Texas A&M University is the latest in a long line of institutions trying to account for the "actual" value of a professor’s work. The past few years have seen a significant rise in this sort of formulation, even as academe has seen a decline in some forms of public support.

As an administrator, I see the value in trying to figure out the "actual" costs related to particular programs. I have a fiduciary responsibility to ensure that my academic programs operate efficiently so that they may be sustained. Indeed, some programs that might be termed "inefficient" by some critics are essential to a well-rounded set of offerings at a university, and they are worth the "cost" of their existence.

I also see, however, the immediate dangers of the overcommodification of academe that can arise from a bean counter's approach to such formulas. The danger of the former is that institutions can become...

When I was on the job market for the first time, back in the 1990s, most of my mentors told me to ignore applying for positions that were posted "pending final approval" or "pending funding." The logic was that most institutions viewed such advertisements as having a built-in escape valve, and that there was nothing more maddening for candidates than to go to the trouble of applying, interviewing, and expending the mental energy required to go that far into a search, only to have the position vanish with the final budget numbers in the spring. When I became an administrator, I heard the same arguments from my department chairs: "Pending funding" will eliminate the strongest candidates. For that reason, I've resisted using such a label except under very specific circumstances.

What I'm hearing now in administrative circles is that many institutions are requiring that almost all position ...

I've referred before to the discussions on CICDEAN-L, the e-mail list sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges primarily for chief academic officers at small, private institutions like mine.

A recent discussion on the list, which caught my eye because we just hired a new economist and a new management professor, focused on the challenges small colleges face when hiring business-faculty members: the shortage of business Ph.D.'s generally, problems posed by what is now a "competitive salary" for such people, and the strictures of specialized accreditation, particularly that offered by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.

Most of the discussion concerned doctorate-holding accounting-faculty members. Depending on what figures you use, the average starting salary across institutional types for such faculty members is around $130,000 per year. The AACSB figures show...

Recently I've noted an uptick in the number of students asking for opinions about interdisciplinary graduate degrees, the kinds with "and" in the middle of their titles. I think this reflects the breadth of interests (and abilities!) that these students have, as well as the proliferation of these kinds of degrees.

I encourage graduate students to be well-rounded and to understand the need to set themselves apart through their credentials. Certainly search committees may find additional areas of scholarly interest to be intriguing. The trick, though, is passing the "neither fish nor fowl" test: Is the candidate an English professor or a cultural-studies professor? Is she an artist or a philosopher of aesthetics? Is he a sociologist or a political scientist? The development of the CV and the research agenda are critical to answering these questions.

What advice might you offer to folks...

It's no surprise to anyone in higher education that there are often considerable tensions between faculty members and "the administration," an amorphous group of people who may or may not include chairs, deans, academic vice presidents, student-affairs people, and others whose duties are not primarily classroom instruction and research.

I think about these tensions a lot, and for all kinds of reasons including my intense desire to minimize them here when I can. An atmosphere of trust and collaboration is obviously much more likely to be productive than one in which the players don't believe in each other's good intentions and willingness to carry out agreements and plans.

I've recently had some correspondence with a professional friend about a provost who quietly overruled the actions of a series of faculty committees that developed plans to strengthen a particular program. I have very...

• The New School today named David Van Zandt, dean and professor of law at the Northwestern University School of Law, as its next president, according to a university news release. He'll succeed Bob Kerrey on January 1, 2011. See the university's Web site for details.

• Stephen Weber, longtime president of San Diego State University, has announced that he will retire next summer, according to the Associated Press.

• The AP also reports that the president of Worcester State College, Janelle Ashley, will step down next June.

• According to a plan released last week, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks will slash over a dozen positions as part of an effort to balance its budget, the Daily News-Miner reports. Some of the positions are vacant, but at least four employees will be laid off; cuts in temporary employees, student workers, and interns are also expected, the newspaper notes.

•...

The past few weeks have been brutal for academic presses. The University of Scranton Press and Rice University Press have both announced closures, even as Southern Methodist University Press has moved into a period of study regarding its sustainability.

Everyone knows the pressure that university budgets are undergoing these days, squeezing academic presses in two directions: Operating budgets are shrinking even as revenues from library and consumer purchases are declining. The fact remains, however, that there is still an important role possible for academic presses. They are repositories of great scholarly traditions, even as they find ways to extend those great traditions and even build new ones. Most professors who publish find that their pedagogy is informed by their scholarly activities. The trick, of course, is figuring out a business model that is functional in the long run.

In...

We're in the midst of our startup exercises for the 2010-11 academic year. Over the past couple of days, we've had the Fall Faculty/Staff Workshop, an annual tradition in which the faculty and many of the staff come together to discuss issues for the upcoming year, particularly those that have large strategic implications for our operations.

This year our two biggest projects are getting though our site visit from our accreditor, the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, in early November, and carrying on with our comprehensive analysis of faculty workload and its relationship to student engagement and other aspects of academic quality at the institution. The HLC visit is actually the less daunting of these, because, while it's a high-stakes process and one that's taken a lot of preparation over the past two years, it also has a clear...

The On Hiring e-mail newsletter is on hiatus this week and will be back next week.

My recent entry on how job candidates can begin to assess the financial stability of potential employers has found a great answer in the U.S. Department of Education's report on the financial well-being of private higher education recently reported in The Chronicle (also see the accompanying chart).

The Department of Education's full chart on private institutions is available here, and I highly recommend checking it out for information about the whole range of private higher education in the United States. Problematic financial ratios are an indicator that candidates should exercise extra caution in considering employment at institutions that have them.

However, I want to state a couple of big caveats to that general rule. First, the finances of many small institutions have been drastically anomalous for the last two or three years. For example, a number of rich colleges and universities...