I was talking with an undergraduate briefly this week who was just curious about how academic institutions make decisions on faculty hiring and as I offered a few quick outlines it occurred to me that this would be a good subject for a column, because there are a lot of people who wonder about this question—and, I suspect, my direct and indirect knowledge on the subject is both increasingly out of date and relevant to a smaller and smaller number of institutions that still have a large proportion of tenure-track positions. So this is a chance for me to learn something to in the comments—and as a result, the comments section will be open to everybody.
I’ll start with a disclaimer: I’m not going to try and represent the process by which an incredibly small handful of wealthy elite research universities hire senior faculty, because most of those hires are ad hoc and usually quite secretive in terms of process.
I will try a bit to represent the processes by which adjunct faculty are hired but a lot of that is also (unfortunately and unfairly) ad hoc and varies tremendously between institutions and within various regional and local labor markets.
Decision to make a request to hire.
At the waning number of institutions where faculty governance remains relatively strong, the first step in the process is often taken by a department or program that has identified a need for a faculty position. There are some circumstances where that identification is simple: when an existing position is vacated by retirement or resignation or when a department has been perennially unable to provide meet the escalating demands of majors and students enrolled in their courses. If departments have the discretionary ability to make a request to hire, almost all of them will ask to replace someone who has left the institution.
Other circumstances are a bit more unpredictable. Sometimes a department will have a strong consensus that there is a fast-growing field in their discipline that they need to represent in their curriculum. They may come to that conclusion also because of pressure from students who are demanding to take courses in that field, because an external review or other outside assessment identified it as a crucial absence in their course offerings, or because of a wider public debate or controversy about the current state of their discipline.
Sometimes the request to hire only comes about after a protracted struggle within a department over its future development, where one faction wins out and crafts a position request. Occasionally peace-making between different factions will lead to several position requests at once so that everybody’s divergent wishes are represented, even if it is well understood that only one of those requests has any hope of being fulfilled. At large institutions, that kind of spamming of the bureaucratic pipeline usually means that the different factions plan to use their relative clout to non-transparently sway administrative leaders one way or the other outside the frustrating scrum of departmental meetings.
Sometimes a request to hire does not really come from a department but is the result of an administrative dictate following a strategic plan or some other form of higher-level deliberation that more or less commands a department to make a particular request that has been written for them. Much of the time, if that’s the way a search is going to develop, academic leaders (maybe faculty at the divisional or school level, maybe the top-level academic leadership hierarchy) will simply take care of all aspects of the search from beginning to end and cut the host department out of the process for the most part.
For contingent positions, if they are full-time visiting positions with one-year or longer contracts, the request to hire may work roughly the same. In many institutions, departments may have a standing allocation of a visiting assistant professor (VAP) position such that when it is vacated by the end of a contract, the department can just go ahead and search for the next person to fill the VAP line with pro forma administrative authorization. There may be a similarly regular understanding at some institutions about replacing faculty who are on sabbatical.
In the case of hiring contingent faculty to teach a single course or several courses with no contract, e.g., on a per-course basis, there’s a vast array of different ways that can happen. Sometimes administrative leadership is directly responsible for doing that. In some institutions where there are very few tenure-track faculty, that small number of faculty might have tremendous individual discretion to hire at need, often at short notice. Sometimes this involves an actual search that is advertised; sometimes faculty or administration have a roster of known local candidates that they just call up and hire.
And the relatively capricious way these jobs get handed out is mirrored by the relatively capricious way they get pulled away—adjuncts who teach by the course know all too well that they can be told they will be teaching three courses on September 1 only to be told on September 3 that none of the classes filled or that the dean changed his mind after looking at the budget. When I taught as an adjunct, I showed up to one institution in the Chicago area with a supposedly guaranteed offer to teach two classes which I had spent the previous two weeks designing and preparing for only to be told on the first day of class that the enrollment threshold had been changed so that I needed 25 rather than 20 students for the classes to be offered and it hadn’t been met, so they were cancelled. Nobody paid my travel expenses that day or compensated me for the work I’d already done; nobody even apologized or acknowledged that I’d turned down a couple of other possible chances to teach elsewhere for this supposedly guaranteed job.The drafting of the request to hire.
When a department or program has reached a decision to request a hire—or when a decision to make a hire has been made further up the administrative hierarchy—the next job is typically to write up the request.
