Category: Faculty Hiring
October 6, 2010, 11:52 AM ET
Teaching, Research, Sucker—I Mean—Service
I spoke with a former student not long ago who is completing a
doctorate and pondering the job market. He mentioned that he had
volunteered to serve on some departmental committees so that he
would have something under "service" on his CV.
I remember that same advice coming from my professors: If you
volunteer for service, then search committees will know that you
understand the realities of life in the professoriate and maybe
even something about departmental politics.
After my conversation with the former student, I started pondering
how often I have actually looked at the "service" section of an
applicant's résumé. Indeed, after serving on search committees for
the better part of two decades, I can't remember an applicant's
"service" ever coming up in our deliberations for entry-level
faculty positions (although for chairmanship searches, it's one of
the first things to be discussed...
October 4, 2010, 11:44 AM ET
Tenure Track? What Tenure Track?
Discussions about tenure have reached fever pitch, whether the
portrayal of public-school tenure in the film Waiting for
Superman or politically inspired criticism of higher
education's tenure policies or sound-bite scrutiny by the news
media. We are about to enter a season of significant change in how
tenure works.
I was talking about this recently with a friend who had served as
an administrator at a college that offers multiyear contracts
rather than tenure. He told me that when job candidates found out
that there was no tenure track there, they routinely pulled out of
their interviews or contract negotiations. That presented a
significant challenge, he said, especially in competitive
disciplines.
Given the current state of the job market, would a lack of tenure
at an institution change how you pursue a position?
October 1, 2010, 03:40 PM ET
What to Do With a Star-Studded Pool
A recent thread in The Chronicle's forums on "Eliminating
Star Candidates from the Pool" once again has me thinking about
how the profession defines "stars" and how we should treat star
candidates as we select our interview pools.
My whole career has been at small, teaching-oriented institutions.
The first of these was the only one where we realistically had a
regular chance to hire the most obvious stars in the pool. Since
then, I've been at institutions that are challenged by location,
reputation (deserved or not), teaching load, and other resources in
such a way as to virtually guarantee that we wouldn't be able to
hire candidates immediately recognized by the profession at large
as stars. But as I've said before, at all of these institutions we
have managed to make stellar hires most of the time anyway. (This
is because there's more than one working definition of "stellar,"
of course....
September 29, 2010, 04:50 PM ET
Somehow Getting on Track
How can adjuncts go from part-time to the tenure track? Not by applying for jobs at the colleges where they're already teaching, writes gbrown on The Chronicle's Forums. Her contingent colleagues should wise up, she says, and realize that most colleges won't "buy the cow if [they] can get the milk for free"—or at a steep discount, anyway.
She sympathizes with their plight: "it's unfair. But it's also a reality. It sucks to be an adjunct and get paid cr@p. It sucks that the people who pass you in the hall and say 'hello' do not respect you enough to at least give you an interview." But the only way to move up is to move out, the now-tenured gbrown writes: "I had to widen my search to get what I wanted."
Fiona, another tenured academic poster, seconds that advice. It's especially true for adjuncts working at research universities like hers, she says, which may have a clause in their...
Read MoreSeptember 22, 2010, 10:48 AM ET
And the Honor of Serving Goes to . . .
Across academe, search committees are being established in anticipation of job announcements. The composition of these committees is often a matter of policy, with specific guidelines about who will serve (the ratio of men/women and senior/junior faculty members, and the representation from other units, from underrepresented populations, and from human resources).
Searches are hard, and the duties are not to be taken lightly.
They can become fraught with political challenges as well. For many
deans and department chairs, the empaneling of search committees is
among the most complicated decisions they must make. As I have
noted previously in this space, there is a saying that is pretty
accurate: First-rate search committees hire first-rate candidates;
second-rate committees hire third-rate candidates.
What is the best way to establish a search committee? How large
should a committee be?...
September 21, 2010, 10:00 AM ET
Diversity in Iowa, Revisited
Last November I wrote about some discussions I had with my
fellow chief academic officers at Iowa private colleges and
universities at our annual meeting about how to
increase the diversity of faculty and staff members at our
respective institutions. The discussion that followed this meeting,
both in public and private responses to my post and among my
colleagues here in Iowa, was extremely interesting and productive.
In fact, we attracted a job application in one of our searches as a
direct result of that discussion, and I am happy and grateful that
we had that outcome.
The CAO's just met again last week and returned to the question of
how to recruit a more diverse faculty and staff to our campuses.
This will surely be a durable issue because we face structural and
cultural challenges that make rapid progress in this area
unlikely.
However, we did generate some interesting ideas that I...
September 13, 2010, 03:51 PM ET
'I Know That Candidate by Reputation'
In my most recent
post, I asked how the public airing of departmental or
institutional turmoil might influence a prospective candidate's
actions. Now I'll extend that in the other direction.
Two senior professors, who served on a search committee together,
were flipping through CV's over coffee.
Professor Jones said, "I like this dossier from Big Name University
(one of the top 10 in their field). I'd love to have someone from
there with us."
Professor Smith countered, "Yes, but that department is falling
apart. The university has put it in receivership, and the place is
rife with infighting. Have you read the stories in The
Chronicle? There's even a Web site dedicated to the problems.
I don't know that we need to bring in someone who has seen that
kind of attitude during the doctorate. We shouldn't risk ruining
the peace we have by hiring someone who has learned the politics
of...
September 9, 2010, 03:44 PM ET
Which Foot Shall I Shoot Next?
A campus was suffering through a significant economic struggle,
which included a midyear budget cut. At a meeting with the
university's leaders, who were growing impatient with the process
of the cuts and with the lack of clear information about the
situation, the institution's president declared, "No one should
discuss these things off campus. If there is one thing that neither
donors nor prospective students want to hear, it's that there are
financial problems here. Donors won't give to problems, and
prospective students are afraid of them. If we lose either of those
groups, our problem will only grow worse."
That conversation happened over a decade ago, before everyone
figured out that information can find new and expansive homes on
the Internet. It is almost impossible now to create an information
lockdown, especially with the easy availability of Web sites where
information,...
September 2, 2010, 12:38 PM ET
Pending the Money
When I was on the job market for the first time, back in the 1990s, most of my mentors told me to ignore applying for positions that were posted "pending final approval" or "pending funding." The logic was that most institutions viewed such advertisements as having a built-in escape valve, and that there was nothing more maddening for candidates than to go to the trouble of applying, interviewing, and expending the mental energy required to go that far into a search, only to have the position vanish with the final budget numbers in the spring. When I became an administrator, I heard the same arguments from my department chairs: "Pending funding" will eliminate the strongest candidates. For that reason, I've resisted using such a label except under very specific circumstances.
What I'm hearing now in administrative circles is that many institutions are requiring that almost all position ...
Read MoreJuly 29, 2010, 10:30 AM ET
Talking About Tenure
Everyone, it seems, is talking about tenure, or rather its demise. This month an article in The Chronicle suggested that the academic tenure system may be on its last legs. The reporter, Robin Wilson, cited stark statistics from an upcoming report by the U.S. Department of Education, which is expected to note that ...
Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007. The new report is expected to show that that proportion fell below 30 percent in 2009. If you add graduate teaching assistants to the mix, those with some kind of tenure status represent a mere quarter of all instructors.
Wilson goes on to ask and attempt to answer the big question.
What does vanishing tenure mean for higher education? For starters, some observers say that college faculties are being filled with...Read More
On Hiring is The Chronicle's blog about the ins and outs of college hiring, with articles and advice from around the Web.