We have just completed preliminary interviews in our search for a new vice-president for student affairs, and this year we decided to do them by Skype, rather than at an off-site location such as an airport hotel. We experimented with this interviewing method for several reasons. First, we have a large committee, and making it possible for eight or so individuals, including a student, with fiendishly complex schedules to be available for an extended, consolidated time off campus is virtually impossible. Secondly, we sometimes do interviews here in Storm Lake, which saves us time but costs candidates several extra hours to make the trip from any of the regional airports. Even if candidates stayed near the airport and we came to them, they would likely spend two days traveling and interviewing, a significant cost for those who may have to take vacation days to interview. Those selected ...

Three years ago, at the start of my first fall here, we planted five or six apple trees along the back line of our acreage. In the intervening time, one has died and been replaced, we’ve added another couple, and the others are growing at a mysterious rate determined by weather, soil quality, and sunshine. Right now, one of these trees has one little apple on its branches, the first we’ve had on any of our fruit trees. Recently the metaphor of growing fruit trees has begun to take over my thinking about how institutions change, not only relative to faculty hiring but also in terms of the various projects we undertake each year, the reforms we try to implement, the planning we do, and the processes we follow. The applicability of the fruit-tree metaphor to hiring faculty should be clear. You recruit new faculty to the university, plant them there, tend them according to your...

We're about to place our first ads for our searches for this year. Consistent with my principles about what I write here, and what I think is useful for job-seekers, as with last year I will update you on these searches to the extent I can to help clarify how the process works for our small, rural, private university.

At the moment, we're preparing to conduct four searches. Three of them are replacement positions: one in educational psychology, one in exercise science, and one in Spanish. One is a brand-new position in biology (something in the biomedical area, but we’re casting a broad net), which is a reward for our biology program for its tremendous success in the past few years in increasing enrollments coupled—crucially—with a real enhancement in student success. Three of the positions are strictly at the entry level, while we're going to advertise the educational psychology...

A recent thread in The Chronicle's forums on "Eliminating Star Candidates from the Pool" once again has me thinking about how the profession defines "stars" and how we should treat star candidates as we select our interview pools.

My whole career has been at small, teaching-oriented institutions. The first of these was the only one where we realistically had a regular chance to hire the most obvious stars in the pool. Since then, I've been at institutions that are challenged by location, reputation (deserved or not), teaching load, and other resources in such a way as to virtually guarantee that we wouldn't be able to hire candidates immediately recognized by the profession at large as stars. But as I've said before, at all of these institutions we have managed to make stellar hires most of the time anyway. (This is because there's more than one working definition of "stellar," of course....

My last entry on the efforts of the small private colleges and universities in Iowa to increase the diversity of our faculty and staff elicited several wholly predictable responses asking for justification for that effort and questioning the value of diversity, per se, as a component of an educational institution.

There are, in fact, a number of solid studies showing how diversity positively affects the undergraduate experience, many of them done by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, as one commenter notes. It's particularly important to add that all the private colleges in Iowa are small and primarily residential in nature, which, I think, increases the value of campus diversity, because what we all seek is a kind of "total experience" where the entire enterprise, not just what happens in the classroom, is part of the education we work to provide.

Still, regardless of ...

Last November I wrote about some discussions I had with my fellow chief academic officers at Iowa private colleges and universities at our annual meeting about how to increase the diversity of faculty and staff members at our respective institutions. The discussion that followed this meeting, both in public and private responses to my post and among my colleagues here in Iowa, was extremely interesting and productive. In fact, we attracted a job application in one of our searches as a direct result of that discussion, and I am happy and grateful that we had that outcome.

The CAO's just met again last week and returned to the question of how to recruit a more diverse faculty and staff to our campuses. This will surely be a durable issue because we face structural and cultural challenges that make rapid progress in this area unlikely.

However, we did generate some interesting ideas that I...

Like most of you who are reading this entry, I spend a pretty fair amount of time on The Chronicle's Web site reading about the latest developments in higher education. Because of my professional role, I also read a number of other higher-education publications, including those produced by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, the Council of Independent Colleges, and other organizations.

Anyone who spends much time with these publications knows that higher education is in the midst of some wrenching transitions that are certainly relevant to anyone pursuing a career as a faculty member. Cuts in public funds, the rise of "assessment imperatives," increases in administrative staff (some arguably necessary, some arguably not), the "accountability movement," recent initiatives by institutions such as Texas A&M University to develop measurements for faculty costs and...

I've referred before to the discussions on CICDEAN-L, the e-mail list sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges primarily for chief academic officers at small, private institutions like mine.

A recent discussion on the list, which caught my eye because we just hired a new economist and a new management professor, focused on the challenges small colleges face when hiring business-faculty members: the shortage of business Ph.D.'s generally, problems posed by what is now a "competitive salary" for such people, and the strictures of specialized accreditation, particularly that offered by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

Most of the discussion concerned doctorate-holding accounting-faculty members. Depending on what figures you use, the average starting salary across institutional types for such faculty members is around $130,000 per year. The AACSB figures show...

It's no surprise to anyone in higher education that there are often considerable tensions between faculty members and "the administration," an amorphous group of people who may or may not include chairs, deans, academic vice presidents, student-affairs people, and others whose duties are not primarily classroom instruction and research.

I think about these tensions a lot, and for all kinds of reasons including my intense desire to minimize them here when I can. An atmosphere of trust and collaboration is obviously much more likely to be productive than one in which the players don't believe in each other's good intentions and willingness to carry out agreements and plans.

I've recently had some correspondence with a professional friend about a provost who quietly overruled the actions of a series of faculty committees that developed plans to strengthen a particular program. I have very...

We're in the midst of our startup exercises for the 2010-11 academic year. Over the past couple of days, we've had the Fall Faculty/Staff Workshop, an annual tradition in which the faculty and many of the staff come together to discuss issues for the upcoming year, particularly those that have large strategic implications for our operations.

This year our two biggest projects are getting though our site visit from our accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, in early November, and carrying on with our comprehensive analysis of faculty workload and its relationship to student engagement and other aspects of academic quality at the institution. The HLC visit is actually the less daunting of these, because, while it's a high-stakes process and one that's taken a lot of preparation over the past two years, it also has a clear...