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  • Politics of Hiring: Riffing on Profgrrrrl

    By Dean Dad November 19, 2009 9:30 pm

    First, if you've ever wanted a sense of academic hiring, read Profgrrrrl's post. Now. Slowly.

    It's all true.

    Worse, it doesn't stop at the department level.

    Let's say, for the sake of argument, that your dean/vp didn't just fall off the turnip truck. Any chances that s/he might be wise to some of these factors? (Hint: Yes.)

    Facts of life like these are why I have this much patience for the argument that the academic hiring market is some sort of meritocracy. It just isn't. That becomes much more true in the disciplines in which it's common to get hundreds of applications per position. After an initial screen for bright-line qualifications, you'll still have dozens of people who are fully qualified, many of whom will have strong letters, academic pedigrees, and experience. That's where things start to get, if not random, then at least situation-specific.

    (And that's before even counting recessions. Is hiring down this year because candidates suddenly got worse? Nope.)

    I've been on any number of searches in which I've met extraordinary candidates who did everything right and still didn't get hired. Sometimes it comes down to niches. Smith may be a better hitter than Jones, but if Smith is a first baseman and Jones a shortstop, and I'm already set at first base, I'm going with Jones. Substitute teaching specialties for positions, and you get the idea. That's the non-sinister meaning of 'fit.' Departments usually hire because they have holes; the exact shape of the hole is specific to that situation. If this year's hole is different than last year's, then this year's winner will be different.

    I've also seen committees try to rig the outcome by putting forward the one person they really want, and two obvious sacrificial lambs. I put a stop to that by threatening to hire one of the lambs. My position is that anyone on the finalist list is, by definition, fair game. That may sound sinister, but I see it as preserving real openness. If the fix is in anyway, why bother running an open search at all? Of course, good luck defending yourself in court when a rejected applicant from a protected class claims discrimination. Although forcing openness may look like administrative meddling, I'd argue that it actually offers the possibility of fairness to all applicants, which can only benefit the college in the long run.

    The more difficult case is the committee member who feels threatened in her niche. I've seen a few iterations of this. One is the senior professor who doesn't want to give up a pet course, so he systematically tanks anyone capable of teaching it. Another is the queen bee who simply refuses to hire any women younger than herself. (I know it's an ugly stereotype, but I've seen it in action.) Since no candidate is perfect, it's always possible to find a flaw if you want to badly enough.

    Most of these are symptomatic of the vagaries of luck, circumstance, and what Kant called the crooked timber of humanity. My sense is that good admins need to do what they can to preserve real openness of process, and to challenge what seem like arbitrary reasons. But as long as the demand for slots so drastically exceeds the supply, some wonderful people are going to be shut out for what seem like silly reasons. Common decency suggests that we shouldn't add insult to injury by telling those left out that they just weren't good enough.

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Comments on Politics of Hiring: Riffing on Profgrrrrl

  • Root problem
  • Posted by Adam Kotsko , Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College on November 20, 2009 at 8:45am EST

  • These types of behavior wouldn't be that big of a deal if universities hadn't so thoroughly gutted the tenure track through the routine use of adjuncts. I'd be willing to be that if all teaching across the country was pooled, there would be enough to go around so that basically everyone with a PhD could have a tenure-track 3/3-equivalent job.

  • It's the Truth
  • Posted by Philogenes , Professor at a Community College on November 20, 2009 at 10:30am EST

  • Sidebar: Adam, it's not the lack of work. It's the lack of funding. And by the way, community college faculty who teach 5/5 and still manage to do service and research find 3/3 or references thereto offensive.

    Hiring in education, I am convinced, is where a group of people who pride themselves on their professional ethics demonstrate, at great cost in time and expense, their lack of ethics. The committee system is intended to reduce favoritism; it is easily perverted to perpetuate it. In many cases, the flimsiest pretexts ("She made a grammatical error during her teaching demonstration.") are used to eliminate candidates. Committees can find all kinds of arguments to interview people who probably shouldn't have been found qualified, all too often to replicate themselves.
    I've always thought that filling a new position was a wonderful opportunity for a department to assess its strengths and weaknesses and move itself toward the future. All too often, it turns into a group of mid- to late-career faculty seeking to ensure that they can go on following their tired teaching philosophies without questioning until they retire. A really good, thought-provoking younger candidate doesn't have much chance.
    And when administrative positions are being filled and every constituency on campus has to be represented, it's worse. Every constituency has to be represented in the search and it's entirely too easy to end up hiring the lowest common denominator.

  • Not unique to higher ed
  • Posted by S. Schroeder on November 20, 2009 at 10:30am EST

  • Politics of one sort or another take place in almost every hiring situation I know of. People in higher ed get more outraged with each other's human foibles on hiring committees and have an opportunity to write cleverly about it, but whenever there are more qualified applicants than openings in any organization or business there will be arbitrary choices made in order to get to a final decision.

  • What about me?
  • Posted by Steve Foerster , an adjunct instructor at a Midwestern community college on November 20, 2009 at 11:15am EST

  • Gee, Adam, but what about those of us who actually like to be adjuncts, and wouldn't want a full time position? I teach IT, and it's the sort of thing where you really might want someone who works in the field and teaches part time for fun.

  • Response to Steve Foerster and Philogenes
  • Posted by Adam Kotsko , Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College on November 20, 2009 at 12:45pm EST

  • Steve Foerster -- as the etymology of the word illustrates, adjuncts should be a "help," supplying a lack that can't be filled by a full-time person. Your situation is the ideal place to use an adjunct. What I'm referring to is the abuse of adjuncts to do core teaching duties in order to save money.

    Philogenes -- I didn't say it was lack of work. In fact, I said just the opposite -- there's plenty of work to go around. And why do you find the reference to 3/3 insulting? Wouldn't it be better if everyone, including community college professors, had that more moderate teaching load?

  • Posted by 3rd year undergrad , sociology on November 20, 2009 at 1:00pm EST

  • My sociology department (well I'm only an undergrad) is in the process of hiring someone now. An adjunct's 3-year contract expires next semester and there is a pool of 100+ applicants for one spot.

    Well, why can't students also be part of the hiring process? In one way, I think that would be a very good check against committee power. On the other, what do the majority of students know about professorship in general? And on another note, we have no graduate sociology department, and therefore no graduate sociology students.

    So admittedly, students probably shouldn't play a large part in hiring. But I still think it wouldn't be a bad idea to have the hiring process more transparent and open to student critique (as far as I know this process is totally closed to us). I am interested in this new candidate because this adjunct whose contract is expiring [would have been?] a potential reader/adviser for my senior thesis. Unless I am skewing the importance of the senior thesis, then I have a fairly good reason to be concerned about this hiring process.

  • Posted by anonymous cc prof on November 20, 2009 at 1:00pm EST

  • And what about when the committee does its work seriously, and after weighing all of the information, overwhelmingly favors one candidate, but the administration, who makes the final decision, ignores the committee's recommendation?

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