Buller Jeffrey L. - How to Review Applications and Interview Candidates

A Toolkit for College Professors (with Robert E. Cipriano)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Buller, Jeffrey L., author.

Title: Best practices for faculty search committees: how to review applications and interview candidates / Jeffrey L. Buller.

Description: San Francisco, CA : Jossey-Bass ; Hoboken, NJ : John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016038235 (print) | LCCN 2016050844 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119349969 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781119351665 (Adobe PDF) | ISBN 9781119351658 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: Universities and collegesFacultyEmployment. | Employment interviewing. | Employee selection.

Classification: LCC LB2332.7 .B85 2017 (print) | LCC LB2332.7 (ebook) | DDC 378.1/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016038235

Cover design: Wiley

FIRST EDITION

For Robert E. Cipriano (Collegial Bob) without whom ATLAS Leadership Training would not exist and my life would be immeasurably diminished.

Jeffrey L. Buller has served in administrative positions ranging from department chair to vice president for academic affairs at four very different institutions: Loras College, Georgia Southern University, Mary Baldwin College, and Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of 13 books on higher education administration, a textbook for first-year college students, and a book of essays on the music dramas of Richard Wagner. Buller has also written numerous articles on Greek and Latin literature, 19th- and 20th-century opera, and college administration. From 2003 to 2005, he served as the principal English language lecturer at the International Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, Germany. More recently, he has been active as a consultant to the Ministry of Education in Saudi Arabia, where he is assisting with the creation of a kingdom-wide academic leadership center. Along with Robert E. Cipriano, Buller is a senior partner in ATLAS: Academic Training, Leadership, & Assessment Services, through which he has presented numerous workshops on academic leadership and faculty searches.

For many faculty members, serving on a search committee is one of those activities that they think they ought to understandafter all, when they themselves were applicants, they did well enough with at least one search committee to be offered a jobbut that becomes more and more puzzling the further they become involved in the process. Why do institutions have all these cumbersome procedures they have to follow? How can the search committee deal with reading all the applications that come in and still have time for its members to do their teaching and research? What questions do you ask in an interview to find out the things that you really want to know? What questions shouldn't you ask, and how much trouble will you be in if you do? Although there are a few resources available on the technical aspects of how to run a search, a search committee will find very little available to review quickly so that they can get their task done properly and efficiently. As a result, faculty searches can be hit or miss. Sometimes everything seems to fall into place, and the search committee ends up hiring a wonderful new faculty member who becomes not only an important colleague but also a person who brings new vitality to the discipline. At other times, the applicant who seemed so perfect on paper and during the interview ends up being a very different type of person once the hiring process is complete, and the program as a whole suffers as a result.

This brief guidebook is intended to help make faculty search committees more effective and to make the work of serving on one if not easy then at least a little easier than it otherwise might have been. I wrote this book with busy college professors in mind, keeping what they need to know clear, concise, and above all practical. You're probably not reading this book to gain a theoretical overview of how faculty searches potentially could be run. You're probably reading it because you're involved in a search