But he gulped a four-espresso Americano before class began, trying to fire up his nerves. And he arrived early to make sure his PowerPoint presentation was functional. And he wore a tie and ironed his shirt and shined his shoes and triple-checked his fly. He needs to make an extra effort today, because he’s being observed as part of his tenure approval.

Associate professor Robert Gordon currently sits in the back row with his legs crossed. He is fat-bottomed with a small chinless face dominated by his nose, so Jack thinks of him as “the Tapir.” On the tip of Gordon’s nose, tortoiseshell glasses are perched, and his eyes wander between Jack and the notepad on which he is busily scribbling. He wears a sport coat, pleated corduroys, and boat shoes with argyle socks.

Jack has despised him from the first moment they met, and he’s certain the feeling is mutual. The AAAS conference is an annual gathering for the sciences as well as a clearinghouse for academic job interviews, and seven years ago, Jack traveled there fresh out of grad school, wearing a borrowed suit. He had put the flight and hotel on his overtaxed credit card, and he hadn’t slept much the night before. This was one of seven interviews he had lined up, all of them in the San Francisco Marriott connected to the conference center.

He walked into the hotel room crowded with professors on the UW hiring committee. They were all seated in a ring of chairs except for the Tapir. He was lying on the bed, twirling a Montblanc pen in his fingers. He asked only two questions of Jack. The first—“How would you describe your pedagogy?”—was generic and easy enough to field, but the second was intended to throw him: “You went to an Ivy League university for your undergrad. You then attended a—how shall we say it—second-tier regional school for your graduate education. Can you explain the . . . downgrade?”