• The University of Illinois is suspending its online Global Campus program and dismissing its staff members, The News-Gazette reports. 

Virtually the entire University of Illinois Global Campus staff, which services about 500 students in the online education program, has been notified of layoffs. ...

Global Campus had 44 academic employees at its peak, said its current director, Charles Evans, but lost several staffers due to retirements and promotions.

Its remaining 32 employees were given notice of no reappointment almost three weeks ago. Of those, 20 were given six months' notice, and a dozen given a full year.

The terminations won't be final until after the next board of trustees meeting Sept. 10, according...

This article about colleges and the increasing rate of lawsuits caught my eye. Last year I shared coffee with a visiting scholar from Europe who asked me many questions about the life of a dean in the United States. He asked specifically about the legal issues one faces in my position, noting that at his institution, each college dean has his or her own legal counsel who reviews almost every decision for liability.

Long before I became a dean, I had the unusual opportunity to complete a postdoc in higher-education administration that included extensive work in legal issues. I am frequently grateful for that training, but I also wonder how most administrators, including department chairs, gain such information. In fact, I wonder how many professors actually know about things like FERPA, ADA, and many other...

The University of Florida will use federal stimulus funds to hire up to 100 professors and rebuild its
faculty ranks, which were slashed over the past year because of budget cuts, The Miami Herald reports.

As the newspaper puts it:

UF President Bernie Machen on Thursday told the Faculty Senate during a meeting in Gainesville that new professors will be hired in the coming year and will help to offset the recent loss of 81 professors.

The stimulus money will serve as a "bridge'' until higher undergraduate tuition rates that went into effect this week for Florida residents generate enough revenue to cover the new professors' salaries.

Some colleges, like the University of South Florida, have used stimulus...

Professors at Montgomery College voted no confidence late Thursday in Brian K. Johnson, president of the prominent Maryland community college since 2007. About half the college's full-time faculty members overwhelmingly passed a resolution criticizing Mr. Johnson's leadership and alleging that he has consistently skipped important meetings and events.

The resolution urged the college's Board of Trustees to dismiss Mr. Johnson. Trustees were not available today, but they have scheduled a closed meeting next week to discuss the matter.

Mr. Johnson was unavailable for comment today. But in a written statement distributed today to the campus, Mr. Johnson said he remained committed to serving the college, which opens its fall semester on Monday.

"I remain focused on our students and ensuring that they receive the high-quality education and services that...

In my previous entry, I discussed some principles for honest advertising, the most important of which is not to advertise aspects of the job we don't have any intention of meeting with the hire. If there are restrictions on rank, degree-completion status, or other factors, those should go in the ad. Increasing the size of the pool is not an excuse for a deceptive job description.

There's a challenge, however, in applying this principle. When we draft an ad, in some instances the search is a fishing expedition to find the best possible person we can in a very broad area. Whether we can pursue a search configured this way depends on the qualifications and interests of extant faculty in the program, absolute versus contingent or desirable curricular issues, and our general sense of what's going to be possible...

I cracked up when I saw this cartoon because you would be amazed at how often fonts come up in search deliberations. Many years ago I saw with my own eyes a full professor put a CV in the reject pile while muttering, "That's a stupid font. Only an idiot would use that font in an application." I didn't see which font was verboten, but I have heard someone say, half seriously, that they would never hire someone who used "Garamond" for formal correspondence: "too pretentious." I'd hate to hear what those guys would say about "comic sans," "Edwardian script," or "gigi."

Obviously, there are professional parameters for...

• According to The Boston Globe, the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government continues to take in high-profile ex-politicians. As a recent Chronicle article notes, however, Harvard isn't the only popular destination for former politicos.

• Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, lawyers and professors are weighing in on whether the University of California at Berkeley should sack John C. Yoo, a tenured law professor who wrote the Justice Department memos that were used to justify the torture of terrorism suspects.

From Piled Higher & Deeper, a comic strip by Jorge Cham:

The comments in response to my last entry about the beginning of our search season raise good questions that deserve some thought and a thorough response.

One commenter suggests that the best way to make everyone happy is to offer a very high salary and then adjust everyone else's salary to match.

Philosophically, this is an excellent point, and I always try hard to offer the best salary I can to selected candidates because I know that doing so will help us attract and retain the best people we can. I also take careful account of the salaries of faculty members who are already here to ensure fairness to them and to avoid inducing serious distortions in our salary structure.

Practically speaking, however, there are real limits to how much adjusting one can do, particularly at a small institution like...

Recently, I had the opportunity to attend a closed-door, small-group meeting of academic leaders with a lawyer who specializes in higher-education law. It was fascinating to hear the questions and the ensuing discussions. I'd never met with an attorney in a setting like that (the clock wasn't running on my personal dime!), and I learned a great deal about actions I need to take, especially in the hiring process, to head off misunderstandings and liabilities.

I try to keep up with as many of these issues as I can, but I am, after all, a layman. I wish that all administrators, and really all faculty members who serve on search committees, could experience such a meeting. The myths and legends surrounding these issues are, many times, far afield from the legal truth. Does your institution provide training on the legal aspects of searches and other personnel matters or does it...