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Faculty members are entrusted with great power to decide who deserves space within the academic profession. Given that the profession's central mission is knowledge production, such decisions inevitably concern epistemic matters, and specifically, what constitutes legitimate knowledge. From this perspective, faculty hiring is not only a matter of inviting new scholars into the academy but an opportunity to welcome new, creative knowledge, or perhaps knowledge that unsettles what has been taken-for-granted. Through interviews with 33 research university professors, we explored how search committees approached epistemic matters throughout the hiring process. Our analysis surfaced three distinct approaches. Defensive committees acted as if their primary task was safeguarding their discipline and department from disruptive epistemic contributions. Inclusive committees foregrounded local community, especially students' learning interests, and welcomed innovative even disruptive epistemic contributions. Conflictive committees displayed both tendencies, but ultimately favored scholars whose epistemic contributions would not disrupt the department or discipline. Across all three approaches, participants described how committees relied on conventions that generated both epistemic and demographic exclusion.

As preparation for the rhetoric and composition job market becomes more readily available through multiple sources, some cover letter writers may need clarification on the well-meaning but perhaps conflicting responses to writing given to them by mentors from differing backgrounds, statuses, and epistemes. This article seeks to illuminate the rhetorical situation behind the cover letter with simulated writing responses to a genuine cover letter by five reader archetypes: a supportive reader, a critical reader, an outside reader, a teaching-centric reader, and a research-centric reader. Through this exercise, cover letter writers are shown how to weigh writing advice through the juxtaposition of each reader's response. Cover letter readers as a secondary audience are also considered for preparing future job market participants.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the principle of fairness as equity, defined by Adams, is applied during the selection of school principals. Our focus was on a secondary education directorate drawing data in two ways. Firstly, a questionnaire was given to candidates who participated in the selection process, in order to investigate to which extent fairness as equity is included both in the process and the selection criteria. Secondly, we examined whether the selection board through the oral interview moved with the respective conditions of fairness as equity through the candidates' scoring. It seemed that the majority of participants have formed their opinion on fairness as equity based on their 'incoming capital' depending on their score, while they consider that the selection board was rather biased in rating their fellow candidates. This is due to previous official or personal relationships with the members of the selection board and party involvement. For the Greek context, the selection of school principals can be characterised as a process that allows the influence of factors clearly non-relating to the principle of fairness as equity. Proposals at the level of educational policy are proposed.

This evaluation of faculty hiring examines how eight faculty search chairs at a border Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) discuss how they enact an HSI consciousness when making hiring decisions. Using a combined phenomenological case study approach, the author examines hiring through a conceptual framework that brings together organizational culture and Borderlands theory to understand how committee decisions on hiring are informed by their campus's HSI designation and cultural identity. Through analysis of faculty search chair interviews, faculty search chairs at a borderland HSI are committed to hiring with their student population in mind by enacting a Latinx-serving consciousness. Overall, the findings of this study contribute to a broader conversation on servingness as well as scholarship on how educators and administrators can embrace the cultural values that their Latinx students possess to make decisions in hiring.

In modern higher education, nurturing successful interdisciplinary collaboration is both an institutional priority and a grand organizational and cultural challenge. Recent scholarship describes the many and varied challenges inherent in the enactment of interdisciplinarity; it also explores how these challenges can be mitigated to spur successful interdisciplinary engagement. While much attention has been focused on interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy, might interdisciplinary service collaborations also play a role? This qualitative case study probes a particular type of interdisciplinary collaboration--a cross-disciplinary committee convened to hire interdisciplinary faculty members. Using interview and observational data to uncover the lived experiences of committee members across campus at one U.S.-based R1 institution, this study explores service-work as a potential site of positive experience and successful interdisciplinary collaboration. Illuminated by the Shared Cognitive-Emotional-Interactive (SCEI) platform for interdisciplinary research collaboration by Boix Mansilla et al. (2016), findings reveal myriad positive outcomes tied to faculty's service participation, probe the multifaceted reasons that faculty choose to participate, and explore how they experience this work. Analysis also uncovers limited cognitive yet significant emotional and interactive markers of and factors that facilitate a successful interdisciplinary collaborative process. Evidence of these markers and factors serves to "reframe" interdisciplinary service as an instance of successful interdisciplinary collaboration, a site of faculty learning and a context that fosters campus connections among faculty. In uncovering these benefits of interdisciplinary collaborative service, this work suggests ways in which it may serve as a missing link to build and strengthen an interdisciplinary campus community.

