Department of things that should go without saying, but apparently do not
It's hard to know what to say to the claim that junior faculty going on the job market violates the holy covenant between the professor and God the department. Putting to one side the career trajectories of successful senior faculty, which generally involve considerable time in transit (you didn't think that all those nice tenured folks at Harvard started there, did you?), this complaint is puzzling for a number of reasons:
1. The rise of the two-academic family. If Spouse/Partner A is in California and Spouse/Partner B is in New Jersey, there will no doubt come a point when said individuals begin to wonder about the feasibility of raising children/maintaining the relationship/continuing to pay the long-distance phone bills. Quite frequently, A and B solve their problems by moving--whether both of them move to a college amenable to hiring them as a pair, or one of them moves to wherever the other one happens to be. Unless American universities decide to impose the old English rules governing Oxbridge fellows and/or outlaw academics marrying each other, then love, marriage, etc. will continue to overrule administrative convenience. (Either that, or departments will have to overcome their aversion to spousal hires.)
2. Administrators encouraging junior faculty to remain on the job market. Someone out there should do a study of ways in which faculty (junior and otherwise) are actively pressured to market themselves continually. At many universities and colleges, my own included, it is impossible to negotiate a raise without an external offer. Many R1 departments look on job offers as a positive sign during tenure evaluations. And the pickiest Ivies make it so difficult to obtain tenure that junior faculty go back on the market as a matter of course. Any and all of these factors reduce the likelihood that Untenured Faculty Member A will profess heartfelt loyalty to his or her campus, given that the Higher Ups are sending quite the opposite message.
3. Geography. I've mentioned before that, thanks to the current job market, most faculty have no choice whatsoever about where they'll end up. (In contrast, during the 1960s, Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt applied for three [four?] positions, two of which were conveniently located in Los Angeles.) There's been some sneering about faculty wanting to be close to their parents, but what about parents who are aging or ill? Hospitalized? In a nursing home? I was unaware that entering academia meant swearing an oath to abandon your family. Even if parents are not part of the equation, not everyone is suited to live everywhere.
4. Hell. Dare I point out that some colleges and/or departments appear to be located in the immediate vicinity of Malebolge?