Faculty Hiring Research Articles

Those Unfamiliar Names and Faces: The Hiring, Management, and Evaluation of Part-Time Faculty

A review of one two-year college English department’s procedures reveals the complexities of dealing with part-time faculty.

Feeling at Home at Work: Life in Academic Departments

As long-time residents of academic departments, we're familiar with the routines of office hours, chatting in the hallway, attending committee meetings, picking up mail, and using the xerox machine in the main office. Every department we've experienced has been laced with gossip and occasional intrigue, and sometimes disrupted by heated conflict and smoldering feuds. Why, we got to wondering one day, do tempers flare so easily in faculty meetings? Why do we "regress" just where you'd think we would be the most "grown up"—at work? Departments are set inside the infrastructure of a bureaucracy and profession and would thus seem to invite an attitude of mild, appropriate concern. Why, then, do matters of recruitment, course scheduling, and xerox paper sometimes evoke strong, and apparently infantile emotions? Using an analogy (one of sociology's finest tools), we've come up with a clue to the emotional and relational mysteries of department life: departments are like families. Like families, departments are small, face-to-face groups sharing space, material resources, and everyday life. The members did not, by and large, choose one another, and (given the sorry state of the job market) they anticipate being stuck with one another for the long haul. Periods of adoption or marriage (faculty hiring) tend to be especially contentious, raising issues of collective identity and fears that the existing balance of power may become realigned. Department members sometimes leave home, having been "courted away" as happens to eligible young people under the rule of exogeny. Indeed, departments don't like to hire from among their own graduate stu-

The Pedagogical Colloquium: Taking Teaching Seriously in the Faculty Hiring Process

The Pedagogical Colloquium: Taking Teaching Seriously in the Faculty Hiring Process

Women Helping Women? Role Model and Mentoring Effects on Female Ph.D. Students in Economics

One potential method to increase the success of female graduate students in economics is to encourage mentoring relationships between these students and female faculty members, via increased hiring of female faculty, or having female faculty serve as dissertation chairs for female students. This paper examines whether either of these strategies results in more successful outcomes for female graduate students, using survey information on female graduate students and faculties of Ph.D.-producing economics departments. The empirical evidence provides virtually no support for the hypothesis that initial job placements for female graduate students are improved by adding female faculty members, or by having a female dissertation chair. However, female faculty members appear to reduce time spent in graduate school by female students.

Affirmative Action in California: Looking Back, Looking Forward in Public Academe

This article offers an overview of the context and consequences of affirmative action in California with regard to faculty hiring and student admissions for African Americans and other Californians of color. It first outlines the policy's philosophical framework and basic premises. It next reviews the several criticisms that have been lodged against it in the nearly three decades since its implementation. The discussion highlights data indicating that (a) representation of African Americans and other minorities in public postsecondary education increased while affirmative action was in force; and (b) minority representation is certain to decrease in the absence of affirmative action. The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. (DuBois, 1903/1989, p. 10) In the near-century since its first utterance, W. E. B. DuBois's prophecy has proven true. What this visionary critic may not have envisioned, however, was the likelihood that the problem would remain for us to solve in the next millennium. To be sure, at times during this century there have been bright moments for people of color, as evidenced by the emergence of strong leaders who clearly and forcefully articulated the hopes and wisdom of their people, the enactment of civil rights legislation, the increase in the educational levels attained by African American men and women. Yet, as the 20th century comes to a close, the United States is experiencing what amounts to a national retreat from issues of equity. The problem of the color line remains as important to us today as it did when DuBois first wrote those words almost a hundred years ago. Few examples of this are more potent than those pertaining to affirmative action, especially as it relates to matters of faculty hiring and student admissions in academe. In 1995, prior to announcing his decision to run for president, California's Governor Pete Wilson orchestrated a meeting at which the University of California's (UC) Board of Regents decided that the nearly 30 years of affirmative action had impaired rather than improved the quality of teaching and learning at state-supported institutions of higher education. The regents subsequently voted to end the practice as it applied to student admissions in the UC system (Wallace & Lesher, 1995). Then, in 1996, the oxymoronic California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) was placed on the state ballot, passing with 54% of the vote. The chief argument of proponents of that measure was that affirmative action did not create an equal playing field for all of California's citizens; that it blocked minorities from being seen as successful on their own merit and resulted in their being perceived as needing a crutch in order to obtain certain positions or status; and that the quality of the state's institutions and businesses depended upon their freedom to hire the best people without consideration of race or gender inequities (Custred & Wood, 1996). Such criticisms formed the scaffolding for a full-scale attack on affirmative action in California. The consequence of the Regents' decision and the CCRI-if the latter's passage is upheld in the courts, where the final decision currently rests-will be that affirmative action, insofar as faculty hiring and admissions at all of California's public institutions of higher learning are concerned, is over. Few battlegrounds have seen more action on both these fronts than those in the state of California. Any policy that has been in existence for a generation deserves investigation and analysis. Contexts change; what worked yesterday may not work today, or perhaps particular aspects of a policy need to change. Thus, the following analysis offers an overview of affirmative action in California and a consideration of the consequences of this policy. It begins by outlining the basic premises of affirmative action and reviewing the several criticisms that have been lodged against those premises. …

