A blogger at Academic Secret envisions a faculty job market that resembles the NFL draft:
Imagine the world watching as schools deliberate over who to hire this year. Will they fill the position that’s weakest in their department, or go for the top pick remaining, or will they throw a curveball (I realize that’s a baseball term) by choosing someone who is completely unexpected?
Imagine the candidates, dressed in their Sunday best, surrounded by family and friends (who just want them to go somewhere, and soon, and would never suggest that they try for a job at the community college close to home). It’s okay to look nervous, to be apprehensive, and there are agents, there to walk you through the process and assure you that today is YOUR day.
Imagine the coverage, with people in the top of your field (or has-beens, or pretty faces), sitting around a table talking about every detail of your performance — the weaknesses in your vita, your stamina, and how you work under pressure — and offering agreement or criticism of every choice that schools made.
The worst, though, would be that 15 minutes that the schools have to choose, with the world waiting with bated breath, until they have to walk across the stage to a podium and “select” their choice to a round of applause or jeers.
Follow On Hiring through your favorite RSS reader:
3 Responses to Academic Draft Picks
Brian S. McGowan PhD - January 31, 2012 at 7:29 am
Thanks Jennifer (and Brock).
This topic is important for so many reasons, even if the current models are not quite ready for ‘primetime’. For one, I think your analogy of the Kardashians is fitting – if we do not evolve the way reputation (and credibility) in science are defined, then we do take the risk of creating Kardashians in science. Whatever the new model is (and I think there are many strengths to the work of the Total Impact team) it must improve he recognition system vs simply change it.
If you know of institutions that have begun to revisit criteria for promotion and tenure to include non-traditional avenues of science, please share. Many in the #openaccess movement have created lists of OA journals, OA institutional policies, and OA alternatives – but without some momentum being made at the level of professional recognition and reward, there is little chance of long-term success. And to date I have not come across any public examples of new recognition models.
Gunther Eysenbach - February 1, 2012 at 7:26 pm
The
problem with social media metrics (stop using the term altmetrics –
these metrics are not alternatives but complementary metrics to citations!) is that
they need to be normalized by field/journal and publication date to
allow for meaningful comparisons between articles. Not doing this and
just looking at raw numbers of tweets or shares is a very crude way of
doing things. The Journal of Medical Internet Research is calculating
and publishing (here: http://www.jmir.org/stats/mostTweeted) a twimpact
factor (the number of unique tweets about a specific article within 7
days after publication), as well as the “twindex” (which is an index
describing the percentile of article tweets relative to other published
articles in the same journal). We found empirically that a twindex of
greater than 75 is predictive for higher citations (http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/).
jenhoward - February 6, 2012 at 10:39 pm
Hi Brian: Thanks very much for the comment. Like you, I’m looking for good examples of institutions that have adapted their T&P criteria to include this kind of approach–not just in the sciences but in humanities and social sciences, too.