May 12, 2008
Presidential Appointments
- John C. Cavanaugh, president of the University of West Florida, has been appointed chancellor of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, Sarah Hebel reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. Cavanaugh will succeed Judy G. Hample — who is leaving to become the president of the University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Va. — on July 1.
- Susan W. Martin, provost and vice chancellor of the University of Michigan at Dearborn, is poised to become the first female president of Eastern Michigan University, The Ann Arbor News reports. The Board of Regents will vote on the resolution to appoint Martin at a special meeting on Wednesday.
- Wayne State University has picked Jay Noren, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha, as its next president, the Detroit Free Press reports.
- According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, State Sen. Jack Scott, chairman of the Senate Education Committee and former president of Cypress College and Pasadena City College, will become the next chancellor of the California community-college system on January 1, 2009.
May 7, 2008
News in Administrative Appointments
- Richard McCarty, a renowned psychologist and dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science, has been appointed as the university’s next provost. See a university press release for more details.
- Jay Stein, founding director for the Center for Health and the Built Environment at the University of Florida’s College of Design, Construction and Planning, will become provost of the State University of New York College at Plattsburgh, effective July 1, the Press-Republican, a daily newspaper in Plattsburgh, reports.
- Sidney A. Ribeau, president of Bowling Green State University, will become Howard University’s next president on August 1, the Washington Business Journal reports.
- Chicago State University’s governing board has picked Frank Pogue Jr. as the university’s temporary chief, the Chicago Tribune reports. He replaces the controversial Elnora D. Daniel, who will step down at the end of June.
West Virginia U. Faculty Demands President's Resignation
Faculty members at West Virginia University have voted no confidence in Michael S. Garrison, the university’s president, and are calling for him to step down “for the good of the institution,” Paul Fain reports on The Chronicle’s Web site.
Demands for the president’s resignation come in the wake of a recent scandal in which the university retroactively awarded an M.B.A. to the state governor’s daughter, Heather M. Bresch, even though she had not completed enough credits to earn the degree, Fain writes.
The university’s provost and the dean of the business school resigned from their posts as a result of the scandal, “although both remain on the faculty, and Ms. Bresch’s degree was revoked,” he notes.
While an investigative panel’s report found that President Garrison was not personally involved in the matter, the president says he accepts “full and total responsibility for failures that led to the award of unearned credits and grades to a former student,” but has no plans to resign, writes Fain. He notes that “only the university’s Board of Governors can fire the president, and so far its members have expressed unanimous support for Mr. Garrison.”
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Wednesday May 7, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [4]May 2, 2008
Office Space
A friend of mine teaches at a school where a good deal of remodeling is under way. “They moved me,” she observed, “to a wonderful new office with a beautiful view. My old office, though, was mercifully converted into a hallway.”
I’d say that if your office is convertible into a corridor, it was not the nicest office in the world.
At my previous place of service, I had a fabulous office: on the corner, on the third floor, with a million-dollar view of the ancient quad. At my current institution, our newest buildings have very attractive offices, but I’m in an older building with sternly spartan offices. Even my decanal suite has nary a window.
I was thinking about this the other day and about how when I was on the market, I usually asked to see where my office would be. One school in North Carolina had almost palatial offices, with expansive views of the mountains. One in Florida was on the Intercoastal Waterway. Other places, though, were kind of sad, even depressing.
As you’ve made your rounds on the market, have any of you been either impressed or discouraged with the office space or lab facilities to such an extent that it impacted your decision to accept an offer?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Friday May 2, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [12]April 30, 2008
Is the U. of Idaho's President Leaving? and Other Presidential News
- According to an article in today’s Idaho Statesman, the University of Idaho’s president, Timothy P. White, has informed the university’s governing board that he is being wooed by another institution. No word at this time on who’s recruiting him.
- The University of Wisconsin at Madison has released the names of nine of the 55 applicants who applied for the job of chancellor, but one of them — Jorge V. José, vice president for research at the State University of New York at Buffalo — had asked that his name be kept secret, Paul Fain reports on The Chronicle’s News Blog. Uh-oh!
- Meanwhile, the University of Oregon’s longtime president, David B. Frohnmayer, has said he will retire in June 2009, The Register-Guard, a daily newspaper out of Eugene, Ore., reports.
