Are Conference Interviews on the Way Out?

Conference interviews for us in history are exactly what my Job Materials Working Group is preparing for. We will submit our materials for the targeted job, and the selection committee will review the packet and then, if they like us, they invite us for a conference interview at the annual conference of the American Historical Association, our primary professional body.

Here is an article by David Evans in the Chronicle of Higher Education discussing the potential decline of the conference interview. I have included a portion of a response by the blog Tenured Radical, plus the link.

I should add that many universities used the phone interview in the last hiring cycle. A good friend of mine had about a half of a dozen phone interviews, some of which led to on-campus interviews (the holy grail for us grad students on the job market). My friend Rob ultimately got a tenure track job that came out of a phone interview. Rob did attend the AHA conference for interviews there, and I believe (my memory is hazy on this), that of his 5 interviews there, only one turned into an on-campus invitation.

I imagine in the lean market coming this autumn, most universities will conduct these phone interviews. In a future post, I will give my thoughts on Tenured Radical's reform ideas.

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My original academic discipline is English, so I was socialized to the hiring process fostered by the Modern Language Association — applications in October, conference interviews at the end of December, on-campus interviews in early-to-mid spring. For years (really, until I became a dean with responsibilities for disciplines with customs very different from my own) I was convinced that conference interviews were the way to go for hiring new faculty members.

I still think that conference interviews have a lot of advantages. Meeting candidates face-to-face is, I believe, considerably more effective than talking to them on the phone. Simply being able to read their body language, make eye contact, and interact directly provides a clarity that isn’t available by phone. The intensity of the conference-interview process, while exhausting, gives hiring committees the opportunity to make direct comparisons between candidates, refine their impressions, and get a sense of the candidates’ interest in the position.

View rest of story here.

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Response from Tenured Radical

In my opinion? It's on its way out. For what Zenith spent on searches this year, we could have hired a bunch of visitors, or two tenure-track faculty. Or we could have given the faculty we have a weenie little raise. Just a weenie one, but a raise all the same. Or not cut the library budget. Or....or.....

Budget cutting is no reason to end a tradition permanently if it is valuable, but I predict that budget cutting will jolt universities to some useful reforms. Replacing the conference interview with the phone interview is one of them. We had this conversation in my department recently, and I have had it with a Zenith administrator on two separate occasions.

Read the rest of the post here

Author Paints Small Town's Struggle In 'Methland'

From National Public Radio's news magazine All Things Considered...

All Things Considered, July 8, 2009 · The small town of Oelwein, Iowa, is home to 13 churches, a refurbished Main Street and a new library with free high-speed Internet.

It is also home to Roland Jarvis, a former meatpacking worker who burned his house down in 2001. Jarvis, who had a methamphetamine lab inside, was hallucinating that he saw black helicopters hovering overhead and, in a panic, dumped chemicals down the drain. The home went up in flames, and Jarvis was burned so badly that he begged the police to shoot him.

Author Nick Reding tells Jarvis' story — and that of Oelwein and the infiltration of methamphetamine — in his new book, Methland: The Death and Life of an American Small Town.

Link to the rest of the story

Article done!

Well, at least the initial draft. I have dispatched the draft article to four friends who I trust to give me unvarnished feedback. Once I get the comments, I will revise, which hopefully will not take much time. Once that is done, I ship it off my adviser. Most likely another round of revisions, and then off to an academic journal.

Until recently, I have not given great effort to get published. I figured a completed dissertation and the host of awards I have won to conduct the research would make me competitive on the job market. Apparently, not having a publication is my Achilles heal.

In the Spring, I lost out on a dissertation fellowship competition to departmental colleagues, only one of which I thought more or equally deserving than/as me. The other two, I'm still not convinced. That said, the selection committee made their determination. I met with the professor who organized the selection committee and the only thing lacking for her was the damned publication. This is now the metric.

So, the article is done, and I am awaiting with bated breath my friends' comments, brutal though they may be.

Now, it is time to organize the Job Materials Working Group, and get our application materials in order.

More to come...

Atlanta is the new distribution hub for drug distribution

Somehow I missed this news article in May. According to BBCMundo, Atlanta is now the chief distribution hub for the Mexican cartels. Atlanta serves as the gateway to the Midwest, Northeast, and obviously throughout the South, including Florida. Authorities point out that Atlanta sits on transportation routes allowing distribution in DC, NYC, and Miami in less than 12 hours.

There is an outstanding map at the bottom of the story. Here is the link to the story (in Spanish).

This is an adaptive enemy who uses lessons learned very well.

Game on!

OK, things have calmed down. The course I am grading has settled in. I have quitting feeling lonely because wife and child are in Okinawa visiting my in-laws. Now, it's time to get busy.

This weekend's project is to revise an article for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Increasingly, this is becoming the threshold for graduate students in history trying to compete on the job market. To date, I have not published any of my research, but I have completed four of five dissertation chapters. I have won several prestigious university and national awards. Yet, the final component allowing me to compete well in a tight market apparently will be this freakin' article.

So, I have great comments from two close friends, an historian and a sociologist. The trick will be to balance the critiques and suggestions of the two and try to make a coherent, connected and integrated whole.

