Yesterday, there was a minor squall that swept quickly across my Twitterological system. One of the departments in my field that maintains its own, somewhat official Twitter account trumpeted the names and schools of the finalists for a senior search in their department. I do have a screen shot of the tweet, but figured that I’d have to redact so completely that there wasn’t a lot of point in sharing it here. But it read:
Delight! Our job search found exceptional candidates: [candidate1]- [school1], [candidate2]- [school2], [candidate3]- [school3]. Job talks coming up!
The post has since been removed, appropriately, but not before it was linked and critiqued by some folk with pretty substantial numbers in terms of followers. I don’t want to name, shame, or blame here; rather, my point is a broader one about social media and the search process, and why folks reacted so strongly and so negatively to what was in all likelihood a genuine expression of excitement and appreciation.
I think that many of us often assume that everyone in a department will know where to draw the lines when it comes to social media. And yet, the landscape changes fast enough that we don’t always have time to think about how they might interact with what may be tried-and-true procedures when it comes to things like job searches, which are not exactly everyday occurrences, particularly in the humanities. And the intricacies of the search process can be opaque, for anyone who hasn’t experienced it from every angle. There are parts of it that I know nothing about because I have neither a partner nor a family, for instance.
Whoever was responsible for the tweet, then, may not have understood some of those intricacies. In the case of a senior search, candidates aren’t always public about their applications, particularly within their home departments. It may not be a secret (although in some cases, it can be), but the fact is that an interview (and even a campus visit) is no guarantee of departure. Candidates don’t stop working or mentoring because they have a campus visit elsewhere, and they may wish to be relatively quiet about the fact that they are looking. The ethics of who to tell and when is a complicated one, and much more involved than “Are you leaving? YES NO (circle one)”
For junior searches, the issues are different, but no less important. Different schools operate according to different timetables, and broadcasting the names of finalists can affect their chances at other schools (“If that person’s a finalist at X, there’s no way they’ll come here. Next.”). It can affect their ability to negotiate other offers, and in some cases, it might even affect their strategy as they approach that campus visit.
It’s tricky. Social media accustom us to a certain level of sharing, to making a certain portion of our everyday lives public, but in the case of searches, campus visits, and the like, there’s a disjunct. A campus visit is a fairly “public” event on the campus being visited, but for the candidate, the campus visit is the final stage of what is supposed to be a confidential process. I’ve seen departments put the names of finalists on publicly-accessible calendars, announce them by name on their homepages, etc., for probably close to 15 years now. But that’s often an issue of one person making a mistake that’s easily correctable. With FB and T, every single person in a department has access to a more-or-less public audience.
At the campus visit stage, the membership of the search committee grows to include the entire department. All of a visitor’s interactions should be treated as “meeting with the (expanded) search committee.” Don’t post finalists’ names anywhere online. Err on the side of caution when it comes to tweeting or updating anything that happens in the context of the visit. Don’t tweet job talks. I’d even be hesitant to friend or follow a candidate until after the process was complete–even something as innocuous as that can be aggregated into privileged information if, say, several members of the same department happen to follow/friend the same person at the same time.
I say all this as someone who’s generally in favor of transparency when it comes to academia. But there are varied and complicated reasons for confidentiality during the application and interview process, and while I believe that hiring programs should be open about the stages of the process, candidate confidentiality isn’t ours to break.
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.