Many of the discussion threads on The Chronicle‘s forums seek advice on how candidates should approach difficult questions during the initial stages of the interview process. Candidates want to know the best way to ask prospective employers about starting salaries, moving expenses, teaching load, research and service expectations, and other such matters.

Trouble is, there’s no universally applicable answer to how, and when, to approach a hiring institution with such questions. For example, many institutions are very open about financial matters such as salary, quoting a range in their job ads, or at the initial point of contact to ascertain a candidate’s interest in interviewing. Other institutions treat salary information as top secret; just asking will be so offensive to some search committees, deans, or others that it will seriously damage a candidacy.

I generally wish for more...

A recent On Hiring post discussed Central Michigan University’s decision to run its own search for a dean without the assistance of a search firm. The post mentions that the university is saving tens of thousands of dollars by managing the search itself, which, on the face of it, seems highly responsible in these difficult fiscal times.

I’ve worked with search firms before, most often as a candidate, but also as the chair of a presidential search committee and as a member of an executive search committee. Although a consultant’s services are indeed expensive, I have to say, I’ve mostly been impressed by the assistance they give to people sitting on both sides of the hiring table.

As a candidate, I have found it possible to be considerably more open with search consultants about my interests and concerns than with people at the institution itself. Hard questions about campus issues, ...

In a recent post here, I discussed how the recession is making it even more difficult for colleges and universities to provide employment (or even real placement assistance) to partners of prospective hires. A few days later, The Chronicle published an article, “Employment for Spouses Gets Harder to Find,” that took up, and expanded on, the same issue.

In the comments to my post, people raised several questions about partner hiring. One of the overriding issues concerned fairness: Is any substantial effort to accommodate the partner of a potential hire “fair” to the other candidates? Do such efforts unjustly disadvantage candidates without partners? Is academe’s approach to partner hiring a deviation from practices in the “real world”?

As I have said before, when a college or university recruits a new faculty member, its main concern should be to make the best possible hire for its...

My institution’s official “Permission to Interview” form includes a space for the search committee to verify that it has considered a candidate’s references and confirmed his or her graduate transcripts (we use a service for the latter). The committee lists the references by name and provides a brief summary of their comments. This form secures permission to invite candidates to the campus for a formal interview.

One of my mentors always stressed the importance of confidentiality in searches, and urged committee members to avoid the temptation of routinely going “off-sheet” in checking references (i.e., calling people who are not named on an applicant’s contact list) unless there were very specific reasons for doing so. His point was that higher education is a small world, and a few careless questions could harm applicants’ current positions.

When is it OK to contact...

Part-time faculty members undermine the quality of undergraduate education and student retention. Just ask Paul Umbach, Dan Jacoby, and Audrey Jaeger. Heck, just ask your grandmother. No doubt she reads a daily newspaper that employs an education reporter who copies quotes from press releases touting the research of the abovementioned scholars. The truth, however, is that the hoopla about the deleterious impact of adjunct instructors on the lives, loves, and retention rates of undergraduates is nothing short of a national effort to tar and feather part-time faculty members.

Last March, a national AFT leader stood before a room of reporters in Oregon and said he pined for the “good old days” when three in four faculty members were full timers and students knew where to find their professors. In the September/October 2008 issue of Academe, the president of the American Association of...

Any conversation about academic hiring will eventually light on the issue of how to define the “best” candidate.

In our profession, the ideal junior faculty member is ostensibly defined as someone who has the potential to make a significant research contribution in a field. But the tremendous majority of academic jobs are at institutions that have significantly different needs from that ideal.

At a university like mine, which is residential and almost entirely undergraduate on its home campus, we certainly want new faculty members to have potential as scholars. Scholarly productivity, however, is probably secondary to a candidate’s teaching skills and willingness to contribute to the life of the university and the surrounding community. We define the “best” candidate in a different way than we would if we were a different kind of institution.

Some academics will undoubtedly think...

Let’s begin by understanding a couple of terms tossed around as of late: “pay parity” and “pay equity.” Quick now! Which do you want? If you said pay equity, please stay after class and clean the erasers. Part timers who want equal pay for equal work want, yes, pay parity. Equity, on the other hand, is what we both agree it is — a terribly slippery slope.

So part timers want parity; heck, they’ve demanded it. Others within higher education have demanded it for them. Still, after three decades during which the number of part-time faculty members has grown to more than half-a-million souls, pay parity is still a hazy opium dream. Administrators say, There’s just not the money for pay parity. Uh huh. And I have a bridge to sell you. Of course there’s money. Let me give you a for instance. In New York, the union that represents 5,623 part-time, and 8,444 full-time, faculty members at the ...

In my last post, I asked what hiring institutions could do to help new faculty members adjust to their new campus. Predictably — and understandably — one responder immediately replied, “Hire. Their. Spouse.”

The Chronicle forums devote an entire board to the two-body problem, and I understand the challenge firsthand. My wife is an academic who has faced career struggles, made worse by the fact that she is in a field with few opportunities.

The area of spousal or partner accommodation is yet another place where the current recession is going to have serious negative consequences. In the past, when we recruited a candidate and needed to find work for that hire’s partner or spouse, we were usually able to find something, although it wasn’t always optimal. However, “finding something” was contingent on having at least some discretionary money available.

Up until recently, most...

For a long time I have been a great fan of The Chronicle‘s discussion forums. I have read them for years and have learned a tremendous amount about a number of professional and pedagogical issues facing academics in all sorts of disciplines and institutions. I have even made some friends “in real life” from conversations and connections there.

A recent thread on The Stress of Relocating has gotten me thinking. The original poster writes, “I’m in the first year of a wonderful t-t job,” in a location that “is really not bad,” yet the poster feels “grief and stress about having left my old life behind.”

I have moved a lot in the past 24 years, from a college not far from my family home to a graduate school across the country, through four jobs in three different states as I have moved along the administrative path. I have felt the same “grief and stress” many times, and have mourned...

On-campus interviews are happening all over the country right now (well, at least we’d like to think so).

I always advise candidates to mine campus Web sites for information before making an actual visit for the interview. I tell people to look at the human-resources page (for details about benefits), departmental Web sites (especially the sections on faculty, curriculum, and even class schedules), and general photos from across the campus (for clues, perhaps, about how formally or informally people dress; always dress above the level of the photos). Other sites to check are the student newspaper (for a less varnished view of the campus) and the media-relations pages (to see what events have been happening, both culturally and politically).

What other information can candidates glean from perusing campus Web sites?