On merit in TT hiring: the Trading Places hypothesis

Excerpted from this talk at the 2013 APA Eastern.

Let's say, for the sake of argument that, notwithstanding some exceptions, merit is a necessary condition for TT placement and advancement in university philosophy programs. But it doesn't follow from that that merit is a sufficient condition for that; there are many talented people who end up in precarious academic labor. But this injection of sheer luck into placement and advancement is hard to accept for some people; they want to think that those who end up in precarious labor deserved it somehow; the reason they didn't make it was some lack of merit on their part. In other words, some folks just don't want to accept that we have a tragic job system where bad things happen to good people. 

There's a wrinkle here: if you don't win the early TT job lottery [this is a strong way to put the anti-"merit as sufficient condition" position, but what the hell, let's go with it], your work conditions are going to be such that your productivity will suffer and it will look, retrospectively, like you always lacked the merit that would have warranted your getting a TT job. But this lack of productivity is produced by external circumstance as much as – or better, more than – it is an exhibition of some inherent quality of the person. So we're back to our critique of the attribution error -- we have made   network position into the property of a person.

In other words, there's nothing about you, Asst Prof X, that would let you show your merit in a precarious labor position. (Again, this is an extreme formulation, and probably should be reworked along population thinking lines – given a big enough sample, the odds of a good sized random sub-sample of early TT hires placed into precarious labor positions being able to gain the publications and citations that would allow a "merit" perception would be much lower than that of a similar random sub-sample of precarious labor people placed into a TT post getting those publications and citations.) Call this latter point the Trading Places hypothesis.

Comments

[Felonius Screwtape]

i've often thought about this in the "Freshness Date" -- you know, those dates stamped on products "best if consumed by ..." of course it's mostly a ruse devised to sell more product : if something is past its freshness date, the conscientious and appropriately disciplined consumer will toss it aside and buy a new product. of course, it's possible the product may linger a while in the cupboard, shoved aside but not completely forgotten, because who knows, you might use that one day, but until then, you view it with decreasing use-value and desirability, no matter how delicious it may in fact be. after a certain amount of time, perpetual adjunct and perennial candidate has past his or her freshness date, and oooooh look at all the shiny newly minted phds over there *sparkly* new product. so this is not quite the same as your TP hypothesis, but is perhaps a corollary of or complement to it.

[Avi]

If merit is a necessary condition of getting and keeping a TT position, we can be certain that everyone ("notwithstanding some exceptions") with such a position merits it. This would seem to entail that having a TT position is some kind of official stamp of merit. I think this is pretty obviously untrue, though. There are plenty of people (not just a few exceptions) in TT positions at mediocre schools (or who were hired long ago at schools which more recently gained prestige) who neither publish very much nor teach very well. This, of course, only exacerbates the injustice faced by non-TT faculty who haven't had the opportunity to prove their merit.

[John Protevi]

Hi Felonius, yes, that analysis (sadly) rings true.

Avi, would you accept an amendment to the OP along these lines: "since the intensification of the buyer's market in TT hiring in philosophy, merit has been, notwithstanding some exceptions, a necessary condition ..."? We could dicker about the point at which the buyer's market begin -- that is, the point at which supply of those who could produce meritoriously given TT conditions exceeded the demand for TT positions by HE administrators -- but I think it would have to be 25 years (1989) ago by now, wouldn't you think?