Yes, there is a chance the candidate might do badly in a phone interview, but I do not see how it is any different from doing badly in a face to face interview. I remember totally tanking a face-to-face at the AHA, even though I had thoroughly prepared. (It was a totally degrading experience, because after the first five minutes it was clear that the committee did not want to talk with me further and was just going through the motions. I would have felt better if someone had leaped up from the couch and hit a giant gong to let me know I was done). I also had a great phone interview for a post doc and did not get the position. I do not think you can blame either outcome on the format of the interview. Frankly, I really do not understand your objection.

You cannot undo the fact that search committees and universities will do everything they can to externalize the costs onto the applicants. That is the logic of ‘excellence with no money” and the bottom line of the modern university. Dance has it right. The AHA should pull together two on-line systems. One for grad school applications and one for job searches. If they do this right, it can be sold as money and time saving proposition to the universities that participate.

Our program at SU is intentionally small, and one of the advantages of that was that while I was grad director, we managed to provide $500 stipends to MLA attendees each year. Not ideal, especially when the conf was West Coast, but pretty good when most of our students split hotel costs (and to be fair, MLA does a decent job of providing relatively fair-cost hotel options).

In terms of our searches (5 in the 9 years I’ve been here), our last two have gone the route of option #2 above, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. We provide our own candidates with practice phone interviews and feedback, but I’m sure that there are excellent candidates we’ve interviewed who haven’t received that kind of practice and who have suffered as a result (as you suggest above). It is a specific skill/talent, and one that can make a big difference in how well a person does, but it’s a skill that has absolutely nothing to do with their ultimate success. Too often, I’ve ended being the committee member who’s cautioned against treating “phone skills” as a relevant factor in our decisions.

cgb

I’m also imagining that the system, once built, could have a variant that smoothes the administration around book/article prizes. Alternatively, might make it more feasible for the AHA to lobby the medical industry to fund a grant for research in medical history, if the industry just supplies the grant and some admin fees. And so forth.

First of all, the AHA sets up an online job processing system, which saves lots of paper, mailing costs, and administrative costs for the dept. Candidates upload materials—depts download an entire package. Letters can still be customized if desired. This adds to the value that a dept receives for registering as a hiring institution with the AHA, which I think they need to do (with associated fees) to get the suite or the table in the hall. It also serves to filter bona fide candidates—those whose materials are complete in the AHAJOBS system AND verified as students, adjunct or independent scholars rather than as TT-faculty are eligible for a limited number of last-minute discounted hotel rooms, perhaps making it easier to do room shares. They can also apply for additional support with the costs, via a relatively simple process–submit a formal letter online attesting to need. The system also provides centralized scheduling (without names, eg, you can see that your candidate is blocked for 3 hours but not the other schools interviewing), reducing more hassle for the hiring dept. It also publicizes basic information such as “interviews all scheduled”, reducing the need for the wiki and thus the potential for nastiness on the internet. It also offers (additional fee, requires uploading dept letterhead) to generate and mail “thank you, you’ve been rejected” letters, a perennial weak spot on the part of depts.

Last minute flights are still a problem—however, the AHA will be able to lobby candidates registered in the system to encourage them to plan to attend regardless, publicizing the career advice workshops that they do, perhaps promising a CV-Doctor workshop to anyone who attends but receives no interviews logged in the system.

All this is funded by membership fees and by the fees paid by hiring institutions, and possibly some grant money.

I don’t know how many institutions seek to bypass the AHA system—this might add to that.