That usually entails at a minimum writing a draft or hypothetical version of a possible position advertisement. This step may involve protracted discussion even within a department with relatively high consensus. If the request is to replace a retired or resigned faculty member (or someone denied tenure), then the easiest default is to write a request that precisely matches the departed person’s role. That’s easier when the vacated position was filled relatively recently and harder when the vacated position has been occupied by the same incumbent for 30+ years. In the latter case, even if the former colleague had high enrollments and represented a field that remains important to the discipline, most faculty are still going to want to talk a bit about whether it’s time to try something else. On the flip side, it can be very difficult for a department to separate their feelings about the departed colleague from the drafting of the request. There’s often an unconscious bias towards trying to recreate people who were well liked and heavily relied upon even when that former colleague’s precise combination of expertise at the end of their career doesn’t really exist as an entry point.
In a department that has strong existing disagreements, the position description step is going to be one of the two most contentious parts of this whole process. (The other is the final decision on who to hire.) Sometimes the difficulty of this stage leaves a mark on the final version of the ad—one clue would be a position description that has a nearly endless list of recommended or preferred fields of specialization with lots of divergence between them. That’s often a sign that either one or two dissidents dug in hard and insisted on getting their preferences into the ad or that the whole department is unable to reach any kind of consensus at all.
I find that some undergraduates I know (and occasionally even a few colleagues unfamiliar with US labor law) think that you can write a position description that explicitly says that the successful candidate must be of a particular race, gender, sexual identity, etc. You cannot; that is illegal, no matter how desperately a given department might need some diversity. There is standard boilerplate that welcomes applicants from various underrepresented groups and you can solicit “diversity statements” and other application materials intended to evaluate a candidate’s commitment to diversity and so on.
A position request may require writing a more extensive justification for the request depending on institutional process. At Swarthmore, for example, all requests are due on a single date in the fall and are then considered alongside each other over the year by a committee of elected faculty, the chief academic officer and the college’s president. The committee makes an advisory recommendation in the spring which is presented to the faculty for comment and the chief academic officer and president then decide whether to follow the committee’s recommendations, which they almost invariably do. So when you’re making a position request, you’re trying to be persuasive to that committee in relation to a number of other requests that invariably outnumber the available faculty lines, often by a considerable margin. Generally the departments making requests have a fair idea of the other proposals that will be made that year.
At some institutions, departments writing proposals will know much less about the deliberative process they’re writing for and there will be considerably less informational transparency overall—there will be a lot more private lobbying and uncertainty about budgets or the preferences of leadership. In large public research universities and even some private institutions, there may also be extensive interference from trustees or legislators to consider. On the other hand, there may also be far clearer institutional imperatives coming down from on high in some institutions where some departments simply don’t bother making a request because there is no chance of it being fulfilled and other departments understand that their requests will be expedited within the limits of institutional resources. The question of what it takes to get a request fulfilled is highly variable, and what is said on paper about how the process is handled may not be a good description of how the sausage actually gets made.The granting of an authorization to hire.
Following whatever procedure is used to evaluate position requests, the chief academic officer of a division, school or overall institution will then inform a requesting department that they are authorized to advertise the position. In some cases, the process of advertising the position and even of conducting the eventual search may remain under the authority of administrative leadership, but in a tenure-track search it’s generally going to be the department or program that’s doing the relevant labor.
Sometimes the authorization is granted on a provisional basis under some later budgetary process confirms that decision. That’s been a familiar terror for people searching for a faculty position for many decades, that a position that they applied for and were interviewed for and were chosen for might suddenly evaporate after all that effort because the budget was finalized and the money for it disappeared. That still happens, and while that should lead candidates to shun any ad that includes the language of “provisional authorization”, most people seeking a faculty job cannot afford to leave stones unturned.
Generally, if there’s a formal procedure for evaluating requests and granting authorization, it’s going to be finalized some time in the late spring or possibly early summer. This in turn structures the cycle of faculty hiring: authorization at the end of an academic year, job advertisements appearing over the summer (often with a bumper crop in August particularly), and then search deadlines falling between late September and mid-November.
For visiting positions, the authorization calendar can be much more irregular, especially those that are a response to filling a position that is temporarily vacated due to maternity leave, illness, administrative service or other unplanned event. A request and authorization can happen quickly, but even then generally it’s tied to the structure of an institutional calendar (e.g., anticipatory of an upcoming teaching need rather than finding a substitute for a class that’s already underway, which is a whole different kind of problem.)
Sometimes the granting of authorization comes with strings attached—a shift in the position request as originally written, an inclusion of another department or program in the process to come, a reminder of a need for compliance to some institutional priority or procedure.The placing of the advertisements, forms of institutional outreach, and the appointment of a search committee.