- According to an article in the Houston Chronicle, Rick Perry, the Texas governor, thinks John Montford, a former state senator who’s currently a senior vice president at AT&T, would be an ideal choice for the job of University of Texas system chancellor. Montford was chancellor of the Texas Tech University system from 1996-2001.
- Edna Mora Szymanski, senior vice president for academic affairs and provost at the University of Maine at Orono, will become president of Minnesota State University at Moorhead on July 1. See a system press release for more details.
- Western Washington University’s governing board has picked Bruce Shepard, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, as its next president, a WWU press release confirms. He’ll replace the longtime president Karen W. Morse, who is retiring in September.
April 28, 2008
Administrative Flight at U. of Wisconsin?
According to an article in the Wisconsin State Journal, professors aren’t the only ones departing the University of Wisconsin for greener pastures; chancellors, apparently, are saying sayonara at an alarming rate, too. The reporter, Deborah Ziff, writes that:
In the last year, more than a third of the University of Wisconsin’s chancellors announced they were vacating the head office. …
Heads of five of 13 UW System ‘s four-year universities are leaving, or have already left — Whitewater, Madison, River Falls, Parkside, and Green Bay.
The reason, of course, is money. Ziff notes that despite the Board of Regents’ recent efforts to raise UW chancellors’ salaries to bring them in line with those of their peers, compensation and benefits packages for UW chancellors are still low. She points out, for example, that:
The salary of UW-Madison chancellor John Wiley, who announced he was retiring last year, is $327,417, the lowest in its peer group. The highest is University of Texas at Austin at $552,500.
Meanwhile the median salary of the other UW school presidents, except UW-Milwaukee, is about $13,000 below the median of its peer group.
Ziff quotes the system’s president, Kevin P. Reilly, as saying there’s no denying that money is major factor: “For the chancellors of UW-Green Bay and UW-River Falls, ‘the compensation packages were a significant part of the decision of those folks, although not the full story.’”
He and others worry that lower salaries will hurt the university’s ability to recruit top leadership talent. Jimmy Peltier, faculty chair of Whitewater’s chancellor-search committee, told Ziff that while he is happy with the pool of candidates to replace Martha Saunders — who departed last year at a chance to help her alma mater, the University of Southern Mississippi, rebound from the damage done by Hurricane Katrina (not to mention a big raise, from $190,525 to $345,500) — he worries that some candidates may be turned off by Wisconsin’s lower salaries: ‘“One of our disadvantages we have as a state is we don’t offer salaries other states offer,” Peltier said. “And that’s a challenge.”
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Monday April 28, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [17]April 17, 2008
Stupid Application Tricks
As a friend of mine started his job search, he joked that he was going to have a glossy 8×10 headshot made and scrawl across the front of it: “Like me? Call me!”
He was poking fun at a classmate who was, um, a “little” on the narcissistic side, but he was also complaining that there was no way to differentiate his résumé from the others that would be received by prospective employers.
On my side of the search table, I can understand this complaint. In our efforts at leveling the playing field, we have forced everyone into a Procrustean bed that saps the personality out of applications. The only place where uniqueness truly stands out is in the cover letter, and even that is often a boilerplate product aimed at covering as many openings at as many institutions as possible.
In the business world, I’ve heard anecdotes of applicants who have included strange things in their CV packets, including DVD versions of résumés (vanity again!) and even gift cards to Starbucks (bribes!) to “help the search committee deliberate more comfortably.”
I guess the only quirky things I’ve seen personally are sticks of Big Red gum (intended to leave a sweet taste in our mouths? An insult to our personal hygiene?), weird borders and letterhead (designed to set the packet apart visually?), and, my favorite: horribly reproduced (faked?) letters of support from celebrities or intellectual superstars (from a best-selling novelist: “Dr. Fabulous is the best young teacher I’ve ever seen!”).
On some level, attempts at differentiation imply that search committees do not look at every single application packet. I can honestly say, though, that each search I’ve worked has looked at every single application with due consideration. Tricks and quirks are unnecessary distractions. I can, however, sympathize with the anxiety that fuels them.
Will any applicants admit to having bad ideas about how to set your packets apart?
How about search-committee members: Have you seen any unusual attempts at differentiation? Better yet, have any of them actually worked?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Thursday April 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [8]April 16, 2008
Dangerous Ambitions
Many years ago, a friend of mine who was a midlevel administrator told me over lunch that he was about to get a big promotion.
