Category Archives: Faculty

Inside Higher Ed: Scholar’s Visa Denial Upheld

The case of Tariq Ramadan has become central to efforts by academic and civil liberties groups to challenge the denial of U.S. visas to foreign scholars. And on Thursday, a federal judge handed those groups a defeat by upholding the right of the government to deny a visa to Ramadan, a prominent Muslim scholar who has been unable to enter the United States to accept a position at the University of Notre Dame.

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The Chronicle News Blog: British Stem-Cell Scientist Is Latest Prominent Researcher to Leave Singapore

Alan Colman, who has been leading Singapore’s efforts to establish itself as a global biomedical hub, has been appointed director of stem-cell research at King’s College London.

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Las Vegas Sun: Higher ed change would keep public in the dark

After months of debate about a lax disclosure policy that shielded UNLV faculty members’ outside work from the public, the Nevada System of Higher Education has crafted a new policy that shines little additional light on those dealings.

The proposed policy, which the Board of Regents will debate next week, simply would require UNLV and other institutions to file annual reports providing vague information such as how many professors filed outside income disclosure forms.

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Austin American Statesman: A&M faculty up in arms over presidential search

Texas A&M University faculty members are up in arms over the lengthy search for a new president and a sharply worded letter from the chairman of the university’s governing board concerning the matter.

The College Station campus has been led by an interim president, Ed Davis, former president of the A&M Foundation, for nearly a year. The previous president was Robert Gates, whom President Bush tapped for defense secretary.

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International Herald Tribune: College lecturer shot dead in students’ clash

A lecturer was shot dead in a government college situated in the Sharea Faisal police limits when two student organisations clashed over control of the college.

As per the details, a clash was reported in the evening hours within the limits of Government Mono Technical College situated in Block-12, Gulistan-e-Jauhar. In the meantime, the police was informed of the clash between two politically active student organisations.

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Sacramento Bee: Audit: CSU hiring inconsistent

California State University should provide more guidance on hiring professors for its 23 campuses and include more women and minorities on employee search committees, the state auditor’s office said in a report released Tuesday.

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The Chronicle: The Job-Market Horror Story

By Otis Nixon
First Person

Academics share their personal experiences

I’ve always had a problem with anxiety. Not in a debilitating sense; let’s just say that during stressful situations, my tension is noticeable to the most casual of observers. As one professor told me before an important exam, “The gods didn’t bless you with a poker face.”

So my nervousness was visible when I went for my first interview at the 2007 meeting of the American Historical Association. It was my second go-round on the academic job market, but my first with Ph.D. in hand. I had attended a large Southern university with a fairly good academic reputation, so I was hoping for the best, but I knew to prepare for the worst, because my field is modern American history, supposedly one of the tightest in academe.

An undergraduate greeted me at the conference check-in desk — undoubtedly asked by his professors to work the interview area in an effort to dissuade him from entering a graduate program. I was just one of many candidates he had processed that day, so he hastily dispatched me to a waiting area behind a curtain.

I had arrived 30 minutes early to give myself time to calm down and get accustomed to my surroundings. That is what the people on the H-Grad e-mail discussion group advised, but in hindsight I wish I hadn’t listened. The room was eerily reminiscent of the sausage-grinder scene in Pink Floyd’s The Wall — but instead of British school children in masks, I was surrounded by guys wearing dark suits, red ties, glasses, and nicely polished shoes. Other than one woman at the front of the room intensely studying her notes and ignoring the world, there was little to distinguish one candidate from another, me included. You could have cut the conformity with a knife.

As I took deep breaths (in four seconds, hold, out four seconds), I reviewed my credentials and my career to determine what would set me apart from the rest of the crowd.

I had lived through most of the clichéd traumas of graduate school and emerged unscathed: My dissertation director had left for greener pastures six months before I completed my degree but had remained on my committee and actively participated in my defense. I had a career in student activism that, rather than angering school administrators, had actually brought about much-needed change at my university. I had failed miserably on the job market the previous year but landed an administrative position at my university that included the opportunity to teach as an adjunct. I finished my Ph.D. in just four years with a decent number of publications.

In short, I did everything by the book and managed to survive. I was determined that, come August 2007, I would be in a tenure-track job.

