Transference, Countertransference, and Search Committees

My most recent stint serving on a search committee has coincided with teaching a class on Freud. The intersections have been instructive.

There is a strange collision that happens as the fantasies and desires of the search committee members are projected onto each of the candidates in turn and find, or fail to find, some reflection or connection.

Oddly, it seems to me that the candidate plays the role of therapist to the committee rather than vice versa. The successful candidate is the one who best manages the transference of the committee members as well as their own countertransference onto the department and the imagined job. Wishful thinking runs rampant at every turn. This includes the projection of fears which are no less reliant on fantasy than are the projections of hope.

A Theory Which Is Mine

My current theory is that tedious committee work is actually the glue that cements the relationships among the faculty on a campus. A great deal of bonding happens over stacks of file folders and the labyrinths of budget codes. This is very different from the heated exchanges that take place at department meetings. I'm talking about the plain-old, everyday, garden variety committee work that nobody likes, but that everybody has to do.

I've spent the past few days toiling over application files as part of the work for a faculty search committee I'm serving on. I've been sequestered in a cushy administrative conference room alongside a handful of my colleagues reading through stacks of files and busily taking notes. The work isn't hard, and it's often interesting. But, still, there is a lot of it and it can get repetitive. During our confinement, folks talk. One of the first subjects tends to be the shared common ground of the time-consuming committee work itself. We're all in it together, so we can safely grouse about it to each other. Like cafeteria food. Or airport parking. I may not have much in common with my colleagues in the Math Department or from over in the College of Business but, by God, we can all be bored to tears by the same committee assignments and we can commiserate about it together.

It may even be that committee work in academia provides some of the same social function as boot camp in the army, or hazing in a fraternity. We bond over our shared suffering. Committee work is simply the substitute form for middle-aged intellectuals who are ill-suited to more physically demanding forms of collective pain. What's important, though, is that it hurts and that we do it together.

To Market to Market...

I'm declaring a moratorium for awhile on whiny posts like the one below. This blog is my primary outlet for such whines and rants, but even I get tired of them sometimes. And the whine accomplished its therapeutic goal – I'm feeling much happier. So... Onward!

I've been reading some of the posts scattered around lately on the fear and angst generated by the impending job search season. Lumpenprof is basking in his first year in more than a decade of not being either on the market, or up for tenure or contract renewal. That's a long time. So I feel perfectly justified in wanting to cleanse my mind of all things job search related. And then it happens. I get the word that I'm to serve on search committee this year. "Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in. "

However, this will be the first time I've had the opportunity to participate in a job search from this side. I'm a hardened veteran from the other side. And even though I would like a year off from job search related tasks, I find I'm getting interested at the prospect of being involved in a search committee even though I know it's likely to be a stressful process.

This search will be something new for everyone involved. Since it won't be a search for a faculty member in my recently defunct department, we are being charged with finding a faculty member for someone else's department – although we don't really know which department that will be. The flipside is that most of the folks on the search committee won't be searching for a colleague to work with themselves, but to work with me. Plus the committee is going to be super-sized to include all the various stake holders involved. Whee! I get a little rush of vertigo just thinking about it. This is going to be fun...

Sadly, I won't be able to blog much about the process for good reasons of confidentiality. I want this search to go well. And since it's the first of its kind, I also want us to try to set some good precedents for future searches. Wish us luck!