No one tells you when you start teaching how much of your work will involve things that seem to have nothing to do with teaching. Of course, there’s research and publishing, but, especially at small colleges, it’s easy for your day to fill up with paperwork and meetings. Searches for new faculty members are especially time-consuming.
They’re also some of the most important things we do as teachers.
Fresh out of graduate school, I was hired by a good man who was getting ready to retire after 40 years of teaching. For many of those years, LaMoyne Pederson had single-handedly kept philosophy alive at our college. A year after I began teaching, he went on a long-awaited one-semester sabbatical, and soon after that he retired, leaving me in charge of the philosophy program.
I’d also inherited the responsibility for teaching classical Greek. Philosophy and classics are housed in a combined department, so I wasn’t completely alone, but I was the only one specifically trained in both disciplines, and so much of the responsibility for curriculum and, eventually, hiring fell to me.
Over the next few years, our college allowed us to hire two more philosophers and a classicist. Each time I began the hiring process, I felt like I was holding a precious inherited object, one that could be easily broken by mishandling it. LaMoyne had defended this department through some lean times and strengthened it by thoughtful collaboration with other departments. Once he handed it to me, it was mine to strengthen—or ruin—with each new hire.
For the last eight years, one sentence in particular, from a handwritten note of encouragement from LaMoyne, has guided me: “Don’t be afraid to hire someone better than you are.” In the upper Midwest, that counts as high praise—his indirect way of saying, “I hired well when I hired you; you should do the same.” (Incidentally, I doubt I’ll ever be as good a teacher as LaMoyne, but I appreciate his compliment nonetheless.)
It ought to be obvious that we should want to hire people better than we are. But we are human, and thus susceptible to vanity and competitiveness. In my first year, for example, before I became involved in search committees, I’d received some encouraging accolades for my performance in the classroom and for my publications. The praise felt good. If I had been involved in hiring anyone then, I might have worried that the new person would be so good that he or she would overshadow me with greater talent, which might endanger my own chances of winning more accolades. If a new hire was really good, my performance might be measured against his or hers when it came time for tenure and promotion. It would be safer to hire someone mediocre, someone who was competent but not quite as good as I.
LaMoyne’s note helped me remember what really mattered. I didn’t get into teaching to climb over the backs of colleagues to get to the top of my particular career ladder. Sure, I want to earn a living, but I want to do it by helping students learn new things. I can do that by teaching well, and by hiring people who can teach even better. An added perk is that colleagues who teach well are people from whom I can learn, too. Their examples can help me to do my job even better. If I’m remembered only as the guy who was wise enough to hire excellent professors, that’s a pretty good legacy.
As my new colleagues have earned high praise from their students, I feel proud, not resentful. When students excitedly tell me what they’re learning in a colleague’s “Philosophy of Mind” class, or when they tell me that our new classics professor is the best teacher they’ve ever had, I think. “Yup, hiring her was a great decision.” Congratulating myself for their success may be a deficient virtue, but it seems preferable to many of the alternatives.
Of course, “better” is a shifty target to aim at. I’ve been impressed by the quality of candidates on the job market, and it pains me to think of so many talented people finding it hard to land jobs. Most of the candidates we’ve brought in for on-campus interviews have seemed better than I am in at least one way. I’ve been fortunate to have wise co-workers to help me sort out just which of those ways of being better matter most.
When you hire someone, you’re choosing not just a skill set but a colleague, someone you’ll see every day and who could make you glad you showed up for work or who could make you want to avoid the office. The effects of those relationships will certainly be felt by your students.
You’re also hiring someone who will affect the culture of your institution. Our students don’t just learn from us when we’re in the classroom. If they learn from our research, they also learn from the way we carry out that research with others. The Stoic Musonius Rufus claimed that our students will learn more from watching us work the fields than from listening to our lectures, and he was probably right. Character, for good or for ill, is contagious. As important as it is to hire talented people, it’s at least as important not to hire jerks.
Hiring is rarely simple or easy, but its effects are often commensurate with the effort it takes to do it well. It’s a chance to multiply the effect of our own work by hiring people who will complement it and inspire us to do better. Hiring well can improve our own work environment and bring us colleagues who are able to do what we cannot.
For busy teachers, a search can feel like a tedious and time-consuming distraction. But for our students—both present and future—little that we do matters more.
