Why Your Last Hire Was a Freakin’ Disaster

Maybe it’s time to just fess up and admit that your last job search didn’t work out too good.

It has come to your attention that your recently hired tenure-track faculty member has been sitting in his office, door wide open, playing jacks for the past three hours.

Or, maybe he has just informed the chair that he doesn’t “do” Gateway courses. Or, perhaps a scene out of Nabokov’s Pnin has been reenacted; the new hire doesn’t actually speak the language he was hired to teach.

The committee may indeed have been “unified in its recommendation,” but from where you’re standing now it was also unified in error.

I have come to the conclusion that this is more or less the norm in academe. For every 10 hires, I would estimate, 2.2 are ultimately “keepers”; three are “indiscretions”; as regards the other 4.5, well, the less said the better. (As for the remaining three-tenths, they failed to apprise you of their actual visa status and never made it back to the States).

In my old age I have developed my own set of metrics for successful job searches. If the process doesn’t end in litigation—then the committee ought be commended for a job well done!

Failed searches are a toxic mixture of an uneven “talent” pool, bewildering academic mores, and our—I mean the professoriate’s—unique culture of dysfunction.

What follows are the major reasons why so many attempts to fill positions go frighteningly awry. Service-oriented solutions follow.

Because half the committee didn’t read the damn CV’s: I am as guilty of this sin as the next person. In my defense I did once sit on a committee that received 835 applications (might we have conceived of the position a bit too broadly?).

Even when one receives the standard 75 submissions it is hard to imagine how, busy as we are, faculty members could spend more than 10 minutes on each candidate. There are too many applicants, too many other committees.

Solution: Although it may end up looking like a scene out of The Office, try having a few “CV Parties” in which all committee members peruse the applications together over coffee and high-transfat crullers.

Deputize the newest, most junior, or least powerful member of the search committee to informally lead the discussion. This inversion of power dynamics is a necessary precaution. . . .

Because your department is completely dysfunctional: Here lies the root of many a catastrophe. The inter-personal relations that develop in academic units are: 1) worthy of fictional portrayal, and somehow at the same time, 2) not fictionally compelling.

Ever have a job search come apart at the seams because one faculty member is still seething over being assigned the “Methods” course in the Friday 3:45 pm slot? I have.

I have also seen senior faculty coerce junior faculty into settling on Melinda when it is clear that Lizette was the better option.(Lizette, by the way, gets the last laugh. She’s now an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.)

Solution: Effective deans notice things—like when the musicology department’s last six hires were scholars who approached their subject matter “primarily, but not exclusively, from a Deleuzian Maoist perspective"—and respond appropriately.

Anecdote: The single most talented scholar I ever hired originally graded out as ninth on my list of 25 candidates. It was only when two colleagues placed me in a headlock and rammed me into a filing cabinet that I was able to realize my error. That clarified things. Ability to admit error—the most important attribute of a highly effective committee member.

“Because only my graduate school produces doctorates who are worthy of working in our department": Do I even need to elaborate?

Because someone on the committee once did summer stock theater (Guys and Dolls) with the eventual first choice: Previously existing, albeit unreported, relations with colleagues are a leading cause of searches gone hopelessly askew.

Years back, we were all sitting around celebrating a “home run” selection—as you may imagine our views on that changed in due course—when an ebullient colleague blurted out: “Thank God we got Corey. I could have never voted for Richard, he looked too much like my ex-husband.”

Solution: At the aforementioned CV party the chair should request conscientious full disclosure of all preexisting relations with applicants. The presence of university counsel and uniformed campus police at the party might be helpful.

Because you overlooked the adjunct in your (campus) gate: Every university has a bevy of part-timers on staff who have produced more quality research and taught more skillfully than assorted tenured colleagues.

Every full-timer has a friend like this (trust me though, they hate you). The ubiquity of these high-performing adjuncts belies the idea that American universities are meritocratic institutions.

Solution: Realize that fresh faces aren’t always the answer. An individual who has contributed, let’s say, a decade of good service to a university at absurdly low wages might be considered more like a “front runner” than a recipient of a “courtesy interview.”

Because the letters of recommendation are not always elucidating: My favorite case being the scholar who pointed out that not only did his doctoral student write about Salman Rushdie, but was, word for word, a better writer than Salman Rushdie.

Aside from pointlessly effusive letters there is the dreaded “hidden message” scenario. Every committee has a self-appointed encryption specialist who insists the phrase “hard worker” or “determined thinker” unequivocally indicates that the person in question is some sort of moron.

Solution: Assign greater value to truly thoughtful letters of reference. Look for referees who seem to have spent time on their recommendations. If a writer identifies a lot of The Good, and some of The Bad then that letter needs to be held in higher esteem than the one whose author’s motto is “if she choose to study with me, she must be brilliant.”

Additional insight: All professors who let grad students write their own letters of rec. and then sign them should never be permitted to recommend another candidate ever again. Ever.

Because selecting junior faculty is a total crap shoot anyway: I ask you to consider the National Football League’s annual draft. It occurs every spring and requires that 32 professional football teams assess more than a thousand college athletes.

The process includes scouting departments whose sole purpose is to travel to gridirons in godforsaken parts of America.There, they interview harried college coaches, assistants and academic administrators. After that, they sit in damp basements viewing endless loops of tape for days on end.

The prospects are graded according to rigorous criteria and then reassessed, in person, at a Combine. At this event, even more people, including hundreds of sports journalists, join the scouts to assess talent.

Security and background checks are performed. Intelligence and even psychological evaluations are administered. The process spans roughly nine months and costs each team millions of dollars.

And even with all of that effort, football drafts produce “busts” regularly.

Let’s compare that with our process, shall we? Applicants, we established above, are initially assessed--with or without cruller accompaniment--for about 10 minutes. Within the span of a few hours of deliberation 98 percent of them are eliminated from contention.

The three left standing are invited to campus for an afternoon of interviews, a job talk, a meal, and maybe a visit to the Campus Compost Initiative. Total cost to your institution: about $5,000.

Solution: There is no real solution. Senior searches provide us, at least, with the ability to inspect scholarly track records stretching back a decade or more. Searches for young scholars are a stab in the dark.

Years back our very own Chronicle of Higher Education ran a “Where are they now?” piece. The young rising stars of a decade prior were revisited at the fabulous universities that hired them. Needless to say, few were still considered stars. Others were difficult to track down. As for the universities, they remain as fabulous as ever.

(Photo by Flickr user Jo Jakeman)