Assisting Asssitants

The job market has been such that universities have, for some time now gotten, a much higher quality pool of incoming faculty than would have been the case twenty years ago. We have had time to watched some of these people go through the acclimatization process of leaving their high-grade graduate programs to settle into mainstream universities.

We all know that the decisions about who gets to teach at primo universities and who ends up somewhere else are not so finely tuned. There are a fair number of high quality, brand new scholars who land at universities that really are not used to having such hot house flowers on their faculty. What becomes of these delicate researchers and writers in the tussle of tenure and administrative review? What becomes of their great promise? Why do some cruise on to publish lots of fine books and articles, while others stick to their one track?

University administrations would love to know how to separate the long term producers from those who settle into a comfortable routine after tenure. I am definitely not here to conjure some answer to this perennial question. There are lots of people out there making such judgments. Universities have an enormous array of reviews and evaluations to pick the wheat from the chafe.

And while the pressure of a deadline has a wonderful effect concentrating the mind on finishing a manuscript, more needs to said about how the review process creates a conformity that undermines its own goal of fostering faculty productivity.

Review processes very often insist that faculty publish in one kind of journal rather than another. For example, there is the concept of a mainstream flag ship journal, one that represents the best scholarship in a given field. For some universities, it is important that their faculty demonstrate their scholarly prowess by publishing in these journals. At other universities, publishing in mainstream journals is a sign of mediocrity, that a scholar is not really cutting edge.

But the rule varies from one discipline to another, from one scholar to another. The problem is when university administrations make broad rules in favor of one over the other, without considering the character of each contribution, i.e. when the quality of an article is judged by the journal in which appears. For young faculty this problem is heightened because very often they went to a graduate school where one rule applied and then they end up teaching at a university where the opposite rule governs tenure decisions.

Add to this-- the general unwillingness of bureaucracies to allow for flexibility. Every educational institution I have ever attended has governed its internal decisions with the presumption that its rules are the only true and correct ones. There is a long list of German departments in this country who all believe they are the best. The University of Michigan has no trouble thumbing its nose at the University of Chicago. And while UC Riverside may understand that it is not in the same league as Princeton, it will insist that its junior faculty follow the California state conventions for demonstrating scholarly excellence, never mind what they told you back east.

I am pulling these examples out of thin air, there are no hidden stories behind them, I am not thinking of anyone in particularly as I write this summary of 20 years experience. I may be totally unfair to the individual institutions but the tendency is common enough,

Still, I have heard department heads of big, Midwestern universities declare that they would never let their best students apply to an Ivy League graduate program, because “they don’t have a comprehensive curriculum there.” Similarly, I have seen Ivy League professors quietly pass over State university PhDs because they don’t come from "truly innovative programs."

OK, so we all know academia is full of picky jealousy.

The trouble arises for junior faculty who have not yet mastered the different standards. And the real problem is that in the long run, the pressure to switch from one standard of scholarship turns clever thinkers into conformists. If you were trained to find the hottest new trend in art coming out of Europe, you are going to have a hard time publishing in a flagship journal. Likewise, if you think like a social scientist about journals, you French colleagues may smile in disbelief.

While the Ivy League can readily afford to toss away excellent scholars, because there is always another wave of brilliance rolling in, other universities might pause to consider the varieties of scholarly accomplishment, to bend a little more.