Autism, Equity and the Faculty Hiring Process (opinion)

In the academic job market, campus visits are framed as opportunities to showcase scholarship, teaching and collegiality. In practice, however, they often function as multiday social auditions where candidates are expected to move seamlessly from formal presentations to dinners, hallway conversations and spontaneous small talk, all while conveying confidence and intellectual brilliance. For most, these rituals are exhausting but manageable. For autistic scholars, they can be insurmountable barriers.

As an autistic academic, I have experienced firsthand how hiring practices tend to conflate intellectual ability with social performance. What is measured in these high-stakes encounters is not only one’s capacity to research, teach or mentor, but also one’s ability to follow unspoken social rules and perform normative versions of likability. However, there are strategies and accommodations that universities could put in place to ensure a more equitable process for neurodivergent candidates.

The Campus Visit as a Social Test

In general, autistic candidates are disadvantaged by standard interview formats, which, as Christopher E. Whelpley and Cynthia P. May write, tend to “focus on interview skills, appearance, and social interactions rather than on the skills needed for a given position.” Since autistic people’s social abilities and conversational patterns do not align with neurotypical criteria, they can seem rude or uninterested during conversations even when they are focused and engaged. Socialization can be extremely difficult for autistic people, from finding the right way to express their ideas to understanding when it is their turn to speak.

Campus visits often resemble extended job interviews in which everything is subject to evaluation. From the formal job talk to the casual coffee chat, candidates are expected to embody a polished, spontaneous professionalism. Yet these situations privilege people who excel at social presentation and penalize those for whom such constant interaction is arduous and draining.

Research confirms this. Sandra C. Jones notes that autistic academics often struggle with the hidden social demands of professional life: “Understanding and following social rules, interpreting others’ actions and reactions, masking autistic behaviors, and combining ‘professional’ and ‘personal’ interactions are effortful activities for many autistic people.” In hiring contexts, where competition is fierce, these challenges become magnified.

Should I stop talking or should I keep going? Have I really answered this committee member’s question? Am I making too much eye contact, which could be seen as intimidating, or too little, which could come across as rude? These are the questions that I obsessed over during my first campus visit, since the “natural” flow of neurotypical conversations was a mystery to me (and still is to this day).

“Fitting in” for people whose natural tendencies differ from social norms requires strong impression-management skills, which most autistic people lack. Therefore, we usually tend to mask. We try to mimic nonautistic people’s behaviors and speech patterns, but this is both exhausting and, more often than not, unconvincing. In such conditions, it is not the quality of the candidate’s research or teaching that is being assessed, but their ability to decode invisible rules and follow them under pressure.

The Importance of Self-Narration

Academic interviews almost always include open-ended questions with little to no structure, such as “Tell us about yourself,” “What are your greatest strengths and weaknesses?” or “What can you bring to our department?” Neurotypical candidates usually know how to use these questions as a chance to sell themselves; as Katie Maras, et al. write, “Autistic candidates, however, find it difficult to interpret these sorts of questions, hindering their ability to formulate and recall a relevant and appropriately detailed response that conveys their best attributes and most relevant experience.”

The struggle that autistic people encounter when trying to narrate their own lived experiences is well documented. As Tilait Tanweer et al. put it, “Children and adults with autism have difficulties in recalling events and facts from their personal life,” and, when they do, their storytelling is seen as less coherent and less captivating. The requirement to be able to organize information that is already present in the candidate’s application materials on the spot seems redundant and does not serve any purpose other than, again, forcing the person to conform to neurotypical conversational standards.

For allistic candidates, vague and open-ended prompts are opportunities to shine. They instinctively know that they are an invitation to employ impression-management tactics that cast them in the best possible light. When asked to talk about themselves, they will try to strike a balance between objective facts and the strategic framing of their professional experiences. They will naturally know what information is relevant and what details could bore their listeners. On the contrary, autistic candidates may find these questions intimidating, because being too concise can seem underwhelming, while too much detail can make one appear boring or arrogant.

The candidate’s experiences and achievements are already there, in the curriculum vitae and the dossier, so there is technically no reason to ask them to repeat this information. Refraining from asking questions that simply ask candidates to restate facts in the dossier, or making sure that this type of question is formulated in a way that indicates the specific nature of the information being sought, would allow autistic scholars to develop their thought in a way that is appropriate and satisfactory, thus lessening the perceived qualitative and quantitative gap between neurotypical candidates’ answers and theirs.

In Defense of Written Formats

From articles to book proposals and grant applications, scholars are constantly required to express their thoughts, ideas and results in written form. However, despite the centrality of writing in academic life, campus visits are almost entirely oral and conversational.

The job talk or presentation must be done in person and synchronously. The interview portion is done orally and requires candidates to talk about themselves and their research in a natural and relatively informal manner. The various lunches, dinners and spontaneous exchanges with potential colleagues and students are all designed to test the collegiality and sociability of candidates in contexts that range from very formal to casual. Yet the teaching demonstration is probably the only portion of campus visits where oral expression is justified and indispensable.

In a study conducted by Philippa L. Howard and Felicity Sedgewick on autistic people’s preferred modes of communication, they found that “many participants said they had difficulties with the speed of verbal communication, and so using the written form gave them ‘time to process’ what was said to them, their reaction and their response.” This aligns with previous research, which has constantly shown that autistic people tend to prefer written communication to verbal modes of interaction. Personally, I know I can write a compelling grant proposal, but in a 20-minute Q&A, my answers may come across as flat or convoluted.

Not only do written formats give autistic people the time to think about their answers and the tone that they want to adopt, but they also reduce “the difficulties autistic people may face in interpreting verbal and non-verbal cues during interactions,” as Órla Walsh et al. put it. The asynchronous and mediated nature of written communication makes it less likely that autistic candidates will be deemed unlikable, rude or awkward by hiring committees. Candidates can focus on clarity, accuracy and substance, qualities that should matter most in academic evaluation.

Given that application materials already provide hiring committees with detailed insights into a candidate’s skills, the additional demand of a marathon interview seems less like a fair assessment than an unnecessary social filter. In a study of autistic candidates’ experiences of job interviews by Mikaela Finn et al., “Participants suggested changes to the interview structure, including providing the questions … or information on structure … beforehand and being able to ‘write down the answers’ to questions rather than ‘verbalizing’ information.” This type of accommodation could make hiring practices in academia much more equitable without compromising their integrity.

What Inclusion Could Look Like

Hiring committees often justify the social intensity of campus visits as a way to assess fit. But fit often functions as a proxy for personality, likability or sociability, which are all qualities that are defined according to neurotypical norms. If universities are serious about equity, they need to rethink what they are measuring. Concrete steps could include providing interview questions in advance, allowing written or asynchronous responses, and reducing the emphasis on social events during campus visits.

Academic hiring, as it stands, is not a neutral process. It is a social test designed by and for neurotypical people, which systematically disadvantages autistic candidates. By conflating sociability with hireability, committees risk excluding brilliant scholars whose only failing is not knowing how to play by unwritten rules. As I see it, the academy should be in the business of hiring those who can research, teach and think in transformative ways, whether they have mastered small talk and eye contact or not.