The minutes slowly ticked by as I made small talk with my fellow candidates. As the other job seekers were called forward and the room emptied, my anxiety got the best of me. I got up the courage to walk to the front and peek through the curtain into the interview booth. There, sitting with yet another man in a dark suit, red tie, and glasses, was the Interviewer.

I recognized the Interviewer from his picture on the university’s Web site. I had done what the online academic community had suggested and studied the institution and the department religiously over the past few weeks. It was actually quite hard to miss him, as he was wearing a horrendous neon green sweater that overpowered the lesser man in his presence. I quickly returned to my seat to wait the final 10 minutes until my interview, feeling that I had somehow violated a sacred taboo by peering into the inner sanctum before my appointed time.

Ten minutes passed. Fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes.

It was well past my interview time and not so much as a sign from the Interviewer. “Had I written down the wrong interview time?” I thought as I checked my PDA. I sheepishly returned to the check-in desk to get an answer.

“I have an interview that was supposed to start 30 minutes ago. Does he know I am here?” I asked.

“Oh. I forgot to tell you,” said my undergraduate friend. “He got off to a late start and is running 30 minutes behind.”

Relieved that the crisis had been averted, I made my way back to my seat, but not before I went back to the curtain. There, indeed, was the Interviewer and the same candidate as before.

Ten more minutes passed. Twenty more minutes.

It was now 50 minutes past my scheduled interview time, and my anxiety had turned to annoyance. “I understand that we are at their mercy,” I said to a sympathetic job candidate seated across the aisle, “but this is beyond ridiculous.”

Rather than bothering the receptionist again, I went back to the front and glanced through the curtain to find one of the most horrific sites I have seen in quite a long time.

The Interviewer was gone.

The booth was empty.

Despite following all of the rules, I had missed my interview.

Frantically, I ran through the check-in area and into the hotel lobby. I scanned the room and there, about 100 feet away and proceeding to the elevator, was the Interviewer. Thank God for that neon sweater. I took off after him and caught up as he was waiting.

“Dr. X?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m your 5:30 interview.”

“I don’t have a 5:30 interview,” he replied.

“Yes you do,” I said rather boldly, “and it’s me.”

Admittedly, that response was a bit much. I half-expected lightning and thunder to rain down from the heavens as I violated the code and dared assert myself.

Fortunately, Dr. X was not a proud man. After quickly consulting his calendar, it became obvious that he had gotten the day of the week and the date mixed up and had me mistakenly scheduled for the following day. We had a brief conversation and I had another graduate-school cliché — the job-market horror story — to add to my collection.

Our subsequent interview went well, but I failed to make it to the on-campus stage.

You could take a number of morals from this story, such as “always sit near the curtain so you can see the interviewers if they try to skip out on you.” But for me, the experience has changed the way I view the hiring process.

In this wired world we inhabit, our perspective on the job market has become skewed. Thanks to online forums and blogs, interviewing in academe has evolved into a series of sacred rituals. Tips for success have become hard-and-fast rules that can never be violated — at least, not if you want to land the job.

While a good percentage of the advice doled out to new Ph.D.’s is probably worth hearing (if I hadn’t done a little online reconnaissance, I would have never known the Interviewer had left the booth), some of it, and the sheer volume of it, serves no other purpose than to terrify job candidates. Stories of rude and unprofessional behavior during interviews are now considered the norm. Interviewers are no longer professors fulfilling a service requirement but villains out to trample the souls of those “lucky” enough to score an interview.

It is quite possible that the culture of the job market is as bad as it seems, but no one would dare try to deviate from the prescribed norms to find out. We have mountains of online evidence to prove that if you do anything the least bit objectionable in the interview, you can be replaced. When branch campuses of the University of Maine claim to have 260 applicants for one position, as happened last year, the tightness of the market takes on a whole new dimension.

As a result, job seekers are afraid to be different, to assert their individuality, or to expect even the simplest of professional courtesies.

Unfortunately the situation is not going to get better any time soon. My second time on the market allowed me to (literally) peer through the curtain, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that the only thing waiting at the end of my graduate-school career is misery and torture.

Even following the rules, though, does not guarantee success. During this job season, I hope to separate the truth from the urban legends that haunt all job candidates — while controlling my anxiety and looking out for neon sweaters.

Otis Nixon is the pseudonym of a Ph.D. in history who is working as a visiting lecturer this academic year at a university in the South.

