Managing Risk in High-Stakes Faculty Employment Decisions

Julee T. Flood, Terry L. Leap

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781501728952
• eBook ISBN: 9781501728976
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management

Understanding the risks involved in hiring new faculty is becoming increasingly important. In Managing Risk in High-Stakes Faculty Employment Decisions Julee T. Flood and Terry Leap critically examine the landscape of US institutions of higher learning and the legal and human resource management practices pertinent to college and university faculty members. To help minimize the potential pitfalls in the hiring and promotion processes, Flood and Leap suggest ways that risk management principles can be applied within the unique culture of academia.

Claims of workplace harassment and discrimination, violation of free speech and other First Amendment rights, social movements decrying unequal hiring practices, and the growing number of non-tenure track and adjunct faculty, require those involved in hiring and promotion decisions to be more knowledgeable about contract law, best practices in hiring, and risk management, yet many newly appointed administrators are often not sufficiently trained in these matters or in understanding how they might be applied in an academic setting. Human resource departments, hiring committees, department chairs, and academics seeking faculty jobs need resources such as Managing Risk in High-Stakes Faculty Employment Decisions now more than ever.

Outlines critical issues affecting U.S. higher education
Analyzes the social and psychological biases that can arise during hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions
Discusses contract and constitutional law from the perspective of institutions of higher learning
Illustrates complex interactions that shape contractual, constitutional, and collegial issues in institutions of higher learning
Examines contract rights and controversies for tenured and tenure-track faculty
Describes how risk management processes can help to deal with these complicated, but critical, issues
Addresses constitutional issues associated with academic freedom and free speech on campus
Investigates the nebulous, but important, issue of collegiality
Discusses the future for institutions of higher learning in hiring faculty

1

Establishing a Career in Academia

Faculty Hiring, Evaluation, and Pay

Faculty hiring is a process that is fraught with uncertainty. And with uncertainty comes risk. We will start this chapter by describing the road to becoming a college professor—a road that almost always starts in graduate or professional school. Individuals aspiring to a faculty position in the arts and sciences or in professions such as business, education, engineering, and many of the health sciences usually hold the PhD degree or its equivalent.¹ Law school professors possess the juris doctor (JD) degree, and may have an advanced degree in law or other discipline. Medical school faculty members hold the MD or PhD, or both.

The highest degree conferred by U.S. universities and the one held by most faculty members is the PhD degree. The degree typically requires two to three years of coursework plus the passing of one or more comprehensive examinations. The most significant requirement of the PhD, however, is writing the dissertation. Doctoral dissertations must represent an original piece of research that creates new knowledge, not simply a reinvention of current knowledge. Unlike most university degree programs, where the completion of a specific set of courses leads to the conferral of a degree, PhD programs are more open ended and often have no set time for completion.

Obtaining a PhD can be an arduous undertaking that involves significant financial hardships and, in some cases, major disruptions to family and social life. Admission to a full-time, on-campus PhD program at a major university is highly competitive, with some programs only admitting one or two applicants a year. The time to complete all requirements for the PhD varies considerably, depending on the school, the discipline, and the motivation and ability of the doctoral student. Furthermore, the dropout rate for PhD candidates is high, with barely half earning the degree.² Thus, when one looks at the low admission rates to PhD programs coupled with the low completion rate of those admitted to such programs, it becomes clear that earning a PhD at a highly respected institution can be a monumental task, requiring four to seven years of intense study. The sacrifices involved in earning a terminal degree and finding an academic position, especially at a major research university, represent a huge investment in a person’s human capital. From a risk management standpoint, this investment is something that a faculty member wants to defend zealously, and it may prompt him to stand up and fight when a tenure review committee says that his services are no longer needed. For that reason alone, the careful hiring and evaluation of faculty members is paramount.

Faculty Recruitment

Hiring faculty members involves two interrelated processes: obtaining a pool of applicants—the recruitment process—and selecting the best candidates from the applicant pool—the selection process. Active applicants simply learn about a job and apply for it.³ A passive applicant, however, is not a player on the job market but is approached by the college or university and is asked to apply for an open position. Passive applicants are likely to be established scholars with strong and promising research agendas.

In an attempt to cast a wide net, colleges and universities usually use multiple recruitment sources to search for faculty candidates. The primary external recruitment sources in U.S. higher education are job postings in publications such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, private employment agencies that specialize in faculty recruitment, placement services operated by professional associations, and organizations such as the PhD Project that help members of minority groups launch their academic careers. Applicants reached through professional publications, web sites, and professional associations are often a mixed group. Some have superb qualifications, whereas others are clearly not qualified but have applied for the position on the off chance that they might be invited for an interview.

