I recently ran across a great quotation from the late Bill Lane, who was a longtime professor at Western Kentucky University: "Never despise your own gift and never covet another." This caused me to ponder something I see repeatedly: discipline envy.

A sense of envy that can so easily turn into rank jealousy finds fertile ground in the "perks" of other academic disciplines, whether they occur in the form of greater institutional support, higher pay, lower teaching loads, elevated prestige, public approbation, or any other boon. As one humanities professor told me, "Every time I hear about the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] initiatives from our governor or our institution's president, I just want to scream. It's a slap in the face to the rest of us."

Likewise, it's easy to envy our nonacademic counterparts in professions like law, medicine,...

The February meeting of our board of trustees starts this evening, and so this afternoon we held an orientation session for two incoming members of the board. As part of this orientation, I give a presentation on academic freedom, the tenure-and-promotion process, and other matters in which the work of the board is likely to intersect with that of the faculty.

We have a pretty small board—fewer than 25 members. Several of them are prominent local citizens, though a larger number come from some distance for meetings. We meet on the campus, so the board members know the town and the university's physical layout very well.

One interesting question asked by a new trustee was about faculty-trustee interaction. I haven't been here that long (this is my fifth board meeting), so I don't know all the ins and outs of the...

Many institutions are starting to offer contracts to their new faculty members. It's an exciting time all around. For the hiring departments, it's fun to think about the energy and talents the new colleagues will bring. For the incoming faculty members, it's joyous to celebrate leaving the job market behind successfully.

For the new hires, there is often a shock, though, that comes in August: either no paycheck or a reduced paycheck. At many institutions, new faculty members report in mid-August, but the paychecks don't fully kick in until the September pay date, often as much as six weeks after that report date. Recent Ph.D. graduates, used to being poor, often find this to be aggravating, but for those who are more seasoned and who are changing institutions, this can be particularly problematic. I have known of many faculty members who changed institutions and found...

Idaho's State Board of Education is trying to reverse an antinepotism law that bars the state's public universities from hiring presidential spouses, the Associated Press reports. Board members worry that the law will make it tougher for Idaho's public universities to recruit and retain top leaders, many of whom have spouses in academe.

A case in point: Laura Vailas, a Ph.D. nutritionist married to the president of Idaho State University, Arthur Vailas, recently had to forgo applying for an $85,000 post at the university, lest she find herself in violation of the law, Mark Browning, a spokesman for the board, told Idaho lawmakers. Browning also pointed out that academic job opportunities for presidential spouses at nearby institutions are pretty scant thanks to the remote location of Idaho's...

As a department chair opened an envelope with a faculty application inside, she was surprised to see several sticks of cinnamon chewing gum drop onto her desk. The application letter had a hand-written note at the bottom that said, "Please let the search committee have this gum as they review my application; I hope they will find it refreshing."

The chair assumed that the applicant thought that the committee would view him as the "refreshing candidate." She chuckled to herself and thought, "Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to have included a packet of nuts."

From unsolicited phone calls to pop-in visits to emails from VIP's in support of candidates, anyone who has served in the search process has experienced the "full court press," where the applicant tries to find every conceivable angle to stand out from the other applicants. Recently I heard of...

As we've been conducting our campus interviews this year, I've begun to think more about how candidates' days on campus are arranged. Even at a small institution with comparatively accessible administrators, such as mine, it's difficult to arrange on-campus interviews so that each of, say, two or three candidates meets the interviewers in the same order.

Not being able to arrange that order does, I fear, change the dynamics for candidates who meet with the dean, the president, and me at different points during their campus visits. For me, meeting a candidate early in the day means that she won't yet have the experience of meeting with the faculty, having lunch with a student group, and doing her teaching demonstration. For the president, it means the candidate won't yet have talked to me or met the others, either. Those variables will inevitably change the tenor and content...

Speaking before a group of new faculty members at a large state university, a dean reviewed the basics of higher-education terminology: "academic freedom," "tenure," and the various academic ranks. As he broke down the general expectations for each rank, one observation about associate professor stood out: "Associate professor is the normal terminal rank for most tenured faculty members. Full professor is generally reserved for only a few persons who serve or publish with particular distinction."

One of the attendees asked, "So most of us can only achieve one promotion for the entirety of our careers? I just assumed that everyone would achieve full professor at some point."

The dean said, "I'm sure that most faculty members view full professor as something of an entitlement, with associate professor marking the passage to tenure and full professor being sort of the...

In a recent post, FemaleScienceProfessor recounts the "legend" of a friend whose job candidacy was inadvertently doomed by an adviser's complimentary letter of recommendation and the pettiness of a search-committee member who read it, or so the story goes:

Years ago, a friend of mine had a highly unsuccessful interview for a faculty position. According to the legend, the department chair, who had had the same adviser as the candidate, was upset that their mutual adviser had written in the reference letter that the candidate was THE BEST graduate student he had ever advised. This was humiliating for the not-best professor, and he did not support hiring the candidate.

While FSP concedes that there's no shortage of petty people in (and out of) academe, she thinks it's...

Sarah, whose doctoral defense was already on the calendar, had landed three on-campus interviews, which shocked her greatly given the realities of the academic market. The first interview was at a small teaching institution with only a fair reputation. The other two interviews were at institutions that better matched her professional goals.

Two weeks before the first interview, she decided to withdraw from that search, since she had doubts that she would be happy at the institution. Among her thoughts was that it wasn't really ethical for her to go through the motions of interviewing when she already had determined that she would be unlikely to take the position if it were offered.

She mentioned this to her dissertation adviser, who told her that she should go through with the interview "for the experience." The first interview would be a dry run for her other...

A recent thread in The Chronicle's Forums discusses whether or not an institution conducting on-campus visits should pay for candidates' expenses for interviewing.

I know it's an uncommon practice for community colleges; until recently, such institutions hired almost entirely locally. (That is changing, though, with the oversupply of Ph.D.'s in many disciplines and the increasing aspirations of community colleges.) I am explicitly not talking about such colleges here.

That leaves four-year colleges and universities, from the fanciest liberal-arts colleges and research universities, public and private, to the dustiest, remotest, smallest regional institutions. For any of them, there is no reasonable justification for declining to pay expenses for campus interviews.

If a college...