This is the time of the year when offers and counteroffers are made, negotiated, accepted, and declined. You might think that the word "and" should be changed to "or" -- accepted or declined -- for, after all, doesn't it have to be one or the other? Well actually, no.
In the strange and wondrous world of the academic job market it is perfectly possible to negotiate terms you promptly reject, or to accept and then unaccept a position in the same day, or to say "yes" and mean "now that we've settled the salary issue, let's talk about the condo I want to buy in Aspen." In the past three years and a bit, I've been on the other side of about 90 of these conversations, and only one has been straightforward. I called the candidate and said, "I am prepared to offer you such and such a salary, a small research budget, and moving expenses up to a certain amount," and he said "I'll take it." I was speechless. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before, and it hasn't happened again.
You should always be suspicious of an old codger who says, "In my day," but I am going to say it anyway. In my day, things were simpler in part because there was so much less to negotiate about. A letter of one paragraph arrived in the mail; it named a figure, gave a starting date and said something minimal about the nature of your responsibilities before segueing abruptly into some boiler-plate language about pensions and medical plans, lifted directly from the university statutes.
Now offer letters can easily be 10 pages long, and speak to everything from the size of your office to the brand of the furniture in your office; to the location of your office; to the location, size, and furnishing of your assistant's office; to the location, size, and furnishings of your assistant's assistant's office; to the extra summer salary you will be paid during months when you will be at least 1,000 miles away from your office; to the graduate students you will bring with you from the institution that just last year refurbished your office; not to mention start-up costs, tuition allowances for the children you do not yet have, special parking places, forgivable (what a wonderful word) loans for a down payment on your house or your yacht, and assurances that five of your best friends will be hired in the first two years, just in time for your return from the leave you were granted so that you could "recharge your batteries." (Negotiating sweet deals is such hard work.)
After a few rounds of one of these conversations I begin to feel like a contestant on a TV game show called "Test of Love," where the challenge posed by the person playing against me is, "How much can I ask you for before your ardor cools?" (It is as if Sally Field kept saying to me over and over again, "Do you really really like me?") The incredible thing is that my ardor almost never cools. It has something to do with being in the hunt; you don't want to come home without having caught something.
On more than one occasion my first response to a letter with a list of 17 demands is "She must be kidding" or "Who does he think he is?" But then, within an embarrassingly short time, I'm saying to myself, "Well, there might be a way to do that." One time, when I was trying to keep someone from going elsewhere, I asked him what he wanted, and he answered, a chimpanzee. It turned out that he had a theory that chimpanzees could be taught math, and the only way to test the theory would be try it out on his very own chimpanzee. I had already begun to find out what facilities would be available to house the animal and what liabilities we would have to insure against when he saved me by taking the other university's offer. (Did he get his chimpanzee? I don't know and have been afraid to ask.) I escaped from that one with my life (if not my sanity), but a threshold had been passed, and I am now ready for cheetahs, giraffes, and bears, but I draw the line (I hope) at elephants.
All deans have similar stories to tell, and all would agree, I think, that the real story is the story behind the negotiations over specific items. Salaries, leave time, research budgets, housing allowances, endowed chairs -- all of these are stalking horses for issues that bubble just beneath the surface of what seems to all appearances to be a purely professional conversation. Only belatedly, when it is all over, do you realize that you really didn't know what was going on in a back and forth stretching over five months; and, what is worse, you realize that the other party -- the supposedly rational, clear-eyed, I'd-never-jerk-you-around recruitee -- didn't know either.
When someone turns you down, there are always reasons, but often when you hear them you say to yourself, it couldn't have been that. One couple declined finally because, I was told, they couldn't find a suitable house, although they were willing to spend up to a $1-million. This makes no sense, even in Chicago, but no doubt there was a sense for which this "reason" was a stand in. I just never found out what it was. Did they? Then there was the apparently eager senior scholar who volunteered a date by which we would be told yes or no (hinting all the while that it would be yes), but then, as the date drew nearer, asked that it be extended a month because a new suitor with new blandishments had unexpectedly appeared; and then one month later did it again, and a month after that yet again. When we finally decided to part amicably, the number of serial lovers was up to six and counting, and to my knowledge the saga -- resembling nothing so much as those medieval tales in which a succession of eligible young men ask for the hand of the king's daughter -- continues to this day. Was this the "Test of Love" game played out on a national stage? Or was it an instance of trophy hunting -- how many can I bag? Or was the pattern the outcropping of issues buried deep in the psyche and never confronted head on? Beats me.
