Well, that put me in my place!

I'm on a search committee at another school in town on account of there having to be women on the committee and externals and having an external woman kill two birds with one stone and I owed it to someone so - anyway.

The talks are this week, the first one today. The talk was your usual attempt to cram lots of material into 45 minutes plus a lot of look-at-me-Ma self-aggrandizing stuff. I've seen worse.

At the interview we were plodding along and I had rather ascertained that he did actually know more about the topic than he had indicated during the lecture, so things were looking up for him. Then the equal opportunity officer asked him about how he would make his teaching gender-sensitive.

He waffled around, finally stating that he would just kinda wait until there was an official policy and all that. The EOO gave him a frosty - we do actually have an official policy, I was interested in how you would apply this to your teaching. I did one of my pithy remarks to the tone of "Ok, right, let the women sort this out." He protested energetically, and we changed the subject.

We went through some more questions, and then we had to bridge some time as some copies were made of an exposé he brought along with him. I asked him to explain one of the stupid comments he had made during his lecture trying to be funny. There were lots of them, this one I found rather nasty.

He exploded. He had the impression that I was insinuating that he was not a sensitive person and he would just not stand for that, he feels that he must sharply refute this and insist that this is not the case!!!!!!! He rose a bit up from his chair (so he could holler down at me). He turned red in the face. I just shrugged and said "Sorry" and changed the subject.

Can you imagine losing your cool and hollering at someone on your interviewing committee? What is the expected outcome of that? I suppose he felt that he put me in my place. We'll see...