Hiring and Promotion Hazards in Academe

Most colleges provide their employees with little if any guidance about managing legal and other risks relating to hiring and promotions, and that is in itself risky, say the authors of a new book.

In Managing Risk in High-Stakes Faculty Employment Decisions (ILR Press/Cornell University Press), Julee T. Flood and Terry L. Leap share approaches that could help college personnel to deal with legal problems, and ideally to pre-empt them.

Who needs such skills? Certainly, the authors say, faculty members do if they serve on tenure-and-promotion committees but “have little knowledge of or training in legal requisites.”

So, too, they say, do administrators overseeing such areas as “food service, chemical-research labs, summer camps, nanotechnology,” and policies on campus violence, as well as employment lawyers who may know little about “the culture of academia.”

But faculty hiring and promotion are the book’s main focus. Leap, a professor of business administration at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville whose earlier books include Tenure, Discrimination, and the Courts (ILR Press, 1993), says that worries about faculty contracts and constitutional issues associated with free speech and academic freedom are growing. Another concern for colleges, he and Flood write, is that hiring mistakes can have outcomes as adverse as students’ struggling to learn from faculty hires who “turn out to be unproductive, counterproductive, and sometimes even toxic or dangerous.”

Flood, a lawyer who has taught at Elon University’s School of Law and directed its Leadership Program, says higher-education personnel should be better prepared to deal with a wide range of risks — among them claims of workplace harassment and discrimination, violations of free speech, and inequitable hiring practices.

Increasingly prevalent, she says, is litigation that results when rejected candidates “don’t get those fewer and fewer faculty positions,” at a time when the treatment of adjunct faculty members has become a “critical issue.”

In hiring processes, she and Leap say, knowing a little about contract and constitutional law, as it applies to employment, is only part of the challenge. Just as imposing is the task of gauging the laws’ tricky intersections with distinctive features of higher education, such as “the nebulous concept of collegiality,” which may determine who gets hired or promoted.

Many subtleties are at work in hiring and promotions, the authors caution. In one chapter, they show that deliberations, however well intentioned, are almost certain to be muddled by unconscious prejudices — “a dizzying array of risk assessments, biases, and fallacies.”

The “contrast effect,” for instance, may lead assessors to distorted impressions of job candidates based on the relative strengths or weaknesses of other candidates seen within a short time period. In “the moral credential effect,” a hiring-committee member’s track record of nonprejudice may lead to “acts of prejudice” through an accrued “sense of entitlement” to act unethically.

In academe, Leap suggests, professors and administrators may assume that their expertise extends well beyond their academic specialization. As a result, “most people think, ‘I know the ropes. My gut feeling is if we hire this person, it’s going to work out OK.’ " But that, he says, is to seriously underestimate the effects on decision-making of such considerations as the threat that a newcomer may pose to a hiring-committee member’s own status and success.

Flood says such considerations “do put more responsibility on our shoulders, when we make an academic decision, to realize the vagueness of some of the parameters on which we’re making the decision.”

One hopeful outlook, she says, is that more and more academic managers are becoming aware that risk-management principles can help their employees navigate the “especially complex” culture of academe. For those who have been slow to realize how important that is, she says, Managing Risk could be a timely wake-up call.