This was my second full year on the academic job market since defending my dissertation in the summer of 2012.  It is rough out there – I don’t think I’ll get an argument from anyone on that point.  I know that some people (including some friends of mine) had very quick, substantial success, landing good tenure-track positions as ABD (“all but dissertation”) graduate students.  Their experience was different than mine, and, I would guess, different from the large majority of us looking for our first post-graduate academic jobs.  There are relatively few positions and a large number of highly qualified people to fill them.  It’s a buyers’ market.

Over the course of the last two job cycles, I’ve done short interviews over the telephone, via Skype, and at the AAA meetings and traveled for campus interviews at four schools.  Each of these experiences has made me a better job candidate, or at least better prepared to do interviews.  Collectively, my experience on the job market has also left me with the impression that much of our culture for filling academic positions, especially tenure-track positions, is a little silly.  Listening to the stories of others and triangulating their experiences with mine has only amplified that impression. 

To be clear, I don’t dislike academics or academia in general.  Not at all.  I am an academic and academia is the life I have chosen for myself.  But I do think it’s worthwhile to consider whether some of our conventions for choosing the “best” person for a position make sense and accomplish what they purport to accomplish.  This is a big subject with a lot to talk about – horror stories related to academic searches are easy to find.  I’m just going to start with this question:

Do interviews really need to take three days?

The multi-day, campus visit interview for the top three or four “short list” candidates is a tradition in anthropology in this country.  The standard formula includes numerous meetings with individual faculty members, meals (breakfasts, lunches, and dinners) with one or more faculty members, a job talk, tours (campus, town, laboratories), pizza with the students, probably a meeting with some sort of dean, etc. 

Sound expensive, time-consuming, and tiring? You bet it is. So why do we do it?  The standard answer is that, because these are tenure-track positions, it is really important for both the candidate and the department to get to know the other thoroughly to ensure a good “fit.”  I’ve heard this a lot:  We’re picking a colleague for life, so we have to make sure we will get along; or It’s more like picking a marriage partner than an employee. 

The rationale makes sense, of course:  you want to make sure an apple isn’t rotten before you give it a quasi-permanent home in the bunch.  So . . . the departments that use multi-day interviews to inoculate themselves against adding a bad apple are filled with people who all get along over the long term, right?  Um . . .  If you are a person who likes to look at evidence, you could quite fairly point out the degree of rancor and dysfunction in many anthropology departments and ask where it came from.  Those departments were presumably built using a strategy of carefully vetting candidates for “fit,” guarding against the admittance of a bad apple.  If this strategy functioned as it is claimed, academic anthropology should be populated by departments that can compromise and make reasonable decisions with a minimum of dysfunction.  I’m sure those departments exist.  I’m also sure that many departments do not fit that description.  Where did things go wrong?

I think two points about the mythology of multi-day interviews are relevant here.  First, the idea that rancor, tension, and unpleasantness in a small group environment can always be attributed to a single “bad apple” is erroneous.  Sure, a bad apple can cause those things, and this is a good reason to try to prevent him or her from getting into the bunch.  But real unpleasantness and dysfunction can also emerge through the interactions of a whole bunch of good apples (yep, I just played a complex systems card there).  A bad apple can spoil the bunch, but it is a fallacy to presume that you can ensure harmony at the group level by only picking good apples. Interactions between and among individuals are just as important as the particular qualities of those individuals.

So it seems like understanding how a new apple with interact with the existing apples would be important.  This brings me to my second point:  the staged, formalized interactions that occur over the course of a multi-day interview do not provide accurate information about the qualities of interactions that may occur in the future.  This is true, I think, from both sides.   The interview stage requires candidates to constantly perform and departments to try to present themselves in the best light possible.  I have been told “we all get along, everybody gets along” during every campus interview I have done.   I’m not sure if I was really expected to believe those lines, or if that was just some de rigueur interview pillow talk.  Maybe it is more-or-less true in some cases, but I know that those statements were far from accurate descriptions of the environments at some of the places I interviewed.  A department can appear to get along for three days while a candidate is there just like I can wear a suit for three days while I’m visiting.  On my end, I will admit that I'm just wearing the suit for interview: it isn't going to happen every day.

I do think it is important for the candidate and existing faculty to have a chance to size each other up.  But how long does that really need to take?  At one school, I was told by a professor that the purpose of the campus visit was simply to “see if the candidate was a butthead or not.”  He and I agreed that one could do that relatively quickly (the campus interview at that school was over a single day).  He was not a butthead, I was not a butthead.  We had that figured out before the waiter came back for the first coffee refill.

I’m not sure if other places in the world engage in these long, drawn out interviews, and I’m not sure how or why this custom arose here.  I’ve been told that the multi-day academic job interview is an American convention that doesn’t exist in Europe.  They seem to be doing just fine without it. 

