My email today included something that seems dangerously close to a teaching award:

Recently you should have received an invitation to the first HOPE Banquet sponsored by Residence Life and Housing Services. The celebration will be held on [redacted].

HOPE stands for Honoring Our Professors’ Excellence, which is the entire purpose of the evening. Each of our Resident Assistant and Graduate Assistant student staff members were offered the opportunity to nominate one Duke faculty member to be invited to this event. The students were asked to select a faculty member who has made a tremendous impact upon them, either inside or outside of the classroom. You were nominated as one of those faculty.

Between this and going to the Teaching and Learning Conference, I may be drummed out of political science (or at least the methods section) in short order…

Is it just me, or does the combination of an hour-long research presentation and teaching a 75-minute undergraduate class seem like a bit much for a campus interview? I guess teaching other peoples’ classes is just karmic reward for cancelling my own classes while on these junkets interviews.

In other “interview follies” news, I’m currently playing email tag to arrange another phone interview for a one-year job in the Midwest. As it turns out, today is also a crunch day in the Spreadsheet of Death, with about a half-dozen application deadlines spread around the next week or so—my part in these applications is all done, but presumably this is the point where serious application triage begins at the recipients’ ends (and, from a self-interested perspective, where competing offers might be most useful).

Finally, my name showed up in an ad in the campus newspaper today; to my disappointment, I was not identified as a member of David Horowitz’s enemies list in the SAF’s full-page ad—instead I was merely being recognized as one of the honorees at this evening’s HOPE Banquet.