‘I Seem To Have Made a Terrible Mistake’

Great article Marybeth, very logical and refreshing. I suspect, however, that some of your readers may be stuck on the first paragraph. Some may have to take a leap of faith to reason that the nation’s ability to be innovative really does require diversity among our scientists. Despite our nation’s falling behind other countries in the STEM areas, it is all too easy to believe that the same status quo that has always served us will continue to. You are sounding very softly an alarm while also appealing to our claims concerning equity. I hope that your readers hear you on one of these notes if not on both.

I am clueless about why this matters.  I imagine that the children of millionaires constitute a very small fraction of the nation’s physicists, as well, and probably the sons and daughters of millionaires make up a greater fraction of the general population.  Nevertheless, we don’t seem to be worried about that.

This, to me, is typical academic myopia,the typical academic failure to see real problems and identify real solutions.  No wonder the larger society wants to de-fund us:  we waste our time on things that just plain don’t add value, choosing instead to follow the current intellectual fad-of-the-month.

In this case, one real problem is that our country AS A WHOLE needs far better education in physics (as well as the other STEM subjects).    Another real problem is that our graduate schools produce vastly more PhD’s than we need, and there is no effective way for these PhD’s to appropriately find their way into the workforce, whether they are white, black, or green.  And yet a third problem is the fact that a permanent, largely African American underclass seems to have been created.  Nods to “diversity” in physics departments address none of these real problems; they just make people feel good.

First, LOVE the Arrested Development reference. Gob worked hard to be an Alliance Approved Magician. He would indeed be an awful hire.

The department that realizes it has made a terrible hire needs to use its own (or the institution’s) evaluation procedures for folks already hired. I am assuming this hire is not terrible in the sense that you are looking to terminate due to something illegal or blatanly egregious. I am thinking you are coming to this from the place of “bad fit” or “poor colleague/instructor.” On the faculty side, have an honest evaluation of student observations, have the division chairs observe instruction, use the distance education’s quality control measures for any online portion of instruction, etc. I would strongly advise extreme due diligence since the removal of a full time faculty member will require hoop jumping like never before. For adjuncts, be fair. Would some training or time (perhaps 1 term) correct the issue?
I think the process used for hiring needs to be examined too. At one of my former institutions, we completely overhauled the questions HR had “blessed” for faculty interviews. While it was lovely to have someone rehash his/her resume, it wasn’t necessary if we were prepared as a committee. Same with asking the candidates their plans/goals/objective for the next X year period. We learned little from most questions. We wrote and rewrote them, made them more specific to what faculty do outside of class and inside, and had them re-blessed by HR. Our interviews were more realistic. We also stopped giving as much notice on the teaching demo’s topic. We found some who clearly had polished and prepped that thing to the moon, but all the innovation shown there was absent once hired. Those with real expertise and enthusiasm didn’t need weeks to prepare for an hour long teaching demo. They could have done it in their sleep. We also threw in impromptu requirements for the teaching demo and actual interview.

All of this is more work, FYI, but I can promise it’s less work than having to fire someone, and it is a lot less work than having to boost the morale of those who are stuck day to day with a new hire. It also saves so much time and energy from the realm of student complaints that it’s worth it.

contractual employment have been around so much lately.. I guess companies wants to avoid the slack off reality
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Well, as has been hashed out here many times, maybe we should seriously focus on teaching as part of our jobs.  At my R1, it’s purported to be at least 1/3 of your responsibilities, but TT who foist classwork onto TAs/Adjuncts to spend more time researching are rewarded in the end.  It is indeed a sad state of where we are today, and where we are heading. 

Or (Henry’s stunning thought), instead of taking a chance with a unknown entity, why not hire the person who you actually know well and who has done a good job while working for your organization as an adjunct?

I know, I know: credentials (which generally means publications) get in the way. 

This article, published on Science Careers (of which I am editor), makes some very interesting suggestions on how to avoid this situation. (While this is a plug, it isn’t shameless. The article referenced is very relevant.) I would be interested in hearing what people think about applying such techniques in an academic context. Could it be done?

Jim Austin, Editor
Science Careers.

The conversation seems to focus on the “bad” hire. but there are some institutions that are so critically toxic that even Ghandi would have difficulty.  It would be of great benefit to a potential hire to do extensive research  on the institutional culture of the institution. Because so many novice faculty are eager to get their careers started

What do you say to the applicant you are trying to hire when you know that the institution is going down the drain?  It may not appear so during a visit, but the budget cuts and infighting may even be serious enough to question the viability of the department?  I have wrestled with this question as we interview potential colleagues and do not have an answer.  I try to be as honest and possible and do not lie about the health of the department.  But I do not tell the entire ugly story, either, as it would turn out to be waste of time.  Most of our candidates have other choices.  They would obviously take one.

