Academic questions 2: Faculty recruiting

To all my North American friends who are devoting large parts of their lives to faculty recruiting this semester: eat your hearts out.  Here the process would take about a day. 

Or maybe, don’t eat your hearts out ….

Here’s how people become professors here (not identical everywhere, but the following is not untypical). A recruiting committee goes through the application packets to choose a short list of candidates, and everyone on the short list comes in on the same day. Each candidate makes a public presentation followed by a question-and-answer period. At the end of the day the committee meets and ranks the candidates. A couple of outside evaluators (relevant field, other universities) examine the short-list dossiers and the ranking to provide assurance that the committee is not doing something like putting the committee chair’s favorite nephew in first place. The ranked list is approved by the college council and the university senate (relatively routine), and then the university administration (probably vice-presidential level) negotiates terms with the first-ranked candidate. If the negotiation doesn’t work out, then the second-ranked candidate gets a turn, and so on.

The approved ranking is public. You and everybody else in your professional world know if you were the University of Bitzelblob’s fourth choice. I think some people even put on their vitas that they were non-first choices at places where they didn’t get hired. To be short-listed for a professorship is an honor, to be non-first is not a disgrace.

At least this is fast. What doesn’t work so well about it? First, the superficial elements of the public presentations can matter too much. If you have to sit through several of these on the same day, you can become excessively grateful for glitzy slides and for liveliness and charm on the speaker’s part. These are not the same as good scholarship; they aren’t even the same as good teaching. (Charm isn’t the same thing as caring about the students.) But the contrasts between charmers and non-charmers loom very large when candidates appear side by side in the course of a single long day.

Second, it distributes power down to the recruiting committee, who make the all-important ranking, and up to the vice-president who handles the negotiation. (Negotiations are fairly non-routine and can fail.)  Power is distributed away from the department as a whole.

The negotiation is a little bit about compensation, but compensation is restricted in a fairly narrow band by the civil-service ranks. (The ranks are very important and allegedly are aligned across civil, diplomatic, and military service to equate pay and prestige for positions of comparable responsibility. A friend here said he worked out that, as a high-level academic librarian, he was the equivalent of a destroyer captain.) To be a W3 professor (a senior full professor) is only a few ranks below God.

Research support is broadly understood, which is what makes the negotiations so important and potentially difficult. Administrators are mostly not professional administrators here, they’re faculty who rotate into key positions and rotate back out again; and does a newly in-rotated historian of the early church really know what a molecular biologist needs to succeed, or vice versa? Research support means staff (often generously supplied, by US standards), equipment, space, travel, and so on.

Lots of “and so on,” at times. Archangel’s department is housed in a rather grand old East Berlin building that had been allowed to run down during a long period of uncertainty about post-reunification ownership. One of his stipulations when he negotiated his professorship was that something must be done about the revolting public restrooms in the building. New plumbing was duly included in the deal, and he went around telling people that he was not just the W3 professor, he was (even better!) the WC professor. People were happy. (He probably should have included something about the roof, which has been leaking and shedding dangerous-looking architectural fragments onto the stairs.)

The negotiation is forever—or at least for five years, after which there is a review; but what you bargain for initially sets an important baseline. Unless you move to a new rank, probably by moving to a different university, your salary is unlikely to change much. Officially Germans do not expect inflation (though they get some), so there are no annual cost-of-living raises. No annual merit raises as a regular matter either.  Merit exists and is important but is not seen as a commodity for annual purchase.