Demystifying Faculty Searches

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 program at the assistant or associate level in hopes that the contractions in public-sector employment may enable us to hire someone with more experience.

We’re thinking now about advertising. We’ll advertise in the usual places, The Chronicle and other professional Web sites, and in the MLA Job Information List for the Spanish position. We’re debating about other locations, such as Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. The problem is that job ads are very expensive, and we need to think about the potential return on our investment for advertising in each location. For perspective, I just authorized up to $1,500 to advertise the Spanish position. Multiply this by several positions, and it becomes obvious how expensive it is simply to start a search.

What will be interesting this year is how a couple of years’ worth of really bad job markets are going to affect our pools. Last year’s searches had larger (and therefore stronger) pools than those we did the year before, and I am curious to see if that effect continues this year. In previous years, we have struggled to recruit Spanish faculty members, and I look forward to seeing what happens this year, in particular, given the increasing level of Spanish spoken here in Storm Lake. We’ve had outstanding pools and great luck in hiring in the sciences, and I certainly hope that continues. I am happy that we have the resources to hire, and even to create a new position (we may create another, the one in some area of sustainability I discussed last summer), and I hope this year again to be at least moderately helpful in demystifying the process.