Oh, really, is that what you think? Because I’m pretty sure it’s because the offer was made something like **TWO MONTHS AGO **and the administration finally got fucking sick and tired of waiting for O’Brien to make up her fucking mind. She’d been jerking them around forever: it was week after week of, “We’ll have an answer by the end of this week.” But, once again, with nothing forthcoming.
MU is reasonably tolerant for a Catholic university–there’s a Gay-Straight Alliance, and I’ve known more than one person who works there who isn’t straight, and who’s out at least outside of work. Things aren’t perfect, but they knew that O’Brien was lesbian when they made the offer. You know, about a billion fucking years ago.
Then maybe you should have fucking accepted the offer when it was made, you moron.
Side note to the Huffington Post: It’s the Journal Sentinel, not the Sentinel. But I guess you didn’t bother to do your homework there, either, just like you neglected to find out exactly *how long ago *the offer was made.
So it looks like she might have actually finally accepted. Either way, this is turning into a giant cluster. I’ll be interested to hear what’s going on behind the scenes from the people I still know at MU.
Doubt it. At least in most academic employment situations, a university doesn’t spend the time and money to conduct a search to fill an open position, choose the applicant they want to hire, and then spontaneously withdraw the offer just to punish their preferred candidate for not making up her fucking mind quickly enough.
If a university has tight time constraints on filling a particular position, they may give the selected applicant an acceptance deadline, after which the job will be offered to the next-ranking applicant instead. But IME, this strategy is used more with lower-level postdoc positions and the like: for high-level appointments like tenured faculty and top administrators, the employer tends to wait it out while the selected applicant reaches a decision, and if the decision is negative they go on to the next applicant. If necessary, they’ll re-launch the search in the following year.
Two months (while definitely longer than I’d want to keep any job offer waiting for my acceptance), is IMO not that unusual a timeframe for a job-offer decision in academia. I’ve seen similar delays in high-level job search processes at institutions I’ve been at. Basically, everything about the employment process takes longer in academia.
And in any case, both links you posted seem to state quite plainly that Marquette gave its reason for rescinding the offer to O’Brien, and it had nothing to do with her not accepting the offer fast enough:
I have to think the time frame was factoring in, though. I know, without naming names, that people involved in the search have been very unhappy with how long it was taking her to make a decision, and that a number of “deadlines” had been set and passed. MU was just desperate for a new dean and didn’t want to get stuck with another temporary one, and they didn’t have many other solid candidates to go back to.
Now, I’m open to the idea that it’s not just about how fucking long it was taking her to accept the offer. But given how long the offer has been hanging, there’s no way that this was just about her being an out lesbian, either. If it were that simple, the offer would have been retracted sooner, or, more likely, never made in the first place.
Also, what you quoted in no way negates that it could be about how long she was taking to respond. I’d say taking that long to respond to an offer because you’re not sure if you want to live in the city, e.g., would contribute to a “totality of factors” that would relate to “the fit for the candidate to the college.”
So either they’re lying or they didn’t bother reading her articles until -after- they offered her the job. All in all, it sounds like O’Brien dodged a bullet.
So, we have a case where the institution gives its reasons for rescinding the offer, and some of O’Brien’s supporters offer their own speculation about why the institution rescinded the offer.
And, in all those different reasons, given by the different parties, not one person (even the institution itself) claims that the offer was rescinded because the candidate took too long to respond. Yet the OP offers some wild-ass speculation that this was the primary reason.
Color me unconvinced.
It’s also interesting that the OP aims his main “Fuck you” at O’Brien, despite the fact that O’Brien herself, as far as i can tell, has not yet even made the claim that the offer was rescinded due to her sexual orientation. Here are two more articles on the subject (1, 2), and in neither one does O’Brien say anything about her sexual orientation as a factor.
If anyone fucked up here, it’s the university, as Merneith says. If you make a job offer to an academic candidate, you should already know about the content of the candidate’s publications. If you don’t, you just look half-assed and unprofessional.
I can believe that as a possibility. But if it’s so, I have to say (without wishing to diss anybody in particular whom you may know in this hiring process) that Marquette made an EXTREMELY foolish choice about the manner in which they announced the withdrawal of the offer.
AFAIK, if you want to withdraw a high-level academic job offer to a chosen candidate, the only safe way to do it is to make the acceptance deadline absolutely ironclad, and then when the candidate doesn’t accept by the deadline, move right on and seal the deal with Candidate B. Your public statement about the withdrawal should say just that you and Candidate A were “unable to agree on the terms of the appointment”.
Trying to pitch the withdrawal decision as inspired by irreconcilable differences concerning the candidate’s published writings, AFTER the offer was already made, just makes the university look like a horse’s ass. It suggests a deplorable cluelessness on the part of the search committee, who are supposed to have conducted an extensive investigation of the candidate’s academic background, including familiarizing themselves with the candidate’s publications, precisely in order to avoid embarrassing mismatches.
And indeed, it looks as though the search committee at Marquette are aware of that implication and angry about it:
I quite agree that if the administration were originally opposed to hiring an out lesbian, they’d never have made the offer to one in the first place. I have no way of knowing what’s really going on in the Marquette administration, of course, but “fears of alumni backlash due to negative reactions after the offer was announced, plus some dissatisfaction with O’Brien’s perceived lack of enthusiasm for the job as signaled by her delay in accepting” would be my guess for their most likely motivation.
