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Norms for job hunting by faculty recently hired into the tenure-track

Brian Leiter

MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY–MORE COMMENTS WELCOME

A philosopher elsewhere recently wrote to me wondering about what norms there are (or should be) regarding junior faculty in tenure-stream or equivalent positions shopping around for other jobs.  Of course, academia operates on something like a "free agency" system:  while schools may have obligations to tenure-stream faculty regarding continued employment, faculty do not have comparable legal obligations to schools.  But aside from legal obligations, faculty presumably have some at least modest obligations of loyalty to their institutions.   If a school, for example, makes special accommodations for a new faculty member (e.g., in teaching load, or in support for an external fellowship, etc.), then is it bad form for that new faculty member to immediately begin shopping for a new post?   But what if the new faculty member is asked by a school elsewhere to apply, is it then acceptable to apply for that post?  Does it depend on the reasons a junior faculty member is shopping around:  e.g., is it more acceptable when the junior faculty member is trying to solve a "two-body" problem, then if s/he is just trying to land a "better" job along some dimension.  Thoughts from readers?  Submit comments only once, they may take awhile to appear.

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41 responses to “Norms for job hunting by faculty recently hired into the tenure-track”

  1. Junior TT

    My advice to everyone is to never love an institution because it can't love you back. I'm on the market every year and I will be until I get my dream job or I burn out. Some have accused academics in my position of taking up more than their "fair share" of the job market. But, as we all know, there's nothing fair about the job market, including shares.

    What's that? Can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is', you say? Just because the job market is unfair doesn't mean that it should be? Think of it this way. The profession, and the job market as a special case, might seem unfair along several dimensions: prestige bias, gender bias, race bias, unequal job distribution relative to subfield, and on and on. Some of these biases work for me, some against. I'm not going to refrain from pressing my advantage where I can when I am disadvantaged in other areas whether I choose to be or not. I won't volunteer for double disadvantage so to speak.

    Reply
  2. Jason "Show Me the Money" Brennan

    The perks and accommodations are simply part of the entire benefit-salary package offered to keep you there. Except in special cases–like you literally promised someone to remain in place for five years in exchange for a salary increase or reduced course load–you should feel free to leave.

    Will some people get mad at you for doing this? Sure. But this is philosophy, full of self-righteous people, a field in which some people think you should get fired for failing to cite them and their friends in your most recent article.

    To be morally in clear, just avoid making any implicit or explicit promises you don't intend to keep. Except in special circumstances, people should not be asking you to promise to stick around anyway.

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  3. Robert A Gressis

    I basically agree with Jason and Junior TT. My only reservation is for someone hired at a small, non-selective liberal arts college. I think such places do their best to hire someone who won't shop around, simply because it's so expensive for them to run a TT-search (at least, this is what I have been told; maybe I've been sold a bill of goods!). So, if you get hired at such a place and then immediately leave, you're leaving them in the lurch.

    That said, their job was to precisely find someone who wouldn't shop around. So, if they hired you and you immediately shopped around, you either lied or misled about your intentions in the first place (which is bad), of they messed up (which is bad, but not something that is your fault), or you changed in unpredictable ways.

    In addition, from what observers of the higher education market say, it's precisely small, non-selective liberal arts college that are going to go out of business in about ten to fifteen years, if not sooner. So, it may be ok to shop around even if you're at such a place.

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  4. BH

    When I was first hired into my position, I was so grateful to have gotten a job that I would have promised them my first born child as a sign of gratitude. Funnily enough, that's exactly what I didn't end up with because I was so busy drowning under the weight of my own perceived moral obligations. What a disaster!

    Employers and colleagues, I don't care who they are, are not family members. We are not in their debt eternally because they hired us, and we have no obligation to commit beyond whatever contractual obligations we have (turning up, producing research, and so on). The trade off for a 40% teaching load is not 40% of my soul. As the others have said above, don't promise things you know you won't or can't do – such as never trying to leave. Also don't be a sneak. Beyond that, people should apply for jobs as they see fit.

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  5. Chris Surprenant

    We just hired four, junior permanent faculty members. I have encouraged all of them to stay on the job market and to apply to any position that they think might be better for them, provide them and their family members with better life opportunities, etc. Beyond that, I have told each of them that I would help them however they need me to help them in that process. That strikes me as the decent thing to do.

    I hope none of them leave and I hope I have created an environment at our university where they would not want to leave, but why would I want them to be held hostage or to otherwise be in a position where they can't leave because of things I or my university has done? That's a recipe for them being miserable, which will rub off on our students and the program more generally.

    Universities should do what they can to try to make sure that there are not better jobs than the ones at their university. That's on us. If we hire junior faculty members and it's clear that our job is not the best available to them, we should be happy for them when they find something that's better. That's the decent way to behave.

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  6. For the State

    Having worked at a state college, I cannot believe one owes them more than what is required by the contract. Of course, putting more into one's job might make for a better workplace, and a more satisfying work life, but from my experience state colleges are extremely unfair with respect to compensation. They have no problems asking for extra work from faculty, and providing as little compensation for it as they can get away with. Often ZERO compensation. It is a pity. So, please stay on the market if you are at all interested in moving. Indeed, I have helped a colleague move. And I would do it again.

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  7. David Wallace

    To some extent Jason Brennan and Robert Gressis have said this already, but my main advice would be just 'don't lie'. (Of course, this follows from broader ethical principles!) If you apply saying that it's been your lifelong dream to work at a small liberal arts college in a small town, and then you turn around 12 months later and move to a research university in New York, your colleagues have legitimate grounds for complaint.

    This said, I don't think the only potential obligations on the table are to colleagues and employers: there are also students. Undergrads are mostly not going to be much affected by your surprise departure, but grad students may well be. I don't think that ultimately prevents you making a lateral move, but it is something to consider – if you aren't confident you'll be staying long, you should probably make sure grad students know that when they're considering accepting a place, and if you do end up moving and leaving students in the lurch, you have some obligation to see how you can ameliorate those consequences. (Of course this is likely to matter more for senior than junior lateral moves, and mostly only applies to departments with PhD programs.)

    (@ BH: I think '40% teaching load for 40% of my soul' gets the equation wrong. It's not 'x% teaching load for x% of my soul', it's 'x% teaching load for (100-x)% of my soul'!)

    Reply
  8. Charles Danforth

    I don't see why we should follow BH and David Wallace and 'don't lie' on the job market. Is it really so wrong to say something like "I want nothing more than to stay at this small school my whole life" and then leave for NYU if you get an offer there. Granted, lying is usually rotten and should be avoided, etc., etc.. But unless you are a radical Kantian, you accept there are exceptions. (And, honestly, even if you were a Kantian… it seems like the job market is a special circumstance, where lying is rampant already — promises are often made and never kept — and so there's no 'contradiction in conception' here and so no perfect duty to refrain).

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  9. Steven Hales

    I’m no Kantian, but you might be a little cognizant of the harm your lies can cause. For example, at the poorer relations where most of us teach, philosophy departments have to fight tooth and nail to get approval for a TT line. If we hire someone who tells us we are a perfect fit, they want to live in our neck of the woods, etc. and is secretly aching to split the first chance they get, here’s what will happen. They leave and it is very likely that the admin does not authorize a replacement. So we just lose the line. Then there is real loss all around—to the department, to the students, and to others on the job market who are now robbed of a job they may have genuinely wanted. Something to consider.

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  10. David Wallace

    I do physics, not ethics. If the cognoscenti want to tell me that simplistic principles like "don't deceive people to serve your personal interests" and "other people doing bad things isn't a good reason to do bad things yourself" don't apply here, I'm happy to be educated.

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  11. David Merli

    Agreeing with Steven Hales. A rapid departure (or a history of them) can be taken as evidence that the department isn't hiring well* or isn't a good place to be, and the line will go elsewhere. Not to say that new hires have special obligations here, but lying is bad, and its prevalence leads to hiring departments scrutinizing the tea leaves for any sign of candidate intentions.

    *You might think that excellent hires are also more likely to get other attractive jobs, but administrators don't always see it this way.

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  12. Junior non-TT

    Following up on what Steven Hales said, it is quite disappointing that most of the discussion here is just about whether junior faculty have obligations to their current department not to leave, rather than any sort of obligation to other job seekers. If you currently have a job, leaving that job likely reduces the number of available jobs by one. Ask yourself: is it really justifiable for me to choose a situation in which I have a (slightly) better job over one in which I have a worse job and someone else has a job? In some cases, it might be (e.g. if you know your current department will replace you, you know the department you are applying to will make a lateral hire, the target position would benefit you more than some arbitrary job seeker, etc.). But I would have thought the general answer is no.
    Of course, this isn't really the place to debate the merits of selfish individualism. That place is, of course, high school.

