When I was a young faculty member in my first job, whenever our department would undertake a search, one of the priorities put forward by the more senior faculty members was to hire someone "who will stay."

At the time, I found this idea intensely irritating. I thought that placing such weight on the potential for someone to stay in the job we were searching for was a recipe for mediocrity and emphasized qualities that did not contribute to building an excellent faculty.

I was reminded of these conversations the other day while reading the comments posted on my previous entry. 
Physicsprof remarks, "I would rather prefer a strong but lukewarm colleague who will leave in a few years than a weaker enthusiastic one who will stay in one place for the entire career because no one wants him." I was struck by this comment for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that I could—and would—have...

In my previous entry, I responded to questions asked by a commenter on a yet earlier entry about this year's searches at my university.

I left one question for this time: What would we do with an "otherwise stellar candidate who seemed lukewarm about the position or institution?" This is a complex question, because it depends on the context of the search involved. It's also one that a lot of institutions are going to need to answer more often, as long as academic-job market remains terrible, since more candidates will feel compelled to apply to institutions they might previously have ignored.

First of all, it's important to note that we don't particularly want to hire people who are lukewarm about the position or the institution. Being a faculty member anywhere is hard. Being a faculty member at a place you don’t like, or in a job that doesn’t suit your priorities, makes the job doubly...

In response to my previous entry about our recent hiring activities, one commenter asked several salient questions about the conduct of our searches in response to the changed conditions I describe in that entry:

"I have some questions for the author: with so few jobs for so many applicants, and many candidates applying for positions they don't really want, are those applicants easy to spot during the screening process? Has anyone like that made it all the way to campus interview stage? Would you rule out an otherwise stellar candidate who seemed lukewarm about the position or institution?"

These are excellent and difficult questions, and they deserve a careful answer. Having said that, I would also caution, in advance, that I'm operating from a fairly small data set, though I do have a number of years' experience hiring at institutions that are not the obvious first choice for many...

Earlier this year (it seems long ago), I promised to provide updates on this year's searches. That promise has proved more difficult to keep than I'd anticipated, as I've found it very difficult to discuss searches in a productive way while they are going on. We've now concluded three of our five projected searches, and restructured one of the others, so I have a little more latitude.

The three searches we've finished are in management, economics, and composition. The composition search was continued from last year, so it's probably the most instructive with regard to what's happening on the market in the current economic situation. As I've mentioned numerous times, we don't always get pools as large as institutions in more obviously compelling locations. Last year in the composition search that was definitely true—we received around 40 applications. They were distributed as...

Since my previous entry about my late former colleague Robert Dana, I've had several interesting conversations with colleagues, friends, and the president emeritus of a distinguished liberal-arts college about the apparent disappearance, or at least the increasing scarcity, of professors like Robert Dana on the small-college scene.

I'm a graduate of a liberal-arts college that at the time had about 1,350 students. I served on the faculty of a slightly smaller liberal-arts college for 10 years, and am now at an institution that has about 900 students on the campus. In total, I've spent 16 of the past 28 years at such small institutions. I have been taught by and worked with a lot of small-college professors.

The kind of liberal-arts-college professors whose disappearance I lament have a number of common characteristics. Most important, they are intensely dedicated to students, though...

The poet Robert Dana died this month, at the age of 80. For 40 of those years, he was on the faculty at Cornell College, in Mount Vernon, Iowa. In his work there, he taught thousands of students, worked on countless committees, served his department and his school, and saw new colleagues come and go.
   
He also published 10 full-length books of poetry, two books of prose, and a variety of other works. Two of his books are forthcoming posthumously. After his retirement from Cornell, he continued to write, give readings, travel, and meet with his former students and colleagues all over the country and around the world. In 2004-6 he was Iowa's honorary poet laureate.
   
Robert Dana was the kind of small-college professor the academy is losing quickly, much to our hurt. An extraordinarily accomplished writer, he chose to remain at Cornell, to work with its students and enjoy the life it...

Like probably every other academic in the United States, and especially like every administrator with authority over hiring, tenure, and promotion, I have been reflecting over the past few days on the tragedy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. I feel the shock and sorrow of the university, and mourn for all the victims, including the family of Amy Bishop. I have been reading commentary and news stories, and have been closely following several threads on the Chronicle Forums, particularly an extensive discussion of the role of university personnel policies in possibly fostering workplace violence.

I've also discussed the issue with several colleagues, including staff members at The Chronicle, and am trying to figure out how to find areas where understanding of events such as the Huntsville shootings might be possible. In my role as an administrator, I am also intensely...

I've mentioned before and am happy to mention again that one of my favorite commentators on higher-education issues is Claire Potter of Wesleyan University, who blogs as Tenured Radical. One of her recent posts advocating a return to smaller class sizes caught my eye both because I agree with what she says and because I know how difficult it would be to get it done.

At the moment, I'm the chair of a working group at my institution that's looking at issues of faculty teaching load in hopes of redistributing some of that load to other activities that demonstrably have positive effects on student learning and success after graduation. One of our guiding documents is George Kuh's booklet, High Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter, published by the Association of American Colleges and Universities in 2008.

Tenured Radical makes some...

The February meeting of our board of trustees starts this evening, and so this afternoon we held an orientation session for two incoming members of the board. As part of this orientation, I give a presentation on academic freedom, the tenure-and-promotion process, and other matters in which the work of the board is likely to intersect with that of the faculty.

We have a pretty small board—fewer than 25 members. Several of them are prominent local citizens, though a larger number come from some distance for meetings. We meet on the campus, so the board members know the town and the university's physical layout very well.

One interesting question asked by a new trustee was about faculty-trustee interaction. I haven't been here that long (this is my fifth board meeting), so I don't know all the ins and outs of the relationships between faculty members and board members. The board does...

As we've been conducting our campus interviews this year, I've begun to think more about how candidates' days on campus are arranged. Even at a small institution with comparatively accessible administrators, such as mine, it's difficult to arrange on-campus interviews so that each of, say, two or three candidates meets the interviewers in the same order.

Not being able to arrange that order does, I fear, change the dynamics for candidates who meet with the dean, the president, and me at different points during their campus visits. For me, meeting a candidate early in the day means that she won't yet have the experience of meeting with the faculty, having lunch with a student group, and doing her teaching demonstration. For the president, it means the candidate won't yet have talked to me or met the others, either. Those variables will inevitably change the tenor and content of our...