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The Tenure Track Job Search Process Explained
N ow that we’ve established all the obstacles to attaining the coveted tenure track position, let’s roll up our sleeves and get down to the business of explaining how you can maximize your chances of doing so.
One of the demoralizing aspects of the tenure track job search is the black box feel of the whole process. To the job seeker it seems like ads appear, you apply, the application disappears into the maw of some mysterious “search committee,” and weeks or months later your heart is broken on the jobs wiki. Or, wonder of wonder, you get a request for more information. But, what is actually happening out there in search committee land?
To answer this we actually have to start about a year earlier, with the creation of the job ad itself. In this chapter, I’m going to begin there, at the birth of a “line,” and follow it all the way through a typical hiring process. It goes without saying that this is just a general model, and actual cases will vary in timing, organization, and institutional policies.
In fall of the year before the ad comes out, the dean of the college will ask all the departments in the college to submit their hiring requests for the coming year. The department will meet and discuss this over one or more faculty meetings, and vote on a ranked hiring priority list. The department chair will submit this to the dean.
The dean will consider all the hiring requests of all the departments in the college (keep in mind in a college of arts and sciences at a major R1 university this may number more than one hundred) and decide which hires will be authorized to move forward. In our current economic crisis only a small proportion get the coveted nod.
The hire that is authorized is called a “line.” As in, “We’ve been authorized to fill the line in Japan anthropology.” Or, much more rarely these days, “We’ve gotten approval for a new line in Japan anthropology!”
With that authorization, the department head convenes a hiring committee to construct the job ad for the line. For the purposes of our model, I will posit that this committee is made up of five members—four faculty members and one graduate student. This committee’s work will start in the spring, and will be devoted to administrative details such as outlining the process, setting deadlines, and defining the search priorities: For example, “We are particularly interested in candidates with specialization in gender and sexuality and/or the environment.” These priorities will reflect the interests of the hiring committee members as well as, to some degree, the stated priorities and plans of the department as a whole. The department will vote on the final ad, and in late spring, the ad will be submitted to the relevant disciplinary newsletters, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and other venues, to go out in the August or September issues.
It is an interesting fact that the fanciest schools will place the most impossibly general ads—“Princeton is seeking a cultural anthropologist”—while lesser schools will be more specific: “University of X is seeking a cultural anthropologist of Japan, with a specialization in gender. Additional expertise in the environment and/or ethnicity preferred.”
Why? Fancy schools operate in the belief that they will consider only “the best of the best,” and having no need to justify their choices, they tend to leave themselves the largest pool to choose from. And then the egos at play may prevent any agreement on an area of specialization.
Other schools will be operating within search parameters more rigidly dictated by current budgetary limitations and currently or temporarily available “pots” of money. So their searches tend to be specific.
Federal affirmative action policies require that the candidates short-listed for a position actually fulfill the listed qualifications of the position. Be aware, however, that this adherence to the letter of the law is not universal. It is more common at public institutions where records are public. I am not a lawyer and not versed in the ins and outs of employment law, but it seems there is a good bit of latitude for interpretation regarding how the successful candidate meets the qualifications, particularly at private institutions. Thus, candidates should apply for jobs for which they are basically qualified, even if they don’t meet every single qualification listed in the ad.
Once the deadline has passed, all of the complete applications will be collected for initial review. Incomplete applications will typically be discarded, although if a candidate looks particularly promising and is missing a recommendation letter, the search committee may take the step of contacting that candidate to let her know (note that, as I discuss in chapter 41 , this courtesy is increasingly rare).
At this point, the search committee commences the grueling process of compiling the long short list. The long short list is the list of candidates who may be asked for more information or invited to a conference or Skype interview. While all searches differ, for our purposes we will say that the long short list contains twenty-five names.
The search committee at this point will be dealing with perhaps 300 to 1,000 applications, and they need to jettison approximately 275 to 975 applications as quickly as possible to get to this manageable list.
Each member of the search committee will evaluate the files, reject the vast majority, and generate a list of twenty-five names. They will then meet as a group and discuss these names. If any of these candidates reflect a particular area of expertise shared by a faculty member not on the search committee, that faculty member’s special opinion may be solicited. At the meeting, the names that make the top twenty-five lists of all five members of the search committee will instantly be “passed” onto the long short list. Little discussion will be devoted to them because they are so obviously strong. Similarly, any names that appear on four of the five committee members’ lists will probably make the long short list without debate. Discussion instead will be devoted to the remaining slots, and the candidates whose names appear on only three (or fewer) of the search committee members’ lists. Search committee members will explain their choices and justify them by pointing to strengths in the record or connections to existing programs in the department or across campus. Eventually, all will come to a shared agreement about the final list.