    Reply
  13. Jason "Transaction Costs Explain the World" Brennan

    Junior non-TT, I'm not sure your complaint, as stated, applies very often. Changing jobs involves relocation costs, search costs, effort, and stress. In short, the transaction costs of job changes are fairly high in academia, since they nearly always involve moving. As a result, we can expect that people will only change jobs if the total net benefits of the new job significantly outweigh these transaction costs. This is one reason why, say, I wouldn't move to take a job that was completely identical in all respects (qualify of life for me, for my family, status, etc.) for a mere $1,000 raise.

    So, probably most people are changing jobs only when they think the new job is significantly better than their current job in terms of pay, status, quality of work, quality of location, or whatnot. Do you also think that even then, those with jobs owe it to jobless job seekers to forbear from taking these new jobs? Why? If job seekers should care about the welfare of other job seekers, what about the welfare of students, faculty, deans, and other stakeholders? (Perhaps you think from their perspective, the next best candidate is more or less equally good so this is a wash.)

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  14. David Wallace

    I'm not sure I find Junior non-TT's argument persuasive in the aggregate.

    Averaged across the sector, is there any reason to think that universities will choose to have fewer TT philosophers because of larger job mobility at the junior level? I can see that given the circumstances of a specific department, one might have good reasons to expect that leaving would mean your line will get lost or delayed. As David Merli says, a history of rapid departures might be taken as evidence that the department isn't hiring well. But for every department to which that happens, there's another department who manages to make a strong lateral hire and so has increased evidence that it *is* hiring well. I can't see what the argument is for all this averaging to less than zero.

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  15. Paul Gowder

    It seems to me that one pretty good principle which addresses the "what about other job-seekers" objection to moving is that it is typically overdemanding to insist that a person unilaterally sacrifice significant individual interests in order to rectify the local application of structural or third-party injustice to which they do not contribute, at least in the absence of some special relationship of moral concern between the person making the sacrifice and the person who suffers from the injustice. (Peter Singer may disagree, but have any of the rest of us donated 90% of our income to hungry people in developing countries lately?) Such injustices are appropriately solved by their perpetrators, or collectively by the relevant group of beneficiaries *as a whole* taking remedial action.

    As applied to this discussion: suppose it is true that if a junior person hops jobs, the place from which they hopped won't fill the line, immediately reducing the number of jobs by 1 and, hence, harming some unknown person on the job market. And further suppose (controversially, and arguendo) that the closure of the line amounts to an unjustified wrong done to the individual who loses out on a job. That is not the fault of the junior person, that's the fault of whatever deanlet is making up budget numbers and looking for cuts. (Or, someone… even if you don't think there's a wrong at all, I think we can safely say that if there were a wrong, it would be much more plausibly attributable to whomever created the "when someone quits we don't fill the line" policy, or to whomever put the university in such a position as to have to have such a policy, or to society at large for not valuing education, etc.) And to ask the junior person to sacrifice their own interests to make up for the wrongful act of the deanlet seems, in turn, unjust to the junior person.

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  16. Thomas Mulligan

    We should implement a "signaling" system, like the one the American Economic Association manages for the economics job market. It would ameliorate this problem and make the philosophy job market more efficient, generally.

    The problem: Schools want to hire candidates who are genuinely interested in them, and will stay.
    Candidates express their interest in their application materials. But these contain virtually no useful information, for it's in every candidate's self-interest to say that he or she is genuinely interested. In other words, this talk is "cheap".

    The AEA's solution: Each candidate gets two–and only two–"signals" which he or she may send to two schools. The AEA manages the process. Because these signals are scarce, they provide genuine information about a candidate's preferences. Harvard and Yale receive no signals, since they can assume, correctly, that everyone genuinely wants to work there. Moreover, these departments can easily survive a young scholar's departure. But most departments cannot be so confident in applicants' preferences. And for these departments, the kind of "shopping around" described in this post can really hurt. If such a department receives a signal from a candidate, it can be confident that he or she is genuinely interested, perhaps for the reason specified in the application materials.

    Reply
  17. Brian Leiter

    That's very interesting. Two questions. First, has AEA collected any information suggesting this system works, i.e., it leads to less lateral movement by junior scholars? Second, are there really only 2 schools that don't get signals? Surely there should be more, but maybe you were just using those as examples. In philosophy, presumably there's a dozen or so schools that wouldn't need signals, because they can presumptively hire who they want (except when the same candidate gets offers from others in the dozen).

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  18. Anon TT

    One thing no one has mentioned is this… Often, one genuinely wants (in many respects) the TT job they got, but that job isn't, all things considered, worth staying in. Maybe it pays total crap for the super expensive city it's in (as in, less than new public elementary school teachers); or maybe one's already meager salary has been put on salary freezes multiple times in one's first few years; maybe one's dept has toxic colleagues; or maybe one's dept is small and struggling and in danger of being cut (especially under recent economic strains); and so on. Things look different once one arrives for a job, often very different from what it looks like when one is the job candidate and genuinely keen on that job.

