"I had a teaching fellowship at Chapel Hill, which was really a pretty nice job, and we had planned to stay for five years.  I did have an offer from Ohio University but we were not particularly interested in that and then I got a call from the placement office that the guy from Dartmouth was there and would I want an appointment with him.  I found out later that Arthur Jensen, who was chairman of the department, was interviewing at Duke and sort of ran out of candidates so he had a free afternoon.  He had gotten a note from an alumnus about some guy named Seymour at Chapel Hill so he came over to Chapel Hill andI went to see him.  We had a very agreeable chat but I did not even know where Dartmouth was--in fact we had for many years the atlas in which we had to mark Hanover because I didn't know whether New Hampshire was the one on the right or on the left.   With a Princetonian's bias I though that if I got an offer from Amherst I would take it in a second, but I wasn't so sure about Dartmouth, but it was an invitation to an interview so I went.  

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"A little while later than that they invited me up, so I went to New York, took the Boston & Maine sleeper which went to White River.  I took a taxi up to Hanover and then went to Sanborn House--now this was all new territory for me, the first job interview--and I was told to check in with Mabel Seavey, the department secretary, so I went up to the third floor, which was the Shakespeare Room, a beautifully carved room, and Mabel Seavey met me and took me in to Arthru Jensen's office and he started me on interviews.  The custom was you were interviewed by each professor in the department, that's a lot of people.  So he would take me in to Professor Hurd's office and we would talk, and after fifteen minutes he would tap on the door and take me out to Professor Booth's office, but every time he got me out in the hallway he would say 'Hey, you need to go to the can?' but before I could answer he would tap o the next door.  I do remember having some anxiety about that.

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"The other thing I remember, and I remember it so keenly--at the other end of the Shakespeare Room was a little seminar room that was used for coffee, they had a coffee machine, and the department at ten o'clock would meet there for coffee so I came in to be part of the coffee group, I was more of a listener than a participant, they weren't interviewing me, but I heard these people talking about this student or that student and one faculty member would say 'I have Williams in my class, didn't you have him in English 1?  He wrote the best paper about Emily Dickinson..." And suddenly I was with a group of people talking about undergraduates and caring about how they were doing.  Now, I'm dead serious about this: when your a graduate student with a teaching fellowship undergraduates to the graduate staff are simply a rationale for the budget for the English Department.  You just as a department don't care about them, you just deliver what the institution requires of you.  Going into a place where people really were interested in their students as individuals and human beings blew me away.  It was a very powerful experience for me. 

 

"I don't know whether I got the offer then--I do remember we went down to the Hanover Inn for lunch and I made the mistake of having a baked Alaska for dessert.  It turned out to be a round baked ball with chocolate syrup on it, and it was like trying to cut a bowling ball.  Every time you put your knife in it it would slide over and you would try to keep it from going in your lap, and I just figured that I would lose my job because of the dessert at the Inn."

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Thaddeus 3/18/18

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