In a previous entry, I promised to discuss the searches my institution is undertaking this year. This is an update on our search in human performance/athletic training.

We have an excellent athletic-training program, which was enthusiastically reaffirmed last year by the Council for the Accreditation of Athletic Training Education. The program provides students with great opportunities to learn from and network with athletes and health-care providers on and off the campus. Its graduates earn places in excellent master's and doctoral programs. The collaboration between the academic program in athletic training and our athletics program is a wonderful example of how departments can work together to enrich students' experiences on the campus.

One thing the accreditation council strongly recommended, however, was the addition of another tenure-track faculty member to support the...

In my previous post, I discussed the question of hiring for political diversity and, more specifically, the issue of hiring conservatives in the ostensibly liberal academy. I used the phrase "professionally reasonable measures" in describing how my institutions have tried to select candidates. One commenter suggested that that phrase requires a lot more unpacking, so here is at least a carry-on full.

In all three institutions where I have had actual power in the hiring process, here are the questions we have always asked (in rough priority and presupposing that the required degree is complete or near completion):

1. Is the candidate qualified by education and/or experience to do the job we are seeking to have done? In other words, we know basically what we need taught, what other duties we may require (e.g., directing a program, etc.), and what scholarly interests are under-represented...

One of my favorite higher-education blogs is Tenured Radical, by Claire Potter, a history professor at a top liberal-arts college in the Northeast. Her latest entry takes up the issue of intellectual diversity -- specifically, the hiring of conservatives -- in academic searches. She looks at that issue with a characteristic combination of thoughtfulness, analytical rigor, and lack of dogma that is perhaps at odds with the title of her blog.

As I've said before, I'm in English, and came of age academically during the "canon wars" and the debates over "political correctness." I am, by personal inclination, what you might call a pragmatic leftist (if my conservative friends and colleagues will grant that such a category exists at all), and "should," by the predictive models of some critics of higher education, be an exemplar of exclusionary hiring practices that strongly favor liberals ...

Late last week Chet Culver, the governor of Iowa, announced an immediate, across-the-board 10-percent cut in the budgets of all state agencies that report to his office. As far as I can tell, this cut is retroactive to the beginning of the fiscal year last July, which makes it even worse, as this year's budgets are already probably 25-percent spent.

There's some comfort, perhaps, in the knowledge that historically, Iowa almost always lags behind most of the country in going into a recession, hitting the bottom, and in recovery as well. While we had tough times last year, they were nothing like those afflicting much of the rest of the nation. So this pattern may mean that other states are on the road to recovery, which would be good news.

However, the other bit of news—less openly discussed—is that the state government is preparing for another round of cuts for fiscal 2011, which strongly...

A well-worn topic of discussion in The Chronicle's forums is the differences between the faculty and corporate (or so-called "real world") hiring processes.     

The invidious comparison usually goes like this: An academic search takes months, a corporate one takes weeks (at most). An academic search involves all sorts of silly rituals based on outmoded traditions (the conference interview, the multi-day campus interview), while a corporate one is rational and driven by verifiable, objective data that simplify hiring the "right person." An academic search is characterized by unprofessional and thoughtless conduct, such as committees not getting back to candidates in a timely fashion or communicating with them clearly, while a corporate one is smooth, professional, and efficient.

A recent article by Alina Tugend in The New York Times calls a lot of these generalizations into question. This...

One of the things that has surprised me when my institutions have conducted job searches is the number of applicants who have degrees from unaccredited institutions on their CV's. In many searches, there are multiple candidates whose credentials are suspicious, and I am curious about what they are thinking when they apply.

Often these candidates are unconventional in academic terms, and therefore may not have the savvy to recognize that an unaccredited degree is virtually worthless to a respectable, accredited institution. But some of these candidates do have higher degrees from accredited institutions, even prestigious ones. Perhaps they learned their lesson and took steps to redress the issue of the unaccredited degree, but of course that history is not clear from most application materials.

Generally, though, a candidate who presents an unaccredited degree in an area for which that...

I'm on my second tour of duty in rural Iowa. My first academic job—where I was for ten years—was at a fairly well-known small liberal-arts college in the eastern part of the state not far from the population center of Cedar Rapids and the cultural center of Iowa City. Now I'm up near the northwest corner of the state about 2-1/2 hours from both Des Moines and Omaha, Neb., our nearest real metropolitan areas, a far more isolated and rural part of the state.

Thus I have read with great interest the recent essay in The Chronicle Review, "The Rural Brain Drain," by Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas. I have thought at great length about the issues they raise, and have wrestled with my own experiences in rural Iowa for the past two decades. My wife is from near where we are now; after about 20 years away, including stints in a couple of big cities, she is glad to return. On the other hand, I...

I am always interested in finding ways to make the faculty positions available at my institution attractive to potential candidates. As I've discussed before, we have some challenges: We are a small teaching-oriented and teaching-intensive university, and (probably more importantly) we are located in a fairly remote corner of northwest Iowa, which, while it can be beautiful if you like cornfields, groves of trees, and silos, is not the dream location for many young Ph.D.'s.

One thing we do have, though, is a very good campus climate. Faculty members on the whole are collaborative, collegial, and friendly. There is a climate of mutual respect among the various constituencies on campus, and given the generally high level of contentiousness academics are capable of displaying, our faculty members are at peace, enjoy their jobs, and work very well together. These qualities are exceptionally...

I'm on record here as favoring fuller disclosure of salary parameters to candidates. I think it saves a lot of time on both sides of the hiring table if candidates know in advance whether or not the potential salary for a position is within an acceptable range, though I also certainly recognize that institutional factors often make it difficult to provide such disclosures.

If there has been a discussion with candidates or potential candidates about the salary range for a particular position, however, there's one thing such candidates must not do: They should never go over the head of the search-committee chair to the department chair, dean, or vice president for academic affairs to ask if it's possible to increase the salary range. Such an action is problematic in all sorts of ways. First, it's seriously presumptuous. The requester is suggesting that his or her application is so valuable ...

It's obvious to anyone who has been around the academy for 20 years or more that the roles of faculty members at all types of institutions are changing quickly and radically. Faculty duties and expectations have diversified and become more complex, but there clearly has not been a concomitant change in the traditional expectations for faculty performance.

To take one example: at many institutions, assessment programs have added substantial burdens to faculty members, who must both plan and execute them. I suspect, though I do not know, that such additional burdens are heavier at teaching-oriented colleges and universities that also have higher standard teaching loads than more research-oriented institutions. There's also increased pressure on faculty members to involve undergraduate students in research, an initiative that takes various forms at various institutions but that is prevalent ...