Over the last two job cycles I have come to enjoy some aspects of these multi-day interviews.  It is nice to have the chance to meet everyone in a department one-on-one, it is nice to have someone drive you around town and show you around campus, and it is nice to go out to dinner and be able to talk to people in a variety of different settings.  Each time I did one of these interviews, I tried to look at it as an opportunity:  I met a lot of people, got a lot chances to explain my work, got to hone my research presentation, and got to try to improve my record of going all day without getting food on my suit jacket.  I took each interview seriously and gave it my best shot. 

I think many (but not all) of the existing faculty I met also like the multi-day interview format.  Because multi-day interviews can be enjoyable to both sides, however, doesn’t mean they do what they’re purported to do.  It just doesn’t take that much time to tell whether or not an apple is rotten.  And no amount of interaction on the artificial stage of the job interview is going to reveal how a good apple is going to interact over the long term with all the other apples already in the department or with unknown apples that will be added in the future.   It is nice to meet and talk with people over the course of a few days, but it doesn’t provide anyone with a crystal ball.

As a job candidate, I don’t expect any department to be completely free from disagreement or personal animosities that have emerged and developed over the years.   I think that those things are a normal product of prolonged human interactions.  I presume that it will be part of my job as the newest faculty member to try to understand and navigate the existing human landscape within the department.  I’m ready to get to work and will do the best I can in whatever situations I find myself in. Perhaps that will be the most important thing I will tell you during my interview.  It is true whether or not I’m wearing a suit and it is applicable whether or not people in your department get along when the stage lights are off. 

One of my favorite professors at Michigan, Milford Wolpoff, frequently reminds his students that science is a human endeavor.  He is right about that.  I'm not sure he would say it this way, but I think you’re kidding yourself if you think you can completely segregate human motivations, feelings, and relationships from the practice of science.  Decisions about which research questions to pursue, which papers to cite, who to make eye contact with at conferences, who to do favors for . . . the “human” part of science is everywhere.

I started this website primarily to give myself an informal platform to talk about things that interest me and draw threads between different aspects of my work.  While the content is mostly professional, I have talked a little bit about the articulation between the personal and professional, such as in this post about taking small children to the SAA meetings.  As far as I can tell, that blog post (which had nothing whatsoever to do with any specific aspect of my work) got more attention than anything else I’ve written here.  I’m guessing that is because a lot of us experience the tension between the “human” and “science” parts of what we do. 

For me, science is the easy part.  It is a blessing to have the time, quiet, and energy to think about a problem or issue and try to figure out a way to address it that helps us learn something  about how human cultures and societies work and change.  I want my ideas to be “right,” but nothing really horrible happens if they’re not:  “wrong” ideas will eventually be extinguished because, over the long haul, science is cumulative and self-correcting.

The human part can be a lot tougher.  I think we all know that.  There aren’t necessarily “right” and “wrong” answers, it is often impossible to break a problem down into discrete chunks that can be individually addressed, there really isn’t any sort of reliable mechanism for understanding cause and effect, decisions may have profound implications for people’s lives, and you usually don’t get a “do over.” 

These past two weeks have really brought into focus for me the potential size of the gap between a difficult “human” issue and a difficult “science” issue.  I decided to allow my 12-year-old daughter to move away to a different state without a court battle.  Making that decision was heart-wrenching - it is difficult even to write it down in a short sentence.  It is the hardest thing I have ever done.  I think it was the “right” thing to do, but I have no way of knowing that for sure and I probably never will.  That’s a tough spot to be in as a parent.  If you’ve been there, you understand. 

How will this affect the “science” part of my life?  I don’t know, exactly, but I’m sure it will.  What I do know is that nothing I have done professionally has been anywhere near as difficult as these last couple of weeks.  

Science is the easy part.

As I touched on in my discussion of this short paper in World Archaeology, I think the model-based study of patterns of change in historically-documented technologies can offer a lot of potential insight into patterns of change that we can identify in archaeological assemblages.  What, you might ask, can we possibly learn from the history of steam engines, cameras, microprocessors, and batteries that will help us understand changes in pre-industrial technologies?

My short answer is that we can: (1) look for common patterns of change and variability among these historically-documented  technologies; (2) attempt to understand the mechanisms underlying those patterns; and (3) try to develop expectations that will help us identify the mechanisms underlying technological change in prehistoric cases where we do not have documentary evidence.  The idea that the details of a particular system (e.g., a technological system) are often not as important to understanding the behavior of the system as one might guess is central to complex systems theory, and it is an idea that I subscribe to.  I think it’s a mistake to assume that technologies that we can observe in archaeological cases follow fundamentally different rules of change than those we can observe in the present or document historically (more on all that later when I finally get around to working on the Technological Change part of this website).

