The Philosophers' Cocoon

Notes from search committee members, part 2: Dr. Research University on luck and best practices

A past search committee member who would prefer to remain anonymous writes in (thanks to Helen De Cruz for obtaining the submission!):

I’ve served on tenure-track search committees at two universities, both large, public, land-grant schools, and both classified by Carnegie as RU/VH (“very high research activity”) institutions. At the first school, our department had a (not very highly ranked) PhD program; at the school I’m at now, we have an MA program, but no PhD program.  I’ve served on more than a dozen search committees for tenure-stream hires within my discipline, a few search committees for tenure-stream hires in other disciplines, and a few search committees for administrative positions at the dean-level or above. As the latter are very different in many key ways from faculty searches, my experiences with those searches is probably irrelevant, and I won’t discuss those below. I participated in a few searches for tenure-stream faculty in a rather different role when I was a Department Chair, and in that role I was also a big part of the process of hiring fixed term (“adjunct”) faculty.   But again, for the below, I’ll focus on my experiences as a member of search committees for tenure-stream hires.

There are (what are considered by some people to be) ‘best practices’ for academic hiring that are, alas, followed by at best relatively few committees (to the best of my knowledge).  These include at least: developing operationalizable screening criteria clearly related to the job that the candidate is expected to perform before beginning the search; developing a search strategy likely to successfully encourage those people with the relevant skills, especially including people from traditionally under-represented groups, to apply; the implementation of an initial screening system designed to identify those candidates who meet the previously developed screening criteria, in a way that minimizes the effects of implicit biases, while following all relevant state and federal laws; and a way of fairly selecting a reasonable sub-group of those applicants identified by the initial screening as highly qualified for further evaluation. (Readers interested in contemporary best practice guidelines for minimizing implicit bias in hiring should consult the extensive literature on the subject.)

Notes from Search Committee Members, Part 1: Dr. MLAC

This is the first post of a new series, "Notes from Search Committee Members." As recent discussions here and elsewhere indicate, people have a lot of opinions about what it takes to do well on the academic job-market--views about what search committees look for in terms of a publishing record, letters of recommendation, and so on. Yet a lot of these speculations are just that: speculation! And so I figured it might be good to seek out notes from search committee members themselves. After all, if anyone knows what search committees at different types of institutions actually look for, surely, it seems, they do. 

What follows is the Cocoon's first submission--by a search committee member at a mid-sized liberal arts college (MLAC) in the Western US. Please note that the search committee member's self-report is just that: a self-report by one search committee member in one department at one school. It is anecdata--no more, no less. The Cocoon, and myself, do not "endorse" the search committee member's statements, or offer them up as advice. They are simply presented as "food for thought"--as anecdata to provide job candidates, grad faculty, etc., insight into the mind of one search committee member.

Here is the full submission: