Did you have involvement in hiring profs? In my experience as a college prof, the decision is made by the people who will be the candidate's colleagues. HR has only minimal involvement, and they certainly don’t have any sway in the hiring decision.
Did you have involvement in hiring profs? In my experience as a college prof, the decision is made by the people who will be the candidate's colleagues. HR has only minimal involvement, and they certainly don’t have any sway in the hiring decision.
No, I wasn't involved in the decision making process. In the UC system, at least 8 years ago, the way it worked was that someone applied for the job or someone(s) from the dept made a recommendation for an individual for a job. A lot of people would be hired from other universities. That recommendation would go to the Dept Chair person who then makes the recommendation to the Dean who then goes to the HR dept (aka the office of the Provost, Vice Provost, a ton of other admins whose titles I forget). In my position, I only saw new job offers and retention offers that had made it to the Provost's office. The professors in the department wouldn't have a say in whether a new professor gets hired or not in the UC system (at least 8 years ago). For all serious offers: the Vice Provost, Provost, and HR personnel are the people who decide. They also control the $$$ package that is offered.
Edit: I believe the Dept Chair could also make a recommendation directly to the Provost's office.
2nd Edit: Oh and they would ask the person's current colleagues at whatever institution + the dept chair for letters of recommendation and justification for the new hire, "This person is a rising star in their field, blah blah blah". These were always good. I never saw the bad ones, probably never made it to the serious-approval stage.
My apologies for coming in so late with a reply; I was traveling and then totally pooped from traveling. (I'm getting old, lol.)
The standard procedure for a new faculty hire has two steps prior to the Chair making a recommendation. There's a hiring committee (usually just three people from the department, or - if an interdisciplinary hire - three people from the involved units). The committee creates a long list for a phone/Zoom interview (or in olden days, for an interview at the relevant academic conference such as the MLA). The committee whittles that down to a short list for on-campus interviews. Either the committee or the faculty in the involved unit(s) ranks the top three candidates after the campus visit; if the committee does the ranking, all eligible faculty must endorse it, typically. Usually the ratification/ranking process is limited to tenured or tenure-line faculty, but in some units like mine - which is interdisciplinary in its composition and relies heavily on scholars stuck in non-tenurable positions - all faculty are allowed an equal voice.
Only then does the chair push the recommendation to the Dean and then the Provost. No doubt both of those offices rely on labor from Associate Deans and Vice Provosts and the like. And yes, absolutely the Provost has control and final say over compensation! The Chair may go up the chain to negotiate more.
But this process is absolutely *standard* and if the UC system deviated from it, it would've made a splash, and I would've heard. I've logged a fair amount of time in fighting for shared faculty governance, trying to claw back more control to the faculty, so I'm attuned to news of outliers from this very basic, standard process.
I appreciate hearing your perspective from HR. I know that HR here believes we truly are treating our people equitably. (We aren't. Ask the adjuncts.) And so I know that HR at my institution, at least, is fairly insulated from truths that are obvious to faculty. But so are the faculty insulated from what HR sees, and so I truly learned from your angle.
I would be *very* curious to know more about what happens with retention offers!! Faculty know this is a thing. Many of us also observe that only stars get such offers. Loyalty and brilliant contributions to teaching and mentoring students count for nothing.
At my university, an utterly incompetent chief financial officer oversaw a multi-tens-of-millions miscalculation that led to retirement incentives that gutted our senior faculty. Instead of trying to keep them, leadership did the opposite. We can't even hire adjuncts unless we can show a plan for pedagogical malpractice! We've seen a few hires of NTT profs in high-demand programs, but even those areas - nursing, business, our growing arts programs - rely largely on adjuncts who teach online. (I'm in the parent FB group for my university, and if this trend continues, enrollments will plummet as our reputation nosedives.)
We are nominally an R1. Meanwhile, the CFO left with a golden parachute. And I - with an Ivy PhD and 20 years at this institution, plus glowing student reviews - still haven't cracked $55k annually. I don't think my uni is atypical of lower-rung R1s. While I'm not above whining about my situation, the larger point is that universities are chewing up their most important human capital, and not just spitting it out but acting like their instructors are an obstinate hairball.
I did not plan to close this comment with a rant; but people like me are legion, and the current situation is utterly unsustainable. Yoel Inbar got screwed, and I feel for him. But below him in the academic food chain are those who don't even have real academic freedom or long-term security, and that is the larger issue. Yoel can stay where he is and enjoy the protections of tenure. People in positions like mine are the new faculty majority, and we will be used as a battering ram to hollow out tenure, academic freedom, and any form of decency beyond that according to an employee at McDonald's.
