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Should job seekers accept offers quickly given the threats to the universities?

Brian Leiter

A colleague elsewhere expressed the view on FB that they should, and that may be right.  When universities face financial uncertainty, they do try reduce future costs, of which salaries for faculty are usually the most important.  It is not crazy that job offers will disappear in the face of the Trump war on the universities.  I would be interested to hear either from job seekers or faculty about the problems they have confronted on this score.  Please use a valid email address, but job seekers, in particular, may post anonymously.  The email address will not appear.

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21 responses to “Should job seekers accept offers quickly given the threats to the universities?”

  1. Anon Assoc Prof

    The uncertainty, both in national local politics, has our provost and dean pushing departments to wrap up searches a quickly as possible. We have a national search at the moment. Not yet a month since the committee received dossiers, the dean has been "encouraging" members of the committee (separately) to wrap things up asap.

    Reply
  2. Charles Pigden

    There is a possibly apocryphal quote from an American University president during the 1930s: Hitler shakes the tree and I gather the fruits. (This is probably less callous than it sounds as the president in question will have made his remark before the scale of the Nazi mass-murder had become apparent.) Well, Trump is shaking the tree and I strongly suspect that there will be plenty of US scholarly fruits for non-US universities to gather.

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  3. Charles Bakker

    The job market was already competitive enough as it was for recent graduates. Now, with departments closing, tenure under threat in places, and with uncertainty around funding, that market has become even more competitive than ever before. As a fifth year PhD candidate, I am no longer seriously thinking about staying in academia after I finish my program.

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  4. working in the UK

    I sure hope that other places can "gather the fruits," but the financial situation in the UK appears, for one, appears to be pretty dire. At least in my faculty, the dean (or head) of arts and humanities has encouraged us to focus on teaching, travel less, and mentioned that funding research will not be a priority. (Sounding a bit bitter because the university's executives have been well rewarded financially recently.)

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  5. Dean C. Rowan

    That "Hitler shakes the tree" quip certainly has legs! It bears "fruit," "apples," and in Dawn Powell's 1942 novel, A Time To Be Born, "plums." Here's Powell's full paragraph, p.202…

    "I'm theoretically anti-Nazi, of course," he roared, "but still I can't help feeling grateful to the régime. Look at the faculty board I got together last year! Carler of Vienna, Chasen of Munich, Lieber of the Sorbonne, Steinbrock of Berlin! Our little college could never afford such men in a hundred years! But Hitler shakes the tree and I get the plums! So I say Heil Hitler! He's done more for our college in ten years than all the trustees and alumni have been able to do in a hundred years!"

    I have a collection of Powell's shorter works. I'll have to get my hands on the novel. Looks like a lot of fun.

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  6. Dean C. Rowan

    On p.188 of their Building Europe on Expertise: Innovators, Organizers, Networkers, co-authors Martin Kohlrausch and Helmuth Trishler attribute the remark to Walter S. Cook, founding director of the Institute of Fine Art at New York University. They credit Mitchell G. Ash and Alfons Söllner (eds.), Forced Migration and Scientific Change: Emigre German-Speaking Scientists and Scholars after 1933, which in turn credits Wilfred McClay, "Weimar in America," American Scholar 55 (Winter 1985-86): 120. Hearsay upon hearsay.

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  7. John Rapko

    As I recall Thatcher made the tree quiver in England, and both Bernard Williams and Richard Wollheim took (what I heard were) lucrative early retirement buy-outs and came to UC Berkeley (Wollheim via Columbia, I think) and greatly enriched things here in the Athens of the West Coast. I got to hear in 1986 Wollheim give his Mellon lectures, soon published thereafter as Painting as an Art, then Williams's class on Nietzsche, the two of them doing a seminar on the self, etc. I look forward to the unintended consequences of the shaking with surges of intellectual and cultural creativity in Auckland, Yerevan (I've been told there are already a lot of Russian cultural émigrés there), Bogotá, Accra, Johannesburg, etc. Why would anyone who can leave wish to stay in the re-greated U.S.A.?

