Yes, well, interestingly they may have deleted it from Twitter, but on Facebook it remains. That seems to indicate perhaps another level of cluelessness about posting on social media for them.
Glad you wrote about this one, Collin. I noticed the tweet in question yesterday along with some of the reactions, and thought it was unusual for finalist names to circulate this way. An incident like this sits alongside the rhet/comp job wiki as an example of how candidates and search committees sit in a mutually fragile positions, each bearing responsibility for honoring the justifiable privacy of the process. Of course, for the unavoidable games of chicken involved with negotiating and renegotiating terms of employment, we may as well have some variation on the unaskable with every annual review, “Are you staying or are you going? YES NO (circle both).”
Thanks, D. I had the job wiki in the back of my mind, too, because it’s a related, but more complex issue. I often agree with those who are critical about unnecessary opacity, but total transparency can have unforeseen consequences, too. I like the way you phrase it: it can be hard to understand those “mutually fragile positions” until you’ve been in them.
And even then, I’ve seen mistakes made by folk at all points along the spectrum–even people who *should* know haven’t always thought it through…
I wonder if this is social media cluelessness or an inability to imagine anyone’s need to keep confidentiality about a campus visit with them. It’s a status thing, where the high status university cannot imagine anyone seeing their consideration as anything but a high honor, something to be broadcast. It’s an honor just to be nominated…
Stephanie Vie
January 31, 2014 2:59 pm
Well, I see that point, but I also think there’s an issue here with the candidates now knowing exactly who they are competing against. There’s already so much tension in the job market process and I personally don’t think throwing the names of one’s competitors into the mix is a useful move. Your mileage may vary, but in previous job searches, I have not wanted to know the names/CVs of the other finalists.
And then once you’re publicly named but you don’t receive the job, what then? Of course it’s fantastic to be a finalist, but there’s only one job and usually 3-4 people competing. Would a person really want everyone knowing which jobs they were a finalist for but did not receive? I personally wouldn’t. Again, your mileage may vary.
That’s part of what I was meaning by cluelessness above … the idea of failing to recognize that now it’s not just the people on that search committee or at that school knowing who all is competing for the job, but everyone. And that everyone now has the ability to check out those people, their CVs, and so on–including the candidates themselves. I’m just not really excited about that idea.
Cheryl
January 29, 2014 12:42 pm
Indeed, hierarchies. I haven’t seen the post in question, but in my experience, office secretaries are (oddly) the ones in charge of these things. And they are the people least likely to understand the fragile nature of searches.
There are two questions here. The first has to do with legal responsibilities and who has them. The second is more a question of ethics/manners. Many campus visits include public presentations of candidates’ scholarship. As Collin points out, these get announced via university email, posters, and so on. This was the case with our last provost search, where the candidates’ names were listed on a website and shared via an email sent to every university employee. Should such an email say, I’m telling you 5000 people, but please don’t tell anyone else? Should attendees to a public presentation of research in a department (which might include undergraduates, staff, faculty from other departments, etc) be asked at the outset to not discuss the presentation via social media?
I guess I would parse it this way. Once you are walking around on the limited public space of a university campus or dining in a restaurant in town or at the airport or whatever, your expectation of privacy and confidentiality has to be reduced. If you know you are doing a public presentation, then you should know that it is public. That said, I think the search committee, the chair, dean and other academic officers, and the official communications of an institution should be savvy enough to not broadcast information about their job search process, if only for reasons of self-interest.
Thanks, Alex. I may be thinking about this in more detail than I should, but I’m not sure what the rules are, or even if there are rules, about faculty job talks. I know, for example, that at some institutions, dissertation defenses are specifically defined as “public,” but are job talks public because they’re announced or announced because they’re public? I genuinely don’t know, and tend to abide by that question of manners, which is far easier to enforce on the level of a department than it is an entire campus, to be sure.
Then, too, it becomes an issue of whether that publicity extends backwards to a case like that tweet, where the finalists were announced publicly before any of the talks had taken place. I would hope that all the other candidates for the position had already learned of their application status, and that the finalists’ colleagues and students knew about their candidacies, because that’d be a horrible way to find out.
Stephanie Vie
January 29, 2014 11:04 amYes, well, interestingly they may have deleted it from Twitter, but on Facebook it remains. That seems to indicate perhaps another level of cluelessness about posting on social media for them.
