IHE article: Talent is Abundant

[polly_mer]

https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/just-visiting/talent-abundant contains:

The parallels to the structures of higher ed and its problems with diversity are obvious, and I think related to Goldberg's view that what he's looking for people to do is very difficult and only a small group are capable.

In academia, talent is also abundant while time and resources are not. You could replace the entire faculty at even elite institutions and no one would notice a diminishment in quality. Everyone who has sat on a job search committee knows that talent is abundant. How many of the people with those CV's were hirable and could quite comfortably do the job? Twenty? Dozens? Hundreds?

There is a benefit to those already inside to believe that making it inside the gates is the province of the special and that being on the inside gives one unique insight into who is worthy, but that doesn't necessarily make it true.

I have sat on search committees on not-at-all-elite institutions where we had literally no one apply who could comfortably do the job.  Finding people for the elite institutions is probably easier than for the non-elite institutions because many people will succeed given access to more-than-adequate resources.  The harder part is succeeding when one is short on everything. 

Thus, I can believe the gatekeeping functions are real at places where many more qualified people would like to work there than can work there.  Life is very different at non-elite places where posters with some riff on "We have been doing the unbelievable with so little for so long that we will now attempt the impossible with nothing" aren't jokes.

[Hegemony]

Hmm — I'm at a lower-tier R1 that pays badly, and Polly's experience hasn't been mine.  The last job search I was in on, we got about 100 applicants, and about 20 people were squarely in the field and could have done the job ably, and about another 40 were a bit off field but could have risen to the occasion.  I also know a number of excellent PhDs who couldn't get jobs and had to leave the profession.  Not every one of these people is a rockstar, of course.  But I think all of them could have taught well and done the job no worse than the people we have now. 

[polly_mer]

The last job search I was in on, we got about 100 applicants, and about 20 people were squarely in the field

For humanities searches, we also often had about 100 applicants with a reasonable fraction squarely in the field.  The problem wasn't getting people with field knowledge to apply*--the problem was getting people who showed awareness of the huge difference between

a) being a professor where one's job is research with some teaching and a little service

and

b) working the job we were actually offering with a lot of gen ed teaching and a fair amount of service that would require being on campus a large fraction of the business hours a large fraction of the week to interact with students who needed a lot of support and research viewed as a personal hobby that should be one's free time during summer and breaks.

I've spent too many years reading posts by newly hired people who are very upset upon getting a case b job where students are an unfortunate combination of underprepared, undermotivated, and overcommitted in the rest of their lives to overlook that content knowledge is not the hard qualification to find.  As the article states, lack of experience in exactly the right job shouldn't be an automatic disqualifier. 

However, I've had too much experience with the equivalent of drummers applying for lead singer positions to let it go.  Yes, some drummers are also fabulous singers who can be developed into lead singers; other drummers have their hearts elsewhere and should be looking for drummer positions.  An R1, even lower ranked with a higher-than-typical-R1 teaching load, tends to offer a different job than an undergraduate-only, Professions plus arts & sciences, no graduate coexistence institution.

I can write similar things about my current position where we have many academic-minded folks applying for our research positions without showing an awareness of our primary mission and how our funding structure is very different from an academic one.  Again, content knowledge is not as rare as someone who really wants the job we have to offer that includes being told what to research in the relevant field and how long one has to get a good enough answer to pass along so someone else can make a decision.

* Outside the TT humanities positions, we often did have significant trouble getting field-knowledge qualified people to apply, especially in nursing, PhD-educated business folks, and math/math-related STEM.

[pigou]

Rockstars are rare, very good musicians are common. You can go to just about any bar in a major city with live music and you'll be impressed by the performers (who are likely unpaid). Go on a cruise ship and the musicians will likely be quite awesome, despite earning virtually nothing and giving up on a social life for a considerable time. But the point is that there's tremendous competition for the rockstars, while an average musician has virtually no bargaining power.

No different in academia: if you have stronger publications than your peers and lucked out on a really good idea that happened to work out, you are likely to end up with multiple offers and considerable bargaining power. If you're the 11th best candidate in the world, you might end up unemployed if the top 10 places hired those ahead of you and the remaining universities want someone with more teaching experience.

But the original tweet that inspired the column also seems way off: writing a 10,000 word piece is not really, really difficult... it's trivial for any moderately well trained journalist. Writing a 10,000 word piece that people want to spend the time reading and that will be published is the hard part. If it won't get published, you may have just wasted a lot of time.

There's a huge literature in economics showing that women are much less likely to participate in these competitive settings. If you could write 1,000 words for $10 guaranteed or 10,000 words for a 1-in-10 chance at $2,000, you'll inevitably get many more men picking the latter. So unless you change those incentives, you shouldn't be surprised when you end up with a gender imbalance. Tenure-track positions at research intensive universities follow very similar incentives... and I suspect where there's increasing efforts for alternative, non-academic careers, women will be the ones disproportionally selecting out of academia.