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  8. Job seeker

    I am an international job seeker currently in a postdoctoral position with one more year remaining. Under normal circumstances, I would defer any TT offers for a year and use the time to focus on my research before moving to a TT position. However, this is no longer my preferred option: I would rather accept any TT position to ensure job security and obtain better visa support. While this decision may negatively impact my academic development, I doubt anyone will notice or care. Oh well.

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  9. someone somewhere

    I am an immigrant who teaches English as a lecturer. As a non native speaker, I never felt more vulnerable that my job will be on the line soon. I am vulnerable, I was vulnerable even before Trump. And now I wonder how I can claw my way out of a deep red state and if that is even possible. The sad part is I love to teach. I don't wnat to do anything else. And I have built a life in thsi country for the last twenty years.

    Reply
  10. Charles Pigden

    Well I did say that it was 'possibly apocryphal'!

    Reply
  11. David Wallace

    People who have extant job offers should accept quickly. The rest of us should have patience. We are less than 4 weeks into the Trump administration; it could resolve to anything from sound and fury signifying nothing, to an autocoup.

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  12. Dude on Market

    I have a TT offer at an American university as well as an offer for a postdoc. Ideally, I'd take the postdoc and defer the TT job for a year. Is there any reason to think that this is a risky plan, and that it would be less risky to just start the TT position right away (as "Job seeker" suggests)? Could the TT offer really be rescinded *after* I accept it and sign the contract?

    Reply
  13. Brian Leiter

    Yes, a TT offer could be rescinded after acceptance…it would constitute a breach of contract, but you would have to file a lawsuit to get a remedy. Schools, after all, fire tenured faculty when faced with financial stress. But it depends on the school. Elite and wealthy universities are less likely to do this, because of the reputational damage.

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  14. ESQ

    Any contract can be broken, but as a very basic matter of law you need an executed contract if you think you’ll need to sue. This depends, of course, on what the K for the TT position actually says and what the K—if there is one—for the other position says. I understand you to be saying that one has a long term K and the other does not, In that case, the strategic move would be to grab the better K while it’s still on the table.

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  15. Simon Goldstein

    Many people make a financial mistake when deferring a TT position for a year to do a postdoc. Often, you start the TT position with the same salary after a year as you would have had immediately without deferral. Often, the relevant TT position increases your salary every year by some increment; future job negotiations also use this salary as a reference point. The result is that you end up making 2-5% less salary every year for the rest of your career. With compounding interest this can cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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  16. ESQ

    Further to the Dude’s situation of possible legal action, do academic employment contracts typically contain arbitration clauses?

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  17. Chris Swoyer

    You can sue if they rescind, but a lone individual suing a university with any resources will likely be put through the wringer. The university has plenty of time and money and a stable of lawyers. They can usually drag things out much longer than you can wait for a resolution and they can make it expensive for you. Veterans here will probably have seen this play out, but it may not be something people just entering the job market would think about.

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  18. Sam Elgin

    My university – UC San Diego – has just announced a complete freeze on all faculty and staff hiring for the indefinite future. Our Executive Vice Chancellor cited financial uncertainty arising from potential federal funding cuts, which could account for a 10% budget shortfall for the campus. I would strongly encourage job candidates with an offer that they like to accept quickly, as I suspect that UCSD will not be the only university to make this sort of decision in the near future.

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  19. Applicant

    Sam – is this affecting the current hiring cycle as well? Know there’s a UCSD job for early modern right now; I’m not in the running for that but I am preparing fly outs for other places in UC system so was wondering, thanks

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  20. Sam Elgin

    My understanding is that this affects the current – as well as future – hiring cycles. All searches are effectively cancelled throughout the university. That said, I would encourage anyone with a flyout at UCSD to contact the search committee chair for clarification (if you haven't heard from them already). They may well have more information than I do – and if they have a reason to think that the search can move ahead, their word should be believed over mine.

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  21. kika

    I'm despondent. I'm a contractor w/ UC San Diego. Turned down a full-time staff offer, b/c I'm remote, but life circumstances changed and now the job is frozen. Worse, I just lost another UC San Diego contract for a project funded by USAID. I worked so hard to rebuild my career after a break due to health reasons, only to watch it burn. Along with my country.

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