The Search Committee’s Role

I’ve gotten slightly tangled up with the committee conducting one of our recent searches, and as a result I’ve been reflecting on the formal and informal roles of the search committee.

At every institution where I’ve worked, the search committee is formally an advisory committee to whoever has the authority actually to make the hire. But the meaning of “advisory” has sometimes been neither all that clear nor, as a result, uncontested. A misunderstanding of the committee’s role, whether among members of the committee or by the hiring individual, can have unfortunate consequences for the search process.

My position, both as a faculty member and as an administrator, is that the search committee is determined and appointed to bring a mix of disciplinary expertise and institutional insight to the hiring process. Many of the searches for which I’m responsible are outside my academic discipline, so I’m in no position to evaluate candidates’ research. As a matter of principle, since there’s no way I can attend every candidate’s teaching demonstration, I don’t attend any of them, and thus listen very closely to the committee’s advice when it recommends a candidate.

I nearly always defer to the committee’s recommendations. I even say this explicitly to candidates when I interview them, although, of course, I still watch for areas of concern or special strength when I have these conversations. I have had search committees reporting to me for 11 years now, and have had the final word for the past three years. In that time, I’ve never flatly overruled a search committee, though I have on occasion nudged it in one direction or another.

Last year we searched in composition, an area about which I know a great deal, having been an English professor and taught quite a lot of composition as a graduate assistant and faculty member. We brought three terrific candidates to campus, any one of whom I would have been glad to hire. Because of their quality, I took the exceptional action of attending the committee’s discussion so that I could thoroughly understand the rationale for their recommendation. We had an excellent discussion, which led to the committee’s and my reaching a clear consensus. I offered that candidate the job, which she accepted, and in which she’s doing extremely well.

But that was the first time in over a decade of having committees report to me that I have participated directly in the members’ deliberative processes, though a couple of previous times I’ve asked the committee as whole to meet with me to discuss its recommendations.

The entanglement I had this year was different. In the search in question, we had a small pool of mostly weak quality. There were, however, a couple of good candidates, clearly and significantly better than the others. Between those two, one was noticeably stronger, at least on paper, than the other one was.

As applications come into my office, I routinely check with the administrative assistant who handles them to assess in broad terms the size and quality of the pool. In this search, I was concerned that we might not be able to proceed with interviews, so I monitored the pool more closely and read the applications with some care.

As a result, I had an unusually good sense of the pool before the campus-interview process, and had a “paper favorite” candidate, an opinion I didn’t bother to hide. In my view, this individual’s superior qualifications for our job were self-evident.

The search committee’s members, though, felt my thumb on the scale. Therefore their approach to the interviews was to look for negatives in that candidate. I think that’s fine—in an interview process, what you’re looking for is strengths and weaknesses, and a firm eye for weaknesses is helpful in finding the best candidate. Honestly, had the committee found those weaknesses, it would have eliminated the candidate from consideration, and we would have taken another direction in the search.

I’m ambivalent about this whole experience. I’ve been around for some time and have been involved in hiring around 60 faculty members. I’ve seen a lot of pools and a lot of candidates. In this instance, I had a clearer opinion than I usually do before the interview process began, and I didn’t hide that opinion. But the outcome of the search was not—in fact, still isn’t—a done deal, and I’m not sure how I could have managed it better without dishonestly hiding an evaluation of the candidate pool that the process has, in fact, borne out.

I regret that I pressured the search committee, but I somehow don’t feel as though I really did. Still, I am thinking hard about how I work with committees, and about how I prepare them to conduct searches and make recommendations to me that are, in the final analysis, advisory rather than conclusory.