Negotiation Tips for New Faculty

During my first few years at Michigan State, I hired over a dozen tenure-stream faculty members. At first, taking the part of the employer in the negotiations surrounding the hire was a new experience for me.

However, as I gained familiarity with the role, I realized that those sitting opposite me (so to speak) were still as new to the negotiation experience as I had initially been. That made my task more difficult than necessary. If your negotiation partner does not comprehend the process, she or he will make elementary mistakes that are challenging to correct later. This is especially frustrating because you both want the same outcome: a successful hire who becomes a thriving faculty member.

Finding out late in the game that someone had an unannounced dual-career issue or that they had not explained all of their professional needs upfront could put me in an awkward position: there might be insufficient time to arrange a partner/spouse accommodation or I might have already asked the upper administration to approve a specific start-up package.

I decided to start providing a negotiation tip sheet to anyone to whom I was making a tenure-track faculty offer. Without having made a detailed study of the result, I can say that in the ensuing years the new faculty members have done a better job of making their professional needs clear to me during the negotiation process. This, to me, is a success. It enables us to arrange the start of their career in the college in a way that will be clear to them and support their future success.

This article reviews the essential elements of my negotiation tip sheet. Because there are a number of excellent books on general-purpose negotiation skills (such as Getting to Yes and Ask for It), I recommend that anyone not familiar with the principles of interest-based negotiation read one of them forthwith. This article gives specificity to those principles by outlining how they apply within the context of negotiating the starting conditions for a tenure-system faculty position.

Preparation:

Congratulations! You are being offered a tenure-stream faculty position in your discipline at a college or university. You are therefore embarking on a probationary period during which you will build your research and teaching portfolios in preparation for applying for promotion and tenure. This is the time to make sure that your position is arranged in a way that will help you become as successful as possible.

Before you discuss the details of the offer with the chair of your new department (or dean of your new college), you should gather background information. Visit the university web pages to learn about how the institution handles personnel issues that will support a successful start to your professional life there: benefits, child care, elder care, relocation, dual-career accommodations, disability services or diversity.

Contact current faculty and staff whom you met on your campus visit to get a sense of how the academic community functions and ask more questions about living in the region.

Next, do some mental preparation on your own.

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