Thread by @dasingleton

I wrote this thread a long time ago but decided not to put it up. Today, because of other things on twitter that you will recognize, I have dusted it off. It is a little raw.

I would like to spend a few minutes unofficially praising and providing my personal view of the background for my university’s workshops promoting diversity and excellence in recruiting faculty. So many people seem clueless about this.

What you first need understand is that 30-35 years ago we 100% considered ourselves to be in modern, liberal times, absolutely unbiased, and completely fair. Had you suggested otherwise, we wouldn’t have listened beyond feeling insulted. We were righteous and we knew everything.

Except … we regularly did things in ways that would favor pretty het white men. Sometimes it was ‘Hey, that married guy with kids [hey, that’s me, and yes, back then they asked those questions pointedly at the interview social party] is more likely to accept our offer.’

Sometimes it was ‘Hey, let’s reopen that failed search. Prof X [from a different scientific area] was drinking with this guy at a conference and says he’s great. No, we’ll never see a rec letter but I hear he is really charismatic.”

Sometimes it was ‘Professor Bigname [who you might recall is chair of that grant study section that will decide your life] wrote to really really push this guy and his wife. Shortlist, oh yeah.’

Hey it often works out. When you give good people, who did absolutely nothing wrong, a great opportunity, many will run with it, often amazingly. Certainly not always - Harvard Harvard, brilliant, nice, but it didn’t work out. We aren’t so good at predicting.

Boom or bust, success or failure happens for reasons that I cannot fathomably connect with what I see in applications or interviews. How well can you meet a deadline? Sometimes, I’ve seen convincingly that success has come down to pure coin-flip luck.

Yes, you have to try to pick the best, but Michael Jordan was drafted third, and we are immeasurably better at predicting basketball success than faculty success.Even later, looking at the success of early faculty award winners is bad prophecy, except as self-fulfilling.

Hell, if you’ve heard of me it’s because of one night I spent doing equations on napkins after a conference banquet. I was struggling, but one night went right. Opportunity!

Perhaps there was never any intentional bias. Perhaps what we did was arguably rational business, hey, making offers to people most likely to accept. But don’t even try to tell me that it was all based on merit or 'most qualified,' or that fairness was a high priority. Nonsense.

The funny thing is that if we really could judge well who was “most qualified” and use that to predict the future well, then a lot of the funny business that was we would now recognize as bad would not have happened. Why would you shortcut a search,

why would you choose someone based on BS when the next full good search would let you pick out the 'best?' Because it wouldn't.

As so we are now taught better. Taught to run a planned fair search with set procedures, taught to push for a wide and diverse pool of applicants, taught to make all candidates feel welcome, taught to avoid conflicts of interest and domination of the search by powerful faculty,

taught to be consistent in our interviews, taught to conduct professional and fair interviews, taught to avoid considerations that are irrelevant to doing the job, and that we should not even be asking some questions that were routine 30 years ago.

It is not nefarious, God what some people say. You run a fair search, and that means you avoid a bunch of things that were intrinsically, subtly or not-so-subtly, unfair. And hey, you know what, not one word of this gets us less qualified hires. It’s exactly the opposite.