Inside Higher Ed has an interesting case of a Ph.D. candidate who was offered a tenure track job at a teaching college. In response, she negotiated. That the right thing to do, right? Doesn’t everyone say that women don’t do that enough? She sent an e-mail to the college with these requests:
“As you know, I am very enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Nazareth. Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier[:]
1) An increase of my starting salary to $65,000, which is more in line with what assistant professors in philosophy have been getting in the last few years.
2) An official semester of maternity leave.
3) A pre-tenure sabbatical at some point during the bottom half of my tenure clock.
4) No more than three new class preps per year for the first three years.
5) A start date of academic year 2015 so I can complete my postdoc.”
She ended the email by saying “I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others. Let me know what you think.”
The college promptly rescinded the offer.
Did the woman ask for too much? Great discussion at Inside Higher Ed and at The Philosophy Smoker.
Apt. 11d 
You don’t start a negotiation in an email. You pick up the phone and call them, and then send an email confirming the discussion. W may think she is negotiating, but she isn’t. She is making demands.
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I totally agree with you. I hate phone calls, but this is a phone call situation. And you do the requests one or two at a time and feel them out. And you don’t do the maternity leave issue at all. You ask, “What are your policies on maternity leave? Are those policies firm?” It was bad negotiating. However, it was not necessarily wrong for her to negotiate in the first place.
On the Philosophy Smoker blog, one commenter said the committee handled it wrong. The chair should have said ” We can do none of those things. Are you still interested in the position?” This is basically what my chair said. 🙂 I said yes, and it has worked out great and I have hugely supportive colleagues, including my chair.
Basically, this is a case where both sides handled things badly.
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Not true. I was asked to send my startup requirements in an email. She wasn’t demanding, she was asking, and made it clear she understood she wasn’t going to get everything.
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Were you asked by email or on the phone? I think start-up requirements are different from her list anyway – they are expected.
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The startup was part of the negotiation though. I was told the offered terms over the phone, with the Dean, and was asked to respond in writing. In another job offer I put counter terms in writing, in part because it was difficult to negotiate with the Chair, who wasn’t clear on the concept (seemed to be in part taking my side, and yet didn’t understand I had entered the negotiating phase, so kept telling me things that seemed designed to have me be fair to other people and what they had negotiated … when I sent the requests in writing, that bumped them up to the Dean and got me a lot of what I was asking for).
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I don’t think her requests are unreasonable, but I definitely would ask on the phone and not by email. Because then you can go back and forth. 65k is too much, how about 62? Etc. And you can’t tell what her breaking point is. What item would make her turn the job down flat?
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Actually, this made me laugh out loud. Candidate has no idea what a philosophy department at a SLAC needs or what the state of higher ed looks like these days. I did 12 new preps in my first two years teaching at a SLAC. A pre-tenure sabbatical is not usually possible in a small department at a SLAC. And a number of new assistant profs in the humanities were starting at 63k at Columbia University in 2009 so 65k for Rochester, with a lower cost of living than Manhattan, seems like a stretch. The requests suggest that she will not be happy at a place like Nazareth and probably won’t stay.
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When my husband got his first job, I don’t know that there were any negotiations of this kind. They just made an offer and he took it.
It was very different with the second (current) job, because he’d already gotten tenure at the first job. A friendly future colleague tipped him off as to appropriate stuff to ask for. It was a fairly ambitious list, but there was absolutely no harm in asking when he already had a job.
None of this person’s demands are that unreasonable in isolation, it’s just that as a list, they give the impression that she doesn’t want to start working with them this decade. Presumably, the reason they’re hiring is that they want somebody to come work with them NOW.
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I asked my husband and I guess with his first job, he did negotiate an extra $2k a year and got a promise of a summer fellowship (for one year?). The negotiation for the second one was way more aggressive.
I’m very curious what the college offered W, but the $65k that she asked for is probably pretty outlandish in that setting as a starting salary. I know a private college in a similar cost-of-living area that pays starting salaries not too far from that, but it’s a much richer school.
A guy we know is a sort of Academic Contract Whisperer (he was the helpful future colleague who told my husband what to ask for for his second job), and the Academic Contract Whisperer says not to worry about this article if you’re negotiating a contract, as it’s very uncommon for an offer to be withdrawn like this.
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Here’s another problem–the department presumably needs to be able to defend the hire to the administration. Presumably, the administration is going to want to know how it’s possible that they need to hire somebody now if they can manage without her for all the time she’s asked for off.
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I have seen it suggested on other sites that given the response, there was internal controversy about hiring her and that is why they changed their mind.
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W’s e-mail may have been tone-deaf and may have indicated that she had a poor understanding of what a non-selective liberal arts college is likely to offer new assistant professors. But Nazareth was clearly in the wrong from my perspective.
Also, for what it’s worth, since everyone is saying that you shouldn’t negotiate over e-mail: Many of us haven’t gotten that memo! I did all of my ‘negotiating’ over e-mail because that’s what my advisors told me to do. That’s what everyone I know from grad school did.
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It’s just occurred to me to wonder what other members of the Naz philosophy department did when they got their jobs. Did they negotiate their offers at all?
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I wonder how much the size of the department matters in a situation like this. It seems that there are only 4 full time professors in the dept (and 5 lecturers, one of whom has a PhD).
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I just heard from someone at my school (not my department) that lower tier schools often don’t higher graduates from a top 5 program as they view them as “overqualified” and assume that the person is going to use them as basically another post doc to get a better job somewhere else. I’ve heard of people being turned down for jobs for that reason. It seems like, her demands taken in aggregate (they really do come off as demands when phrased as: “Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier”. This reads as saying that you are not sure you want the job, and you’d be more likely to deign to take it if you got some sweeteners, but even then you’re STILL not guaranteed to say yes) read like she’s trying to use this place as a 2nd post doc and planning on bolting as soon as she gets a better offer. That might be unfair to her, but her wording and the combination of 3-5 really make it sound that way. Also, while her demands aren’t unreasonable at some places, reading about Nazareth she’s asking for things beyond their power to grant (like a 30% pay raise, a sabbatical only given to tenured faculty, etc.). While I think her demands are totally reasonable for a larger school, they read like she knows they can’t meet them and doesn’t really want the job or she has no clue that she’s not at an R1 or prestigious SLAC. I agree that rescinding the offer was cruel, but 1) if it was a divided decision in the first place, and 2) the department is very small and all the faculty have a high teaching load, I can see why they might feel like this person is a bad fit and probably not work out. Either s/he’s going to leave immediately, making them redo the search, or s/he’s going to be unhappy at a teaching-heavy non-research university. While I am a grad student and reading this gives me hives, I also think that, if you’re hiring a colleague for potentially life, you really want to make sure you’ve made the right decision.* If a candidate reveals more information after the initial offer which causes hesitation, then the department should reconsider. I don’t know if revoking the offer is the right choice, and clearly it would be better not to offer than to offer and revoke, but I can see why a hiring committee might give pause.
*We’ve denied tenure to two people in the past 4 years. One person found a TT job in actually the middle of nowhere, the other may be teaching yoga. That also gives me hives, but I think it was the right choice to not give tenure if you’re not sure that the people meet the standards of the departments, in terms of research, teaching, and advising students.
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B.I. said:
“I just heard from someone at my school (not my department) that lower tier schools often don’t higher graduates from a top 5 program as they view them as “overqualified” and assume that the person is going to use them as basically another post doc to get a better job somewhere else.”
That’s true, and it’s unbelievably aggravating if you don’t have another job lined up–my husband heard that from a perfectly respectable state flagship school on his first venture at the job market.
