This mornings top story on Above the Law (a blog aimed at recent law grads in the BigLaw world) is about a male student who had his summer internship offer revoked for trying to negotiate from a position with poor/nonexistent leverage. He asked for compensation for commuting expenses, and 2 weeks off to do another internship. They said, “you know, you’re not a good fit for our organization. Scram.”
I get that you would not want this job, but the bigger question to me is, would you have applied for it? Or would those have been deal-breakers from the beginning?
W did apply for this one, so we can conclude that the idea of moving to Rochester was not completely out of the question. If W did any homework about the school at all, we can conclude that the idea of doing a lot of teaching didn’t seem completely out of the question either. Knowing these things, W went ahead and applied. Would you have done that?
I think it’s entirely possible that W wasn’t really all that interested in the position, either at first or after interviewing. But W was interested enough to apply, and wasn’t so turned off by Nazareth as to reject their offer altogether. And I guess I’m not sure why the withdrawal of the job offer was so bothersome to W if the job was really that undesirable to her.
*I mentioned this in another thread: I have a cousin in academia whose career has taken quite a hit in large part because he has decided to limit himself to one particular geographic region, excluding enormous numbers of colleges from his search because they aren’t where he wants to live. Partly as a result he’s nearing 40 and just beginning a TT position (at a school that even after that isn’t really where he wants to be). Part of me respects this, and part of me thinks he’s crazy. But you can’t accuse him of not being clear about what he wants…
Nope. That’s why she’s not there. She didn’t follow proper etiquette.
Moreover, since Nazareth can’t confirm or deny anything about this story - stating their name doesn’t make it any more or less real. She could have taken screen shots of the emails and blanked out the school’s name.
You’re more devious than I am! 
But yes, absolutely.
I will ask you for a third time- what is the basis of your experience in this area that you can make such pronouncements, especially in conflict to people who actually do this for a living?
You actually think she’s not there because of a breach of etiquette? That’s actually almost insulting.
It’s actually the *most likely *cause. People need to understand that they are dealing with a most conservative kind of employment here. The highest standards are applied to positions of this sort. Consider the parents of college-age kids. Whom do you want teaching *your *daughter?
Good grief.
Who did I want teaching my daughter (the 2013 college grad)? I’ll tell you. Someone knowledgeable in the subject area. Someone able to inspire. Someone fair-minded. Someone who can make dry topics interesting rather than the other way around. Someone available and accessible to students. Someone who would accept that my daughter had some learning issues and work with her on that. Probably a couple of other things I can’t think of at the moment.
You know what, though? An understanding of “etiquette” doesn’t even BEGIN to enter into it.
Melchior, in my experience, academics as a group, especially in the humanities, are pretty laid back.
Maybe later, but not in this sort of situation.
Right. What I’m asking is why this kind of thing should be counted as “unprofessional” in general.
What is wrong with this? What general principle recommends that an individual seeking employment should not be able to do anything the potential employer is not allowed to do? Or is that not the general principle you’re relying on?
Here you’re giving practical reasons why she shouldn’t have done it, but I was meaning to ask, not what was wrong with her doing it, but rather, why we should regard her action as of a type we generally shouldn’t allow. In other words, why regard her “outing” of the university as a piece of wrongdoing, instead of thinking of it as a matter-of-course natural response to a university’s own wrongdoing?
Probably my prior response applies here too.
Academics are hardly the white-haired professorial people you seem to think they are. Even my my esteemed professor, who was at the Cavendish labs with Watson and Crick and insisted on tea every afternoon, was laid back and collegial, and that was with undergrads. Science folks are very laid back as well as humanities folks- I don’t remember the last time we wore something other than jeans, especially on days we’d be in the lab a lot (teaching or research). Remember- we stayed in academia because we didn’t want to deal with the corporate world!
But hey, what do I know… I only do this for a living…
And to answer your question- the Professors I want teaching my children are ones who are passionate about their subject area, stay up to date and care about communicating it well to the students, and are at the type of institution that fits them best.
And with that I’m done. You have little interest in hearing from anyone that sees things from a different perspective than your own, or hearing from people that have different professional expertise. If we were posting in a thread about doing translations and I countered everything you said with absolute certainty, and you were telling me I wasn’t right, and I doggedly instated I was, despite having no experience in the area, wouldn’t that be frustrating?
How you deal with the hiring process is an indication of many things: personality, character, how much you care, etc. She showed a lack of seriousness about the whole thing by her flippant message.
The bulleted list was poor, sending via email is fine.
I just watched my spouse negotiate her way for a full professorship with an endowed chair via email - nobody mailed anything. In addition, the offer (and counter offer from her current school) came via email as well.
Nothing wrong with form - it was the content.
Congrats to your wife! That is no small accomplishment!
The content of the email was fine as well, for another type of institution.
She would have taken more time and care with a paper document, and it would have showed.
This is absolutely right. When you have a list of pie-in-the-sky things that you’d like but don’t necessarily expect to get, a phone call lets you talk about them one at a time and gauge the institution’s response to each item. Maybe there’s no room to move on the base salary, but there’s summer funding available from the department to teach an independent study or to attend a conference. Maybe the pre-tenure sabbatical request leads to a discussion of how important it is to have this person teaching every semester - then a smart candidate doesn’t ask for a delayed start, but focuses on limiting new preps so she can do a better job with the classes she’s got. Negotiations are a give and take, and it’s a lot easier to know where you stand when you can gauge your counterpart’s reactions in real-time.
I’m not W, obviously, but I am a post-doc in the sciences and I can answer this for an equivalent job in my own field. It’s not an attractive job to me, but a year ago I would have applied for it. Right now I’m in a relatively secure and well-funded position, so if it came up now, I wouldn’t apply. In two years, my secure funding runs out - a year from now (assuming nothing’s changed with my current position), I’ll apply for jobs like the one at Nazareth again. It’s just a fact of life, given the uncertainty of the market, to apply for anything that’s going to let you pay the bills for the next few years.
Whether I’d take the job is a different question, and it would depend largely on other options. But damn near every academic these days has applied for jobs they’re not all that interested in.
ETA:
Yeah, that’s really great!
Good point, my bad. Three per semester seems reasonable; three per year quite a bit less so.
Then you see entitlement because you want to, not because it’s there. Read it again. She clearly does not expect to get even most of what she’s asking for, and makes it quite clear that she’s willing to negotiate.
No matter how many times you say it, you don’t get any less wrong. If you were responsible for hiring and let people go based on your reasons, you’d let a lot of great candidates slip away.
But go ahead, keep repeating it. Just keep in mind it says more about you than about what you’re talking about.
I’d say “concise”.
I worry about people who are too easily insulted.
Not only was she not hired, she was fired *before *she was hired. Doesn’t that say something?
Thanks all!