I overheard a colleague say once that his basketball skills had paid dividends in his academic career.

In graduate school, he had discovered that the department chair and several other significant faculty members played lunchtime pickup games. So he landed an invitation and ended up playing almost daily with most of the members of his dissertation committee. He found a similar situation in his first tenure-track job, playing with several leaders on the campus, including his department chair and the dean, who became friends as well as supervisors.

I’ve seen the same thing happen with golf, community-service organizations, and other extracurricular activities, in which a faculty or staff member forms relationships with important persons through nonacademic interests. I’ve been told by such insiders that it is simply a part of collegiality — but...

Despite academe’s supposedly progressive tendencies, when it comes to parental policies, mothers seem to get all the love while fathers get left out in the cold. In a recent Balancing Act column, Mary Ann Mason, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and co-director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & Family Security, describes that cultural bias and calls on colleges to extend paid parental leave (and other official and unofficial parental perks) to dads.

Too many colleges still assume that the primary parent is always the mother, Mason writes. “Among the members of the Association of American Universities (the 62 top-ranked research institutions),” for instance, “only a handful offer paid parental leave to fathers after their children are born...

Let’s begin by understanding a couple of terms tossed around as of late: “pay parity” and “pay equity.” Quick now! Which do you want? If you said pay equity, please stay after class and clean the erasers. Part timers who want equal pay for equal work want, yes, pay parity. Equity, on the other hand, is what we both agree it is — a terribly slippery slope.

So part timers want parity; heck, they’ve demanded it. Others within higher education have demanded it for them. Still, after three decades during which the number of part-time faculty members has grown to more than half-a-million souls, pay parity is still a hazy opium dream. Administrators say, There’s just not the money for pay parity. Uh huh. And I have a bridge to sell you. Of course there’s money. Let me give you a for instance. In New York, the union that...

When I was 16, I landed my first paying job, at a Jack in the Box restaurant. I changed the grease in the fryers, flipped burgers, mopped bathrooms, and scrubbed the concrete slab outside the drive-thru window. It was a perfect job for a teenager: It taught me what hard work really was and it taught me to swallow my pride (necessary when you are covered in french-fry grease and the cheerleading squad happens to come to the counter).

I suppose that higher education’s version of fast-food work is teaching freshman composition, working in grants administration, or maybe in the entry-level roles in enrollment services. Each of these kinds of experiences is hard work but produces lessons that can last for an entire career.

What other jobs in higher education might qualify as character-building experiences?

The union of faculty members and librarians on the University of Massachusetts’ campuses in Amherst and in Boston has reached a tentative agreement on a contract that includes a one-year moratorium on salary increases.

Officials of the union, the Massachusetts Society of Professors, said they hoped the agreement, reached on Friday, would persuade the UMass Board of Trustees not to raise fees for students. The board’s finance committee recommended on Friday that the trustees raise fees by $1,500.

While the union consented to the pay freeze in order to “prevent layoffs and program cuts on campuses,” according to Randall Phillis, its president, other union leaders voiced reservations about how the university had reacted to the budget crunch.

The trustees’ finance committee recommended the fee increase “despite protests...

In my last post, I asked what hiring institutions could do to help new faculty members adjust to their new campus. Predictably — and understandably — one responder immediately replied, “Hire. Their. Spouse.”

The Chronicle forums devote an entire board to the two-body problem, and I understand the challenge firsthand. My wife is an academic who has faced career struggles, made worse by the fact that she is in a field with few opportunities.

The area of spousal or partner accommodation is yet another place where the current recession is going to have serious negative consequences. In the past, when we recruited a candidate and needed to find work...

Think presidents are the top earners in academe? Think again. While college and university presidents lately have been criticized for taking home hefty paychecks, even as the bottom falls out of higher-education budgets, data compiled and analyzed by The Chronicle reveal that they’re generally not their institutions’ best-paid employees.

In fact, a measley 11 out of 88 private-college employees who pocketed $1-million or more in the 2006-7 fiscal year held the top job, The Chronicle’s new report on the compensation of more than 4,000 employees at 600 private four-year colleges found. Those making the biggest bucks were more often than not administrators and professors at medical...

Rebecca S. Chopp, president of Colgate University since 2002, will become the new president of Swarthmore College, the college’s Board of Managers announced on Saturday. Ms. Chopp takes over the position being vacated by Alfred H. Bloom, who is leaving to run New York University’s new campus in Abu Dhabi. Mr. Bloom has been Swarthmore’s president since 1991.

Ms. Chopp, a scholar of religion, women’s studies, and American culture, received her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago and her B.A. at Kansas Wesleyan University. She has been provost at Emory and dean of the divinity school at Yale, and is well known as a...

I think my university is finished with faculty hiring for this year. We completed four of the five tenure-track searches we anticipated at the beginning of the fall, and suspended the other with the consent of the program faculty members affected. I don’t anticipate further searches — at least full-scale ones — at this point in the year. So my thoughts now turn to what our hiring season will look like next year.

I’m already thinking about several factors. First, we will face a further decline in endowment revenue, as the dismal returns of the past year will continue to eat into our three-year retrospective endowment average. We will know a lot more about enrollment in a couple of months, and once we see what happens next fall we should have a better idea of how the current economic downturn will affect student demand over the next several years....