To keep beating a dead horse, it is definitely true with regard to PhD jobs in industry. The candidate might not know where she stands before she gets an offer, and an offer has to got through multiple levels of management, any of which might kill it if the candidate starts demanding things not in the standard offer.
During the Bubble you might get away with asking for more after the offer, and now if you have multiple offers. Not the case for her.
Entitled. The school made the right call.
More money
Time off
Time off
Limited workload
Too busy to work now.
In sum = Inflexible, among other things.
What’s not to like for a small college where faculty is always short and being stretched?
Exactly my thoughts. Unless she’s the next hot shit rising star of her field, she should be pretty conservative in her negotiating. If she is in fact the NHSRS in her field then I’m sure she’ll find somewhere else that will appreciate her more.
I’m not saying the applicant was stupid or entitled. And I’m not saying the college was deceitful or vindictive. It appears there was just a late realization that there was a misunderstanding about the job. The college was apparently looking for somebody who would primarily be a teacher. When the applicant wrote back asking about spending time away from teaching, the college realized she was looking for a different job than what they were offering her.
I apologize in advance because I know this will insult someone, but…
Is it even possible to be the “next hot shit rising star” in teaching philosophy?
I’m ready and willing to be corrected.
Zing!!! I’m not gonna lie, I smirked a little as I typed those words… 
If you are particularly skillful in obtaining grant money, you will be eagerly sought. Or you might have discovered a previously unpublished manuscript written by Kant, or you may have discovered that if you take the 3rd letter of every seventh word in an important philosopher’s work it spells out “I don’t believe any of this stuff either, but as long as they keep paying me, I’ll keep shoveling it out,” or you analyzed the works of Sartre and Shakespeare and proved that they were written by the same person… This list goes on and on.
I guess I don’t understand why her demands were made in writing, and not in a face to face discussion with whomever hired her?
Surely the best place to negotiate is in person, where you can actually negotiate and guage reactions, or explain your requests in more detail?
Of course you want any final agreement in writing, but submitting a list of demands like that comes across terribly to me, I’m not surprised at all that the college weren’t impressed.
Because she wasn’t hired? She was replying to an offer that was emailed to her, post-interview.
I was about to write my thoughts, but the second comment on the linked article did it so much better:
Couldn’t agree more.
My question still stands. They have offered her the job, why doesn’t she arrange a meeting to discuss terms and conditions?
Writing emails back and forth sounds like a horrible way to arrange such important matters.
This was my thought, as well. I would assume the interview process was not 15-minutes in the dean’s office, but rather a day long tour of the facility, long conversations with 10 different people, etc., etc. If over and over again “This is a student-centered, teaching position” was repeated and over and over again she said “Oh yeah, I am all about the teaching”, I can understand their reaction.
I think that’s a very good insight. Interviews are usually 1-2 days long and would involve those very questions.
She sounds high maintenance, and appears to have an entitlement mentality. The college did the right thing.
On the flip side, you can also see how someone who has always been in a high-powered research university could have seen “We are all about teaching” as one of those things everyone is obliged to say over and over again, but no one really means-so they may have carefully said it 100 times, and she never heard it once.
Exactly. I’d still fault her for not doing her research (reading the mission statement, discussing teaching load with faculty etc). I get a naive bead off of her rather than entitled. But, like everyone else, I’m only going by a few sentences.
It’s not really that hard to discern if a school is focused on teaching versus research, or whether a school has the intention to shift away from one to the other. I was once an adjunct at a small liberal arts university while I was still in graduate school. The contrast between my research university and the school where I was teaching couldn’t have been more starker.
So I have to wonder just how savvy she is for her to have misread the situation so badly.
Or she was desperate for a job, applied everywhere, and then tried to adjust the job to be more in line with what she wants.
My guess is she’d have been looking for an R1 position the while time she was there.
Sounds very naive to me…, or else she’s a spoiled kid with an oversize sense of entitlement.
Am I the only one who checked out the website for this Nazereth college? (it’s in the OP:) )
The Philosophy department only offers a BA degree–no graduate courses at all. It seems obvous to me that a small liberal-arts college with no grad students is not going to be a major research institution in her field. If she gets hired, her job will be to teach 19 year olds.
Yet she wants a very low teaching load, and an early sabbatical.
You don’t need a Phd to realize that one of these things is not like the other.
It’s highly unlikely that she lives anywhere near Nazareth. She wasn’t going to fly back to the school just to have this conversation. I suppose you could argue that it should have been done over the phone, but the reality is that most of these negotiations happen by email these days (speaking specifically about academia).
I made some pie in the sky requests when I was negotiating my first position at a SLAC. Luckily, they just said no. My requests all focused on research support, which could be taken as indicative of a bad fit. I don’t think W’s problem is just not understanding the culture, she was asking, repeatedly, to teach less. That’s a problem at a teaching school.