Over at Helen De Cruz's recent NewAPPS post raising questions about the role that "pedigree" appears to play in the hiring process for academic jobs, Charles Pigden offered the following proposal to counteract bias in hiring (based, he writes, on something written previously on a Leiter thread):
May I suggest a ‘first cut’ heuristic for TT positions that would at least diminish the classist (and therefore racist) biases inherent a pedigree based system?
1) Rank the journals on a scale of 1.0 to (say) 0.4, ranking Mind and Analysis at 1.0 and The NoName Journal of Philosophy at 0.4.
2) Multiply each candidate’s actual and forthcoming publications by the rank number of their venues. Thus a publication in Mind counts as 1 and a publication in the NoName Journal counts as 0.4.
3) Sum the (multiplied) publications for each candidate.
4) For each candidate divide the result by the years out from their PhD (perhaps adjusted for any time out they may have taken to have babies, feed the starving or to save the family business from bankruptcy).
5) Select the top ten candidates for a more detailed examination.
Although I replied to Pigden's proposal over in the comments section there — and although I agree with quite a lot of what he writes in his initial comment — I want to comment on it again here in order to draw greater attention to how misguided I think the proposal is. I think it is a very dangerous proposal that would not only not eliminate biases, but probably worsen things. Allow me to explain why.
Carolyn's analysis of job-hiring data in the past has shown that men from top programs are more likely to get presitious post-docs than non-men or people from lower-ranked programs (this is, I think, common knowledge by now). Consider, then, the resources that someone has at a prestigious post-doc. One usually has 2-3 years to publish, along with an immense amount of resources (mentorship, etc.). In a post-doc, one has the time to send stuff to top-20 journals and wait. One doesn't have to rush to get stuff on one's CV…at least not like adjuncts or VAPS do.
Now consider the position of an adjunct or VAP (in a 1-year position). People in these positions often not only have very few resources (mentorship, etc.); they often do not have the luxury to consistently send stuff to top-20 journals. Why not? Simple. If you're in a 1-year job, you need to get stuff on your CV. Sending stuff to top-20 journals is a very, very high-risk strategy. You can wait anywhere from 4-8 months to hear back, and chances are your paper will get rejected. And you can't afford that. You need to go on the job market every year, and so you need to get stuff on your CV ASAP. So, what's the rational thing to do? Maybe send a paper to a top-20 journal from time to time. But the far more rational thing to do in general is to send stuff to lower-ranked journals, so that you can get some publications on your CV.
Here, then, is the thing. I don't think that making first-cuts on the basis of assigning numerical values to publications on the basis of journal quality is likely to counteract bias. Rather, it is likely to favor those who have the time and resources to target top-2o journals: namely, males from top programs in prestigious post-docs. Indeed, I shudder at what Pigden's proposal would mean for me. Although I am male, I have worked my tail off under sub-optimal conditions (a heavy teaching load, few mentors, etc.), and published a lot of work I think is quite good (I've gotten a number of literature citations, some online discussion, etc.). I just didn't have the luxury of waiting to get that work in top-20 journals. I'm not saying any of my work would have gotten into those journals — though I'd like to think so! 🙂 My point is simply that, like many people in 1-year jobs, I faced a great deal of pressure to send my work to places it would be more likely to get accepted. Anyway, Pigden's formula would basically have search committees cut people like me — and candidates in even tougher professional positions — in their first cut without actually looking at our work. Far from counteracting bias, Pigden's formulaic approach would seem to stack the deck even more in favor of candidates in more privileged professional positions.
Or so say I. What say you?
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