Did you have involvement in hiring profs? In my experience as a college prof, the decision is made by the people who will be the candidate's colleagues. HR has only minimal involvement, and they certainly don’t have any sway in the hiring decision.
No, I wasn't involved in the decision making process. In the UC system, at least 8 years ago, the way it worked was that someone applied for the job or someone(s) from the dept made a recommendation for an individual for a job. A lot of people would be hired from other universities. That recommendation would go to the Dept Chair person who then makes the recommendation to the Dean who then goes to the HR dept (aka the office of the Provost, Vice Provost, a ton of other admins whose titles I forget). In my position, I only saw new job offers and retention offers that had made it to the Provost's office. The professors in the department wouldn't have a say in whether a new professor gets hired or not in the UC system (at least 8 years ago). For all serious offers: the Vice Provost, Provost, and HR personnel are the people who decide. They also control the $$$ package that is offered.
Edit: I believe the Dept Chair could also make a recommendation directly to the Provost's office.
2nd Edit: Oh and they would ask the person's current colleagues at whatever institution + the dept chair for letters of recommendation and justification for the new hire, "This person is a rising star in their field, blah blah blah". These were always good. I never saw the bad ones, probably never made it to the serious-approval stage.
My apologies for coming in so late with a reply; I was traveling and then totally pooped from traveling. (I'm getting old, lol.)
The standard procedure for a new faculty hire has two steps prior to the Chair making a recommendation. There's a hiring committee (usually just three people from the department, or - if an interdisciplinary hire - three people from the involved units). The committee creates a long list for a phone/Zoom interview (or in olden days, for an interview at the relevant academic conference such as the MLA). The committee whittles that down to a short list for on-campus interviews. Either the committee or the faculty in the involved unit(s) ranks the top three candidates after the campus visit; if the committee does the ranking, all eligible faculty must endorse it, typically. Usually the ratification/ranking process is limited to tenured or tenure-line faculty, but in some units like mine - which is interdisciplinary in its composition and relies heavily on scholars stuck in non-tenurable positions - all faculty are allowed an equal voice.
Only then does the chair push the recommendation to the Dean and then the Provost. No doubt both of those offices rely on labor from Associate Deans and Vice Provosts and the like. And yes, absolutely the Provost has control and final say over compensation! The Chair may go up the chain to negotiate more.
But this process is absolutely *standard* and if the UC system deviated from it, it would've made a splash, and I would've heard. I've logged a fair amount of time in fighting for shared faculty governance, trying to claw back more control to the faculty, so I'm attuned to news of outliers from this very basic, standard process.
I appreciate hearing your perspective from HR. I know that HR here believes we truly are treating our people equitably. (We aren't. Ask the adjuncts.) And so I know that HR at my institution, at least, is fairly insulated from truths that are obvious to faculty. But so are the faculty insulated from what HR sees, and so I truly learned from your angle.
I would be *very* curious to know more about what happens with retention offers!! Faculty know this is a thing. Many of us also observe that only stars get such offers. Loyalty and brilliant contributions to teaching and mentoring students count for nothing.
At my university, an utterly incompetent chief financial officer oversaw a multi-tens-of-millions miscalculation that led to retirement incentives that gutted our senior faculty. Instead of trying to keep them, leadership did the opposite. We can't even hire adjuncts unless we can show a plan for pedagogical malpractice! We've seen a few hires of NTT profs in high-demand programs, but even those areas - nursing, business, our growing arts programs - rely largely on adjuncts who teach online. (I'm in the parent FB group for my university, and if this trend continues, enrollments will plummet as our reputation nosedives.)
We are nominally an R1. Meanwhile, the CFO left with a golden parachute. And I - with an Ivy PhD and 20 years at this institution, plus glowing student reviews - still haven't cracked $55k annually. I don't think my uni is atypical of lower-rung R1s. While I'm not above whining about my situation, the larger point is that universities are chewing up their most important human capital, and not just spitting it out but acting like their instructors are an obstinate hairball.
I did not plan to close this comment with a rant; but people like me are legion, and the current situation is utterly unsustainable. Yoel Inbar got screwed, and I feel for him. But below him in the academic food chain are those who don't even have real academic freedom or long-term security, and that is the larger issue. Yoel can stay where he is and enjoy the protections of tenure. People in positions like mine are the new faculty majority, and we will be used as a battering ram to hollow out tenure, academic freedom, and any form of decency beyond that according to an employee at McDonald's.