Chapter Two
AT POINT OF HIRING

a. Negotiating salary and everything else

(A great source for Arts and Letters basics rules, regulations, policies, and procedures is a PDF file called "Orientation Guide for Arts and Letters Chairpersons")

Questions to ask your chair
You will want to try to pin your chair down as specifically as possible about what will be expected of you for both renewal and tenure. Some departments are willing to give you a quantifiable set of guidelines (i.e. you need to publish a book); most will be vague. The bottom line is that you shouldn't expect to get a very specific answer, but you should still ask the following questions: What will be taken into consideration when I come up for renewal? How heavily are teaching, research, and service weighted? How is teaching evaluated? How is scholarship evaluated?

There are three kinds of mentoring available at the University: two official (university supported) and one unofficial, through WATCH.

Though a certain amount of departmental, college, and university service will be an important and reasonably-expected part of your job, it will be essential to keep the amount of service you perform within some fairly strict boundaries. This can, depending on the requests made of you, be quite a challenge: it is all too easy to say "yes" to too many service requests, with the result that you have no time left for your own research. This is, for a variety of reasons, often a particular problem for women. It is essential that you determine, early on, how much service is reasonable, and how to avoid service above and beyond this level.

How much departmental service is reasonable will vary to some extent from department to department, depending on such factors as the size of the undergraduate and graduate programs, and the number of faculty members available for departmental service (and not, for example, serving as university administrators). To get a feel for what's reasonable, you'll need to ask around, determining:

What are the departmental committees that need staffing and chairing, and how time-consuming are each of them? (Note that this varies very, very widely, from committees that meet once a year to those that meet every week

How much of this kind of work is done by each of my departmental colleagues?

How much of this kind of work is done by people at my level (brand-new assistant professor, full professor, etc.), both within my department and in other departments, and by acquaintances elsewhere?

Having gotten a feel for the work-load distribution in your department, keep in mind that it is reasonable to expect newly-arrived faculty members, particularly those at the beginning of their career, to be asked to perform less service than those further along in their careers. Assistant professors should generally not be asked to perform the very time-consuming, and potentially contentious, jobs of director of undergraduate studies and director of graduate studies — in fact, the Dean of the College of Arts and Letters has advised strongly against it. Quoting directly from the Final Report of the Committee on Institutes, Departments, and Collective Resources in Arts and Letters, 5/15, 2001, "One aspect of mentoring is guiding faculty members through service assignments. Chairs should mentor incoming faculty members on their commitments and make every effort to protect junior faculty members from overly onerous committee assignments that take unusual time away from teaching and scholarship. Chairs should also make provision for an incoming faculty member whose appointment has been understood from the beginning as a link from the department to an institute and vice versa. In such cases, the chair and the institute director should consult to determine appropriately balanced service assignments."

Similar remarks apply to service for the college and for the university. Unless you or your department have unusual commitments to interdepartmental programs or the like, it is not unreasonable to postpone service outside your department for a few years, until your research is well under way. Though there are no hard and fast rules about how service "counts," service outside your department will typically not do much to enhance your prospects for renewal, tenure, or promotion. It might help increase you salary for the next year — a bit.

You should also consider which service assignments are most attractive to you. Service on a curriculum committee might be useful for your teaching, and service on a lecture committee might allow you to help host interesting speakers and potential mentors. But some assignments may be far afield from your developing intellectual interests.

What to say when I'm asked to do more?

Though some particularly time-consuming service assignments (chair, director of undergraduate/graduate studies) are typically accompanied by a reduced teaching load, other service assignments usually come along with no such compensation, which is to say that they cut directly into your research time. So it is, again, essential that you avoid unreasonable such assignments.

This kind of avoidance is sometimes extremely easy: when asked by someone outside of your department to serve on a college or university committee that you would like not to serve on, simply decline, promptly and politely, explaining that your other commitments make it impossible for you to serve this year. You will probably get quite a few such requests, and your general rule of thumb early in your career should be to decline them unless there is some particularly strong reason for you to serve.

