May 25, 2012, 3:12 pm
By David Evans
Recently I spent a couple of days at one of the Council of Independent Colleges’ Department and Division Chair Workshops in Indianapolis. The CIC hosts these professional-development workshops for (mostly new) department, program, and division chairs to help them network, be more effective and, frankly, to give them evidence that they are not alone in their professional challenges.
These workshops consist of a variety of sessions of interest to chairs, including developing and supporting adjunct faculty, working with institutional budgets, managing hiring and evaluation processes to maximize outcomes and minimize legal risk, and dealing with difficult colleagues. Each session is facilitated by an experienced senior administrator (that was why I was there) or an appropriately qualified attorney or other professional.
One of the things that the chairs in attendance noted was that few…
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April 27, 2012, 2:21 pm
By David Evans
This year one of our schools has experienced a wave of retirements that has left about half of its primary program unstaffed. In turn, we have the unprecedented opportunity to make multiple hires at once to rebuild the program and, perhaps, turn it in new directions.
A helpful analogy may be the college basketball team that graduates three of its five starting players in a single year. Inevitably, next year’s team is going to be drastically different–whether better or weaker is an open question. However, if there’s still going to be a team, the positions need to be filled with the best possible people, but those new people need to fit together into a team and play different roles for the team to be most effective. Just as a basketball team doesn’t need three shooting guards, for instance, a small English department doesn’t need three Shakespeareans.
As it happens, we advertised…
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March 22, 2012, 2:53 pm
By David Evans
Lately, I’ve been struggling with the concept of teaching demonstrations and their role in campus interviews. I believe that we need to have some sort of live, real-time demonstration of candidates’ teaching, but I am not convinced that we have found the best model.
Let’s start with context. The campus interview is a highly fraught and nerve-racking experience for candidates, particularly those without a great deal of professional experience. That fact alone throws a wrench into the conduct of a teaching demonstration, as it takes place, as a baseline condition, in a situation far out of the normal course of faculty work.
Moreover, the candidate is being observed and knows that the stakes are high. Even in the vaguely analogous classroom visits deans or chairs do for annual evaluation and tenure and promotion cases, the pressure of having a senior colleague watching can disconcert …
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March 9, 2012, 1:49 pm
By David Evans
George David Clark recently asked, Can a single faculty member can have a significant impact on the culture of a university, even a small liberal-arts school?
He asks this question as a job seeker who is seeking the elusive career opportunity that will enable him to pursue his professional dreams. He also asks it from the position of someone whose search has led him to see that “some of the jobs I am most competitive for are no one’s ‘dream jobs,’” a realization that comes hard to many graduate students looking for academic work. The larger context of his question is whether you can take a job at a “non-dream” institution and have the kind of impact that enables you to find professional growth and fulfillment beyond your original hopes. In my experience, the answer is “yes,” though, admittedly, it can take years to understand that fact.
When we complete a search here, we not only…
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January 20, 2012, 3:17 pm
By David Evans
I have written before about how hard it is for my institution to help prospective faculty members find suitable employment for their spouses or partners. We share this challenge with many small private colleges and universities in small towns and rural areas, and I have had many conversations with my fellow chief academic officers at comparable institutions about how to find or create viable options for partnered candidates who we have invited to join our faculty.
Though our possibilities in the spousal-employment area are limited, there is one thing we can do to show partners and spouses the life they might have were they to come to Storm Lake. This year, we have started to invite the selected candidate and his or her spouse or partner back to campus for a short visit to explore the town and get a taste of what life is like here.
Doing this has increased our search expenses…
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January 9, 2012, 3:56 pm
By David Evans
When talk turns to academic hiring, it also often turns to the question of mentorship: how candidates have been guided, well or poorly, by those with more experience and, presumably, more savvy in the ways of academe, and how that guidance has helped or hurt candidates.
Certainly, I have encountered job applicants who have apparently been getting bad advice from their mentors. Years ago, in a couple of consecutive searches at my first institution, we saw a string of really poor job letters from candidates in an extremely prestigious graduate program, candidates whose general qualifications and accomplishments would have made them highly competitive for our positions. These letters were poor in similar ways, suggesting a pattern of bad advice rather than some odd series of quirks in a fairly large number of candidates. They were terse and arrogant, lacked sufficient detail about the…
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December 20, 2011, 2:43 pm
By David Evans
For the last few years, we’ve been administering an assessment test of working and leadership styles to candidates for management positions at the university. The hiring manager reviews the test results during the search process to help gauge candidates’ strengths and weaknesses while making a decision on an offer.
I confess that, like many people with a faculty background, I am skeptical of what might be termed “HR initiatives” such as this personality test. However, in this case, my skepticism was based on ignorance. I had not examined the test we use, nor taken it myself, and so my response to it was pure prejudice, which was, as is so often the case, based on a lack of real knowledge about the issue in question.
Last week, as we were finishing up our on-campus interviews for several senior leadership positions, my relationship with the test took a new turn. In one particular…
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December 2, 2011, 12:23 pm
By David Evans
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…
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October 21, 2011, 12:00 pm
By David Evans
We’re about to advertise for a new dean of our school of education. This particular position poses an interesting dilemma for our search, because on a certain level the job is intensely local and involves extensive connections with schools in the area as well as the state educational organizations and bureaucracies here in Iowa.
Iowa is a special case in this regard, as it has a long and powerful tradition of local control for its schools and thus a very complex relationship between schools of education and the state department of education, as well as with local schools and the area education agencies that provide resources and services for schools that often lack them due to the small size of many Iowa school districts. In short, we have a quirky system of public education, productive engagement with which takes a certain degree of local knowledge that only comes with experience…
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October 14, 2011, 4:22 pm
By David Evans
In the old days before the Internet, the middle of October was the pivotal moment of the academic year for job seekers in English and modern languages. Sometime about now, the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List would land on desks at graduate programs across the United States, and within minutes (seconds, even) eager graduate students would be flipping desperately through the nearest available copy to see how the market looked for the year.
Like picking apples and raking leaves, grabbing the earliest copy of the JIL was a fall tradition. My program kept copies in the graduate lounge, and even the new M.A. students would comb through them carefully to see if they could spot market trends that would determine their odds a few years down the road. In a way, the JIL was a temptation to fantasy, and there was a tremendous amount of trying possible opportunities on for size …
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