Unless a department is very small, the initial workload of a faculty search is usually apportioned to a subset of the whole. That may include faculty with proximate expertise to the field to be searched for, faculty who didn’t work on the last search committee, faculty who are trusted and reliable, faculty who bully their way onto the committee because they want to control the outcomes, etc. Once the search is real, the department needs to make that committee fairly quickly, especially if they might be doing more than one search. The committee usually supervises the process of placing the ads and in doing a bit of work to draw on their professional networks to help encourage candidates to apply. They also may set the deadlines for the process, undertake any required DEI or HR training, and begin drawing up the calendar for the search process after the deadline for applications.First reading of the applications, usually right after the application deadline.
Generally a department has some idea of what they’re in for in terms of the likely number of possible applications, which often affects the size of the search committee. In some disciplines, the range in the size of the applicant pool can be huge.
Most committees will divvy up the work. A common ‘best practice’ is to make sure that every file has at least two people who will undertake a first reading.
What most search committees are trying to do on first reading is eliminate applications that are unambiguously non-competitive. Generally this means one of three things: a) an application that is substantially incomplete (e.g., not missing just one recommendation letter but missing almost everything); b) an application from someone who has none of the required professional credentials (so, say, for a job in a history department that requires a Ph.D or equivalent degree, an applicant who has an MA in psychology and who has mostly worked in a clinical context); c) an application from someone with the required credentials but who works in a completely different field than the one specified and who doesn’t address that (so, say, a position in American history where the applicant is a specialist in early modern Ottoman history). In my experience, that’s about 10-15% of the applications; it may be higher in some fields or disciplines and lower in others.Second reading of the applications, to identify candidates for a long list of screening interviews.
The most common way to go about this work is to have at least two readers on the appropriately qualified files who do some kind of preliminary ranking on the applications they’re assigned. That allows for a rough sorting of the entire pool into three rough tiers: candidates where there is strong positive consensus and strong negative consensus and then in the middle candidates where there is a ranking divergence. Increasingly departments will use some kind of formal rubric in doing the ranking, with the hope that this produces more consistency and transparency in the outcomes.
The best designed processes (since this is also similar to the way grant-giving bodies often decide) will typically flag a dossier where there is a strong standard deviation in the rankings. E.g., if you have three readers and two give the candidate the highest ranking and one gives the candidate the lowest ranking, that’s a mandatory conversation even if that candidate ends up near the top of the pool—you know that your committee members saw something really different when they read the file.
This work takes place under a range of time pressures but generally there’s no more than two or three weeks available before this has to be completed. When the committee meets to discuss the rankings, often almost all the conversation will be about the upper range of the middle tier. There’s usually a pro forma review of the consensus top and bottom rankings to be sure that everybody’s sure about those outcomes and maybe to look at any patterns—does the top reflect the range of the pool overall, for example? I personally often argue that if there are four or five common genres of candidates working in this field—projects that strongly resemble each other or are methodologically similar—that you want to see all those genres appear in the top rankings. That has implications for applicants that are worth considering—the goal might often be not to be the absolute best in your field of specialization but to be the perceived top candidate of a small subgroup of people who are doing highly similar kinds of work in terms of methods, subject matter, etc.
The arguments about the upper range of that middle tier can be very protracted even if the search committee has strong consensus and are friendly to one another because the degrees of distinction between highly-qualified, highly-plausible candidates are so very small. When the committee settles on its list, it often reports back to the whole department and there may be some discussion or concern expressed about perceived patterns or issues in the list, especially in departments that went into the search in a divided way. But sooner or later, the list has to be finalized and it has to be big enough to allow for choices and small enough to be plausible to handle in a concentrated time period.
Up to this point, there’s been no communication between the search committee and the applicants other than to confirm receipt of application or perhaps to inform a candidate that their application is incomplete. Sometimes the chair of the search committee or the department chair has been fielding informal or backchannel queries and comments from graduate advisors, etc. who are trying to promote their students; most chairs know enough to be noncommunicative and noncommital in response to those attempted contacts. Occasionally a candidate at this early stage will try to seek early feedback or suggest that they need to hear early because of anticipated offers. That’s usually a bad idea early on.