Occasionally you will be clued into what's really going on by the nature of the first contact. Someone calls you up just after a big fight with a dean or just before a divorce or in the midst of an exodus of friends and associates ("they're breaking up that old gang of mine"). In these instances, you have a fighting chance because you can take the measure of the trauma and think about whether its force will fade in a couple of months and whether you can offer conditions that will assuage it. But more often you're treading in a minefield in the dark, never knowing what your next step might detonate, and this is especially true when you find yourself in the middle of someone else's marriage or long-term relationship. Here a lot depends on just when the question of the spouse or partner is introduced, or if it ever is. Again, the straightforward scenario is the exception. Only rarely will you be told up front, "Look, there have to be two good jobs, and if that isn't a realistic possibility it's best that we go no further."
The other scenarios are fairly limited in number: The spouse or partner is acknowledged to exist, but you are assured that employment for him or her is not a deal-breaker (don't believe it, even if they do); the spouse or partner is never mentioned until every little detail has been worked out and you are awaiting the signed offer letter (now you're in so deep that you feel obliged to scramble around and find something); the spouse or partner is mentioned but you're told that since he or she is not an academic and has very marketable skills, you needn't worry about it (call out the troops and pull out the stops); the spouse or partner you know to be an academic is never mentioned, and when you say that you would be happy to look at his or her CV, the answer is vague or not forthcoming (watch out; something is afoot here, and even though it isn't strictly any of your business, the business you are trying to do will surely be affected by it).
Alertness to the possibility of such situations will not do you very much good because by the time you recognize that you are in one, you will have been sucked into its dynamic; and you will already be playing a role dictated not by your agenda, but by the unacknowledged agendas of two people who have been locked in an economy for years; each now sees a chance to gain an objective by deploying and manipulating a third party -- you! The offer you generate might be used by one to validate his or her worth in the eyes of the other, and once that has been accomplished, there will be no more need for you and your wares. The two may be engaged in their own "Test of Love." One may be saying (through you), Will you (Ruth-like) go wherever I go? The other may be saying (again through you), Will you give up this opportunity of a lifetime on my account? Or they may be playing the game of "my turn, your turn": "I've moved for you twice; how can you hold back now?" "I've moved for you twice, you can't expect me to do it again." Or they may be playing the self-sacrifice or who's-got-the-biggest-debt game. One declares, "I'll do it (either stay or go) for you." The other replies, "I don't want you to do it for me; I want you to do it because you want to." "That's asking too much." "All I'm asking is that you do nothing against your will." "No, you're asking for a guarantee that you will never have to hear regrets and recriminations."
One shouldn't respond to having been drawn into one of these domestic dramas (and what I have offered here is only a small sample) by feeling that you've been had. Such a response (and the indignation that goes with it) would be justified only if the two partners had come into the situation with the clearly seen intention of using you and your office and your university as go-betweens, as therapists who, unlike professional therapists, happen to take their patients out to dinner and pay for their rooms in the best hotels.
That is in fact what happens, but it is not by design. It is just that the prospect of rooting up one's life and moving lock, stock, and barrel to some town you've never been in for more than five days is likely to trigger deeply felt anxieties and bring into focus issues that have been playing themselves out in a thousand smaller forms. At the end of the affair, the remark I hear most often is some version of "I never knew," as in, "I never knew how attached I was to my present circumstances" (this said by the candidate who gives as the reason for declining "I didn't want to live in Chicago," forgetting, it would seem, that Chicago is the location of the job he applied for), or "I never knew how oppressive and suffocating my life had become" or "I never knew the extent to which my happiness depended on the weather" or "I never knew how attached I was to my flower garden."
So even when you lose and the prize slips away, you can tell yourself that at least you have helped some poor (and now considerably richer) soul come to terms with his or her position in this vale of tears, even though in the process the terms you fashioned with great effort and high hopes have been rejected. And when you win, think about the odds, and rejoice that in pulling off a successful recruitment, you have done something that is little short of a miracle given all the variables, most of which are hidden from you and none of which you can control.
