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Class Notables

BY MIKE UNGER

Beginning in the midst of Washington’s sticky summer and culminating around commencement in May, AU engages in an annual routine of attracting what comprises the backbone of any successful university: quality teachers and scholars. The school hires roughly 25 to 30 tenure-track faculty at the assistant professor level each year. It’s an exercise that has lasting impact; many of these men and women will go on to grace the university’s classrooms and laboratories for a generation or longer.

“The key to AU is that we really are looking for a balance,” Interim Provost Ivy Broder says of prospective professors. “We wouldn’t be interested in faculty members who weren’t deeply engaged in both parts [teaching and scholarship] of their professional lives.”

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The competition for such individuals is fierce. Just as AU pursues the top thinkers, so do Georgetown, George Washington, and hundreds of other institutions, and AU, like the other schools, must work hard to attract the best faculty who often are entertaining multiple suitors.

The faculty recruitment process is a true collaborative effort in which almost every constituency on campus participates. Current faculty, students, department chairs, deans, and the Office of the Provost all have a hand in selecting new professors.

“It is effective precisely because it does involve so many,” says Kay Mussell, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS). “Recruiting faculty is how we guarantee the future of this institution. Collective wisdom is critical to that goal.”

“There’s a very clear template that we have to follow,” says psychology department chair Anthony Riley. “Every step along the way we have to verify where we’re doing the search, the number of applications that we’ve had, their diversity in terms of male or female and different ethnic groups, to make sure that we have a representative pool of people.”

AU has been spectacularly successful in this regard.

“We have over a hundred more women on the faculty than we had 12 years ago,” Broder says. “At that time, only a quarter of the tenured faculty were female, now it’s 36 percent.”

In addition, this year more than 18 percent of the full-time faculty are minorities.

“We have done a tremendous job in the last decade attracting a very high quality and diverse faculty to the university, who continue to grow professionally once they arrive here,” Broder says. “As the academic reputation of the institution improves, we’re able to attract better and better people to the campus. I don’t see any end to that.”

For academic year 2006–07, AU hired 20 tenure-track faculty in 13 departments. Here is how the process unfolded for one psychology professor.

Searching Ads

In September of last year, Juan Dominguez began scanning professional journals and Web sites in pursuit of one of the oldest pillars of society: a job. Three years had elapsed since Dominguez earned his PhD in behavioral neuroscience from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and now, after working in laboratories, he was convinced he had sufficient experience to make the leap from associate research faculty member at Florida State University to tenure-track professor.

“I felt I was properly prepared to join an institution as a professional scientist and academician,” he says. “I learned that the psychology department at AU was in search of an assistant professor. I became quite excited, in part because I was already familiar with AU and its reputation as a great academic institution. I also knew D.C. was a fabulous city to live in, so I quickly submitted my application.”

Position Available

In the summer of 2005, College of Arts and Sciences dean Kay Mussell submitted a request to the Office of the Provost asking for funding for the position for which Dominguez would later apply. The request ultimately was approved, marking the beginning of the courtship ritual that commences annually at AU and on campuses throughout the country, one in which both schools and prospective faculty vie for the most attractive counterpart.

“I [had] been interested in joining a department and an institution where scientific research and teaching were equally important and where one did not overshadow the other,” Dominguez says. “AU offered me that opportunity. I strongly believe that teaching and research work in synergy. With my research, I am able to bring hands-on experiences into the classroom. There’s much to be said for discussing your own work during class. But also, my research gains immensely from my teaching.”

When hiring requests are submitted by deans in each of the six colleges in July, it is the dean of academic affairs who recommends to the provost which are approved and which are denied.

“What happens is a kind of high level negotiation between deans’ needs, budgetary priority, a certain directive from the board, and then through various offices, including this one, those needs are put together,”says Haig Mardirosian, acting dean of academic affairs. “The request comes from the unit; this is what we need. There is a judgment on that request. You look at resources. Then finally, the positions that are available get brokered.”

Once authorizations are finalized, the schools submit a detailed recruitment plan by the end of August. This blueprint includes specifics of how they will go about attracting applicants, the composition of a committee to interview candidates, and an affirmative action plan.

After Mardirosian approves the recruitment plan and calendar, advertisements like the one Dominguez saw in the Journal of Neuroscience are posted in professional publications, and staff from the schools visit recruitment events. Targeted scholars are invited to apply, while others send in résumés on their own volition. Response levels can vary widely.

