Ask the Radical: A Young Historian Seeks Advice On Overcoming Obstacles

A SLAC graduate in the midst of a prestigious PhD program in history asks us for advice, dear readers:

I write to you today with a very elderly cat sleeping next to me (she's 18, it's kind of ridiculous) and thoughts of the job market and my ability to provide food for the very elderly cat foremost in my mind. What I've been wondering, lately, is what I'm supposed to do with the knowledge BOTH that the job market is very bad AND that, as it happens, a graduate program is probably the best place for me right now.

(Brief aside: I say this not because I'm Special and Being A Historian Is What I Was Meant To Do, but because, in practical terms, it's true. It's sort of weird to tell a stranger this, but the flexibility inherent in graduate school--the ability to disappear for months at a
time and still have money to pay [most] bills has been vital. My parents are both dead and I am solely responsible for the care of a very ill younger sibling. I didn't know any of that would happen when I started, but at this point, bailing is just not logistically reasonable.)

So put another way, what do I do now, exactly? What steps can I take to make myself appear employable, maybe on the market, but maybe not? Like, yeah, I shouldn't have gone to graduate school, but I did and I can't really quit. So . . . now what? It's a question I don't really
see addressed in online conversations or, particularly, in my program.

I've done a lot of things to try to make it work, including cobbling together a bunch of odd jobs--as a museum docent, as a freelance researcher doing copy editing, image identification, and everything else in between, as an advisor to an undergraduate research program. I was invited to give a lecture in an undergraduate course as a pinch-hitter when a prof had a health crisis. I've a paper coming out in Prestigious History Journal and am giving a paper at Prestigious Conference next year. I've JOINED the Berks in the hopes of cultivating some friend/mentorships with Lady Historians. Is that all there is to the circus? That and, as everyone says, "Write a really good dissertation?"

I'm curious what you think about this--about how one might go about making the best of a bad lot, and whether it's specific to every person or there are more general ways to think about this.

My first piece of advice is that you need to go out and acquire a kitten immediately. Despite the fact that s/he would represent an additional expense, you could not only use an extra set of paws in your life, you need someone in the household who is relentlessly optimistic. Someone dashing about the apartment with her tail in the air sounds like just the ticket to me.

So let's get down to your real circumstances and the substance of your question: you went to graduate school in history under one set of assumptions about what your future held, and then your life changed dramatically. Although you have not indicated whether there are other relatives in the picture, you have been orphaned at an unusually early age and now are charged with the well-being of a sibling. You have not indicated whether said sibling has resources or other caregivers, but your point is clear: despite the lousy job market, you cannot afford not to work. You cannot even afford to work at a level that supports one person rather meanly, which is what some young historians can do when they only support themselves and/or can rely on others to bail them out when their cars die on I-95 on the way to a poorly paid adjunct job. Furthermore, even if you were willing to chuck your dream of being a historian, it doesn't seem realistic to quit graduate school now and retrain for something with a guaranteed future like bankruptcy law, refugee relief and disaster management, or the Border Patrol.

I agree. Let's look at the plus side for a moment.

Although you rightly portray your circumstances as mildly Dickensian, you also seem to have what all heroines of nineteenth century fiction require: pluck, ambition, prudence and character. You also have good judgement, and have focused at least some of your efforts on concrete accomplishments that will display your scholarly talents to others. You have done all the right things: gone to a great graduate school in a major city where there are jobs (teaching and non-teaching) a-plenty; you are publishing; and you are giving papers and reaching out to other historians to build a set of contacts that, while they can't necessarily get you a tenure-track job, will help to lift you out of obscurity. You have explored a number of other options for work, options that -- given the right circumstances -- will open paths to working in public history, or working in programs that help link the study of history to fields outside traditional academia.

I am also cautiously optimistic about the possibilities for academic employment over the next few years, barring a double-dip recession. The first issue of AHA Perspectives had a lot of good jobs, several of which were rank open, which suggests that purses are beginning to open up. Even big public universities that have taken a serious beating from their legislatures are advertising jobs -- Rutgers, Cal, CUNY and UI -- and Rutgers is committing to three more searches in the next couple years. My sense of things is that universities responded to the crash by closing their pocketbooks with a snap. That they were a little short of cash was one issue, but the bigger issue was not knowing where the bleeding would stop, so administrators did not want to make commitments that would make them look improvident down the line.

