Searching and Hiring Away From the Spotlight

During the 2008-9 hiring season, one of the things I would like to discuss here is how colleges and universities that are not at the top of many candidates’ lists of desirable places to work can position themselves to compete for strong and interesting new faculty members.

In particular, I am thinking about colleges in locations that are not obviously attractive and institutions that have high workloads or are strongly oriented to teaching. How can they make their cases as good places to work, given the profession’s dominant focus on research and sophisticated college towns as the pinnacle of academic success?

I know from firsthand experience that a career away from the Ivy league or away from cities like Seattle, Madison, Charlottesville, or Chapel Hill can be highly rewarding. I also know that many candidates for assistant professorships do not feel the same way.

So some pretty good jobs at lesser-ranked colleges go begging while a place like Swarthmore College rejects 700 or more candidates for an English search.

I suspect that an enormous revolution needs to occur in the way the profession thinks about itself to redress those challenges. Still, I would like to think aloud on occasion about how institutions can reach candidates, and how candidates can understand, and come to terms with, professional opportunities that may differ greatly from what they envisioned when they first began to think of a career in academe.