I agree that school counselor program curriculum should include at least one class on transitioning students from secondary to postsecondary, including career and college advising.  But, there are many opportunities for school counselors to get very specific info from colleges themselves.  At least once/year my institution offers a day program for high school counselors on advising high school students about college – the workshop includes up-to-date info on financial aid, admissions, new academic programs, requirements of special services, i.e., students with disabilities, and housing.  These workshops are free and usually include free food!  I hear many high school counselors expressing frustration with having duties that have nothing to do with “counseling”, e.g., one counselor told me she has “bus duty” and “lunch room duty” which cuts into her time to see students; the rest of her time was spent “doing schedules”.  I’m in a college student services area which brings me into contact with school counselors regularly, and I am often shocked and dismayed at their lack of the most basic info about state required college entrance testing, overall college requirements i.e., housing and application deadlines, etc.  These are things all of them dealt with in their own college career, but somehow this very basic info is not being passed along.  But, I can’t lay all the blame on their shoulders since a large portion of the problem is how school counselors’ education and expertise is utilized.  USA’s public P-16 (pre-k thru bachelor) educational programs are simply antiquated, unimaginative, and poorly managed - in short, the system is broken and very few parents or politicians seem to care. 

Sorry to hear this. A black eye for the profession.

In the rankings game, if you aint cheatin, you aint tryin.

[deleted]

Interesting LSAT requirements.

I work for a large and prestigious international corporate law firm with major offices in New York and Washington, among other places around the world.  I can assure you that people here get hired from lots of other places beside HYP.  Just a few real-life examples:  the lawyers near my desk did undergrad at Wake Forest, Chapel Hill, U of Michigan, Villanova, Cornell (ILR), Brown, Swarthmore, Binghamton, Princeton, U of Chicago, Albany, Seton Hall, Geneseo, Emory, Cornell (Arts College), Bowdoin, Hobart, Amherst, Fordham, Stony Brook, Williams, Brandeis, Brooklyn College.  Law schools include: Georgetown, Columbia, Penn, Columbia (again), U of Michigan, Cornell, Harvard, University of Virginia, Georgetown (again), UVA (again), St. Johns, Duke, and several from NYU.  For some reason, nobody in the immediate vicinity from Yale.

Yes, there is an East Coast and near-midwest bias, simply because hiring teams from the New York and Washington office can’t visit every school, and because they also hire from other east coast law firms and from US Attorneys offices, etc..  The California offices hire more from Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA law schools, after undergrad at those schools and Pomona, Reed, UC Santa Cruz, USC, UC Davis, and, yes, Claremont McKenna — among others that I am unfairly leaving out.

I agree with some of the complaints here, but as you can see, not entirely.  Ironically, supposedly “second-tier” colleges in this country are more heavily laden with Ivy League (not just HYP) and similar schools, so that the faculty looks top-drawer.  And no question, law firms also fear being relegated to the second-highest drawer if they take too many people from less prestigious schools.  It’s just not as bad as you say.

People in the real world really aren’t all such slaves to the US News and World Report idiocies as some high school students (or their parents, especially from abroad) appear to be.

Why does anybody think that Amherst/Swarthmore/Williams is better than Oberlin?  There is no real basis for this, other than the inane US News & World Report standings that — with no evidence provided — have consistently listed ASW as the top 3 (in fluctuating order) for a decade or so.  And why do they do that?  A lot of these listings are based on per-student endowment, but that doesn’t tell a graduating high school senior very much. 

For example, a higher endowment should allow the college to be much more generous in financial aid.  Swarthmore leads the pack in that regard, according to the Princeton Review.  Ironically, Williams (currently at the top of the USN&WR listing) is the only school that has bailed out of its earlier commitment (which the others have maintained) to make it possible for students to leave school debt-free at the end of four years.

Oberlin is a superb school, the same as Haverford, Pomona and many others.  As one contributor to the Columbia Daily Spectator recently remarked, all this is like being told what is the best flavor of ice cream.

And a lot of people in hiring positions really do know that, as law firm hirings (mentioned above) indicate.

@Unemployed_Northeastern:

The “Brown and Cornell are Second Tier” article you mention is based on such thin anecdotal evidence, at least as reported, that I’m amazed that a serious publication like The Chronicle published it.  As a socialist, I’m the first to denounce elitist old-boy-networks, but I have to point out that they are far weaker today than they were in decades past — it only appears otherwise because of the Wall Street meltdown which has drastically cut hiring at Wall Street investment banks and Wall Street law firms. 

