Campus Confidential by Jacques Berlinerblau

Author:Jacques Berlinerblau [Berlinerblau, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2017-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Job Searches: All Hail, the New Guy!

The academic job market is in tatters. As a result, every tenure-line position in the country attracts a surfeit of applicants. Among the finest of these candidates, the differences in accomplishments, talent, and potential are small and subtle. In order to make the right decision, evaluators must marshal the diligence, focus, and cold impartiality necessary to tweeze out those fine distinctions.

The tweezing evaluators will almost always be Fuddy Duddies. Anywhere from three to twelve scholars will comprise the hiring committee. A departmental chair, or some other scholar/administrator hybrid, will likely serve on the committee as well. Maybe a stray dean will represent the administration. But for the most part, longstanding conventions of faculty governance dictate that these searches are left almost exclusively to the discretion of professors.

Which is perhaps why academic searches provide us with so much rich comic earth to frack. Even when the job market was stable, in the once-upon-a-time era of the undisrupted academy, our hiring protocols left much to be desired. Now, more qualified candidates than ever before vie for our attention. We stand, as always, unready, unwilling, and unable to properly assess their prodigious talents. The crisis of contingency is largely the fault of administrators. The crisis of standardlessness, however, is on us.

A comparison with another industry may provide some useful context. The National Football League conducts its annual draft in the spring. The proceedings are splashily broadcast to the multitudes. Viewers are mesmerized by eye-lacerating graphics, torrents of analyses, and endless clips of very large men pulverizing other very large men.

Prior to all that sound and fury, thirty-two professional franchises spend the fall and winter studying thousands of college athletes. The work is entrusted to well-staffed scouting departments who sojourn to gridirons across our nation. Ever eager for comprehensive data, the evaluators consult with leather-lunged college coaches, coked-up assistants, and shifty athletic directors. After that, the scouts hunker down in dark film rooms pouring over infinite spools of tape. All the better to pinpoint the precise merits and demerits of the players they vet.

The prospects are graded according to rigorous criteria and then reassessed, in person, at a combine. At this event, even more observers, including hundreds of sports journalists, join the scouts and front-office people. Security and background checks are performed on the athletes. Intelligence and psychological evaluations are administered. The process spans months and costs each team millions of dollars. And even with all of that effort, all of that labor and industry, football teams make mistakes—often referred to as “busts”—on a regular basis.

Scholar drafts are somewhat different—except for the whole part about busts and making mistakes regularly. Which is unfortunate because a person hired to a tenure-track job is not expendable like a nose tackle selected from McNeese State. Our busts can conceivably hang around the “team” for half a century or so!

The NFL’s draft occurs every year. Conversely, no one quite knows when an academic job search might take place. And yet, as with the NFL, a tenure-track line is a multimillion-dollar investment.

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