So I am cautiously optimistic that the job market is returning to normal bad, a state of things that will also bring with it the visiting positions, temporary work and post-docs that sustain this state of normal bad -- but were suspended immediately following the crash to cope with the cash crunch.

There is more good news: because you are not a snob, because you had no backup, and because you look forward and not backwards, you have explored other kinds of work. I have one relative who, suddenly left as a single mom with a small child, decided overnight to suck it up and go to law school, despite the fact that she really might have preferred to be an entrepeneur. In a moment of useful hardheadedness, she put the interests of her dependent first, and developed her talents in another way. And yet, I am quite sure that her immediate need -- to have a salary and benefits -- will ultimately dovetail with the creative talents that caused her to explore another kind of life entirely. Similarly, while you might end up making a career in public history, this does not bar you from a satisfying life of scholarship (have I ever told you how much time, in my cushy tenured job, I spend doing work I do not value and that detracts from my own writing and teaching?)

Let me offer another piece of advice following from this thought: Administrators Make More Money. A lot more money. There are more administrative jobs, and administrators have more flexibility in terms of where they work geographically. Some of them even have tenure (ask Lesboprof if you don't believe me.) You really need to keep this path open, and think about doing so by amplifying your work experience in areas of university administration that are interesting to you. Knowing how to run a budget, how to supervise a staff, how to write an institutional grant, how to construct and supervise a curriculum - these are things that they don't teach in graduate school but that, in combination with your PH.D. and your publishing, could take you far, my friend. There are very few good academic jobs nowadays, particularly academic deanships and directorships, that do not require a PH.D. and a record of publication. Not infrequently, these ads ask for a "distinguished" record of publication as well. Hence, regarding administration as a fallback option for failed scholars is not only less true than it ever was, but it also seems that in the near future, having street cred as a scholar will actually be critical to moving up the ladder administratively.

A great many graduate students are instructed that doing such work takes them off the fast-track, making them look unserious, unfocused and lacking in commitment to their scholarship. To this I say: Balls. Since when did the allegedly virtuous path of eking out a living on adjunct pay, moving around the country, and becoming increasingly bitter about what you have sacrificed prove to be a guarantee of tenure-track labor? Furthermore, while some narrow-minded person at Prestigious Ivy U. might look at your vita, overlook all your academic accomplishments and say, "Hmmm. Assistant to the Dean of the College? Yeccch!" someone at Zenith, or State U - Calabash might say happily, "Now here's a person who won't have to be taught how to walk, talk and find the chalk!" It is also true that you can send vitae to different schools that emphasize different things.

So you see? It's all in your perspective, isn't it? You are, in fact, doing the right thing. And while we all wake up in the middle of the night from time to time with disaster on our minds (yes, even Tenured Radicals who are full professors), you, my dear, have your head screwed on just right. Keep up the good work.

Yes, it's job season again. Got a question? Ask the Radical! Submit questions for publication to: tenuredDOTradicalATgmailDOTcom.

Ask the Radical: Blogging and The Untenured Academic

Leaving the country often has the happy effect that people stop sending email to me almost entirely. Why sabbatical doesn't accomplish this I do not know, particularly given the vivid bounce-back I composed this time around. Only the chair of my department removed my from the distribution list in September, but I am pleased/dismayed to see that now everyone else has too. Perhaps while I was still state side some secret hope was cherished by many colleagues that I would, in fact, come to advertised meetings of various kinds? If so, I am happy to say that they have not taking to dashing their brains on the flagstones in despair that their coy invitations have gone unanswered.

Since arriving in Cape Town, South Africa, the most sustained correspondence I have had to date is with a group of very capable people who are taking care of my affairs (dog and house) while I am away. We have been in correspondence about the circumstances of a mysterious "alarm event," as ADT Security calls it which, as it turns out, was probably caused by my efforts to draft-proof the front door. But that is all.

Anyway, the lack of email allows me to catch up on messages I have failed to respond to all fall, either because they were too complicated, or because I was ambivalent about them in some way, or because I didn't know what to say. For example, the following questions were asked by a graduate student who heard me and several other bloggers do a panel several months ago. Since there is no point responding to the actual person (as the date of the assignment s/he wanted the information for is long past) I will answer these questions publicly:

1. What are the challenges non-tenured professors face when deciding to keep a personal blog?

Not using the blog to: a) spend most of your time venting about the oppressive condition of being you; b) publish humorous pieces that are just another way to express your boundless rage at those who offend you; c) say witty things about your students that portray them to a national audience at their most foolish and naive; d) waste so much time blogging, reading blogs, commenting on blogs and checking your Site Meter that you don't write anything else; and e) blog constantly about your cats (even though they are very cute and do twee things to distract you from working.)

