CAMBRIDGE MIDDLE SCHOOL. Inside Higher Ed reports on an investigation at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology into a senior faculty member making too public his opposition to the appointment of a promising post-doc. The article provides the Quote of the Day.

“In a healthy department, you are looking to hire the smartest people you can, and you want them to be at least as good as you and preferably better than you, and senior people want to work with them and collaborate with them,” said Cary Nelson, Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors, has written extensively on power relationships in higher education in his books Will Work for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis and Academic Keywords: A Devil’s Dictionary for Higher Education.

He said that his department has always been one to welcome young talent, but that as he travels around the country, he’s sad to find out how common it is for departments to be “armed camps” where senior people abuse junior people (or at least certain junior people). Nelson said that it is important for departments to take responsibility for such situations. If there is one professor causing problems, a department should make sure a new hire can work effectively around that person. “This should be settled before someone arrives in a department,” he said.

When that doesn’t happen, many people say young scholars should run. Most senior people who are opposed to a new hire aren’t going to change, said Christopher J. Lucas, a professor of higher education at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and co-author of New Faculty: A Practical Guide for Academic Beginners (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). “You really need to know what you are getting into here. And this could be so disruptive at a time you don’t have much traction, that you would be ill-advised to take this position,” he said.

There's nothing quite like an established faculty member, let alone a clique of established faculty members, whose real agenda is to make sure that nobody better than them ever gets tenure (preferably ever gets hired) to kill a department, and their attitudes are likely to poison the university. And they're not likely to have that good a department. Pat Summitt (one of the most successful coaches in basketball, both sexes considered) has that among her management commonplaces.

Surround yourself with people who are better than you are. Seek out quality people, acknowledge their talents, and let them do their job.

I'm not sure whether the manifestations of professional jealousy and insecurity at so-called prestige institutions reassure or discourage.