A recent thread in The Chronicle's Forums discusses whether or not an institution conducting on-campus visits should pay for candidates' expenses for interviewing.

I know it's an uncommon practice for community colleges; until recently, such institutions hired almost entirely locally. (That is changing, though, with the oversupply of Ph.D.'s in many disciplines and the increasing aspirations of community colleges.) I am explicitly not talking about such colleges here.

That leaves four-year colleges and universities, from the fanciest liberal-arts colleges and research universities, public and private, to the dustiest, remotest, smallest regional institutions. For any of them, there is no reasonable justification for declining to pay expenses for campus interviews.

If a college cannot afford such interviews, it cannot afford to hire tenure-track faculty members. An expensive campus...

It's again the season when my university makes job offers, and so I’ve been thinking about how long to allow candidates to respond to them once they are on the table.

This year has been a little unusual compared with last year. I've made offers for two positions: One had a very small pool, while the other had a significantly larger pool than anyone here had anticipated. Those different scenarios have very different implications for handling offers.

While I understand from an institutional standpoint why a hiring college or university wants a quick answer to offers, I also wonder about places that pressure candidates significantly on their time frames. The Modern Language Association, for instance, recommends giving candidates a two-week window, which seems pretty reasonable to me. I strongly believe that institutions that pressure candidates to accept immediately or very quickly, or...

My previous entry discussed some issues about managing on-campus interviews in bad weather. One of the commenters asked what kinds of candidate behavior have impressed my institutions when bad weather strikes. While I do have some specific anecdotes, a little further thought—yesterday when I was stuck at my house in blizzard conditions and again this morning while I was waiting for the plow to remove the 8' drifts from the road in front of our house—has led me to think more in terms of specific, practical advice for candidates and institutions.

For candidates:

•    Make sure that you ask whomever is coordinating the interview for several contact numbers, including ones you can use outside of office hours. Ideally, get the number for the person who's scheduled to pick you up at the airport.

•    If you don't already have one, get a cell phone with a national calling plan, even if you...

Anyone following the national news during the last two weeks has heard about the disastrous weather system that overtook much of the country over the holidays. In our corner of Iowa, we received over two feet of snow, and driving through town is currently quite hazardous as the piles of snow on the curbs are, in places, head-high.

It's also the season of on-campus interviews. Candidates are flying to colleges and universities all over the country on trips that often involve layovers, passing through airports in cities (e.g., Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul) that often have disastrous weather at this time of year. Roads are icy or covered with snow. Candidates from warm climates are flying to places like Iowa, where the temperature on my computer currently reads 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

Earlier in my career, at another institution in Iowa, I often oversaw candidate visits to campus after the...

In my last post, I discussed the challenges of managing international programs and the concomitant implications for faculty hiring and the shape of faculty careers. Meanwhile (and this is why I've been gone for a while), I've just returned from an 11-day trip to Singapore and Seoul, the planning for which inspired me to write about such programs.

One of the commenters on that last entry provided some very interesting and thoughtful discussion about the high costs and excessive travel involved in conducting such programs, and raised the possible alternative of teleconferencing and other virtual modes of delivery. Believe me, I have been thinking a lot about those options as my institution considers a possible foray into Singapore.

There are, however, some cost and other issues that could make moving wholly or largely to a virtual presence in international locations challenging. For starters...

There is a tremendous amount of discussion in administrative circles, and in higher education more generally, about the rise of the so-called "global university" and the need for institutions to develop a significant presence in the world beyond the United States. This discussion often centers on countries like China and India, where a growing, education-hungry population and rapidly developing economies promise great opportunities for American institutions that manage to create and maintain a strong presence in those places.

At my previous institution, we had a large program in Singapore, which is, conveniently enough, a kind of cultural crossroads between China and India. We had several hundred students from the region enrolled, and the program was highly successful academically and financially for the university.

The challenge of such a program lies in its management. We had a...

I received a couple of private responses to my last entry on the efforts of Iowa's private colleges and universities to strengthen recruitment of diverse faculty members. I'm grateful for those responses and appreciate the ideas and suggestions from my correspondents.

One mentioned the tendency of search committees to eliminate or give lesser consideration to diverse candidates because the committee members are more comfortable with colleagues who are like themselves. This is a concern often expressed when recruiting diverse faculty members is discussed. For one thing, it calls into question another truism of faculty recruitment, which is that there aren't that many strong multicultural candidates to be had, particularly in fields that are not grossly overproducing Ph.D.'s.

There is a lot of truth in the point that search committees often tend to gravitate towards candidates who resemble...

The other day, I was at a meeting of the chief academic officers from institutions affiliated with the Iowa Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. IAICU serves as the consolidated voice of Iowa's private institutions (almost all of which are active members) in state and national governmental affairs, and as a clearinghouse for information-sharing and other activities that serve the common interests of those institutions.

For the last two years, we've been discussing how to increase the diversity of our faculty at IAICU institutions. For many reasons, this is a very tall challenge. Most importantly, Iowa has a reputation for being not very diverse, and therefore perhaps not very welcoming to people who do not have a European-American heritage and ethnicity. In addition, most of the private institutions in Iowa are, like mine, relatively small and teaching-oriented, with all ...

My last entry on small private colleges' need to find faculty members who can cover a wide range of courses was inspired by comments I heard at various sessions of the Council of Independent Colleges' annual institute for chief academic officers. Another interesting, and somewhat related conversation occurred at the dinner meeting of the CAOs at Presbyterian colleges, which was sponsored by the Association of Presbyterian Colleges & Universities. The discussion, led by Robert Holyer, Provost at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC, concerned recruiting and socializing new faculty members to meet the mission of member colleges in APCU.

APCU institutions have a wide range of missions and characters. A couple of the CAOs participating in the dinner came from institutions that continue to require faith statements from their faculty members, though these statements are quite different from...

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 programs can prepare...