Strategizing on Salary and Rank

The comments in response to my last entry about the beginning of our search season raise good questions that deserve some thought and a thorough response.

One commenter suggests that the best way to make everyone happy is to offer a very high salary and then adjust everyone else’s salary to match.

Philosophically, this is an excellent point, and I always try hard to offer the best salary I can to selected candidates because I know that doing so will help us attract and retain the best people we can. I also take careful account of the salaries of faculty members who are already here to ensure fairness to them and to avoid inducing serious distortions in our salary structure.

Practically speaking, however, there are real limits to how much adjusting one can do, particularly at a small institution like mine. For example, I can imagine a scenario in which I would need to find enough money to create an entirely new faculty line in order to increase a candidate’s salary offer by $2,000 to $3,000, which in times such as these, simply cannot happen.

It’s not a question of being cheap or trying to oppress either candidates or faculty members who are already here. It’s a question of making maximum use of available resources, and right now available resources are seriously strained, even at my relatively prosperous institution. I also believe strongly that I owe a great deal more to existing faculty members than I do to someone to whom I’m making an offer, and in the long run, I am convinced that this attitude pays off in faculty satisfaction and retention, even if it doesn’t result in the pleasant vertical salary creep the commenter recommends.

Another commenter discusses his experience as a candidate at my institution some time ago (long before I was here). His concern is that the job was advertised at open rank, even though it was clear that the search committee never intended to hire anyone higher than an associate professor. While I cannot speak to his experience, I am absolutely opposed to advertising anything that the institution is not prepared to offer. If we’re not going to hire at the rank of professor, we’re not going to advertise that we will consider doing so. If we’re not going to hire someone without a degree in hand, we’re not going to say “ABD considered.” While I want larger pools than we get (the commenter suggests that some institutions advertise open rank to increase pools), I see absolutely no benefit to having larger pools that are full of people we won’t consider hiring.

At any rate, all these matters are complex. I spent quite a few years as a cynical faculty member with a strong distrust of administrative motives. I remember that feeling and don’t intend to act in a way that would shame my earlier self. But I also have a much clearer picture of the reality in which we operate, and it is definitely true that the ideal is the enemy of the possible in many matters of academic hiring.