Best Practices for Faculty Search Committees E-Book

Jeffrey L. Buller

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 214

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The essential guidebook for effective faculty hiring committees

Best Practices for Faculty Search Committees presents a clear, direct action plan for faculty and administration involved in hiring. Written by a veteran university administrator, this book lays out a step-by-step process for selecting the right candidate for the job. Practical guidance on application review, interviewing, and evaluation walks you through established and effective methods, while case studies and examples from a variety of institutions provide insight into real-world implementation. Whether you're serving on a faculty search committee for the first time, or simply seeking a more efficient route to the best candidate, this book provides invaluable guidance that can streamline the search and selection process.

Tenure-track and long-term opportunities don't come about every day, so it's essential for hiring committees to make the correct choice. While the search process may be codified to an extent by your institution, there is still plenty of room for error or misjudgment; this book helps you keep the process on track and moving forward until the best candidate is identified.

• Develop criteria for efficient and informative application review
• Conduct in-depth interviews that provide a clear picture of fit
• Evaluate final candidates on the most pertinent points for the job

Most faculty search resources are technical in nature, with little guidance on getting the job done properly and efficiently; best practices tend to be unwritten, and frequently verge into "habit" rather than critically evaluated method. Best Practices for Faculty Search Committees provides clear, concise, concrete guidance for a more efficient, effective, and successful candidate search.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Seires Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

The Author

Introduction

Chapter 1: Achieving Diversity Goals

affirmative action and equal opportunity

the problem with unnecessary specialization

support from institutional leadership

composition of the search committee

phrasing of the advertisement

targeted efforts

the positive and negative aspects of fit

putting it all together

Chapter 2: Advertising the Position

step one: decide what information the most desirable and qualified candidates need to know in order to be encouraged to apply for the position

step two: decide on the most appropriate venues for disseminating that information

step three: tailor the information to the specific venue

step four: track success rates of each venue and advertisement format to improve future searches

step five: adjust the strategy as needed if the desired results aren't being obtained

Frequently Asked Questions About Search Advertisements

putting it all together

Chapter 3: Reviewing the Applications

best practices for chairs of search committees

best practices in screening the applications

best practices for narrowing the pool

best practices in reducing the short list

best practices for making reference calls

best practices in conducting phone or video interviews

best practices for achieving consensus on finalists

putting it all together

Chapter 4: Scheduling the Interviews

scheduling comparable interview processes

searches with incumbents or internal candidates

involving realtors in the interview process

the role of free time in the interview process

information needed by the candidates

information needed by the interviewers

putting it all together

Chapter 5: Conducting the Interviews

the purpose of campus interviews

“Illegal” Interview Questions

the conclusion of the interview

putting it all together

Appendix A: Candidate Evaluation Form

Appendix B: Suggested Interview Questions

References and Resources

Works Cited

Materials for Further Study

Index

End User License Agreement

Pages

ii

iv

v

viii

ix

x

xi

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

52

53

54

55

56

57

58

59

60

61

62

63

64

65

66

67

68

69

70

71

72

73

74

75

76

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

86

87

88

89

91

92

93

94

95

96

97

98

99

100

101

102

103

104

105

106

107

108

109

110

111

112

113

114

115

116

117

118

119

120

121

122

123

124

125

126

127

128

129

130

131

132

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

List of Tables

Chapter 5: Conducting the Interviews

Table 5.1 Protected Classes and Inappropriate Interview Questions

Other Books by Jeffrey L. Buller

A Toolkit for College Professors (with Robert E. Cipriano)

A Toolkit for Department Chairs (with Robert E. Cipriano)

Academic Leadership Day by Day: Small Steps That Lead to Great Success

Best Practices in Faculty Evaluation: A Practical Guide for Academic Leaders

Building Academic Leadership Capacity: A Guide to Best Practices (with Walter H. Gmelch)

Change Leadership in Higher Education: A Practical Guide to Academic Transformation

Going for the Gold: How to Become a World-Class Academic Fundraiser (with Dianne M. Reeves)

Positive Academic Leadership: How to Stop Putting Out Fires and Start Making a Difference

The Essential Academic Dean or Provost: A Comprehensive Desk Reference, Second Edition

The Essential College Professor: A Practical Guide to an Academic Career

The Essential Department Chair: A Comprehensive Desk Reference, Second Edition

World-Class Fundraising Isn’t a Solo Sport: The Team Approach to Academic Fundraising (with Dianne M. Reeves)

best practices for faculty search committees

how to review applications and interview candidates

jeffrey l. buller

Copyright © 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass

A Wiley Brand

One Montgomery Street, Suite 1000, San Francisco, CA 94104-4594—www.josseybass.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax [phone], or on the Web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax [phone], or online at www.wiley.com/go/permissions.