Collin
January 29, 2014 11:10 amYeah, and the presentations are listed on the front of the website under Events.
Derek
January 29, 2014 11:19 amGlad you wrote about this one, Collin. I noticed the tweet in question yesterday along with some of the reactions, and thought it was unusual for finalist names to circulate this way. An incident like this sits alongside the rhet/comp job wiki as an example of how candidates and search committees sit in a mutually fragile positions, each bearing responsibility for honoring the justifiable privacy of the process. Of course, for the unavoidable games of chicken involved with negotiating and renegotiating terms of employment, we may as well have some variation on the unaskable with every annual review, “Are you staying or are you going? YES NO (circle both).”
Collin
January 29, 2014 11:40 amThanks, D. I had the job wiki in the back of my mind, too, because it’s a related, but more complex issue. I often agree with those who are critical about unnecessary opacity, but total transparency can have unforeseen consequences, too. I like the way you phrase it: it can be hard to understand those “mutually fragile positions” until you’ve been in them.
And even then, I’ve seen mistakes made by folk at all points along the spectrum–even people who *should* know haven’t always thought it through…
llcadle
January 29, 2014 11:50 amI wonder if this is social media cluelessness or an inability to imagine anyone’s need to keep confidentiality about a campus visit with them. It’s a status thing, where the high status university cannot imagine anyone seeing their consideration as anything but a high honor, something to be broadcast. It’s an honor just to be nominated…
Stephanie Vie
January 31, 2014 2:59 pmWell, I see that point, but I also think there’s an issue here with the candidates now knowing exactly who they are competing against. There’s already so much tension in the job market process and I personally don’t think throwing the names of one’s competitors into the mix is a useful move. Your mileage may vary, but in previous job searches, I have not wanted to know the names/CVs of the other finalists.
And then once you’re publicly named but you don’t receive the job, what then? Of course it’s fantastic to be a finalist, but there’s only one job and usually 3-4 people competing. Would a person really want everyone knowing which jobs they were a finalist for but did not receive? I personally wouldn’t. Again, your mileage may vary.
That’s part of what I was meaning by cluelessness above … the idea of failing to recognize that now it’s not just the people on that search committee or at that school knowing who all is competing for the job, but everyone. And that everyone now has the ability to check out those people, their CVs, and so on–including the candidates themselves. I’m just not really excited about that idea.
Cheryl
January 29, 2014 12:42 pmIndeed, hierarchies. I haven’t seen the post in question, but in my experience, office secretaries are (oddly) the ones in charge of these things. And they are the people least likely to understand the fragile nature of searches.
Alex Reid (@digitaldigs)
January 30, 2014 1:28 pmThere are two questions here. The first has to do with legal responsibilities and who has them. The second is more a question of ethics/manners. Many campus visits include public presentations of candidates’ scholarship. As Collin points out, these get announced via university email, posters, and so on. This was the case with our last provost search, where the candidates’ names were listed on a website and shared via an email sent to every university employee. Should such an email say, I’m telling you 5000 people, but please don’t tell anyone else? Should attendees to a public presentation of research in a department (which might include undergraduates, staff, faculty from other departments, etc) be asked at the outset to not discuss the presentation via social media?
I guess I would parse it this way. Once you are walking around on the limited public space of a university campus or dining in a restaurant in town or at the airport or whatever, your expectation of privacy and confidentiality has to be reduced. If you know you are doing a public presentation, then you should know that it is public. That said, I think the search committee, the chair, dean and other academic officers, and the official communications of an institution should be savvy enough to not broadcast information about their job search process, if only for reasons of self-interest.
Collin
January 31, 2014 8:32 amThanks, Alex. I may be thinking about this in more detail than I should, but I’m not sure what the rules are, or even if there are rules, about faculty job talks. I know, for example, that at some institutions, dissertation defenses are specifically defined as “public,” but are job talks public because they’re announced or announced because they’re public? I genuinely don’t know, and tend to abide by that question of manners, which is far easier to enforce on the level of a department than it is an entire campus, to be sure.
Then, too, it becomes an issue of whether that publicity extends backwards to a case like that tweet, where the finalists were announced publicly before any of the talks had taken place. I would hope that all the other candidates for the position had already learned of their application status, and that the finalists’ colleagues and students knew about their candidacies, because that’d be a horrible way to find out.