    Reply
  19. What Anon TT said …

    This is true. One can be incredibly enthusiastic about a job opportunity, then arrive and discover that the job is not great. There might be cruel or unpleasant colleagues, incompetent administration, a culture or climate that is oppressive/stressful, and so on. I am speaking from experience here. At the same time, I have lots of friends struggling on the market. Do I owe it to them to stay put? Part of me thinks yes, since there is a possibility that my line would not be filled were I to leave. But part of me thinks no, since it also occurs to me that someone else might be happy in my current job, even if I am not happy here, so all I am doing by staying put is increasing the overall misery in the world.

    It never even crossed my mind that I might owe something to my current institution.

    Reply
  20. Jonathan

    Not in Philosophy, but elsewhere in the humanities. Norms have pretty much disappeared, so far as I can tell. When there's almost zero mobility or movement for anyone at any rank then people just apply to whatever they want to, whenever they want to, because, well, that passed-opportunity is not going to appear again

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  21. JDRox

    I haven't seen anyone acknowledge that there's a very significant cost to not having some sort of strong formal or informal norms against "shopping around" (for X number of years–say, until tenure): schools decline to hire the best people applying for their jobs, since they're scared to lose them. This happens a lot. Since many of the best applicants would stay for at least a long while, or would be willing to say for at least a long while, that's a real shame, and a real loss. I don't know that anything short of employment contracts would fully solve this problem, but a strong informal norm should ameliorate it. And maybe I'd be happy with employment contracts? Maybe they could forbid taking a job at a "competitor" (other university) unless one buys out the contract. Maybe $5-7K would be sufficient? So one could still choose to leave academia without penalty, and one could switch jobs before the end of one's contract with a penalty. Sorry if this is a dumb idea, just spitballing. But regardless of the adequacy of this solution, the problem is a real one.

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  22. Fritz Allhoff

    One worry here is that the departing faculty member's position may not be re-filled (i.e., the Dean sweeps that money because of budget shortfalls, reallocates it to a different academic unit, or even the Provost reallocating it to a different college). So the departing faculty might literally be "deleting" a job from the profession. By contrast, if that faculty member stays and the other university hires someone else, now there's two employed philosophers. As opposed to, if someone leaves and the position is contracted, there's now one employed philosopher.

    Say it didn't work this way: if I leave my position, it gets filled by someone else. That seems fine. But if people leaving positions accelerates the decline of the profession and leaves someone who otherwise would have had a job without one, that seems like a moral hazard. I'm not saying that someone should never leave a position, but there's a few things to think through.

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  23. Thomas Mulligan

    Brian,

    I don't know if the AEA has collected data like that. Theoretically, the system makes sense.

    And yes: I was using Harvard and Yale as examples. In philosophy, one would not expect, for example, NYU or Pittsburgh to receive many signals. This is because those departments can already be confident that applicants are enthusiastic about getting jobs there. Thus, signaling such a school is redundant. A rational job seeker will spend his or her scarce signal elsewhere.

    Reply
  24. David Wallace

    @Fritz Allhoff: this is repeating my comment at (14) to some extent, but I don't really understand how this would work in the aggregate. Sure, if Deans collectively want to reduce TT faculty headcount by 10%, say, they'll opportunistically do so by not refilling lines that become empty, and so they'll get to that target incrementally faster if people make lots of lateral moves than if they don't, but in the medium term the result will be the same. (And recall, ex hypothesi the Dean released this particular line less than 5 years ago – we're not talking about some long-ago-established line that wouldn't have been established under the current regime.)

    If people moving around more at the pre-tenure stage reduces the aggregate number of jobs available it would have to because on average Deans would employ fewer tenure-line faculty if more of those faculty made junior lateral moves. Perhaps there is evidence, or a good theoretical basis, for that claim, but I'm not seeing what it would be. In particular I don't see how your examples would work:
    (i) if the Dean sweeps that money because of budget shortfalls, she'd have to find the money elsewhere, which probably means failing to refill some other tenure line in some other department
    (ii) if the Dean reallocates the line to a different unit, that unit has one more tenure-line job, and the total number of tenure lines doesn't change.
    (iii) if the Provost reallocates the line to a different college, again the total number of tenure lines doesn't change.

