There’s been much discussion of late concerning Peter Higgs’ assertion that, were he a newly-minted PhD today, he likely wouldn’t have been hired. Yes, that Peter Higgs. You know, the Nobel laureate for whom the Higgs boson is named? Since 1964, he’s published fewer than 10 papers.
Fast-forward just a few weeks, when Rebecca Schuman posted that a search for a tenure-track job in pre-1900 English literature was going to interview candidates on 5 days’ notice at the Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. She pointed out that not only was this logistically and financially impossible for many who are on the job market (postdocs and early-career researchers generally don’t have much disposable income to purchase last-minute flights and hotels), but that it signalled the devastating way in which the academic hiring system is broken.
To be clear, I don’t think this particular problem is found that frequently in the sciences (at least in Canada). I’ve been to two interviews, both of which were paid for by the interviewing department, and both of which gave me at least 4 weeks’ lead time. But this aspect is tangential to today’s subject.
In a rebuttal, Claire Potter at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Tenured Radical blog put forth many reasons for the short notice, and generally took issue with Schuman’s original assertions.
Today, Schuman argued that Potter’s view was skewed by her position – as a tenured full professor – and took to analysing the following hypothetical question: would Potter, with her CV at the time she was hired in 1991, be competitive for a job today? Her conclusion: No.
But I want to step back from these two cases, and propose something that would both be useful, and (at least in my opinion) blindingly obvious. But then again blinding obviousness has never stopped scientists before.
Let’s take the CVs of n (maybe 10) postdocs (or others on the academic job market), and the CVs of n tenured faculty at the time they were hired (but with dates changed & updated) and present them to a series of fake search committees. Who would be short-listed? Interviewed? Hired, even?
Of course, the CVs wouldn’t necessarily have to be from real people, and should be anonymized based on gender, race, and other hiring biases. In fact, this very thing was done to show that female scientists were less likely than their male counterparts to be hired as a lab manager, even with identical qualifications. And yes, there’s more that goes into hiring someone besides their CV, but without a competitive CV, a well-written teaching philosophy or research plan won’t get you very far.
I don’t think there are many that would argue that the academic job market hasn’t changed in the last 10, 15, 20 years (which is when many of those on search committees were hired, if not before). But as an ecologist (a discipline who’s motto should be “Quantifying the Obvious“), I think showing the numbers would sway many of those on the fence, especially if they are one of the Tenured Few.
And, I think that any critical introspection into the way that we, as individuals, “do science” can only improve things. And by starting with the individual, hopefully things will scale up to the department, the discipline, and perhaps even the Academy™.
Finally, this isn’t just idle speculation. I really think that someone with the required sociological bona fides (and research ethics board approval) should consider this question, even if the answer is staring us in the face.
The Lab and Field 
I have heard other well-established faculty members muse about this same topic. What strikes me is that they often say that their own hiring process was much less formal than current ones – there may not have been a formal interview, or they may just have known someone who convinced the department to hire them. I don’t know how common such a scenario actually was in the good ol’ days, but it’s easy to see how a culture like that could prevent people of colour, women, etc. from being hired.
Reblogged this on Jane Zelikova and commented:
Something that’s been brought up to me by many tenured faculty as I discuss my job search with them and critically assess today’s academic job market.
This is an interesting discussion but I think it misses an important point, which is that the CVs of recent postdocs and those of academics at the same stage in their career, say 20 or 30 years ago, would not be comparable because expectations, opportunities and how science is done have changed over that time period.
To give just one example: the internet, email, and cheaper international airfares has made global collaborations much easier to instigate and maintain, so PhD students are being encouraged to travel much more and work with different research groups. That’s something which happened more rarely even 20 years ago when I was completing my PhD. You simply can’t compare the CVs of people whose training and early careers were from different eras, it’s not a fair comparison.
I think that’s part of the point, but I would argue that the expectations of new candidates have surpassed this “natural” rate of academic inflation. Sure, 30 years ago, publishing a paper that used bootstrapping or randomization would have put a candidate ahead. Today, not so much thanks to increased computing resources. But not everyone’s sense of this inflation is similar (though perhaps it has never been?), and some expect more of candidates (after accounting for academic inflation) than others. I’m sure the two groups are comparable if this, among other things, is taken into account.
Hi Alex – to take your points in reverse order:
1. How would you take “academic inflation” into account in the proposed experiment without letting on to the fake search committee that one set of CVs were from an academic generation ago, thus invalidating the test? I don’t see an easy way round that, though perhaps you’ve given it more thought than I.
2. What do you feel is a “natural” rate of academic inflation? To dissect this analogy further, in economics, as I understand it, monetary inflation has no natural rate, the rate simply responds to broad economic drivers. It can be very low or very high, but there is no expectation of a rate which is “normal” or “natural”.
Is it more difficult to obtain a permanent academic position now than it was a generation ago? Possibly, though the main driver of that, I would have thought, is competition: we’re producing far more PhDs and postdocs now. Consequently there’s more choice for search committees and CVs have to stand out. But has this increase in PhDs been linear over time? I honestly don’t know the answer to that.
Jeff – great questions that I don’t have the answer to (hence my call for sociologists 🙂 ). On your point about “natural” inflation, different commodities have different rates of inflation, all of which contributes to an overall index. And yes, there is more “choice” for search committees, which is part of the problem (i.e., far more PhDs competing for a limited pool of academic jobs). This is why we need to stop advocating (implicitly and explicitly) that the tenure-track is the “one true way” for researchers.
Reblogged this on confessions of a worried teacher and commented:
A good post by by Lsb and Field. Are we actually talking about Academic Capitalism?