Academic librarian hiring processes are designed to allow hiring institutions to learn about candidates through a multiple-round process, but often these processes are not designed with the candidates in mind. This paper uses a qualitative approach to interpret and understand how the attitudes of search committee members shape on-campus interview practices, with a particular focus on how interview practices create barriers to inclusivity. Library employees who recently served on academic librarian hiring committees were recruited to respond to a questionnaire, and a text analysis of responses to open-ended questions was performed to identify themes in academic librarian hiring.

Efforts to mitigate bias in faculty hiring processes are well-documented in the literature. Yet, significant barriers to the hiring of racially minoritized and White women in many STEM fields remain. An underreported barrier to inclusive hiring is assessment of risk. Guided by theory from behavioral economics, social psychology, and decision-making, we examine the inner workings of five faculty search committees to understand how committee members identified and assessed risk with particular attention to assessments of risk that became intermingled with social biases. Committees identified and assessed five risks, including candidate interest, candidate disciplinary expertise, candidate competence, candidate collegiality, and the timing and oversight of the search process itself. We discuss implications of risk identification and assessment for effective and inclusive searches.

Faculty hiring is an important dimension of diversity efforts across many postsecondary institutions. Many U.S. colleges and universities have released faculty job announcements establishing a demonstrated commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion as a necessary criterion for applicants. This move is significant because it entrenches diversity as a commodity--an exchangeable good that universities value and are willing to pay for. This conceptual paper explores how underlying racialized cultures in academia incentivize People of Color to commodify their racial identity when participating in the faculty job market. By interrogating the racial character of capitalist exploitation, we expose how diversity imperatives shape the faculty hiring process at historically white institutions in ways that commodify, exploit, and devalue People of Color.

Bias among faculty search committees has been considered a significant barrier to diversifying the professoriate. Given the traditional faculty hierarchy in academia, junior faculty search chairs may not have the positional power to challenge authority when confronted with bias or prejudice. Yet, search chairs are expected to ensure equitable practices and outcomes in their searches. In response to this quandary, through the lens of role theory, this study examined how faculty roles, within the hierarchical structure of tenure, affected equity during the hiring process. Findings revealed that the faculty hierarchy often superseded decision-making power given to search chairs if they were junior faculty, often leading to implicit support of biased hiring practices and the perpetuation of a culture of Whiteness. The study also indicated that search chairs' identities, values, and perceptions influenced how they operationalized diversity and equity in the search process, contributing to either diversity advocacy or support of the status quo. This qualitative inquiry makes an important contribution to the literature by exploring the ways in which faculty search chairs' status and social identities impact interpersonal committee dynamics and decisions about hiring diverse candidates.

Many institutions of higher education have implemented workshops for hiring committee members to familiarize them with the pernicious effects of implicit bias and how to counteract them. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for implicit bias trainings is not matched by the evidence for their effectiveness. Recognizing the difficulty of removing entrenched biases and the potential for trainings to backfire, we introduced the role of equity advocate (EA) at one institution. EAs are trained volunteer faculty and staff members who serve on search committees outside their home departments to identify behaviors and judgments that might have a disparate racial effect in hiring. We conducted focus groups to document the perspectives of both EAs and non-EA search committee members who completed a cycle of academic hiring. Search committee members credited EAs with helping to mitigate bias by questioning their assumptions and introducing standardized tools for evaluating candidates. By contrast, EAs reported a more contentious relationship with the rest of the search committee and expressed less confidence that the process was free from bias. Both groups agreed that the EAs added valuable race-conscious equitable practices, and untrained committee members identified ways they could apply the lessons of bias reduction in other parts of their professional roles. Our study provides evidence for how to engage all faculty and staff members in sustainable, equity-minded efforts.

Employee selection and group decision-making skills are critical for ensuring hiring is valid, meets organizational goals, and considers ethical and legal limitations. This exercise has participants role-play members of a search committee reviewing job finalists using shared and unique information. A novel twist to traditional hidden-profile exercises is introduced by including unique information inappropriate for employment decisions (e.g., health information, an old misdemeanor charge). By uncovering unshared details and deciding whether to discuss potentially biasing information, learners practice group decision making and consider legal issues. While exploring professional guidelines and best practices, the exercise acknowledges that managers occasionally know sensitive or potentially biasing information. Although primarily an human resource activity, the exercise includes a traditional hidden-profile variant with organizational behavior learning goals. Both variants are appropriate for learners across the organizational spectrum. A teaching note for adapting the in-person exercise for synchronous or asynchronous online delivery gives detailed instructions for popular learning management systems.

