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    Should Departments Be Promoting From Within?

    In the discussion that followed Anca Gheaus' guest post on the gender situation in the German academy, there was some mention of the fact that in many European job-markets, faculty searches are not truly 'open,' so that internal candidates are strongly preferred to those from outside the hiring institution. Clearly, when taken to an extreme—institutions becoming highly resistant to hiring anyone but their own PhDs and/or post-docs—such a practice can be very detrimental to any process of diversification within the academy. But I wonder if there might not be other situations in which an over-emphasis on 'open' searches is actually detrimental. 

    I'm thinking of the situation in the U.S. academy, where the norm is very strongly against not only hiring a department's own PhDs, but also hiring any currently employed non-tenure track faculty into tenure lines, or even adjuncts into full-time NTT lines.  Given that the galloping precaritization of the professoriate as a whole is fast becoming a structural crisis, I wonder if it is not time to examine the possible merits of encouraging departments to commit to making at least a certain percentage of their full-time and TT hires from within the ranks of their current part-time and NTT faculty. 

    Obviously, this would not solve the larger problems of adjunctification and precaritization, but it might improve the overall sustainability of an academic career path in a period where many, if not most, people will find themselves working in precarious positions early on.

    It is fairly easy to see how this improvement would be achieved.  If widely adopted, the principal benefit of such a policy would be to offer—and indeed to normalize the creation of—a definite path out of adjunct or precarious labor.

    Moreover, giving current adjuncts and NTTs a hiring preference would encourage departments to evaluate their merits according to standards that are realistically applicable to people working under the conditions that typically obtain in their jobs.  

    Compare this to the current situation. As things stand, to be a viable candidate for a full time / TT position, one often needs to be either a very recent PhD or to have produced a fairly large body of scholarship—production that typically requires that one already have a full-time, moderate to low teaching load position with good institutional support for research. Those who find themselves in adjunct and NTT positions post-PhD are thus disadvantaged when it comes to getting any other kind of job. 

    Structurally, this is a disaster. In a market that is unprepared to absorb many of the PhDs produced in any given year into full-time or TT positions, let alone cope with the backlog of recent PhDs, allowing part- and full-time NTT positions to be 'dead-end' jobs means effectively abandoning an sizable portion of those doing the undergraduate instruction on which many departments depend for their existence. It is to accept the WalMartization of the profession. And given the percentages that now obtain, this is no longer a tangled backwater in an otherwise rational career stream, it is the main channel.  

    Or, to put the point more bluntly: as things stand, many of us will work in adjunct or NTT positions early in our careers. That is a reality over which departmental-level authorities have little control. The question is whether and how the profession can offer adjuncts and NTTs a way to move into other, better positions. Shifting the norm in our hiring practices towards promiting at least some adjuncts and NTTs seems like one potentially achievable way of doing so.

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    14 responses to “Should Departments Be Promoting From Within?”

    1. Crimlaw Avatar
      Crimlaw

      I don’t think it’s correct that there is a presumption against hiring “any currently employed non-tenure track faculty into tenure lines” — it is not at all uncommon at many departments to hire those holding “visiting” appointments into tenure lines. My department has done this several times and I am aware of many other departments also doing this.
      There is a strong though defeasible norm against hiring one’s own PhD students.
      I’m not aware of any general attitude about hiring adjuncts from within. At my own institution, which employs a small number of adjuncts, adjuncts are like everyone else welcome to apply for advertised positions. In the past such applications did not stand up well to the general applicant pool. The features of adjunct employment that you discuss surely contribute to this to a significant degree.

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    2. Marcus Hedahl Avatar
      Marcus Hedahl

