Moving Up

Unleashing the Vitriol

Article tools

Printer friendly	E-mail article	Subscribe	Order reprints
	Discuss any Chronicle article in our forums
Latest Headlines First Person Just Visiting Again When his tenure-track search fell short, a Ph.D. faced a fundamental choice about dealing with the disappointment. The Adjunct Track It's All in the Bag Teaching part time sometimes makes a Ph.D. feel like a failure, but it also allows her life as a parent to work. Heads Up Keep Your Emeriti Close How can deans and chairs find appropriate ways to involve retired professors in the life of the college? First Person An End and a Beginning Accepting the possibility of tenure denial and dealing with the reality of it are two different things. Moving Up 'A' Hire vs. 'the' Hire Following the 5 principles of external hiring can keep your search for a dean from getting derailed. 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 Dennis M. Barden

Character assassination has gotten a lot easier, leadership a lot more dangerous, and administrative searches a whole lot harder.

Today, communication moves at the speed of light and is completely unregulated. The blog is the ultimate guarantee of free speech, and a place where anyone can say anything about anybody and make it available to the entire human race.

Gee, do you think that this paradigm might leave some room for abuse when you are out seeking a new position?

One of the candidates my colleagues and I worked with in a recent presidential search thinks so. The search had gone pretty much according to plan. We had completed the formal referencing, searched the Web for anything critical of the candidates, and talked to people whom we thought well positioned to offer a review and analysis of the candidates' previous performance. In short, we had taken all reasonable steps to help our client make a good hiring decision and to predict, at least based on past success, eachcandidate's future potential as a college president.

The board made its choice, and set the compensation and terms of employment. All that remained was for the chosen candidate to resign her current position and for our client to introduce her to its constituencies and the press.

Some bloggers chose that moment to unleash their vitriol. Once our candidate had announced her intention to leave her current job, they went on the offensive. And I mean offensive. Our candidate was accused of everything from abusing employees to being under investigation for criminal misuse of funds. The invective was brutal -- as was most of the grammar. What those bloggers lacked in perspective -- and courage, for the blogs were all unsigned -- they certainly made up for with pure, unadulterated venom.

But could we be absolutely sure that none of it was true?

None of our Web searches turned up any of those allegations; they had been posted after the fact. Even if we had seen them before the deal was done, none of our references had indicated that there were any problems of that magnitude, and the candidate had, in fact, made it clear to us that she had had to make some difficult decisions at her current institution, leaving some people very unhappy with her. Leaders often do.

So much of what we saw on the blogs was understandable. Still, the allegations leveled against our candidate were very specific, and the words "grand jury" certainly filled us with a certain degree of trepidation.

To a large extent, the impact of ad hominem attack is made even more acute by a contemporaneous trend affecting references. With so much litigation out there, many institutions have begun to adhere to a strict policy of offering no information in references beyond confirming dates of employment. Even when you can get people to talk, they will often be extremely circumspect about any level of criticism lest they incur some legal liability.

Referencing, always an art in the best of times, has become an exercise in detecting nuance, and clairvoyance is in short supply among search committees and consultants.

Whether or not accusations made on a blog are true, they undermine the effectiveness of the person under attack simply by spreading tales directly to the community. No spin. No context. And very frequently no truth. Just damage.

Committees and consultants can, of course, get to the bottom -- or at least near the bottom -- of most issues. Happily, there are still enough people out there with the professionalism and self-respect to tell the truth about their colleagues when asked.

It is also the case that where there is smoke, there is some kind of combustion. That was true in the search discussed above. Thanks to some excellent cooperation on the part of the candidate's former colleagues, we were able to put the accusations in the blogs into context. Yes, she had made some difficult decisions. Yes, those decisions had made some people angry. Yes, she had been a challenging employee for her former bosses. And yes, they endorsed her accomplishments and even expressed admiration for her ability to overcome considerable challenges to get the job done.

The grand-jury accusation was pure fiction, and the former employer had no intention of looking into the finances for which she had been responsible. The woman was controversial, and the former employer was not necessarily unhappy to see her leave. But she had done exactly what she said she had done.

But did any of that matter?

The information in the blog attacks -- while exaggerated at best and willfully, maliciously fictitious at worst -- has hurt the candidate in her new surroundings. It took less than an hour for her new colleagues to see everything her enemies had to say about her. No matter how much information we bring to light to the contrary, no matter how the board expresses its support -- indeed, no matter how well she does in her new job -- the specter of what has been said about her will haunt her, maybe for the rest of her career.

So what is a conscientious search consultant -- and even more to the point, his client -- to do? The answers are not easy, but I do have a few ideas:

• Search committees should discuss at the outset how they will deal with all sorts of over-the-transom information, whether via the Internet or hearsay from their own sources. To ensure the integrity of the search, it's critical that committees insist on consistency in the way they deal with information.

• Candidates must be prepared to inform those involved in the search of any potential red flags regarding their candidacy. The rules of this game have changed. Candidates can no longer take a chance that someone they have angered will not make enough noise to compromise their chances in a search; they must assume that it will happen.

• Previous employers are going to have to provide accurate and honest information in references. Yes, there will always be candidates out there who will abuse the legal system to silence their critics. There will also be references who will abuse the system to redress a grudge. But, by and large, referencing is a system that works. Future employers must learn from previous employers the strengths and weaknesses of potential hires because no other predictor of future success is more reliable than past performance. And truth is an absolute defense against slander and libel. Remember, employers who refuse to give thoughtful, substantive references don't deserve to get any, either.

• Search committees and consultants are going to have to change tactics. Blogs don't show up on LexisNexis. We are going to have to look into every murky backwater on the Web to flesh out what is circulating about our candidates, and we are going to have to be proactive about refuting -- or confirming -- what we find.

• Hiring authorities -- boards, presidents, provosts, etc. -- must be prepared for the fact that there are no perfect candidates. Anyone who has ever had to make a difficult decision is going to have made enemies. Institutional leadership is going to have to get comfortable with a reasonable level of ambiguity.

• Colleges and universities pride themselves on dealing in substance rather than perception. That laudable principle will be challenged mightily in a world in which unfiltered and unsubstantiated perceptions of people are available to everyone.

• Finally, leaders must continue to lead. If people cease making the tough decisions, if actions are based on avoiding the wrath of someone with access to the Internet and a willingness to be vicious, effective leadership will be impossible.

On our candidate's new campus, everyone knows about the allegations, and the board knows they are malicious and false. How well the board refutes those accusations -- and how the candidate performs in her early days on the job -- will determine whether she succeeds in the long run.

The bloggers will continue to have their say. And search committees will continue to have the opportunity to listen -- or not.