The hire said she was a trailing spouse, as a way to explain a strange hop-scotching of jobs, 6 in 12 years. She said her husband worked in finance and had moved them from NY to DC to Chicago to Florida and to Texas. (Those are not the real states, but they're geographically comparable.) She'd had a couple of t-t jobs, but about half of her gigs had been part-time.
Her spouse had left his job to consult full time from home, and what a great chance to settle down, and wasn't she happy that we were considering her!
There also had been some gaps in the hire's work history, 2 years at one point and two 1-year breaks of work that the hire described as "sabbaticals." I brought up in a committee meeting that these could not have been traditional sabbaticals, but nobody seemed too worried about it. We were at the end of a long and contentious search and this person fit our job needs nicely.
Well, within six months she told us her husband had gone back to finance and was now going to commute weekly to a large city (we're a dinky city) 250 miles away. It was not a problem, she said, etc.
Then at the end of the fall semester she put in a request for classes that only met on Saturdays and Mondays. Nobody has that kind of leverage here, especially someone so new.
She told the chair yesterday that she's now going to move to the big city to join her husband, but it's not going to be a big deal - except for committee work, faculty meetings, etc. The chair wants to assuage the hire and give her the odd schedule, but a few of us in the department are grumbling. I wanted to go all detective style on it and find out how long the husband had been working in the big city, was it all a hiring ruse, etc.? (We are not a social department, and a sort of large one, so we don't often see spouses at all.)
She's tenure-track, and got 3 years of her 7 year clock lopped off for her experience elsewhere. She seems like a diligent teacher, and I like her personally, but I'm getting some bitterness about her being on the verge of being on-call for us 2 days a week with no possibility of being around for the day-to-day work of a full time person.
Q: Should I be bugged by this? Is it a portent of a new search committee? Has anyone ever seen this happen? What would you do if it happened in your department?
It doesn't bode well. You probably will be forming another search committee in a year or two, but all you can do for now is let it all happen. I suspect she'll fail to satisfy her contractual obligations; what are the office hour requirements, for example?
ReplyDeleteAs for investigating her husband or "sabbaticals", you're triggering lots of red flags, alarm bells, warning lights, and other cliched potents of a whopping EEOC violation. Drop it. Where her husband lives and what she did before the hire are not relevant. Only her current performance counts.
Not that it's any of your business, but as a frequently moving trailing spouse, she could have chosen to spend a year here and there just writing rather than endure the misery of adjuncthood. She could have been taking a maternity leave between jobs, or caring for a sick parent, or focusing on fertility treatments and miscarriages, or enduring chemotherapy. Even if she spent a year binge-viewing "Ernest" movies and shining her lava lamp, what does it matter?
Ernest movies. That brings back some memories.
DeletePG, you're the best.
I can't help thinking that "shining the lava lamp" should have an entry on Urban Dictionary.
DeleteI think the only "hiring ruse" you could have considered would have been one that involved her performance or qualifications. Technically you shouldn't have been discussing her husband. OK, well, let me backpedal a bit. She introduced the husband into evidence as the reason why she had moved around so much; that could be because it was true, or she was aware enough about how the moves would appear to you that she made it up. So it was OK to be talking about the husband as you did, but that doesn't make it OK to base a decision to terminate her on his job situation. So you should be specific about what you would do with the information about him before you seek it. You might decide it's not worth the effort to seek; you already have enough smoke to deduce that there may be a fire, but you'll still have to wait for the actual flames. So I agree with Proffie Galore that the focus should be on her current performance, but propose that anything she faked about her past on-the-job performance is fair game.
ReplyDeleteI also think that "sabbatical" as she used it is a rough equivalent of "between opportunities" but with the implication that some reasonable fraction of the time was used for professional growth. I kind of like it.
Vance, I'd be pissed off too but none of this matters now. Your school had it's chance to not hire her based on her previous work experience. Now you are stuck with her until she leaves or she doesn't get tenure. For the latter, she should be evaluated just as all other faculty are. If she's getting out of committee meetings but doing other service work at home then there's no problem (other than she is getting a favor to perform her choice of service). Tenure likely comes down to teaching and research. If she's doing those well then who cares where she lives?
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ReplyDeleteWe have retention reviews every year for assistant professors, including a faculty vote. Ordinarily it's a pro forma admininuisance, but I think if we had somebody who only showed up twice a week, the number of `no' votes would be large enough to trigger a talk from the dept head to the effect that `your tenure is at risk'.
