As I was speaking at a faculty meeting the other day, I had a thought that comes to me with some regularity these days: Right now, almost nothing I do in my job as dean of the faculty is directly related to what I learned in graduate school, or to my original plans when set out to earn my Ph.D.

I certainly never thought that I would become an administrator, at least beyond the department chair level. Even as a visiting instructor, though, I quickly developed an intense interest in how my college worked. The analytical thinking and institutional skepticism inculcated by scholarly training in my discipline (English) most definitely contributed to that interest. I think they also made me a pain to our administration in ways that I now understand quite thoroughly.

But budgeting, student recruitment and retention, strategic planning, facilities, personnel, and other issues that I now deal...

Like many academics, I am at a small institution that plays host to programs staffed by only a few faculty members. While at a big research university the English department, for example, may have five scholars of Renaissance literature, at small schools like mine the entire English department may comprise five scholars, period.

Graduate school generally conditions candidates to specialize and focus, whereas life at a small institution can force faculty members to generalize and diversify. Some professors thrive on this challenge, becoming wide-ranging, thoughtful instructors in an array of topics. Others do not shed their investment in specialization and thus turn out to be a poor fit at their institution.

From the hiring side, there are two main challenges in finding and hiring colleagues for a small institution. The first is attracting applicants who by temperament and training...

The happy outcome of a successful job search is, of course, a new job. Usually, a new job starts with a faculty-orientation session, many of which are going on now.

I have been to several of those — twice as a faculty member, and once so far to see what it looked like from the dean’s side of the table. I have to speak at one next week and, frankly, I am wondering what to say since I have all of five weeks’ experience at my new institution.

We talk a great deal about how the search process is a kind of courtship where both the candidate and the institution are trying to make a good impression. After that process is over, though, the great asymmetry between faculty member and institution reasserts itself. An untenured professor is still going to have to spend a lot of effort on impression management, but colleges and universities often stop making similar attempts.

What would...

Anyone who has been involved in academic hiring knows that searches for faculty and administrative positions can be occasions for high drama. Various conflicts and fantasies about personal and institutional identity can easily play a large and inappropriate role in the composition of job announcements and the conduct of searches. Candidates, who have much less power in the process than hiring institutions, can be treated very shabbily as those conflicts and fantasies play themselves out.

The blogger Tenured Radical has been consistently sensitive to such concerns. Today she offers excellent advice for the chairs of search committees, and hiring institutions in general, about how to compose job ads that are likely to be both effective in attracting the right candidates and fair to them as they decide whether to apply.

Tenured Radical’s advice is detailed and worth heeding as search...

Threads regularly appear in The Chronicle’s Forums discussing candidates’ concerns over what to wear to job interviews (the latest such thread is here).

The question is stressful for many candidates, particularly those who are still in graduate school and thus likely to be pressed financially. But the issue of how to dress is vexing for a number of reasons beyond the cost.

At many colleges and universities, faculty attire is aggressively casual, which can make job candidates wonder why they need to dress formally for an interview. However, even at such institutions, the hiring committees will judge candidates on their professional image as conveyed by dress. I suspect that the operating principle here is to see whether candidates have a “sense of occasion,” and can be formal and professional in circumstances that generally call for that kind of decorum.

However, hiring...

In my last entry, I discussed how job seekers can take advantage of late openings to gain a foothold in academe. One commenter noted that temporary, non-tenure-track positions are just that — temporary — and that no one should go into one believing anything different.

My own job history includes getting a visiting position that led to one on the tenure track, and I know of many other Ph.D.‘s who have made similar transitions. However, it is certainly true that many non-tenure-track faculty members do not get hired into tenure-track positions at the same (or any) institution, which raises a very important issue: What obligations does a hiring institution have to visiting, temporary, or non-tenure-track faculty members?

At minimum, such candidates should be treated with professionalism and fairness. In particular, when a search is undertaken for a position occupied by a temporary...

Yesterday I met with one of our deans, her incoming successor, and a faculty member in one of our larger programs. A faculty member had recently resigned and left a sizeable gap in our course schedule. Because of the late date, the remote location of our university, and the large enrollments in several of the courses, we are facing a major challenge in trying to accommodate our students without overwhelming the remaining faculty members in the program.

Over the years, I have had similar meetings with professors and chairs, and have several times needed to make temporary full-time hires to replace faculty members who have announced their departures late in the season.

From an institutional point of view, the greatest challenge is finding the right person for the position. In the past, I have worked with local doctoral universities, advertised on disciplinary e-mail groups, and relied...

I just started a new position this week as vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Buena Vista University, so I have been thinking about career transitions and institutional fit.

My new university bears many strong similarities to the small college where I started my faculty career. At times, I find the similarities ironic, as many of them are things I found irritating as a young junior faculty member but today I see as positive aspects of my professional life.

For example, at the small college, my first job after graduate school, I struggled with my new colleagues’ apparently odd and counterproductive obsession with institutional procedures and policies. I thought many governance committees, activities, and protocols were a waste of faculty time and more properly the purview of administrators who were getting paid a lot of money to care about such matters....

On top of all the bad news about state budgets, the recent release of a report by Moody’s Investors Service on the financial health of private colleges and universities whose bonds it rates adds still more budgetary gloom to the new hiring season.

Private institutions face multiple challenges in the current economy. Problems with student lending, shrinking endowments, financial disruptions in families with children in college, and credit scarcity all make meeting enrollment targets and managing budgets even more difficult than usual, particularly at the great majority of private institutions that are tuition driven.

All those developments are bad news for job seekers. Colleges and universities are already canceling searches and, in some cases, laying off faculty members. Renewals of existing positions and allocations of new ones will certainly receive extra institutional scrutiny ...

As I hoped, my last entry on how graduate students and hiring committees are socialized by the culture of research universities has attracted a variety of divergent comments, including a thread on The Chronicle’s Forums.

People talked about how the job market functions relative to graduate training as well as about the priority placed on research, the challenges of finding money to support your work, the sometimes ill-functioning nature of institutions with high teaching loads, and so on.

Coincidentally, I recently received an e-mail message from a former student, one of the best I have taught in 20 years, who is now enrolled in a master’s program in English at a midlevel research university in the South. Her university, while perfectly good (in fact, I recommended that she go there), is not likely to be placing many of its English Ph.D.‘s in top research universities. I asked her...