Two nonacademic jobs in my background have greatly influenced my career in academe.

One was the few years I spent volunteering at a crisis hotline in New Orleans. The training I received and the experience of handling those calls helped to prepare me for the many occasions when my office is visited by a freaked-out student, a restless parent, or a frustrated faculty member.

The other job was the minimum-wage year I spent scrubbing the drive-through concrete and filtering French-fry oil while wearing an asbestos apron at a down-at-the-heels Jack in the Box restaurant. That influenced my attitude about being a professor: You’ll rarely catch me complaining about my job.

Which nonacademic job experiences helped prepare you to work in academe?

Admittedly this may seem like a fantasy for some of you, but I have noticed over the years that the strongest candidates seem to receive multiple job offers that arrive at more or less the same time.

In fact, in probably half of the hires I supervised this year, our chosen candidates had serious offers from other institutions at the same time as we were making our pitch.

I suppose that the big three considerations for such sought-after finalists are: student quality, opportunities for professional advancement, and salary/cost of living. But perhaps there are other factors to consider.

What advice would you offer a candidate who has to decide between competing offers?

Citing widespread unrest among faculty members and alumni, Baylor University’s regents fired the president, John M. Lilley, effective immediately, according to a report in The Chronicle.

Just three years ago, then-president Robert B. Sloan Jr. left the job amid controversy.

While his predecessor’s downfall was marked by deep philosophical rifts over the future of Baylor, the world’s largest Baptist university, Mr. Lilley’s firing appears to be due instead to clashes over his management decisions and style.

Said Howard K. Batson, chair of the regents: ““A lot of the faculty were upset, and our faculty are important to us. The board lost the confidence in John’s ability to unite the various Baylor constituencies.”

Read more

In my last entry, I discussed how job seekers can take advantage of late openings to gain a foothold in academe. One commenter noted that temporary, non-tenure-track positions are just that — temporary — and that no one should go into one believing anything different.

My own job history includes getting a visiting position that led to one on the tenure track, and I know of many other Ph.D.‘s who have made similar transitions. However, it is certainly true that many non-tenure-track faculty members do not get hired into tenure-track positions at the same (or any) institution, which raises a very important issue: What obligations does a hiring institution have to visiting, temporary, or non-tenure-track faculty members?

At minimum, such candidates should be treated with professionalism and...

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Brutus observes:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life Is bound in shallows and in miseries.”

The job fortunes of applicants who are “all but dissertation” fall in line with that observation. I’ve seen many instances in which the hiring of A.B.D.‘s turned out great; they were able to finish their dissertations and make a felicitous start to the profession. I’ve also seen promising careers shuffled into “shallows” and “miseries” when A.B.D.‘s took full-time jobs, either teaching or staff positions, that ended up being time hogs and snuffed out the possibility of finishing the dissertation in a timely way.

I advise people to avoid taking a tenure-track...

Yesterday I met with one of our deans, her incoming successor, and a faculty member in one of our larger programs. A faculty member had recently resigned and left a sizeable gap in our course schedule. Because of the late date, the remote location of our university, and the large enrollments in several of the courses, we are facing a major challenge in trying to accommodate our students without overwhelming the remaining faculty members in the program.

Over the years, I have had similar meetings with professors and chairs, and have several times needed to make temporary full-time hires to replace faculty members who have announced their departures late in the season.

From an institutional point of view, the greatest challenge is finding the right person for the position. In the past, I have worked with local doctoral universities, advertised on disciplinary...

I am a stickler for confidentiality in searches. I won’t contact references until I receive specific approval from candidates. I won’t call an on-campus telephone number if I can avoid it. I won’t use a candidate’s campus e-mail address if I can find an alternate address.

That last concern is probably just me being paranoid, based on anecdotes about institutions monitoring employee e-mail messages, but it’s also an issue of the appropriate use of campus resources. Faculty members using a campus e-mail account to search for another job is a little like their using campus letterhead, printers, and postal accounts for their applications.

Mind you, I’m not talking about applicants who are completing their graduate work, serving in postdocs, or in one-year positions — i.e, situations in which it is clear they are on the job...

A freshly minted Ph.D. landed a tenure-track position at a top-tier undergraduate institution. As a part of his package, he negotiated to have a budget for new library purchases. His doctoral specialty was not well represented in the library holdings, and he needed very specific standard reference works and other materials for his research.

He developed his list for the library, which totaled several thousand dollars, the amount that had been agreed upon. A budget cut hit, however, and the order was cancelled.

“They aren’t a part of your contract,” a senior administrator told him. “They were, in effect, a wish list, not a part of your package. We can’t fund wishes now.”

The negotiations had been conducted via e-mail when the young Ph.D. was at his former institution. That e-mail account was purged when he departed, and...