An Analysis of Faculty Recruiting in Schools and Departments

applicant for the senior-level faculty position enthusiastically accepted the invitation to the interview and traveled a great distance to talk with the faculty. He learned only after he arrived on campus that the program was about to lose its accreditation by the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He did not sit in on a faculty meeting, as planned, because of a faculty quarrel. program's problems were not described to him prior to the interview. Another applicant accepted an apparently genuine invitation to interview for a position as chair. applicant interrupted a 4,000-mile family vacation because the program was to fill the position, and he bought new clothes because he was not given time to go home before the interview. When he asked the search committee head whether the interview could be scheduled for the following week, he was asked, Are you interested in the job or not? applicant went for the interview and then did not hear from the anxious unit for weeks. Finally, he learned the job had gone to an internal candidate who had the job locked up from the start. Catherine Cassara described her disheartening interviewing experiences in Chronicle of Higher Education. She reported that a faculty member at a prestigious institution called following her interview to tell her she had an assistant professorship wrapped up. faculty member called later to say he had passed on erroneous information.(1) She also showed up for her research presentation to find only she and the department head's secretary were there. Another time, Cassara was told after she arrived for an interview for one of two positions that the program had interviewed a couple, and that if one member of the couple was hired, the other member would get the other job. Recruiting quality faculty is an academic unit's most important activity. Without efficient, knowledgeable, articulate faculty members, a unit cannot fulfill its potential, even if it boasts the best students and the most outstanding facilities. And yet, as these anecdotes suggest, some potential faculty experience egregious treatment at the hands of inept and inhumane recruiters. Aside from the human considerations, recruiters are short-sighted when they treat applicants shabbily, because the time may be gone when a search committee can count on several good applicants for each position. McGuire and Prince have predicted that the need for new faculty in all disciplines will be acute in 1996, 2000, and 2003.(2) Mooney, in a report about the McGuire-Prince study, said, The increased need is due mostly to the fact that a large cohort of professors hired in the 1960s--which were expansion years for higher education--will be retiring together. If enrollments grow significantly, the need could be even more acute.(3) Herling, who studied communication staffing needs for 1993-98, wrote: The most striking finding of this survey is the number of faculty openings predicted for the next five years (up to 2,820 in 1993-98). ...The implications of a much greater number of openings than qualified individuals gives those candidates that approach administrators' dreams the advantage of a 'seller's market.'(4) Van Ommeren, Sneed, Wulfemeyer, and Riffe--in their study of ethical issues in faculty hiring--predicted that recruiting will become more competitive, that the number of qualified applicants will dwindle, and that the process should be examined carefully.(5) Job seekers and search committee members often find the hiring process daunting, particularly as the pool of qualified applicants contracts, but some guidance is available in journalism and mass communication. Peirce and Bennett, who surveyed unit heads and recently hired faculty, made several important and useful suggestions about what those on each side of the interview should and should not do;(6) Merskin and Huberlie, who studied position announcements published in 1992-93, suggested efficient and effective ways for units to advertise faculty vacancies;(7) and Van Ommeren, Sneed, Wulfemeyer, and Riffe, who reported data from 407 journalism and mass communication faculty members, recommended ways to keep the process open and fair to all. …