2. What were your main concerns before you exposed your identity on your blog?

Unfortunately, I had no concerns. This is why I made a some critical errors (see 1a, 1b,and 1c above) that required varying levels of apology to others. I probably would have done d) and e) as well, except that I write about eight hours a day when left to my own devices, I no longer participate in memes, and I have no cats.

3. Do you think that blogs should be considered, in any respect, when a professor has yet to attain tenure?

Since the discipline in which I hold tenure (history) has barely dealt with electronic publishing at all as part of the promotion process, and also has a mixed record on how it regards pre-tenure scholarship published to a trade audience, I would hope that we would not start having a conversation about blogs that was not preceded by one that addressed these other critical issues. But I should think that participation in group blogs that serve a field or a discipline should be taken into account as much as book reviews or encyclopedia entries, which everyone lists in endless, boring detail on their vitae as if they took more than a day to write. Would I hold a blog against someone? Sure! If I was certain that a person had been caught in a huge bloggy lie -- plagiarism, seducing people on line by pretending to be someone else, and masquerading as a variety of different, malicious sock puppets on their own and other peoples' blogs are three examples that come to mind -- it would cause me to wonder about that person's general integrity and scrutinize other aspects of the tenure case a bit more carefully for similar flaws. It has been my unhappy experience that people who lie don't just do it in one context, and they tend to keep doing it. I stumbled onto the website of someone whose first book was plagiarized in the manuscript stage (although when this was pointed out, innocence was claimed and the problems were at least partly rectified.) Many years later, the web page was full of flamers about said person's personal history that were entirely irrelevant to scholarship but that fabricated a far more dashing past than the individual actually had. Honesty in personal relations strikes me as equally, if not more, important than scholarly integrity, since in most of our daily work we count on people to be honest in all their relationships.

On The Road: Radical Research Tips For Historians And Other People

The National Archives

Your favorite Radical is settled in at the  Rumor Mill in Culver City, an Internet cafe that has a convenient coin laundry next door.   Research trips lasting longer than a few days necessitate either big luggage or laundry.  I opted for the second, since I had a Sunday, and since my travel wardrobe consists mostly of black tee shirts I only need to do one load.  But laundry also gives me another opportunity, which is to hang out and see a little bit of where I am.  Last night I walked Abbot Kinney in Venice and had an outstanding dinner at 3 Square Cafe and Bakery (barbecued ribs and sweet potato fries, with a cucumber, watercress and yogurt salad to start) and spent the rest of the evening checking out tee shirts that cost between forty and sixty dollars.

I had spent the day at UCLA Special Collections in the Women Against Violence Against Women papers.  For those of you who haven't heard me give a paper or a talk lately, WAVAW was one of several radical feminist groups that became involved in the effort to curb the production and sale of pornography by the mid-1970s.  This grassroots movement was soon opposed by other feminists, civil libertarians and (of course) the pornography industry itself, and has become famous as the "sex wars" of the 1980s.  This is a history which intersects (and is often confused) with a second, conservative, movement to enforce obscenity laws which, I will argue in my book, is a crucial historical distinction that has been overlooked.  This latter story is partly told in political archives:   hence my repeated trips to visit the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (RRPL), where records that lead up to and through the Meese Commission's national hearings on pornography in the mid-1980s are located.

But the difference between these two experiences led me to think that a quick post on research trips might be helpful, particularly for those of you just starting out in graduate school who are planning research, but also for scholars who may not have been to an archive in a while.  So with that, here are a few of the Radical's Research Tips:

Expense.  This is by far the greatest barrier to research nowadays, even for established scholars.  At Zenith, research money has actually decreased over time, not just because it has not kept pace with inflation, but because it is low hanging fruit and can be cut without affecting the entire faculty.  I find it easy to get the standard research awards from Zenith, but those now available from university coffers don't usually cover my expenses anymore. While costs can be cut by staying, or traveling, with friends, and driving rather than going by plane or train, a solo one to two week research trip that includes meals, transportation and hotel can't be budgeted at much less than $150.00 a day.  That is *with*  relatively modest priced accommodations that don't smell, Southwest getaway fares (often cheaper than a round trip train ticket in the Northeast), and the lowest priced rental car (a necessity if you are doing research in a city without reliable public transit.) 

