Faculty job negotiation - dual career and salary [closed]

Question

I received a phone call from the department chair informing me that they are willing to give me an offer. Then, he sent me the startup sheet and asked me to send them my comments. This sheet contains salary, student support, travel, moving expenses, and a few other items. The chair also asked me to add any equipment I need and he made it clear that he will push as much as he can because it will be beneficial to the department whatever I can get from the university for my startup in terms of equipment.

For this position, I plan to join the target university (R1 university) as an associate professor, and thus the salary is a bit confusing for me since the salary for other department members is not online. My current institution is giving me, let's say $100K but they also give me 20-30K in the summer to stabilize my salary due to declining my previous request on raising my base salary during COVID. However, the destination university is giving me $120K as my base payment [these numbers are just random numbers :)].

I have two questions:

1. I am not sure how I should talk about my salary. Because the base payment of the destination university is higher but the total payment is lower!

2. I also need to ask them about my spouse and her employment. I am not sure if I should bring this up now or should wait until I finalize my offer and then ask them about a dual career. I am not sure when the right time is. If I bring this up now, then, they might not fully consider my requests on salary and other items. If I also bring this up later, they might say why I have delayed it since spousal hiring needs a long process and discussion. When do people discuss this matter based on your experience?

Answer 1

As a general rule, if you go into details discussing issue X before you even mention issue Y, people will reasonably assume that X is more important to you than Y is. Now think of the special case when X stands for “salary” and your spouse’s employment is the Y. Is it really the case that you think it’s more urgent to discuss salary than something as critical as your spouse’s ability to work?

About talking about salary, I think you may be falling prey to the chair’s trick of asking you to send “comments” about an offer that doesn’t yet exist. This is a common trick that employers pull (more common outside academia, but I’ve seen it within academia as well) to get job candidates to disclose part of their internal bargaining parameters. It’s similar to asking a job candidate the question “how much did you make in your previous job?” (now outlawed in some places), or “what are your salary expectations?”. The professional way to answer this is “I am really excited about the position and am looking forward to receiving an offer from you”. In some situations it might be beneficial to give hints as to what might be an acceptable salary figure, but there is a risk in doing so, and the precise conditions when that could be a useful thing to do would be extremely situation-specific and probably not relevant to your case.

In any case, when comparing salaries at two different places, what usually matters to people is the bottom line, not which part is called “base salary” or any other name. Of course, the cost of living also varies from place to place, so your comparison of the offer to your current situation should take that into account. Good luck!

Answer 2

First off, determine your bargaining position. Do they really need/want you or can they just get the next one on the list when the negotiations don't work out? Be realistic: for most associate prof. jobs your negotiating position is very bad. So you can't get everything you want, and probably you can't get much. So you really need to prioritize and decide what is the absolute minimum you are willing to accept and when you just walk away from the negotiation (if ever, but then you're negotiating position is pretty much non-existent).

In my university, if the negotiation is over, then it is over; the university will not negotiate dual career options after the negotiations are over. So you need to find out if that is also the case in your university. If your university works like mine, then you have to bring the dual career option up at the beginning and accept lower pay (if you find the dual career option more important than your pay).