First Person

To Spurn a Star

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By Regina Warwick

I have a colleague at another university who addresses me in all of her e-mail messages as "Dr. Starkiller." This appellation stems from my unfortunate reputation for shooting down luminaries who apply for faculty positions in our humanities program.

In three cases, I've been involved in wooing big players -- scholars whose prestige in our field was unquestioned and whose CV's were redwood thick -- only to end up turning them down. I feel bad about every one of these decisions, but I don't regret them. I think we made the right choice for us and, in the long run, for the candidates.

Which doesn't mean that I enjoy fending off friends at conventions who sidle up and ask, "Say, what happened? I heard you guys turned down ..."

I believe in the idea of hiring faculty stars -- under certain conditions. Money follows money, and stellar reps attract the best students and even other faculty members. Graduate students will join programs to study with the "Great Doctor X," and grant agencies measure the name value of principal investigators.

A star's CV also lengthens the department's list of faculty publications. Stars can make phone calls to fellow stars and give a big boost to a Ph.D. student applying for a job. A star can advise a junior faculty member: "If you want this to go into a top journal, here's what you need to do."

On the other hand, stars can create problems. Stars beget jealousy, even if they are of humble mien -- e.g., Why is Ms. Big Shot getting twice as much as I am for doing, on paper, the same job? Stars are always jetting off somewhere: They may be off giving lectures, doing visiting stints, accepting awards, or acting on commissions. One colleague at another college notes that its star "has spent more time talking on other campuses than teaching on ours." And even while stars attract students, they may have less time for individual students or other faculty members.

Administrators, too, even when they recruited the star, may end up chafing at limitations on their own power over the 800-pound Silverback down the hall. One dean told me of a star he hired who then proceeded to receive worse and worse student evaluations, which included comments like, "He never shows up for his office hours" and, "He never returns student e-mail."

The star's rejoinder, in paraphrase: "There must be something wrong with your students. Of course, I don't have time to prep anymore. Too busy, you know?" The dean found no support among the administration for any punitive action; his university did not want bad publicity. Tenure plus stardom makes one almost immune to criticism.

Being a star scholar, as well, can be a burden. I have a friend who is a star -- at least everyone calls him that. He hates it. "When I give a talk somewhere, people look at me like I'm supposed to be really profound. I see myself cited ritually in papers even when it's clear that the author never read my work."

Another colleague, a prominent researcher who is also a member of an ethnic minority group, notes that she gets calls from search firms and committees all the time, but she always declines their offers. The reason: "In my field, I'm one of the few big names who is also a minority. So they call me to visit even when I'm patently wrong for the position, just so they can say, 'Look, we brought in a minority candidate!'"

In the first search I led, I had some of this star dialectic in mind, but was still determined to bag somebody big for an endowed professorship we had open. To my delight, one of the most published people in our field applied. I talked to her. She sounded perfect. She was unhappy with her present situation, wanted to start over, was interested in (and seemed knowledgeable about) the direction of our program; she stressed her interest in advising grad students and young faculty members and was unpretentiously collegial. The on-campus interview and her presentations and chats with professors, administrators, students, staff and alumni all went swimmingly as well. We did interview others, but, to no one's surprise, the faculty vote was unanimous: Get her.

Our director made the offer. That's when the death spiral of this hire began. Salary was a problem. The star wanted much more than we ever said was the ceiling. We scrambled to create a joint appointment and begged the university for more financial support. Then there was her husband. He was not an academic and needed a local job. OK, well, we worked with folks in local industry, Hopes were high.

Also, she would need at least three doctoral students for her research. Then she informed us that she would be away at least two months of every academic year because of consulting commitments. Of course both her kids needed to be admitted to a prestigious private school in the area. And so on.

I began to feel that I was no longer a professor but one of those penthouse-suite concierges in Las Vegas who cater to the whims of the "whales" (million-dollar gamblers). If our star finally signed on, would she be calling me at midnight to deliver her French champagne and have her Pradas polished?

My advice to our director was: Back out now. He agreed. I wanted to protect the privacy of the search process, so I did not give any details of what happened to our faculty. All I could offer was an elusive, "It didn't work out." Some accepted this verdict; some were puzzled; one was irate: "How could we lose her?" he demanded. The buzz became fieldwide within a few weeks.

We ended up hiring someone who had no great reputation, but who was obviously working hard towards earning one. He has since become a star and is a huge help in every aspect of the program. Of course, we worry that he will be hired away.

The second time I lead the search to fill the endowed professorship, our efforts failed in a simpler fashion. This time the star we recruited was both highly accomplished and reasonable in wants and needs. All his colleagues thought he was, as one put it, "a good guy and great man." I knew the combination was rare but found it to be true in this candidate's case. Again, the campus visit was successful, until the last night's dinner.

Sitting with the donor of the money for the chair, the star blew it. The donor asked what should be a softball question: "What are the major findings of your research?" The star was unable or unwilling to answer coherently. So much for hiring him. If our field had been particle physics, then perhaps such abstruseness would have been forgivable. But we are a humanities discipline. I don't think by subsequently spurning this star we were caving to the pressures of capital; we thrive on explaining our work to the public. This star, no matter the word count of his CV, was not right for us.

We did not make him an offer. Embarrassed, and out of misguided courtesy, I actually called him to tell him that we wouldn't. I lamely offered vague statements like, "Well, we went in a different direction," but my explanations did not ring true for him or me.

My penultimate adventure as Dr. Starkiller came not when I led a search committee, but when I attended a "meet the faculty" gathering for a candidate who had applied for an administrative post in our program. I asked a question which, again, I assume is on the top-10 list of obvious queries for administrative candidates: "You are an accomplished researcher, but this job entails a lot of time-consuming busywork. Are you willing to do that?"

There was a lengthy silence, one of those silences that mystery novelists build plot twists around. Then the candidate replied at length to the effect that, "I would hope to have a staff to handle such labors."

Fair enough, but that was not going to be the case. We all imagined petitioning this fellow on some petty matter and receiving a "Don't bother me with stuff like this" in reply. The starkiller had struck again.

I don't regret any of my actions. In retrospect, I could have done a better job on preinterview investigations, but, in the end, only face-to-face interviews really give you personal insight into a candidate's abilities, and even those impressions can be misleading.

We are not a rich program at an elite university. We can't afford stars who just sit around in a holdover glow from past successes or who too frequently fly off to distant lands to further shine. We can't allot a disproportionate share of the wealth just to hang a high-rep name on our marquee. We want a colleague who will work with us, not lord above us, who can be a public intellectual, not an orchid. Of course, there are colleges that can afford stars to just be stars; indeed, I think each one of the stars we turned away would be perfect academics in other programs that have different needs, aspirations, and resources.

My final experience with star spurning was a reversal of fortune, or perhaps just deserts. Last year, I was a finalist for a top position at another university. They told me that they thought I was a star and were "thrilled" that I had applied. I almost believed them, but then they ended up turning me down.

Later, I ran into the search director at a conference; she began to tell me why I didn't get an offer. I stopped her, shrugged, and said, "When I visited you, I just tried to be myself. I'm sure you had your reasons for going in another direction; I respect them. It's hard to make the right match." Relieved, she nodded, and we moved on to other matters.

That's the main lesson I have learned from my experiences with stars: luminosity is relative to a body's position in the firmament. Some stars will glow in some regions of the academic cosmos; in others, they cast darkness on all around them. We do stars a favor to hire them not for their celebrity alone but because their personality fits into our unique academic and corporate cultures.