What can help you out are research funds that are sometimes available from the collections themselves to help scholars make a trip.  History graduate students should also check out the American Historical Association's Awards and Fellowships for travel money that in some cases is specially designated for you.

Call ahead -- call way, way ahead.   Everything below follows from this, and anything you can plan prior to actually arriving at the archive extends the value of your research dollar.  Don't forget that archivists like you to use their stuff, and that they know more about any collection than you can possibly find on line.  They will always help you if you bother to ask.

Finding aids that aren't on line can usually be sent via email, and detailed descriptions of your project can sometimes elicit suggestions from the archivist about other collections you might want to look at.  The good archivist can often have several boxes waiting for you when you get there, and help you prioritize the documents you want to look at first.  Some collections may be off site and will take a couple days to retrieve.  Scholars working in presidential libraries established since the 1960s should also be prepared to have erratic access to political documents that have not yet been cleared for public use.  The process of clearing presidential materials slowed dramatically during the George W. Bush administration, and although the Obama White House has a far greater commitment to access, you will find that vast numbers of documents unrelated to national security matters have not been cleared yet.  Historians of the recent political past will also find that even though categories of materials have been cleared, memos from political advisers to the president have not, on the theory that advisers should be free to give advice without being castigated for it in their lifetimes.  So don't expect to find that "smoking gun" that you might find in, say, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library.

You also want to find out from an archivist what you have to do to get oriented, and how much time you need to build in for that on your first day.  It varies widely.  At the Reagan Library, for example, it takes about five minutes to get up and running; at the Library of Congress, getting your researchers card can take up to an hour, depending on how many researchers show up that day.  Find out what the restrictions are:  several decades ago, the New York Historical Society actually had a dress code that required women to wear skirts.  Feminism took care of that one, but other issues crop up.  For example, archives that require government issued ID cards often put trans people who have not yet (or do not ever wish to) officially transition to a gender other than the one they were given at birth are not infrequently put in the difficult position of disclosing their status to an uncomprehending person.  There are few good ways to handle this, as far as I can tell, and those who have dealt with this barrier to access might want to leave experiences in the comments section.

Finally -- and this may shock you -- there is limited seating in many reading rooms.  I have never heard of someone showing up and not getting a chair, but wouldn't that be a drag?

Getting and using the documents you need.  There is no such thing as standard archival practice when it comes to making pulls (for nubies, a "pull" is when they go and get your stuff.)  At the New York Public Library, for example, you can't put in a request ahead of time, and there are only a few pulls a day:  if you don't make the 11:00 pull, you are $hit out of luck until 1:00 -- which really means 1:30 when all is said and done.  At the Reagan, there are no rules about when you put you requests in, and the boxes appear within ten or fifteen minutes, but that isn't true at all NARA facilities.

Archives also have different rules about how many boxes you are allowed at any one time; whether you are allowed to have the whole box on the table or just one folder; and whether you have to wear little white cotton gloves to protect what you are looking at from the oil that naturally forms on the surface of your skin.  Theft of documents is a terrible problem, and you may be asked to jump through all kinds of hoops that seem like unnecessary obstacles to you but are important to keeping historical materials out of the hands of unscrupulous people who put them on the autograph market.

Copying is another variable:  National Archives (NARA) facilities have a pretty liberal copying policy, for example, although quite sensibly, they won't let you xerox documents that aren't in good shape.  The Schlesinger Library allows only 500 copies, per researcher, per year, on the sound principle that the extra handling, heat and light is too hard on the collections.

Digital photography has, I am glad to say, mostly solved these problems. I used to include a xeroxing budget in every research funding request, and I no longer do because most places will let you use a camera (with flash and sounds turned off) to photograph documents.  A cheap digital camera is possibly the best research investment you can make, and many people use a tripod, although I don't.  An iPhone produces surprisingly good reproductions, and I suspect that other smart phones do too.  Word to the wise:  even with a tripod, photographing documents can be really hard on your back.  Bring a computer in to download your research periodically and every night you should make some kind of back up.  I recommend your university server, Google's cloud, or Dropbox.  God forbid your electronics should be stolen, and poof! There goes even a couple day's work that has to be redone.

That said, I discovered to my surprise that in one of my archives, they don't permit photography, and xeroxing is almost $2.00 a page.  Be prepared to type, just like in the good old days:  most importantly, it is simply going to take you longer to make your way through a collection without copying, and you need to know that when you are figuring out how long you need to be there.  These documents should also be backed up at the end of everyday.

