Interviewing ten candidate a day for a couple of days can make a guy a little crazy. On the one hand, you owe each candidate your thoughtful attention, because careers are at stake. But conducting interviews is a tedious process and everyone who has ever done it knows that faces and voices and attitudes tend to blur into an indistinguishable lumpy mass. So much earnestness! So much contrived presentation of self!
I remember one such endless day in a featureless room in a high floor of a pretentious modern hotel in Chicago, or Atlanta, or perhaps Houston. We were making an appointment to our budding "Writing Program" -- an academic innovation that I now believe to have been a total disaster. Writing Programs hired "writing specialists" -- experimentalist social scientists who believe in "theory" and who generally can't themselves write a lick. Or half a lick.
I remember one candidate with whom I had this remarkable exchange:
Me: "Could you remind me about the subject of your dissertation."
He: "I worked with the Brown Corpus."
Me (astonished): "What the heck is the Brown Corpus."
He: "It's a computer file of one million edited words drawn from magazines and newspapers. It was compiled at Brown University. The idea is to study the English language as it actually written."
(I interrupt this conversation to say that "Brown Corpus" may be the most injudiciously-named academic enterprise in history. To me, "brown corpus" might have something to do with decayed corpuscles, or a fecal mass, or someone or something a-mouldering in its grave. Not a phrase with much poetry to it. But let us proceed.)
Me: "That seems interesting. What exactly did you study in this corpus."
He: "I studied the use of the comma."
Me: "The comma. You studied the comma." (More astonishment). "What in the world did you learn about the comma?
He: "I learned that the comma is used to link a sequence of nouns, or phrases, in a series."
I was already giddy and aghast when I heard this news and I had a sudden revelation, a flash. I saw myself picking up the candidate and throwing him through the plate glass window and watching as he plummeted painfully to the street below. But I controlled myself and thanked the candidate and, I believe, ended the interview politely. I didn't even indulge myself with something snarky, like, "do you intend to do any follow-up work on a more challenging mark of punctuation, as for example the exclamation point?"
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