Recession = Faculty poaching season

[sakky]

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My interpretation is that this likely slows even further an already slow pace of hiring.</p>

<p>I don’t know if this slows the pace of hiring or not…But I do know this after being involved with 3 out-of-state corporate moves (to Chicago suburbs, to Maryland, to Huntsville):</p>

<p>It is getting VERY HARD to get people to relocate and getting academia to relocate is no different. When people have either lost their jobs or are in serious danger of losing their jobs, it becomes a bit easier to get people to move.</p>

<p>The reasons it has become VERY difficult to get people to relocate are many…</p>

<p>1) Spouses may be entrenched in their present careers and can’t/won’t relocate</p>

<p>2) Child custody orders may not allow a parent to move kids out of state/area</p>

<p>3) Non custodial parents don’t want to move away from their kids</p>

<p>4) Parents of teens don’t want them to change high schools</p>

<p>5) Grandparents don’t want to move away from grandchildren</p>

<p>6) Adults don’t want to move away from elderly parents.</p>

<p>I have seen corporate move attempts completely fall apart when people “en masse” quit when facing a transfer to a new area (one such failed attempt cost the company over $100 million dollars). BTW…Women are the WORST about accepting relocation offers…It’s not their fault, many of their spouses simply refuse. Not ONE female participated in the transfer to Maryland…they all quit.</p>

<p>So…my point is…no matter who is at the helm driving these attempts to hire 100 new profs, it is just VERY difficult to get people to MOVE unless their jobs are in jeopardy.

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<p>Perhaps I missed something, but I suspect that many (probably most) of these 100 newly hired Michigan profs are not going to be current faculty members, but rather, newly minted PhD’s or post-docs who are entering the academic job market for the first time. I would surmise that it would be trivially easily to convince them to move. After all, they should have all known full well that after finishing their PhD or postdoc, they were going to have to move to wherever an academic position was available, and if they (or their spouse) didn’t know that, then that speaks to risibly poor life planning. Are there really many PhD students or postdocs who truly don’t realize that they will probably have to move upon finishing? What exactly did they think was going to happen? </p>

<p>For those PhD students who truly have spouses with entrenched careers, child custody issues, teen children who don’t want to leave their high schools, grandparent/grandchildren ties to maintain, or any other such family issues, then my advice would be to simply not enter the (non-local) academic job market in the first place. Heck, I would even question why you’re even seriously pursuing an academic career at all. It’s one thing to pursue a PhD for your own personal knowledge or because you want to take a local industry position via perhaps a PhD in engineering or computer science. But if you’re pursuing a PhD because you want a career in academia, then you ought to know that almost certainly involves relocation, and if your personal circumstances render that unfeasible, then honestly, you should consider a different career.</p>

<p>I’m quite certain the University of Michigan could easily find 25 new PhD’s or postdocs every year who would gladly take tenure-track academic positions. After all, even in the best hiring years, many PhD’s/postdocs can’t land any academic positions at all, much less ones at a school of the caliber of Michigan. Nor do I see much danger of diluting the quality of the faculty. If they prove to be poor hires, then you simply don’t renew their contracts and don’t promote them to tenure.</p>