Hiring

Perhaps the most consequential decisions made in any chair’s tenure involve hiring. Because faculty members often spend their entire careers at the institutions at which they are first hired, hires, once made, shape departments for decades. Kenyon aspires to employ the best teacher-scholars available. That means we must effectively attract, recruit, and hire the best young scholars and artists who also want to commit themselves to being truly excellent teachers in a liberal arts college setting. Chairs play central roles in recruitment and hiring. First, chairs must seek and receive authorization to hire. For visiting and part-time positions, that typically means a request to the Provost to replace someone on leave or to be able to hire a part-time instructor to fill certain course needs. Tenure-track hires, in contrast, are authorized after a formal request has been made to the Provost, routed through the Resource Allocation and Assessment Subcommittee (RAAS) for consideration in the context of all other requests for new and replacement positions (see the RAAS guidelines in this section), and then approved by the Provost. Once authorization to hire has been granted, the chair must organize a search committee. Many times chairs lead the search committee, but other times they delegate the search committee chairing role to another member of the faculty. An important step in the formation of the search committee that chairs usually undertake is selecting a member of the committee from outside the department. When candidates visit campus the department chair should be among the faculty who interview them. This section of the Chairs’ Handbook includes the various documents that guide faculty hiring here at Kenyon as well as examples of forms that must be completed during the course of filling a position.

Faculty Recruitment and Hiring (.pdf) statement of importance
Procedures for FTE Allocation and Re-allocation 2011 (.pdf)