And taken her tiara too!
I think both sides screwed up in this particular incident. W should have worded her requests more carefully, and the college shouldn’t have immediately rescinded the offer like they did.
I don’t necessarily think that W’s list of requests were inherently unreasonable. However, the way she made them did come off as a bit clumsy (I think she should have written a small paragraph for each item, explaining why she thought it was fair, rather than simply listing them). Still, she ended with “let me know what you think” and not “these terms are non-negotiable.” The college should have at least made a token effort to make her feel like she wasn’t being summarily brushed off.
For what it’s worth, W did provide an update to the original blog post which added some context. For example: the maternity leave provision had been informally mentioned to her during the interview and she just wanted it in writing.
In my opinion, she should have left the college anonymous. Instead, she threw the college under the bus, which is somewhat unprofessional. This would have been justifiable if the college had clearly been in the wrong, but this feels more like a gray area to me. Both sides screwed up, but I feel that W thought she was beyond approach and that the college did her a great injustice.
It’s possible that their response was so harsh because she’s female, but there’s no actual evidence of that in this case. On the one hand, there is at least one study that suggests that women can get especially screwed over when negotiating a job offer, and there’s still clear gender inequalities in the workplace. Should we just assume sexism every time something like this happens, even if there’s no clear link?
This is why I think she should have removed the college’s name. People would know that it happened without shaming the college when they may not have deserved it.
Agree completely.
Here’s how I see it:
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The job market in academia heavily favors the schools. If you’re the applicant, and you get an offer, you’ve got to keep this in mind.
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If I’m on the hiring committee, my thought is, “we liked her, but if her position and ours are THAT far apart, it’s just not worth our time and trouble to come to a meeting of the minds. And our original offer clearly isn’t good enough for her. So on to our next choice it is.”
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And that’s before we get to “oh, I want to wait until a year from this fall to start.” That’s a deal-breaker for a small college all by itself.
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If I were in her position, I might try and negotiate a little on salary, and maybe on one non-salary condition of employment. But FIVE? Gimme a break.
I was speaking more from the point of view of the hiring school, that when they saw the demands they might have thought they were plan b and dropped her.
But As for why to go public, she probably expected the conditions to be rejected, but not dropped entirely. But once she was maybe she saw it as an opportunity to rile up the womyn power community and get a better sympathy offer somewhere brand new.
Of course it is. I’m curious where your idea comes from. I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re wrong about this.
Look here: http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/page/resources
“Research resources”. To help you with your research.
Peer reviewed journals to publish your research, such as:
The Journal of Philosophical Research. Journal of Philosophical Research - Home
Here’s another: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1933-1592
Since most of us don’t get jobs after finishing our PhDs anyway, spending a lot of time in grad school pretending to learn how to teach undergraduates would be even more worthless than doing what we usually call “research.”
But hey, you have to be realistic.
Point. Although if I recall you got a job, just not one remotely related to your field of study for which both teaching skills and your subject expertise aren’t useful (but your ability to think is).
That’s a bit of a stretch. Usually it’s just called ‘scholarship’.
Anyway, I think this woman is in for a rude awakening. Or perhaps several!
I can’t tell if this is hair-splitting or snobbery. What exactly is your problem with the use of the word “research” for what humanities scholars do? It certainly meets the benchmarks of (1) dictionary definitions and (2) common usage.
[QUOTE=American Heritage Dictionary]
- Careful study of a given subject, field, or problem, undertaken to discover facts or principles.
- An act or period of such study: her researches of medieval parish records.
v.intr.
To engage in or perform research.
v.tr. - To study (something) thoroughly so as to present in a detailed, accurate manner: researching the effects of acid rain.
- To do research for: research a magazine article.
[/QUOTE]
I got an MA ten years ago and worked in the private sector doing something completely different for awhile. Now I’m a 5th year ABD working on my dissertation, and I go on the market next year. The market was bad enough when I started, but at least in my limited view the pace of decay has increased.
I am happy with my work and I am in a real niche. Either a job will appear or it won’t, and I accepted the long odds going in. But things have gotten worse in unpredictable ways. It sucks to hear the message over and over, “what you do is intrinsically worthless, you have no business trying to assert yourself, you should have known your profession was going to implode when you committed years ago.”