But things are less straightforward when the request comes from within your department. The difficulty here is that it's very important both to pull your weight within the department (and be recognized as doing so), and to maintain good relations with your colleagues, without acceding to unreasonable service requests. If your chair asks you to perform more service than is reasonable, the first thing to do is to discuss with him/her the reasons you take the service in question to be overly burdensome. That may be enough: your chair may well agree, and ask someone else to do the job instead. You will have saved yourself from too much service, and will have made the point that you are not the person to be turned to for all and sundry service tasks.

If this doesn't work, which is to say that you're still asked to take on the service job that you take to be overly burdensome, it's possible to try to minimize the overall impact on your research by bargaining about future service or other items. Ask, for example, that you be relieved of certain service tasks next semester in return for taking on the task in question this semester. Or if your research would be helped by some extra research assistance by graduate students, you might ask for some hours of research assistance in return for the service overload. Or for a teaching assignment that will be closely related to your research or just less time-consuming than others. Though there is a limit to how much your department can do for you, be creative here, and try to come up with ways in which the department can help you to get your research done even in the face of the extra service. Keep in mind that it's in your department's interest, not just your own, that you get your research done.

If, finally, you experience a pattern of unfair service requests that can't be dealt with in either of the above ways, then it's time to seek help elsewhere. Discuss the problem with trusted senior colleagues in the department, and, finally, take up the issue with your dean. If there is a consistent pattern of overburdening women assistant professors, get together with them and discuss the situation, then consider approaching your chair as a group. If that produces no relief, you can consider going to the Office of Institutional Equity and asking for help there.

 

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d. Spousal hires

Being the M/P/S can be very trying, especially if you were the chosen hire (even the cherished hire) of your last employer. If, in the negotiation process, you are offered a regular Teaching and Research (T&R) line in the process, all well and good. Take heart from the fact that most likely, most of your departmental colleagues-to-be were not the first choice of some (perhaps sizable) fraction of your new Department, and managed, eventually, to feel welcomed and integrated into the Department. You can do it too.

But what if you are not offered a T&R line? Now the trouble begins. Why? Because in general, the non-T&R faculty are hired at the rank of Special Professional Faculty or worse yet, Adjuncts. SPFs and Adjuncts are exploited economically, professionally, and are sometimes psychologically damaged by the experience. (Some exceptions: All library faculty are SPFs, as are some well-paid and well-esteemed administrators. I am focusing here on non-T&R teaching faculty.)

As a non-T&R faculty member, it is likely that you will be asked to teach twice as many courses as your colleagues, and to do that for about half their salary. (Some SPFs who are very active in research teach are contacted to teach a 3-3 load instead of a 4-4.) And you will be defined, not as a heroic martyr, but as a second-rate scholar who deserves no better. After you're in that position long enough, you could come to see yourself as a second-rate scholar who deserves no better. But you do deserve better — everyone does — though it is very profitable for the University (who pays you less than your T & R colleagues) and for your colleagues (who have a lighter teaching load because of your labors) to make you think you deserve no better.

What to do? You are in your best bargaining position when you and your mate have not yet accepted a contract and thus can negotiate the terms of both jobs. Push for T&R positions for both of you. Barring that, push for a half-time T&R position for the M/P/S that can turn into a full-time position later. That way you will get the same benefits and pay-rate as everyone else. Barring that, push for a non-T&R position that is as close as possible to a T&R position in terms of salary, benefits, and research supports. Then carve out a unique area of teaching for yourself in your Department, get your publications to match or surpass the publication-record of your untenured colleagues, and then attempt to renegotiate your status. If possible set up an explicit timetable for renegotiation and clear criteria for what it will take to change your status to a regular T&R position. And get it all in writing. In addition, during the time it takes to move toward renegotiation, remember always to push for more salary, a better computer, compensation for professional travel, less teaching, etc. — that is to say, whatever it takes to make your position indistinguishable from a regular T&R one. That way, when the time comes to renegotiate, it will not cost your Department very much to transform your status from SPF to T&R... a strong argument in your favor. And remember always to guard against the demoralization that frequently comes with a non-T&R position and to strenuously fight against it.

