Well yeah. But at that point, I was hired. I had already told my other offers “thanks but no thanks.” I got some sincere apologies (it was an honest mistake), but at that point, what am I going to do?
Yeah, I thought I (and others) answered that question way back on page 1 of the thread.
Things like vacations, maternity leave, sick leave, sabbaticals are usually in policy set by the university as a whole and by law. She could have asked someone else some of this stuff.
I guess that’s a typical problem with large threads. My bad.
So why is this thread still going?
Someone in another thread related to academia brought up spousal hires. Some people, as part of their negotiations for an academic job will say, “My spouse is also an academic. What do you have for them?” In some cases, the hiring university will make hiring the spouse part of the employment package. This is complicated, because it typically involves multiple departments within the university. Like other aspects of the labor market in academia, I gather that this is increasingly rare, but it’s certainly not unheard of.
Makes asking for a semester of maternity sound like small potatoes, no?
As my previous post demonstrates, no request is small potatoes when you are in a position of zero bargaining power. You can only negotiate when you aren’t fungible with 1,000 other candidates.
In case you’re too lazy to scroll up, in that incident, a male law student gets a prestigious paid internship offer, which is rescinded when he requests compensation ($100 or so per month) for commuting costs, and 2 weeks to complete another internship. The firm informs him he is not a good fit for their culture and revokes the offer.
Note: Since these internships usually pay about 50 grand for the summer, the commuting cost was a trivial sum to the firm.
Or better yet, do a little research on her own.
Precisely.
Emphasis mine.
Like so many other posts here, this one misses the concept of negotiation. If the intern had zero bargaining power then the firm could simply had said no dice, take it or leave it. It has nothing to do with “fit”, that’s merely the official, legal, HR, response when declining someone for a position.
But they didn’t WANT to say take it or leave it, they said, you obviously don’t fit our culture, scram. And that’s because he cluelessly acted like he was something to them, rather than the lucky one picked essentially at random from 1,000 qualified applicants happy to take what they offer.
I doubt very much that this philosophy department had as part of its essential criteria an applicant who displayed the characteristics of knowing that she was a worthless, undeserving piece of common filth who should be do lucky as to crawl on her knees and kiss their feet and then happily present her posterior to be abused and misused however so their lordly selves saw fit.
'Cause if that’s the case, then THAT ITSELF would be a valid reason to criticize the college. That should not be considered a socially acceptable attitude for an employer.
Which proves my point. It’s like at Christmas when you buy your nephew a gift he doesn’t like, and you get offended. It’s not that he doesn’t fit your gifting paradigm, it’s that your gift doesn’t fit what he wants. In these hiring cases they can do a takesey-backseys. Do that at Christmas time and Aunty hits you over the head with the fruitcake.
You don’t know much about philosophy profs, do you?
Maybe too far to say “worthless”, but I get your point. The progression went from committee, then to the administration, who then decided to do the takesey-backseys. But, I’m fairly certain that some members of the committee raised some eyebrows when they saw the “negotiation” too.
But the schools that do that are usually strongly research oriented (even small liberal colleges), and are often competing for the top few applicants in a very deep pool every year. For those positions, the candidates aren’t fungible - the department’s not just looking for a philosopher, they’re looking for a philosopher whose work, interests, and potential fill a particular gap in the department’s research profile. If she’d been offered a job at a school like that, her negotiating position would have been perfectly appropriate.
But she was offered a “general purpose philosopher” kind of job, teaching 4 undergraduate sections a semester. At those jobs, the candidates’ research interests are less important than their teaching. Aside from the maternity leave, everything in her negotiating platform was geared towards the first kind of job, but that wasn’t the kind of job she’d been offered.
I discussed this with my BF who is a tenured prof at small liberal arts college. He didn’t think her requests were outrageous or out of step with what is typically asked by new hires in academia. His position is that if anyone looks unreasonable, it’s the college.
If it’s not unusual for academics to make such requests, either in part or in whole, then it makes it hard for me to fault W. It doesn’t matter to me whether she was in a position of power or not. By rescinding this offer on the grounds that it has, the college is sending the signal that it wants a faculty that is too spineless and afraid to express itself. Not exactly an image I would think a liberal arts college would want. Maybe this won’t keep PhDs from applying for positions, but a reputation like that is not going to help with attracting the best and brightest students.
I don’t think it was unethical at all for her to release the name of the school. Perhaps doing so will make the next institution think twice before pulling an unexpected gotcha ya on somebody.
I see that point, but teaching vs. research in liberal arts (and other areas, I suspect) is something of a controversy for that reason. People that get the “teaching” jobs have less time to do the research that furthers their careers, but they are still expected to do research more or less, depending on the department. That’s why the “research” positions are the desired ones, and schools hire adjuncts and temps for the “teaching” positions. It’s good that the school decided to hire a permanent faculty member to teach, but to rescind the offer because she wanted a bit more time for research is selfish. Further, the teaching positions bring in more money (for liberal arts), so that should also be recognized in these negotiations.
I think you are hearing only one side. Of course your BF will side with the applicant. I think they would have been insane to hire this applicant. I have trouble understanding how it even got this far!
Did you miss the “tenured professor” part of her post? Chances are he’s been on both sides of the table in this scenario.
But I think the phrase “typically asked by new hires in academia” is too broad for this discussion. There’s not one typical tenure track job that covers every situation. Even SLACs can vary from schools where professors teach 3-4 classes a year with high research expectations (where W’s requests would have been pretty normal) to places like Nazareth where professors are full-time teachers.
It may not matter to *you *‘whether she was in a position of power or not’ but it matters to those involved. She didn’t want to start right away, and that’s the main issue as I see it. She thinks the world should revolve around her and her schedule. It doesn’t.