So, the first candidate for one of our positions (don't ask how we are actually hiring in this economy) was featured in an earlier post. The competitor arrived today. Remember that these candidates are picked by a search committee who weeds through dozens of files, conducts numerous video conference interviews, and, finally, settles on the cream of the crop for the much coveted 'campus visit'. And we saw how that worked out with bachelor/ette number 1... I will meet number 2 tomorrow, but by all advance measures, it promises to be a spectacular crash and burn. Despite the fact that this is a position for a particular language/literature area, half the search committee members were not in that area (we like to diversify since we are a diverse department). Nonetheless everything indicates that the English of this candidate is not firing on all cylinders. We do not discriminate against the linguistically challenged - lord knows I have many of them in class every day -- but we do have a minimal expectation that a person can lecture/teach/interact in his or her language of choice or origin AND in English. Having seen the bio and talk blurb the person sent in advance (person "enjoys listen music") I jokingly predicted that s/he would show up planning to give the job talk not in English. Lo and behold, candidate emailed a copy of the talk to my better administrative half this morning and IT IS NOT IN ENGLISH. He assured me that he would telling the candidate that this was not ok, so tomorrow I anticipate a poorly translated talk given by a bleary eyed misfit.
Hmmmm, might be the perfect addition to what Craig terms "the island of misfit toys" aka my department.
