I've discussed here several times the discontinuities between graduate education and what's really called for from faculty members at small, teaching-oriented institutions. I've also discussed the even bigger discontinuities between my education as a Ph.D. in 17th-century English literature and my current administrative role. These gaps sometimes yawn widely, though I have certainly found that a lot of the skills I developed as an English student and professor have served me extremely well in my administrative career.

Sometimes my academic training and interests come to the fore in surprising and rewarding ways. At the moment, I find myself especially well served by my scholarly interests, which focus on travel writing around the time of the English civil wars in the mid-17th century through the death of Queen Anne in 1714.

"How?," you might ask.

Well, my institution is making an...

In my previous entry, I discussed some principles for honest advertising, the most important of which is not to advertise aspects of the job we don't have any intention of meeting with the hire. If there are restrictions on rank, degree-completion status, or other factors, those should go in the ad. Increasing the size of the pool is not an excuse for a deceptive job description.

There's a challenge, however, in applying this principle. When we draft an ad, in some instances the search is a fishing expedition to find the best possible person we can in a very broad area. Whether we can pursue a search configured this way depends on the qualifications and interests of extant faculty in the program, absolute versus contingent or desirable curricular issues, and our general sense of what's going to be possible in a candidate pool we haven't yet seen. So, as I've said here before, the trick is...

The comments in response to my last entry about the beginning of our search season raise good questions that deserve some thought and a thorough response.

One commenter suggests that the best way to make everyone happy is to offer a very high salary and then adjust everyone else's salary to match.

Philosophically, this is an excellent point, and I always try hard to offer the best salary I can to selected candidates because I know that doing so will help us attract and retain the best people we can. I also take careful account of the salaries of faculty members who are already here to ensure fairness to them and to avoid inducing serious distortions in our salary structure.

Practically speaking, however, there are real limits to how much adjusting one can do, particularly at a small institution like mine. For example, I can imagine a scenario in which I would need to find enough money...

Over the past year, I've written a lot about the challenges of recruiting faculty members to my small, rural institution. We are not part of the dominant narrative of the job market in any significant way -- we're out of the way, teaching-oriented, and not glamorous. However, as I mentioned in a reply to comments on my last post, there are a number of very attractive things about the institution and the jobs we can offer.

This year, as far as I know at this point, we will undertake a total of five searches in management, economics, composition, secondary education, and athletic training. The management position is to replace a retiring, longtime faculty member, as is the position in secondary education. The economics position is a consolidation of two previous economics positions reflecting enrollment shifts. The composition position is to replace someone who left two years ago because...

Many conversations about the academic job market bandy around figures about the number of applicants for various positions. Comments on a recent post about my struggles to write the right kind of recommendation letter for a former master's student of mine contain dire predictions that she will never find a job, or will need to teach English in Asia, or that she should get a teaching certification (which she actually already has) and teach secondary English.

My own Ph.D. is in English, and I am deeply familiar with the trials of the academic job market from both sides of the table. Searching for a faculty job in English or in other fields (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) is highly competitive and can certainly be heartbreaking.

But here's something true. In the last nine years, I have worked as an administrator at three different institutions. All three of them have had ...

The core of a lot of my thinking about academic hiring has been that graduate schools tend to (want to) produce candidates for a particular kind of job -- one that to a large extent reproduces the faculty members of a doctoral university while the large majority of academic jobs are at institutions that only minimally resemble such places.

All four of the colleges and universities where I've worked as a faculty member and administrator have been relatively small, teaching-oriented institutions where research, while valued, was not at the top of the agenda. All four have been at least pretty good at their missions, and have provided excellent educational opportunities for undergraduates (and in a couple of cases, master's students).

I'm struck, though, by the continuous disjunction experienced by new faculty members (most especially those fresh from doctoral programs) between the job ...

I'm in the process of composing a letter of recommendation for a former master's student with whom I worked closely several years ago, both in courses and as a member of her thesis committee. She was -- and I'm sure will continue to be -- a splendid student, bright, a wonderful writer, a fine and clear thinker, and a pure pleasure to be around.

Although I am exceedingly wary of recommending students to Ph.D. programs in English due to the brutality of the job market, in this instance I know that my former student has a true calling that can sustain her throughout the challenges of completing a Ph.D., and then of facing a market that may or may not yield the outcome she desires. She tells me that this is what she needs to do, and I believe her and am therefore glad to support her pursuit.

Moreover, if she were coming to my current institution as an applicant with her Ph.D. in hand, ...

A recent First Person essay in The Chronicle, "How Tenure Decisions Are Made," by Michael Bugeja, my colleague down the road at Iowa State, and the subsequent discussion in the Chronicle's discussion Forums raise a number of important issues that should be of interest to academic job seekers.

The original essay caught my attention for several reasons, not least of which is Bugeja's interest in attracting and retaining faculty in Iowa, a challenge with which I have some familiarity. The Forum discussions, though, raise a number of concerns about the breadth of his rhetoric, even as he opens with a discussion about understanding an institution and its priorities as one considers possible employment there, and then one's potential bid for tenure.

My institution is in no way a research university. It is a small, teaching-oriented comprehensive baccalaureate college with a couple of...

To follow up on my last post about adjunct-labor issues, I would like to propose a simple taxonomy of the ways in which institutions use adjunct faculty members. Each of those ways has its own particular ethical and educational implications:

Lately the pages of The Chronicle seem to have had even more articles, editorials, and blog entries than usual on the use and abuse of adjunct faculty members. The economic downturn has had effects ranging from painful to devastating on college and university budgets, and whenever budgets come up in conversation, the issue of adjunct hiring is sure to be close behind.

One major argument often mounted against the extensive use of adjunct faculty members is that they reduce the quality of the education students receive. Sometimes those arguments are well motivated, and sometimes not. Some commenters assert that adjunct instructors, as a class, do not teach as well as full-time faculty members, basing that argument on an array of factors ranging from adjuncts’ often lower academic qualifications to simple prejudice.

In my supervisory and evaluative experience — nine years as a department ...