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The Chronicle: Carnegie Corporation Announces New Faculty-Training Project in Africa

The Carnegie Corporation of New York announced today the creation of a new graduate-level training program for African academics in science and engineering.

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The Forum: Troubled history

A handful of faculty at North Dakota State University question whether one of their colleagues is truly distinguished.

Four faculty members have protested to administrators about history professor Tom Isern receiving the distinguished professor award, a new NDSU initiative that honors top faculty with a $20,000 raise and prestigious title.

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Indianapolis Star: College reviews faculty dress code

A good college professor can inspire a hungry mind with wit, knowledge and teaching style.

But what if he’s wearing an earring? Or she is wearing a skirt above the knee?
That’s a problem, says Earl D. Brooks, president of Tri-State University in Angola, Ind., which issued a detailed dress code policy for faculty last month only to pull it back for more study after some of the school’s 70 professors complained.
“Our policy was not rescinded, but it is under review,” said Brooks, who has led the private Northern Indiana college for the past seven years.

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The Chronicle News Blog: U. of Michigan Pledges $30-Million for New Hires

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor plans to spend $30-million over the next five years on hiring 100 new tenure-track faculty members to lead interdisciplinary research and teaching in areas such as energy and environmental sustainability.

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Inside Higher Ed: Professors and Politics (Again)

A month after the release of a study hailed by many as a definitive examination of faculty members’ political views, a slew of new research on the topic — some of it updated versions of previous research — will be released today finding (not surprisingly) that professors lean to the left.

Today’s research will be released as part of a day-long conference, “Reforming the Politically Correct University,” being held at the American Enterprise Institute. Two of the papers were released in advance and (judging from paper titles) they appear consistent with the theme of the conference that ideological diversity is in short supply in academe. The papers argue that the political imbalance in humanities and social sciences departments is large, growing and inappropriate. And one paper charges that “groupthink” is at work in ways that limit the opportunities for those who don’t share the leftist views of many other professors.

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The Chronicle News Blog: 20% of Canadian Faculty Members Are Stressed Out, Survey Finds

More than 20 percent of Canadian professors say their jobs are making them sick, according to a national survey commissioned by the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which says it shows very clearly that high levels of stress are a major problem with serious consequences for faculties. About 10 percent of those surveyed were classified as clinically distressed, which would qualify them for long-term disability.

A 42-page report on the survey lays out the variety of faculty stressors, including workload, scheduling, role conflicts, and problems with senior administrators. Professors who tend to be the most stressed are women on the tenure track who are trying to balance work and family.

The survey covered 1,470 people who were randomly selected at 56 universities. The response rate was 27 percent. Over all, 65 percent said they were satisfied with their jobs. —Karen Birchard

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Inside Higher Ed: When and Why Professors Retire

Joan Lorden said she noticed something unsettling a few years ago: When she went to events honoring professors for teaching awards, there was too much overlap in those being honored with those whose retirements were being announced at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she is provost. She worried about losing “the backbone of departments,” she said.

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The Chronicle: Faculty-Productivity Index Offers Surprises

Third annual ranking gives high marks to some lesser-known programs

Intellectual heft may seem like a tricky thing to measure, but Academic Analytics says it can be done.

The for-profit company, owned in part by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, recently compiled its third annual Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index — a ranking of graduate programs at research universities based on what purports to be the first objective measurement of per-capita scholarly accomplishment. The measurement this year considers several new factors, causing some surprising fluctuations in the rankings.

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The Chronicle: You’re Not Fooling Anyone

Holden Caulfield used to hunt phonies a few blocks from here, but times have changed. Now the phonies — or people who think they are, anyway — hunt themselves.

Case in point: On a recent evening, Columbia University held a well-attended workshop for young academics who feel like frauds.

These were duly vetted, highly successful scholars who nonetheless live in creeping fear of being found out. Exposed. Sent packing.

If that sounds familiar, you may have the impostor syndrome. In psychological terms, that’s a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment.

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The New York Times: Swastika Painted on Columbia Professor’s Door

A swastika was found spray-painted on a Jewish professor’s office door yesterday morning at Teachers College at Columbia University, the second time in less than a month that one of the college’s professors has been the target of bias.

The professor, Elizabeth Midlarsky, a clinical psychologist who has done studies on the Holocaust, said the college’s associate provost called to notify her of the swastika. Ms. Midlarsky said it was actually the third time in recent weeks that she had been the target of bias.

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