Here read it for yourself since apparently you missed it in the OP… These are her words, that factual enough for you?
So let’s review shall we?
#2 more than the standard FMLA = I can’t teach for a full semester.
#3 give me time off = I can’t teach
#4 I want to limit the number of classes I teach = I can’t teach what you need
#5 I can’t teach this year
Yup from where I sit this is a prime a number one appliCAN’T
You are 100% incorrect. I hire people to do a job. If they show me through their words or actions that they don’t want to do the job I am hiring for then their app goes into the round file as they have shown me they aren’t interested in my job, and I am not interested in hiring a future problem child.
I’m with Rick. Rick gets it. Many here do not.
The college withdrew the offer. What more do you need to know?
Yes, there was.
Data point? What are you talking about? This is not math.
Yes, I was dumbfounded.
I’d fire you based on your inability to understand the meaning of negotiation.
I can see that’s all you think is significant.
Specifically, what?
You’re making a sweeping generalization based on one case. Perhaps the college is the odd one here, not the applicant.
I don’t believe they would withdraw the offer for any reason other than what was said in the e-mail. Since the contents of that e-mail have been revealed, we can analyse them. Are you with me so far? There were several ‘requests’ made, including a pay raise beyond what was offered, justified only by ‘what others have been offered’. She does not seem to be concerned in the least with the ability of the college to pay what she believes to be ‘the going rate’. Not all institutions pay the same. She should know this. This college is not Harvard or Yale or Michigan. There is one traffic light in Vinton County, Ohio. Do you think police officers in McArthur are paid the same as in big cities?
You don’t know what she wanted. You only know her initial negotiation position. In fact, from the long search and application process, if you had been involved, you likely would have gotten the idea that she did want the job. Either way, the bullet-point list does not indicate one or the other.
She has clearly stated that she didn’t expect to get any or all of what she asked for. So, again, you either don’t know or are wrong about what she wanted.
You don’t know how much other people in her department were getting paid or what their work load was. You certainly have zero idea whether her proposal would result in her getting paid more or working less.
About people “wanting” a job. The majority of people weigh what they want in a job by balancing the desire to have that particular job with the benefits she would get in return. No applicant should be expected to be stupid enough to “want” a job no matter what. Merely testing to see what the boundaries of those benefits might be does not indicate whether or not she “wants” that job.
The tone seemed to indicate that she did not take the offer seriously. It’s not just what you say, it’s also how you say it.
The college may have drawn the reasonable conclusion that based on W’s very high desires that there was probably an extremely low possibility that she would accept an offer which rejected all of them (with the possible exception of the maternity leave). But if the back and forth discussion went on for a long time before her final rejection there was a good chance that the college’s second choice would accept a job elsewhere. So by immediately withdrawing the offer the college had a better chance of getting its second choice.
Here a quarter, go buy a clue.
Better yet a real world example:
I have a staff of porters that park cars at my dealership. I pay them $10-12/hr. (Make no mistake it is a minimum wage/ entry level job. I pay above minimum because I want good people)
If someone comes in and demands $15/hr to start I am not going to “negotiate” with them to $10/hr. Which is the starting rate. I will wish them well and wait 2 hours for the next applicant to arrive.
If I were to negotiate with them to let’s say $13/hr. Then I would either have to give all my existing porters a raise or have them take it as a giant fuck you from the boss for their hard work and loyalty.
Now since I want a happy hard working crew, I won’t do anything to piss my people off, so Mr. $15/hr. gets told no thank you look elsewhere.
This is exactly what the college did.
My real world boss would fire me if I were to hire someone @ $15/hr. To park cars, because the job doesn’t pay that. Also I am charged with making a profit in my department.
I am doubly disturbed by an attitude apparent among a large number of commenters that a person seeking a job should be expected to be a groveling shit-eater. That expectation should be socially unacceptable.
In that sense, I would like such employers to be embarrassed publicly by name if what happened to W was that she insufficiently groveled and was deficient in the tugging-the-forelock department.