Employment Trends in Geography, Part 1: Enrollment and Degree Patterns*

This paper is the first in a series of three papers dealing with the current and future labor market for geographers. It is based on a report prepared by the Association of American Geographers' (AAG) Employment Forecasting Committee to the National Research Council's (NRC) Rediscovering Geography Committee. This report provides a data-based analysis of the past and future supply of geographers, the current labor market conditions in the field, and the factors likely to influence the future demand for geographers (faculty hiring, geographic education initiatives, trends in private-sector jobs, etc.). Each year some 4,000 individuals receive degrees in geography from America's institutions of higher education. They, or some portion of them, make up the new supply of geographers entering the labor market. In the near future (up to five years), the availability of new geographers is related to the number of geography students now in the educational pipeline. Their current specialties, and the specialties of ...

Sexism in Single-Sex and Coeducational Independent Secondary School Classrooms

This study investigated how engenderment (socialization to gender) operates in three types of independent secondary schools—boys' schools, girls' schools, and coeducational schools. Observational data were collected in 86 classrooms in 21 schools in specific curricular areas. The study found that teachers initiated most of the incidents in six categories of sexism. Furthermore, although the frequency of incidents was similar in the three types of schools, the forms of sexism were different. Chemistry classes were the major locus of sexism in coeducational schools, and the severest form of sexism was found in boys' schools. Although girls' schools exhibited the most gender-equity events, they also perpetuated a pernicious form of sexism: academic dependence and nonrigorous instruction. Schools with policies that actively promoted gender equity in enrollment, in the hiring of faculty, and in personal relations were the least likely sites of sexism.

Politically correct hiring Will Destroy higher education

Aaron Wildavsky, a founder and president of the California Association of Scholars, died on September 4, at the much too early age of 63. Professor Wildavsky's life exemplified a total commitment to the university, and his achievements were prodigious. He authored or edited, alone or with colleagues, some three dozen books, and he wrote hundreds of articles. In the thirty years he spent at Berkeley, he was at various times chairman of the Department of Political Science and founding Dean of the Graduate School of Public Policy. He also found time to serve as president of the American Political Science Association and the Policy Studies Association, and to be active in myriad other organizations. When Yale, where he had earned his doctorate in 1959, earlier this year made him an honorary Doctor of Social Science, it stated, “You have improved every institution with which you have been associated.” Aaron Wildavsky was profoundly concerned about the future of the university, the institution that he loved so much and served so well. At the Fourth National Conference of the NAS, held in San Francisco this past April, he expressed his fears about the effect of politically correct faculty hiring practices on the long-range future of education. Academic Questions here reproduces his remarks in the hope—one that, in fact, he shared—that for once his predictions will be proved wrong.

The Continuing Vitality of Affirmative Action Diversity Principles in Professional and Graduate School Student Admissions and Faculty Hiring

Thurgood Marshall was unquestionably the greatest lawyer of the 20th century in the United States and perhaps the world. However, not too many years before Marshall successfully argued the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas case, which set the stage for the desegregation of all public education in the U.S., Marshall. himself had been denied admission to the University of Maryland Law School because of the color of his skin. Wounded but not defeated by this egregiously deliberate racial discrimination, he went on to excel as a superb law student at the Howard University Law School. There, Marshall was inspired by magnificent teachers and lawyers such as Charles Hamilton Houston. Upon obtaining his law degree, Marshall embarked on a remarkable career that included experiences as the general counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the nation's leading civil rights attorney, as the Solicitor General of the United States, as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and culminating as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States for nearly a quarter of a century (Rowan, 1993).It is most appropriate that some of Marshall's most significant legal victories prior to Brown involved successful challenges to the racially discriminatory and exclusionary policies of major state public university law schools. In State of Missouri, ex. rel. v. Gaines (1938) and Sweatt v. Painter (1950), for example, Marshall achieved favorable decisions overturning the racial discriminatory and exclusionary practices of the then all-White law schools of the universities of Missouri and Texas, respectively. These victories were especially sweet ones for him given his own personal experiences of denial and rejection, based on race, in his pursuit of a legal education.It was not until 1974, fully two decades after its landmark decision in Brown, that the United States Supreme Court again faced the issue of racial discrimination in professional school education in DeFunis v. Odegaard. Significantly, and as would be expected, now-Justice Thurgood Marshall was among the dissenting voices in this case, which presented an opportunity for the Court to decide whether an affirmative action admissions policy adopted by the University of Washington Law School failed to meet the equal protection provisions of 14th Amendment. By a narrow 5-4 margin, however, the Court deemed the case moot, signalling that it was neither willing nor prepared to decide the first of the major post-Brown race discrimination cases in the realm of professional school and higher education.The DeFunis case involved a White male applicant, Mark DeFunis, who had graduated with distinction from college. After repeated unsuccessful efforts to obtain admission, DeFunis sued the University of Washington Law School and its chancellor in federal district court. He alleged that persons in recognized affirmative action classifications were admitted, despite their lower predicted first-year averages, because of their race or color.(1) As a White applicant, DeFunis claimed, he had been unconstitutionally denied admission in violation of his 14th Amendment right to equal protection. The Court, under the auspices of Associate Justice William Douglas, granted interlocutory relief to DeFunis. This allowed him to be admitted to and attend the law school while his case proceeded through the lower federal courts. By the time the matured case returned to the Supreme Court, DeFunis was in the final semester of his last and third year of the law degree program. Because his graduation was imminent and in all likelihood assured, the Court refused to hear the case on the merits, deeming it moot.By 1978, however, the situation had changed. In what has become perhaps the landmark post-Brown decision in this area of contention, at least in the public university context, the Supreme Court endorsed the principle of affirmative action in University of California v. …