      As noted, I think that there is some promotion from within. A small handful of “open” searches are likely tailored in order to fit an internal candidate, and probably much more common, some departments will give advantages to an internal candidate. This may often be a pretty reasonable decision given that the department knows the internal candidate better than they do an external candidate.
      Should we in philosophy departments do this more?
      It’s not clear if that would be useful. It would create a “track” for some NTT to get a better position, but if its the same number of TT positions (or as is more likely to be the case – less), you would forcing more people into that track, you could extend the apprenticeship period of the profession (post-doc, then NTT, then pre-tenure clock), you could create a competition among local NTT members (which I think is different than a larger global competition), you could create an incentive to take the NTT job at a better school than a TT job at a smaller or higher-loaded or less well ranked university, and junior members of the profession could have to wait even longer to find out if they will in fact land a TT job. The proposal does have an upside, but there are also downsides.
      I’m honestly deeply sceptical that any approach will have any real benefit to those NTT members without some sort of structural reform (even if the structural reform is minimal). Members of the academy complain about the pay, job security, and treatment of adjuncts, and we are quick to point out the market mechanisms from above that are driving the increased use of adjuncts, but we are much less likely to focus on the fact that the rise in adjuncts also in part due to the general failure of the TT system to properly address teaching responsibilities and teaching excellence.
      Perhaps the creation of more permanent teaching-centred jobs within departments (like in the California System that now has Lecturers with Possible Security of Employment, its like TT but the review centred around teaching rather than research excellence) could have a better chance to create a non-dead end NTT “track”. This may not be as immediately “achievable” but it might be greatly beneficial both to help tackle the Adjunct crises and for lots of other reasons for departments to convert some of their TT lines to LWPSE lines (although someone really needs to come up with a better acronym than the UC-System has).

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    3. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Thanks for the reply.
      As you say, there’s a good degree of variation here, especially concerning the better class of NTT position. As I said in the OP, If you’ve got something that looks a lot like a research gig (moderate to low load, with good institutional support for research), then you’re not necessarily in bad shape. That certainly includes a much higher likelihood that you’ll find your line converted to a tenure line. But of course, that’s still a fairly small subset of people.
      I see no reason at all that things should change vis a vis departments hiring their own grad students with any regularity. I think the reasons against doing so implied in the discussion of Anca’s post hold.
      By the end of your reply, you get to the core of what I take to be my point. Aside from the folks who are lucky enough (and yes, it’s luck at this point) to find themselves well positioned to compete in the ‘general applicant pool’ (which at this point almost surely entails a couple hundred applications for any advertised position), there’s the structural crisis I mention where the conditions of folks’ employment is surely having a real effect. And at that point, tossing your own employees into a ‘general applicant pool’ that you know damn well they don’t have a reasonable chance of competing in and then claiming that they can of course ‘always apply’ looks pretty lame.

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    4. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      At least in philosophy we often hire an instructor because that’s all the dean would approve, and in more than one case the instructor has ended up having a better publication record than those of us with tenure.

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    5. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Hi Marcus,
      I agree that this doesn’t solve the larger problem and that the larger problem won’t get solved without some real reforms. But in an environment where those larger reforms are going to require what may be a decades long political effort (recall how much of this, especially at public institutions, is going to require executive and legislative action at a governmental level), I’m not sure how we avoid the question of why anyone in their right mind would enter a field where the balance of probabilities is in favor of them finding themselves in a poorly paid, dead-end job 8-10 years of highly specialized education down the road.
      More, it seems at least worth asking whether departments don’t have some particular obligation to the folks they are using to support the research activities of their more senior members. This isn’t just a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ It’s also a case of ‘because these poor slobs are teaching 4-4, or 2-2 at 3 places, etc., I get to have a 2-2 and go to three conferences this term.’
      This might make the apprenticeship longer, but a long apprenticeship is still an improvement over a dead-end job. Also, your ‘longer apprenticeship’ path omits the real elephant in the room, adjuncts. But it seems to me that it’s precisely this dimension which we shouldn’t be overlooking.
      Finally, I’m not so inclined to believe that ‘lecturer’ positions are the solution either, especially if they’re significantly less well-compensated and basically amount to creating de jura permanent class of slightly more sustainably paid teaching faculty to replace a de facto class of folks who usually either bounce from one term limited high-load ‘visiting’ gig to another or make do by adjuncting at a bunch of places. It’s a little bit more secure, but if you’re talking about offering pay scales that would make a lot of struggling post-docs roll their eyes, I’m not sanguine–especially if the workload is also such that, once again, it locks folks into that job since it makes preparing oneself to compete on a ‘research driven’ market a virtual impossibility. That just looks like a slightly more comfy dead end job.

