Department of things that should go without saying, but apparently do not

It's hard to know what to say to the claim that junior faculty going on the job market violates the holy covenant between the professor and God the department.  Putting to one side the career trajectories of successful senior faculty, which generally involve considerable time in transit (you didn't think that all those nice tenured folks at Harvard started there, did you?), this complaint is puzzling for a number of reasons:

1.  The rise of the two-academic family.  If Spouse/Partner A is in California and Spouse/Partner B is in New Jersey, there will no doubt come a point when said individuals begin to wonder about the feasibility of raising children/maintaining the relationship/continuing to pay the long-distance phone bills.  Quite frequently, A and B solve their problems by moving--whether both of them move to a college amenable to hiring them as a pair, or one of them moves to wherever the other one happens to be.  Unless American universities decide to impose the old English rules governing Oxbridge fellows and/or outlaw academics marrying each other, then love, marriage, etc. will continue to overrule administrative convenience.  (Either that, or departments will have to overcome their aversion to spousal hires.) 

2.  Administrators encouraging junior faculty to remain on the job market.  Someone out there should do a study of ways in which faculty (junior and otherwise) are actively pressured to market themselves continually.  At many universities and colleges, my own included, it is impossible to negotiate a raise without an external offer.  Many R1 departments look on job offers as a positive sign during tenure evaluations.  And the pickiest Ivies make it so difficult to obtain tenure that junior faculty go back on the market as a matter of course.  Any and all of these factors reduce the likelihood that Untenured Faculty Member A will profess heartfelt loyalty to his or her campus, given that the Higher Ups are sending quite the opposite message.

3.  Geography.  I've mentioned before that, thanks to the current job market, most faculty have no choice whatsoever about where they'll end up.  (In contrast, during the 1960s, Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt applied for three [four?] positions, two of which were conveniently located in Los Angeles.)  There's been some sneering about faculty wanting to be close to their parents, but what about parents who are aging or ill? Hospitalized? In a nursing home? I was unaware that entering academia meant swearing an oath to abandon your family.  Even if parents are not part of the equation, not everyone is suited to live everywhere. 

4.  Hell.  Dare I point out that some colleges and/or departments appear to be located in the immediate vicinity of Malebolge?

Comments

[Jonathan Dresner]

The double-standard can actually be quite painful. It's true that my present institution makes it almost impossible to negotiate raises without outside offers. It's also true that applying elsewhere is widely seen as a gross lack of committment to the institution, even by faculty who admit that they themselves sometimes send out applications to desirable positions for the same reasons!

[gg]

I've had similar discussions with graduate students who feel guilty about suddenly going to another school, feeling like they've 'let down' the people who accepted them and gave them stipends. To which I usually make two points, both applicable to the faculty case:

1. The department will survive without you. If your department will wither and die without your presence, that's the best reason to leave - it can't be particularly good.

2. The department didn't hire you as a personal favor. Somehow people get the unconscious impression (low self-esteem, perhaps?) that the department went out on a limb to hire you out of charity, or something. No, they brought you in to make themselves look better. If they can't provide a compelling atmosphere for you to stay, that's their fault.

[Rohan Maitzen]

Junior faculty should also be aware that what limited lateral mobility they have may completely evaporate once they pass the tenure barrier and get their first promotion, as there are very few openings in the middle ranks. Thus, unless you are a'superstar,' you will eventually realize that in order to move you have to change careers. The two-academic couple issue remains a big one given how controversial hiring remains. (At my institution, you can't leverage one without having, yes, an offer from somewhere else--so round and round we go.) I remember when I announced my engagement to my PhD advisors, one of them said immediately, "you must be prepared to live apart, then," which rather shocked me at the time (and still does, but for different reasons, as I'm much less naive now!). As for wanting to be close to your extended family, I was shocked at the nasty comment on the thread you linked to about "running home to mommy."

Too bad there couldn't be some kind of job swap system. :-) There must be someone out closer to my folks who would rather be out here, and we'd both do, not as well, but better if we were able to align our personal and professional lives, so our departments would gain rather than suffer.

[Rohan Maitzen]

That is, "how controversial *spousal* hirings remain"!

[perilla]

Thank you very much for this post. Just out of curiosity, what are the "old English rules governing Oxbridge fellows"? (asks the new North American.)

[Miriam]

It used to be the case that a Fellow had to remain unmarried.

[Young Prof.]

I have the opposite problem of the two-academic couple: I'm single and living in a teeny tiny town with few dating prospects. Sorry, but I'm not going to be a sexual martyr to my department if I have the choice not to. I'm a young woman and times have changed since young bright women automatically married professors and followed them to their academic postings with no thought of their own careers. If the senior faculty can't understand that, that's their problem.