The exception, as always in recent decades, is found in anxiety-ridden colleges and universities which fear hiring from any but Ivies et al. and have a flood of applicants anyway. But even there, the above-noted example of the academic pedigrees of the presidents of HYPSM shows that things are not as the “Brown Cornell Second Tier” article might imply. (In answer to your point, the HYPSM presidents were all named fairly recently, and most wouldn’t even have been considered in prior decades. For a start, three are women, and one is African American.)

1.  Top law firms DO NOT limit themselves to Harvard and Yale, as my other post, citing the concrete example of the firm where I work, indicates. 

2.  A half-century and more ago, top law firms (known then as “white shoe” firms) DID limit themselves to the “white shoe” (i.e., Harvard and Yale) law schools, much more than they do today.  They also did not hire Jews, causing Jews to form their own law firms and banking houses, and their own college fraternities that served as old-boy-network conveyor belts into those law firms and banks.  In the last 40 years, many of the Jewish law firms and Wall Street banking outfits have elbowed the old clubby WASP firms aside, and partners with top family and school connections have actually been fired or forced out when they couldn’t produce and were not even good “rainmakers.”  This began in the 1980s and really came as a shock to people whose lives had been guaranteed since they were in prep school, or more exactly since they were born. Many of the Jews came from places like Cornell, Columbia and Penn (and Harvard) but many also came from places like NYU and “Jewish Ivies” like Michigan, which at the time were considered “not the right sort of place” (no longer). For example, the 4 name partners of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz law firm (not the firm where I work): undergrads at NYU, Penn (Wharton), CCNY and Brandeis. Law school for all 4 was NYU, with one getting a masters of law at Harvard.

3.  I can’t speak so knowledgeably about the Wall Street wheeling-dealing-reeling “investment banking” crooks — except to say that they like to hire immigrants from places like India, with, yes, business school degrees from Harvard, etc.  One of the questions they asked of an Indian immigrant friend of mine (with Yale School of Management diploma) was “Are you hungry?”  “Hungry for what” he asked.  “Money?”  “Uh, well, challenge, stimulus, and well, yes, money,” was the reply.  In other words, somebody who was not only willing to work unbelievable hours but for whom making money was the most important thing in his life.  They had found that the WASP old boy club did not cultivate sufficient money madness. 

4. Law firms and banks are not the only places for jobs.  Silicon Valley hires heavily from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, U of Washington.  They, too, have a flood of applicants, especially now, and find arbitrary ways to reject people without an interview.  Google was recently accused of rejecting without an interview all the people in the waiting room who were overweight.  (My source for this is a guy who is overweight, but I don’t doubt his story.)

5.  Finally, the Wall Street Journal published a report a year or so ago that found that corporations around the country (not Wall Street investment houses) hired mainly from state universities and suchlike.  The only Ivy League school that made their list was Cornell, probably because of its strengths in engineering and hotel administration.

The idea of requiring athletic compliance departments to report to the academic officers of the university is a good one in principle, but requires that those officers not themselves be infected with the “sports-above-all” bug.  This isn’t always the case, as we have seen in the recent Penn State scandal that brought down the university’s president among others.

Frankly, I’m skeptical that presidents and provosts can sufficiently distance themselves from the glory reflected from athletic success.  I learned this lesson at commencement in my first year of teaching: students with impeccable academic credentials walked across the stage and received their diplomas from the president without any special recognition; then a football all-American, who had barely been able to pass my freshman-level composition class *as a senior* (!), got a big smile and a hug.  Clearly, the president knew who he was; did he know any of the others?

Despite this skepticism, requiring key reports to go to the academic side seems to me a step in the right direction, if only because it will make it impossible for presidents and other authorities to claim ignorance of shenanigans done by the athletic department in the university’s name.

Hi
You picked up really good point.!

 
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Of course it is possible, but who could resist the irony of a faculty member teaching a course on fraud being convicted of fraud.  It being for-profit was just a little frosting on the cake that added to the irony — especially when the dean writes — after the conviction! — how invaluable the person is.  Surely you can see the humor!!

This gives new meaning to the phrase “Practice What You Preach”, doesn’t it?

That too.

Yes, there are plenty of unethical types in the tenured ranks, too.  Recall the extremely tense interviews shown in “Inside Job” between the producers and economists who collected hundreds of thousands for “sponsored” studies on the wonders of Iceland’s banking system without disclosing the funding at publication.  Moreover, they insisted that they saw no problem with it.

 And Jorge Gilbert and his enablers (Chronicle of Higher Ed, April 9, 2012).