All in the Game

Don't Do It

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By Stanley Fish BACKUP

Recently the college I administer formed a Board of Visitors, a group of distinguished Chicagoans (most of them alumni) who have agreed to advise us and to apply the wisdom gained in industry, finance, and corporate philanthropy to the problems now facing academic institutions. At the inaugural meeting of the board, I rehearsed the college's structure, history, goals, and aspirations, and spoke of the hard choices now facing us given significant shortfalls in state revenues. It was when I reported that there would be almost no university funds for counteroffers this year, and that the college would have to take money from its own operations in order to make counteroffers, that one of the board members exclaimed, "What's a counteroffer?"

When I replied that in the academy it was the practice first to solicit an outside offer and then to bring it to one's present institution in the expectation that it would be matched or bettered, my new advisers were incredulous.

Is there such a shortage of qualified persons that you would be unable to replace someone who left? No, I answered. Is everyone who receives a counteroffer irreplaceable? No. Is there a serious effort to determine whether the person brandishing an offer might be replaced by someone better and cheaper. Not usually. Do you take into account whether the faculty member with an offer has played this game before, and if so, how frequently, either at your university or elsewhere? Not really. When making a counteroffer, do you get a commitment from the person who accepts it that he or she will stick around for at least a few years? Afraid not. Before making a counteroffer, do you require detailed documentation from an authoritative source that the offer is real and unconditional and amounts to a contractual obligation? Sometimes, but not always.

By this time, I was, as they say, on the defensive, and I thought to make up some lost ground (and recover my standing as a competent manager) by explaining that academic salaries at this institution have been low for years, and that long-term faculty members suffering what is called "salary compression" generate offers as a way, and perhaps the only way, of improving their material circumstances.

So, I was asked, you continue a bad practice in order to artificially circumvent market conditions that obtain nationally and will not be altered by what you do in particular instances, and you allow that practice to skew and distort your other operations? Does this mean, I blurted out, that we shouldn't make counteroffers? No, I was told; make them in those very few cases where the person really is indispensable and the likelihood is that a program or department will self-destruct should he or she leave.

But you should know, it was added, that colleagues who bring offers to you harbor dissatisfactions and resentments only obliquely related to salary and other tangible benefits, and that, according to the statistics in the corporate world, someone who accepts a counteroffer will stay an average of 18 months before heading out into the sunset for good. This really hit home; for in 1996, I turned down an excellent offer from a first-rate university, and I did so in response to an even better counteroffer from Duke University; and then in 1997, I turned around and accepted the position I now hold, 18 months later almost to the day.

After the meeting I was glad that I had not brought up another academic practice even more suspect than counteroffers -- the custom of granting leaves of absence to faculty members who have accepted jobs elsewhere. In fact, I had already ended that practice a year and a half ago after realizing (a little too late) that there is absolutely nothing to be said for it.

When asked why his teams threw the forward pass so rarely, the legendary coach Woody Hayes (or so the story goes) replied, "If you put the ball up in the air, only three things can happen, and two of them are bad." Well, if you give someone a leave of absence on the way to taking a post at another institution, pretty much everything that might happen is going to be bad. First of all, you restrict your options and put your plans and the plans of a department on hold with all of the attendant professional and psychological costs. Second, you sign on for at least a year of rumors (he's happy, he's miserable), anxiety (will she or won't she), and second guessings ( I wish I hadn't done that). Third, you open yourself up to the possibility that the prodigal daughter will want to return to a department that only last year declared it could not live without her but that has discovered in the interim that life is better and now fears and resists what it had once desired. Fourth, you are likely to be asked at the end of one year to extend the leave for another, and if two, why not three, since the principle (whatever it was) that led you to grant it in the first place still holds. And finally, even if the story ends happily, and the return of the wanderer ("come back to the raft, Huck honey") is welcomed with hosannas, you will have years of explaining to do whenever you decide to deny a leave of absence to someone else (unless, of course, you just give them out like party favors to everyone in sight).

Lately I've been thinking of going my ban one better by refusing to extend an offer to someone holding a leave of absence and by withdrawing an offer if I discover that my recruited prize is holding one but hasn't told me.

It's easy to see why someone might want to keep his or her options open, and have a safety net in the event that the brave new world turns out to be less than Edenic when seen up close. But that's what visits are for. You want to try a place out, look it over as it looks you over? Fine, but don't sign on anyone's dotted line until you really mean it, if only because the resources that have been given you as inducements have been taken from someone else and from the college's finite funds in the expectation that you were really coming. There are one-time costs in moving expenses, start up, office equipment, computers, pre-arrival summer salaries, and much more; if after seven months your new star says, I'm sorry but I'm going back, these costs will have been incurred for nought, and now they will have to be incurred anew in the search you didn't think you would have to do again for at least five years.

And then there are the intangible costs of whatever political battles were fought in the effort to secure the offer for this candidate; the supporters of the rival candidates will not only say I told you so (even when they didn't) but will hold this fiasco over your head forever and ever. What will happen to the center established as a part of this recruitment? Do you let everyone go? Do you sell the equipment? Do you give back the space to the central administration or to the department you took it away from? Does your public-relations office send out a notice of abandonment to the same media outlets that had been persuaded to broadcast your success? There are many more questions of this kind, but the answers will all be distressing and will all lead to the conclusion that this was a road better not traveled.

I have heard the suggestion that leaves of absence might work and be OK if both the receiving and the sending institution know what is going on and approve it. You might then be able to craft an intermediate state in which resources are not wholly or finally committed until the deal is really done or really undone. But as far as I can see this would only produce a twilight-zone situation that still had all the disadvantages I have enumerated, although perhaps with less upfront monetary risk.

Sure you would have full disclosure, but what you would have disclosed is a scenario of folly best not entered into by anyone. But, the objection will come, you may lose someone you really want. Yes you may, but the risk of losing someone you want or someone you already have cannot finally be guarded against; and if you're going to lose you might well do so with some part of your dignity intact and when you are still in possession of the shirt you have not yet taken off your back.