Spotlight

Turning Down a Promotion

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines An Academic in America Yearning After Books Why are so many artists and writers preoccupied by the so-called demise of bookish culture? First Person What Am I Doing? Shouldn't seven years of graduate school have helped me avoid taking a job just to have a job? Career News Too Much Information Colleges encourage the use of cellphones for emergency-alert purposes, but professors have begun to worry that students can use their phones during exams to cheat off the Web. First Person Moving a Step (or 3) Up the Ladder Why would a newly tenured associate professor in the sciences decide to go on the job market? Resource Salaries: Faculty | Administrative Presidential pay: Private | Public Financial resources: Salary and cost-of-living calculators Career resources: Academic | Nonacademic Library: Previous articles by topic | by date | by column Career Talk, Ms. Mentor, and more... Landing your first job On the tenure track Mid-career and on Administrative careers Nonacademic careers for Ph.D.'s Talk about your career Blogs

By Jennifer Jacobson

The candidate had only 72 hours to decide: He could take a job on a new campus and earn an additional $20,000 a year or he could stay put in his current administrative post and pursue his dream of becoming a professor.

The dream, he decided, could not be deferred. "It boiled down to ultimate career goals," says the administrator, who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity about the job offer he snubbed four months ago. He is a doctoral student in higher-education policy at the Midwestern university where he works, and he hopes to have the degree in hand by 2007. "It would've been nice to have the extra income, but in the long run the rewards of doing research will outweigh the temporary increase in salary."

"But then again," he says, "I could be wrong."

While some academics move up the administrative hierarchy to secure more money and authority, plenty of others pass on the chance. It's a dicey enough move, though, that few people are willing to speak on the record about rejecting a promotion.

Academics who have say it was a difficult decision. Some think the promotion would mean more work, and less time for their families and outside interests. Others say the added income isn't worth the long hours and endless meetings. And some say they realized they were simply happy with their current jobs.

While most of those interviewed say they are convinced that turning down the promotion was the right call, some remain ambivalent, even years later.

The doctoral student mentioned earlier is an assistant director of student life as well as director of multicultural affairs. He wants to move from student affairs, where he earns $37,500 a year, to the faculty ranks in a school of education at a research university. If he had taken the higher-paying administrative job and enrolled in the Ph.D. program at that institution, he would have lost two thirds of the credits he has already earned, which would have set him back two or three years from his dream of becoming a professor and conducting research on affirmative action.

His motivation is not financial. After spending 13 years in student-affairs positions at four research universities, he says he has seen affirmative action rolled back in states like California where he has worked. "The best thing I can do would be to do good research about affirmative action in the U.S." he says. "I want to contribute to the scholarship, to preserve affirmative action or come up with alternatives" that will work in academe. An administrative promotion, he says, would only have distracted him from that goal.

Once they turn down a promotion, many people fear that one may never come their way again. That's not been the experience of a chairwoman at a small, liberal-arts college in the Northeast who did not want to be identified. She's been offered three administrative promotions and turned them all down.

In 1997, she was offered the position of dean of the faculty, but turned it down because she felt she didn't know enough to do the job. "At that point, the dean was in charge of faculty recruitment and reappointment and tenure review," says the chairwoman. "I'd been a professor for 11 years and I had been a full professor for only one year, and I was pregnant."

In 2001, she was offered the position of associate dean of the faculty for literatures and humanities, and again she turned it down. If she had accepted, she would have had to postpone her one-year sabbatical. "That was a very hard decision because I was very fond of the current dean of the faculty, the person I would have worked directly under, and the administrative assistants [in the office] are great," she says. "I was truly tempted by it."

Even so, she declined because her sabbatical was the year before her daughter started kindergarten. "The idea that I would take a 50- to 60-hour-a-week job that required me to be on campus instead of having some flexibility being with my daughter before school was a choice I chose not to make," she says. "I like to think I've made that decision permanently. I don't know if I have."

"I think there's a kind of idea we inherit from business culture: You're supposed to keep moving up," she says. But she wonders, "Where do you move up from full professor? In a little college like this, moving up is being in administration. There certainly are many senior colleagues who've never been in administration." So for now she wants to "keep moving up" as a scholar, to become more respected in her field of 20th-century American literature.

But she can imagine herself climbing that administrative ladder when her son, who's in second grade, and her daughter, who's in kindergarten, are older. When she turned down the associate deanship, she said, "they made it a great point to say this doesn't mean we won't ask you again," she says.

But that was before she rejected a third offer -- to become an associate provost overseeing residential life on campus. Joining the student-life side of campus, she says, would have effectively meant setting aside her scholarly work, and she wasn't willing to do that. But she also didn't think she was right for the job, since her experience is in the area of academic administration. In fact, when the college offered her the associate provostship in student-life, she admits, "I was offended, really. Who in the administration thought this was the best use of my time?"

Why does the college keep asking her? Because few women have prominent roles in the administration on her campus, and officials are always on the lookout for female faculty members who may want to move up. "They don't want to assume someone doesn't want to do it because they had a baby."

Her main reason for turning down all three promotions, however, is that she simply thinks that "a faculty member's life is better." So does Thomas F. Miller, chairman of the history department at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire.

From 1991 to 1998, he served as the university's associate vice chancellor for academic affairs -- a job that he says was actually "fun." He dealt with faculty personnel issues, interviewed job candidates, and "basically did what the provost didn't want to do."

After six years, however, the job began to get old, so he decided to try his hand as interim provost from 1998 to 1999. But that didn't interest him much either. "The buck really does stop with the provost, with the exception of a few things that get appealed to the chancellor," he says. "There are an enormous number of meetings with individuals or with groups virtually the entire day," as well as a three-hour drive once or twice a month to university-system meetings in Madison.

Most mornings, he had to get up at 4:30 a.m. so he could tackle the pile of administrative paperwork on his desk that he couldn't get to during the day. "I was just worn out," he says. "I thought, This isn't why I got into this business in the first place."

Although he was encouraged to apply for the provostship, Mr. Miller never did. When he stepped down as interim provost, he returned as associate vice chancellor, but after less than a year in the job realized it wasn't for him. "I thought, I've done this before," he says, so he decided to return to the faculty.

"I really missed the students," Mr. Miller says. "That's what it really came down to." As chairman, he teaches two classes a semester, and also has about 50 advisees -- a high number that is of his own making. "I just enjoy talking to students one on one," he says.

And he enjoys talking to people, in general, which is the real appeal of administration, he says. Teaching at an institution with about 10,000 students and 700 faculty and staff members, he says, there's "a real tendency to associate with people in your own department. I've always enjoyed knowing large numbers of people in a variety of disciplines."

The university has a formula for converting an administrative salary back to a faculty salary, and Mr. Miller has ended up at the high end of the scale. Ultimately, though, "the money is not worth it," he says. "Money wasn't the reason I got into it in the first place. If you want to get rich, you shouldn't be a college professor."