When 'Best Practices' Go Bad . . . or Were Never Actually Very Good to Begin With: Assorted Tales From Academia

This is the second in a series of basically non-political Toteboard posts.

A Tale of Two Citizens

Just over twenty-five years ago, a young scholar – let’s call her “Hortense” – applied for an entry level faculty position in a small but growing program at an up-and-coming public university. She came with fine credentials and performed exceptionally well during her campus visit: teaching a sample class, presenting a scholarly paper, and sharing her ideas for course development and future research. Her training and academic interests also made her a good fit for the program, not in the sense of replicating the existing faculty’s scholarly and pedagogical approaches to the subject, but by providing methodology and expertise that augmented and complemented the program’s current strengths in unanticipated ways. The university hired her as an assistant professor, and she quickly established herself as a first-rate teacher, a crackerjack scholar, and an overall good citizen of the program and institution.

Thanks to a combination of ambition, hard work, intellectual prowess, and political acumen, Hortense spent the next two decades working her way up the academic food chain. She earned tenure and promotion, first to associate professor, and then to full professor. She served for several years as department chair, and eventually joined the administrative ranks as an associate dean. For her final act (so far), Hortense then took the position of president at a nearby liberal arts college. 

In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that the school made a very smart hire.

About five or so years after Hortense joined the faculty, when the program was beginning a period of tremendous growth, another scholar – let’s call him “Gabriel” – applied for a position there. This new position, unlike Hortense’s, was for an endowed chair, the first of its kind in the program. This was designed to attract a senior scholar with a solid publication record, someone who would join the program with advanced rank and de facto tenure, and who would take on the role as one of the major public faces of the university. Gabriel came in with a great dossier and, perhaps even more so than Hortense, impressed everyone during his campus visit with the rigor and creativity of his scholarship. What’s more, he also connected easily both personally and intellectually with everyone in the program, which boded well for how he would be able to work with graduate students and execute the more public responsibilities of his position. Needless to say, Gabriel’s application generated significant enthusiasm.

But Gabriel did not get the job. With literally minutes remaining in his campus visit, Gabriel made a passing comment that suggested his “girlfriend” was, in fact, his recent (or perhaps even current) undergraduate student. And so suddenly the question arose as to whether he had violated his institution’s ethics policies and was involuntarily leaving his position tarnished by scandal. When pressed on the matter, Gabriel was not forthcoming about the circumstances of his departure, and his institution agreed to talk about it only with his written permission, which he declined to give. With legitimate concerns about the likelihood of an ethical cloud hanging over an expensive, high-profile new hire, let alone the safety of its female students, the program ultimately passed on Gabriel’s application.

In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that the school just barely dodged a bullet.

Two Tales, Take Two

So why bring up these stories from decades ago? Why bring up cases when it seems that the program and institution made the right decisions? Because if the rules that currently govern the search and hiring processes were in place twenty-odd years ago, the results would have been very different. The university probably would not have hired Hortense, but it probably would have hired Gabriel, both of which would have amounted to real mistakes. And that reflects very poorly on how hiring is now conducted there and at countless other institutions that function similarly.

It seems that over the last dozen years or so, administrative offices at many universities have been issuing directives, often with the imprimatur of “best practices” (a phrase once reserved for the corporate world), to institute top-to-bottom changes in hiring (and other) procedures. Those responsible for these directives generally invoke but seldom actually cite, and almost always misapply, cherry-picked nuggets of research to justify these changes. And because the conversations about the relevant policies generally occur in detached, self-contained feedback loops, they sometimes generate mandates that supposedly make internal sense but that any half-rational person could recognize as silly or inane: like the directive that members of search committees are not supposed to compare candidates or their dossiers with one another. No wonder a large portion of the US population believes that academic institutions are out of touch with reality.

Anyway, back to our friends, Hortense and Gabriel.

Hortense, Redux

Part of what made Hortense such an appealing candidate was that she not only satisfied the job requirements, but also brought additional strengths to the program, the kinds of strengths that the department might very well be looking for in its next hire, or the hire after that. In other words, appointing her to the position would (as a colleague at another institution put it) generate more bang for the buck, and would allow the program to begin its expansion sooner and more broadly than had been originally planned. Now to a great extent, every candidate brings in strengths and skills not subsumed by a simple job description, and it is sometimes only when a search committee reviews the candidates holistically that it can determine what those candidates’ respective possibilities may be within future incarnations of the program. And when the search committee members looked at Hortense, they (correctly) saw the program’s future.

However, it is currently not in line with “best practices” to make such holistic appraisals of job candidates. Rather, search committees are directed to enumerate the specific requirements articulated in the job description, determine the relative weight given to each requirement, and then evaluate each candidate separately with respect to those requirements, and only with respect to those requirements. Consequently, any additional skills or experiences a candidate brings, no matter how spectacular or potentially beneficial to the program, are simply deemed irrelevant to that candidate’s application. And truth be told, Hortense applied for her position when she was still greener than some of her main competitors for the job, and she probably would not have been hired had she been judged solely with respect to the language of the job description. And that would have been a great loss for the program, as Hortense’s main competitors went on to have fine careers but nothing near her level of accomplishment.

