November 11, 2009, 04:00 PM ET
In Search of the Flexible Candidate
I've spent the past several days at the Council of Independent
Colleges' annual Institute for Chief Academic Officers. The CIC is
an association of small and midsize private institutions that
offers its members developmental conferences such as this one, a
similar one for presidents, a series of workshops for chairs, and
other programs and projects including a valuable tuition-exchange
program for children of faculty and staff members.
While a number of the more elite private institutions are members,
for the most part the academic officers attending this institute
were from the less rarified strata of private higher education. As
such, many of the discussions revolved around the issues that have
been the subject of my entries here for some time: attracting and
retaining a strong faculty out of the limelight of prestige and
outside compelling locations; how graduate...
November 05, 2009, 12:00 PM ET
From Bad to Worse
Over at Crooked Timber, Michael Bérubé describes how "extra extra dismal" this year's job market looks to be in modern languages. Why the extra "extra"? Well, because ...
the effects of the Great Collapse of 2008 are only hitting this part of the academic machinery now. Colleges and universities have already taken—and administered—hits elsewhere, via salary cuts and/or freezes, furloughs, elimination of travel and research budgets, etc. And I don’t know how many searches were cancelled last year after being advertised. But I do know that in the modern languages, we might be looking at a 50 percent dropoff in jobs from last year, and there’s no federal stimulus coming to bail us out. ...
He goes on to explain that in recent years...
Read MoreNovember 04, 2009, 11:00 AM ET
Meeting Institutional Needs
In a previous
entry, I promised to discuss the searches my institution is
undertaking this year. This is an update on our search in human
performance/athletic training.
We have an excellent athletic-training program, which was
enthusiastically reaffirmed last year by the Council for the
Accreditation of Athletic Training Education. The program provides
students with great opportunities to learn from and network with
athletes and health-care providers on and off the campus. Its
graduates earn places in excellent master's and doctoral programs.
The collaboration between the academic program in athletic training
and our athletics program is a wonderful example of how departments
can work together to enrich students' experiences on the
campus.
One thing the accreditation council strongly...
October 12, 2009, 10:00 AM ET
Is Hiring More Rational in the 'Real World'?
A well-worn topic of discussion in The Chronicle's forums
is the differences between the faculty and corporate (or so-called
"real world") hiring processes.
The invidious comparison usually goes like this: An academic search
takes months, a corporate one takes weeks (at most). An academic
search involves all sorts of silly rituals based on outmoded
traditions (the conference interview, the multi-day campus
interview), while a corporate one is rational and driven by
verifiable, objective data that simplify hiring the "right person."
An academic search is characterized by unprofessional and
thoughtless conduct, such as committees not getting back to
candidates in a timely fashion or communicating with them clearly,
while a corporate one is smooth, professional, and efficient.
A recent...
October 06, 2009, 08:00 AM ET
Another Kind of Nepotism
The topic of nepotism is a popular one in the Chronicle
forums, and I've seen it
discussed recently on some listservs I follow, possibly because the
economy has more folks looking for joint appointments within family
units. This got me thinking about another kind of familial
favoritism that crops up at some smaller colleges: parent/child
nepotism.
Sometimes faculty members have their own children enrolled in their
classes. It's only natural for faculty children to gravitate to
their parents' fields as majors. I know of several cases in which
professors' children have been turbo-powered versions of their
parents, incredibly talented and well-prepared for their courses.
In these cases, there have been no questions about rigor in classes
that were taught by a parent. Unfortunately, I have known of other
cases in which a...
October 05, 2009, 08:00 AM ET
Dubious Distinctions
One of the things that has surprised me when my institutions
have conducted job searches is the number of applicants who have
degrees from unaccredited institutions on their CV's. In many
searches, there are multiple candidates whose credentials are
suspicious, and I am curious about what they are thinking when they
apply.
Often these candidates are unconventional in academic terms, and
therefore may not have the savvy to recognize that an unaccredited
degree is virtually worthless to a respectable, accredited
institution. But some of these candidates do have higher degrees
from accredited institutions, even prestigious ones. Perhaps they
learned their lesson and took steps to redress the issue of the
unaccredited degree, but of course that history is not clear from
most application materials.
Generally, though, a candidate who presents an unaccredited
degree...
September 30, 2009, 11:00 AM ET
The 'Rural Brain Drain' and the Academic Job Search
I'm on my second tour of duty in rural Iowa. My first academic
job—where I was for ten years—was at a fairly well-known small
liberal-arts college in the eastern part of the state not far from
the population center of Cedar Rapids and the cultural center of
Iowa City. Now I'm up near the northwest corner of the state about
2-1/2 hours from both Des Moines and Omaha, Neb., our nearest real
metropolitan areas, a far more isolated and rural part of the
state.
Thus I have read with great interest the recent essay in The
Chronicle Review, "The
Rural Brain Drain," by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas. I
have thought at great length about the issues they raise, and have
wrestled with my own experiences in rural Iowa for the past two
decades. My wife is from near where we are now;...
September 25, 2009, 01:00 PM ET
Evaluating Campus Climate
I am always interested in finding ways to make the faculty
positions available at my institution attractive to potential
candidates. As I've discussed before, we have some challenges: We
are a small teaching-oriented and teaching-intensive university,
and (probably more importantly) we are located in a fairly remote
corner of northwest Iowa, which, while it can be beautiful if you
like cornfields, groves of trees, and silos, is not the dream
location for many young Ph.D.'s.
One thing we do have, though, is a very good campus climate.
Faculty members on the whole are collaborative, collegial, and
friendly. There is a climate of mutual respect among the various
constituencies on campus, and given the generally high level of
contentiousness academics are capable of displaying, our faculty
members are at peace, enjoy their jobs, and work very well
together. These qualities...
September 23, 2009, 10:00 AM ET
The Ultimate Gated Communities
I ran across a recent
comment by Alan Wolfe that gave me pause: "The academic world
suffers from too many people trying to hire people too much like
themselves."
While Wolfe was discussing ideological diversity, he really
referred to one of the unfortunate tendencies that we have in
academe: a relentless drive to retain comfort. Universities are, in
many ways, the ultimate gated communities. A mentor once warned me
of the ease with which searches can degenerate into a process of
faculty members making copies of copies of copies of copies of
themselves until departments become stale, tepid groups that are
fearful of change. Such tendencies are not limited to faculty
searches alone, but also to staff and, more dangerously,
administrative searches. What he warned me about was not just
people hiring...
September 16, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Hiring and Firing Bytes
• The University of Cincinnati has picked Gregory H. Williams, president of the City College of New York, as its next chief, The New York Times reports.
• Thompson Rivers University, in British Columbia, has booted its president, Kathleen Scherf, who during her one-year tenure was known for calling people "dude" and streaking her hair, The Ticker reports.
• A growing number of faculty members at the University of California are backing a planned systemwide walkout on September 24 to protest the university's handling of the budget crisis, The Ticker reports. Per the
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