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    6. Jonathan Avatar
      Jonathan

      I see the strong norm against hiring one’s own PhDs, and I think that is a good thing, although there will be cases where it should be violated (and always have been). I don’t see a norm against hiring adjuncts, or not of the same kind, especially since adjuncts are typically trained elsewhere. There may be implicit and even explicit biases against adjunct hiring–so and so person has a red flag because he or she has been out for so long without a “real job”–but that strikes me as a different sort of thing. In any case, such implicit and explicit biases should of course be combatted. But I don’t think that any system of re-weighting evaluation so that those already teaching for you are officially given a preference should be encouraged. First of all, it is dubious legally (I don’t know enough about the matter to say how exactly it would square with title nine and other facets of labor law, but I know enough from experience that administrations are hyper-sensitive to such difficulties). Second, it violates some principles of meritocracy that should in the end of the day be defended, if only because if we give up on them the rest of the world will be happy to go along.

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    7. Jonathan Avatar
      Jonathan

      Or perhaps to put it differently, the question you ask seems to me whether some variety of “precarious laborer” should count as an affirmative action category. Perhaps so. But that is a legal matter, and not to be settled by hiring departments alone.

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    8. Tyler Avatar
      Tyler

      When going about the business of hiring someone for a tenure-track position, we are required by law to meet certain standards. One of those standards is that we do a national search for the position. We have to indicate where the job was advertised, the audiences those advertisements would reach, the extent to which we looked for qualified minority candidates, and other relevant criteria. We have to have a committee that reads through those applications, culls a list to interview, and then after the interviews, make a determination about who to bring to campus to give job talks. That committee must write a description of the list of criteria it used to make the short list. After the job talks, the committee writes a lengthy report on each of the candidates, and then offer a ranking of the candidates by order of who to offer the job to first, second, and (perhaps) third. The full department must then meet to discuss the committee report, which is then offered as a motion to accept or reject the committee report.
      Lecturers are hired on their basic qualifications to teach introductory courses in their field(s) of study. The department draws from a local pool of academics. Based on the quality of their teaching and their interest in service, those instructors may be promoted to senior positions that have longer-term contracts, from 3 to 5 years.
      I offer this description not to endorse it but to point out the following: the processes to hire tenure stream and non tenure stream academics have different levels of scrutiny, attendant with different duties–e.g., overseeing graduate education, and the like. Now imagine that you have 30 non-tenure stream faculty at your university (perhaps a large state university that staffs introductory courses or composition courses with NTT faculty and/or qualified graduate students).
      Unless every person hired into a NTT job had the same level of scrutiny from a national or international pool of applicants as those interviewed for tenure stream positions, I would feel very ill-at-ease about offering a preference to the NTT internal job candidate.

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    9. Jonathan Avatar
      Jonathan

      Tyler’s first paragraph describes very well the legal and institutional parameters into which any preference system for hiring internal candidates would have to fit. Administrations scrutinize these procedures very closely.

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    10. Mark Silcox Avatar
      Mark Silcox

      If Jonathan’s sensible remarks about legality and meritocracy seem a little austere, it’s perhaps worth remembering that one’s job on a search committee is supposed to be to act as agent for the students at one’s institution, whose tuition payments do after all usually form the bulk of one’s paycheck. Hiring a candidate who is anything other than the person believed to be the best available teacher, supervisor, and friend to one’s students – or rigging a search so that such a person is predictably less likely to be found – is a gross violation of professional and institutional ethics.

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    11. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      Thanks everyone for the thoughtful replies. Let me make a general reply to the last few comments.
      First, I suspect that any explicit quota would fail on legal grounds, and I was fairly careful not to suggest that. That said, I find the idea that there’s any legal problem with preferring internal candidates highly suspicious. I’m not a lawyer, but this happens far too often both inside and outside the academy for it to be problematic in principle. And I can see a perfectly reasonable argument that a demonstrated track record of good teaching at a hiring institution and already established relationships there are substantive qualifications. In other words, I see nothing in particular about giving those factors serious weight that’s a problem — and it’s fairly common in business (and hardly unheard of in academic hiring as well).
      Second, I’m unconvinced by ‘meritocratic’ arguments here. If you can find me a standard that gives you objective reasons to prefer one candidate out of 200 I can find you 10 others that will give you reasons to prefer 10 different candidates. I would even consider the possibility of arguing that most decisions are NOT made on the basis of merit (since none of the merit standards being used are really decisive) and I strongly suspect that ‘the best for the students’ is likely somewhere down the list in a lot of cases too. Institutional prestige markers, just for instance, or ability to pull in grant funding, and a whole bunch of other factors are almost surely much more decisive. I’m not saying any of these factors are unimportant, but it’s clear that there are a lot of moving parts to this and the idea that there’s a simple standard of ‘best person’ that would be violated by the proposal in question here seems pretty dubious.
      Third, the ethical question. I think it’d be possible to formulate a very plausible rule utilitarian justification for reworking the hiring norms to be friendlier to internal candidates, especially if we took into account: 1) the ways that students benefit from continuity of faculty and the sorts of investments in their work that a real possibility of promotion might lead many non-FT/TT faculty to make; and 2) the overall benefit to the profession that would accrue as a result of having a more viable career track for more people.

