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[scion]

Can a department at a public university conducting a search for one TT position hire more than one person if the advertisement specifies only one position (versus one or more, multiple, etc.)?  I am asking because I am a finalist for a position in a department that has supposedly done this in the recent past. I was under the impression that public universities were bound by the language in the advertisement and had little or no flexibility.  Has anyone heard of this happening?

[copper]

Yes.  Though I bet whether a department "can" depends on state employment laws and how individual institutions interpret them.

[mleok]

The detail that is most likely to be binding is open rank vs. junior faculty searches. I don't think there's anything stopping them hiring more than one person if they choose.

[glowdart]

I know at least three departments who have done this in the past couple of years, and only one was a private. 

[melba_frilkins]

Yes, I've seen it done.

[scion]

The detail that is most likely to be binding is open rank vs. junior faculty searches. I don't think there's anything stopping them hiring more than one person if they choose.

Thanks for pointing out the rank aspect. I should have mentioned it in my original post. In the past search the department advertised one position at assistant rank and hired two people at that rank.  The current search advertises one position at assistant or associate rank.

[litdawg]

We advertised one opening but plan to hire two IF I take a different job before our search is concluded. Department would have two hires but only a net gain of one faculty member.

[ruralguy]

My dept. did this a number of years ago (its at a private SLAC). There was a sudden retirement, and we made the case that we found several excellent candidates to fill two positions. So, long story short, the appropriate faculty and admin committees and authorities to
let this happen agreed with us, and let us hire two people. But those two people wre both hired as a result of the original add.

Also, when I was in grad school, when a senior faculty member was hired, he essentially made it a requirement of his hire that he be able to bring in one junior faculty member from his team at the old school. That was also a private school.

[liberta]

Doesn't this scenario often come to pass in spousal hire situations? 

There are many married couples in departments.  You don't know it from the faculty list on the website because they have different names.  But when you go to the place, you then learn that so-and-so is married to so-and-so and the two happen to be experts in the same area.  This circumstance came about because the department did a search for ONE new TT faculty, and then the candidate that the department chose divulged to the dean, during the conversation where the dean made the official offer to the chosen candidate, that s/he is married to, of all things, another academic.  The dean wanted to accommodate the chosen candidate, so the dean created a second position in the same area of expertise. Thus the spouse was hired for a position for which s/he never applied or interviewed.  That's why humanities departments sometimes look lop-sided in terms of having more modernists but zero medievalists or vice verse, or the like.

Often a similar scenario takes place wherein the trailing spouse works in a different area of expertise but the same general field; for example, a Romance Languages Department conducts a search for an 18th-century Italianist, and the chosen candidate turns out to have a trailing spouse who works on medieval French poetry.  Both are hired to accommodate the "needs" of the chosen candidate; isn't that an example of how ONE position can turn into TWO positions?

[firstgeneration]

This happened to me twice.  Two years ago, I was hired TT at an urban R1.  I recently accepted a TT offer at an Ivy R1.  In both cases, I was one of two hires for a single advertised position.

My macro field is fairly broad.  It's not just Basketweaving.  We're more like Containers and Vessels of Various Types.  At my current institution, I'm the basket weaver, and the other hire is an excellent young potter.  Apparently, at the new school, the other new hire in containers is a promising cobbler, while the department is headed by a glass blower.  Each subfield has different theoretical origins, materials, and methods, and the prerequisite academic and professional experience for each kind of container varies.  Therefore, our CVs look very different.  However, we all make containers.  (Of course, at cocktail parties, when laypeople hear that I make containers, I get asked my opinion about the latest article in the Times or the Economist about glassmaking or pottery.  I just blink and wait for the conversation to come back to what I know best -- baskets.)

When advertisements seek an Assistant Professor of Containers, my guess is that they've made a good case to the dean and the provost for why several different kinds of container experts are needed, and why a basket weaver is insufficient to teach courses in pottery, or to supervise a dissertation that's all about glass.  At least in both of my early career cases, these are aging departments making multiple TT hires.   In both cases, I've begun and will be beginning with a cohort of new assistant professors.

[seniorscholar]

We advertised one opening but plan to hire two IF I take a different job before our search is concluded. Department would have two hires but only a net gain of one faculty member.

And best wishes, by the way, again.

The post reminds me that we hired two a few years ago under similarly unplanned circumstances: we had begged the Dean for two lines, the Dean said "one," we made the offer and it was accepted -- and then within a few days the search in another department in the College was declared "failed" and the Dean told us to go ahead. We did not, however, go to the other two on our original campus visit list, since they too closely duplicated the one we'd hired, but we plunged quickly into the list of people who had convention interviews, brought in the two with a somewhat different approach and different secondary fields, and hired one of them.

[daniel_von_flanagan]

Yes.  Why not?  Language in ads is binding so as to make sure EEOC guidelines etc are met, but unless the ad says something like "at most one" there is unlikely to be anything in it that precludes multiple hires. - DvF

[justanotherucprof]

Can a department at a public university conducting a search for one TT position hire more than one person if the advertisement specifies only one position (versus one or more, multiple, etc.)? 

Yes of course it can, and in my experience this is very common, even during these financially difficult times.  We deliberately run broad searches so as to best position ourselves to respond either to opportunities in the candidate pool or to unexpected departures or retirements, especially in departments that have earned the trust of the dean for their history of making sensible strategic hiring decisions. What possible violation of discrimination law or policy do you imagine this could be? And by the way we sometimes hire zero when we say we plan to hire one.  That isn't a violation either.

[scion]

What possible violation of discrimination law or policy do you imagine this could be?

I simply did not know. That's why I asked the question.

[heptameron]

And how amenable are admins such as deans to the requests of search committees who ask for two candidates to be hired in a search that was for one?