Check to see what is up on line first.  Increasingly, archives are preserving documents by making them available online.  Doing this work before you travel can get you oriented to the collection and give you a better sense of what, and who, you are looking for.  That said, always check the finding aid against the online collection. I was assured by one archivist that "most" of a collection I was using was available online and that I probably didn't need to make a trip to the archive:  matching the online listings to the finding aid allowed me to see that well over a third of the folders in the finding aid were not represented in digital form, and that many folders had not been reproduced in full.

What are the documents you won't find on line?  Ephemera, for one thing.  One thing I am interested in is what it cost to run a grassroots feminist anti-pornography group, and where the money came from.  Some of this information has to be cobbled together from handwritten notes, bank statements and receipts; other information can be found in IRS filings.  Neither of these is of interest to the general public, and IRS filings raise privacy issues, as does anything with a name and address on it.  The letter items are crucial to seeing who was involved, and what other groups they may have belonged to.  You also won't find the often intensely personal notes that activists wrote to each other ("Dear Sister....") that reveal interpersonal dynamics, conflict, euphoria, and burn out that radical feminist groups produced.

And finally, take time off to have fun.  I don't have to tell you how to do this, do I?  Get a guide to the city; use Yelp; buy tickets to something in advance (when traveling alone, a single ticket purchased at the last minute can be surprisingly cheap); eat at a restaurant you have always heard about; and make dates with friends, particularly in your final days when the archival work can get exhausting and mind-numbing.  Research is fun, but it can also be isolating.  You are traveling, after all:  take some time to be where you are.

Readers?

The Job Market Is A Lot Like The PBS NewsHour, And Other Advice For Skype Interviews

"Of course I can teach the second half of the U.S. History survey, Mr. DeMille "

As I have suggested in earlier years, the day of the convention interview may be coming to an end.  It has been spitting blood and teeth for at least twenty years, as the academic job market has taken a pounding with only occasional, and unusual, seasons of activity that cause the professional association newsletters to write perky articles about recovery.

Even when I was a graduate student, a person could expect to pick up more than one interview at a conference.  Three interviews were considered a tipping point after which it was clear that something you were doing was ringing a bell and there would be a job with your name on it.  Even visiting jobs sometimes merited sending a small committee to the AHA:  the job that washed me in the holy water of the Ivy League and sent me catapulting into a real career was a three-year non-TT gig at a school that sent a committee to the AHA.

However, the economic crash, the near-freeze in new hiring that followed in 2015-09, and the cautious thaw in pared down academic budgets in 2015-04 may have put a permanent dent in sending hiring committees to the annual conference, even though the professional organizations don't like it (go here for a great 2009 blog post by Robert B. Townsend of the American Historical Association in response to the last time I declared the death of the conference interview.)

Let's face it:  searches are expensive and time-consuming.  Depending on where the candidates are coming from, where your campus is and whether you are served by a major or a minor airport (when was the last time you tried to buy a plane ticket to or from Tulsa?  Columbus?  Flagstaff?  Williamstown?  Burlington? Ithaca? Corvallis?) a visit to campus from one candidate can cost up to $2500.  Most colleges have shaved a hundred bucks off each visit by making the faculty purchase their own alcohol, but there really isn't any way to budget less without asking the candidate to bring a sleeping bag.  One way to save real money, and a few precious days of winter break, is to not send three to five faculty to the annual conference.  This will result resulting in saving your institution a minimum of $3K, and as much as $8K.  And think what kind of money it could save the job candidates?  There are so few jobs that hardly anyone has even two interviews anymore.

So Miss Desmond, get ready for your close-up.  It's time for the Skype interview.

I did a Skype interview last spring, for a job that no one could have interviewed  at a conference for, and it does pose certain challenges that I will address below. But it also has great advantages.  Other than liberating a big chunk of the budget (either for more useful things or for hiring another dean), one great advantage to ditching the conference interview is that departments could be liberated from the tight calendar on which searches are approved and carried out.  We would, of course, also have to liberate ourselves from the idiotic idea that the "best" candidates, like the best local peaches, are only available at a certain time of year.  The latter could be a more difficult task, but look at it this way:  doctoral candidates defend at all times of year but departments hire as if all doctoral candidates defended in May.  Furthermore, given that most schools have two to three terms, and students drift in and out at will, why couldn't a faculty member begin work in January?