Of course, one of the reasons for such a policy is to prevent search committees from acting in bad faith and doing an end-run around the process, i.e., employing phony baloney “holistic” criteria to hire friends, ideological allies, or people who look like them. But this is a case of administrators identifying a real problem and implementing an ill-conceived (or downright stupid) solution to that problem – it brings to mind the story of a railroad company that, upon discovering that the caboose is the car most likely to sustain damage during a railway accident, decided to “solve” the problem by removing the cabooses from all of their trains. Yes, such a restrictive search process may prevent shenanigans on the part of certain bad actors, but it also risks letting an obviously stronger overall candidate (or even several obviously stronger overall candidates) slip away on what really are technicalities. One would think that someone, somewhere, could come up with a better mechanism for maintaining the integrity of the hiring process, especially when there are so many redundant levels of routine review of each potential hire.

Gabriel, Redux

Gabriel was a superlative candidate who simply stuck his foot in his mouth, revealing that he apparently stuck something else in someone else's mouth. But Gabriel didn’t exactly come out and say or put on his CV that he was banging his student. Rather, toward the end of the multi-day interview, when he (correctly) sensed that things were going very well, he inquired about other schools in the area as possible employers for his girlfriend, which prompted relevant and seemingly innocuous questions about her training and area of expertise – and it was his answers to those questions that raised the red flag. The search committee may have stumbled onto this information in a somewhat random conversation, which led to a protracted period of unpleasant follow-up with Gabriel and his employer, but this bit of serendipity ultimately saved the program and the institution from a serious ethical scandal.

However, it is in keeping with current “best practices” that interviewers scrupulously avoid engaging candidates on any subject not directly related to the job, especially on matters of religion, sexuality, marital status, and so forth, even if the candidate brings up those subjects him or herself (or themself). And of course, if those procedures were followed to the letter with Gabriel, no one ever would have responded with something like, “Oh, your girlfriend’s a teacher too? What does she teach?” or “Where did she get her degree?” – questions that were actually asked in order to be helpful. Obviously, the motivation for avoiding such topics of conversation is that those who are in the business of judging job candidates should be arriving at those judgments fairly, and not basing them on what is essentially extraneous personal information. But in this case, the “extraneous personal information” turned out to be quite relevant to the candidate’s possible job performance, specifically with regard to relations with students, adherence to professional ethics, general trustworthiness, and so forth. The program is very lucky that its practices weren’t particularly “best” in those days.

As a brief aside, one of the most unfortunate unintended consequences of this particular caboose-removal solution has been, in some pockets of academia, the gradual conflation of contextually impolitic behavior with morally objectionable behavior. That is to say, administrative directives to employees not to discuss certain things with or ask certain questions of job candidates seem to have slowly morphed into the implicit message that those topics are more broadly taboo and should be avoided with colleagues or students whenever possible. If this is starting to sound like the formula for a cold and depressing work environment, well, that is indeed another conversation for some time down the road.

True Tales/Tails

The tales of Hortense and Gabriel are very different in nature, had very different outcomes, and bring to the forefront very different sets of policies that govern hiring in many contemporary academic workplaces. But what these disparate hiring policies and procedures have in common is that none is in place primarily (or perhaps, even incidentally) for the purpose of making hires that best serve the intellectual and pedagogical needs of the institution. In reality, all of the “best practices” illustrated here are simply CYA practices, i.e., prophylactic mechanisms for insulating the school or program from damning lawsuits, accusations of impropriety, negative press, or even just bad scuttlebutt within the electronically well connected applicant pool. If search committees stick to the job description and only the job description, then the institution doesn’t have to worry about disgruntled candidates complaining that they lost out to someone with “lesser” credentials, even if it means bypassing a candidate of Hortense’s caliber. If interviewers assiduously avoid discussing personal details during three-day candidate visits, the institution doesn’t have to worry about candidates claiming that they lost out because they disclosed their sexuality or religious affiliation, even if it means running the risk of getting stuck with someone like Gabriel and all his baggage.

And of course, the hiring policies articulated here are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to administrative “best practices” that are patently nonsensical, self-serving, and even at odds with the academic mission of any scholarly institution. The tragic irony here is that colleges and universities supposedly invested in veritas, in the search for and dissemination of knowledge and truth, have increasingly mired themselves in procedures designed to “avoid getting in trouble” as opposed to “getting it right.” In so doing, they have created an environment that deliberately dampens the exercise of critical thinking and dehumanizes the workplace. And as might be expected, faculty who execute their responsibilities by numbly following carefully curated scripts and paranoically avoiding evem the merest appearance of rule-breaking produce students who are adept at, well, following scripts and avoiding rule-breaking . . . but haven’t the foggiest idea of how to engage in real-world problem-solving. Remember the last time you spoke to a "customer service" representative who couldn't even understand the problem you were describing?

Anyway, you can bet that there are lots of pretty fishy academic tales out there just waiting to be told, but you probably won’t hear them because too many people in positions of authority are too busy covering their own sorry-ass tails.