Chad has an interesting post explaining the timescale of a faculty search at his college. One of the rate-determining steps he notes in the process is the posting of the job (and its deadline for applications):
So, why does it take so long? Well, to start with, you need to post the job and set the deadline so as to obtain a reasonable pool of applicants. Academic job-hunting season traditionally begins in September or thereabouts, so jobs tend to be advertised on major academic sites during September, October, and November. If you post the ad and set the deadline too early, you won’t get many good applicants, because people don’t really start looking before the fall, but if you do things too late, you end up picking from the people who are left over after everybody else has made their offers. We went with December 1 as our deadline, which is maybe a little on the early side, but not ridiculously so.
In my experience (having been on two search committees), there are some other time consuming steps that precede the posting of the job:
- Establishing departmental consensus on what area of specialization (AOS) and area of competence (AOC) you’re looking for. This seems like it should be straightforward, but it involves taking into account not only the current make-up and teaching needs of your department (e.g., there’s only one guy who can teach X, which we offer every semester), but also the likely future needs and faculty make-up. There are some courses we try to offer simply because every self-respecting philosophy department ought to offer them. There are other courses that we regularly offer which are fed by other majors (like Computer Science) whose enrollment decreases and increases are tied to the economy. We want to build a department with a wide range of research interests, but we don’t want to set up a situation where people are pursuing projects so different from the rest of the faculty that they feel like they don’t have anyone to talk to (or be mentored by). And, we have to take into account which of our areas of expertise are tied to faculty who will likely retire in the next n years. Trust me, these discussions can take a long time.
- Persuading the Dean to approve your search for the AOS and AOC the department has agreed it needs. At least at my public university, the Dean is charged with watching the bottom line for the College. (The University contains a number of Colleges. My philosophy department is in the College of Humanities and Arts.) The department needs to make the case that a new hire in this area will not only be good for the departments (and especially, will help the department meet or exceed enrollment targets), but good for the College (which also must meet or exceed enrollment targets to keep the funds coming in).
- Getting official university approval for the search plan and the precise wording of the job listing. Shuffling papers usually takes longer than you expect it will.
Our goal is to get through these steps in time to get our job listing in the first Fall edition of Jobs for Philosophers, the publication that pretty much everyone on the philosophy job market consults to see where the jobs are. (We also post it a bunch of other places, but JFP is crucial.) Often, we miss the first one and don’t get our post in until the second one.
The timing is important, since we need to set an application deadline that lets us get through all the files and come up with a “long list” of candidates we want to talk to at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Like the Modern Language Association convention, the Eastern APA falls at the end of December, so you need to be able to contact candidates on your “long list” to arrange appointments with them at the APA before they leave town to be with their families for the holidays, and before their APA dance-cards are already full. These “convention interviews” (in our search, officially, they are “exploratory discussions” since we can only afford to send a subset of the full search committee to the convention) are a step that is not (as far as I can tell) typically in faculty searches in the sciences. Some people have speculated that convention interviews provide noise rather than useful information about candidates that couldn’t be discerned from their cover letters, transcripts, CVs, writing samples, teaching portfolios, and letters of recommendation. My hunch is that they do tell us something beyond who interviews well. In any case, most of us conduct them.
After the APA, the search committee tries to get together as soon as possible to narrow down the “long list” to a “short list” (for us, five is about the maximum we can afford to fly out and put up for campus interviews). This is often complicated by the fact that we have a longish break between semesters (Spring semester doesn’t start until the fourth week of January) during which faculty members like to travel, and our search committee usually includes all of our tenured and tenure-track faculty. (Why? Because the department is trying to choose someone who we’ll have with us for their whole academic life. “You’ll essentially be married to them,” as one of my senior colleagues put it.) But, since candidate visits cause significant disruption to the normal patterns of the term — you’re scheduling each candidate for a job talk, a teaching demo, an interview with the search committee, a meeting with the Dean, a lunch with the students, a campus tour, and a dinner with people from the department — and because you don’t want the people on your short list to get hired out from under you by other schools who are searching, you want to get them scheduled with the candidates for early in the term.
Of course, you can’t make a decision about who you want to hire until you’ve had all the candidates on campus. Then, you have another long talk with the whole search committee, trying to come to agreement about who will be the best fit with the department at its present state and into the future. Even among a group of people who are basically on the same page, it’s hard to come to consensus.
But again, we don’t want our short list to all be hired by the time we’ve achieved consensus, so we usually have a really long meeting from which no one is allowed to leave until we’re all happy with the agreement. We then get our result (who we want to hire, who our next choice is to hire, etc.) approved by the Dean, and then we can make the call.
Since the candidates are given some time to respond to the offer (typically a couple weeks), we may encounter situations where we don’t know whether we’ll have to go down the list — and whether, by the time we get to the next candidate, he or she will have already accepted an offer from somewhere else. If you’re lucky, your first choice has your department as his or her first choice and you can seal the deal quickly.
It’s probably not the most efficient system in the world, and part of that is due to bureaucracy. However, part of it is because the search committee is really sweating to do a good job. After all, when we find someone who’s a good fit for this place — who will flourish here and be a good colleague — we don’t have to search again for a while!
This explains why my med school is going nuts filling academic faculty and department head positions right now. (although the med school AY actually starts in July, so at some level it’s actually a bit late in the game)
Philosophy and Physics are probably the exceptions to the rule. In life sciences, the rule is much simpler where faculty searches are concerned: the richest candidate (with the fattest grant) is the top candidate. To find this one takes time since some times you have to change the AOS or AOC or if all candidates who apply have either a skinny grant or no grant. The brains, the science, the ideas, all these are much less important than the mighty Dollar.
the comment on hiring life sciences – this would imply that most postdocs need to already have substantial grants to be hired as assistant professors. Is this really the case? In my limited experience, it is relatively rare for postdocs to be listed as PI on major grants.