Academic Earth science in transition

During the past 5 years, I have served on visiting committees for Earth science departments at Stanford, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia, Cal‐Tech, and the Geophysical Lab of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. As chair of Princeton's department, I have also experienced external review from the other side of the process. These committees attempt to diagnose major problems, supply appropriate remedies, and target opportunities for improvement in matters ranging from faculty hiring to curriculum. One very useful service provided by a visiting committee is to help distinguish dilemmas that are truly local and unique to the institution from those common to science and society as a whole. A snapshot of the tensions and opportunities common to academic Earth science has emerged from these experiences.

Attitudes v. Aptitudes: In re Faculty Hiring in Canadian Law Schools

Journal Article Attitudes v. Aptitudes: In re Faculty Hiring in Canadian Law Schools Get access Pierre Legrand Jr Pierre Legrand Jr 1Pierre Legrand Jr is Lecturer in Law and Director of European Legal Studies, Lancaster University, United Kingdom Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Journal of Comparative Law, Volume 41, Issue 3, Summer 1993, Pages 385–399, https://doi.org/10.2307/840655 Published: 01 July 1993

Doctoral education in public affairs and administration: issues for the 1990s

This paper reports the results of a 1990 survey of 60 NASPAA doctoral programs in public affairs and administration. It presents descriptive data about a variety of facets of public affairs and administration doctoral programs: program and institutional structure, size, student diversity, number of degrees granted, and faculty hires. Respondents identified five broad areas as sources for special concern for the design and operation of doctoral programs: (1) problems that stem from limited resource availability; (2) issues related to the quality of the educational program; (3) questions dealing with the definition of the scope of offerings and requirements; (4) considerations for the needs of part-time students; and (5) issues of minority recruitment and retention. The paper concludes with a discussion of issues that the survey findings pose for doctoral education in public affairs and administration.

Signal processing's education survey results

The data from 33 responses to the more than 100 survey forms that were sent out to north American universities are tabulated and analyzed. The following information was selected: program statistics, including number of faculty, faculty hiring, number of Ph.D and Masters students, Ph.D graduation statistics, and research funding levels and funding trends; instructional aids, i.e. software used for computer-aided instruction and DSP laboratory hardware information; and course information, including course title, undergraduate/graduate enrollment, and subject area coverage. Statistics and various graphs and charts on program information, CAI software adoption, DSP laboratory facilities, and course subject area coverage are presented. It is concluded that not enough is known about DSP education at this time to speculate on its future. >

What Occupational Therapists Can Do to Eliminate Racial Barriers to Health Care Access

Now is the time for the American Occupational Therapy Foundation and individual institutions of higher education that house occupational therapy programs to step into the leadership vacuum created by this issue. We must not only design new minority scholarships programs, but also be prepared to defend existing ones. Given the current confusion and fluctuations of opinion on this issue, what is policy now may not be policy after the next presidential election. The Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs of the AMA has recommended recruiting minority students, procuring greater scholarship assistance, and pursuing affirmative action in school admission and faculty hiring as strategies for eradicating racial barriers to equal access to health care. As an allied medical profession, we must follow the Council's lead.

