By now, you’ve probably heard about the scholar who had a tenure-track job offer rescinded after she tried negotiating on a number of terms. That incident has stoked a lot of talk on an important question: What’s the right way to go about negotiate an academic offer? We asked our experts to dole out some advice.
Given the hiring climate we’re in, what advice would you give to young academics on negotiating?
Here’s the bottom line: Know the institution with which you are negotiating. Your doctoral-program mentors might try to convince you that you’re weak if you aren’t aggressive, or if you don’t treat the hiring institution as if it were a large research institution. Don’t let them. You must be reasonable.
In the horror story at Nazareth, the demands were significantly overreaching for a teaching institution. The salary tweak was not a problem, and neither were the maternity leave nor the number of course preps, but asking to delay the start date means that the candidate didn’t understand that classes must be taught by a full-time faculty member. This was echoed in the request for a pre-tenure sabbatical.
Those two demands alone mean that the candidate is wishing to be out of the classroom two years out of her first five, which is just not reasonable at a teaching institution where relationships with students and colleagues are important. Put another way, with a 24-hour load in philosophy, the candidate was proposing to be released from as many as 16 courses out of, potentially, 40. That’s a lot of classes. While maternity leave is not a problem at all legally or as an ideal, it would be another semester out of the classroom as well.
I always recommend that candidates be transparent in their objectives and in their goals. Don’t talk your way into a job that you will hate just to have a job. Candidates who won’t be happy teaching represent themselves as teachers in order to get jobs all the time. And the reverse happens as well. It is a buyer’s market out there right now, but applicants have to realize that every job, and every institution, has a certain reality and that being out of step with that reality helps no one.
One other factor that might be in play in the example of the blog: It is quite common for a hiring committee to be deeply divided between two finalists, or for the search committee to be at odds with the administration. At teaching institutions in particular, it is common for one candidate to be a very strong scholar and a promising teacher and the other to be a very strong teacher and a promising scholar.
With the pressures for institutional reputation constantly pressing on what can be mission creep, it is common for search committees to select the scholar over the teacher. But this runs contrary to the preferences of a large minority of the department and of the administration. If the scholar looks overly precious or high-maintenance, the opposition will leap into action and demand that the candidate be cut loose immediately and the runner-up selected. This is often what’s behind the rebound-offer post I wrote recently.
While it’s common wisdom that you shouldn’t negotiate if you’re not prepared for the other party to walk away, we’ve almost never heard of that actually happening. Have you?
I hear of these things happening from time to time, and it’s usually at teaching institutions when the candidate clearly doesn’t understand the mission. I know of a dean at a teaching institution who had a candidate who was very strong on scholarship and a strong teacher to boot, but the demands in the negotiations kept growing more onerous and, in reality, quite odd.
He called his provost after a frustrating conversation with the candidate and said, “I’m done with this one. I have seen the future of these conversations, and I don’t have the time to keep this person happy.” He was ready to withdraw the offer the following day, but the candidate phoned the next morning and accepted. Deal done. Productive colleague.
Here’s what other academics had to say in the Negotiation 101 series: