Academic Searches I

This is the first of several posts on the process of academic searches. I’m going to be writing in the general case (that is, not specifically applicable to either the Krasnow Institute or George Mason University) although I’ll try to point out some of the unique aspects of how we fill positions here. I’m also going to limit the purview to academic searches for scientists, since that is what I really know something about.

Searches begin long before advertisements are places in SCIENCE or other venues. As much as a year before the first public sign that an institution is looking to fill a position, the process begins with what we call a faculty line (i.e. the position) either opening up through a vacancy or being newly allocated by the university administration to the unit. There is a tremendous amount of academic politics involved in just this initial stage. For an institution at a steady state period of its development, a vacancy offers the opportunity for budget relief and a newly allocated faculty line is often at the expense of a vacated line in some other academic unit of the university.

Sometimes faculty lines are allocated to units as compensation by the central administration for some other action entirely unrelated to the line itself.

Tenure-track faculty lines are the reserve currency of academic politics. For most universities, such lines are usually backed up by hard dollars–either from tuition, the endowment, or in the case of public institutions, the state government. Thus ultimately faculty lines represent base budget dollars for an academic unit.

For an institute for advanced study, like Krasnow, these faculty lines usually (but not always) reside within a separate unit from the Institute–and that academic unit becomes the primary academic home for the Krasnow Principal Investigator. Thus, our own search process is inherently collaborative.

Next post we’ll write about the search committee.

Jim