Note: In the “Ask the Chair” series, the author of How to Chair a Department answers your questions about departmental leadership. Send your queries via Facebook or email. Read previous columns here.
Question: For those of us lucky enough to have faculty positions authorized for this year, recruitment season is upon us. There’s one aspect of the process that has long bothered me, though, as chair. In my department, we always write a thoughtful ad to attract the right kind of applicants. We read those applications with great care, interview a shortlist of finalists, and usually bring three to the campus. The process of getting from 100-plus applicants to 10, then three, then one can be challenging, and fraught. Disagreements over a hire can fester for years.
But once we are able to settle on our top choice, or our ranking of the shortlist, the whole process is handed over to the dean to negotiate the offer, and the chair and the rest of the department are effectively shut out. It’s almost unbearable.
What can a chair do to ensure that the dean makes an appropriately generous offer to the department’s candidate — and woos our preferred candidate with the same ardor as we have?
Signed,
Helicopter Chair
Dear Helicopter Chair,
The image in your nom de plume is an apt one, but perhaps not for the reasons you had imagined. It’s entirely appropriate for you to “hover” in this ultimate stage of your search: You and your colleagues have put a lot of blood, sweat, toil, and tears into the process, and ideally, have “fallen in love” — in a scholarly, platonic sense — with someone you hope will come join your faculty. Having to entrust your courtship to a relative outsider to close the deal is exasperating.
But it might be helpful to realize that most, if not all, of your “helicoptering” should focus on your candidate, rather than on your dean. That’s not to say that there’s no work to be done with your dean.
Some of it’s long term. For example, it will help if you and your colleagues have shown a knack for identifying talent. Over the years your department needs to have demonstrated itself to be a good judge of achievement and potential. Meaning: The folks who rise to the top in your searches have to have been successful on the tenure track at your institution.
More immediately, ask to meet with the dean before the top candidate gets offered the job. In most campus hiring processes, the dean or someone in their office (often an associate dean) will have interviewed your candidates, and will have at least a passing acquaintance with your department’s top choice. But the dean’s office will not, of course, have had the opportunity to get to know the finalists and their work in the detail that you have. Odds are, too, that your dean is not a specialist in your discipline, so will not be as well situated as you and your colleagues to assess the quality of the scholarship. And almost certainly, no one in the dean’s office will have seen the candidates teach.
In your meeting with the dean, aim to present the human story that mere hiring paperwork might not convey. Share a telling anecdote about your candidate’s interaction with students while on the campus. Recount a clever strategy deployed during the applicant’s teaching demonstration. Describe the signs that you and your colleagues see in the scholar’s research that promise continued productivity. Make it clear, as the bureaucratic process might not, how excited you and your colleagues are at the prospect of adding your candidate to the department.
And then get out of your dean’s face.
One of the areas that we chairs worry most about in hiring is salary: We want the dean to mortgage the farm in order to spend what it takes to land our top prospect. One thing I know about myself as a chair: If I were allowed to negotiate the salary of the job candidates I’ve fallen head over heels for, I would quickly bankrupt the place. And of course, if the institution succeeds in hiring this new faculty member at a starting salary completely out of whack with institutional norms, your colleagues (and probably you, yourself) will be a bit resentful — which isn’t a great note for your new hire to start on.
Deans are expected (and trained) to come up with an appropriate salary offer (many institutions subscribe to the Oklahoma State Faculty Salary Survey by Discipline for objective peer data). Your role as chair is to do your best to convince the dean that you’ve really, really (really!) found the very best candidate for your faculty opening. And that’s about it.
As frustrating as that feels, over the years I’ve come to appreciate the new position that this pivotal moment puts me in. The official hiring process is now out of my hands (unless my dean should choose to pull me back in for some reason). But the unofficial process has really just begun. While my colleagues and I were trying to make our selection, the candidates and I were in a relationship of seller to buyer. But now that we’ve presented our list to the dean, my impartiality goes right out the window. Now I’m an unabashed advocate for our chosen candidate — almost like their agent.
Deans might not like to hear this, and I’ll be waiting for their letters of objection, but: Once the department has made its choice, I can become my candidate’s coach.
Just what does that look like? Most important, it involves treating your “candidate” like the newest member of the department — like a colleague. You want this person to take the job when it’s offered. During the offer negotiations, check in to see how the candidate is doing. Try to remember what an incredibly stressful process this can be for a new recruit. You’ve been there before. Make sure your would-be colleague knows you’re there to answer any questions.
Years ago, we were interviewing a candidate who is now my colleague in the English department. At dinner, one of our faculty members asked: “What would it take for this to work for you?” I was mortified; I didn’t think this dinner was the right place, and wasn’t sure it was the right time (the department hadn’t yet met to rank our finalists, though perhaps the front-runner had become obvious).
But timing and venue notwithstanding, it was exactly the right question. In such moments, you may learn some crucial detail on which the entire hire will hinge. You may find out that your top choice hopes to negotiate a position for their partner. You might find out about start-up needs, or competing offers. At some point in the recruiting process, candidates go from seller to buyer, and that’s when their sometimes complicated, very human, needs may become visible.
If the candidate trusts you, you can also offer insights into the best negotiating positions. Most of the time, the new hire has no history with your institution, no idea what kinds of things faculty members have been able to negotiate in the past as part of their offer packages — including salary, leave schedules, partner accommodations, housing allowances, teaching schedules, summer opportunities, and accelerated tenure/promotion reviews.
If you’re lucky, when the offer negotiations start, your dean may involve you selectively in the conversations. But whether or not that invitation comes, become an ally for your prospective colleague. Be their inside informant. The dean’s job would be easier — and the institution could probably land your candidate more cheaply — if you didn’t give your top choice access to that sort of information.
But that’s not your concern as chair. You, instead, want to make sure that your preferred new colleague joins the department, and does so with as many of the things they need to succeed already in place. And that scholar’s success will, in turn, help you make the case for the next hire.