DeleteEven if you don't have this process, if enough of your colleagues "share your concerns" (hate that phrase) with the dept Chair, the message "your tenure is at risk" would be conveyed to her. And then just wait four years (which she will use to look for a job in the big city, of course)
(Sorry, editing typos a la Frod)
Service is usually considered a perfunctory category in retention and tenure decisions, but it's there for a reason: if you just need someone to teach a few classes at odd hours, and not be part of the departmental decision-making, curriculum, policy process, you could hire part-timers.
ReplyDeleteThat said, why not try to include this person by skype and email? If they really want to be part of the department, they should be willing to participate, put in the time and energy.
For what it's worth we reportedly (I got this second hand, but it was *only* second hand) had a case at a previous institution where someone took the job, but demanded a similarly compressed schedule so they could also do the job they'd taken elsewhere. They apparently got two offers and decided that they couldn't decide, so kept both until they could make a decision. Double-salary wasn't that great, honestly, because travel costs would have eaten up at least one of them. Discovered eventually, lost both jobs.
Good God, Vance. Your new hire is very SPESHUL. Why can't you realize that and get on board?
ReplyDelete*coffee snort*
DeleteI agree with others above: it's too late to revisit the hiring process and whether there was any deception involved (except to reflect that it's too bad that your experience with her may end up prejudicing you against other candidates with two-body problems and/or complicated work/family histories/situations; she's doing others in parallel situations a disservice), but it's not too late to expect her to either do her job or resign if she can't -- though I doubt it would be a good idea to put it quite that starkly; you probably have to stop at the "do your job" (with no more flexibility than others receive) part.
ReplyDeleteMy department has had a fair number of members with long-distance marriages/relationships and similar complications. I'm not privy to all the ins and outs of how tenure-track faculty have handled the situation, but it's my impression that faculty members with distant or dual home bases arranged* their living situations so as to make themselves available as many days a week as the average department member of their rank, and stayed longer than usual in our university's city when a normal work obligation (e.g. participation in a search) required. I'd certainly expect someone who was going up for tenure soon to be bending over backward to demonstrate that the living situation was not a problem (or not even mentioning it at work, at least not any more than necessary).
*While we probably have a few faculty members who meet this description now, there's a reason I use the past tense: faculty in this situation probably do have a higher-than-average tendency to leave, usually at least in part to live full-time with their spouse. That tendency is probably increased by the fact that, although our university is pretty aggressive about spousal hiring (and we're in an area with a good selection of non-academic jobs and relatively low unemployment), our TT salaries are low in relation to the local cost of living, which is very high (this problem is, of course, even worse for contingent faculty, but that's not who we're talking about right now). Add up all the various vectors representing the pressures on a faculty member with a two-body problem, and that person often ends up elsewhere.
I was really intrigued by this when it came in. I almost wanted to ask some followups, but perhaps Vance will address some things that have come up.
ReplyDeleteIn my own reading of this, I'm sure the hire lied her ass off to explain her moving around. I'm guessing the ruse worked, the husband always had his intentions of the relocation, and now the hire is pushing the department chair around to get as much freedom as she might.
Are we sure we shouldn't care where our colleagues live? 50 miles away? 200? Doesn't it seem more likely that Vance will get caught up doing department things and the hire won't? If they have to wait 4 years to dump her, what will have been the cost?
I know of several universities in the UK which have 'distance rules' - you are required to live within x miles of the city. This is generally ignored UNLESS a person starts missing too many things (a colleague who always got snowed in for weeks at a time when everyone else was 2 hours late on the snow day then back to normal comes to mind)...
DeleteThis really seems like the chair's responsibility to me. It's not surprising that someone might ask for a two-day schedule. The problem is that the chair is trying to take the path of least resistance instead of instituting some kind of equitable policy. As Deming (might have) said, 90% of quality problems are management's fault.
ReplyDeleteWe have to deal with that sort of thing in our department - fellow dept members generally try to accommodate this sort of thing, but the resentment builds when the away-from-campus prof seriously strains and stretches out the timeline of a committee's work because only very occasional dates are convenient for them.
ReplyDelete@Beaker Ben (because my stupid computer won't let me reply above): Credit goes to Weird Al. I was misquoting "Calling In Sick":
ReplyDelete"I could shine my pennies or clean my lava lamp;
I could spend all day in my underwear watching 'Ernest Goes to Camp.' "
This only increases my respect for you, PG.
DeleteThanks, Kate!
ReplyDelete