When the search committee finally settles on a list for screening interviews, the first communication to candidates after the deadline happens. This can be tricky to handle, and is the source of a lot of information trading on wikis and message boards among candidates. Generally a search committee’s list includes some possible alternates if anybody declines the invitation to interview and as a safeguard against the possibility that all or almost all of the screening interviews turn out to be disasters in one way or the other. As a result, some search committees do not inform anyone at this point that their application has been unsuccessful (except for the applicants cut in the first reading). I personally think that’s wrong, so I’ve argued for telling everyone but the people who are alternates and interviewees that they have been rejected (as kindly as possible). I hate the idea of complete radio silence for months.The screening interviews.
Generally the search committee is still doing this work. Once upon a time, this often happened at the meetings of big professional associations if those fell at an appropriate time in the academic calendar. Today, even before the pandemic, it’s increasingly done via Zoom or some other service. I think that’s a great change in multiple ways.
Screening interviews can range between 30-60 minutes, so if you have a large candidate pool and the list of interviewees is large, that can be a huge time commitment for the search committee. Way back when I was on the job market, the range of things that search committees would ask in screening interviews was hugely variable, as were the conditions of the interview. I had one interview in a hotel room where the two men doing the interviewing were sprawled out on a bed with their shoes off and just kind of meandered along (I think they talked more than I did) and another where six people in a conference room peppered me with a truly weird assortment of their own scholarly and institutional hangups, including one man who wanted to know if I had a firm grasp on the cost of office supplies. I think but I’m not sure that contemporary screening interviews are a bit more consistent and focused. Here I await confirmation or disconfirmation from any readers who have other intuitions and experiences.
For applicants, I’d say this is the first place after compiling the application where you can actively screw up. If you’ve gotten this far, your application has to be somewhat appealing. But candidates who genuinely blow it at this stage are pretty rare. Fundamentally the choices at this point are just a much harder version of the earlier hard choices, between a small set of highly-qualified people who could all do the job very well. For the most part, someone who gets knocked out at this stage didn’t make a mistake.
Generally a search committee will meet, draw up a list of 3-4 candidates they recommend bringing for an on-campus visit and 2-3 alternates and present that to the department as a whole. When that’s finalized, at this point many search committees will communicate with rejected applicants to tell them so, but some will still hold off on the logic that they might still need to go back into the pool. I really don’t approve of that.Planning and doing the on-campus visits.
In many institutions, this is the part of the process that requires the most administrative help, because the scheduling of the visits has a lot of moving parts. It varies a lot from institution to institution, but frequent elements of an on-campus visit are a meeting with the chief academic officer or head of school, a meeting with a few faculty in other departments who have shared interests in terms of specialization, a meeting with students in the department (both undergraduates and graduates), possibly a meeting with other administrative staff who are strongly connected to the department or position, the teaching of a demonstration class, meetings with many or even all of the individual faculty in the department, a job talk or lecture, and a dinner with some of the faculty in the department.
These are major ordeals and not just because of the effort that goes into them and the exhausting range of people and conversations, but because it can be tremendously difficult to read how it’s going and what the real situation of the department actually is. Sometimes it’s deeply unpleasant or weird experience, or something shockingly rude or inconsiderate happens. Sometimes it’s a terrific experience and that’s even worse, because the job candidate can see a good life dangled in front of them, one they dare not get attached to.
Again, this is a point where the candidate can potentially screw up badly, but again, that doesn’t happen that often. Sometimes a candidacy is doomed from the start because the finalist has been chosen to placate one or two people who represent a preference that the rest of the department doesn’t share. Often it’s going to come down once again to incredibly fractional distinctions that the people deciding feel deeply torn about making.The feedback comes in. The department meets. A recommendation emerges.
At this stage, departments meet, usually a week or two after the on-campus visits conclude. (Which are often spread out over 2-3 weeks, usually sometime between mid-December to early March). They’ve typically gathered feedback from everyone who attended the job talk and anyone who met the candidates, particularly from students. Feedback from anyone who met all the candidates is generally more highly valued—someone who just came to hear the candidate that they knew they liked because of the work that candidate does and skipped the rest isn’t seen as having enough perspective.
These can be very long and very difficult discussions under the best of circumstances. They tend to reveal very different temperamental and intellectual preferences that are submerged most of the time, some of which are very nearly incommensurable once they’re out on the table. If the disagreements are between people who lack the grace to concede to other points of view or preferences, it’s generally going to mean that the conversation loops around again and again and again to the same points without progressing.
Points that figure at this stage are often: a) assessments of how well each candidate’s research compliments or extends the existing work of the department. You can make a fair case that building strength in one area or method is good and a fair case that range and heterogeneity of approach across a department is good. b) whether the candidate’s classes will have good enrollments or bring in new students as majors or minors. c) whether the candidate will change the perception of the department within the institution and across institutions. d) more impressionistic takes on the candidate’s personality, vibe, etc.
