Apropos of nothing, some advice for my academic friends who do or may have to negotiate a faculty position, either on the giving or receiving side. It probably applies well beyond academia, but I see the same disappointments year after year in the university. So much dissatisfaction among newly hired junior faculty (and the chairs who have to manage them) comes from failing to secure a meeting of minds between the parties. And from stirring the pot of dissatisfaction.

If you are considering an offer, you have to ask very specifically for anything you really want or need. If you can’t get it all, you have to choose to move forward knowing what you will and won’t have. The things you want may or may not be reasonable, but the things you can get are the things you can negotiate. Once you take a post, you’re also committing to working under the conditions you negotiated. Those conditions will probably be unfavorable in some way, because negotiation is a process of compromise. If you really can’t compromise on something, you’ll either have to make that requirement clear or be prepared to decline in light of it.

If you are making an offer, you have to make very clear what you can and cannot provide, particularly if you know that some aspect of this is likely to pose a problem in the long run. Discover what a candidate really needs, and comment directly upon how you can or cannot accommodate those needs. If something extenuating factors into the offer (a spousal hire, the absense of other offers, etc.), make it clear that those factors are contributing to the package. Otherwise the faculty member will start dissatisfied, and that feeling will never go away (whether it is reasonable or not).

If you are a colleague of a new (or an experienced!) faculty member, don’t stir the pot by mixing in your own long-steeped feelings of injustice once a new faculty member comes on board. Instead, help them determine how to accomplish the goals that are really their purpose, how to realize the means to accomplish them that they feel they need, or how to let go of those those feelings if they might be unnecessary. It’s always possible to go back to the well after success, but some things don’t come out of wells, and continued visits to the same dry aquifer lead only to bitterness.

Seems like pretty straightforward advice; there’s no real wisdom here, just patterns of experience. But for some reason, mismatches in expectations and reality seem pervasive. And yes, before you object, I do realize the academic job market is fucked up, but even so, what you can get is what you can negotiate.

published August 10, 2013

Comments

  1. Nathan Gale

    Thanks for this, Ian! I’ll be on the job market this Fall and am trying to gather as much advice as possible. Any specific suggestions on negotiating spousal hires?