    (Possibly the point is that if philosophers, specifically, move laterally then Philosophy is disadvantaged, to the advantage of other subjects? But I didn't read Brian's original post as asking specifically about philosophers, nor have I seen obvious arguments that this is a uniquely philosophy issue. Even if it was, though, you're just changing which job applicants get jobs (say, +1 French Literature, -1 Philosophy); you're not changing the number who get jobs. That doesn't seem morally problematic.)

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  25. Lisa

    In general, ceteris paribus, I agree it makes sense for individuals to apply for (and move to) jobs they think are better suited to their own interests. And some concerns about the unintended consequences of doing that (departments losing positions) have already been mentioned. There is, however, another potential cost — the integrity of collegial governance. I realize that I am fortunate to work at an institution with quite robust collegial governance in place. I realize that this model is threatened at many institutions. But I believe in collegial governance strongly enough to think that is well worth continuing to fight for, and to fight back against models of higher education as a service industry. It is a constant struggle to convince faculty that if they want a real voice in how the institution is run, they actually need to take on service responsibilities. If junior faculty do not weigh into the calculation of their interests that they are a colleague to other faculty, and recognize that their having one foot out the door at all times does impact collegial governance (even if they might not be expected to take on service duties), then I really do think the fight for collegial governance may be even harder to win than they already are.

    WRT taking Economics as a model: I think it is worth noting that ECON departments are usually significantly larger than PHIL departments (and so with different collegial responsibility distributions) and that economists often (but not always) try to game the university system to benefit their units. It's hard to take a collegial governance model seriously if you think each of us are atomistic individuals with separable interests.

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  26. Kicked Around

    My impression is that in academics, it overwhelmingly the case that the only way to significantly improve one's job situation, with respect to compensation and other goods, is by changing jobs, or lodging a credible threat to do so.

    Therefore, if there are strong moral arguments prohibiting or limiting job shopping (such as those referencing lines lost to departments) these arguments would seem to entail prohibitions or limits on what is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the only way to improve one's work situation.

    This seems to me a striking implication.

    But perhaps the operative empirical supposition is wrong: perhaps there are other way to substantially improve one's job situation.

    For example, administrations might be generally receptive to reasonable, if costly, requests by faculty to improve their situation. For example, it might be the case that administrations routinely grant off-cycle raises when approached with credible evidence that a faculty member is undercompensated, relative to peers at other institutions.

    My impression is that such concessions by administrations are in fact quite rare.

    But if that were the case, and administrations routinely granted reasonable faculty requests for improved job conditions in the absence of credible threats to relocate, I’d think arguments supporting job shopping based on self-interest are somewhat weakened. (To put it another way, arguments against job shopping based on considerations like loyalty would seem a little less quaint.)

    Do people have experience suggesting that my impression is wrong, and administrations routinely respond positively to reasonable faculty requests for improved job conditions that are unsupported by threats of relocation?

    Reply
  27. JJ

    Despite my otherwise Kantian leanings, I think candidates and job holders have ZERO obligations to their institutions. The institution will throw you under the bus in a hot minute if it serves their interests. I have worked at a crappy state school (4-4 load), an semi-elite SLA College (3-3) and now an R!. My position now is one in which there appears to be institutional support and respect for faculty. The previous two jobs always came with institutional financial precocity, hoards of angry faculty, toxic work environments because of admin/faculty class wars….So, even if your kind colleges hired you in the hopes you'd stay, they'd leave in a second if they could, and the institution is always going to put "its" interests first. Under such an amoral system–advancing your own interest is perfectly legitimate. Only caveat: don't leave in the middle of a term. I was Chair of my dept, when a junior guy submitted a resignation letter in October announcing he would leave in 2 weeks. He left for a non TT job (he was TT at the time at our institution). Super uncool. But, I held no grudge either; he had a great opportunity and it was then or never. The institution will survive.

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  28. For the State

    Kicked around …
    administrators are not all alike. And what they do is often constrained by very local and time-sensitive factors, like a good economy, or even a recent gift to the college, etc. But I worked with a provost once who DID give raises to people when they had the "stuff" to ask for them. You needed to have a record of service, and make a strong case that you deserve more IN WRITING (as you do in jobs outside the academy, where I once worked). But some faculty managed to get $ 5000 on their base salary – this probably sounds like peanuts to many on the blog, but this is at a state school that was constantly cash strapped. And the salary increase for promotion to full professor was LESS than that (now go throw up in a toilet at the thought of that one).