Because of d), I’ve argued that in a well-run search, candidates should never be meeting with only one faculty member—there should always been two people at least in every meeting, so that any claims about what was said or about the mood or feeling of a discussion have at least two witnesses involved.
Different institutions handle the process of a recommendation to the chief academic officer or head of school in different ways. In some places with less faculty governance, the administrative leadership may feel completely comfortable vetoing a departmental preference for any number of reasons. In other places, that might be an extraordinarily rare event that only happens if and when the candidate did something really wrong in one meeting. If the recommendation is approved, generally it comes with some parameters about what the offer to the candidate can be and what, if anything, is negotiable.The offer is made.
If the candidate is genuinely aware that they already have or might have other offers, they’ll often ask for additional time to consider their decision. They might also have communicated before the offer being made to inform the search committee that they need to know soon about the outcome because of other offers. This means of course that the other candidates remain in the dark while all this is going on, which can be exasperating. They might ask for information, but any search committee, whatever its inclinations on communicating, will have to remain silent at this point.
If the candidate is inclined to accept—or wants to see if they offer can be improved in order to compare it properly—they will likely see if there is any range on the offered compensation. They may also negotiate about initial teaching loads, about start-up research support, and anything else that plausibly might be up for improvement. All of this has become more normalized at least at wealthier elite institutions—back when I was hired, I think the feeling was that you could lose a job offer if you seemed too pushy. Horror stories of that kind still come up every year, but I think graduate programs have helped to encourage many of their students to not simply accept the first offer as given.The candidate says yes.
Congratulations to everybody! Except the other candidates. Though some departments will still not communicate to the unsuccessful finalists until the offer is absolutely finalized, a contract is signed, etc. on the grounds that who knows, something might change. Me? If I were told I didn’t get the job and then they called me back a month later and said, “Actually would you like the job? Someone else changed their mind,” well, I’d be fine with that. Wouldn’t bother me at all. (This is in fact exactly what happened to me at Swarthmore, so I can verify that it did not bother me one bit.)
There is now also the task of informing colleagues and students who provided feedback about the candidates, which can be a bit delicate if they expressed a very different preference. I met with our students once just to talk a bit about how we worked through the decision so that they didn’t feel that we had just ignored their preferences.The candidate says no.
Move on to the next alternate. If all the candidates say no, ask the department if they’d like to invite someone else from the screening list for an on-campus visit. If not, or if they do and that person says no too, you have what is called a failed search.
What happens after that is hugely variable. Sometimes that’s it, the authorization is withdrawn. Sometimes you just gear up and do it all over again in exactly the same way and hope other candidates apply. Sometimes the department rethinks the search and completely rewrites it.
Tim - thanks for this! Like your much earlier blog post on how the academic job market is a tournament economy, like acting, I'll share it with my department's Ph.D. students.
When I've chaired faculty searches, and now as a department chair (entering my final year!) I've prioritized letting candidates know where they stand at every point, even when my institution's HR has discouraged that. So at each stage - first and second screening, preliminary interviews, and on-campus interviews - I've followed up to let candidates know if they are definitely out of consideration, not selected now but still in the pool, or some other status. It gets tricky when you're at the final stage and there are several acceptable candidates, and you've made an offer to one. What do you do if one of the others asks about the search status? My inclination is to be honest, but also to add that in my department, search negotiations are confidential, and those who are in the know are honor bound not to say anything about the process once the outcome is known. So even if someone is the second, third, or even fourth choice, they should never know that.
And I have personal experience that my department follows that norm. I was hired in 1997, and perhaps 15 years later, a retired colleague mentioned over drinks that in the search that hired me, the department had invited 4 previous finalists and had not been able to agree on them, so they invited me as a 5th. I gave my job talk on my birthday (which I didn't mention). I got the job offer a couple weeks later. No one ever mentioned to me that I was not one of the first choices, until that confidence at the bar, at which point it didn't matter any more.
A final anecdote: When the department chair called to offer me the job, I wasn't home (this was in 1997, so no cell phones). I was running laps on the indoor track at my university. My wife got the call, though, and she walked two thirds of a mile to the field house to give me the news. As I was running past her, she yelled "UMass!" However, I thought she had yelled "You ass," and I was very confused until I stopped and got the news. I then finished my workout, went home, popped some champagne, and then called the next morning to accept the offer. I didn't really negotiate, but fortunately, the faculty union was doing that on my behalf.