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February 13, 2009, 08:14 AM ET
They Like Me, They Like Me Not ...
It’s no secret that likability is a factor in academic hiring, but the extent to which it counts may surprise you. According to a post by University of Florida law professor Jeffrey Harrison at Moneylaw, it’s often the overriding factor. He quotes from an e-mail message he received from a law professor who was presumably participating in a search for the first time:
“I assumed that the hiring meeting would show me that people took the hiring process seriously. While this was certainly true of a number of people on my faculty (I suspect a majority), others really surprised me. Lessons that I learned from the faculty meeting (based on oral comments at the meeting rather than the vote itself): 1. scholarship matters except for when you like a person 2. the job talk matters except when you like a person 3. when you don’t like a person, you say it indirectly (“something does not seem right about them” without explaining what it is) 4. scholarship matters except when you don’t like the person
Imagine how a football team would perform, Harrison asks, if the coach selected players on the basis of how agreeable they were, rather than on their ability to play the game: “The team would lose every game. Is there any reason to think the ‘like’ factor is different for law faculty success?”
Our own On Hiring contributor Gene Fant pointed out just yesterday that the single most important consideration in some tenure decisions is not research, service, or teaching, but … you guessed it … collegiality.
Being well-liked by colleagues may be even more essential in dark times such as these, when budgets and jobs are being hacked left and right, which is why Ms. Mentor counsels readers of her latest column to make nice, lest they find themselves standing in the unemployment line. No matter how much you “love your subject, and love to teach and write about it,” your “colleagues won’t keep you if they don’t like you,” she writes.
Let’s continue (and broaden) the discussion that Gene began. Is likability a reasonable consideration in hiring, firing, and tenure decisions or do some committees place too great an emphasis on it? How does it factor into hiring decisions in your department?
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