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  29. Matt Tedesco

    @David Wallace:
    You ask: "If people moving around more at the pre-tenure stage reduces the aggregate number of jobs available it would have to because on average Deans would employ fewer tenure-line faculty if more of those faculty made junior lateral moves. Perhaps there is evidence, or a good theoretical basis, for that claim, but I'm not seeing what it would be."

    I believe there is evidence for this–google "demographic cliff 2026" and you will find it. Many colleges I know of, whose budgets are already stretched perilously thin because of (depending on the kind of school you are) reduced net tuition revenue because of increased discounting and/or reduced state budget contribution, are reducing faculty FTE counts now. Starting in 2026 (basically 18 years from the Great Recession), we have good reason to believe that we will have fewer overall college-age citizens, and therefore fewer college students. So some institutions–with the covid emergency providing the spark for accelerating this process–are now beginning the shrinking process. And because schools typically want to avoid declaring exigency (if you're working hard to recruit a class, that isn't the best selling point), they're doing it not be lopping off programs all at once (though we do see this, and will assuredly see more of it in the next 5 years), but instead by the slow contraction of using departures and retirements to not re-fill lines.

    So there is no aggregate strategy here, but in the aggregate, it is extremely likely that the overall number of faculty FTE in 2026 will be lower than it is now. And, of course, this just layers on top of the general trend of shifting tenure-stream FTE to contingent lines, which both have a lower budgetary impact and offer the benefit of low-fuss deletions when things get worse in 2026. Taking those two factors together–the long-standing trend of replacing tenure lines with contingent positions, and planning for the demographic cliff by reducing overall FTE counts–makes a very clear (and grim) case for the likely overall reduction of tenure-track lines.

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  30. Daniel A Kaufman

    I'm not going to comment directly on the moral question, the discussion of which I find dubious anyway, insofar as prudential considerations are overwhelming in the domain of job-seeking and always will be. But I do want to say a few things about hiring and job-seeking, especially at unranked, run-of-the mill teaching institutions. I've been at one for 20 years now and have chaired more hiring committees at this point than I can remember.

    First, flight risk is amongst our top considerations/concerns. Stephen Hales [#9 above] gets it exactly right. We have a failed search? We hire someone who leaves a year later? We kiss the faculty line goodbye. Forever. And given our size already, this means we literally cannot teach our own curriculum, due to insufficient staffing. Every hire is an existential situation for us. So we are predisposed from the beginning against those with super hot-shot resumes. Our most attractive candidate is one from a decent but not super-Leiteriffic school, with a broad and high quality teaching record. Research output is our lowest consideration.

    Second, several people have made observations regarding institutional disloyalty towards employees. This is exactly right. And for those who think they've finally arrived somewhere that this is not the case — It seems like JJ [#27 above] might think that, though I'm not sure — you are wrong. There is not a single institution on the planet where this is not the case.

    Third, while this is not true of some, I think it true of many more than one might think: Keeping yourself on an endless ladder, in search of a spot at a "top" place, may be one of those things where you don't know what you are asking for and may regret it, when you get it. For my first 5 years at Missouri State [then Southwest Missouri State], I was on such a ladder, sending out a good 50 applications a year. Not only was I convinced that I would only flourish at a place better than this, I was facing a hostile faction in my department who tried to deny me tenure. It got so bad that I had to hire a lawyer to keep my job. So I had every reason to want to leave.

    But with 20 years experience now and knowing and talking with people who were on that ladder and succeeded, I'm actually glad that I failed. I have far more freedom than my friends at the "top" places. I can publish at the pace *I* prefer, on the subjects *I* want to publish on, and in the journals *I* think are interesting and a good fit for my work. I have complete control over my courses and teaching, as there is no standardization of any kind, even at the general education level. And I teach students who are the opposite of entitled, many of whom are first generation college students from farming communities in the enormous rural area surrounding Springfield. None of this is true of my friends at shi-shi places, and more than a few have told me that they find their high-powered environments suffocating, both professionally and socially.

    Finally, I am always a little bit amused by people in our profession complaining about workload or conditions. While I understand that at one level, one doesn't want to give admin — or in the case of public schools like mine, state legislators — any excuses to increase one's workload, having worked in virtually every level of employment since 1981 or so, I can safely say that being a professor is by far the easiest, pleasantest, most time-flexible/forgiving job I have ever had or could imagine having. Hell, my job as a dishwasher and frozen pizza maker in a supermarket, when I was 16 years old, was much harder and more unpleasant. Never once as a professor have I almost lost a finger washing the knives used to slice lox. 😉

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  31. David Wallace

    @Matt Tedesco: I can perfectly believe that there's an overall reduction of tenure lines going on in many places. But it doesn't follow from this that junior lateral moves increase that reduction.