Oh yeah, I have organized a Job Materials Working Group made up of some good friends. I was told by another friend who recently graduated from Michigan and is now teaching at Loyola of Chicago that the job application letter (a 2-page single-spaced document) will be the most important document I write in my graduate schoolcareer. Frightening, no? Hence, the Working Group.

Will post more as events develop...

From the BBC, and based on the World Drug Report from the UN...

Cocaine, opiate markets 'shrink'

Global markets for cocaine, opiates and cannabis are steady or declining, the UN's annual drug report says.

Opium cultivation in Afghanistan fell by 19% in 2008 while cocaine production in Colombia dropped 28%, it says.

Consumption of the drugs in major markets in Western countries is said to be stable or declining.

But the production and consumption of synthetic drugs are thought to be growing as they shift increasingly to the developing world.

Link to the rest of the article

Here is a great article from the New York Times' James McKinley.

Mexican Cartels Lure American Teens as Killers

LAREDO, Tex. — When he was finally caught, Rosalio Reta told detectives here that he had felt a thrill each time he killed. It was like being Superman or James Bond, he said.

“I like what I do,” he told the police in a videotaped confession. “I don’t deny it.”

Mr. Reta was 13 when he was recruited by the Zetas, the infamous assassins of the Gulf Cartel, law enforcement officials say. He was one of a group of American teenagers from the impoverished streets of Laredo who was lured into the drug wars across the Rio Grande in Mexico with promises of high pay, fancy cars and sexy women.

See rest of article here.

This is an excellent article by an old friend of mine who I met in Yemen way back in 1997. Angus was a freelance journalist who lived in Iran from 2003 to 2007, and published this piece in the English daily The Guardian.

Arrested Iranians face terrifying ordeal

Most of the hundreds of protesters arrested in Iran have disappeared into a tortuous system of detention

When I asked an Iranian friend if he planned to go out and protest this week, he said he was afraid. "It isn't the idea of getting beaten up that's the problem," he said. "I'm much more scared of being arrested."

For the hundreds – or even thousands – of people seized on the streets and in their homes over the past 10 days, the real ordeal is only just beginning. A few have already been paraded on Iranian television, implausibly claiming to be common thugs, terrorists or agents in the pay of foreign governments.

Link to the rest of the article

C'mon Texas!

My Horns will win BIG tonight. Last night's loss was painful, but I can deal. I was an undergrad at UT during the lean David McWilliams and early Jon Mackovic eras. These are problems I can deal with!

I'm interested to see if Augie reverts to small ball and get some runs early.

Anyhoo, more to come from the traveling circus!

Narcotrafficking, Latin America, Texas and Ohio

My neighbor is a young attorney trying to build his business, and in the process of generating revenue some of his clients happen to be accused of drug trafficking. In a brief conversation, I learned quite a bit about the drug trade here in Ohio. Did you know that US Route 33 (coming from the NW) is the major artery for importing drugs into central Ohio? I didn't.

As you can imagine, narcotrafficking is a direct threat to several nations in Latin America, but what is significant is how Ohio is becoming a competing ground for distribution networks peddling narcotics. Texas and the Southwest has long been points of entry and transportation hubs.

This is the launching point for what will be a series of posts on narcotrafficking. I actually devote a class entirely to drug trafficking in my modern Latin American history course. Let's face it, Latin America's two principal contributions to globalization are mass migration and narcotrafficking, both of which disproportionately affect the USA.

Some general observations: For those who advocate neoliberal economics, one must be impressed with the production and distribution of drugs. Long gone are the massive, vertically integrated cartels of the 1980s and 1990s. With the collapse of the Cali Cartel in the mid-1990s, the production of cocaine became decentralized with particular drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) carrying out specific roles (transporting coca to production labs, processing coca paste to cocaine hydrochloride, smuggling cocaine to Mexico/Central America, etc.). The distribution of drugs has fostered the development of competing DTOs in Mexico and provoked a corresponding spike in violence. This violence has and will continue to spill over into US cities. It's already in LA, Phoenix and Houston.

The politics of it are critical, transnational and local. Two weeks ago, Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared democracy in Mexico was "in play" because of the power of the DTOs there. These organizations are adaptive, creative, technologically savvy, and very violent. To give the most recent example, Mexican authorities yesterday discovered more than a ton of cocaine stuffed inside frozen sharks about to be shipped from a port in the Yucatan peninsula. This followed the discovery of 50,000 litres (>13,000 gallons) of ephedrine, enough to produce 40 tons of methamphetamine, or 309 million personal doses, at the same port.

The challenge is enormous, but it is critical to the long term security, democratic governance and public health, both here and abroad...

72 hours in Caracas, democracy's fun house

Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is a polarizing leader, not only for Venezuelans, but also for scholars and commentators of Latin America. Here is a fascinating, if cursory, story of a brief visit to Caracas by Canada's CBC Latin America correspondent Connie Watson:

I got the word just after landing in Caracas. The Venezuelan conference I had been invited to attend on public broadcasting was on shaky ground — suddenly not a sure thing.

That morning, someone in the government had called someone with the conference to suggest the event should be postponed. Now, coming from a government that runs most of the events in this country, that's a pretty serious suggestion.

One reason for the postponement was about to be made evident at the airport arrivals gate. Mario Vargas Llosa, the well-known author and Peruvian presidential candidate in 1990, had a crowd of media waiting for him. And waiting for him.

Click here for the rest of the story.