Does your department have a particular philosophy or practice regarding the make-up of search (hiring) committees for tenure-track faculty positions? And if so:
- Is the committee chair the person most closely related to the subfield of the search, or is it someone from a bit outside this subfield (but experts are included on the committee)?
- Are people from outside your department (or program or whatever the relevant unit it) typically included?
- Are any of those people ever non-academics?
- Are students part of the committee? Postdocs?
- If students are on the committee, do they have access to all application materials, or only some? (for example, CVs but not letters of reference)
- Is there always at least one assistant professor on the committee (because they possibly represent the future of the department and have a good view of what is current in particular fields) or not (because serving on such a committee is a huge amount of work and assistant professors shouldn't spend so much time on service activities and/or your department doesn't want to give this responsibility to the untenured)? (or other reasons of philosophy, beyond just 'There are 3 of us in the department and one is an assistant professor' type reasons.)
- Other?