    Look at it this way: suppose I'm Dean of Arts and Sciences and I want to achieve a 10% reduction in tenure-line faculty over the next five years. I'm going to do that by heightened scrutiny of replacement cases, permitting them only where there's clear demonstrable need (by whatever my standards are) and with my overall standards set to achieve that 10% reduction. At the end of that process, I'm going to have 90% of the faculty I had at the start of the process. If someone leaves two years after arriving, maybe it's their post that doesn't get renewed, but the overall target doesn't change.

    (Of course, if I just have a policy of reducing faculty *as fast as I can*, this argument doesn't work. But that's much more drastic than you're suggesting – and, ex hypothesi, I didn't have that policy two years ago, because otherwise I wouldn't have authorized the line from which the junior lateral move took place.)

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  32. Look out for Number One

    I was hired on the tenure-track and laid off four weeks after beginning my position. Budgetary reasons were cited, but financial exigency was not officially declared. (They let me finish out the academic year, of course, since that is what my contract forced them to do.) This was during "good times" for universities and colleges in the recent past.

    Your university will delete you at a moment's notice. You do not owe them anything other than adequate notice for your colleagues to lobby to keep the line and to conduct a search.

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  33. CC Prof

    This is a great conversation. I’ll add my own anecdotes.

    After my PhD, I worked as a contract instructor for two years at an R1, mostly teaching to service the Gen Ed requirements that could be fulfilled via philosophy courses. During my time there, the department hired two TT positions at different times. I applied for both. They didn’t even bother to initially look at me for either one. Both were in my AOS/AOC. I had a couple publications under my belt. I was committed to the university. I had amazing teaching evaluations. I really loved that place. I loved the students. I really wanted to have a career there. But they simply did not want me. I was hurt at first, but the chair, who was always very kind to me, finally came and told me the story. For the sake of keeping their lines, and even possibly increasing the number of them, they needed to keep hiring their TTs from elite schools. Apparently, administration had an inferiority complex given where it’s located (not a very desirable city for the most part), and that meant that even if they had some turnover, they were okay with that so long as they were getting people from top grad programs coming in. That’s what was valuable to them. If the philosophy department could keep doing that, it sent a message to administration that the department was viable. If they eventually left for another city, it was just simply assumed that that city couldn't compete with NYC, LA, Austin, or Ann Arbor.

    Funny thing is, it’s completely different at the school where I did my PhD. In the year I finished, the department needed to replace the retiring chair. Administration requested that it be done internally. But no one in the department stepped up. This forced an external chair search, which got them a chair, but it royally pissed off administration, too. Since then, five more faculty have retired or moved elsewhere. But administration won’t let them hire to replace. Retired faculty can come back as “adjuncts,” but that’s it. No new hires. And it’s not because there’s no money.

    Seems to me that in both cases, administration gets what administration wants. It’s difficult for me to believe that I have some sort of obligation of loyalty to these institutions when their prerogatives are always what they see to be in their best interests at the time. So, maybe that’s the trade-off. They are looking for what’s best for them, and I have to look out for what’s best for me. And maybe that’s what implied at the table from the get-go.

    On another note, I just received tenure at a community college. This job is fantastic for all the reasons that Daniel Kaufman noted above regarding his employer. Plus the benefits here are better than the R1 down the road since I’m lumped in with this state’s K-12 benefit package and pension. It’s definitely not a “prestigious” place. But I really couldn’t ask for anything better. The feel is much more community oriented, and I’m really appreciated by my bosses. It makes me resent the silence about these kinds of jobs when I was in grad school. I wish someone would have coached me about this possibility back then instead of pushing the near impossibility of getting a TT at a major university.

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  34. Another Junior TT

    “If you apply saying that it's been your lifelong dream to work at a small liberal arts college in a small town, and then you turn around 12 months later and move to a research university in New York, your colleagues have legitimate grounds for complaint.”

    As someone who left a small, non-selective liberal arts college for a large, public institution because of salary inequity and lack of support (research and otherwise), I want to remind senior faculty, chairs, and deans at small, non-selective LACs that someone who genuinely *wanted* to work at a small LAC and even loved working there when they did can be turned off by a lack of support… no matter how much they love the students, their colleagues, etc. So if they show up telling you it’s their lifelong dream to work at a small liberal arts college and then they turn around after a couple of years and leave for a different kind of institution, don’t assume they were lying. Instead, ask yourself what you could have done to make them feel more supported (or, when they get a counteroffer, go to bat for them right from the beginning).

