Searches for Department Chairs and Institute Directors
The Dean shall appoint a Search Committee to recruit a Department Chair and/or Institute Director
1. Search Committee
The following guidelines will apply to Committee member composition and appointment.
- The Dean of the School will appoint all Committee members, and will designate one to serve as Committee Chair;
- The Committee Chair will appoint a Diversity Advocate who will help ensure search is equitable;
- The number of members appointed to the Committee shall be flexible to permit appropriate representation of academic disciplines;
- The Committee composition will always aim to include at least one female faculty member and one member from a group Under-Represented in Science or Medicine (URiSM) unless exceptional circumstances make this impossible;
- Committee members should ordinarily be tenured professors. However, in order to achieve sufficient diversity of gender and/or ethnicity, a tenured associate professor may in some cases be invited to serve on the Committee;
- No Committee member can hold a primary faculty appointment in the Department for which a search for a new Chair is being conducted, except under extraordinary circumstances;
- The President of a member hospital of the Mount Sinai Health System may be appointed to a Search Committee seeking a new System Chair for a clinical department.
2. Charge to Committee
The Dean of the School will charge the Committee. In most cases, the Committee will be instructed to conduct a national search which will include advertising in leading journals and/or professional society platforms, interviewing a diverse panel of candidates that includes women and individuals underrepresented in science or medicine, and soliciting external referrals for leading candidates.
On occasion, the Dean may put forth a single candidate for consideration by the Committee based on the individual’s unique expertise and experience. In such cases, the Dean will ask the committee to determine whether that candidate would have been a leading contender if a national search had been conducted.
Members of the Committee will adhere to the following:
- All members will have completed on-line training about implicit bias and gender discrimination prior to committee participation;
- The committee will maintain confidentiality throughout the search;
- The committee will interview at least one woman and/or one URiSM candidate;
- Members will use a standard evaluation form provided by the Dean’s Office for all candidates interviewed to ensure that criteria are consistently applied;
- The Committee Chair and Diversity Advocate must consider whether there is sufficient diversity represented in the pool of applicants before finalists are submitted to the Dean for review;
- At the conclusion of the search, the Committee Chair will submit to the Dean a summary report describing the search process, the candidates interviewed, and the committee’s recommendation(s);
3. Committee Recommendation to the Dean
In national searches, the Committee may recommend leading candidates for the Dean’s consideration. If the search fails to identify candidates of sufficiently high quality, the Committee will report this to the Dean and the search will be re-evaluated.
If a single candidate is being considered, the Committee may recommend or not recommend the candidate to the Dean.
Once a candidate selected by the Dean has accepted an offer to join the faculty, the Dean’s Office will work with the relevant academic department(s) to submit the candidate's appointment application to the Committee on Appointments, Promotions and Tenure for review and approval.
4. Site Chair Searches
When recruiting an individual to serve as Site Chair of a member hospital of the Mount Sinai Health System or at an affiliated institution, the above procedures shall be followed except:
- The System Chair of the Department will serve as Search Committee Chair;
- Committee members shall include representation from the member hospital or affiliated institution;
- All members shall be appointed by the Committee Chair, upon consultation with the President of the member hospital or the affiliated institution. The President of the member hospital or affiliated institution may be invited to serve ex officio
Searches For Faculty Other than Chairs, Institute Directors, or Site Chairs
To identify and recruit a diverse pool of candidates of the highest caliber at the rank of Assistant Professor and above, formal, national searches are strongly recommended if significant school resources such as laboratory space and seed funds are involved.
1. Search Committee Composition
The relevant Chair(s)/Institute Director(s) will appoint a Search Committee comprised of a Committee Chair and an odd number of faculty members, including at least:
- One woman and/or one URiSM candidate.
- One candidate from outside the department/institute.
- One member at the same or higher rank than the position to be filled.
- Faculty of all ranks should be considered for committee membership.
2. Search Process
If a recruit will be jointly sought by multiple departments/institutes, the Chair(s)/Director(s) of those entities will agree on which of them will charge the committee.
In an effort to generate the highest quality pool of applicants, the Committee will advertise in premiere scientific and/or clinical journals and/or appropriate websites. Internal candidates, if any, will be included in the applicant pool.
The Committee will also conform to the following guidelines:
- All candidates will be evaluated using the same criteria and using a standard evaluation form;
- All members will have completed an on-line training about implicit bias and gender discrimination prior to committee participation;
- The committee will maintain confidentiality throughout search;
- The committee will interview at least one woman and/or one URiSM candidate;
At the conclusion of the search, the Committee Chair will prepare a summary report for the relevant Chair(s)/Director(s) with information about the search process, the candidates interviewed, and recommendations. If the Committee determines that the search did not identify candidates of sufficiently high quality, this will be included in the Committee report and the search will be re-evaluated.
Once the selected candidate has accepted an offer to join the faculty, the Department Chair(s) will submit the candidate's appointment application to the Committee on Appointments, Promotions and Tenure for review and approval.
Supporting materials are available at the following links:
Updated December 2019