We did a search. We had three finalists. We offered the job to Candidate 1. She accepted, signed her contract, and we all got ready for her to move here. She just emailed yesterday to say she's not coming. As in not taking the job. As in reneging on her promise to come teach here.
Candidates 2 and 3 have already accepted positions elsewhere. We suspect Candidate 1 was simply using this as leverage to bargain at her current job.
Any advice on what to do about this? Have any of your departments encountered this problem? What did you do?
You really can't do anything but tell anyone and everyone that candidate X bailed on their contract. Many will have sympathy but others will just shrug their shoulders. I suppose since it's a contract the university could sue--but who would care? It's more expense and time and trouble.
ReplyDeleteThis has happened where I work--not in the lovely month of May but in August--a week before classes were to begin.
What you do is make do. If you can get the university to authorize a one-year on such short notice, you do it. Then you get someone to come in at the last minute. It would not be hard in my discipline, because jobs are so scarce. If that can't happen, you offer overloads to profs and adjunct the rest out, and/or cancel classes.
Plenty of people use the job market to leverage higher salaries for themselves, or bugger off on a contract if another better one comes along. It's not terribly common because the job market sucks so bad, but it happens. People are selfish.
You just have to make the best of it.
1. Be grateful. Why would you want someone who doesn't want to be there.
ReplyDelete2. So, #2 and #3 are gone. Contact the best of the other hundreds of qualified people who applied.
3. Relax.
What Wisconsin Will said.
ReplyDeleteGiven the current job situation, it's hard to believe that the three final candidates were the only strong candidates. I've seen some incredible people miss the cut in the job search process.
One problem, though, might be that some institutions are unwilling to fund a second search in cases like this.
You are probably past the point when you can start organizing campus visits from someone in the 4-10 range, unless you happen to be on quarters. But that doesn't mean all is lost. If I were your chair, I'd already have asked the deans for permission to offer a one-year to one of the candidates in the 4-10 range. Then I'd have started cold-calling them. Dollars to donuts, one of them will want it.
ReplyDeleteThen, if you like that person, you can offer them the job next winter. They have an application for a TT job in your department on file, and the search technically did not close, so that makes it kosher. Departments in your situation do this all the time.
Basically, my sense is that you;ll get someone perfectly good who wants your job. You'll just have to wait a year to put that person on the TT. A blow to the collective ego, I'd imagine, but not a tragedy by any means.
As far as #1 goes, I'm sure lots of people here will let fly about what a fuckface he/she/it is. But this is a shitty profession, and the opportunities for leverage to get one's spouse/partner hired, get a decent raise, or whatever, are few and far between. The signed contract makes it a little shittier than most such scenarios, but anyone here wh says they wouldn't use the leverage for all it is worth if they managed to get their hands on it is either naive or lying (and my money is on the latter). I've never signed a contract like this person did, but I have waltzed off on a one-year visiting gig to make my intentions clear. It happens.
Or, #1 may have been in some other situation that you don't know about. I know someone who pulled out of a signed contract because her PhD got revoked and she had to drop out of the profession. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but it may not be what you think. Just forget about that person and move on.
I signed a contract and my new job reneged on me because they decided the impending budget cuts warranted closing the whole department. After I turned down other interviews. What could I do? Nothing. Sure, it's a pain, but as has been said, there are hundreds of people out there who want jobs. In the short term, at least nobody is having the money they need to buy groceries and pay rent taken away from them in your situation.
ReplyDeleteAll good advice. At some point, though, some school is going to decide that they've got lawyers on retainer that aren't doing anything else productive over the summer.... really, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet, but the time academics spend doing searches -- and doing them over, etc. -- hasn't yet been valued highly enough to be worth it. Soon, though.
ReplyDeleteTo be clear about the meaning of "waltzed off," it means signed and fulfilled one-year visiting contract at another university that had offered me a TT position, and then returned to my original department once they realized that I might actually leave. This is more conventional, and more honest to all parties involved, than signing a TT contract and then bailing on it. But not everyone knows they can do that, or has the stomach to negotiate for it.
ReplyDeleteSo if you are looking for what not to do next time, and #1 was, in fact, someone you were trying to poach from another school, know that such trial arrangements are common, and an option if you fear a repeat of this year's drama.
When you ask a girl to the prom a month before the date, it's a good idea to keep in touch with her instead of just expecting her to be ready on prom night. If you really like her, then call her every night during those thirty days. Otherwise, she might get distracted by one of the other boys. A girl wants to be wanted--or so I'm told.
ReplyDeleteAt least your girl kept you in the loop instead of having you knock on the door of her empty house on prom night.
Ugh, someone did this to us and WE WILL NEVER GET THE LINE BACK. She screwed us and the colleague we hired with the promise that there were two in the field coming in. Now said colleague has to hold up the whole field for the foreseeble future, which means we are very likely to lose said colleague. Nothing to be done, no legal recourse, but I have no intention of forgiving this person.
ReplyDeleteI have considerable sympathy both for the job candidate who did what was best for her, and for the department that finds itself in the lurch, and may not be able to recoup the line. The present job market is tough for everyone.
ReplyDeleteFrom a selfish standpoint, I can't help noting that, if enough people already in TT jobs did this (or just pursued jobs to the offer point, then used the offer as a bargaining chip -- the more common situation, as Archie points out), it could make those of us who *don't* already have TT jobs, and really are interested in one, more attractive as candidates. I could live with that.
And I suspect all of us could live with a set of incentives that encouraged people to go on the job market only if they really wanted a different job. Somebody should do a cost/benefit analysis of funding failed searches vs. spending money to adjust faculty salaries so that more senior professors receive more than recent hires, and so that salaries remain competitive in comparison to peer and/or geographically similar institutions. I'm not sure that, in this case, encouraging competition among a small set of already-desirable professors is actually serving to keep total costs down.
As for the present situation, if you can get permission to offer a one-year, Archie's strategy sounds pretty good to me. Or, if you're in or near a major metropolitan area, just put an ad in the paper (or, for that matter, take a look at your adjunct pool). Finding a qualified person to cover scheduled courses is not likely to be a problem. Retaining and filling the TT line while meeting all the requirements for a national search may be -- which might just raise some questions about whether, in the current climate, national searches are the wisest strategy.
F&T, how is it that one candidate's fault that your school doesn't adequately support your department? Sounds like misplaced blame to me.
ReplyDeleteF&T: You got screwed, for sure. But it sounds like the admin was looking for an excuse, any excuse to do your department in. That is seriously tough.
ReplyDeleteCassandra: I think a lot of people are on the market 24/7. There just aren't enough positions relative to the pool for them to have the kind of impact you'd want.
My sense is that there are a lot of unhappy academics out there, many of whom landed in non-optimal situations (bad institutional fit, trailing partner/spouse, bad pay, what have you). Cassandra is right that if admin would just look at the cost-benefit of having faculty always looking for outside leverage, they might rethink things like salary compression and raises. But that seems unlikely, since the status quo seems to suit them.
My own favorite idea has always been that departments should be run like sports teams in the sense that there should be trade options. So, for example, one English department in a big city R1 has someone who would much rather be at a SLAC, or has a partner in a different city; and someone at a SLAC, or an R2 in the partner's location who happens to be in the same sub-field and has similar attainments wants to live like a pauper in the big city. Why couldn't a trade get worked out? Maybe with cash considerations, or a grad student to be named later, or whatever? You'd get two happy people who wouldn't feel compelled to be on the market 24/7/365. Everyone wins.