A slice of lemon

I should tell one positive experience about applying for a university job. If my Looking-Glass University experience was the job interview from hell, then this was the job interview from heaven.

It began with a phone call offering me a postdoc position at the University of Chicago, and inviting me to visit. Not for an interview, since they had already made me an offer, but to help me decide whether to accept.

They put me up in a beautiful suite at the historic Quadrangle Club. Felix Browder, the department chair, took me for a lovely meal in the Club's elegant dining room.

Just before my talk, my host, Niels Nygaard, asked if I'd like some water. When I said yes, Niels went away and came back with a glass of water with a slice of lemon on the rim. I exclaimed at what a nice gesture that was, and he told me it wasn't him, it was the secretary. She had met me and liked me, and wanted me to take the job. I'll always remember that lemon slice. Sometimes it's the little things that one remembers.

Switching the offers

I was finishing my PhD and applying for jobs. My significant other, K, got his PhD a few years earlier, and was applying for tenure-track jobs.

Professor X was one of the good guys (he was the one who told me that I shouldn't let anyone get away with saying I got a job due to affirmative action, since I had a great file and I deserved any offers I got).  One day during that hiring season, Professor X phoned me and said his university (let's call it Confused State) planned to fill several tenure-track positions, and they wanted to interview K and me for two of them.

Three candidates were invited to interview at the same time, including K and me.

At my interview with the department Chair, much to my surprise, he informed me that the department had only one tenure-track opening. They also had a temporary postdoc position, from which one could eventually apply for a tenure-track job. He said it didn't matter to them which of K and I got which job.

He asked me which of us should get the tenure-track offer and which the postdoc. Should they offer the tenure-track job to me and the short-term position to K, or the other way around?

I was shocked at X's betrayal. I had been brought there under false pretenses.

I knew that I was terrible at thinking on my feet under pressure. I took a deep breath, and replied, almost without thinking, "Normally when hiring a senior person and a junior person for a senior and a junior position, the senior person gets the senior position and the junior person gets the junior position." That seemed at least like an obvious and innocuous statement.

K, X, and two other Confused State professors in my field were waiting for me outside the Chair's door, and asked how it went. When I told them, X and one of the other professors were furious at the third one, since he was on the hiring committee. It turned out that he had known that there was only one tenure-track opening, and he had misled his two colleagues. I was happy to learn that X hadn't in fact lied to me.

Eventually, K was offered the tenure-track assistant professorship and I was offered the temporary job.

K really wanted to be at Confused State for geographical reasons. But I wasn't willing to accept a postdoc position, when I already had tenure-track offers elsewhere. K was eager enough to go there that he would have been willing to take a temporary job in the hope that it would get upgraded later. We agonized at length, trying to figure out what to do.

Eventually, K came up with a good solution. K phoned the Chair and reminded him that he had left it up to us to say who should get which job. K asked the Chair to switch the offers. The Chair said he'd get back to him.

Some days later, the Chair phoned back. Downgrading K's offer didn't feel right to them. The department decided to upgrade my offer to tenure-track, without downgrading K's offer. At least we found out that they really were willing to offer me a tenure-track job.

I wasn't ready to forgive Confused State, and didn't accept the offer. The moral of the story is: don't mislead job candidates (or your colleagues). It isn't nice.

Consent Decree

Am I the only one who's had bizarre job interviews, or does that happen to everyone?

My first job interview was in 1984, when I was finishing my PhD. The Chair of the math department at Looking-Glass University phoned me at my office to invite me to interview for a postdoc position. This was well before the Internet and cell phones. We fixed the date, and he said he'd phone back with the details of who would meet me at the train station to take me to my hotel. I bought my train ticket, but never heard back from the Chair.

The day before my trip I phoned the Chair. "Hello, this is Alice Silverberg...," I began, and he hung up on me. I tried again. Same thing, except this time he angrily slammed down the phone. I tried a third time, but no one answered. Either he was being incredibly rude, or something was wrong with the phone connection and he wasn't able to hear me. It was shortly before offices close at 5 pm. Luckily, I managed to reach the department office and talk to a secretary who gave me the name of my hotel.

When I arrived by train, I found someone who could direct me to the hotel. When I rank the hotels I've been put up in on business trips, this one ranks near the bottom, both for how run-down my room was, and the discarded cigarette butt near the bed (though this wasn't as bad as the decaying sandwich I discovered behind a couch after a couple of weeks at a math summer school).

The next morning I made my way to the campus and found the Chair in his office. My main recollection is our walk from one side of campus to another. The point wasn't to show me the campus, it was so that the Chair could run his errands, which included picking up some large posters that a university printing office had printed for him, and mailing them at the campus post office. The posters were gifts for his children, who were in college. The Chair used his NSF grant to pay for the posters, the tubes, and the postage. I expressed surprise that NSF would pay for gifts for his kids, but he shrugged it off.

During the walk, the Chair asked me if I was married.

I had gone to a panel that Princeton put on for grad students, at which female faculty gave female students advice for how to navigate job interviews. They warned us that we would be asked the standard "illegal questions" about our personal lives, and our answers would be used against us. Their advice was:

Answer truthfully and politely. You could add "but here's why that doesn't matter and I'm still interested in the job." If you tell them it's not an appropriate question, you won't get the job. Maybe someday things will change, and we won't have to give you this advice.

