Aha, thanks.
Can you please discuss for 8 more pages whether or not using the abbreviation TT was an affront to the English language?
Only 8? These are academics, after all!
Is it possible the college was looking for a teacher who could start in 2014 to handle 4 classes?
Gosh, you know, you just might be on to something there!
I’m sure it was. And I can actually live with that! 
I want to get something clarified here to make sure I’m not misunderstanding the context. I’m in real estate sales, I’m not an academic, but it is my understanding that college level tenure track, professorial positions in Philosophy (teaching or research) are among the rarest beasts you will ever see offered in the modern academic environment, and that there is a super abundance of qualified applicants for any of these positions. In this scenario a newly minted PhD would have almost zero leverage in negotiating anything with respect to a tenure track position being proffered.
In certain circumstances in negotiating anything there are times you just take the deal and say “thank you”. This would seem to be one of those circumstances.
Is my understanding of the relative power positions of the college and the applicant in this scenario correct or not?
That is my understanding. Which is why I am simply flabbergasted at the way she handled this.
There is more to the story. It is the case that every job has a large number of qualified applicants. But that does not mean that each of the applicants is necessarily interchangeable with one another. Search committees are not just looking for a body to fill a spot. Hiring is done by committee, so it may not be the case that a set of equally qualified candidates would all receive the same support from that committee. Alternative candidates may not have the right specializations, they may be qualified but are unable to fill a particular niche, and most importantly, the search committee may not like then enough to want to hire them fir life. Committees get so many applicants that they can afford to be very selective. Any one of a number of intangibles might turn a member of the committee off enough that he might rather try searching again in the following year than making a substandard hire.
It is true that there are lots of qualified candidates for every position, but the fact that a department makes an offer at all also sends a pretty strong signal that a particular candidate is wanted. If they want you, they may really want you. Of course no department has any incentive to disclose this to a junior person who probably doesn’t know how much she is worth.
In retrospect I realize that there may be cultural differences here. Melchior is apparently from the UK, which has succeeded in dismantling its higher education system and its professoriate with even greater speed and vigor than the United States, mirabile dictu.
Sorry if this was already posted, but here are W’s own follow-up comments. She says the raise was small, the maternity leave had already been verbally assured, that she was excited about teaching, not research, and asked for leave etc to make it easier to ramp up into a teaching-intensive job, and that she’d negotiated like this before, successfully, in both academic and non-academic settings.
She also says the moralizing responses are off-base, and I agree. This should be a purely pragmatic question. Character judgments have no place here IMO.
In that case, I think her mistake may have been “switching to a negotiating tone.” She gave them warning, apparently, but if she was sending friendly, and presumably less formal sounding emails it may have been a bit of a wtf moment when that happened, even with prior warning. I don’t think it’s usually good to “switch tones” when dealing with the same people. Granted I haven’t seen the earlier emails so they may have not had as wildly different tone as she’s making it sounds like.
I also feel like she should have done some “as you knows” in the negotiating email. Rather than listing “maternity leave” in the demands, it would have probably been a bit softer and sounded less demanding to say “I’d like the informal offer of potential maternity leave we had previously discussed formalized.” I also would have laid out reasoning for the lower course load. Even if it had been given previously, I think it would have been much better to just say in the negotiation email itself “I’d like no more than 3 new course preps per year for the first three years so that I can focus on preparing better for courses I am more unfamiliar with. I believe this to be for both the students’ benefit and my own.”
Except that W’s publicizing of the college’s response is mainly about moralizing… It’s at least in part an attempt to shame them.
Missed edit: not that maternity leave sounds demanding. I frankly find it kind of wtf that it’s not a given. I just feel the entire email could have done with a little more explanation and a little less terseness. Less of a “I’d like these things” and more of a “I’d like these things and here’s why.” She did that for the salary, I’m not sure why she stopped after that point. Granted I am in no way a master negotiator and do, in fact, have problems with overexplaining myself into a hole.
That doesn’t seem obvious to me. She emailed the story to a blogger whose blog is focused on the ins and outs of the Philosophy job market. The message, the overt one anyway, wasn’t “look at these jerks” but “watch out, this may happen to you.”
Then there would have been no need to name the college.
Flippant. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, the University did it. I think it’s really that simple.
Maternity leave is not a given. In a previous position, I was told informally that the policy was 12 weeks of maternity leave at full pay. I was pretty pleased, as I was expecting at the time. There were several expecting ladies in the office, and we were all so happy with our organizations generous policy.
Several months later, when I let my work know I was expecting, I learned that only employees with a year of seniority were eligible for maternity leave, the year and a half of full-time consulting I had before did not count, and I was left with disability, sick leave, and vacation time. Furthermore, FMLA only kicks in after a year.
So while my friends went on their 12 weeks at full pay, I spent nine months without a day of vacation or sick leave, working crazy hours so that I could avoid taking leave for my doctors appointments, and I took a pretty strong financial hit as I had several weeks with no pay, and I returned to the office shortly after giving birth and had to pay more for child care.
If I had thought to get it in writing (I was terrified to let them know I was pregnant, so I stupidly avoided the issue), I am sure I could have leveraged the fact that I’d worked for them full time for more than a year to get an exception to the wait period (as they had made other exceptions as well). But I didn’t, and I missed out.
Of course, maternity leave is one of those things that is impossible to negotiate, as you get scared that if they think you might get pregnant, they might do something like revoke your offer.
I know intellectually that it’s not standard in the US, I’ve heard enough people gripe about it. I just… can’t… fathom… why it’s not. I don’t get it. I really feel that it should be standard to the degree of “there should be a law.” Like, I can’t fathom not offering it from any ethical or practical standpoint. I mean, maybe you’ll get yourself into a hole where 98% of your staff are women and they all get knocked up at once or… something… but barring that ridiculous scenario it’s just dumb.
To play a bit of a Devil’s Advocate, your proposal would create a perverse incentive. If I am a small business with one female employee, my workforce is 100% female. If she is young and fertile, I might look elsewhere for help if the law requires too much of me with regards to her reproductive choices. And it is a choice, right?
At what point does someone else have to subsidize that choice? I know that child rearing is sacrosanct, but what else approaches it? Caring for a sick relative? A troubled adolescent? What else should government mandate that an employer do?
I’m not unsympathetic to expectant mothers, because I have been close to one in my life. I’m just worried as to how far your proposal might reach.
The key to responding too that problem is to give father paid paternity leave of the same duration