Those top twenty-five—the long short list—will then enter the next stage of the search. They may have their references called at this point, and be asked for longer writing samples. In most cases they are also invited to a conference or Skype interview, a 20–40-minute interview with some or all of the members of the search committee.
Based on the results of this review of additional information, which typically takes place in October, November, and December, and meeting the candidates personally at the conference or Skype interviews, the search committee will then meet to compile the short short list.
The short short list typically contains about five names. These five candidates’ files will be made available to the faculty as a whole (which in large departments probably has not been involved in the actual search process up to this point), for review.
The short short list must be ranked in a faculty vote. Things often get heated here. Some departments have a kind of decentralized ethos in which the faculty places a great deal of trust in the judgment of the search committee, and simply rubber-stamps the ranked short list, while other departments will view this as a battle royal, with egos flying and long-simmering resentments, alliances, and agendas emerging into open conflict. When this debate concludes the top three, or as many as the department can afford, will be invited for campus visits. Often the pleasant duty of inviting the candidates to visit will move away from the search committee to the department head, reflecting the fact that in some departments the search committee will be dissolved at this point, and all further deliberations will take place among the whole faculty.
In many searches the invitations will go out just before winter break, with visits scheduled for January and February. It is worth noting that with the increasingly frenzied state of the market, sometimes this pace is accelerated, and campus visits will be scheduled for December with an offer made before winter break. These early offers can result in much consternation for the recipients, who then have to weigh accepting a perhaps lesser offer early, or turning it down to wait for the results of other campus visits at better schools later. It’s a dilemma.
In any case, the candidates come to campus for their visits. A two-day visit is common, although small, resource-poor campuses may restrict visits to one day. Administrative assistants will be in charge of arranging details of lodging and flights with the candidates. On any campus visit, the schedule typically begins with the pickup at the airport, and concludes with the drop-off for the return flight. In the interim will be a packed schedule of meals, short meetings with individual faculty members, a formal sit-down meeting with the search committee, the job talk or teaching demo or both, meetings with the department head and dean, and a campus tour that includes visits to the library, special collections, or centers or programs particularly relevant to the candidate.
Shortly after the final candidate is dropped off at the airport to go home, the final decision-making process begins. In some departments this will continue to involve the search committee as a deliberative unit, while at others, where the committee was previously dissolved, it will occur among the whole faculty. Here there may arise a new battle royal. And now that the candidates are flesh-and-blood humans, emotions can run high.
The debate will typically focus on the candidates’ performance in their job talk and Q and A, on their demonstrated ability to fill the research and teaching needs as advertised (that is, the fit), and their likability and/or collegiality: Is this a person whom we can tolerate seeing in the hallways and at faculty meetings for the next five or ten years?
After some hours or days of debate, the faculty votes on the ranking of the candidates. The candidates will be ranked not just first, second, or third, but also “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”
At that point, if all three top candidates are viewed as unacceptable, the alternates will be invited to visit. Similarly, if the top candidate is voted as acceptable and the other two unacceptable, and the top candidate turns down the job, then the alternates will be invited.
If all available candidates are unacceptable, or all acceptable candidates are unavailable, then the search “fails.” Nobody is hired, and the department will have to start the process of requesting a reauthorization of the same line the next year.
But if one of the acceptable candidates is offered the job, and accepts it, then the search comes to a successful close. The offer is made and negotiated. The elements of the offer will likely be dictated mostly at the dean’s level. Contents of offer letters vary widely in level of detail and specificity, but will usually include the teaching load, salary, start-up funds, moving funds, junior sabbatical or leave, general insurance and retirement benefits, and other basic elements. Some other elements of the offer, such as annual conference travel funding, may be arranged through an email agreement with the department head but not listed in the contract. This will vary widely by institution.
Once the contract is signed, it is all finished. The candidate—no longer a candidate now, but the “new hire”—will, we hope, receive warm welcome emails from his or her future colleagues, and will start packing up his or her apartment to move sometime over the summer.