AGS: I did not mean to be endorsing informal chats as a replacement for APA interviews. I'd prefer to eliminate preliminary interviews altogether.

[Brian Weatherson]

The more I read here, the more perplexed I am about worries about the (US) job market getting out of sync. I don't understand the mechanism by which this could happen.

Let's say School A offers Student S a job in October, with a one week deadline. S would rather get a job from School B, who won't decide until March. What should S do? Well, she should accept the offer from A, and not withdraw her application from B. If she gets the offer from B in March, she can give A several months notice, and start at B the following August, without ever going to A. If that's not enough notice, she can give A nine months notice, and start at B the following January. In practice, once A sees she's going to do this, it would be easier for A to release her, and she starts at B in August.

What exactly could go wrong with this plan, at least from S's perspective? A can't force her to take their job. In the US, which is the only place this discussion is relevant to, that's been illegal since 148 years ago yesterday. A could try to sue S for breach of contract, but it would be hard work to show that giving nine months notice is an actionable breach, and it would be very hard to establish damages. So that doesn't seem likely.

It might be argued that S's action is somehow unethical or dishonest. But it's worth stressing here that A is breaking the informal rules, and exploiting a loophole to try to force S to take a job she doesn't necessarily want. Now it's also true that S is exploiting a loophole - the one-way enforceability of labour contracts - to get her desired result. But there's nothing unethical about using loopholes to stop others exploiting loopholes. And unless one thinks that accepting a job is a promise to stay there for life, it isn't even unethical. (Note that if S used the same trick to accept an offer made in April over the offer accepted in March, these arguments wouldn't apply. It's crucial to my case that A has 'dirty hands'.)

I can imagine S would worry that such behaviour would be held against her in future job searches. But apart from school A, who isn't likely to make her another offer, I can't see how this is true. For one thing, see the arguments of the previous paragraph for why S's behaviour isn't unethical. For another, if this were held against people, you'd expect schools to also look askance on people who turn up at a job and send out new job applications within a few weeks of arrival. Yet many people actually do just this, and many of those people are very successful in the profession. Indeed, many of those people walk away very quickly from jobs that were made with clean hands, and it isn't held against them.

So if there's a convention that job offers are not morally binding until February/March, then I think that convention will persist with or without APA Eastern interviews to back it up. In a way this is too bad. A rolling job market actually sounds somewhat attractive to me. It means students who make a mistake in how to package themselves on the job market aren't compelled to wait 12 long months to try again. But enough people like the current timetable enough that it will be persistent.

So if you like that timetable, you shouldn't fear that saving everyone thousands of dollars by abolishing the APA Eastern interviews will destroy it.

[Brian Weatherson]

Eliza D said:

YP claims Skype interviews are as good as in-person, more convenient, economical, and environmentally friendly. Uh-huh. If one feels that way, then I’m assuming one would not be opposed to teaching classes that way.

I think 'also on the 2010 job market' made the right reply to this, that the analogy between interviews and classes is not that close. What could be a closer analogy? Well, if we focus on the fact that interviews involve huge travel expenses (in time, money and environmental damage) for a one hour gig, the right analogy is to a guest lecture.

And then the force of Eliza's reductio looks very weak. I think having guest lectures, given by someone from the other side of the country/world, given via video conference is a very good idea. I don't really use guest lectures, but if I did, that's how I'd do it. Indeed, I know some people who have used video conferencing to have guests from around the world talk to their classes. It's not perfect, but given the expense of the alternative, it's close enough. Large travel for short one-off meetings seems like it should have gone away years ago, and presumably will go away soon. That includes in interviews, and it includes in pedagogical settings.

[Another Job Seeker]

I am a job seeker who did both Skype and in-person Eastern interviews this year. I might be in the minority, but I thought the in-person interviews were much better than the Skype ones. The tone was more conversational, more interviewers seemed to be involved in the give-and-take, and more interesting philosophy came out of the exchange. I came away from each of the in-person interviews much more interested in the department. The Skype interviews felt more like I had just completed another bureaucratic step in their process. If I find myself in the position of weighing more than one offer- for better or worse- these first impressions might matter. Maybe this isn't an issue in awful job markets like this one, but it might be an issue in future markets.

If hiring committees do not think the interviews provide much useful data, or if they think they tend to produce a lot of noise, then first round interviews should stop entirely. (On this point, I agree with L.A. Paul. Why waste resources gathering bad data?) But if hiring committees do find the interviews useful, and if one function of the interview is to give the candidate a first impression of the department, I think there is a distinct advantage to continuing in-person Eastern interviews.

In my view, it would be ideal if the Eastern interviews continued but more PhD programs helped job candidates defray the cost of attending.

[Lisa Shapiro]

The issues raised by Eliza D's comparison between online interviewing and online teaching actually belong on another thread, but nonetheless I feel compelled to make a point that the embracers of technology might well not be in a position to see. These arguments in favor of Skype interviews, despite their real flaws, are made from a rather local calculation of cost and benefit -- individual candidates, and departments in Philosophy. However, considerations of the use of technology in an academic context are currently not local. There *is* a trend amongst senior administration to push on line teaching, to a very large degree because it is profit making. Once an administration gets an idea it can be very hard to stop. Administrators in many instances can be deaf to the fine grained distinctions that allow for legitimate arguments that first round interviews are different from teaching. And in my experience they haven't been willing to put up money to advance really interesting ways of using technology in the classroom. The pedagogy of online courses leaves much to be desired. And what if tuition paying students prefer to have all their lectures delivered online rather than enrol in real time classes? Should the bottom line drive where the University directs its pedagogic resources? Equally, to respond to Brian W's point, if technology is good for guest lectures, then perhaps a unit's colloquia budget should be cut and all colloquia given through video conferencing technology? The slope is not particularly slippery or steep one in these financially strapped times. Again, these remarks are not meant to be an argument against Skype interviews, but rather simply meant to sound a note of caution about the use of technology in an academic context.