This study updates and expands upon past work on how tenure-track hiring committees evaluate teaching effectiveness to provide centers for teaching and learning (CTLs) current data as they support graduate students and postdocs navigating the academic hiring process. In this study, 166 hiring committee chairs from nine academic disciplines and a variety of institution types (e.g., Baccalaureate, Master's, and Doctoral) responded to survey questions addressing how they evaluate teaching effectiveness for tenure-track positions. Results indicate that hiring chairs across institution types and disciplines value a candidate's teaching effectiveness. Hiring committees use a variety of documents to gather information about an applicant's teaching, but the teaching philosophy statement is most common. The survey responses also provide greater clarity on what hiring chairs find effective in applicants' teaching philosophy statements, diversity and inclusion statements, and presentations of student evaluations. We discuss implications of these findings for scholarship of educational development (SoED) researchers, CTL leadership engaged in strategic planning, and educational developers providing consultations and workshops for future faculty.

This piece examines the Writing Studies job market from a perspective not addressed in previous literature: accessibility. I draw on work in the field of disability studies to argue that accessibility does not only affect those people who identify as having a disability; rather, it is a concept that speaks to how well all candidates are able to participate in the procedures and expectations for a tenure-track job search. Focusing on interview formats, this article ultimately argues for more generous interview practices that take into account the various ways in which candidates might be disadvantaged by rigid structures.

In this paper we review current practices for developing and promoting academic leadership in universities. We consider the forms of leadership that are appropriate for academic organisations, while exploring the types of leadership favoured by recruitment and promotion committees. Using the Australian higher education context as a case study, we critique the current situation as promoting a restricted form of leadership focused on technical leadership within an academic discipline, rather than the broader array of leadership skills necessary for effective academic leadership. We go on to consider a number of ways in which this broad range of leadership skills can be fostered and developed within academe.

The boundaries between universities of applied sciences and universities in the binary higher education system in Germany have begun to blur. This is likely to affect the criteria for hiring professors, too. The article investigates whether or not there is a similarity of the relative weight universities of applied sciences and universities put on selection criteria in appointment procedures for professorships. This analysis is based on data of an online survey of heads of appointment committees from both types of organisations, focusing on the relevance the respondents have attached to 23 selection criteria.

This case study examined how color-evasive racism operated through search committee members' practices in ways that undermined university policy created to centralize racial equity in faculty hiring. Findings show that abstract liberalism, racialized decoupling, and racialized agency impeded the realization of an equitable search process. Faculty engaged in these color-evasive practices through selectively applying hiring criteria, undermining racial equity work, compartmentalizing racial equity work, and discrediting committee members trained in equity-mindedness. The findings illustrate how power imbalances on search committees may lead to decoupling policies, processes, and outcomes that reproduce racial inequity in faculty hiring, particularly in the final stage.

This study explored the Mexican system to appoint school leaders from a perspective that could consider its positive aspects and as well as its shortcomings. This research was framed as an exploratory case study. Three types of participants were interviewed: five aspiring heads, twelve incumbent heads, and four administrators of the promotion system. Thematic analysis was the procedure adopted in the analysis of transcripts. The research was carried out to the highest ethical standards in educational research as anonymity, confidentiality, and respect for the participants were observed all the time. The study revealed that there are some positive aspects in the Mexican system that could enable its consolidation. The study found also a need to upgrade the current system of promotion since school leaders in Mexico are appointed by a system in which its regulations and procedures were promulgated more than 40 years ago. The current system of promotion does not enable the appointment of prepared school leaders. The findings revealed a need for leadership preparation as a prerequisite for participants in competitions for deputy headships, headships and for those who are already holding a leadership position.

This piece outlines the process generally used for hiring faculty at community colleges and offers advice for individuals seeking positions at two-year institutions.

Various concerns regarding the vitality and racial/ethnic composition of the academic profession have prompted new study of faculty search committees and hiring paradigms, most notably examining the term "fit" in candidate appraisals. Yet no study utilizes a candidate evaluation framework to investigate whether or not faculty members truly assess for fit, or if these assessments stifle diversification processes, especially in light of pervasive institutional efforts to reform faculty hiring. This study uses a critical person-environment fit framework and multiple case study methods to investigate how faculty search committee members individually evaluate and collectively select prospective early-career faculty. Results indicate that fit, as system of assumptions, practices, and tactics designed to evaluate and select candidates based on organizational needs, was minimal in faculty searches. Instead, faculty relied heavily on idiosyncratic preferences to evaluate research, teaching, and service credentials, which also contained criterion that directly and indirectly averted diversity. Findings reveal how the review and selection of candidates is as much, if not more, about individual committee preferences than organizational demands or congruence.

The definition of leadership changes over time, and the language used to describe leaders is key to understanding what is acceptable and desired in those who lead community colleges at the highest level: the presidency. Language is inherently political, so the discourse around the qualifications of and expectations for presidents has the power to shape who sees themselves in those roles and whose image is forefront in the minds of search committees and campus members. We engaged in feminist critical discourse analysis of job postings for community college presidents at two points in a 20-year span, 1996 and 2016, to better understand how leadership is defined at the presidential level in the community college environment and, more importantly, who fits the profile of a leader. We found that although a counterdiscourse exists, the predominant discourse remains couched in outdated ideals of hero leadership that favors men.

Background/Context: Education scholars have recommended steps for college and university leaders to take toward creating a more racially diverse professoriate. However, the majority of the scholarship is neither empirical nor focused on faculty actively negotiating barriers during search committee meetings to create equitable practices. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The study examined faculty within search committees who received formal training to interrogate exclusionary hiring procedures and create race-conscious and equitable hiring practices. My goals were to understand the strategies and efforts to advance racial equity of faculty trained on equity-mindedness to negotiate and use practices to change exclusionary hiring procedures. Thus, I answer the following research questions: (1) How do professors enact their agency to create equitable hiring practices during faculty search committee meetings? (2) What challenges do professors encounter when using equity-minded practices during faculty search committees? How do professors overcome such challenges? Setting: The study site was a religiously affiliated private liberal arts university with a predominantly White student and faculty population. Senior administrators invested resources in a ten-month intervention to train 17 faculty to advance racial equity in faculty hiring. Population/Participants/Subjects: Study participants consisted of 10 faculty members whose university leadership designated them as advocates of racial equity on search committees. Research Design: Data for this critical narrative analysis were collected through eight interviews with faculty equity advocates, observations of two faculty search committees, and documents of hiring materials such as hiring criteria, interview questions, and evaluation rubrics. Findings/Results: Ultimately, faculty enacted their agency to deactivate exclusionary practices and inscribe new rules for search committees to follow. The findings illustrate that faculty agency for racial equity is an effort to establish positional power, to use equity-minded practices, and to informally strategize to overcome resistance as members of faculty search committees. Conclusions/Recommendations: I conclude that faculty advance racial equity by manipulating and subverting practices (e.g., recruitment strategies, evaluation criteria), rules (e.g., conversations about race), and roles (e.g., legitimate roles as committee members, who have the knowledge to integrate equity-mindedness) that historically excluded racially minoritized professors from the hiring process. Study findings suggest for senior administrators to train faculty search committee members on taking active steps to create an equity-minded evaluation system, including the appointment of people who are explicitly trained to advocate for equity in the evaluation process.

One of the critical issues in education today is how to help all students to maximize their fullest potential. Achieving this goal seems to be difficult for many people who come from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. At all levels, they endure direct and indirect disenfranchisements, disadvantages, and disillusionments, especially if they learn differently, are racially different, demonstrate different behavioral patterns, have different personal idiosyncrasies, or come from different countries. Despite these apparent impediments, Asians are viewed by many as "model" minorities when compared to African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. This view has continued to affect how Asians view themselves and how the society as a whole views them. Coming originally from Nigeria to the United States, I have had myriad interactions with Asians as student, professor, scholar, leader, and professional. In this article, I share my experiences with Asians and how these experiences have exposed multicultural realities and myths.

Many times, the search process is steeped in traditional methods, questions, and procedures that limit the depth and scope of a search. The purpose of this study was to examine the beliefs of faculty in colleges of education for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of what early childhood faculty believe. What was discovered was there is a generally homogenous view of the purposes of education. Yet, there were differences in beliefs with regard to gender, race, university size and rank which allowed for recommendations on lines of inquiry as to beliefs.

Pressures facing junior faculty during a tenure track job search are high and can come from a multitude of areas. It follows that professionals in this position would try to reduce uncertainty associated with securing a new employment contract. The authors offer their observations below on how to increase an applicant's chance to succeed in an initial screening process--what is we refer to as "making the first pile"--and the interviews that follow.

