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 of our...

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 finish line: After...

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 improbable that her friend's candidacy was sabotaged by one:

Perhaps I am naïve, but I don't believe that the wounded ego...

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 two interviews. Still, Sarah ...

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 cannot afford such interviews, it cannot afford to hire tenure-track faculty members. An expensive campus...

A search-committee chair handed her dean the list of finalists for a national search. The dean asked, "Did Dr. Matters not make the list?"

The chair said, "No. He met the minimum requirements but compared with the others, he was clearly in the second tier."

The dean looked down and then said, "I need to let you know at this point that Dr. Matters is well-connected with several influential board members, including at least one substantial donor to your home department."

"Does this mean that we have to interview him?"

"Well, he's local and it wouldn't cost anything, so I would encourage you to invite him to a courtesy interview. You won't have to offer him the job, but it would score points with some VIP's if we could at least say, 'He was one of our finalists.'"

This scenario repeats itself all over the country at this time of year. Sometimes it's a well-connected applicant....

An article in yesterday's Chronicle notes that there's still a lot of inequity when it comes to household chores, according to a study from the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender and Research, at Stanford University. The study, "Housework Is an Academic Issue," found that female scientists shoulder "54 percent" of "core household tasks, such as cooking, cleaning, and laundry—about twice as much as their male counterparts," while still working "at their paying jobs about 56 hours a week, almost the same number of hours as men do."

They are hardly alone. Many working women "do a disproportionate amount of housework," says Jennifer Sheridan, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison's Women in Science & Engineering Leadership Institute.

That's hardly a revelation. For the scientists, though, "more housework doesn't affect the quality of work but its quantity, which could make a...

At the beginning of her career, a freshly minted Ph.D. began receiving invitations to join various Who's Who lists. She was tickled to have been nominated by those mysterious persons who had submitted her name, and she dutifully sent in her information and added the bullet points to her CV.

One of these invitations turned into aggravation, though. Salespersons began to call her office trying to sell plaques, coffee mugs, and other logo material, as well as the printed registry of other honorees (at almost $400). She asked them not to contact her anymore and did a little research on the company. It turned out, of course, that the particular "honor" she'd received was probably the result of her name's being on a mailing list, rather than of any actual accomplishments.

In fact, an Internet search of the phrase "Who's Who scam" had some interesting results. Of a particularly grievous sort ...

It's no surprise that Thomas H. Benton's column on why you shouldn't go to grad school is one of the most popular articles on The Chronicle's Web site these days, what with the bottom dropping out of the humanities job market and all. Now, via The Boston Globe's Braniac blog, comes one more reason to think twice about getting a doctoral degree: According to the economics blogger Mike Mandel, the real earnings of full-time workers who hold a Ph.D. have sunk by 10 percent since 1999 (see chart below).

I suppose I really am a dean at heart because after I saw Avatar in 3-D, I started thinking about how the technology of the film would impact higher education. I've taught online before, as well as distance courses through compressed video. I despised the sterile nature of the experiences, as it was impossible to read the nuances of voices and body language in the ways that I enjoy. Further, the distance created a barrier to mentorship that was troublesome.
 
I wonder, though, if those barriers will change when/if distance learning ever advances to the point at which professors and students have the ultra-high-end avatars of the sort in the movie that seem so completely life-like (in the film it is nearly impossible to know what's real and what's computer generated). I rather like the idea of moving to Aruba and teaching my classes from there, with my avatar teaching on a virtual Oxford...