Last Wednesday about 20-25 grad students, Richard Anderson, Scott
Dakins and I met to talk about faculty recruiting.  Since our meeting
turned out to be a (very good) discussion rather than a gripe session,
I'm going to dispense with the usual "gripe/action item" report and just
tell you what went on.
 
After a brief discussion of how faculty recruiting is different this
year, we spent our time on ways we could improve communication between
the faculty and grad students wrt faculty recruiting.  
 
--- So that students find out about who has been invited to interview
earlier than Scott's talk announcements, I will send out mail right after
the recruiting committee has made a decision to invite.  And the faculty
hosts will follow up with a more detailed message about the person and his/her
area, the same message that goes to the faculty.  One motivation for this is
that the students would like more notice for planning their own
participation in the interviewing process.  This will go to student
mailboxes rather than the bulletin board for the privacy issue mentioned
below.
 
--- We'll create a web-based calendar of interviews so that the students can
quickly get an overview of what the recruiting season looks like in a glance.
This will have to be protected in some way, since a few of the candidates
may be interviewing without their home departments knowing and therefore
will not want their talk to be publically announced as an interview.
The students wanted something that would be separate from the normal
list of talks, so that they could tell who among our speakers are
candidates.  I've asked our web master Scott Rose for his input on this,
and he is putting something together. 
 
--- I'll tell the students to whom we have made offers, and whom we have
rejected as we do so.  And they will assume that if they hear nothing, the
candidate is still on hold.
 
--- The students would like a little more flexibility wrt the student meeting,
so that if the candidate wants more time to prepare for his/her talk,
he/she can take it.  (The students felt that some candidates got edgy
as the time for their presentation got closer and closer, and so began to be
less involved in the student meeting.)  The students also wanted a more natural
ending to the meeting, if conversation was beginning to fade.  We decided to
shorten the graduate student meeting to an hour (leaving the candidate from
2:30 to 3:30 to prepare for the talk), but leave open the option to extend
it to 3p (as it is now), if things were going well and everyone wanted to
continue. 
 
--- We need to find a better place to hold the student meeting.
 
--- It would help the faculty better gauge student reaction to the candidates
if the students could provide some sort of summary reaction to each candidate,
plus a rolling ranking of sorts as the season moves on.  So that the faculty
has a better sense of which candidates are really high on the list, and which
are really low.
We talked about various criteria by which the students could evaluate
the candidates and came up with this list:
        what the students feel is the candidate's aptitude for teaching
        what the students feel is the candidate's aptitude for advising
        how the candidate fits into the department areawise
        how the candidate fits into the department socially (our culture
                comes into play here)
        how the students feel about their being hired
        what the students liked best and least about the candidate.
The students are going to decide what they want to do here, and just do it.
 
I think that's it.
 
To the students:  I'd be delighted to meet with you again, if you feel
the need.  And let me know if I've omitted something important that we
discussed.