Permission is given for individual classroom teachers to reproduce the pages and illustrations for classroom use. Reproduction of these materials for an entire school system is strictly forbidden.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Readers should be aware that Internet Web sites offered as citations and/or sources for further information may have changed or disappeared between the time this was written and when it is read.

Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986, or fax [phone].

Wiley publishes in a variety of print and electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some material included with standard print versions of this book may not be included in e-books or in print-ondemand. If this book refers to media such as a CD or DVD that is not included in the version you purchased, you may download this material at http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about Wiley products, visit www.wiley.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Buller, Jeffrey L., author.

Title: Best practices for faculty search committees: how to review applications and interview candidates / Jeffrey L. Buller.

Description: San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016038235 (print) | LCCN 2016050844 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119349969 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781119351665 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119351658 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Universities and colleges—Faculty—Employment. | Employment interviewing. | Employee selection.

Classification: LCC LB2332.7 .B85 2017 (print) | LCC LB2332.7 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038235

Cover design: Wiley

FIRST EDITION

For Robert E. Cipriano (“Collegial Bob”) without whom ATLAS Leadership Training would not exist and my life would be immeasurably diminished.

the author

Jeffrey L. Buller has served in administrative positions ranging from department chair to vice president for academic affairs at four very different institutions: Loras College, Georgia Southern University, Mary Baldwin College, and Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of 13 books on higher education administration, a textbook for first-year college students, and a book of essays on the music dramas of Richard Wagner. Buller has also written numerous articles on Greek and Latin literature, 19th- and 20th-century opera, and college administration. From 2003 to 2005, he served as the principal English language lecturer at the International Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. More recently, he has been active as a consultant to the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia, where he is assisting with the creation of a kingdom-wide academic leadership center. Along with Robert E. Cipriano, Buller is a senior partner in ATLAS: Academic Training, Leadership, & Assessment Services, through which he has presented numerous workshops on academic leadership and faculty searches.

introduction

For many faculty members, serving on a search committee is one of those activities that they think they ought to understand—after all, when they themselves were applicants, they did well enough with at least one search committee to be offered a job—but that becomes more and more puzzling the further they become involved in the process. Why do institutions have all these cumbersome procedures they have to follow? How can the search committee deal with reading all the applications that come in and still have time for its members to do their teaching and research? What questions do you ask in an interview to find out the things that you really want to know? What questions shouldn't you ask, and how much trouble will you be in if you do? Although there are a few resources available on the technical aspects of how to run a search, a search committee will find very little available to review quickly so that they can get their task done properly and efficiently. As a result, faculty searches can be hit or miss. Sometimes everything seems to fall into place, and the search committee ends up hiring a wonderful new faculty member who becomes not only an important colleague but also a person who brings new vitality to the discipline. At other times, the applicant who seemed so perfect on paper and during the interview ends up being a very different type of person once the hiring process is complete, and the program as a whole suffers as a result.

This brief guidebook is intended to help make faculty search committees more effective and to make the work of serving on one if not easy then at least a little easier than it otherwise might have been. I wrote this book with busy college professors in mind, keeping what they need to know clear, concise, and above all practical. You're probably not reading this book to gain a theoretical overview of how faculty searches potentially could be run. You're probably reading it because you're involved in a search now and you want to know what to do. For that reason, I've structured Best Practices for Faculty Search Committees so that it can be used in three different ways:

You can read it straight through from beginning to end and gain a solid understanding of what you need to do as a member of a faculty search committee.

You can jump immediately to whichever chapter contains a topic on some aspect of faculty searches that you need.

You can browse through it casually and pick up a few pointers or best practices along the way.

In fact, to make the casual use of the book more productive, I've formatted the text at certain points to highlight the most important concepts for readers to return to and for casual browsers to find more easily.

Passages in boxes such as this are concise summaries of the best practices referred to in the book's title. They've been set apart so that they'll be easy for you to find again when you've finished reading this book or for others to find when they're just flipping through the pages.

I'd like to express my gratitude to Magna Publications for granting me permission to reprint material from “What Every Search Committee Will Tell You,” Academic Leader (March 2014) 30(3), 4–5 in Chapter 3and “Searches With Incumbents or Internal Candidates,” Academic Leader (May 2009) 25(5), 4–5 in Chapter 4. I'd also like to thank Sandy Ogden for editorial advice and Selene Vazquez for research assistance. They both played a significant role in making this book better than it otherwise would have been.

Serving on a search committee can be difficult work, requiring long hours and elaborate attention to details. But the end result—a new colleague who can help our programs and institutions improve and possibly become an important part of our own professional growth—makes all that effort worthwhile. I wish you nothing but the best in your own searches, and I hope to hear of your successes in putting these ideas into practice. You can reach me at [e-mail] or through our website www.atlasleadership.com.