I agree that the process of getting approval to begin the hiring process can take much longer than the hiring process itself. Some departments fight for years to get permission to make a tenure-track hire.
The question I was really trying to answer was “Why does it take so long?” from the candidate side, and all that stuff is essentially invisible to the people applying for the job.
What you describe is also a good deal more bureaucratic than what goes on here, but that’s probably the difference between a small private college and a large public university. Ditto the grant thing mentioned in comments– we’re a small college, we’re not just about the research funding.
the comment on hiring life sciences – this would imply that most postdocs need to already have substantial grants to be hired as assistant professors. Is this really the case? In my limited experience, it is relatively rare for postdocs to be listed as PI on major grants.
Depends on the school. If you’re at a tier 1 research university, then yes, you can pretty much “follow the money.” However, given how few people are getting funded lately (especially junior scientists), all those at universities and colleges lower on the pecking order may not have that ability. Makes for a bit of a disconnect with the administration at times though. Administrators are all about the money, quite often, and many administrators aren’t catching on that funding is getting scarcer and scarcer, which is leading to real stress for those who are junior faculty and are pretty much required by their administration to bring in grants for tenure. But I digress…
When we hire at the Assistant Professor level we’re only looking at Postdocs. They don’t have grants so that’s never a factor in hiring.
In our case (University of Toronto) we usually have five candidates on the short list and it’s rare that their first visits can be scheduled in less than a month. (They stay for several days and we don’t want overlap.) The top candidate is brought back for a second visit.
Final negotiations often take more than a month because most of our candidates have more than one offer and there’s a lot of back and forth as they try to get the best deal.
Hmm, I really am fascinated by claims that many postdoc applicants in life sciences have independent grants. At least in physics and biophysics this is not the case (unless we are talking about extended 2nd or 3rd postdoc position).
NIH website claims that average age of the receipient of the first NIH grant is: “42 for PhD degree holders and 44 for MD and MD/PhD degree holders”. Most applicants for assistant-faculty positions in my field are in their late 20ies, or very early 30ies. Something doesn’t add up, can people shed more light on this issue? Are postdocs in biology really have to write up NIH proposals for grants fresh out of PhD so they can get a future job? Considering how time consuming grant writing is, their scientific output must suffer as a result, no?
All tier 1 and wannabe tier 1 universities will not hire a candidate for an assistant professor position (ex-postdoc) unless he/she has a grant funded. This is why so many are postdocs for life (4-6 years) with no end in sight for their slavery. Funds are not getting scarce, they simply being funneled to a smaller number of beneficiaries who shape science today for its immediate practical uses (for profit), not simply for new knowledge and discovery. Assuming that we can predict the benefits of new knowledge before it’s discovery and bet most of our federal research funds on it is the most dangerous turn that our scientific approach has taken over the past 25 years.
S. Rivlin asserts
“In life sciences, the rule is much simpler where faculty searches are concerned: the richest candidate (with the fattest grant) is the top candidate.”
and
“All tier 1 and wannabe tier 1 universities will not hire a candidate for an assistant professor position (ex-postdoc)
unless he/she has a grant funded.”
These claims are just plain false. I’m a tenured professor in a biology department at a top-20 research institution, I’ve sat on a dozen faculty search committees, and I’ve seen nothing like what is described above. With very few exceptions, the assistant professors we have hired out of postdoc positions have come without research grants. The level of associate professor with tenure, we would expect a research grant – but these people are a very different career stage.
As for the top candidate being the richest candidate, this is utter nonsense. The top candidate is neither the richest one nor the one who we expect to generate the most research funding. The top candidate is the one whose research gets us the most excited, and who potential for dynamic collaboration within the department. Even a scant familiarly with the search procedures of research universities would make it obvious that he “richest is top” claim is false — while bean-counters may decide what units are allowed to hire, it’s not the bean-counters who make the actual choice of who to hire, it is the faculty who compose the department which is hiring.
Mr. Rivlin, while I somewhat agree with the sentiment that seems to underly aspects of these posts — namely, that the funding system plays too great a role in steering life sciences research in the US — it’s a great disservice to simply make up and assert false “facts” such as those above. I feel sorry for a graduate student or postdoc who reads your confident assertions and perhaps is discouraged by them, instead of seeing them for the nonsense that they are.
-Crow
“All tier 1 and wannabe tier 1 universities will not hire a candidate for an assistant professor position (ex-postdoc) unless he/she has a grant funded.”
As Crow correctly points out, this claim by Rivlin and most of his others about entry-level (i.e., assistant professor) faculty searches in the biological and biomedical sciences are totally false.
There is *no* expectation that a post-doc transitioning into her first faculty position will have any funding, either federal or private.
There are some sources of funding for late-stage post-docs that overlap into the beginning of the first independent faculty position–e.g., certain NIH K awards, Burroughs-Wellcome career awards, and a few others. Any candidate that has one of these is of course looked upon favorably, most importantly because of the prestige, but perhaps also to some extent because of the cash. But these awards are very rare, and having one is absolutely *not* required to secure a first independent tenure-track faculty position in the biological/biomedical sciences at even the most prestigious of “Tier 1” research universities.
I know this both because of my own job search, and through serving on search committees after coming on faculty at such a university.
With all due respect to Crow and Physioprof, I would wait until some disillisioned postdocs say their word on the issue here before responding to the “all false” accusations.