I consider "Kevin" a friend. We are not particularly close, but we have chatted occasionally in the halls of the college where we both teach. Our kids have taken swimming lessons together and have played on the same sports teams. Kevin has gone out of his way to be kind to me, always greeting me with a smile and wondering how things are going with my research and teaching. When a member of my family was recently injured, Kevin's concern for her well-being lasted longer than most of my other colleagues'.
That is why I was not thrilled about serving as an outside member of a search committee in Kevin's department. He had had a series of one-year contracts with the college and had just thrown his hat into the ring for a tenure-track opening in his area of expertise. He was what we in academe refer to as an "inside candidate."
As anyone who has been on a search committee will attest, dealing with inside candidates can be dicey.
Most members of search committees are well acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of inside candidates. If they have produced a stellar record of teaching, research, and service, and have proven to be good colleagues, then the committee's work is relatively painless. In those cases, the inside candidate gets hired, there are no bruised relationships or difficult conversations, and everyone goes home feeling pretty good about themselves.
But what if the inside candidate's record has been below average? A search committee's decision to reject an insider will inevitably produce hurt feelings, anger, and awkwardness, especially if it happens in a small department at a small college like the one where I teach.
Kevin, unfortunately, fell into the latter camp. His teaching evaluations were poor and he had no publications. Yet he was a beloved colleague to most of the members of his department as well as to people like me, who encountered him on the sidewalk or at the library circulation desk.
All of those attributes, I might add, were considered as the search committee evaluated his application and weighed it against a crop of impressive outside candidates who, at least on paper, seemed to have great potential for improving the quality of the department in a way that Kevin could not.
He did not get the job. Needless to say, we don't have those informal sidewalk conversations anymore. In fact, I no longer see him around the campus and I have no idea, apart from the occasional rumor, where he went.
Academe can be a cruel-hearted place to work. As in any other job, only the strong survive. Most search committees forced to consider Kevin's application would probably have done the same thing we did -- hire someone else. But Kevin's case is a bit more complicated at the place where I teach -- a church-related college with a mission rooted in Christian virtues such as compassion, grace, and community.
It is this last virtue -- "community" -- that has become a buzzword in church-related higher education. At hundreds of colleges, the word "community" means much more than just a group of people with shared interests in teaching and scholarship.
At those institutions, community is deliberately cultivated. It is often driven by a common religious faith or a shared sense of mission. Because of that sense of mission, faculty and staff members tend to be more loyal to their employer. They have a sense that there is something at stake in higher education beyond personal ambition. They are even willing to make sacrifices in their lives and careers to advance the greater cause of the institution. I have met dozens of employees who have turned down better-paying jobs out of a sense of duty and service to the college where I work.
Admittedly, it was the way the college articulated its understanding of community that first attracted me to it. My church-related college seemed to do things differently from most other academic institutions. As a Christian, I was pleased when administrators explained to me the ways in which community was fostered through chapel services, a belief in the dignity of all persons, a generous benefits package, and an ethic of mutual care for one another.
It was a countercultural vision -- an approach to higher education far removed from the cutthroat world of academe that I had come to know in graduate school.
During my first few years of teaching here, I often wondered just how far such a communal vision could be applied in an academic setting. Granted, I have wonderful colleagues -- many of them are people like Kevin who are concerned with my life beyond the usual chat about professional progress. I have a sense here that I am part of something bigger than myself. I am probably not leaving anytime soon.
But if I have learned anything from my experience on the search committee, it is that "community" can go only so far in the world of academe, even the religious version.
I know now that church-related colleges are not the same as churches. Would a true community of Christian believers reject one of its weakest members? Of course not. A real community defined by Christian compassion would do everything possible to encourage, help, and care for people like Kevin. Colleges, however, are not those kinds of communities, and we should not pretend otherwise.
Although I am unwilling to give up believing in the possibilities of a compassionate and caring Christian academic community, I also think that we who work at church-related colleges must remember that we live in a world where the purest forms of community will always be subordinated to the pragmatic demands of college life, especially the need to offer a quality education that will attract students, donors, and notice from U.S. News & World Report.
Do I feel good about what we, as a search committee, did to Kevin? No, I do not. But was our decision good for the college? Yes, I believe so.
But as long as that is the case, then church-related colleges should tone down their rhetoric about community -- at least a little bit.
George Theodore is the pseudonym of an associate professor in the humanities at a church-related college in the Northeast.