Most academic disciplines are tightly networked—that is, a faculty job candidate is almost always known by the hiring school or is known by someone with connections to the school. Research on recruitment methods outside of academia has shown that informal methods—most notably networking—can provide an inside view of a university. Evidence also indicates that realistic job previews reduce both unpleasant surprises and turnover, especially for people who have been recently hired.⁴ Although networking may enable schools to assess the interpersonal fit and collegiality of a faculty candidate, this method may exclude minority candidates, from both inside and outside of academia, who tend to make greater use of formal recruitment methods.⁵

Non–tenure track faculty members are usually hired from local labor markets. Visiting positions, although obviously temporary, may lead to a job offer if the visiting faculty member turns out to be an especially good fit with the host college or university’s culture and needs. Universities in or near large cities frequently receive unsolicited applications from people looking for a full- or part-time teaching position. Although some non–tenure track faculty members do not hold a terminal degree, many do. Dual career hires are also becoming more commonplace in U.S. higher education. If a history department wants to hire a renowned medieval scholar, for example, the university may make an offer to hire her “trailing spouse” (who may also hold a PhD degree) as a non–tenure track member of the English department. Academics, it seems, often marry each other.

The Selection Process

Faculty search committees collect information about faculty job candidates from three primary sources: the faculty candidate’s curriculum vitae (CV), a series of interviews with the candidate, and a reference or background check. The foundation of the hiring process is the position announcement, which describes what the job is about and the credentials that a job candidate is expected to possess. An announcement may also include broader information about the university and local community. A newly hired faculty member has every right to expect that the announcement under which she was hired will provide a blueprint of the tasks, duties, and responsibilities she will encounter, at least for the first year or two of her employment. Any changes in the initially agreed-upon job duties and performance expectations should be communicated clearly to avoid accusations of misrepresentation during the initial hire. Although most announcements are general, some provide a detailed set of criteria that the hiring institution wants in an applicant, often distinguishing between necessary qualifications, such as an earned doctorate, and preferred qualifications, such as five years of tenure track experience. In theory, there are a large number of selection criteria that can be used in the hiring process. In practice, criteria such as the quality of the program where the faculty candidate obtained her doctorate, her scholarship, and her teaching are the major criteria. Furthermore, the candidate’s interpersonal skills and perceived collegiality are important, as well as the degree to which the candidate’s research and teaching interests mesh with the needs of the institution. Because hiring and tenure criteria contain a great deal of subjectivity, a significant amount of unexplained variance exists in the predictive value of the selection process. That is our reason for saying that hiring and, later, tenure granting decisions are akin to placing a bet on the outcome of a sporting event; it is impossible to measure every aspect of human behavior and to predict that behavior with certainty.

Reliability and Validity in the Hiring Process

When members of faculty search or tenure review committees are asked to explain their hiring, reappointment, promotion, or tenure decisions to a court or grievance board, the issues of reliability and validity may arise, either explicitly or implicitly. Reliability refers to the consistency of a measure. A high school student who takes the SAT several times within the span of a year should receive approximately the same, but not necessarily identical, scores on each testing (known as parallel forms reliability). Likewise, if five members of an interview panel all agree that a faculty candidate is acceptable and warrants a job offer, the panel’s assessment is a reliable one because everyone agrees on the candidate’s potential (known as interrater reliability).

Validity refers to the extent to which information obtained from a selection process can be used to predict a person’s future performance in school or on the job. Students who score in the 90th percentile on the SAT usually do better in college than do students who score in the 10th percentile. In this case, SAT scores are a reasonable, but far from perfect, predictor of a student’s success in college. It should be noted that a measure cannot be valid unless it is also reliable. Reliability by itself, however, does not guarantee validity. Faculty hiring depends mainly on criterion-related validity in which various measurements or predictors (such as the number of publications, leadership traits, or communication skills) are thought or shown to be predictive of future job performance.

In a nutshell, faculty and administrators who participate in a faculty search process must be cognizant of whether the information they gather on a job applicant will help them make a better hiring decision than if they did not have this information. That is, if a faculty candidate is hired, will the information gathered from the candidate’s CV, interview, background check, or research presentation help a search committee to predict the quality of his performance in the six years leading up to a tenure decision? Most experienced academics have witnessed a “can’t-miss” faculty candidate be hired and later fall well short of the tenure threshold. These same academics can probably point to a seemingly marginal candidate who not only achieved tenure, but also became a highly respected researcher or teacher. Reliability and validity clearly matter, but they are sabotaged by the high degree of subjectivity that plagues academic hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions.

