Newsgroups: sci.research.careers
From: mdhutton@cs.toronto.edu (Mike Hutton)
Subject: Re: Hiring quotas and faculty positions (Repost #2)
Organization: Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Date: 15 Sep 92 21:45:22 GMT

It's fun to watch people get their backs up against the wall when
they think they are being (reverse?) discriminated against.  But I
wonder why only certain types of discrimination are worthy of protest?
Hiring takes into account many factors besides "research ability", 
for example:

* research interests (so that the entire department is not
  from the same area; so that graduate students with all types
  of interests can be attracted; and so that the possibility of 
  collabaration across areas is maximized).

* teaching vs. research staffing (both are needed)

* grant money brought in (not necessarily correlated with ability, 
  sometimes more with research area).

* the origin of faculty (i.e. avoiding hiring all faculty from 
  the same department which could cause stagnation); also 
  subjective views on the 'value' of the candidates previous department.

* quantitative measures like paper-counts, which are really only a proxy
  for ability. 

* seniority and age of faculty (so that the entire department doesn't
  retire in the same year, and so there is a reasonable pipeline in the
  department administration).   

* compatability with department members (i.e. "we need a queuing
  theorist to properly complete this project", not having two
  researchers in exactly the same field or, alternatively, wanting
  exactly that).

* personality (and the possiblity of personality conflicts and
  bad departmental politics).

* contacts (one would be stupid to ignore this simple fact).

* reputation of the candidate, and what this could do for the
  departments profile (irrespective of whether they are continuing
  to do research).

* salary, teaching-load, admin-load and supervision-load 
  expectations of candidate and how that matches with department goals.  

* availability of money in the department for the type of research desired.
  
* teaching ability.

* timing---year you graduate vs. availability of positions at that time.

* does the department desire someone who will permanently move to there,
  or will they be satisifed with a super-star who will obviously move
  on 2 years later.

* citizenship 

I could continue, but they might get more esoteric.  Whether these
factors are explicit or implicit is unimportant, they exist.

Assuming a research-oriented department, every one of these
is a tradeoff with research ability, and quite often the best candidate
(in the research sense alone) might not be hired.   This is especially
true if the candidate is a really bad fit with other issues of interest to 
the department.  Academic hiring never has been and never will be done
*purely* on the basis of research ability alone, but rather for the
"best interests of the department, students and faculty".  Politics
is everywhere: not necessarily a complaint, simply a fact.

Having a better gender or ethnic representation attracts better 
graduate students and better research (how would you like to be
the only female graduate student in the department, even if you were the 
best student there?  or the only black professor?  More likely to go 
somewhere where you would be more comfortable, where there are 
more women or minorities in the faculty.)   It prevents stagnation 
in ideas, discrimination in teaching, and encourages qualified students 
who would otherwise be turned off the subject (as in Engineering) to 
participate.  It also could attract research grants from 
progressive governments and corporate donors.  Most important
of all, the process of actively searching for disadvantaged candidates
tries to address the biases that some groups have encountered throughout 
the pipeline.  Why is affirmative action always phrased as 'righting past 
wrongs' rather than as 'attempting to evaluate candidates in the 
presense of biases in their background'.  .  

Other interesting whys:

- Why has it always been acceptable for fraternities etc. to provide
scholarships only to their members (obviously men only), yet someone
who decides to award a scholarship to women only is promoting
reverse-discrimination and ignoring the "best candidate"?  Same
goes for religious organizations.

- Why is nobody in this group complaining about the simple fact that
huge numbers of qualified candidates are excluded from academic
positions based, not on their research ability, but on their
citizenship?  Certainly everybody supports hiring the "best" 
candidate regardless of all other factors.

- A traditional argument against affirmative action is that the
market will do the job---if I discriminate it will catch up to
me in the end when somebody else gets the qualified people I 
ignored.  Why doesn't this argument work in the reverse direction?
Aren't "reverse-discriminators" just cutting their own throats?

Closing thought:  If you are the best in your field, you will
get hired regardless of discrimination or reverse-discrimination.
For anyone else, it is all a crap-shoot anyway, it is impossible to
"fairly" evaluate over 300 almost-identical applications on
an ill-defined and idealistic concept of "ability alone".

Mike.