More job searches by language and literature scholars are coming up empty, because of the budget tightening and hiring freezes adopted at colleges in response to the battered economy. A new analysis of employment advertising conducted by the Modern Language Association, to be released today, projects a 21-percent drop in faculty positions advertised in the association’s electronic job list this academic year, compared to a year earlier.

The decline is the steepest one-year drop in the 34-year history of the list. “For the individuals looking for a job this is really a tough situation,” said Rosemary G. Feal, executive director of the association.

Those looking to land a job as a faculty member in English language or literature will have 22.2-percent fewer openings to look at during the 2008-9 academic year, compared with last year, the MLA projects. The expected number—1,420 jobs...

In a recent post, Bitch Ph.D. compares leaving academe to being dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend who was never that into you:

what’s so painful about “leaving” academia is that we usually aren’t leaving by choice. More often, academia is leaving us, and all we’re doing is having to slowly come to the point of acknowledging that we’ve been left alone in this big apartment full of books, maybe with a cat or two, and a big pile of bills on the counter. Academia, that bastard; he just up and walked one day, and it took us a while to realize he wasn’t going to come back.

You try to convince yourself that you’ll get back together, she writes:

Oh, you know, maybe we could maintain the fiction that the relationship isn’t over. We could seek him out, hang around in the background picking up a few scraps of part-time attention when he needs someone to fill a gap in his schedule a...

Some professors, students, and donors at Duquesne University are upset about the sudden dismissal last week of popular law dean Don Guter, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports.

As the newspaper tells it …

Without giving a reason, university leaders informed law faculty [last Wednesday] morning that Mr. Guter, dean since 2005, was out. A statement said Ken Gormley, an associate vice president and member of the law faculty, would serve as interim dean and that Mr. Guter, a former Navy judge advocate general, would remain on the faculty.

Mr. Guter told a Post-Gazette reporter that he was just as surprised by his removal as many of his colleagues were, adding that he was given no explanation and no option except to step down or get the boot:

“My reaction to this is shock. The school — really by a lot of people’s accounts, not just mine — has never been in better shape,” he...

Lawrence Lessig, a renowned legal scholar best known for arguing for reduced legal restrictions on copyright, will leave Stanford Law School and return to Harvard Law School. Mr. Lessig, a founding board member of the Creative Commons, previously taught at Harvard before going to Stanford, in 2000.

In announcing the move on Friday, Elena Kagan, dean of Harvard Law, called Mr. Lessig “one of the most brilliant and important legal scholars of our time.” She added: “His work has recast the very terms of discussion and debate in multiple areas of law, ranging from intellectual property to constitutional theory.”

Earlier this year, he publicly considered running for Congress, but decided challenging a popular former state senator would be too difficult.

With the holiday season upon us, many folks are facing the annual dilemma of workplace gift giving. I personally like to give to charities where possible rather than give gifts that are either tawdry or just plain stupid. Of course, then I wonder if people think of a donation given in their name as being like the one George Costanza on Seinfeld made to “The Human Fund.”

How is the gift-giving climate is on your campus? Are gifts for colleagues and assistants demanded? Are they met with hostility? Does a failure-to-give generate lasting repercussions? Do people chip in on gifts for administrative assistants and housekeeping, or are you all left to your own resources?

What advice can you provide new faculty and staff members about scouting out the gift-giving culture at their institutions?

I’ve mentioned the Tenured Radical blog before. Its author, Claire Potter, is a consistently thoughtful and provocative commenter on many issues of interest to faculty members, administrators, and others concerned with the state of higher education.

Her most recent entry, Lifeboat: A Conversation About the Incredible Shrinking Budget, is a meditation on how her own institution is discussing its budget issues. As she suggests, almost every college and university in the country (and certainly every one that’s responsibly managed) is having some version of this conversation.

At my own institution, the vice presidents and the president spent most of a day earlier in this week posing various budget, endowment, and enrollment scenarios, and trying to think about the most constructive ways to respond (which may turn out to be the least-destructive ways). The conversation was challenging,...

Several recent news stories have reported on voluntary pay cuts taken by some senior administrators during the current financial crisis. The logic behind such pay cuts is both practical (it frees up money for other purposes) and political (it signals a willingness by leaders to share the pain).

I once heard a public-relations consultant say, however, that voluntary pay cuts might actually be unwise, sort of like publicly cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. His concern was that for off-campus folks (and some people on campuses, too), such a move might smack of desperation, triggering other panics and anxieties among prospective students, donors, and other constituencies.

Is it wise for senior administrators to take pay cuts, especially if no other employee salaries are being cut, or is it merely cynical symbolism?