This past week saw our dining room transformed into a cluttered staging area for half-packed boxes and disassembled furniture. My family is gearing up for another cross-country move and at this point (after two similar relocations in the last three years) we are perfecting the process. What’s actually helped the most this time around is the support we have received from our destination. Representatives of the program I’ll be working in have offered assistance with everything from ordering textbooks to scouting prospective homes. We already have help lined up to unpack the moving van. Faced with all this generosity, I’ve begun thinking not only about the logistics of the move, but, more generally, how new hires can best greet (and thank) the departments and programs they enter.
Last week, I attended an event during which I was seated at a table with an undergraduate student who loves her classes and is enthusiastically pursuing three majors. I expressed genuine admiration for her sense of drive and ambition and asked what she planned to do with degrees from our colleges of science, humanities, and business. “Well,” she explained, “I’ve always wanted to be an anesthesiologist and a wedding planner, but in the last few years, I’ve grown more interested in real estate.”
Over the past few months, I’ve been writing about higher-education administration as if it were some sort of Manichean duality: authoritarians versus libertarians, control freaks versus true leaders, power-mongers versus those who exercise authority properly.
Please note that when I say “middle area,” I don’t mean that in a positive sense. I’m not saying that these people are moderates or that they’ve somehow arrived at the perfect balance between authoritarianism and libertarianism. Rather, I’m suggesting that they’re neither hot nor cold but tepid. I refer to them as “Lumps,” because they’re mostly just there.
The policy concerns deadlines. In all of my classes, students write essays of one type or another, but I’ll focus on ENG 101, of freshman composition. In here, students write three medium-length essays that make up most of their grade for the semester. These essays have due dates. The kicker is that I don’t enforce these deadlines; they are loose deadlines. Let me explain.
In each of my department interviews this spring I got a question about my preparedness for the position’s service obligations. My response was simply that this was the area of academic work where I had the least experience. I directed a reading series some years back and I edit a literary magazine, but as a graduate student I hadn’t found many opportunities to “serve” in the ways permanent faculty are expected to. I told my interviewers that this was something I looked forward to about a tenure-track position: not necessarily the interminable committee meetings and excruciating bureaucracy I have heard my mentors complain about, but the chance to engage with the larger life of the campus, to develop relationships outside my department, and to have some stake in the university’s future.
You did it! You made the first (or even second!) cut of applicants for that faculty job, and you’ve been invited by the chair of the search committee to come to campus. 
While having lunch with one of our university’s rising stars recently, my dining companion recalled how hard it was for her to leave home to start her doctoral program. Because her father was determined to keep her close by, he offered to buy her a decked-out pickup truck if she would agree to attend a very mediocre graduate program in their hometown. “I was close to my family and I really wanted that truck, so it was hard,” she explained. Despite the attractive offer, she eventually declined her father’s retention package.
How do you resuscitate a floundering class? I find that a quick break, acknowledging that we’re all struggling with interest, can do wonders. Sometimes I change the order of activities — e.g., instead of writing at the end of class, I’ll shake things up a bit and do that earlier. Other times …
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.-
George David Clark
is a Ph.D. candidate in English at Texas Tech University. He is also a fellow in creative writing at Colgate University. He will defend his dissertation this spring.
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David Evans
is vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty at Buena Vista University, in Iowa.
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Gene Fant
is vice president for academic administration at Union University, in Jackson, Tenn.
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Isaac Sweeney
is an assistant professor of English at Richard Bland College, a two-year institution in Virginia.
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Rob Jenkins
is an associate professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College.
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Katharine Stewart
is a professor and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences' College of Public Health.
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Audrey Williams June
is a staff writer who covers the academic workplace.
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Eliana Osborn
has been an adjunct instructor at Arizona Western College since 2001, teaching mostly developmental English.
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Julie White
is assistant director of student services and an adjunct instructor of sociology at Monroe Community College in New York.
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Allison M. Vaillancourt
is vice president for human resources at the University of Arizona, in Tucson.
Read Allison's On Hiring entries
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