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August 26, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Hiring and Firing Bytes
• According to The Boston Globe, the Institute of Politics at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government continues to take in high-profile ex-politicians. As a recent Chronicle article notes, however, Harvard isn't the only popular destination for former politicos.
• Meanwhile, over at The New York Times, lawyers and professors are weighing in on whether the University of California at Berkeley should sack John C. Yoo, a tenured law professor who wrote the Justice Department memos that were used to justify the torture of terrorism suspects.
• Via The Ticker comes the news that Old Dominion University has cancelled its $40,000-a-year contract with a Virginia delegate, Phillip Hamilton, a Republican, thanks to e-mail messages obtained by The Virginian-Pilot, which revealed that he expected the university to hire him to lead a new teacher-training center when he sought start-up funds for the center in the state legislature. Hamilton has denied any wrongdoing, but the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Associated Press report that Virginia's speaker of the House, William J. Howell, also a Republican, is calling for an investigation into whether Hamilton violated the state's Comprehensive Conflict of Interest Act.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that Temple University has filed an unfair-labor-practice complaint against the faculty union for failing to continue negotiating a contract because of disagreement over union membership fees.
• Dean Dad explains why it's much harder to hire staff members than faculty members:
Faculty are conspicuous, and the tie to the classroom is obvious. Back-office support staff are inconspicuous, and show up in public discussion as 'overhead' or 'administrative bloat.' But their work is necessary, as anyone whose financial aid package got lost in the shuffle can attest. And the relative lack of romance in back-office work means that good people aren't willing to accept adjunct-level wages to do it; adding staff means full-time salaries with benefits. (There's some limited ability to use work-study students in a few roles, and funding for that has actually increased. It helps on the margins, but anything sensitive is out of the question.) We can't expand capacity on the cheap with staff, the way that we usually can with faculty.
• GayProf at Center of Gravitas has prepared a handy guide on how to spot good, bad, and crazy colleagues.
On Hiring is The Chronicle's blog about the ins and outs of college hiring, with articles and advice from around the Web.
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