I agree with those who said that the tone of her letter indicated to the committee that she was going to be a long-term headache. Why take the risk when they likely have a huge pool of other qualified candidates?
If she had come to them asking if there was room for negotiation on salary, and inquiring about their maternity policy - “is there any flexibility there?” - she would have demonstrated a willingness to partner with the college instead of making demands on it.
I strongly think there should be a norm of fixed pay scales, with no negotiation. (I also think pay scales should be public knowledge, as they are for public universities- you can look up any employee of a public university in Michigan, for example, and find out what they make). Having people ‘negotiate’ their salaries results in unjustly favouring people who are more assertive/aggressive over those who aren’t.
(If you care about that sort of thing, that results in lower salaries for women, since women are less self-assertive than men, on the whole. I don’t really care about the gender pay gap, per se, but I do care that people get less because of psychological/personality traits that have nothing to do with the job).
Oh, I don’t believe its a sense of entitlement - like Manda JO and ITD, I think on her part its cluelessness.
And, I admit, I’m wondering about the intelligence of people who invest the time and money in getting Liberal Arts PhDs without reviewing the job market and are SHOCKED to discover that there are a shortage of jobs and what jobs their are pay crap. But I’m don’t think its entitlement - I think its more often cluelessness.
And, from what I know of Liberal Arts grad schools - she probably ISN’T a good teacher - grad school isn’t about making good TEACHERS. And if teacher were her passion, she probably wouldn’t be countering with all the ways she doesn’t want to spend her time teaching.
Which of her requests do you believe is unrealistic?
All of them taken together. As mentioned above, she appears clueless.
Unless the promotion/tenure decisions at this particular college work differently from practically everywhere else, she will be judged primarily on the quality/quantity of the research she puts out, and relatively little on teaching. Even if your main interest is teaching, you still have to be able to sink huge amounts of time into research to keep your job.
Which is why grad school doesn’t teach you to teach…
That’s one of the problems- even self proclaimed teaching-centered institutions have high research demands for tenure. It may not be as much as at an R1 institution, but it often seems out of proportion to the time and resources allotted to get research done.
Unfortunately, that’s just the reality at those places and you can’t make it into something it’s not.
But what ‘research’ is there in philosophy? Do you mean publish papers full of ‘new’ readings?
Why would you think philosophy is dead? It’s as vibrant and changing as any academic discipline, from psychology to sociology etc. Don’t put research and new in scare quotes like it’s some made up thing.
They are researching philosophy, not the history of philosophy or the study of philosophy.
I don’t know this school at all, but several several small, undergrad-only schools that I know really do have minimal research expectations. And that’s for scientists.
I know, I work in philosophy, but I don’t think it’s called ‘research’.
It’s basic scholarship, not ‘research’.
Last week you were a translator.
That’s what research, aka scholarship, is.
You may want to ask yourself what the Ph in PhD (the research degree) stands for.
Doctor of Philosophy. Everything used to be philosophy.
That’s right. Philosophy is the original research and scholarship field. It isn’t dead. Research and scholarship in that field are ongoing.
I’m with the group that believes she simply was clueless about the type of organization at which she was applying, and her negotiating position. It would be like if I got a job offer to be the president of a small town mom and pop hardware store and asked for use of the company jet.
The request for a one year delay in her start date was especially egregious. They are hiring now because they need someone now. Instead, she lists several requests for deferred and zero work and asks for higher pay. I would have yanked her offer as well.
But study of philosophical writings isn’t usually called ‘research’.