Other validity questions might deal with the relationship between a faculty candidate’s credit, driving, and criminal history and his performance in an academic setting. Are such measures reliable? The answer to this question is probably yes, because this information is available from public and private sources and, if three equally trained and competent people are sent to do a background check on a faculty candidate, all three should obtain nearly the same information. But are such measures valid? The answer to that question is more difficult to answer because of the subjective assessments that must be made by faculty search and tenure committees. A person with a history of bad credit, irresponsible driving, or criminal convictions may prove to be impulsive or irresponsible—traits that could pose a problem on just about any job.⁶ It should be clear that academic searches depend heavily on hard-to-defend assessments of validity. For junior candidates who have recently received their doctorates, the quality of the school and PhD program where the candidate received his degree, the reputation of his dissertation chairperson and mentors, the quality of his limited research productivity, and student evaluations of his teaching effectiveness are all important, but subjective, measures of his competency as an academic. Issues of reliability and validity are usually measured quantitatively using regression analysis.⁷ But because the number of candidates who are hired is so small, inferences about the validity of common selection and evaluation tools can be difficult to defend. Standardized measures such as structured interviews, aptitude tests, or psychological assessments are often validated using nonacademic subject samples, making inferences about faculty hiring difficult. Furthermore, search committees must be cognizant of the “false negatives” who were not hired, but who went on to be successful at other schools.⁸

For senior candidates with established research records, a search committee can easily and reliably count the number of refereed journal articles on her CV. But judging the quality of a senior candidate’s research record is sometimes subjective and problematic. In recent years, proxies for research quality have emerged. These measures include a faculty member’s citation count as well as the impact factor of the journals where the faculty member has published. Numerical ratings, however, may create a false sense of precision. That is, are the forty refereed publications of one candidate better than the thirty refereed publications of another candidate? The answer to that question depends on how the quality and impact of individual journal articles are measured. Top-tier journals gain their reputations primarily through the timeliness, quality, and rigor of their articles. The most elite academic journals in the social sciences have less than a 10 percent acceptance rate, and it is extremely rare for an elite journal to accept a submission on the initial try. The top journals require that an article go through multiple rounds of revisions and often reject submissions even after three or four rounds of editing. Moreover, there is a degree of luck in journal publication. A meticulously researched, conceptually and methodologically sound, and well-written journal article may be summarily rejected if the journal editor does not believe that the topic is timely or does not believe that the article is a good fit for that particular journal. Many otherwise excellent journal articles may go through multiple rounds at several different top-tier journals, never to see the light of day. Academia is clearly not a profession for those who seek immediate gratification.

The Typical Hiring Process

Once a faculty position has been approved, the college or university will advertise the position. Budget approvals, however, may be tentative and not final until shortly before the academic year is scheduled to start. Furthermore, non–tenure track positions may be funded on a contingent basis from one year to the next. For these reasons, it is important for a college or university to be completely transparent about budgets and hiring promises so that candidates are not misled.

At most colleges and universities, faculty search committees are expected to adhere to detailed, multistage procedures under the watchful eye of human resource managers, university legal counsel, and affirmative action officers. Hiring the best faculty, it seems, may depend more on a search committee’s ability to navigate byzantine human resource management procedures and policies than it does on a committee’s ability to provide a meticulous evaluation of the research and teaching potential of a job candidate.

Some faculty search committees require that a candidate submit all materials by a certain deadline. Others may be willing to accept applications until the position is filled. At some point, however, a search committee will begin screening candidates, eliminating those who clearly do not meet expectations, and deciding which ones to pursue further.

Candidates who are selected to move beyond the initial round of screening may be invited to meet with search committee members at a professional conference or through a Skype or Zoom interview. The emphasis in this round of interviews is to assess whether the candidate’s academic qualifications are adequate and whether a candidate fits well with the group of faculty colleagues with whom she will be working.⁹ Faculty candidates who are still in contention after the second round of interviews may be invited for an on-campus visit. At this stage, less than a handful of applicants usually remain in contention. The campus interview, especially when it entails extensive travel, can be a grueling experience for the job candidate. A typical visit includes meeting with faculty on an individual basis and meeting with small groups of faculty and graduate students, often over a meal. Candidates can also count on meeting with administrators such as department heads or deans. A critical component of an on-campus interview is the candidate’s presentation of a scholarly piece of work. The academic presentation, or “job talk” as it is frequently called, is the rough equivalent of a job knowledge test. For candidates who are in the final stages of their doctoral program, the talk usually centers on the candidate’s dissertation and the stream of research that she plans to pursue after the dissertation has been completed. For more senior candidates who may be hired at the associate or full professor level, the talk usually focuses on the candidate’s research stream as well as a current research project (or an article that they recently published). This part of the interview provides an important opportunity to assess how well the faculty candidate’s rese...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Establishing a Career in Academia: Faculty Hiring, Evaluation, and Pay
• 2. Risk, Biases, and Logical Fallacies
• 3. Faculty Contracts
• 4. From Contracts to Constitutions: Faculty Free Speech Issues
• 5. Collegiality: An Enigma
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index