How to Hire

We had to sit through a two-hour meeting the other day learning how to hire correctly. Start early, we were told. Post your job announcement widely, form a search committee, interview a wide variety of candidates, bring the best ones to a campus visit. Here are the places to look for the best candidates. Here are the questions to ask. Here are the activities for the campus visit. Here’s the funding. On and on it went.

It’s all a sophisticated form of mockery because we aren’t allowed to do any of this. I hired a new French professor, and because of our new bureaucratic procedure, I had literally only a few days – yes, days – to announce the position, interview, and extend an offer. There was no search committee because it’s the summer and everybody is on vacation. There was no campus visit. I didn’t even have time to interview more than one candidate. I had to hire whoever applied first.

Now it looks like I made a mistake and hired a person who’ll kill our French program completely. Everything was done to sabotage this search. But that wasn’t enough. We now have to be mocked by long-winded explanations of how we should have started these searches a year before we were actually allowed to start them. It’s akin to lecturing a homeless person on his correctly to cook beef bourguignon. And not just any homeless person but one whom you personally reduced to homelessness.

This is what neoliberalism is. It not only dispossesses you but mocks and blames you for getting dispossessed.