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Admissions from the inside
At Slaves of Academe, Oso Raro meditates on the corruption inherent in the academic system of hiring and promotion:
I recently had a long talk with an old mentor, someone who was incredibly important to my success at Prestigious Eastern U. and remains embedded in my life. Mentor had recently served on a search committee at their institution, and we spoke about the excruciating nature of the conference interview, in their words, "from the other side of the bed," a metaphor I liked because of its associations with the intimacy of the academic hiring process. We are not only hiring co-workers, we are also hiring lovers, confidantes, children, parents, and the whole realm of messy, subjective, personal relationships we associate with collegiality in the academy. Mentor spoke of the parade of lackeys, flunkies, and the qualified that passed through the hotel suite, and how it was not the latter category that got invited for campus visits. All in all, not terribly surprising. But Mentor's commentary on the nature of the academic hiring process, and the academy in general, I found compelling. Mentor observed that the system was rotten to the core, with little or no oversight or accountability. It was a completely unexamined process, rife with ridiculousness and illegality. Mentor observed that not even in the ziggurats of Mammon was so much entrusted into the incapable hands of so few, with no repercussions for bad behaviour or a job badly done.I had never thought of it in this particular way, and I found the idea shocking as well as depressing. This infrastructure of incompetence is dependent on secrecy. Search committees are riddles wrapped in enigmas entombed in lies, secrets, and silence. There is no accountability of their process, no public measurement of fairness and success (if you discount the beauty pageant that is a series of job talks, that is). In fact, the whole process is so shrouded in secrecy that candidates have no idea about basic things in many searches, like for instance who eventually got the job, never mind more important information like where the candidate may have flubbed, or if one of their letters of recommendation is suspect. Nowadays, some committees don't even bother with a formal rejection letter, even for candidates on the short list. Those of us who have done our time on search committees know the messy internal functions and petty compromises one must make with infantile senior faculty or sensitive constituencies. But from the outside, the academic search committee is the very definition of the Star Chamber, inscrutable and random.
Talk about extraordinary rendition! Every year, thousands of hopeful candidates send out reams of paper in a process relatively similar to tossing pennies in fountains, or wishing on a star. And this process, random and inchoate and opaque, has been naturalised for us, normalised as the way it is. But why should it be this way? The story of how our profession came to this stage is more a story of the banality of evil than meritocracy, a corruption and misapprehension of market forces and the constant, drum beat raising of the bar, illusions and delusions of the professoriate, as well as a total collapse of the guild structure that ironically follows the end of formal white supremacy in the academy and society. Brutal economic conditions masked as the socio-cultural are not unique to the academy, but are perhaps most pronounced in the abuses of the academic hiring process, a cesspool under the basement floorboards that at any given moment threatens to bubble over into scandal or legal action. When this happens, ever so rarely of course, the mess is cleaned up by paid professionals, settlement checks are issued (if you're lucky), confidentiality agreements are signed, and everyone goes back to business as usual, maintaining the secret.
There is much more, including some smart comment on how blogs encourage the secrets upon which so much academic procedure is based to be leaked ... and hence critiqued.
The trouble is that this leaking is itself shrouded in additional layers of secrecy. Oso Raro, like many, if not most, academics who comment about their professions on blogs, writes anonymously, as do many of her commenters (including the one who notes that "In my time at one institution I heard all of the following from people involved in different searches: 1) Questioning a candidate's religion 2) Questioning a candidate's ethnic background 3)Questioning a candidate's marital status 4) Speculating on a candidate's desire to have children 5) Discounting a candidate because 'Don't we already have enough people of color/women/gays and lesbians in the department?'" and who wonders aloud: "Why universities and departments are not sued more often is a mystery to me. Perhaps it is that silence, though, which prevents an otherwise litigious society from wreaking havoc on higher education").
Shrouded in pseudonyms and steeped in the sidelong accusations of virtual people talking about virtual places, the criticisms these bloggers make somehow get lost in the echo chamber of an academic blogosphere that is, on the whole, quite delighted with itself, and quite unwilling to entertain criticism that comes from an identifiable, actual outsider--even when that criticism is virtually identical to that which is purveyed by anonymous insiders.
The criticisms enumerated in this post--and hurrahed by Oso Raro's academic commenters--are quite similar to those ACTA and other nonacademic critics have been making for some time. That's worth noting. There are bridges to be built -- there is already common cause.
Posted by acta online at March 24, 2007 08:38 PM
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Comments
By far, the most important education reform possible would concern the faculty hiring process. I cannot tell you the level of filth I have witnessed over the past decades in this regard, and it directly accounts for the abysmal quality of people appointed to teaching positions. Were the public to see exactly who gets hired and who gets canned (even at the first screening stage of the process), there would first be shock, then termination of public funding for the disaster. Just put these people through a battery of professional tests -- like the bar or medical boards -- and watch them drop like flies. Yet, they are the ones locking up faculty positions and graduating fully illiterate and uneducated students. People should give a damn about their children and the hatchet job that academic hacks have been doing on them for at least twenty years.
Posted by: Federal Dog at March 25, 2007 07:54 AM