With the academic-hiring season under way, some search-committee members will turn to the Internet to conduct a little due diligence on potential future colleagues. In short, they’re going to Google them.
Official job applications—the carefully crafted curriculum vitae, idealistic teaching statements, glowing letters of reference—are meant to represent candidates in the best, most professional light. An online search, meanwhile, might ferret out a piece of interesting information that didn’t make the application packet or give a glimpse of how candidates portray themselves out in the (virtual) world.
For the most part, faculty members find it perfectly natural to check out that public persona, thinking that “anything that is publicly available on the Internet is fair game,” says Robert D. Sprague, an associate professor of business law at the University of Wyoming.
In this day and age, job candidates and evaluators alike might expect such searching. A recent survey revealed that 48 percent of employers use Google or other search engines to learn more about applicants at some point before they’re hired—or not. In higher education, that practice can both pose legal risks and raise concerns about academic freedom.
A recent incident signaled how much impact a professor’s online presence can have on future employment. In August the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign revoked a job offer it had made to Steven Salaita because of his comments on Twitter about Israel’s policies in Gaza. The move triggered a passionate debate over academic freedom.
It also served as a crucial reminder that, whether or not applicants are aware of it, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, personal blogs, even comments on email lists are all part of the mix of information that can surface in the hiring process.
For most committees, Google searches or peeks at social-media conversations aren’t likely to turn up anything that would throw a candidate into the international spotlight like Mr. Salaita. At the same time, a post or personal site could let a search committee discern someone’s race, ethnicity, or religion; whether she has a disability; or her marital status—all things that can’t legally be asked outright of a candidate.
What’s discovered online, though, could knock a person off the short list. “Somebody on a committee might say, You know, maybe this is somebody we better not talk to,” says Mr. Sprague, whose research involves employment-related privacy and privacy in the age of evolving technology.
Although institutions generally have policies for search committees to follow, the use of online searches is not always mentioned. When it is, the policies tend to encourage committee members to be mindful that what they find, they may not legally be able to consider. And in some instances, the information may not even be accurate. Criminal background checks on academic candidates, when they are done, are typically handled by human-resources departments.
With online searches, it’s usually tough to prove that a candidate’s prospects were torpedoed by the results. But a job applicant at the University of Kentucky filed a lawsuit in 2009 arguing just that.
C. Martin Gaskell, an astronomer, was a leading candidate to direct an observatory at the university. A search-committee member there found an article on Mr. Gaskell’s personal website titled “Modern Astronomy, the Bible, and Creation” that raised questions about whether he held creationist views. He had also given lectures to religious campus groups around the country in which he asserted that he sees flaws in evolutionary theory, even though he’s able to reconcile it with the Bible.
A member of the search committee emailed her colleagues with worries that Mr. Gaskell was “potentially evangelical.” There were discussions about whether hiring him could result in his ultimately saying something that would embarrass the university.
Those written conversations, which came to light through the deposition process, worked in Mr. Gaskell’s favor. Kentucky settled the case two years later, without admitting wrongdoing, and paid Mr. Gaskell $125,000.
What You ‘Can’t Unlearn’
Brian W. Ogilvie understands why faculty members fire up search engines: They’re curious. Yet when Mr. Ogilvie, an associate professor of history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, headed a search committee several years ago, he advised his colleagues against it.
Mr. Ogilvie’s name isn’t all that common, yet if someone types it into Google, one of the first few hits will be Brian Ogilvie, the retired professional hockey player (not the same person). Some of the historian’s students—seemingly having Googled him—have asked about his prior career, Mr. Ogilvie says.
Another reason he doesn’t Google job candidates, he says, is that professors, as quasi-public figures, can attract malicious online commentary from people who remain anonymous (think of the popular site Rate My Professors). An instructor may not even have taught the course in question, and the person trashing his teaching skills might not have been his student. But in such a case, or with other personal details, “once you learn something,” says Mr. Ogilvie, “you can’t unlearn it.”
Instead, his use of Google in job searches is rare and focused. “If someone says on their CV that they organized a conference, I’ll look specifically for that conference to see who else was there, what the theme was, just to get a sense of how much work was involved in organizing it,” Mr. Ogilvie says. “You’re not going to drag up anything you don’t want to see.”
Still, someone else might. Donna L. Whitney, a professor at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, says she’s been on search committees with colleagues who’ve Googled applicants and wanted to talk about what they’ve found.
“I tell them I don’t want to hear it,” says Ms. Whitney, now chair of the department of earth sciences. “I feel like we always have to be sort of watching ourselves and not biasing our decisions with information that’s not relevant in a professional setting,” she says. “We should just use what we have in front of us.”
Still, Ms. Whitney advises her graduate students to think about how they look online. They don’t always grasp, she says, how social media or even an unprofessional-sounding email address can come back to haunt them on the job market.
“They seem to know it but not know it at the same time,” she says.
Judicious Use
The City University of New York makes a point to remind them. “It is essential to have a robust and professional web presence if you are a graduate student on the job market, as you will be ‘Googled’ by the search-committee members at the institutions to which you apply,” says the website of CUNY’s Office of Career Planning and Professional Development. Google yourselves, it urges, to see what comes up.
Wyoming’s Mr. Sprague, who provided legal advice to small businesses before becoming a professor, is the search-committee member that advice anticipates. When he Googles candidates on a short list, he says, he’s verifying publications, but mainly looking around “to see how the person presents themselves online.”
What Mr. Sprague expects to see differs depending on the candidate’s rank or experience. Junior faculty candidates, he says, should have social-media accounts that they use to promote their research or engage with scholars in their field. “I would be more surprised if they don’t have anything,” he says. “If that were the case, I’m thinking, How come I couldn’t find you online?”
At the associate-professor level, Mr. Sprague says, he hopes to find an online presence showing how active candidates are in their discipline: mentions in news releases that tout their work, for example, or a professional website. For senior candidates, he’s not expecting to see Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, he says: “I don’t have any of those accounts myself.”
In any search, Mr. Sprague doesn’t worry about unfairly altering his opinion of candidates. “I feel like I’m a fairly savvy Internet user,” he says. “I know how to ignore things that I see.”
What Kurt Lindemann, an associate professor in the School of Communication at San Diego State University, most likes to see pop up when he Googles a job applicant is a professional website outlining that person’s career.
Mentions in the media, press releases about an award, or article citations are the next best things, Mr. Lindemann says. And Facebook or Twitter profiles high among the results aren’t “the end of the world,” he says. But what shows up on those pages—say, pictures of partying or drinking—can leave a bad impression.
Over all, he considers Googling applicants a small part of the search process. “You have to use it judiciously,” he says. “It shouldn’t be the reason you don’t hire someone or the reason you don’t call someone in for an interview.”
Yet academics may find it hard to resist the opportunity to learn just a little more, says Mr. Lindemann. “How could you not?”
