The Interview
I like this, so I thought I’d share. There’s this job interview for a prospective philosophy teacher, see…
Other candidates should create distractions. One man illustrated proper logic with this syllogism:
All men are mortal.
Socrates is mortal.
Therefore, Socrates is a man.
I raised my hand. “Birds are mortal too, aren’t they?” I asked, hoping he would correct his error.
“Yes,” our teacher agreed.
“So Socrates could be a bird?”
He smiled benignly. “No. Socrates doesn’t have feathers.”
You beat me to it. I wanted to submit that precise bit in a comment before you linked to the article, but you hadn’t yet created an appropriate thread. Now you have, but it’s too late…
It really does deserve some kind of classic status, doesn’t it?
Yes, that was a nice article.
The other half of the story is probably about the candidate walking away from the interview kicking him/herself: “Did I really say that? My whole academic career is lost. How could I have been so stupid?”
At least I prefer to put it down to interview nerves rather than real stupidity.
Funny, though.
Having gone through many academic interviews and having also been on academic search committees, let me say that the piece was just a little very tiny bit excessive. I did once have a candidate who, when I interviewed her, interrupted me whenever I tried to ask another or a follow-up question, saying “Excuse me, I’m not done talking.” She was very well done…burnt, in fact.
Saw this one at the weekend in an episode of “Family Guy”. Our hero and his pals are horrified to discover his local bar has been converted into a British pub full of expats discussing cricket. One tries to explain the game to our hero et al. Our hero asks if anyone understood it. One pal ventures that the only “British idiom” he knows is that “fag” means “cigarette”. To which our hero replies “Could someone tell this cigarette to shut up?”
(For the sake of the the Richard Warnotcks of the world, consider this an immediate disavowal of homophobia)
Haw!
(Yes but what about Britophobia, expatophobia, cricketophilophobia, and surely a touch of toffophobia? Dear oh dear…)
I think Mr Warnotck is only obsessed with discovering homophobia, and that only in anti-Freudians. So I think I am now safe. Otherwise my attempts to use good English with correct spelling might condemn me as being illiterates-phobic.