Great.  Now that we have that straight we can begin.

Here's what you need to think about when you are on the search committee:

• In case you don't really understand Skype, it is essentially a videoconferencing device (a telephone, in other words) that you can download and use for free on any laptop.  This means that it is easy to use, and you don't need to have people from IT involved.  What you do need is to position the screen in some way so that the candidate can see your faces to the extent that this is possible.  Have someone in another office Skype into the room in which you will do the interviews so that you can prop the laptop up on books and gauge how well your faces can be seen.
• There is a good chance your faces can't really be seen.  Therefore, it's a good idea to wear different clothes, space yourselves boy/girl/boy/girl, and whatnot, so that the candidate has an idea who is talking at any given time.  Even so, repeat your names occasionally.
• Even if the visuals aren't great, the candidate can see you well enough to know whether you are picking your nose, texting, passing notes or whispering with your neighbor.  Do not do anything you would not do with the candidate in the room.
• Do not suggest that a candidate go to an internet cafe for the interview.  This is wrong, since there is no possible way that the candidate can control for the atmosphere, the quality of the equipment, or even being able to get online at the correct time.  If a candidate cannot possibly do Skype at home or in a university technology studio, then settle for a conference call.
• Do consider taking advantage of how inexpensive these interviews are, and expand your semi-finalist list.  I have never been on a search where we haven't knocked people off the conference interview list for marginal reasons; and I have never done a set of conference interviews where at least a third of the candidates didn't knock themselves out of the running in the first five minutes.  I have never done a search where at least one semi-finalist who was intriguing but sort of a mystery didn't hit the ball out of the park unexpectedly when asked about hir teaching, or turn out to be interesting in some way that was not revealed in the dossier.

And if you are the candidate:

• Consider setting the stage.  That's right -- all they are going to see is your big ol' head and whatever is behind it, so use that to your advantage.  Prop your computer up on as many books as you need to pile up to ensure you are looking directly into the camera, and then decide on your backdrop.  What books are central to the thesis?  Is someone on the committee an author whose work needs to be featured -- with lots of lovely post-its bristling out of the top?  How about a green, leafy plant, that makes you look like a mature, relaxed person?
• They can only see you from the waist, or maybe mid-chest, up.  Be conservative around the face, since your head will fill half the screen:  facial jewelry that is larger than you have ever seen any of the untenured faculty in your department wear into the classroom needs to go for the Skype interview.  A big heavy ring in your septum is going to make them wonder about what they can't see.  On the other hand, everything below screen level they can't see so -- let it all hang out!  I mean literally!  It can be your little joke.
• In every interview, particularly the preliminary ones, you need to get certain things about yourself on the table, regardless of how inept the interviewers are.  And yet, in the moment, those things can be hard to remember.  The Skype interview allows you to -- write them down! A Sharpie, some note cards, and a small bulletin  board (or a dry erase white board)  that can be placed behind your laptop are a worthwhile investment.  The survey you would be expected to teach?  Sketch it out, with key texts.  A little anecdote that dresses up a methodological problem in your thesis?  A phrase like "Soup kitchen/condom/fireman" will remind you of exactly what you wanted to say about it.
• While I don't necessarily recommend this, some of us, when especially nervous, find that a quick swallow of vodka does the trick.  Guess what?  They'll never smell it on you.
• Be bold.  Answer questions aggressively, and make sure you address your answers to the person who asked them, even though the people at the table may look like little flesh-colored balloons with wigs on.  You have to exaggerate turning your head, since you can see them just by flicking your eyes:  women, in particular, get annoyed when they ask a question and the candidate appears to be directing hir answer to the men in the room. 

Above all, be prepared to do a Skype interview if you are going on the market.  I have known several job candidates recently who were taken by surprise by this, and did not have computers that had cameras in them.  You can buy a serviceable webcam over the internet for as little as $25 and spend a couple hours learning to use it so that you are ready to go when the search committee calls.  While it isn't OK for the committee to force you to do an interview in a public place, it also isn't OK for you not to be ready to do an interview because you haven't bothered to prepare for what is an increasingly common way to do screening interviews.  When they call, they may want to schedule for next week -- or for Friday.  The web cam is as essential to your job market success as a good interviewing outfit.

You may have discovered already that many of the links embedded in this post are to other posts I have done on the job market in past years.  Read them and learn. Good luck.