When I replied to the Chair that yes, I was married, he asked what my husband did. When I replied, he told me that I couldn't take a job at Looking-Glass since they didn't plan to offer a job to my husband. I said that didn't matter because K already had nice offers in or near Nirvana, a nearby city. The Chair said that Nirvana was too far away. I disputed that, but the Chair wasn't interested.

Not long after my interview, I visited the city of Nirvana and stopped by the office of my friend Dr. Unicorn. While I was there he got a phone call from a mutual friend, Mr. Lion.

It turned out that Mr. Lion had interviewed for that same postdoc position at Looking-Glass U before I had. During Mr. Lion's interview, a Looking-Glass professor told him that the department had already decided that he was their first choice, but they might have to first offer the job to the woman they would be interviewing, before they could make an offer to him. Looking-Glass U was under a "consent decree", due to what (I was told by a colleague) was egregious discrimination against women. They had been forced to include a woman (me) on their short list.

Mr. Lion did indeed get the first offer, and turned it down. Looking-Glass U went far down their "short list", but I never got an offer.

Deciding that they wanted to hire a different candidate before I had even interviewed violated the consent decree. I asked K if I should report the violation, and his advice was, "If you do that, you'll get a reputation as a troublemaker, and you'll be unhirable anywhere."

Curiously, my friend Dr. Unicorn soon became a math professor at Looking-Glass U and continued to live near Nirvana, since his wife had a job there.

One reason I didn't feel too hurt by the rejection was that a colleague at another university where I applied, who saw my file with the letters of recommendation, told me, "Don't let anyone tell you that you got a job offer because you're a woman. Your file is wonderful. You're getting the offers based on merit." That was one of the kindest things anyone ever said to me.

"We assumed you weren't interested" (or: How not to make a job offer)

I've been holding back on telling any of the stories that will explain why I think of my Adventures in Numberland memoirs as having the subtitle "Why I don't discuss my personal life in professional settings." It's hard to tell those stories without discussing my personal life. And once I do that, it's hard to turn back. Well, here goes.

In my last year of grad school, my significant other, whom I'll call K, applied for a tenure-track job at Euphoria University, and I applied for a postdoc position there. We did not in any way link our applications. I even went to the trouble of using a different typesetting program from K's for my job applications, with a different font, and gave only my office address and phone number, not my home phone number. (This was back in the day of landlines.)

While K and I were traveling over the winter break, our friend and colleague Catsitter dropped by our apartment to feed the cat.

One day, while Catsitter was feeding the cat, the phone rang and Catsitter answered. The call was from Well Meaning, a young Euphoria professor, asking to speak to K. Catsitter explained that K was out of town, and he asked if K should return Well's call. Well replied, "No, I'll call again."

After we returned from our travels, I tried to get K to return Well's call, but K refused. "He said I shouldn't phone him. He'll phone me."

But Well never phoned back. Every so often I'd say to K, "Please phone him. Maybe it's about a job," but K wouldn't do it.

K and I eventually got rejection letters from Euphoria University.

A year or two later, I ran into Well in the Harvard math department Common Room. He said, "It's too bad you didn't come to Euphoria. The number theory group would have loved to have you." 

Perplexed, I told him I didn't know what he meant. "I got a rejection letter from Euphoria. In what capacity should I have come?"

Well said that the number theorists were very interested in making me a postdoc offer. Well had phoned K to see if he was interested in a tenure track offer. "When K didn't phone back, we assumed you weren't interested," Well said.

No one thought to contact me.

"But she misled us" (or: Hire people based on their own merits)

I am not enamored of discrimination on the basis of marital status.

In the late 1970s, two grad students told me that when they got married, their university took away one of their stipends, telling them that "two can live as cheaply as one."

Later, a mathematician told me that a department that planned to offer her a tenure-track job instead offered her a postdoc position, since the department was also offering her husband a postdoc job and thought they could get away with giving her a lower position than she deserved. She and her husband turned down the jobs, and took better offers elsewhere.

More recently, the pendulum has swung the other way. Rather than punishing women for being married, they're sometimes rewarded for it.

A scientist told me about two people her department hired, thinking that they were a married couple. Their new colleagues were angry when they found out the two weren't actually married, just living together. If the faculty had known, they wouldn't have offered a job to the woman.

Personally, I think that a job offer should be based on merit, rather than assumptions about the applicant's marital status. I think it's unfair to pass over people who worked harder and accomplished more, for reasons that are not based on merit or need.

A math department made an offer to a woman who then asked them if they could hire her husband. The department then hired the husband, but was furious when the couple divorced, especially when it turned out that the divorce had been in the works while they were on the job market. The two mathematicians wanted to live in the same city since they had joint custody of their children. But the department felt tricked into making an offer under false pretenses.

And then there's the job candidate who was treated like furniture, rather than evaluated as a mathematician in her own right.

I think that people should be hired based on their own merits, not on someone else's. If you are contemplating giving someone an advantage or disadvantage based on what you think is their marital status, keep in mind that:

• The situation might not be what you think it is.
• Circumstances can change. The person you really wanted might leave or die, and you might be stuck with the one you didn't want. Are you OK with that? Would it change your decision?
• Someone might be hurt by your actions. Are you passing over people who are better? Is that fair? Is it legal?