Professors, administrators, and staff members in the middle of their careers are more likely than other employees to be dissatisfied with their jobs, career advancement, and the fairness of the workplace, according to an extensive survey conducted by The Chronicle.

More than 15,000 employees were surveyed at 89 colleges and universities that participated in The Chronicle‘s first-ever Great Colleges to Work For project.

“When employees hit their late 40s or after eight years in a campus job — just after many faculty members have come up for tenure — workers reach their lowest levels of satisfaction on several measures. …”

“The excitement wears off when the honeymoon phase ends,” says Richard K. Boyer, principal and managing partner of ModernThink LLC, a Wilmington, Del., human-resources-consulting company, which managed the survey for The Chronicle. “Just like in corporate...

One of my decanal duties includes securing interim department chairs when the existing chairs resign. In talking to other deans, I’ve found that the chairs who resign late in the academic year are usually among the most effective and are leaving for deanships at other institutions.

The later the resignation arrives, the more important it becomes to name an acting chair quickly.

I like to call the acting-chair role “taking one for the home team” because I realize the difficulties in serving temporarily. Research gets put on hold, and other plans deferred. Often, the compensation is negligible. The opportunity, however, can be a good way to get your feet wet in the world of administration.

What advice would you offer folks who are asked to serve as interim chair?

I just started a new position this week as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Buena Vista University, so I have been thinking about career transitions and institutional fit.

My new university bears many strong similarities to the small college where I started my faculty career. At times, I find the similarities ironic, as many of them are things I found irritating as a young junior faculty member but today I see as positive aspects of my professional life.

For example, at the small college, my first job after graduate school, I struggled with my new colleagues’ apparently odd and counterproductive obsession with institutional procedures and policies. I thought many governance committees, activities, and protocols were a waste of faculty time and more properly the purview of administrators who were getting paid a lot of money to care about such matters....

Falling home prices have both helped and hurt colleges and universities in their recruiting, according to a report in The Chronicle.

“For some institutions, the collapsing real-estate market would be a great recruitment tool—if their state economies weren’t also ailing.

‘For the openings that we’ve had, there are more attractive prices than they’ve seen in the last couple years,’ said David B. Ashley, president of the University of Nevada at Las Vegas.”

Job candidates who already own homes have found it challenging to sell them and make a career move to a new institution. However, junior faculty hires are often first-time buyers, and the struggling real-estate market has made it possible for them to purchase homes, especially in cities where the housing stock has been out of reach.

“A few weeks after Robert J. Alexander arrived in Northern California last month, he...

Want to know which colleges have the best tenure policies? Or those that provide a healthy work-life balance? Or where administrators and faculty members have a good working relationship?

Watch The Chronicle‘s Web site on Monday, July 14, for the results of the first-ever survey of Great Colleges to Work For, academe’s version of Fortune‘s Best Companies to Work For.

The Chronicle plans to make this an annual project. For more information on next year’s survey, click here.

Those of you fortunate enough to have relocation expenses included in your hiring packages will find that such benefits come in a variety of forms. Over my career, the most common form I’ve seen has been for the institution to offer reimbursement of all or part of the cost of a self-haul truck. On one occasion I was able to hire a full-service moving company, with the bill sent directly to my employer, no reimbursement necessary. Now that was awesome.

Since relocation season is upon us, I was wondering if anyone had advice to offer newly hired professors and administrators regarding moving expenses (or moving in general).

What are your pet peeves about how colleges and universities handle relocation for employees?

The University of Nevada at Reno says it has been forced to spend about $1.7-millon on outside legal help to fend off a flurry of lawsuits filed by employees who are all represented by the same lawyer, according to a report on The Chronicle’s News Blog based on an article in the Reno Gazette-Journal.

“UNR said it’s the target of meritless complaints filed by disgruntled current or former employees with the help of an attorney who uses ‘abusive’ tactics,” the Gazette-Journal reported.

The lawyer, Jeff Dickerson, told the newspaper that the only thing “absurd and abusive” is how the university has wasted public money in what he called its attempts to cover up corruption.

A year after DePaul University denied tenure to Norman G. Finkelstein, the controversial political scientist has still been unable to find another post in academe, according to a report on The Chronicle’s News blog about a recent interview Mr. Finkelstein gave to The Jewish Week.

Mr. Finkelstein told that local newspaper that he doubted he could get even a job teaching high school.

“The way they do background checks is to Google your name,” he said. “With me, they would get 30,000 Web sites, one-third of them saying I am a Holocaust denier, a supporter of terrorism, a crackpot, and a lunatic.”

Police arrested the president of the University of Evansville this month for driving while intoxicated, according to a report on The Chronicle’s News Blog.

In a statement released by the university, the president, Stephen G. Jennings, who is 61, acknowledged making “a very serious mistake,” apologized, and pledged to “take every necessary action to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”

On top of all the bad news about state budgets, the recent release of a report by Moody’s Investors Service on the financial health of private colleges and universities whose bonds it rates adds still more budgetary gloom to the new hiring season.

Private institutions face multiple challenges in the current economy. Problems with student lending, shrinking endowments, financial disruptions in families with children in college, and credit scarcity all make meeting enrollment targets and managing budgets even more difficult than usual, particularly at the great majority of private institutions that are tuition driven.

All those developments are bad news for job seekers. Colleges and universities are already canceling searches and, in some cases, laying off faculty members. Renewals of existing positions and allocations of new ones will certainly receive extra institutional scrutiny ...