The Secret Lives of Search Committees - Part 16: job-talks at teaching schools

A reader wrote in yesterday:

I’m trying to mentor a former student who has an upcoming campus visit at a SLAC. This student has been asked to give a job talk, the parameters of which seem a little unusual. The search committee has said that it wants to hear about the candidate’s research interests and projects in this talk -- but that they also want the talk to reveal how the candidate presents scholarly material to a lay audience, for the purpose of assessing teaching. In effect, it seems that the committee wants one talk to serve both as a research presentation and also as a teaching demonstration. The candidate has one hour in total (including q&a). At my university, we always have candidates do a research talk and a teaching demonstration, and while there are of course important connections between them, they are fundamentally different requirements that are judged by very different criteria.

Have you ever had a thread on this particular kind of requirement? If not, would you be interested in starting one? I’d be very interested to hear thoughts and advice from others on how to prepare for, and succeed in, such a talk.

This is a great query. As I explained to the reader via email, this sort of thing is not at all unusual at SLACs. Indeed, my department has done something very similar for our recent TT hires, telling candidates to pitch their job-talk to undergrads. Allow me to explain the reasons for this. I'll then share some quick tips and open things up for discussion.

Some reasons job-talks at SLACS may be pitched to laypeople

In my experience, there are several reasons why SLACs may ask candidates to pitch their research talk to a lay audience.

First, one’s main ‘audience’ at SLACs will almost always be undergraduate students and people in other departments with no background in philosophy (including administrators). At my university, we have honors colloquia, college research fairs, etc., where faculty present their research to the community. Because attendees at these events are nearly always undergrads and people with no background in philosophy, it matters whether the person we hire can present research to them in a way they can understand and appreciate the importance of.

Second, the ability to present one's work to nonspecialists matters a great deal during pretenure and tenure review, as there are several stages of the process where people with no background in philosophy (college T&P committees, deans, provosts, presidents, boards of trustees, etc.) have to understand why your work is important and worthy of tenure and promotion.

Third, SLACs also have an interest in attracting parents and students to their university. One way they can do this is through selling things (research and teaching) their faculty do. So, being able to sell your research to laypeople is once again important: it's something the university has an interest in.

Finally, and probably most importantly, the ability to pitch a research talk to a lay audience is relevant to the thing we care about most: teaching. As Anonymous made clear here and here, hiring committees at R1s really don't care much about teaching. At an R1, as long as you're a publishing rock star, you can teach upper-division undergrad courses however you like and it not be a problem. At teaching schools, however, we expect exemplary teaching - and teaching upper-division undergrad courses really well requires being able to make high-level, cutting edge philosophical research comprehensible and interesting. Because teaching demos at SLACs are usually lower-level courses, the job-talk is the one place where a candidate can really display these capacities.

Some tips for pitching job-talks properly

I think we all sort of know what makes for a good job-talk at a research university: you want to be clear, precise, show you're the 'smartest person in the room', show off your technical skills, show how groundbreaking your research is, show some charisma, and give brilliant answers during Q&A. I suppose some people may take exception to this description of what a good job-talk looks like at a research department - but it seems to me broadly accurate. In any case, this isn't what the current post is about. Our issue is: what are good ways for pitching job-talks to a lay audience at a SLAC?

Tip 1: stay away from formalisms and jargon

It's okay to introduce some technical terms in a job-talk pitched to a lay audience. However, if you do, you really need to keep it to a minimum and introduce whatever technical terms you do clearly and intuitively, using concrete examples. Also, formalisms are a 'no.' Your job-talk shouldn't be full of quantified logic, etc. 

Tip 2: begin with some background, explaining the problem & its importance

Many high-level research talks (viz. departmental colloquia, conferences, etc.) just jump into things, presupposing familiarity with relevant philosophical problems (free will, etc.). Alas, your 'lay audience' of undergrads may not have any background in the area - so it can be really helpful to begin with a brief background of the issue your paper is engaging with. Don't be pedantic about it, as job-talks at teaching institutions are usually short (30 minutes or so). It's just a good idea to introduce the audience to the topic so you get some 'buy in' to what you're arguing.