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    12. Witholding Caulfield Avatar
      Witholding Caulfield

      I stand to benefit from such a preference policy, but I do not think it is a good idea. You’ve already said why: Germany, and the European academy more generally. Scholars-in-waiting spend decades of their life cultivating relationships with specific institutions in order to take advantage of these hiring preferences, and it creates more rather than less domination, more opportunities for one person to cultivate long-standing habits of subservience to another. And it does this by incentivizing loyalty to the institutions that exploit us, making it harder to take advantage of opportunities far away, or pursue love or family or mere whimsy to other cities. The one small benefit of NTT life is avoiding the golden handcuffs of tenure; this would take even that from us, and without changing the basic fact of academic political economy that the vast majority of college instruction is done by NTT faculty.
      So the problem is unintended consequences: this would be great if it were instituted tomorrow, and then eliminated next year. But over time, this would produce a completely different set of relations between NTT and TT faculty. Right now I’d say the main relationship is neglect; with priorities and privileges in play, it would become something much darker.

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    13. Ed Kazarian Avatar
      Ed Kazarian

      I’m not sure we need to be rushing down any slippery slopes. There seem to be an awful lot of positions in between the current situation in the US academy and the current situation in the German one.
      More, if you read the comments in Anca’s post, there’s an interesting similarity between both, namely that many folks who invest c. 10 years of their lives acquiring doctoral credentials find themselves with no real path that makes staying in the academy viable for them beyond a few years. True, we produce that overall situation in different ways, but in either case it’s horrendous and in both cases it seems to be strongly correlated with a significant lack of diversity in the profession, along with a number of other problems.
      As for the ‘golden handcuffs’ argument, I’d reply that the personal burden of having to move all the time to maintain a reasonable income (if you can even do it) is surely a much bigger and more problematic burden.
      Finally, this is a strategic intervention, given a certain specific problem. To worry about unintended consequences at the level you’re thinking about presumes that we don’t ever modulate practices as conditions shift again. I’m not sure why we should assume that as a condition of responding to problems we have now.

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    14. Jonathan Avatar
      Jonathan

      I think the value of this kind of discussion is only that it can raise consciousness about the adjunct situation in general and implicit biases in particular. That is, the more people who are involved in hiring (as I am myself quite often, including this semester) can read this kind of thing and correct against whatever biases might crop up in their own thinking about candidates whose PhDs are not recent or who have been holding down heavy loads, maybe even on multiple campuses, the better. But the chances that any concerted effort could be made actually to institute any kind of preference for internal candidates is both negligible and ill-advised on several fronts. First there is the simple practical grounds that hiring practices accrete slowly over time and are not centrally managed; the only way to change this kind of norm across the board would be through the, very difficult, route of including “adjunct” or some similar category among the set of affirmative action sub categories all searches are legally bound to work extra hard to find. Second, job searches are structured and closely monitored so as to thwart any preferences or weightings that don’t fall on merit (I know you don’t like the term, but it’s built into the practice) or on affirmative action; as discussed above, searches have to be advertised, short lists accounted for, work and visits described, votes taken and accounted for, and decisions represented at length, all in such a way that would have to be either thwarted or dishonestly worked around should any effective weighting in preference for what you call an internal candidate to work. Thirdly, implicit in all of this, the strategy attempts to solve one problem (the plight of internal candidates) by introducing another (the plight of those meritorious candidates not hired in that candidates stead). One could argue that any system of preferences introduces that final problem, but that is just to show that any argument for actually weighting internal candidates differently (as opposed to fighting one’s own implicit biases) would only stand up is an affirmative action argument. My hunch is that such an argument would be a hard one to make.

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