I note that many of my fellow deans at teaching universities are encountering a maddening problem that is unlikely to surface at research universities where research is so clearly tied to tenure and promotion.

In what seems to be increasing numbers, entry-level faculty members who are hired to teach a certain set of courses in their department decide that they would rather teach other courses (usually new courses that they’ve developed).

What’s aggravating is that often that leads to a new search in their original area of expertise, which is a very difficult sell for a dean.

When the vice president for academic affairs says, “Didn’t we just hire a medieval fish farming expert?,” it’s hard to say, “Well, she’s decided to teach courses in medieval film adaptations now.”

More complicated are...

My institution is in the midst of several searches to fill a vice presidency and some entry-level faculty and administrative positions. In the past few days I’ve interviewed about 10 candidates.

I’ve talked to strong candidates for all of the positions. As I have discussed before, though, our main hiring challenges include our remote location and our mission as a four-year institution that, while valuing research, puts a premium on teaching and advising undergraduates.

As our search committees begin deliberating about the best candidates to recommend we hire, one of the questions they will surely ask is, Are our candidates genuinely interested in our position? Or, are they simply applying to every possible institution because of a weak job market?

Many academics would argue — and they have a point — that it is up to candidates...

Check out Historiann’s recent post about whether phone interviews are a good alternative to face-to-face interviews at big annual conferences. Her initial feeling — based on the fact that none of the departments she’s worked in have “brought someone who had a telephone interview to campus as a job finalist when we also conducted conference interviews” — is that face-to-face meetings are superior. A “disembodied voice over the speakerphone just doesn’t establish one’s energy or presence in the same way that in-person interviews can,” she writes.

She’s quick to note, however, that at least one

The Albuquerque Journal reports that Brian Schmidly, son of the president of the University of New Mexico, declined a $94,000 job last week as its associate director of sustainability just days after he was hired. He would have started the new job yesterday, but gave it up following complaints from faculty members.

According to the Journal, which reviewed the 33 applications for the job, “Brian Schmidly beat out engineers, award-winning environmentalists and state and UNM employees who have been working in sustainability fields for years,” even though “many of his credentials directly related to sustainability were obtained in September, the same month he applied for the job.”

The university’s president, David Schmidly, issued a public statement denying any involvement in his son’s selection for the job. The university’s...

Student trustees from each of the three University of Illinois campuses are calling on university administrators who earn $150,000 or more to accept a two-year pay freeze, The News-Gazette reports. The student trustee from the university’s Springfield campus told the daily newspaper, based in Champaign, Ill., that the students plan to raise the issue at the next Board of Trustees meeting in November.

The savings from such a freeze would be minimal compared with the university’s overall annual budget of approximately $4.2-billion — “probably less than $250,000,” according to James Winters, the University of Illinois at Chicago student trustee who was recently chosen by Gov. Rod Blagojevich to hold the official student...

Arizona State University plans to lay off at least 200 non-tenure-track faculty members in the coming months, a move that could push some lecture-style classes to enrollments of 1,000 students, The Arizona Republic reported today.

Arizona State employs nearly 1,000 “faculty associates,” a term that describes a number of non-tenured positions. Tenure-track faculty members will not be laid off, and the university said it had no plans to limit enrollment or eliminate majors.

University officials said they anticipated at least $25-million in state budget cuts, in addition to the $30-million in cuts they have already made. Arizona’s three public universities receive about a quarter of their budgets from the state.

Amid students’ concern that...

As the job market continues to be influenced by the stock market, one issue I haven’t heard much about is the number of expected job openings that are vanishing because of deferred retirements.

Many faculty members time their retirements to stock-portfolio values; if the fund balances don’t hit their expected marks, retirements are deferred.

That has two effects on the job market. First, new openings do not materialize as expected. And second, institutions don’t have as much as money to make salary changes as they had anticipated. Full professors who retire generally are replaced by entry-level faculty members at much lower salaries, and the salary savings is used to help pay for other positions. A deferred retirement may, in fact, block two positions from being opened.

Are...

The University of Arizona has put a freeze on all state-financed hiring, Georgia’s 14 technical colleges are being merged into seven, and New York will probably have to shelve a plan to create a $3-billion fund to attract cutting-edge researchers. But in some places, things look much different.

States with booming industries, such as oil and natural gas, are using their riches to bolster higher education, sometimes at their neighbors’ expense.

The University of North Texas is looking to lure researchers by spending tens of millions of new dollars on collaborative research projects. North Dakota State University is on a hiring binge; it added more than 30 new professors last year and is now looking to add 26 more. The University of Alaska is fixing its aging infrastructure and preparing to build a $46-million health-sciences building, among other new...