Chronicle readers have such interesting lives, and when one of them wrote to me recently with a subject line that read, “Ethical Dilemma! Can You Help?,” I couldn’t wait to hear more.
The short version of the story went like this: “We have found a perfect candidate. Her qualifications far exceeded any of the competition. Her job talk was riveting. We had her meet with stakeholders all over campus, and after almost every encounter, people wrote notes or whispered various forms of, ‘Where did you find her?,’ and ‘She is clearly the one.’ There is only one problem; several of us will feel terribly guilty if she comes. Our department is a snake pit, and this woman will come to hate it as much as we do. We need her, but it would be cruel to encourage her to come.”
That is an ethical dilemma. So, what to do?
As we all know, nasty organizations are usually made better only when the mean people die, leave, or somehow get outnumbered. Once there is a critical mass of “good people,” the nasty people’s antics become far more obvious and outrageous and their power base declines. Getting to that critical mass can be tricky, however, and a one-person-at-a-time approach does not usually work, as the nasties often descend on the newbies and drive them out in order to maintain control.
In an optimal situation, a cluster of fresh blood would be brought on board at once to tip the balance of power, but resource constraints make that a very unlikely possibility. So, if you can only bring on one person, do you have an ethical obligation to warn him or her about how awful the new job is likely to be? Or do you have an obligation to do your best to recruit the best person?
News flash: Smart people will figure out that they have been dropped into hell on about the first day on the job, and they will come to resent those who should have offered fair warning. Nothing good will come of trying to cover up the real situation. A better approach would be to offer an honest assessment of the department’s current culture and explain how the candidate can help create a better future. Providing the candidate with a ready-made network of like-minded or at least not-evil colleagues inside and outside the immediate work group would be important as well. Life inside the department might be tense, but if there are at least a few potential allies and life outside the department seems OK, the perfect candidate might be willing to take a risk.
Have you ever discouraged a candidate from accepting an offer? Have you ever joined an organization that turned out to be nothing like you were led to believe?