It should be noted that arranging for spousal hires is sometimes a difficult and trying process for the Administration as well. Often they have a hard time convincing a department to hire, especially on a T&R basis, a new faculty member they haven't conducted a search for themselves. It can be that the spousal hire would duplicate skills and research areas already available to the department. Some departments are loathe to hire someone on a tenured, associate professor basis whom they have not tenured themselves, or at least searched for themselves. Sometimes this is just purely snotty on the part of the department and sometimes it is a legitimate concern. Even when the administration is most anxious to hire the spouse on a T&R basis, it might be that the relevant department rejects the offer. The Administration has some options left, in this case, but they are likely to be "costly": the promise of a new line for the department or some such.

Negotiating spousal hires is tricky for all three parties (you, the administration and the department) and could be the break point in the negotiations for the M/P/S's job. You'll have to judge/test/guess how flexible or inflexible to be.

(Take a look at Chapter 8 on Adjuncts and Chapter 9 on SPFs.)

 

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e. Split appointments and their hazards

Spending one's time and energy in two places puts an extra burden on the faculty member, to account for how her/his time was spent, and to negotiate the boundaries of his or her responsibilities. Though the rewards may be substantial, especially in a tenured position, the potential pitfalls for junior faculty need to be considered.

In many universities, joint appointments can mean double responsibilities and obligations: for student advising, committee work, and department service. It is difficult for departments, Centers or Institutes to divide up this work proportionate to the position: what exactly is 50% advising, or 50% committee work? The problem of allocating work can be exacerbated when departments, Institutes and Centers fail to communicate with one another about what they require of a position. Academic units are famously loath to surrender any power, or source of labor, so there is no motivation to "share" human resources with another department. It is crucial that someone contemplating a split appointment work out in advance how these responsibilities will be managed, and to secure agreement with the arrangement from each unit. This is especially true with teaching, since each unit will arrange its schedule to suit its own needs, and the faculty member may be left with an untenable — and untenurable — schedule if there is no communication. Quoting directly from the Final Report of the Committee on Institutes, Departments, and Collective Resources in Arts and Letters, 5/15, 2001, "Probationary faculty members who do serve on committees or provide service to institutes should be given credit for that service. In response, chairpersons may want to reduce some service obligations within the department, or they may want simply to recognize this as additional work during annual reviews. Before assigning a major assignment to a junior faculty member, an institute director should consult with the appropriate chairperson and seek his or her advice in terms of the junior faculty members' trajectory toward tenure and other service commitments. The terms of such an agreement should be spelled out in a letter, a copy of which the probationary faculty member should receive."1

Even after issues of advising and service are worked out, there are less tangible factors, like socializing. People split between two departments often have twice as many social engagements as faculty members who are based in a single department: twice as many receptions, dinners, candidate lunches, retreats, etc. These social obligations do not "count" as part of one's formal review, yet they are vital to establishing and nourishing links with colleagues. And since academic units do not usually keep track of each other's social calendar, it can be difficult to explain how pressing these social demands are. A failure to turn up for these informal but important occasions could be held against a faculty member later on.

Split appointments also complicate the review and tenure process. This is the most dangerous aspect of the arrangement for junior faculty. The Academic Articles currently mandate that the tenure home be a department. But who will make the final decisions about tenure and promotions? Who will make the decision about salary, and how will the faculty member be reviewed, separately by each unit, or by the two together? What if the two viewpoints differ? If it becomes apparent that the candidate devoted more time to one unit than the other, will that decision result in a lower rating from one unit?

Anyone thinking about accepting a split appointment would do well to consult with wise and trusted people in her field to see how these things are viewed and to get a sense of how successful people who hold them have been when it comes to getting tenure, promotion, and professional advancement. It would also be a good idea to talk to people already on campus in such "split" positions - for example, people with appointments in English and American Studies; History and Irish Studies; Theology, Anthropology, or Government and the Kroc Institute; and other combinations.

 

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