I’m currently reading George Basalla’s (1988) book entitled The Evolution of Technology.  One of the basic premises of this book is that “Any new thing that appears in the made world is based on some object already in existence” (Basalla 1988:45).  He is making an argument that technological change is fundamentally a continuous phenomenon and also asking the age-old question “where does innovation come from?”  I’m not deep into the book yet, but I’m finding it very satisfying so far.

Some of my favorite examples of technological change are related to aviation.  Since 1903 (the advent of powered flight) there has been an incredible amount of change in the design and performance of both aircraft and aircraft powerplants.  This change has been entangled with political, economic, and social change, global conflicts, and change in numerous “other” technologies.  As I’ve had time over the last few years, I’ve been collecting a large, dense dataset on aircraft and aircraft engines that I will be able to use as empirical example of technological change.   Up to now I’ve gathered data on over 1600 military aircraft (mostly fighters and bombers) and over 7000 engines.  I’ve still got a ways to go before I’m going to do any real analysis.  Eventually (as I publish) I’ll make those datasets freely available.

What does all this have to do with reverse-engineering of alien technology? As anyone who is paying attention to what passes for “history” on television these days will tell you, suggestions abound about extraterrestrial intervention in numerous aspects of human culture, history, technology, and biology.  In many cases these claims point to the “sudden appearance” of something as evidence of an extraterrestrial origin.  Contrary to Basalla’s (1988) continuity argument, the alien crowd asserts that (1) discontinuities in technology (i.e., the sudden appearance, without antecedent, of “advanced” technologies) can be identified and that (2) the most plausible explanation for those discontinuities is an extraterrestrial origin.  As an anthropologist and archaeologist, I get peeved by the ease with which people seem to swallow this nonsense.  The volume of “aliens” programming these days suggests that many people are watching, and, presumably, believing the garbage.   That’s a shame.  It is often fairly simple to debunk the “alien” claims using basic, easily available information.  This is especially true when the claim for extraterrestrial origin involves technology.  These are testable claims: showing continuity of technological development/change destroys the claim for discontinuity, and, consequently, the basis for asserting an alien origin.  And it's also fun.  And educational.

The B-2 bomber, a “flying wing” aircraft unveiled to the public in the late 1980s, is a modern machine which is said to incorporate alien technology: its unusual shape and the secrecy surrounding both its development and the technology used to make it a viable aircraft underlie those claims.   If the shape of the B-2 doesn’t look to you like any other “conventional” aircraft you’ve seen, you’re right.  It is one of only a small number of “flying wing” designs that have actually reached the flying stage.  The B-2 is clearly an outlier on a plot of the ratio of wingspan : length of over 600 bombers produced since World War I:  its wingspan is over twice its length, unlike any other contemporary fighter or bomber aircraft.   It also lacks a vertical tail surface.

Although the B-2 looks very different from other contemporary aircraft (as well as the vast majority of aircraft that preceded it), a quick look at aviation history shows that it did not simply arise out of nothing.  The history of “flying wing” aircraft designs, in fact, goes back to the very early years of powered flight.  J.W. Dunne was producing operational, swept wing, tail-less aircraft within just a few years of the Wright Brothers’ first flights (see this story in a 1910 issue of Flight and the photo at the top of this post).  The Horten brothers experimented with powered and unpowered “flying wing” aircraft during the 1930s and 1940s and produced a flying prototype (the Ho-229) that may have been produced in quantity if World War II had continued.  Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-2, produced numerous experimental and prototype “flying wing” aircraft during the 1940s.  If one were to plot the dimensions of these and other “flying wing” aircraft on the chart with the B-2, continuity would be apparent back to the early 1900s, when the proportions of Dunne’s aircraft fell within the range of variability of what was “conventional” at the time (see figure above). 

The proliferation of a technology or a technological system has practical, social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions, all of which may affect how it is perceived, used, developed, or perpetuated.  If “flying wing” designs are practical and have been studied and understood, why have "flying wing" aircraft never become commonplace?  Good question: from what I can tell, the answer involves a mixture of the factors listed above.  Understanding the interplay of those factors is an interesting problem.  We know for certain, however, that the B-2 does not represent a technological discontinuity.  It is one chapter in a history of human experimentation with “flying wing” aircraft that predates the advent of powered flight.  If we want to attribute the shape of the B-2 to a non-human origin, we have to go at least all the way back to Dunne to do it (maybe the aliens came down and told him to create a tail-less, swept-wing biplane).  Or (see this source) to the gliding properties of the seed pod of the Zanonia macrocarpa (a kind of gourd).  Aliens or gourd seeds . . .  Aliens or gourd seeds . . . hmmm, that really makes you think.