One other thing his diatribe doens’t seem to be aware of: the freeze on jobs from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. If these folks are in their 50s, that meanst that they would have finished grad school 20-25 years ago, in the midst of that massive job ice age. It seems to me that those of us who benefited from better job search years (the late 1990s and early 2000s were sweet, my friends!) owe people of that “lost generation” even more respect. They’re the survivors of an even more brutally darwinian job market.

We’re not worthy.

As to why people stay in a job, it seems obvious… because they are so hard to get! Lateral or upward movement is a near impossibility. I personally know of only one person who managed to write and publish her/his way out of “hole in the wall U” in the South East and into a prestigious tenure track job. Sure, I entertain vague fantasies of moving from the 4/4 teaching job I hold now into a 2/2 at ‘distant research one University’ but its not gonna happen. Please compare this with the job mobility experiences of Doctors, Lawyers and computer engineers.

Ambition is relative. My ambition is to try and publish some worthwhile articles that will advance the work in my cranky, parochial, subfield. I also want to be a superior teacher, so my students learn and retain more. Other people want to get out there and publish those monographs. More power to them.

Good point about the leadership–senior faculty (or “dead wood” according to the Diaper Daves) are enormously influential, and they shouldn’t ignore that fact. They set the tone–for good or for ill–and Indyanna’s comment (and long-suffering experience!) makes it clear how important they are.

So, JJO, do you think Dave is a joke? It sounds like you might be leaning my way on this.

One of the major aspects of that sanity was the leadership of senior colleagues on job searches, who always reiterated that we “don’t play God” — that is, we can’t know everyone’s motivation or long term plans, so the best we can do for us and for them is to judge them fairly by their academic work and credentials, what they tell us about their goals and desires, and what their performance in interviews/campus visits suggests about their potential as a scholar and colleague. In general this has served us really, really well, resulting in several hires of people in odd situations (a tenured prof at a SLAC applying for a tenure track job with us, e.g.) that worked out fabulously.

Of course there’s always speculation about candidates’ personal lives and their long-term plans — just as candidates imagine what it would be like to work and live somewhere, department members imagine what it would be like to have this person as a colleague, potential friend, and member of a community. But letting that (often inaccurate) speculation guide your hiring seems deeply counterproductive, and I think (hope) we’ve been good about understanding the distinction there.

That said, sometimes a cigar is really a cigar, and a lack of some sort of overt signs of ambition would be pretty unnerving to a candidate. When a cohort of people simultaneously cave to the norm of institutional expectations about “not being a research-U” it’s not good for them, and a bad example for recruits. When I arrived for an on-campus visit some years back the search chair met my airport van. After asking if I had $5 to tip the van driver, as he hadn’t gotten to an ATM that Sunday!!, he walked me toward the on-campus No-tel room they used to put up candidates. He said “I just published a thin little book” (it *was* thin), but, sigh, “you’ll get tired fast with the teaching load here.” He was not wrong about that, and I did get the $5 back, but the hunger for print seems to grow with the years. There are ways of juggling obstacle and opportunity.

Historiann’s broaching of the ageism question offers an opportunity to note that the AHA has just “momentarily unretired” (an odd, and I thought unfortunate, figure of speech) its 12-year old condemnation of age discrimination in hiring. I’m heading up in the general direction of their meeting tomorrow to see what’s going on. But not going near the job bin. I’ll file a report if anything eggregiously or unseemly interesting seems to be afoot.

It’s the hiring department’s job to make itself appealing to job candidates, and to make it a good place for people to stay and build their careers. “Build it, and they will come,” and many will stay!

Nor can this be separated from the sexism married women in particular face. My wife was also asked about her husband at multiple on-campus interviews, and was told straight out by a search committee member at another school that she was eliminated from the pool because they knew she was married to me and that my career would always come first. So they skipped past the part of asking her about the spouse, and went straight to inviting her in for a meaningless job talk. You can imagine how thrilling it was when I heard that story.

Candidates don’t know why search committee members stay at jobs; neither do search committees know why candidates are considering leaving. I have been astonished at the number of times I have heard members of my own department try to factor a candidate’s personal life into the equation when we talk about whom we should hire. (And yes, they do this more often with women–surprise!) I don’t know why anyone should assume they *really* know what’s going on in someone else’s life.