At a recent conference panel, one of the topics was the role of undergraduates in faculty searches. One speaker suggested that students should only be involved if they were closely supervised by a search-committee member, including at meals and any other sessions with the candidates.

At my first institution, we generally had one or two students serving as adjunct members of a search committee, and that experience has permanently shaped my feelings on the subject. While it is certainly true that undergraduates must be carefully trained and socialized to conduct themselves properly, the advantages of involving them are great.

First, candidates will often say things to students that they would never say in the presence of other committee members. I have seen candidates both eliminate themselves from consideration by treating students with disdain, and move themselves to the top of...

Talented faculty members often inspire gifted students to aspire to the professoriate. I sometimes think those students are a bit like an eager-to-please puppy that brings a dead squirrel to its owner under the assumption that a loving pat on the head is in order.

“So naïve,” the professor might think. Or perhaps, “So innocent about what graduate school and the job market look like.” Better yet, “Please tell me you aren’t dropping your premed track for some esoteric, low-paying field!”

But what should professors actually say to those would-be academics?

Most job candidates who are new to the academic market treat conferences like some sort of extended job interview. I once heard those folks called “conference squirrels” because their cheeks (briefcases) were stuffed with nuts (CV’s). When I became a department chairman, I always cringed when conference organizers put my title on my nametag because I knew I was going to be a magnet for the duration of the meeting.

That’s not to say I haven’t solicited my share of CV’s at academic meetings. They are prime ground for networking, but it’s a fine line to walk. Nothing sours search-committee members quite like an overeager job seeker who has buttonholed them in the doorway to a reception or a restroom.

What advice can you offer applicants who want to network at conferences?

I’m writing from Portland, Ore., at the annual meeting of the Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences, an organization dedicated to both professional development for deans and advocacy for the role of arts-and-sciences colleges in the contemporary university.

The talk in the halls and over coffee is, of course, about the impact of the current fiscal crisis on higher education. Public institutions are contending with budget cuts ranging from painful to brutal, and private institutions are facing depressing reductions in endowments and potential enrollment challenges as families assess their ability and willingness to pay big tuition bills.

Deans face a specific and daunting set of challenges in this context. As middle managers, we have limited room to maneuver between the demands of students, faculty members, and departments on one side, and vice presidents, provosts, presidents, ...

Legislators and the public are quick to blame escalating college tuition on faculty pay increases, but an article in The Chronicle shatters that myth:

In real terms, professors earn about the same as they did 20 years ago. From 1986 to 2005, faculty pay grew by only a quarter of a percentage point, adjusted for inflation. Physicians, by contrast, saw their incomes rise by 34 percent, on average, above inflation, and lawyers by 18 percent.

While “faculty salaries do account for the largest single chunk of higher education’s recurring annual expenditures,” according to the article, faculty members’ piece of the pie is shrinking, as more full-timers are replaced with part-timers (about 70 percent of all faculty members are now nontenure-trackers, who earn money by the course and must find their own health insurance).

Meanwhile administrators’ piece of the pie seems to be...

My institution is in the midst of several searches to fill a vice presidency and some entry-level faculty and administrative positions. In the past few days I’ve interviewed about 10 candidates.

I’ve talked to strong candidates for all of the positions. As I have discussed before, though, our main hiring challenges include our remote location and our mission as a four-year institution that, while valuing research, puts a premium on teaching and advising undergraduates.

As our search committees begin deliberating about the best candidates to recommend we hire, one of the questions they will surely ask is, Are our candidates genuinely interested in our position? Or, are they simply applying to every possible institution because of a weak job market?

Many academics would argue — and they have a point — that it is up to candidates to determine their interest in us, contingent on...

As the job market continues to be influenced by the stock market, one issue I haven’t heard much about is the number of expected job openings that are vanishing because of deferred retirements.

Many faculty members time their retirements to stock-portfolio values; if the fund balances don’t hit their expected marks, retirements are deferred.

That has two effects on the job market. First, new openings do not materialize as expected. And second, institutions don’t have as much as money to make salary changes as they had anticipated. Full professors who retire generally are replaced by entry-level faculty members at much lower salaries, and the salary savings is used to help pay for other positions. A deferred retirement may, in fact, block two positions from being opened.

Are you hearing about a lot of senior professors delaying retirement?

We’re hearing a lot lately about hiring freezes in academe, especially at public colleges and universities. A “soft” freeze means the institution is still able to fill some positions in critical areas, while a “hard” freeze means it has stopped hiring at all.

The large number of freezes is going to have some interesting effects on the market this year and in future years. And while there is no disputing the tremendous negative impact those freezes will have on candidates, it’s also true that some institutions — small, remote, teaching-oriented campuses like my own — are still hiring vigorously, because when we have retirements or resignations it is often not possible for us to do without the faculty position or rely on local adjunct labor.

What I suspect will happen is that at least some candidates who would otherwise be unlikely to consider institutions like mine are going to...

Most colleges and universities have no idea just how much time serious applicants spend scouring campus Web sites for information, especially if the institutions are not particularly well known.

But the same information that administrators seem proud to post on their “Campus Highlights” page often leaves candidates cold. How can anyone really think that phrases like “a newly installed computer lab,” “our first hi-tech smart classroom,” or “recently air-conditioned” will attract high-quality faculty members in 2008? Even the photos that are selected tell a story: Dingy classrooms with no technology visible are distressing on one end of the scale, while too many model-pretty students who look like they are attending the University of Ralph Lauren are unnerving at the other.

Have you ever decided not to apply for a position based on something you’ve seen on a campus Web site?

Let’s suppose you have tenure at one institution when you are offered a lucrative position at another. You will not, however, be able to take your tenure with you but will have to reapply at your new institution after two years. Do you take the offer or insist on tenure portability?

Now let’s flip the situation: As an administrator, one of your departments has an opportunity to “steal” a major scholar. In order to land “Dr. Fabulous,” you make the hire at a full-professor rank and talk your senior administration into waiving the normal two-year waiting period for granting tenure to previously tenured faculty hires. The good doctor, however, turns out to be a jerk and begins to indulge heavily in his “newly discovered passion” for writing botanical poetry, and only dabbles in the area of scholarship for which you actually hired him. There are few teeth in your post-tenure review...