Every college and university where I’ve worked has included extra-departmental faculty members on search committees, though the rationale has been somewhat different in each place. It’s also important to note that all four of those institutions have been small and primarily focused on teaching.

Chosen carefully, such external committee members can have a powerful positive effect on the outcome of a search. From a candidate’s perspective, they can show that the institution as a whole is interested in each department’s hiring, and can lay the foundation for future collegial relationships.

From a departmental perspective, it is (or, more precisely, can be) extremely helpful to get a clear, external perspective on the various candidates. It’s almost inevitable that the disciplinary enthusiasms and schisms that operate in a particular...

College professors have a well-known affinity for comic strips, but I have a feeling that this recent Wizard of Id strip won’t be going up on office doors or into PowerPoint slides on too many campuses.

When I saw it, it made me think about a colleague who told me that a relative of his, who is a farmer, once observed that he worked more during most days than a professor did in an entire semester (professors only teach 12 hours per semester, right?).

One of the problems we face as a profession is the perception that thinking is not legitimate work. It’s hard to compare jobs that include visible, sweaty, physical labor to reading, writing, and reflecting. I have to say, however, that writing a book is just as tedious and exhausting as any job I’ve ever had (and I’ve had some very...

The governor of Oregon is expected to sign a bill that includes principles of the American Federation of Teachers’ Faculty and College Excellence campaign. The legislature approved the bill over the weekend, as the State Senate voted unanimously to make Oregon the first state to enact such a law.

The union’s national campaign, which began in early 2007, urges colleges to hire more full-time faculty members and to give part-timers health benefits and to adopt policies of “equal pay for equal work.”

Oregon’s bill would require colleges to document just who makes up the faculty — many adjuncts fall between the cracks when it comes to official data — and would give part-timers...

Here’s the latest appointment news …

The summer months can give chairs and deans night sweats, but it’s not from the heat. They are dealing with unsuccessful searches, last-minute retirements, and surprise resignations. This time of year is very active among administrators as they try to figure out how to fill positions when the calendar dictates that full searches may be impractical.

This season underscores two important elements about the search process:

I’ve written here a couple of times about how important it is these days for job candidates to carefully evaluate the financial circumstances of potential employers. A recent article in the Des Moines Register on the indebtedness of various private colleges in Iowa highlights, once again, how important it is to consider an institution’s overall financial health as part of your deliberations about potential offers.

Currently one of the conversations occurring in the state (and I’m sure in other states as well) concerns cuts in institutions’ TIAA-CREF contributions. While I wouldn’t say in the current economy that such cuts are an automatic indicator of serious financial problems on a campus, candidates should certainly ask questions about what’s behind...

Harvard University is feeling an unaccustomed pinch, as it tightens its belt another few notches in an effort to deal with its withering endowment, the Boston Globe reports. The university depends on its endowment — which last June was valued at $36.9-billion, but is expected to plummet more than 30 percent by the end of this month — to help cover about a third of its daily operating expenses, the newspaper notes. As a result, Harvard officials told the Globe, the world’s richest university can no longer afford to replace top scholars who retire or are poached by other universities, which has many professors fretting about the university’s academic standing and the impact on its students.

The California State University system has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle an age-discrimination complaint involving an instructor at San Francisco State University who was passed over for a tenure-track job at age 61 in favor of a younger candidate without a doctorate, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced. The agency sued the university system on behalf of the instructor, Lawford Goddard, last year.

The university has denied that age discrimination was involved in the decision affecting Mr. Goddard, but it chose to settle as “a good business decision,” Susan Westover, a lawyer for the system, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

The...

I recently saw an advertisement for a full-time lectureship in the humanities, Ph.D. required, at a flagship state university; the salary would be $32,000, plus benefits, to teach a 4-4 load, half in general education.

This advertisement has made the rounds in e-mails and discussions, and as some observers have noted, perhaps praise should be offered to the university for not farming out the work to underpaid/overworked adjuncts, but rather creating a bona fide full-time position. There are lots of folks out there who would love to have a job with a salary/benefits like that. On the other hand, what year is this? A salary of $32,000 is roughly what one would have earned for an entry-level position at a state university in 1989.

Obviously the law of supply and demand works here, but how can faculty leaders, especially those in the humanities, keep the current...

Salaries for most faculty and staff members at the University of California could be reduced by 8 percent through pay cuts, furloughs, or a combination of the two, under a proposal released on Wednesday by the university’s president, Mark G. Yudof.

The proposal, which was sent in a letter to university employees, seeks to use the salary cuts to cover about one-quarter of the university’s $800-million budget deficit over the next 12 months. Another quarter of the budget shortfall will be made up with increases in tuition, and the remaining half will need to come from budget cuts on the system’s 10 campuses, Mr. Yudof wrote.

The options to achieve the salary savings include 21 days of unpaid furloughs or an 8-percent pay cut for all employees making more than $46,000...