Sorry, but it’s ridiculous to blame this on any delay by O’Brien; there’s no way that Marquette would have made an issue out of her work if the reason had been anything so respectable as “she just wouldn’t make up her mind.” While two months is unusually long for accepting a deanship, O’Brien did ask for the extra time up front, and MU has made no statement regarding the acceptance period. Meanwhile,
She was vetted by a relatively small group which had no problem with her writings; either the senior officials accepted that judgment without reading her work, and are now embarrassed, or the withdrawal was prompted by major donors, who would only have read O’Brien after her selection was announced. Possibly both of these factors were in play, but certainly the timing was not, as she had accepted the offer by the time this went off, and had already been house hunting.
The problem with the applicant pool was well before all of this–before the initial offer was even made. From everything I was hearing from people who interviewed O’Brien, she was a very strong candidate, and I was in favor of her being selected. Then the whole mess started where she kept needing more and more time to make a decision. Seriously, who doesn’t do that kind of research *before *applying for a job? How can somebody be a good *dean *if they can’t even figure out if they want a job before they ask for it?
Really? Have you never heard of someone applying for a job that they may not want to take? This happens so often, in just about every field, that you’d have to be a moron not to know it.
Also, you argue that she’s unprofessional for taking too much time, and yet you have basically no criticism of the university itself for making the job offer and then rescinding it based on (by their own admission) the content of her academic writing, which it had plenty of time to evaluate before interviewing her, and then again before making the offer.
Taking **MONTHS **to figure it out, though, is highly unprofessional, IMO.
Yeah, it’s definitely possible that MU also fucked up there. I’m still waiting to hear exactly what happened–e.g., whether or not she’d finally gotten off her ass and accepted the offer before it was rescinded.
Really, the more I read, the more *everybody *is coming out of this looking retarded.
For one thing, people apply for jobs that they end up not accepting all the time, in academia or out. For another, remember that pretty much nobody who’s applying for a high-level academic job is currently unemployed. Generally speaking, a successful applicant is already tenured (at least) at another institution, which has usually made a fairly strong commitment to them and has an interest in keeping them.
That means that once you have an offer of a new job from a different institution, your current job can change, maybe change a lot. Promotions, sabbaticals, salaries, all these things can be used as bargaining chips by an institution that knows one of its members now has a solid opportunity to go somewhere else, possibly to a more lucrative or prestigious job, and wants to keep them on board.
I definitely know from firsthand experience that waiting on applicants’ acceptance decisions is indeed a major pain for search committees and administrations, but I really don’t think that a delay of this sort is as exceptional or pathological in its occurrence as you’re suggesting.
Even if so, it would be even more unprofessional for an institution to rescind an offer to a candidate that they WANTED to hire, after spending lots of money and time to select and interview her, just in a fit of childish pique because the candidate wasn’t seeming eager enough about their offer.
Seriously, there’s no way that a delay of two months in accepting an offered position would be a sufficient reason all by itself for any properly-functioning institution to decide to withdraw the offer. Especially if they’ve been having trouble finding a candidate that they wanted to hire in the first place.
There’s got to be something else underlying Marquette’s decision here, IMO, whether it’s that they never liked O’Brien that much in the first place, or are alarmed about alumni blowback on the lesbian thing, or really didn’t bother to read her books before picking her, or some other factor. If Marquette did indeed nix a deanship deal with a candidate they were happy with solely or primarily because “the administration finally got fucking sick and tired of waiting for O’Brien to make up her fucking mind”, then they’re morons, no two ways about it. I honestly can’t believe any sane administration would do such a thing.
At my grad school, a high-ranking member of my department was in line for the job of Dean at another prestigious university on the other side of the country. The department, and the university, did everything possible to keep her. This included telling her that, if she accepted the other job, they would keep her job at our university open for a year while she tried out the other job. The other university also agreed to give her a year to make up her mind.
She went all the way across the country, spent a year in the Dean’s job there, decided she preferred her old job, and came back.
I might add, also, that the only substantive quote i’ve seen from O’Brien herself on this issue is the following:
Bolding mine.
So, according to O’Brien herself, she actually accepted the offer before it was rescinded. If true, this kind of shits all over the OP’s suggestion that her heel-dragging was the reason for not hiring her.
I’ve read a good dozen news stories, and a similar number of blog entries on this issue, and i’ve found only a single reference to the long period between offer and acceptance. From here:
Again, if true, this demonstrates that Marquette was aware, from very soon after they made the offer, that O’Brien wanted an extended time period to make her decision.
Okay, having had a chance to talk to people who have a better idea than I did what was all happening behind the scenes, I would like to amend my OP.
I *mildly *pit Jodi O’Brien for taking so fucking long to make a decision. If she would have accepted weeks or months ago, the offer would have been solid and it would have been too late to take it back.
However, I am now much more mad at either/or (a) the search committee and (b) Fr. Wild. It’s not 100% clear yet, but it seems to be that either the search committee didn’t have the proper respect for the anticipated reactions from some of the more conservative members of the university community (i.e., they read all of her work, but they didn’t show the most potentially problematical stuff to anyone else), or they *did show the “worst” pieces to Fr. Wild, got him to agree to back O’Brien, and then “something” changed his mind.
*:cough:richconservativedonors:cough:
Either way, MU comes out looking *terrible *on a national stage. So, fuck you, search committee, if you didn’t try hard enough to ensure that the administration had all the facts, even the ones you thought might be inconvenient; and fuck you, Fr. Wild, if you agreed to support this nomination and then backed out because you got too chickenshit about losing money from bigoted idiots.
All in all, I believe we have here what is generally referred to as a monumental cluster fuck. Gonna ask a mod to change the title of this thread accordingly.