On the other hand, it is actually true there can be terrible cultural mismatches with that kind of hire. 1) The hire may not be used to dealing with non-elite undergrads–dealing with students of average or below-average intelligence and preparation year after year may cause them to rapidly burn out. For many, it’s much easier and more fun to deal with bright, well-prepared students. 2) There’s the geographical problem. I remember years ago prowling City Data for South Bend (home to Notre Dame and pretty close to Chicago) and for our current town (which is a largish college town in Texas and fairly close to a number of metropolises) and noting how many faculty were howling like damned souls about how TERRIBLE it is to live in those places. And in real life, I certainly meet people who go around talking about how they can’t stand it here. And then I visited an old friend (a New Englander) who has an academic job in a tiny insular Dutch town in the Midwest (remember, if you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much), and found she was slowly going nuts there (but enjoying the excellent Dutch bakery and excellent Dutch butcher).
It is a real question that colleges in those kinds of places are interested in–can you be happy here?
“While I am a grad student and reading this gives me hives, I also think that, if you’re hiring a colleague for potentially life, you really want to make sure you’ve made the right decision.”
Yes–it’s as permanent a relationship as marriage. And there’s no “no-fault” option for get rid of a tenured faculty member.
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I thought she came across as inflexible and legalistic, and I found myself as an administrator thinking that she’s probably the person who wouldn’t take an extra section because her colleague had cancer because “you promised me this in my contract.” Also, is she actually pregnant — or was the maternity leave for a hypothetical baby, to be conceived (TBC) in the future? I feel like I have enough worries in my department with the real issues I have, without someone who has time to worry about hypotheticals. (Also, I could see her taking the semester off pre-tenure and combining it with the maternity leave, all while the other colleague had cancer, and pretty much leaving the whole department high and dry for a year.)
Also, resources can be verbally promised far in advance and so some of her demands would probably involve queu-jumping. In other words, giving her that sabbatical might mean putting her in line in front of Norman who has been waiting patiently for four years for his turn to have a semester of leave. Either she didn’t know that or she didn’t care.
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It seems like the question here isn’t whether her demands were reasonable or not but whether a man who made the same demands in the same way would have come off in such a negative way that the offer would be completely rescinded. I believe that research shows that women are generally screwed in these situations: seen as weak-willed if they don’t negotiate and conversely seen as too aggressive if they do negotiate. I expect that if a man made these demands Naz probably wouldn’t have met them but they also wouldn’t have abandoned the offer either.
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I agree, it’s a terrible double edged sword. I read in some comment from someone claiming to know the person that he is actually a man though.
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Though, most articles refer to the person as a ‘she,’ so maybe it is a woman. If it were a man maybe it made them read the maternity leave request differently (not necessarily that it should, since we need paternity leave as well.)
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Agree!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Also, it must really suck to work in a field where even trying to negotiate is viewed so negatively. I once had an offer rescinded after I made my initial salary request and it was because their number and mine were so far apart it was clear we would never meet in the middle. It was clearly not the right match for either of us and we parted ways amicably. It speaks to the dysfunction of the academy that this incident has become a “thing” worthy of outrage on both sides.
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I think the important lesson *not* to take from this interchange is that you shouldn’t “lean in”. You should ask for what you want to make the job feasible for you, in combination with what you need to do your best at the job. Some of the things that accrue directly to you — say, salary– make you a better employee if it makes you more likely to stay in the job, makes it possible for you to pay for the things that allow you to be a good employee (say, like childcare, or a place to live close to work).
But, people also have to remember that they are being hired for a job, not to make them happy. They need to ask for things that will allow them to do the job well. In this case, in particular, three of her requests (delay of start, maternity leave, and pre-tenure sabbatical) were all things that meant that she *wouldn’t* be doing the job. They contribute to her ability to do a job only if a long term commitment of employment is in the offing — that, is, giving someone all that time not doing their job is worth it if you are looking at 40 years of employment down the road. The requests, though, raise red flags that the person will want to leave, and in that case, the requests are a bad investment.
I do still think it’s odd that they rescinded the offer rather than just saying no. They did decide that she wasn’t collegial, I’m guessing, and I suspect, that was more likely when hearing requests from a woman.
But, I really hope that no one takes this as a lesson not to ask for what you need and want. Because, what’s the alternative? Having a job that isn’t going to work for you anyway?
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