[Margaret Atherton]

To Harry B: Well, as Brian Weatherson has just made clear, one problem with early timetables is that the candidate you laboriously winnowed your way down to in December can leave you high and dry in February. My Associate Dean was rather taken aback when I told him that many philosophers thought this was just fine. But more importantly, so long as the prevailing practice in philosophy revolves around the Eastern APA, then my department would prefer to make offers to candidates who had a good sense of what their options were like.

[Shelley Tremain]

A propos remarks by Brian Weatherson and Ben Caplan above, the philosophical community must become accountable for the environmental damage wrought by the widespread practice of conducting "face-to-face" interviews at the Eastern APA, organizing international conferences, guest lectures, and speakers series. This article should be of interest:
http://www.rabble.ca/news/2010/08/air-destroying-planet

[Mike Otsuka]

Brian Weatherson writes,

"if we focus on the fact that interviews involve huge travel expenses (in time, money and environmental damage) for a one hour gig, the right analogy is to a guest lecture"

It's relevant that many job candidates have multiple interviews. For them a better analogy would be flying to, say, New York to give a number of guest lectures at a number of Departments in the area over a short period of time. It might be worth it to give them all in person rather than over Skype.

By contrast, flying across the country for a single one hour guest lecture or interview might seem wasteful. But an APA consists of more than the sum total of one's job interviews. If my memory serves, I twice made a trip to an Eastern APA, that I wouldn't otherwise have made, for a single job interview. I didn't just sit around in my hotel room doing nothing when I wasn't being interviewed. I attended a number of APA sessions, went to the mixers, had a look at what books had recently been published, caught up with friends, met philosophers with similar interests, etc.

"Large travel for short one-off meetings seems like it should have gone away years ago"

The typical APA session on the main program is an hour. And one isn't supposed to be a speaker at more than one APA session on the main program. So should APA meetings have gone away years ago, as well as other conferences with multiple sessions that don't last more than an hour, where each speaker has no more than a single gig? Would conferences with long sessions (e.g., two hours) be okay, by contrast?

[A non-US graduate student]

Here's a reason to decouple the Eastern APA from the job market that may not have yet been noted -- as far as I can tell from browsing the comments, it hasn't. I didn't read them all, and I apologize if this has already been pointed out. The philosophy job market is international. There is no justification for preferring candidates from one geographical region over others (of course, there may be national laws that require this, but we try to get around them as best we can). However, the APA/US job market coupling puts non-US job candidates, and especially non-(US-or-Canadian) ones, at a huge disadvantage. First, there is the high cost of intercontinental travel at the most expensive time of the year. Second, there is the fact that entering the US is not easy if you're not a citizen of a country that participates in the US visa waiver program. Most of Europe does, but Romania, for example, does not. If you're a job seeker at, say, a UK institution, and you don't get a visa waiver in virtue of your citizenship, this means you will have to apply for a visa at the US consulate in your country of citizenship. Depending on where you're from, that can double the cost of travel involved in getting to the APA. And you have to do this well in advance of knowing whether you will have any interviews. The visa is not guaranteed either, of course.

On-campus visits present similar problems, but at least the candidate is typically given more time to plan their travel for those. And if the department that invites them is non-American (say, a Canadian department that interviews at the APA, as many of them do), clearing the US immigration bureaucracy won't be necessary.

[David Hildebrand]

Much of the debate here focuses on whether *all* first round interviews should be via Skype. It seems inevitable that at least more and more interviewing departments will *have* to move to Skype for budgetary reasons, and so there's an imperative to regulate the process (timetable, audio/video quality, etc.) right now. The APA could play a role here--and if it's actually in existence for philosophers, it should.

I incline toward the overall benefit of the Skype interview argument despite that fact that I probably gained my present job by making a good joke to a room full of interviewers right at the start of my interview. (I explained that once it was clear that my college dream of being a jazz guitarist wouldn't pan out, I defaulted to philosophy "for the money." Big laugh.) In other words, atmospherics can be important, but as long as the playing field is equal, there will be situations when others (or me, in more nervous moods) will benefit from the more toned down Skype situation.

One point in favor of Skype needs stressing: for most candidates with only one or two interviews (how large a percent is that?), the financial burden of the APA trip/hotel is really onerous. Given the tough odds for getting a job, it now seems conclusive (to me, at least) that for such candidates a Skype alternative really helps make things significantly more just.

This is a fantastic discussion and I suspect my colleagues and I will use this as the basis for our own (future) decision about hiring.

[Sydney Penner]

It looks like some of the literature departments are also thinking about Skype: http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/will-skype-kill-the-mla/30725

[soon to be phd candidate]

I'm surprised that concerns have been voiced here about possible "global effects" of web-based interviews in the context of the digitization of the academy. I see this as a good ocassion for a slightly off-topic comment...

Job seekers are not always getting the treatment that they deserve, and it's naive of graduate students to expect departments to grant them this or the fulfillment of other modest desires given market pressures. We ought to unionize.