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.