- #I AM NOT A VERY ADVENTUROUS PERSON ON THE JOB MEANING PROFESSIONAL#
- #I AM NOT A VERY ADVENTUROUS PERSON ON THE JOB MEANING FREE#
He asked why I hadn’t contacted him sooner. but for whatever reason, he had given the courses that he hired me for to someone else. He thought that I couldn’t take the position. I send the chair an e-mail inquiring if the syllabus was satisfactory, and he responds with a surprised e-mail…. It all takes a fair amount of time, several weeks. I start putting together syllabi for the courses I’ve been hired to teach. Being my first teaching position, I had extra hoops to jump through, getting fingerprinted, filling out tons of paperwork at HR. No need for a interview process etc., beyond meeting with the chair and the dean. Straight out of grad school, I was interviewing for part-time teaching positions. It would be useful to be reminded of the various contingencies that can affect the outcomes of job searches. If you’ve had experience, as a member of a hiring department, with a surprise failure of your department’s hiring decision to be executed by your university, you’re welcome to share that, too.
#I AM NOT A VERY ADVENTUROUS PERSON ON THE JOB MEANING FREE#
If you’ve had an unofficial offer fail to materialize in writing, or a similar experience, feel free to share it here. Whether an individual job candidate has a job offer could have significant effects on the candidate’s life, even if they don’t take it but whether a department has to hire someone else because their first choice candidate accepted an offer elsewhere as they wrapped up their hiring process is of little if any moral significance (at least in regard to its effects on the department).
Those on the hiring side may fear that being honest with a candidate about the uncertainty of the process risks losing them, but they ought to recognize that the matter is morally much more important to the candidate than the department. Of course, it may be that the actual explanation in this case is that the chair was intentionally conveying to the candidate a false impression of his chances as a way of keeping him interested while the department looked at other applicants or made up their minds.
#I AM NOT A VERY ADVENTUROUS PERSON ON THE JOB MEANING PROFESSIONAL#
And they should know that professional ethics at the very least here recommends that they be transparent about the contingency of job “offers” before they are in writing and in the possession of the candidate. Search committee members, department chairs, and anyone else providing informal updates to job candidates should know this. In short, there are a variety of ways in which what ends up officially happening with a search is not what the search committee or department decided to do. Or it could be that the department voted the candidate the offer but for some reason a dean or someone else higher up surprisingly didn’t approve (and perhaps for some reason completely unrelated to the candidate’s qualifications). It may be that the chair was foolish in thinking things were settled before they really were, and then was too embarrassed to communicate this before circumstances forced them to.
But also, some forms of incompetence are professionally irresponsible. As for why things like this happen, my default background view is Hanlon’s Razor: don’t assume malice when incompetence will do. It is unusual for this kind of thing to happen, and it ought not to happen. He wrote in to share the story, curious about how common this is. He doesn’t know the precise reason, but says “I can only assume the chair was lying to me while they locked down someone else.” He says that the reason is not that funding for the position vanished or that the search was canceled. the chair continually repeated to me, “the written offer is coming in a few days.” Then, over five weeks later, I was in fact told that no formal offer was going to come. I just went through an absolutely wild experience where I was given a verbal offer for a position.
The application and interview process went well, and he got the offer. A philosopher with a tenure-track job applied for a position at another university.
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