    Deans: Make sure you’re paying new hires in the same or similar fields a comparable salary and there aren’t (even accidental) disparities along gender lines.

    Chairs and senior faculty: Advocate for your junior faculty. Don’t be absent or unpleasant when they get a counter-offer; advocate for them.

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  35. David Wallace

    @Another Junior TT:

    That sounds entirely reasonable. Don't lie, but if you genuinely discover you were wrong about what you wanted, don't feel bad about changing your plans.

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  36. SocialNorms

    It may be interesting to note that the German academic system has an institutionalised procedure for the somewhat related case of tenured faculty. Tenured faculty that get an offer (a 'call') from another institution are expected to (1) get the call on paper and (2) then enter into negotiations with their current institution ('Bleibeverhandlungen') within a specified period after (1) before (3) they either stay (most likely because their current institution improved their position) or they move on. If it is permissible (not saying that it is) that there is an institutionalised procedure for -tenured- faculty to try and land a better job I suggest it is clearly permissible for tenure-trackers whose status implies that their employer is, well, not quite sure -yet- about whether they really want them there. Why should they be?
    (PS: I've no personal experience with this, but there have been complaints that the institutionalised procedure is erroding as institutions try to poach faculty by offering an attractive position without issuing an official 'call' thereby eliminating (2) and undermining the ability of the current institution to make a counter-offer. But this may mainly suggest that employers are 'fighting dirty' with regards to the institutionalise procedure when trying to attract high-profile candidates, not much about morality on the employees's part).

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  37. Charles Danforth

    Here we go again. You keep telling junior faculty 'don't lie' to institutions that are all too ready to exploit them. If only these junior faculty had the luxury! Given how brutal the philosophy job market is for people trying to get a foot in, and given that their desperate competitors can be counted on to say "I want to stay at this crappy little school forever"… junior faculty who follow your moral advice will be honest and unemployed. So please, stop telling these junior faculty not to lie! They might have to do so just to have any chance at all. (When they have a secure job, then they can afford to follow your advice!)

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  38. David Wallace

    @Charles Danforth: if you're confident that everyone else on the job market is dishonest, then sure, honesty might disadvantage you. (Probably not, though: if everyone's dishonest, wouldn't search committees know that, and discount any information gained from asking?) But I have a somewhat higher opinion than you apparently do of human nature in general, and the moral integrity of philosophy job-seekers in particular. And the honesty norm, if it exists, is more useful to job-seekers than the dishonesty norm would be, for familiar prisoners'-dilemma reasons.

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  39. David Wallace

    Separately, on the broader point of loyalty: I agree with those who say that your University won't be loyal to you. And probably it shouldn't: universities ought to deploy their resources in pursuit of their educational goals, and that will sometimes conflict with a faculty member's own preferences. What you *can* reasonably ask of your university is:

    – good goals (are they actually focused on excellence in scholarship and teaching? Do they value your subject? Do they protect academic freedom?)
    – a sufficiently longsighted view of achieving their goals (are they willing to invest in career development? do they treat retention seriously? do they avoid the temptation to cost-cut in places that cause long-term harm?)
    – honesty and transparency (do they keep their promises? can you trust verbal assurances or do even the smallest things have to be in writing? are the frameworks they're operating for recruitment, retention and compensation actually adhered to?)
    – competence (does their administration actually run things effectively? do plans actually get carried out? is bureaucracy under control? do they seem to have a functional budget process?)

    These things, unlike loyalty, actually do vary a lot from one institution to another.

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  40. Seriously: don’t lie

    Everyone has the “luxury” of telling the truth. Don’t sell your soul for a job. Why should I become a worse person, simply because some people/institutions are terrible?

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  41. Uppity

    Just a tangent here. Some new faculty want to leave a new job for greener pastures. I don't blame that faculty member. Who I blame is the hiring committee who gets "uppity" in their hires. Take a lower tiered state school. They end up hiring someone from Columbia, NYU, Stanford, Yale, or Harvard, and then wonder why that person leaves. They never planned on staying, it's pretty simple. They want to work at a research school, not a teaching school. More so, geography matters. Many "east" coasters don't want to live on the "west" coast and vice-versa. A life long New Yorker is probably not going to stay at a rural Cal State if they can return. Don't hire the wrong person and they are much less likely to leave. My alma mater has done this exact thing no less than four times in the last decade. But it is a desperate profession, truly. The countless PhD's who never even get a serious interview, and yet others, have a job and still want more. If jobs were plentiful this really wouldn't be an issue.

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