There's an interesting thread right now in The Chronicle's Forums on the issue of asking about rejection when you're a finalist for a job you end up not getting. This is a painful topic and one that often gets rehashed here and elsewhere—I think because the job search process is so intense, difficult, and, once one reaches the finalist stage, inevitably personal.

I don't want to rehash any specific points from that thread, but I do want to add some perspective from the hiring side of the table. In my years dealing with searches, there have been many times I have wanted to provide unsuccessful candidates with feedback, though I virtually never have felt enabled to do so. As chair, dean, and vice president for academic affairs, I have truly liked many of the candidates we were not able to offer jobs. In some instances, the reasons we didn't extend an offer were small things from which the...

About a month ago, I wrote about our intention to undertake a late search for a position in management after our earlier search had fallen through. We're in the process of setting up on-campus interviews for the finalists, who on paper and in preliminary phone interviews look promising.

As we set up these interviews, I'm reminded again how important it is to have a competent and good-spirited person managing the arrangements. In our case, the administrative assistant to the associate dean of the faculty, in my office, handles the arrangements. She is good at it, dealing well with juggled schedules, flight arrangements, lodging, and all the other logistics that go into a successful campus-interview process.

Any regular reader of the Chronicle Forums has read horror stories about botched on-campus interviews—candidates have experienced late notice, unclear instructions, and poor...

If you're around academe long enough, you'll develop a network without even trying. You'll get to know people by way of conferences and other professional activities, through publishing, by connecting with friends of friends, and simply being plugged in to the life of college education in the United States.

Since I wound up as an administrator, my career has taken me to several institutions. In turn, many of my colleagues there have moved on to other places, taking on different professional roles as they go. Added to this group are all the people with whom I went to grad school who have found their way into academic positions, along with the smaller number of undergraduate friends who have done the same.

Once I account for most or all of these people, it's interesting to see that I have friends, acquaintances, or former colleagues at a large array of institutions around the country. It is ...

I've written several times here in the last year about a project we're undertaking at my institution to restructure workload to free faculty members to engage more extensively in mentoring student research, actively developing and supervising internship experiences, advancing their own scholarly expertise, enhancing international opportunities on campus, and the like. We've had a National Survey of Student Engagement Task Force to consider these issues, and the discussions have been rich and productive, though more complicated and difficult than I (perhaps naively) expected in the fall, when we started.

I've joked more than once that this process was our version of health-care reform, but, in fact, that's exactly what it's been like. Redirecting faculty workload—even when it's likely to accomplish the highly worthy ends of improving students' educational experiences and making faculty...

My Chronicle "On Hiring" blog colleague Gene Fant's recent entry on "Curricula and Faculty Hiring" prompts me to write about a similar issue, which is how to define new positions an institution might be able to create.

As Mr. Fant suggests, replacement openings in an existing department are definitely an opportunity to reconnoiter and rethink the curriculum in light of an institution's current needs and interests. One of my previous institutions had a process in which the department had to apply to a college-wide committee to renew an empty position, and while some aspects of that process were flawed, in general, it was a solid idea because the department had to think about how the position fit into what it was doing and justify that thinking in writing to convince colleagues from across campus.

At my current institution, I am essentially in charge of faculty hiring, including defining...

The next few days are Alumni Weekend at my alma mater, and I'm heading out to attend the 25th reunion of my college class. Like anyone who had a good experience in college, over the years I've thought sometimes about returning for this kind of event, though I've actually set foot on the campus perhaps just three times since I graduated. My most recent visit was 15 years ago.

Like a lot of academics, I've had the interesting experience of working at institutions that are much less prosperous and prestigious than the one where I earned my degree. That is not terribly surprising, since "elite" undergraduate institutions produce alumni who go on to earn doctorates at a rate greatly disproportionate to the number of graduates, and the strongest doctoral institutions, in turn, produce a large percentage of the faculty members at colleges and universities of all types.

My undergraduate...

In my previous entry, I talked about how our management search fell through because of the immigration issues of the candidate's spouse. In the comments there is some discussion of how to proceed, and I thought I'd follow up on that discussion.

We've decided to try a quick search for a tenure-track hire, perhaps even by the end of the academic year. This approach is somewhat unorthodox, but here are our reasons.
   
First of all, we are in a position in which we must make a hire. Students are registered, the fall schedule is set, and faculty members are assigned to other courses. Because we're a small institution, we normally have only two faculty members in management even when we're at full strength, so the absence of one without a lot of advance planning can cause big problems. And, as I've discussed before, we're in a small town in northwestern Iowa, and our adjunct pool is neither...

I promised in a previous entry to discuss our management search separately from the searches I discussed then. I've thought for the past several weeks that I needed to get back to that story, but I'm glad I didn't until now, because things have changed.
   
I was originally going to discuss how small the pool was for that search—much smaller than in the other searches this year—and how challenging that made the interview process. We ended up making our offer to a very strong candidate, a foreign national who met all of our needs and brought some great bonuses to our undergraduate business program, including significant expertise in international business that would have complemented the knowledge of our other management professor.
   
The day before yesterday, however, the candidate called me and withdrew from the position for personal reasons. The brief story is that her husband couldn't ...

My institution's hiring plans for next year are already beginning to take shape, even though we're not quite done for this year yet. Partly this is a quirk of the way we plan, but it's also partly the result of some helpful direction from faculty members who have announced retirement decisions and other professional transitions.
   
Financially, next year looks better than this year. Before the rapid decline of the stock market in the fall of 2008, our endowment was quite strong, around $150-million. By March 2009, it had briefly fallen below $80-million. The recent strength of the market has brought it back comfortably above $100-million (the last figure I saw put it at $113-million), which is a tremendous help, though it does highlight the sad fact that it takes a 100-percent gain to offset a 50-percent loss.

Even with a policy of averaging the endowment over the past 12 quarters to...

Recently I was in Philadelphia at the Association of American Colleges and Universities conference on "Faculty Roles in High-Impact Practices." For those not familiar with the AAC&U, it's an organization that undertakes advocacy in favor of undergraduate liberal education, science education, civic engagement, assessment, diversity, and other areas of strong interest to the contemporary academy.
   
This conference, like most of those sponsored by AAC&U, was an excellent opportunity for information sharing, networking, commiseration, and institutional self-evaluation. Once again, though, it raised issues that I've been discussing in this blog more or less consistently for the past two years about the changing role of the faculty, the very large differences in expectations for faculty work among different types of institutions, and the overall shape of higher education's future.
   
In his...