“In a tenure-line search in a big discipline like psychology we can have as many as 100 applicants easily,” Mardirosian says. “In a temporary search in a much more specialized area of, let’s say arts management, we may have five, so it varies tremendously. You eventually have to make a judgment as to whether this is a reasonable number. We’ve pulled the plug on searches when they have been under subscribed [or lacked diversity reflective of the field].”

AU received about 120 applications for the position Dominguez ultimately landed. Each one was read by every member of the six-person search committee appointed by psychology department chair Anthony Riley. The committee included faculty, a graduate student, and a representative of Dean Mussell, CAS.

Following a meeting that ruled out unqualified candidates, about 30 résumés remained. Those were whittled down to roughly a dozen names that were sent to the school’s dean and the dean of academic affairs. After receiving approval for that short list, the search committee then picked three finalists to interview. Dominguez was among the survivors.

Interview Time

After the top three in a search are chosen, they’re invited to campus for a full day of interviews with the search committee, the dean, and then Mardirosian.

“To meet scholars from around the country who are at the cutting edge of their work, who talk about it with some passion, who talk about teaching, it’s just a great thing to do,” Mardirosian says. “I always ask in my interview, ‘What is it about AU that attracts you?’ I listen very closely to the quality of that answer. Sometimes it’s a canned answer. Often people will come up with really thoughtful explanations, and often the narrative that I hear is ‘this is a place that’s complex enough to allow me my research agenda, close enough to the centers of where I need to be in an attractive urban setting, which offers all of the advantages of a small liberal arts college. Which is to say, I love doing my work, but I love teaching; I love to be engaged with my students, and here I get a sense of a real community of students around me.’ It’s the answer I love hearing.”

For the candidates, the interviews can be nerve racking, but Dominguez handled his with poise. He was introduced to every member of the department, presented a colloquium on his research interests before about 25 people, met with students, and dined with potential colleagues at a local restaurant.

Riley and his colleagues came away from Dominguez’s visit quite impressed.

“He had all the credentials on paper before he ever came for an interview. He had teaching awards; he had exceptionally wonderful training. He had wonderful research skills; he already had applied for grants. He had already shown all the things we want in a colleague,” Riley says. “Furthermore, I got two unsolicited calls from colleagues across the U.S. to tell me that he was a star. His colloquium was very nicely done. He was polished; he was engaging. The graduate students fell in love with him. He clearly wanted to do collaborative work. Some people come in and they just don’t know how to interview. He knew how to interview, and he was sincere.”

The Final Cut

Following the interviews, in the midwinter freeze, search committees reconvene to rank the three finalists. In the psychology department, the committee makes its recommendation to the faculty council—composed of every faculty member in the department plus two graduate students—which votes on the potential hire. That tally is then taken to the dean and Mardirosian, who are confronted with tough choices.

“We all confer,” Mardirosian says. “About 90 percent of the time, first choice wise, the deans and I will agree. Almost as much of the time the search committee and the dean will agree. But passions do run high.”

Usually, when a consensus candidate is identified, the dean makes an official job offer, beginning yet another phase of the dance.

“Sometimes we don’t land our first choices,” Mardirosian says. “You have to remember that these faculty members are not only being recruited here, they’re being recruited in five or six different places. But we probably land a great majority of our first choices, certainly over 50 percent.”

As in any profession, money plays a central role for candidates weighing multiple offers. But as is equally true of other professions, factors other than the financial bottom line can have a major impact.

“There are ways of sweetening the offer beyond salary and benefits,” says Jonathan Knight, director of the American Association of University Professors’ program on academic freedom and tenure.

AU’s Washington location obviously provides a great selling point. But it’s idyllic campus, and the quality of the public school systems in suburban Maryland and Virginia play no less a role.

“Dollar for dollar it’s hard to go up against places with billions of dollars in endowments, and millions and millions of dollars in research funds coming in,” Mardirosian says. “We’re just not that big . . . if we just get into a spitting contest with this we’re not going to attract these individuals. We overachieve in terms of the quality of the faculty we bring here because they pick up on those very specific elements of what define American University and they see that as a real advantage to them. A good dean negotiating with a faculty member can be a master in playing that.”

Making the Offer

By late in February, AU is making hires and signing contracts. Dominguez was at a conference in Hawaii when he received his offer and happily accepted. The new faculty generally are in place by May, and after a brief respite, the process then begins anew.

“It’s a yearly cycle, kind of like flowers blooming,” Mardirosian says.