Not what they are saying. Legacy admits bypass the regular admission process. The 10% are legacy admissions. Before all these changes, one-third to half of highly-selective colleges were preferential admissions. Thus, when a college says it has a 12% acceptance rate, they are excluding the athletic, legacy, celebrity, kids of big donors, transfers, and politically connected. They are in a completely different pool. Granted, legacies may have only a 33% chance of acceptance, but that still is a lot better than their odds would be in the regular pool.

In addition, legacies have a huge mostly adverse impact on campus culture far in excess of their actual numbers. They tend to have instant access to the organizations, institutions and traditions of the college. Places like Cornell, Duke, Dartmouth, and Princeton are dominated by legacies: the social life and the networking.

When the time comes that legacy applicants can view their legacy status as a motivation to excel beyond the normal limits of what might be expected, then the privilege of legacy status will have finally met the challenge that it legitimately should have recognized several generations ago.

I also was competing with a peer for a department chair position.  I was not chosen mostly because I was not the favored candidate of the outgoing chair (I think) even though I had much more administrative experience and am better at getting things done.  (The chosen candidate was the outgoing chair’s long-term drinking buddy).  I was extremely ticked off and did start looking for chair positions at other universities.  However, as the interview offers started coming in, I realized that I loved working at my university and living in this town and did not really want to leave even though I was still very upset. 

So, instead I looked for new challenges within my university and ended up developing an entire new set of graduate programs.  This kept me engaged and challenged long enough to finally calm down (unlike the poster below this took me over a year) and I have gotten a great deal of recognition for these efforts.  Also, I now see that the person chosen got a much worse job than I did (the economic challenges over the past four years have made chairing a department a terrible job).  I currently have a very cordial relationship with the department chair and am daily grateful that I am not in his shoes as he is constantly stressed and depressed….

My advice would be to do nothing rash, particularly within a department where you hold tenure.  If you generally like your job and your personal life, look for a different challenge and even create an important job for yourself which allows you to learn something new.  While I have not “moved up” into another position, my CV is now much stronger if I want to compete for a future administrative post.  Now I just have to decide whether I still want to.

Actually in some ways this is the “Hiliary Clinton” strategy. She did not get the presidential nomination but took the Secretary of State job. Maybe she will run for president again, maybe do something else, but overall her willingness to cooperate with the victor has built her resume for other things in the future.

The stories I am reading here are hair-rising. I am aware that there are two—three, four, or more!–sides to a story, of course, but I also tend to believe that hiring practices are more often than not far from being strictly fair or based on merit. Other things count, such as who you know, who likes you, the biases of the members of the hiring committee, etc.  In my case, I have not been selected a couple of times for what I believed to be my dream job and for which I considered myself a perfect fit. Perhaps something is wrong with me, but when not selected even for an interview, and knowing that others were selected I didn’t think were such a great fit, I cannot recall feeling more than a “oh well!” sort of brief disappointment and didn’t dwell long on it at all.  Not even more than a couple of days, if that. I cannot imagine going on a rampage about it.  Nevertheless, I don’t think the less of those that react otherwise.  If a person believes strongly that a case has to be made about it publicly or that he/she is not appreciated and should leave for another job, then maybe he or she should actually do that.  Taking what is defined here as “the high road” is not always the best thing to do for that person or that circumstance.

and help those you know who end up in similar straights.

Having just begun the “better opportunity” than the one I wanted, I’d like to share some of the challenges involved.  I had competed with a colleague in an election for department chair that he won. But I decided to throw my loyalty toward my colleague who became chair for the remainder of his tenure in the position rather than fight it or even regret it. First, it took no time at all for the inappropriateness of the choice of a less qualified person to be noticed. Department members who had not voted for me expressed regret and hinted that they would support a coup d’etat of sorts.  It took a lot of forbearance not to join the “trash the new chair” movement.  Second, it was difficult to watch consistently bad decisions being made that affected the future of both people I cared about and people who, in some sense, deserved to bear the consequences of their choice.  I had to fight a very perverse schadenfreude for several years.  Finally, when the chair crashed and burned in a rather spectacular way that even transcended some of the department’s worst expectations, I had to fight the urge (and the mixed signals from department members) to go for the chair position again. Over the year in which the old chair was on his way out and a new chair was being chosen, I finally learned in every possible way that, while I could be the chair I wanted to be, I could never be the chair my colleagues wanted.  

 Swagato,

You may be able to afford this kind of flippancy.  The rest of us have bills to pay.

(And yes, it’s flippancy.  Don’t get on some high horse about the immorality of being an adjunct.  The system itself is immoral and change comes from the top down, not from the poorly-paid bottom up.)

Fly-on-the-wall,

You go! 

What happens with adjuncting is that you get so pigeonholed that no one can see you as a real candidate for a full-time job.  It’s like being the educational system’s comic sidekick and no one can see you as the main attraction. 

After a number of years, your experience can make you too expensive, especially if you work for a state institution with union representation.  I had a friend with a doctorate and 18 years experience adjuncting in her field.  Adjuncting meant that she had been teaching more hours and more students than any full timer could imagine doing, even on a bad day.  This friend applied for a tenure-track position at one of the community colleges where she had been teaching for all those years and got passed over for someone with an M.A. and two years experience.  The M.A. was cheaper.