Women are not tenured at the same rate they are receiving PhDs, and less likely to be tenured when compared to their male counterparts. Reasons women have difficulty achieving tenure include not discussing important information about an academic appointment with colleagues, working part time or as adjunct faculty, being involved in "pastoral or administrative" work, not having a realistic understanding of how important research is when untenured, and experiencing non academic issues. Interventions to alleviate this situation include departmental/campus policies before/during/after the woman is hired. Before being hired it is important to provide female faculty mentors to bright/capable women doctoral students and help them prepare for the academy by prioritizing scholarship over teaching and encouraging publications. During the hiring process it is useful to target women through advertising/recruiting at conferences, consider hiring current female doctoral students after completion of a post doctoral experience at another institution, and appointing women faculty as chair/members of search committees. After women are hired it is important to improve transparency/equitability/inclusivity of tenure guidelines, assist women create a plan of action related to tenure criteria and their own skills/abilities, provide formal/informal mentoring opportunities, improve the departmental/campus climate regarding female faculty and interaction with male colleagues, and adopt family friendly policies to better integrate family/work obligations by providing flexibility in when/where/how work is done, or offering job sharing or part time employment options.

The increasing diversity of the student bodies of community colleges calls for faculty who are motivated and equipped to educate them. This diversity is a product of the common theme community colleges share in their missions that espouses providing access to education for all members of their local communities. The faculty search committee plays a crucial role in identifying candidates for full-time faculty positions, and further awareness of the implications of their missions for the search process is warranted. The steps that faculty search committees navigate are reconsidered with an eye toward the impact that consideration of the community college mission could have on the process.

This article examines how macro-discourses of internationalisation and excellence shape formal and applied selection criteria for early-career researcher positions at the meso-organisational and micro-individual levels, demonstrating how tensions between the various levels produce inequalities in staff evaluation. In this way, this article contributes to the literature on academic staff evaluation by showing that Selection Committee members do not operate in a vacuum, and that their actions are inextricably linked to the meso- and macro-context. This study draws on qualitative multi-level data that comprise institutional-level policies, recruitment and staff protocols, job postings and individual-level interviews and focus groups with Selection Committee members. Findings show that a majority of Selection Committee members consent to university policies and macro-discourses when evaluating early-career researchers, but a smaller group questions and resists these criteria. Furthermore, the analysis revealed four inequalities that emerge in the application of criteria and reflect on disciplinary differences between the Natural and Social Sciences. The article concludes that with only a few Committee members to critically question and resist formal selection criteria, they limit the pool of acceptable candidates to those who fit the narrow definition of the internationally mobile and excellent early-career researcher, which may exclude talented scholars.

A national survey of high school principals was conducted to determine whether they agreed or disagreed with selected practices and procedures used to hire high school physical education teachers. A survey instrument, developed with the help of experts in the field and consisting of 29 items, was sent to 400 randomly selected principals. Useable survey instruments returned numbered 214 for a 53.5 percent rate of return. The results revealed the schools' hiring practices, policies, and procedures in terms of the treatment of solicited and unsolicited applications; the advertisement of vacancies; the use of search and screen committees; the importance of job references; the interview process; how applicants are kept up to date relative to their applications; the number of years of prior experience granted to new hires; preferences for experienced or inexperienced candidates; preferences for a graduate degree and for swimming certification of candidates; and whether principals preferred candidates who are willing and able to coach one or more sports. (Contains 1 table.)

In the last ten years, many colleges, universities, boards, and agencies have jumped on the diverse faculty/staff hiring bandwagon not only by issuing resolutions, policies, and mandates but also by inventing programs, initiatives, and strategies all intended to increase the number of faculty and staff of color in predominantly White institutions. The statistics illustrate the results: 80-90% of faculty and staff in most colleges and universities are still White. Why, despite the best intentions, are most of these programs and policies failing to increase faculty/staff diversity? Unfortunately what is often overlooked in the diverse hiring conundrum is the crucial role that both search committees and institutional culture play in the recruitment and retention of diverse faculty and staff at predominantly White colleges and universities. It has been assumed that those who serve on search committees prioritize diverse hiring when in reality many have never even discussed, let alone agreed upon, the institutional and departmental advantages of a diverse faculty and staff. This author contends that, if predominantly White colleges and universities are serious about their commitment to faculty/staff diversity, if they want to move from empty rhetoric to real action and progress that changes statistics and transforms institutional culture, they must make a concerted effort to educate everyone who serves on their search committees. Although search committees are only one part of the diverse hiring picture, diversification of faculty and staff at U.S. colleges and universities can not occur without their eyes being opened to the various biases, assumptions, and stereotypes that influence their perceptions, judgments, and decisions. More importantly, inclusive educational cultures that retain diverse students and employees can not be created without knowledge and skills in intercultural competence. Given the rapidly changing demographics affecting colleges and universities, it is imperative that predominantly White institutions recognize now the serious repercussions of a monocultural faculty/staff serving a multicultural student body and support their employees in moving from minimization of cultural differences to acceptance and adaptation so that predominantly White search committees selecting diverse candidates will no longer be an oxymoron.