Chapter 1achieving diversity goals

Since about 1980, one of the most commonly repeated themes during the faculty interview process is the need to make sure that a finalist pool is sufficiently diverse. At times, this emphasis on diversity assumes a level of importance that nearly equals the attention given to the credentials and experience of the applicants. To be sure, higher education's intense focus on diversity sometimes seems unusual to people who work outside of academia. “Sure, we all want to follow policies that aren't discriminatory when we build a workforce,” someone might say, “but diversity almost seems like an obsession to college professors today. Why can't you just decide to hire the best applicant regardless of race, gender, country of origin, or any other factor that's irrelevant to the requirements of the job?” But hiring the best applicant is precisely what higher education's diversity goals are all about. So, as an initial step in increasing the diversity of an applicant pool, let's begin by reminding ourselves why this goal is important to us in the first place.

The first reason why a diverse faculty (as well as a diverse staff, administration, and student body) is important at colleges and universities is to correct past injustices. For many years in American higher education, the vast majority of the professoriate consisted of White males of European ancestry. People who didn't fit that profile were discouraged—sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly—from pursuing an academic career. Moreover, for most of their history, a significant number of institutions enrolled only a single gender, with the result that men's colleges and universities had an almost exclusively male faculty, and even most women's colleges and universities had a faculty that consisted mostly of men. The existence of historically Black colleges and universities meant that some schools only admitted White students, whereas Black students were often encouraged to attend the historically Black institutions, even when all universities were technically open to them. The result was that most institutions had a faculty that was almost exclusively White, and historically Black institutions had a faculty that was almost exclusively Black. Following the ruling of the US Supreme Court in 1954 in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, it was increasingly recognized by professional educators that the doctrine of “separate but equal” wasn't working at any level of education. Most universities became more integrated racially throughout the 1960s, and then, in the early 1970s, a large number of men's colleges began admitting women.

Those historical injustices may seem like ancient history now, but they've had a lasting effect. In 2014, 77.4% of the US population was White, 13.2% was Black, 17.4% regarded themselves as Hispanic or Latino, and 50.8% were women (U.S. Census Bureau, n.d.). As the National Center for Education Statistics has reported,

In fall 2013, of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, 79 percent were White (43 percent were White males and 35 percent were White females), 6 percent were Black, 5 percent were Hispanic, and 10 percent were Asian/Pacific Islander … . The percentage of all faculty who were female increased from 39 percent in 1993 to 49 percent in 2013. (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.)

So, although there's been progress in promoting the representation of women on the faculty, the percentage of Blacks and Hispanics still lags significantly behind their representation in the population overall. These matters are of concern at colleges and universities because institutions of higher education view themselves as sources of opportunity and positive social change. If even the people who are most vocal about providing fair representation in employment are not achieving their own goals, what hope can there be for the rest of society to do so? As a result, members of search committees often feel that they're under a moral obligation to make the faculty more diverse than it already is.

The second reason for considering matters of diversity when building faculty positions and conducting searches is that it adds significant pedagogical value to a program. The world in which graduates of our institutions will live and work is highly diverse. They must feel comfortable working alongside people who look at the world very differently from how they themselves view matters, come from very different social and economic backgrounds, and want very different things from their lives. Students become more adept at negotiating their way through a diverse world by being exposed to a diverse educational environment from prekindergarten through graduate school. Moreover, a diverse faculty is likely to challenge students' thinking in ways that a more homogeneous faculty won't. By reflecting on their basic assumptions about how projects that benefit humanity are selected for funding, how to find balance and meaning in their own lives, and how best to provide for their families without promoting inequity for other people's families, students gain in critical thinking skills, learn to defend their values more effectively, and understand when it becomes necessary and acceptable simply to agree to disagree with others.

Because providing a diverse intellectual and social environment for students is so important in higher education, is it also important to add positions and conduct searches in such a way as to attain a faculty that's diverse in terms of its political views? Certainly, the criticism is often made that the US professoriate is far more liberal than society at large. Books such as Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals (2008) and Ben Shapiro's Brainwashed (2004), along with films such as Evan Coyne Maloney's Indoctrinate U (Maloney, E. C., & On the Fence Films, 2004), argue that liberal elites at colleges and universities perpetuate themselves by teaching students to think exactly like them and only hiring other professors who share their beliefs. Isn't it hypocritical of the academy, therefore, to claim that it's committed to diversity when it comes to race and gender but not when it comes to ideology, the very area that an institution supposedly devoted to advanced learning should care most about? Shouldn't we be pursuing political diversity as well?