Race-Based Faculty Hiring and Layoff Remedies in School Desegregation Cases

Race-Based Faculty Hiring and Layoff Remedies in School Desegregation Cases

Patterns of Faculty Hiring in Four-Year English Programs: Findings from a 1987–88 Survey of Job Information List Advertisers

Patterns of Faculty Hiring in Four-Year English Programs: Findings from a 1987–88 Survey of Job Information List Advertisers

The University: An Owner's Manual; How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire (Book Review)

Recent Publications BOOK REVIEWS Rosovsky, Harry. The University: An Own­ er's Manual. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990. 309p. $19.95 (ISBN0-393-02782-1). LC 89-9466. Trumpbour, John, ed. How Harvard Rules: Reason in the Service of Empire. Boston, Mass.: South End Press, 1989. 450p. $35 (ISBN 0-89608-284-9). Paperback, $16 (ISBN 0-89608-283-0). LC 89-6206. In the past several years, academic li­ brarians and our faculty colleagues have witnessed an increased concern about American higher education, reflected in a multitude of publications addressing such issues as cultural literacy, tenure, and the neglect of undergraduate education. The university has been besieged from without by conservative cultural critics and probed from within by academics dis­ quieted by the shift in disciplines and values-from the social and spiritual to the scientific and specialized (or sometimes vice versa); from the aim to foster fully developed human beings, in Wendell Berry's words, to careerism and commer­ cialism. Debates rage about the political, economic, and moral problematics of the tenure system; the implications and obli­ gations for academe posed by the chang­ ing demographics of our society; the im­ pact and relevance of issues of race and gender (or racism and sexism to be more blunt). These forces affect not only stu­ dent recruitment and faculty hiring, pro­ motion and tenure, but also call into ques­ tion the fundamental character, aims, and values of the university and of higher edu­ cation. If there is an epitome and ostensible ideal of the American university, it is Har­ vard. Harvard's influential power­ political and economic, ideological and pragmatic-casts so wide a net that it has been labeled ''the Harvard factor.'' The exaltation of Harvard and its pervasive in­ fluence make the review of two recent books, each an investigation of higher ed­ ucation placing Harvard at the center, all the more relevant for anyone working in academia. In the first, Henry Rosovsky, Dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1973 to 1984, presents an optimistic defense of life in a major research univer­ sity. Drawing upon his love for automo­ biles, he takes as his model the owner's manual and aims to present a guide to the university as an unfamiliar object which, in order to operate successfully, one must understand and learn to negotiate. Librar­ ians will find this a highly readable guide to university administration and govern­ ance, the tenure system, graduate train­ ing, and core curriculum, enlivened by humorous anecdotes and Rosovsky's ob-.­ vious personal passion for the Mercedes and BMWs of higher education. Readers seeking an investigation of the particular challenges facing our campuses as we approach the twenty-first century, however, may be sorely disappointed. Fundamental questions about the pur­ pose and availability of education and the very nature of research find no forum here. Rosovsky' s enthusiasm for Harvard blinds him to the multiple implications of power and privilege embedded in the re­ search university. He accepts exclusivity

Twenty Years of Testing Theories: What Have We Learned and Why?

Despite 20 years of extensive research, criminology has not made scientific progress in the sense of falsifying some theories and accumulating verified knowledge in the context of other theories. The problem lies in theory. This article presents a new conception of theorizing as a cumulative, iterative, developmental enterprise directed toward falsification, rather than as an “all or nothing” enterprise directed toward explanation. Scientific progress requires that theorizing, like researching, be nurtured in graduate education, publications, grants, and faculty hiring, tenure, and promotion.

Hiring, evaluation, promotion and tenure decisions in a US geography department

Abstract The practices and procedures relating to faculty hiring, promotion and tenure are among the most important decisions made by a department and faculty. For a head of department, merit evaluations and salary increases are additional major decisions. This paper examines these issues from the perspective of a former chair of a US doctoral geography programme. Variations and problems occur across departments in spite of major underlying similarities.