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Leaving a TT job for a stable non-TT job?

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I have a TT offer in hand. The trouble is that I'm not sure if I'll be happy there.

I have also been told I have a strong probability of being able to come back to my current institution (non-TT, but stable in the medium term, where I'm fairly happy) if things go badly in the TT gig. However, I wonder if this would look suspicious once I'm back on the market. Is it a red flag if a candidate has left a TT position for a temporary position? Is it the sort of thing that would prevent one from getting interviewed?

(Let's bracket cases from the same part of the world where the TT gig is…I do suspect those institutions would be concerned that a candidate had left a position nearby; but what about the wider philosophical world?)

Good questions. Another reader submitted the following reply:

I would certainly wonder what happened. If you were at the TT job for 5 or so years, I would assume you were denied tenure … if you leave too quickly, I might also wonder whether you were not renewed (because of some sort of behavior). So, I would tend to set such a file aside, given the many other strong applicants in a typical pool.

I think I share these worries, but maybe one could address the issue in a cover letter? What do you all think?

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3 responses to “Leaving a TT job for a stable non-TT job?”

  1. Tenured now

    I’m afraid that you could address those issues in a cover letter, but that it might not work. I’ve read cover letters before where people say they want to leave TT jobs because their colleagues are toxic or they just weren’t happy there, and as a letter reader it’s hard to know which way to go: are the colleagues actually toxic, or is the person applying out sensitive and high maintenance? The second judgement might not be fair, but when you’re looking at TT applications you have so many, and you’re often just looking for reasons to rule people out.
    If you do need to explain leaving, then the reasons that don’t seem to me to raise any possible red flags are: 1) the TT job institution was in serious financial distress and the non-TT job you were going back to was financially stable, 2) the TT job had a higher teaching load and left less time for research than the non-TT job, and maybe 3) you had family reasons that made you go back to the first job (but be careful with this, as it might make future search committees wonder if you’d also be likely to leave their job). Obviously any of these may or may not be true, but the general point is just to avoid making it look like you might be a bad colleague or a hard person to get along with.

    Reply
  2. Chris Surprenant

    I have a different view from the person who commented above — I don’t think it’s a red flag, at least not in the way the responder above is concerned about.
    From the CV, you can tell pretty much immediately if someone has been (or is likely to have been) denied tenure. 5-6 years with minimal publications would do that, and then they’re probably not super competitive for whatever position they’re applying for if research production is at all important.
    There are lots of academic environments that are pretty toxic. There are others that aren’t toxic but are just bad fits because of personalities or location or something completely unrelated to the university. It happens. We all know this.
    But I do think it could be a potential red flag in that the person may be looking to give a test run to the position I’m hiring for. If they take a TT position, stay one year, and leave to go back to their former position, what’s the say that they won’t do that with me? We all know the problems of getting lines. Unless I or someone else close to the search has a previously relationship with this person that would allow us to feel comfortable that they’re not just treating us in the same way, I’m liking going to pass over this person to avoid the risk of them coming and leaving.

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  3. Bill Vanderburgh

    I think OP’s best strategy is to take the TT and then apply to new TTs if it turns out to be a bad fit. (Many departments would think it makes sense to apply to them instead of “that lesser place” (whatever it is) so applying to a TT from a TT is less obviously bad. Unless, as another reader says, it is at around the five year mark, where it would look like failure to achieve tenure.)
    If new TTs don’t materialize and the TT place is desperately bad, they could go back to their current institution. But that would feel to me like a temporary stop on the way out of the profession.
    General thought on how to address these things in cover letters: It is almost always better to enthusiastically make the case about why you want to be at the new place to which you are applying, rather than to make excuses about why you are leaving some other place. It never looks good to put down a place or colleagues, and it is too easy for readers to imagine that doing so is covering up the writer’s own failings. It might come up in an interview question, where you can address it in a bit more detail (but still vaguely and focused on the new place).
    I would suggest that any file that has a cause for worry, like this one would, needs to be a slam dunk in other respects (fit, teaching, research) to have a serious chance.

    Reply

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