Certainly, search committees should be cognizant of these issues as they design their positions and plan their searches. But it's also important to understand the context in which certain claims and counterclaims are being made. A number of surveys do suggest that the US professoriate is more liberal than the public at large (see, for example, Hurtado, Eagan, Pryor, Whang, & Tran, 2012; Jaschik, 2012; and Kurtz, 2005). But there are several important factors that skew these data:

The population that chooses to attend a college or university identifies itself as more liberal than the population that chooses other paths in life (see Jennings & Stoker, 2008). Because a college faculty is, by necessity, a subset of those who attended a college or university, it is all but inevitable that college professors will be more liberal than the population at large.

Because college professors belong to a public service segment of the economy in which salaries are traditionally lower than in the corporate world, more liberals (who value advancing the good of society over personal gain) than conservatives (who value personal freedom and success over social welfare projects) tend to be attracted to academic life.

Neil Gross (2013) argues in

Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?

that American conservatism in the post–William Buckley age has frequently defined itself in terms of its opposition to liberal intellectual elites. As such, we shouldn't expect many neoconservatives to be seeking employment in the academy because that would be tantamount to joining forces with “the enemy.”

Moreover, despite the fact that professors tend to be more liberal than the population at large, if their goal is to indoctrinate the youth, they've proven themselves to be singularly bad at it. In study performed by Mack Mariani of Xavier University and Gordon J. Hewitt of Hamilton College (2008), it was discovered that the shift toward liberalism that occurs among traditional-aged college students is no greater than that which occurs in general among the population aged 18 to 24. Does all this information mean that search committees can be blithely indifferent to the question of ideological diversity on the faculty? Absolutely not. Students should—and, I would argue, do—receive exposure to a full range of political perspectives during their college careers. But it's just as unreasonable to expect that the percentage of conservatives on a college faculty will reflect that of the general population as it is to expect that the percentage of creationists in a biology department will reflect that of the general population. There may be a larger pool of conservative humanists than there are creationist biologists, but the same factors we previously outlined make that pool fairly small in any case. Our goal, therefore, should be to avoid excluding a qualified candidate from our finalist pool simply because he or she differs from us in political ideology rather than to try to construct some sort of affirmative action program for conservatives (who would probably be philosophically opposed to that idea anyway).

The third reason why diversity needs to be considered in matters of faculty recruitment is that it provides students with a broader range of role models. No one would deny that all good college professors want to serve as positive role models for all their students and that many students have role models who differ from them in race, ethnicity, gender, and other ways. In fact, one strength of a highly diverse educational environment is that students do begin to see people who are very different from them as mentors and examples to emulate. Nevertheless, it does send an unintended message that a certain field or profession doesn't really welcome people of certain backgrounds if students never see a member of their own race, ethnicity, or gender working in those positions. For this reason, colleges and universities often make diversity one of their goals in faculty searches as a way of encouraging the broadest possible range of students to consider various options for careers, fields of study, and ways of life.

affirmative action and equal opportunity

One of the most common misunderstandings in faculty searches is how the concepts of affirmative action and equal opportunity relate to an institution's diversity goals. The first area of misunderstanding arises from the assumption that affirmative action and equal opportunity are the same thing. They're not. Providing equal opportunity relates to what institutions shouldn't be doing in its searches; affirmative action relates to what they should be doing. In other words, although equal opportunity offers passive protection (“We consider everyone equally, no matter who they are.”), affirmative action strives for active inclusion (“We take steps to make sure our applicant pools are suitably diverse.”). Providing equal opportunity means that applicants for a position won't be discriminated against because of factors such as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and the like. Participating in affirmative action means that an institution is making a conscious and systematic effort to undo the lingering effects of past discrimination, ensure that all applicants have an equal opportunity to be considered for a position, and base its hiring decisions only on valid, job-related criteria.

Affirmative action is thus a more highly structured process than simply offering equal opportunity to all candidates for employment consideration. In the United States, affirmative action began as a series of executive orders under presidents Kennedy and Johnson that required government agencies and other entities holding federal contracts to be systematic in giving due consideration for employment to members of various groups who had previously faced discrimination. The groups included in affirmative action policies evolved over time, eventually addressing issues of race, gender, creed, color, and national origin. Different laws protect other groups that are not explicitly addressed under federal affirmative action laws, such as veterans, people with physical challenges, and those over 40 years of age. Some of these laws similarly require employers who accept federal contracts—at times, the laws specify that this regulation applies only when the federal contracts are of a certain minimum size and when the hiring institution has a certain minimum number of employees—to engage in systematic efforts to hire people from these additional protected groups. As public institutions, colleges and universities are generally viewed as venues where affirmative action must be applied. But technically speaking, unless an institution accepts federal contracts, it's not required