THE HIRING SEASON. Michael at Wormtalk and Slugspeak provides a rundown of the search and tenure procedures at his college. His primary message:

Lack of transparency is everywhere a problem, but it is particulary bad in academia, and particularly bad within academia at large institutions and state-run schools.

Why is that true? At tenure time, decisive sets and blocking coalitions are possible.

There can be administrative veto by any number of Deans up the ladder to the Provost. The Provost or the President can also veto, and they don't need to give any reasons. There are also in-department vetoes at some places (we don't have one officially, but it is unlikely that someone would be tenured if their entire department wasn't behind them), and by this I mean that there are small committees, controlled by single individuals or small groups, that can effectively veto a candidate.

This varies among institutions. The Northern Illinois University bylaws require the Provost and University Council, and the President and Trustees, to approve any recommendation that has the support of the department, the department chairman, the college promotion board, and the college dean. A written explanation (which can be cursory) is supposed to accompany any negative recommendation.

Where can there be corruption and malfeasance? Obviously at any stage where there is a veto that doesn't need to be explained. The next most obvious places are with the selection of outside referees. Due to super sub-specialization, it is at least theoretically possible for people to choose their friends or obvious supporters and for the Provost and Tenure Committee not to know that this has happened. If there isn't an obvious paper trail, the Provost and President won't see that the possible conflict of interest. People do look out for their friends and political fellow travelers. And the biggest problem of all is that nobody really wants to be a bad guy. So once someone gets to the tenure process, it's very hard to stop it from happening. Referees don't really want to write negative reviews. Faculty members don't want to write negative letters (they'd rather just ignore the whole thing in many, but not all, cases). Most people are only willing to be negative when it appears to be safe--thus the over-emphasis on any hint of certain politics.

I'm not sure what that last sentence communicates. Perhaps economics is different. Note, however, that those reviewers are evaluating published research -- sometimes, in the case of tenure candidates, working papers that are still being evaluated at a journal. And there is one source of the error rate John In the Shadow of Mount Hollywood notes.

I challenge both Jim and Michael to explain the error rate, the assistant profs who are hired whose accents are too thick for sophomores to understand, whose mastery of the material in the 101 course is dodgy, who lecture with their backs to the class, who break out in tantrums at students, who assign soap operas instead of readings, who stay out for a week with a toothache. . . how can this happen with a formal procedure that appears to be so rigorous?

Um, because the formal procedure doesn't evaluate teaching that carefully. That's the message in several of the posts describing the "job talk," which is a presentation of current research. Very rarely does a job candidate get called upon to guest-teach an introductory course. I might have just confessed that the research mission dominates the teaching mission in many searches, but as long as the incentives are for promotion to depend on research and for research to be funded, and as long as evaluation of teaching is limited to student surveys and assessment of the obvious, and as long as administrators use student credit hours per faculty member as the metric of teaching productivity, that is going to be your reality. (Oh, as an aside to John: K-Line have just announced a Suburban Tank in O 2-rail. Thus endeth today's rail content.)

It also remains true that searches can be conducted for reasons unrelated to performance as a teacher or as a researcher. That remains the common thread in the Ward Churchill and Larry Summers stories. Stanley at the Corner suggests that Harvard's president is being mau-maued for telling an unpleasant truth.

Summers calls for research on whether affirmative action does what it claims to do. Do diversity searches really find top quality professors who were only being verlooked because they are minorities, or do these searches only yield professors of middling or low quality? Summers also points out contradictions in what diversity advocates are asking for. Some of them want faculty picked on purely objective criteria like number of papers published. This will supposedly eliminate subtle hiring discrimination. But other diversity advocates want the opposite. They call for choosing minority candidates based on subjective considerations like potential and collegiality, supposedly to overcome the discrimination built into “objective” criteria. Summers asks, which is it? He also wants data to back up the choice of strategy. So in this talk, Summers is subtly but clearly exposing the contradictions and secrets of the campus diversity industry. By calling for objective proof that diversity searches really produce faculty equal in quality to color blind or sex blind searches, Summers is laying out a standard that he knows diversity proponents can’t meet. And the contradictory criteria thrown up by diversity advocates are just different ways of getting to the numbers they want. By calling for objective studies of which strategy actually works, Summers is exposing the failings and contradictions of the whole diversity enterprise. I think this is the deeper reason why Summers is in trouble.

We shall see. It is true that administrations can interfere with searches to force departments to expand their pool or to interview individuals the diversity industry has identified as potential hires. I continue to maintain that many of the shortcomings of hiring identified in the other posts are consequences of the deteriorating working conditions and pay packets, which push ambitious people away from their academic vocations.