From: schieber@jetson.uh.edu (Schieber, Jay D.)
Subject: Re: Hiring quotas and faculty positions (Repost #2)
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41    
Organization: University of Houston
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 22:13:00 GMT

In article <21929@optima.cs.arizona.edu>, debray@cs.arizona.edu (Saumya K. Debray) writes...
>merolajs@vtcc1.cc.vt.edu (JOSEPH S. MEROLA DEPT OF CHEMISTRY VPI&SU) writes:
> 
>>      Let me get a little more specific with my example.  Suppos we have an
>> opening for an Inorganic chemist and the ad reads that way.  But we 
>> already have some folks on staff in various inorganic resarch areas.  Do
>> we want another organometallic chemist?  Maybe.  Or do we want someone
>> in a different area such as solid state chemistry?  Again, maybe.  So,
>> from some perspective, the "best" person may be an organometallic
>> chemist, but we decide we want someone with research interests that are
>> not currently being done by someone on staff.  
> 
>You're hiring someone with certain technical duties (research, teaching)
>in mind.  From this perspective, you've given some good examples and
>argued convincingly that _going_by_technical_criteria_, there may not
>be a single "best" person who suits your needs.  I don't see anyone
>arguing with this.  The important point here is that you're using
>technical criteria to evaluate a person for a job involving certain
>technical duties.
> 
>> Back to the idea of affirmative action, the "qualities" of gender or
>> ethnic background can indeed be a valid consideration.  
> 
>This seems to be a leap of faith.  I see little relationship between
>the structure of one's reproductive organs, or the amount of melanin
>in the skin, and the quality of one's research or teaching.  In
>general, I see no reason why non-technical criteria should be used
>to judge suitability for technical duties ("I'm sorry, we can't
>offer you a position in our lab, your moustache isn't quite the right
>color.")

There is no leap of faith involved (the deleted sections of the
poster imply this).  Being a faculty requires much more than
strictly technical skills; to think otherwise is quite naive.
In industry it is even more true.  Industry looks for people who
fit into the "corporate culture"--clearly not a technical 
qualification.  I am mentor to hundreds of students, who ask
me questions about many aspects of working and studying, with
at least half of the questions having nothing to do about 
technical matters.

Moustache colour is currently not considered to be an important 
criterion in judging faculty qualifications.  If society suddenly
started categorizing people wholesale on moustache colour, frequently
made derogatory remarks about certain colours of moustaches, told
off colour jokes about them, etc. so that the students came into
my class feeling stigmatized by them, then I would consider making
even moustache colour an important criterion.

Nowadays, most faculty are judged very heavily on a single criterion:
"are they likely to bring in a lot of money?"  Is this a technical
criterion?  Do you ever feel victimized by it?  Do you feel the same
animosity towards it?  Why not?


>-- 
>Saumya Debray
>Dept. of Computer Science, University of Arizona, Tucson
>debray@cs.arizona.edu
Newsgroups: sci.research.careers