Superstars and Rookies of the Year: Faculty Hiring Practices in the Postmodern Age

Mary Burgan

University of California at Berkeley, Center for Studies in Higher Education from Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley

Abstract: Hiring new colleagues is a matter that engages individual faculty members intensely, for peer control of admission to the professoriate has been a highly successful source of academic quality in American higher education. “Super Stars and Rookies of the Year” analyzes the fixation on research acclaim as a negative version of academic hiring practices which has become embedded within the academic psyche. This fixation tends to be aroused by the rituals of recruitment and retention that take place on all campuses. But when recruitment becomes an exercise in what some economists have called “the-winner-take-all” mentality of our culture, departments, and programs can become unhealthy environments. When faculty and administrations insist on the extremely volatile criteria of early promise or current fame in choosing new colleagues, their efforts to build a community of scholars can become an exercise in professional pathology. When they neglect excellent current members of their departments to recruit outsiders at higher pay and richer benefits, they risk alienating their own excellent faculties. The antidote is a wise consideration of the total identity and mission of institutional departments in all recruitment efforts.

Keywords: Higher Education; Hiring; Professoriate; Faculty; Recruitment; Salary; Finance; Institutional Culture; Mission (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005-08-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/0tp9x6cf.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:cshedu:qt0tp9x6cf

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of California at Berkeley, Center for Studies in Higher Education from Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff (help@escholarship.org).