The university is a class system, and the adjuncts are downstairs.

“I’ve also sat on committees where the committee chair didn’t want to
hire an adjunct because they figured that the adjunct was already here
for two guaranteed classes a semester and they didn’t want to bother
finding someone else to fill those classes. ”

That’s actually pretty common, mathzilla.

There’s also the little problem of a prophet not being appreciated in his or her hometown.  Adjuncts run into that all the time.  Committees often value the unknown quantity BECAUSE he or she is unknown.  There is a clean slate on which to write one’s own fantasy candidate when a new person comes in for an interview.  One can’t do that with an adjunct.

At my previous job, a colleague of mine was a finalist for a job at a better liberal arts college.  Despite the fact that he was an alumnus of said college, the job went to someone else.  Even though this happened many years ago, he was never able to let it go.  The truth of the matter is that the person who got the job had a much more impressive publication record.  Simply being an alum of a college should not guarantee getting a faculty position there down the line.  It should also never trump actual professional accomplishments.  Nevertheless, this colleague of mine never ceased referring to the person who got the job as the “man who is living my life.”

In any job search process, there are often times when the organization has someone in mind before the search is begun. In those instances, the process is a formality and the odds are against the outsider.
It happens. It happens a lot.
To quote the somewhat canned advice of M. Scott Peck, life is difficult. Once you accept that premise, life begins to get easier.
Applying that to this model, assuming you have done your best in the application process, your only choice is in your response to the situation.
And understanding that you do need to work somewhere, bear in mind the related question: do you want to work for an institution that makes poor decisions based on seemingly arbitrary criteria?

I was an adjunct at the university of my dreams, when I was told by a tenured member of the department to apply for a new full-time position that was being created as director of the university’s writing center.  I’d held four writing center director position before, I had excellent credentials and evaluations at this university, and I had even done a small, informal study to determine how the writing center could improve service to students.  Needless to say, I was stunned when the chair called me herself to tell me that the position had gone to a male candidate (I’m female) who didn’t have the credentials that I did.  She said that she wasn’t on the hiring committee, so she had no say in the matter.  It turned out that the position had been created for this candidate and posted for only three days, in the hope that no one else would see it and apply.  I felt a little bit better when the chair told the tenured faculty member who’d recommended me that she felt the committee had made a huge mistake in hiring this guy, as I was the better choice.  I was a team players afterward and eventually left the university for a full-time professorship elsewhere, but I really do think I missed the job of my dreams, as I loved everything about that university, except, of course, its rigged hiring system.     

I had a similar experience recently. I had a great interview for a job that was basically my 2nd choice. The institution was very active in recruiting me prior to the interview. Even though I was 90% sure I was going to turn down their offer, it still was a bit of a shock when I was rejected. I don’t suspect anything unethical was at play but it just shows these situations are very much out of our control and can change quickly and aren’t predictable.

This is the problem with America and our society, people are hired on who they know and not what they know.

John M. Marinatto, the Big East’s commissioner, said the league had long encouraged its basketball athletic directors to meet separately from the football AD’s and to discuss any concerns they may have with proposed changes
And therein lies the problem with the conference since birth.  Why should one sport hold dominion over all the others?  By encouraging this behavior, Marinatto assured the conference would ultimately become irrelevent.  Continue to allow the friars on the BB side to call the shots and you will have what you started with: A nice little basketball conference.  Football is a joke.

In response to jlowers and sanmarcos08, in the article I mentioned that the full funding is provided by the Albukhary Foundation. This foundation was established by Mr. Syed Mkhtar Albukhary. Coming from a poor and disadvantaged family, Mr. Albukhary made the promise some 20 years ago “to establish a university to provide opportunities to bright students from underprivileged and disadvantaged backgrounds to receive tertiary education and become useful, productive and caring members of society”

I have known Tan Sri Dzulkifli for a while now and I daresay he is the leading thinker on Education in Malaysia, and certainly could stand his ground internationally. He has spoken about creating alliances of philantrophical universities, of which he had found a few around the globe. Being in Private Equity in the Education Sector, I would be one of those who would naturally think of financial sustainability as a precedent to a university’s continuance. However, the Islamic concept of ‘wakaf’ (bequeathment) and zakat (tithe) was the basis of AIU, and these two mechanisms have a lot of history of sustainability. I greatly believe in their mission, and look forward to continued discussions with Tan Sri Dzul on their model. I have also visited AIU but unfortunately was not able to interact with the students there due to the short duration of my visit.

Liliana: Coincido que el concepto de “humaniversidad” es muy interesante. Curiosamente, contra lo que uno pudiera imaginarse, los programas académicos de AiU son en las áreas de negocios, contabilidad y tecnología informática, los cuales pudieran ser vistos precisamente como lo más cercano a una educación de corte neoliberal. Vale la pena seguir de cerca a esta institución para ver qué sucede. Francisco Marmolejo