Every year, Grinnell College conducts searches for a variety of faculty positions, which require resources from the College and significant time from current faculty.
The College has been engaged in a search for a chair of the new African Diaspora Studies Department for almost a year. On average, the College will conduct about five to seven searches a year for tenure track faculty, according to Caleb Elfenbein’s estimate, associate dean for faculty development and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
African Diaspora Chair search in its final stages
The search for a chair for the College’s new African Diaspora Studies Department is in its final stages, according to Elfenbein, who oversees the search, and Tammarah Townes, a senior consultant for Summit Search Solutions, who the College contracted to assist with finding candidates. Townes said the goal is for a new hire to start in summer 2025.
“We really have two finalists that they’re [the search committee] very excited about,” Townes said. “Hopefully in the short term, they [the College] will actually extend an offer to one of those two individuals.”
After the search firm used job postings, email, LinkedIn and nominations from other candidates to reach out to over 1000 people, the position received 56 formal applications. The College brought three finalists for the position to campus last April but were not able to find a candidate to accept the position.
In September, the College brought a second group of finalists to campus.
Townes said that candidates in the first round did not accept the position for a host of reasons.
“I wanted somebody who had been at this for a while, wasn’t a junior scholar, had a strong reputation, had a lot of notoriety,” Townes said. “If you think about somebody who’s that well situated in their career, sometimes there’s not an interest in leaving.”
Family dynamics and Grinnell’s location may have also factored into the decision.
“Some folks had family members … whether it’s children that are tied into school at this point in time, or spouses that had a career that couldn’t be elevated or picked up and moved to the Grinnell area,” Townes said. “I think state level politics in Iowa played a role in that as well, that some folks just really were concerned about the capacity to build something like this, realizing that the climate was a blue star in a red state.”
Anne Harris, president of the College, will fill the role of hiring manager in the place of Beronda Montgomery, who resigned as dean of the College and is currently on sabbatical.
Elfenbein emphasized the significance of building a new department.
“Student interest and advocacy really played a huge part in moving toward a full department,” Elfenbein said. “People at Grinnell, especially in the president’s office and the dean’s office, really thought that a department was a really important statement by the institution about values and how we support values with resources.”
Townes said that candidates were excited by the position.
“We’re at a very, very polarized time in our nation, more polarized than ever before,” Townes said. “A lot of institutions are dismantling their DEI programming. There’s not a lot of support for inclusivity and belonging. … Grinnell has decided, despite all these changes that are happening in the country, they recognize the importance of establishing a role. And so that sat really well with a lot of people.”
Tenure track process takes time and resources
Danielle Lussier, the chair of the College’s Political Science Department, said the Political Science Department conducted two searches for tenure track faculty last year and is currently searching for a replacement for Wayne Moyer, who is transitioning to professor emeritus status.
Lussier said she has already spent 50 to 60 hours on the current search.
“It’s exhausting because it’s very, very labor intensive to conduct a faculty search, in part because you’re often working on really narrow timelines,” Lussier said.
The Dean’s Office and the department conducting the search collaborate to coordinate the hiring process for tenure track positions, normally starting in the spring. According to Elfenbein, departments typically receive anywhere from dozens to hundreds of applications for tenure track positions. The department selects about 10 semi-finalists for virtual interviews and 3 finalists to bring to campus for an extended interview, meetings with faculty and presentations on their research.
“If you think about travel and hosting someone here, so all the meals that go into having someone on campus for a couple of days, lunches with students and dinners with the search committee, it starts to add up,” Elfenbein said. “It’s not a small amount of money.”
Lussier said the Political Science Department went through three rounds of the process before they hired Courtney Nava, assistant professor of political science.
“We searched for three years on that position, and every year there were a very large number of similarly structured positions at other institutions in the U.S. and Canada,” Lussier said. “We were just dealing with a really competitive market in that instance.”
Lussier said going through multiple rounds can be frustrating, but she is hopeful about the current hiring process.
“This is the largest applicant pool we’ve had in my time at Grinnell,” Lussier said. “I also don’t think that we’re in the situation that we were in with that race and ethnic politics position [Nava’s position], where lots of other institutions were also trying to hire in that very specific field. So I think that we’re going to be well-positioned to have a successful search this year.”
Both Elfenbein and Lussier emphasized the important role students play in the hiring process.
“Faculty want to know that students are going to be excited to work with people,” Elfenbein said. “We hire people that we, as an institution, invite to join us as a learning community, and so those lunches, the job talks that we ask people to attend, the feedback that we get, really contributes to the deliberations at the departmental level.”
“When faculty come here, if they’ve never been to Grinnell before, and they have a chance to interact with our students, they realize what a special and amazing institution we are,” Lussier said. “Student voices and participation in the faculty recruitment process is often really integral to our success in bringing our best candidates to campus.”