This is especially true for an educational institution, one of whose principal purposes is to be a hotbed of free thinking, intellectual exploration, and source of principled dissent in society.
This is just one more reason why I think that everyone should be represented by a union, so that employees are never in such a weak bargaining position.
Uh, no. You can simply say that your offer stands firm and they’ll have to make their decision based on that. Which is what the college should have done.
Who is saying that? The *fact * is that tenure track positions in philosophy are *very *rare. There are certain rituals you go through that express your appreciation of the offer and acknowledgement of that fact. She did not do that. There is a hierarchy and you are a fool to ignore it. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
She is obviously clueless.
Some of the posters here are forgetting about how important fit is. I left my job (by mutual agreement) as an adjunct at a local community college because it was not a good fit. I got hired since I was a progressive educator which worked great for the developmental classes. But then they wanted me to teach transfer classes and and leave the developmental classes for those without a master’s degree (transfer classes have to be taught by someone with a master’s). It was a disaster. The philosophy of the department was for transfer classes that it was rote memorization of skills, no calculators on assessments, no conceptual exploration. Basically it was sit down, shut the fuck up and do these problems for the next 90 minutes using no notes or calculator. We ended up with unhappy students (a lot of entitlement there but that’s another thread), an unhappy department and an unhappy adjunct. Oh did I mention that one class in particular had a less than 50% pass rate in the department yet my methods had it up to 70% (close to 100% of students that attended class). Didn’t matter - that wasn’t their style and since my success didn’t matter or the fact that I was a highly rated developmental teacher didn’t matter since I wasn’t going to get those classes, the department and I agreed to part ways.
So SLAC is looking at these demands saying “You’re a researcher at a teaching institution. It doesn’t matter if we come to an agreement because eventually no one is going to be happy with the situation.”
If that’s the case then they really screwed up the selection process, which should have weeded out researchers.
That’s what puzzles me about this whole affair. How in the world did both parties not know what the other wanted?
There’s actually no hard evidence that she didn’t acknowledge and appreciate the fact that she got the offer. W said that the negotiation email was the last in a long correspondence and was preceded by an email stating that she was about to go into formal negotiation mode. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if she first responded to the offer with gratitude and then hunkered down to start the negotiations, though there’s no proof of that, either. The truth is that we don’t know exactly what she did before that last fateful email.
Was it a sloppy negotiation attempt? Yes. Did it backfire on her? Yes. Does it prove that she misjudged her standing with the college? Yes. Does this prove that she’s an entitled little princess who thinks the world revolves around her? No.
This is a very interesting point that I don’t think has been previously brought up in this thread. It ties in well with the theory that they liked her but were conflicted, or that there was another candidate that she only barely beat out. They may well have thought it was better to try their luck with the second choice rather than negotiate with W and end up with a situation where no one was happy.
My understanding is that employers make offers to a single candidate at a time, but is there any law in place requiring that? It seems to me that if employers could provide offers to several people at once, that it would be favorable to them. They could play candidates off of each other and discourage negotiation by getting the them to scramble to be the first one with a signed contract, lest they lose the offer.
If there’s no law requiring single offers at a time, it’s possible that Nazareth actually did send offers to multiple candidates, and retracted W’s offer because someone else accepted. The “fit” issue could have just been a convenient excuse, so they didn’t have to admit to it.
I do not believe it is customary to offer a single position to more than one candidate at a time. It could get quite complicated and uncomfortable if both accept and then resign from their current positions.
What else could lead her to make such foolish moves?
That only works when the candidates are being up front about their own interests and goals, and that doesn’t necessarily happen. In a good job market, you’re right and the researchers will weed themselves out of the selection process. In today’s market, they won’t - even if you really want to do research, teaching might be the only way you have to pay the bills.
Anybody can pretend to be interested in a job they’d really rather not have to take for the length of an interview. I know I’ve done it. Ideally, interviews are about fit on both sides, but that’s unfortunately not the way academic hiring works right now. In an interview, the candidate tries to be what the school wants. In negotiating, though, she communicates what she wants. I think her negotiating position was a lot closer to what she wants to do than her interview was.