My work on a blog post about another novel nobody has read was interrupted by David Perlmutter's article in the CoHE, which argues that no, the conference interview should not die on the vine. I think I remain under-convinced.
[As an aside: the argument against MLA interviews on the grounds of expense could be extended to conference-going in general for grad students, those not on the TT, junior faculty, &c. Schuman et al. have been calling attention to MLA expenses because you have to incur them for interviews, but every domestic conference I've attended in recent years has cost $1K+ between travel, accomodations, registration, and not starving to death. And by "not starving to death" I mean eating at cheap restaurants and, in some cases, packing breakfast in my luggage, not finding the swankiest eateries in town. Some things can be finagled--finding a roommate to lower expenses being the most obvious--but travel often can't. My college is generous with funding, but even so, our allowance usually covers no more than part of one conference; going to more than one means anteing up out of pocket.]
So, to go through Perlmutter's bullets:
"Expense." There are some untested assumptions here. It is not a given that faculty will attend a big national conference "anyway": for me and many of my colleagues, the MLA is not necessarily a particularly relevant or useful conference, and faculty in other disciplines report having a similar relationship to their equivalent umbrella organization. (Don't get me wrong: some years, the MLA has a lot that interests me; many other years...it doesn't.) And of course campus visits are pricey, but the whole point of phone/Skype interviews is that one can sort out the candidates beforehand, right?
"Up close and personal assessment." The difficulty here in part derives from preparation--most graduate departments coach their students for the MLA interview (assuming they coach their students...) and not for phone/Skype interviews, which are a different skillset. For example, someone Skyping needs to know some basic things, like where to position the chair and camera in order to simulate eye contact, how to neutralize the background so as to eliminate distractions, and so on, just as someone phoning has to learn how to compensate for missing physical cues (e.g., by erring on the side of concision in one's answers). But, honestly, it's also a matter of taste, which is not an argument for or against. I should also note that it's just as easy to make a bad impression during a ftf interview, so...
"Technological leveling." Now this, I think, is a legitimate concern: we cannot make cheery assumptions about candidates' access to a) high-quality internet connections, b) decent camera equipment, whether in a studio or on a computer, and c) suitable conditions. A solid graduate program should be able to make all of these things available to their students, but contingent faculty (and, for that matter, faculty at resource-poor campuses) may not be able to muster all or even any of those things. That being said, candidates should be given the opportunity to interview by Skype or phone, not just by Skype.
"Comparisons in context." Speaking of context, the comparison shopping analogy is perhaps not the best way of referring to people seeking jobs (although, in practice, goodness knows that candidates are objectified enough). In any event, the idea that the conference interview serves as a neutral "shopping" site for all candidates does not engage with the class-based aspect of Schuman et al.'s critique, let alone the ways in which candidates have reported being positively disadvantaged by the conditions of conference interviewing (the dreaded hotel bedroom interview from campuses unavailable to afford a suite being the most notorious). Perlmutter's suggestions for the advantages of conference interviewing seem somewhat up-and-down: yes, you can get practice "reading a room," but given that many candidates can now expect only a tiny handful of interviews, the opportunities for gaining this skill would appear to be minimal; "network," maybe; the magical "come and be interviewed right now," sure, unless your HR department wallops you hard for doing such a thing; and the "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" situation, also sure, except that in reality, that doesnt necessarily compute until you get to the campus interview.
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