The Academy's Dirty Secret

[Zinhead]

@juillet -

My point is that the opinion of the home department doesn’t matter. It’s the opinion of the hiring department that matters, and who is the most qualified or least qualified can be different from department to department.

If that is true, why do you have an issue with my statement that race and gender were important considerations as to why these candidates were hired? From what you are saying, statements like “We are especially interested in applications from women and minorities/diverse candidates/underrepresented minorities/candidates who can teach and mentor a diverse group of students/etc.” are considered boilerplate in academic advertisements. If so, and universities come out and say that they are “especially interested” in certain classes of people, by definition they are less interested if you are not part of those classes. That fact that these qualified candidates were chosen in part because of their race/gender should come as no surprise to anyone involved in academics.

The Cornell ad was not for “a generic URM professor.”…The reason why the Cornell faculty (and by extension, others) were upset about the ad wasn’t that line; it was because the Cornell administration mounted a generic search for some generic faculty member in the social sciences or humanities without consulting the faculties of those respective departments right before the holidays.

The point of quoting the Cornell ad was to illustrate that the sentiment that “We are especially interested in applications from women and minorities/diverse candidates/underrepresented minorities/candidates who can teach and mentor a diverse group of students/etc” is common in academic circles. The reason why the Cornell faculty was upset was irrelevant.