Tip 3: don't go long

Your job-talk will probably be scheduled for an hour. Don't talk for 45 minutes. That's probably too much content for your audience, and won't leave enough time for Q&A.

Tip 4: consider using Powerpoint or Prezi

From what I can tell, it's still pretty standard for philosophers from top-ranked programs and research universities to do 'old-school' presentations consisting in nothing more than a handout and standing in front of the room talking. I think it may be possible to do this well in a job-talk at a teaching school - but for what it is worth in the two TT hires I've taken part in, not a single candidate invited to campus gave that kind of talk: they all used Powerpoint or Prezi. Not only that: my experience is that this way of presenting things is increasingly standard at SLACs - in teaching, colloquia, etc. We don't live in the 19th Century any longer. For better or worse, administrators and students expect the use of technology.

Tip 5: behave during Q&A

I have enough experience in R1 contexts to know that research talks can turn into 'pissing contests' designed to figure out how 'smart' the person giving the talk is: faculty in the audience raise the most difficult objections they can, and speakers are expected to give brilliant responses. This is the wrong way to approach Q&As at teaching schools. Although you may get a few difficult questions by faculty, your audience is going to be mostly undergrads - so you need to show you are gracious, understanding, etc. In these talks, you're not just going to be judged on the quality of your research but also on your demeanor, professionalism, how students respond, etc. Whichever question you are asked - and chances are some undergrad in the audience will ask something totally off the wall, since they may not know much philosophy - receive and answer the question graciously. Give what you think the right answer is, but treat lightly!

Anyway, these are just a few tips that immediately came to mind. If I think of any others, I'll update the post - but I'm curious to hear what others think, especially those who have hired at institutions that have job-talks like these! 

Comments

[powerpoint]

This might belong in its own post, but can you say more about what makes Powerpoint work well for a job talk? In particular, have you ever seen them done successfully for candidates in the history of philosophy? I find history talks almost impossible to follow if I can't read the texts at my own pace on a handout.

[Michel]

I've seen lots of perfectly good PowerPoint talks in the history of philosophy, although none were job talks (all the history job talks I've seen were done with a handout, but they were quite some time ago). FWIW, I have a very hard time following talks that are just read aloud, especially history talks.

To my mind, the key to doing it well is to think of the slides as the items on your handout. So, you want to follow the usual guidelines:

1.) Don't cram stuff onto slides (one point per slide is a good guideline).
2.) Don't have too many slides (less is almost always more--I budget 3 slides for ten-minute talks, 6 for 20, and 15-20 for 60, not counting the opener with the title or any additional slides I need to achieve certain effects).
3.) Don't use lots of effects and don't use many different effects. Prezi tends to be really bad on this score.
4.) Use the slides to signpost for the audience. (So, e.g., introduce a point/argument you want to make on one slide, then use the next slide or two to present the evidence, then move on to the next point and repeat; use a slide at a critical juncture to summarize the arguments/results so far, etc.)
6.) Don't rush through your slides.
7.) If you've got any information that lends itself to a visual presentation--pictures, data, diagrams, a comparison chart, etc.--then put those to work for you.
8.) In the Q&A, don't flip through the slides. It triggers headaches, migraines, and nausea for some people, and it just doesn't look great. Use your slider to find the slide you want, then select it.Better yet, master the keyboard shortcuts.

If you've got a lot of quotes, it might be useful to give the audience a handout that contains them all, so that they can refer back to a quote at will (which they can't do if they're only on your slides and you haven't made the slideshow otherwise available to them). But if you're also giving a PowerPoint presentation, then I'd suggest having all those quotes on your slides, and just making the handout available for people to refer back to once you've moved on.