I believe in what I do and I would do it again. I love research and teaching and have gambled several years of my life to live a relatively modest life in a helper profession.
But I admit, it chaps me a bit that I had to grovel a lot less when I combed through data to sell people shit they didn’t need. It’s a crazy world.
I’m almost certain she had at least one other job offer for a tenure-track faculty position in hand and that’s why she felt comfortable being so aggressive. And I think the college must have realized it too.
I think all this speculation about her having difficult personality or being entitled really does reflect some basic sexism at play here.
It is absolutely true that for the past five year or more, professional women have had it pounded into their heads that their failure to negotiate aggressively accounts for the gender pay gap–the whole “Lean In” issue. And just this week, some conservative was saying that it accounts entirely for the gender pay gap.
So this is one woman taking that advice to heart.
But I have mixed feelings about this because in reading her e-mail to the college, I was also feeling offended by its time. We might have an issue of naïveté or merely bad advice. I think jumping to any other conclusions is suspect.
I have no idea where you get your info, but you are incorrect. Scholarship is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of academic pursuits, including the creative arts. Research is a subset of this and is hardly limited to the sciences.
I find it absolutely amusing that actual philosophers call it research and publish journals for the purpose of sharing their research, but that’s “a stretch” in your book. However, despite my amusement, I am happy to leave you in your ignorance. This level of stubbornness is beyond my desire to deal with.
Yeah, uppity woman in the humanities gets her comeuppance! Great story!
In common parlance, ‘research’ is used mostly to describe activity that produces new discoveries, in fields such as medicine or physics, and is ‘experiment-based’. The secondary sense of ‘research’ is simply ‘looking up stuff’, and legal research comes to mind. That is the sense you mean, of course. It’s a ‘weak’ sense of ‘research’.
Let’s call them ‘empirical research’ and ‘clerical research’ to make our lives simpler.
This took a lot of gall!
Words like “common parlance” and “used mostly” is weaksauce, man.
Strengthening your definition a bit gives us “new discoveries” and “experiment-based.” Mathematicians call what they do “research”: look no farther than www.ams.org to see that. But no experiments.
So is mathematics “empirical” or “clerical”?
Ah, snobbery, then.
I would place the blame about 90% on the applicant, and 10% on the college. An the college only gets that 10% for offering her the job in the first place, when they should have seen how whack she was beforehand.
Her first request is fine. I don’t know whether that’s actually in line with what starting philosophy professors make or not, but money is always negotiable.
The maternity leave, it’s not clear precisely what the situation is. If she’s pregnant right now, well, almost all employers will require some minimum time of employment before you’re eligible for maternity leave, and it’s unreasonable to ask for it before then. If she’s just asking for future reference because she plans to eventually have children, and she’s just asking for clarification on the policy, it’s fine.
The sabbatical request, I can’t imagine is common anywhere, at a research institution or a teaching one. I’m not sure what “bottom half” means, whether that’s supposed to be “first half” or “second half”, but you simply don’t ask for a sabbatical before you’ve got tenure.
The course load, she’s basically saying that she wants to do only half of the work she’s being hired to do. Absolutely unacceptable.
And the late start date makes no sense at all. The whole point of a postdoc is that it’s a flexible position that can be used to fill the gap between when people graduate and when they get hired to a permanent position. If you take a 2-year postdoc position, and get a permanent offer after 1 year, then you shake your advisor’s hand, say “thank you for the year of work”, and move on. This is expected by everyone, and carries no hard feelings for anyone. Asking for a year to finish your postdoc says that you find your postdoc to be a preferable job to the permanent position, in which case why are you even considering the permanent position at all?
Plenty of schools, research and teaching, offer pre-tenure sabbaticals. Junior faculty just have to apply for them.
Asking for a delayed start date is so you can move research to publication that you want taken into account when your tenure review is up. Tenure reviews don’t discount publications before the clock starts ticking, so it is a way to squeeze out some more research for your CV to boost your chances later. If the school wants you, they can hire an adjunct for a year to cover the delay.
These are not prima facie insane requests.