Faculty members are entrusted with great power to decide who deserves space within the academic profession. Given that the profession's central mission is knowledge production, such decisions inevitably concern epistemic matters, and specifically, what constitutes legitimate knowledge. From this perspective, faculty hiring is not only a matter of…

Various concerns regarding the vitality and racial/ethnic composition of the academic profession have prompted new study of faculty search committees and hiring paradigms, most notably examining the term "fit" in candidate appraisals. Yet no study utilizes a candidate evaluation framework to investigate whether or not faculty members…

Within academe, there is much interest in the workings of the academic marketplace. Efforts to understand how the process unfolds occupy both researchers and participants. Clearly, the search process is complex. This article contributes to one's understanding by systematically examining how teaching is valued and assessed by search committees. As…

Preliminary considerations (position description, salary, campus politics), organizing the committee, conducting the search, and the interview are discussed to combine in the planning of a successful search committee. (PG)

The search for a leader is seen as a symbolic process through which institutional goals are discovered, political influence is negotiated, organizational values and myths are confirmed, uncertainty is reduced, and processes of choice are simplified. (Author/MLW)

This study examines whether specific interventions account for the hiring of diverse faculty above and beyond hiring done in academic areas specifically focused on race and ethnicity. Using data from approximately 700 searches, the authors investigated the hypothesis that at institutions with predominantly White populations, hiring of faculty from…

This article critically analyses administrative searches through the experiences and perspectives of candidates and search committee chairs at a predominantly white university. A model of filtering is advanced that describes how candidates are included and excluded and how the perspectives and consequences differ for black female, black male,…

A multiple case study design was used to gather search committee members' perceptions of the decision-making process characterizing three academic deanship searches in one university. Results suggest that searches have both structured and anarchic aspects and that neither the structured nor the anarchic decision making, by itself, contributes to…