In a recent interview in my office, a candidate mentioned that her doctoral advisers had been very critical about her interest in locating a faculty position that emphasizes undergraduate research. As a scientist, she talked about the importance of cultivating strong research skills in preparation for both graduate and professional work. She believed that her role as a professor would be to foster excellence in a department that shared that kind of vision.

As she related this to me, I remembered one of my mentors wriggling his nose over a university where I had an interview. Never mind my out-and-out JOY over even having an interview, he was insistent that going to the interview was a waste of my time and that my talents would be wasted if I ended up taking the position. I landed the job and had a wonderful several years there before moving to my current institution.

According to an article in the Wisconsin State Journal, professors aren’t the only ones departing the University of Wisconsin for greener pastures; chancellors, apparently, are saying sayonara at an alarming rate, too. The reporter, Deborah Ziff, writes that:

In the last year, more than a third of the University of Wisconsin’s chancellors announced they were vacating the head office. …

Heads of five of 13 UW System ‘s four-year universities are leaving, or have already left — Whitewater, Madison, River Falls, Parkside, and Green Bay.

The reason, of course, is money. Ziff notes that despite the Board of Regents’

A few postings ago, I mentioned that the application process seems to force all applicants into a kind of harsh format that bleaches out individuality. The only place where individuality can rise to the surface is in the cover letter.

As I’ve pondered this realization a bit, I can remember how my own cover letters changed throughout my career. When I was A.B.D., I knew I was at a disadvantage, so I spent hours crafting each cover letter. This was in the days before the Internet, and I would actually go to the library and retrieve microfiche copies of institutions’ catalogs so that I could speak specifically about each university and how I might fit in with the department’s curriculum. I studied faculty rosters to see how many professors had degrees from doctoral...

Sadly, though not surprisingly, Republicans filibustered the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (HR 2831) in the U.S. Senate yesterday, effectively killing the bill, the Los Angeles Times reports. The bill would have reversed a Supreme Court ruling that gives victims of pay discrimination only a narrow window — 180 days from the date they first get paid — in which to file a complaint. The bill’s defeat means that victims who discover after that six-month time frame that their employer is shafting them have little recourse.

Of course, the reason Republicans opposed the bill, according to...

In his latest Heads Up column, Gary A. Olson, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Illinois State University, suggests that colleges that refuse to hire dual-career couples out of a fear of being saddled with an undesirable spousal hire are missing out on a good thing.

As a case in point, he recounts the experience of a leading scholar and dean he knows who, before taking her current job, was up for a deanship at another institution that turned her down because it didn’t want to foot the bill for her spouse, who is a superstar in his own right.

By not being open to the idea of a spousal hire, the institution let a golden opportunity slip away, as “the dean’s husband would have been every bit as much of a catch for the institution as the dean,” Olson...

When I decided to work on a Ph.D. in English literature, back in the early ’90s, I remember having a conversation with my wife that went something like this:

“Well, it will take me four or five years, but at least when I’m done, I will make a good living. I guess that professors start at, what, about $75K? I hear that full professors all make way over $100 grand.”

My wife, who went to a small, underendowed private college, just laughed. “Um, I think we need to drive through the faculty parking lot at a couple of campuses. There are a lot of very old, very used cars in them. I think you are way off on that starting-salary thing.”

She was right, of course. And was I wrong. The first job I interviewed for when I was A.B.D. was slated to start at $30K, with very limited benefits. I had earned that much back when I taught...

In a previous post, I mentioned that higher education has systematized and regularized applications into a Procrustean bed that seems to excise individuality from the process.

This uniformity is helpful in terms of ensuring that applicants include the same basic materials (this is, apples are compared to apples through official application forms and a narrow range of formats for résumés). I must admit that in my role as dean, where I see applications for positions in 15 departments, it is hard to differentiate among the basic applications for disciplines as diverse as art and physics. Certainly there are portfolios that accompany materials or personal Web sites that include other materials for candidates, but the stacks of paper that are the first level of consideration are...