“You know Vice President Bigwig at my institution? He told me that he’s going to retire next May, and he wants to recommend that I be promoted into his position. He’s given me a couple of new tasks to complete as a test for my ability to do his job. It will make life horrible for the coming year, but when I land his job, it will be easy street. He makes a ton of money and doesn’t have much work to do. He just entertains alumni most of the time.”
I congratulated him on his good fortune and watched him begin to work bodacious hours trying to prove his mettle.
A couple of weeks later, over a table in a different restaurant (I eat out a lot!), one of that guy’s colleagues leaned in to tell me a secret: “I’m going to let you in on something: I’m about to be promoted. Vice President Bigwig at my institution has told me that he will retire next May. … “
You get the picture. It was no wonder that VP Bigwig was a person of such leisure: He had an office filled with ambitious young workers whom he pitted against each other!
Ironically, when VP Bigwig retired, neither of my lunch partners was rewarded. Instead, the university’s president appointed a well-connected alum into the position!
There is a lesson to be learned in this: Ambition can be helpful in providing energy, but it can also become a narcotic that blinds you to reality.
Does anyone have a good story or two about poor decisions you may have made or seen made that were based on overeager ambition or its near cousin, gullibility?
By Gene C. Fant Jr. | Posted on Wednesday April 16, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [1]April 15, 2008
Putting Your Best Face Forward
Everybody knows that beautiful people have it good, but apparently they’ve got it much better than we thought. According to this recent post on Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist blog, they get more affection and higher salaries. And sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, folks, but they get better teaching evaluations, too. (If you’ve ever seen that episode of The Family Guy where Peter Griffin gets star treatment and an invitation to join “The Beautiful People’s Club” after having plastic surgery, then you get the picture.)
Given all that, it’s no surprise that the latest advice on landing a good job or getting a leg up at work includes not only polishing your résumé or CV and application materials, getting your recommendation letters in order, improving your job talk and interviewing techniques, but having a little cosmetic work, too. That’s what a longtime adjunct and the pseudonymous author of yesterday’s First Person column, Norma Desmond, did to juice up her search for a tenure-track post. Guess what? She got the job.
How far would you go to get a good job?
Also see a related thread in The Chronicle’s forums.
By Gabriela Montell | Posted on Tuesday April 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment [2]A Joint Decision
When Leigh Ann Wheeler and Donald G. Nieman decided to get married, she gave up a tenure-track job in Florida in 2000 to move to Bowling Green State University, where he was dean of arts and sciences.
At first, Ms. Wheeler was only a visitor in the history department before working her way onto the tenure track and finally into a tenured position. But while she and her husband enjoyed working on the same campus, Ms. Wheeler says she never felt comfortable at Bowling Green. Some history professors, she says, resented that she was a spousal hire who was married to the dean. “It can create divisions,” says Ms. Wheeler.
So when Mr. Nieman began looking at job openings for provosts a year or so ago, Ms. Wheeler was not too thrilled by the prospect of being a trailing spouse all over again. Then the history department at the State University of New York at Binghamton e-mailed to ask if she was interested in a job. When Ms. Wheeler told them no because her husband was an administrator, Binghamton said they might have a job for him as well.
Now, after winding their way through separate interview processes, Ms. Wheeler and Mr. Nieman will both be moving to Binghamton this summer. She will be an associate professor of history, and he will be dean of arts and sciences.
“It’s sometimes kind of hard to believe it worked out,” says Mr. Nieman, who had also applied to be provost at the University of Northern Iowa, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Illinois State University. He was offered the post at Northern Iowa but turned it down. “This was so obviously the best thing for us as a couple,” he says of the Binghamton move. Their 5-year old son will attend a school on Binghamton’s campus this fall.
Jean H. Quataert, a history professor who headed the search committee that voted to hire Ms. Wheeler, says she wasn’t daunted by the idea that Ms. Wheeler would probably come only if the university decided to hire her husband. “These things do work out, and you have to wait for your moment to come,” she says.
Ms. Quataert knows that firsthand. Her husband, Donald Quataert, a historian, followed her to Binghamton in 1986, and now they are both full professors there.
By Robin Wilson | Posted on Tuesday April 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comment