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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I seem to be reading this differently from most people here. To me, this post reads like someone who's hard to work with. He listed his race first, coloring the entire rest of the story, and then he went on to air the seemingly confidential advice his president gave him in good faith.

It's also a bit puzzling that he didn't realize that "being liked" is a valuable skill, and dismisses it as "I thought it would only be on merit, rather than any other pesky things like working well with people", as if that doesn't factor into merit.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was his personality that lost him the position, instead of his race.

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Do you prefer bad research because the researcher is liked? Because this is what it ultimately boils down to. Ideally, meritocracy would be the most important factor. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be treated by the least competent but most liked surgeon. Why should it be any different in other professions?

If nobody wants to work with you, you won't be able to get research done. You shouldn't get tenure if you're so toxic that you make N other researchers quit.

I prefer three good researchers to a great one. The exchange rate is not even close.

It's not an either or. There's a threshold for everything. Saying "this is what it ultimately boils down to" is a slippery slope fallacy

Have you ever seen how many authors are on a research paper? Research in most disciplines is not some lone person at a bench doing experiments, it's a collection of people looking at previous work, generating new ideas, and testing them. People like to downplay effective teamwork as "office politics" but the best research comes not only from intelligence or "merit" but also from the ability to work effectively with others.

If the researcher is hard to get along with, will he or she be able to attract or great PhD students?

Would you like to be treated by a surgeon who doesn't get along well with the nurses and the other staff that's in the operating room? And because of this the performance of the whole team is impacted?

While I understand the lens this is coming from, I don’t think it’s realistic.

Faculty, in general, don’t operate as a team like in a more traditional business. One or two or five might collaborate on a project but they typically operate very independently of one another.

Words like “collegiality” are frequently used in the academic hiring and promotion process to speak to issues that are seen as outside or parallel to merit. The problem being that the historical evidence shows that concerns about collegiality have frequently been used to disrupt actual evaluation of meritocracy in ways that specifically harm URM faculty.

Collegiality gets used because there is no real expectation that faculty act like a team, just that they aren’t active assholes to do heir peers in committee meetings.

Being difficult to work with is not a generalized negative in academia. It only is seen as a problem when someone has some other problem with you. Many faculty, in my experience/opinion, who are fantastic researchers have the emotional maturity of small children. There is a trend against that but it is far from disqualifying.

Academia, like many things, is a meritocracy until it’s not.

I would ask if you really understand the organization of lines at a university. If you do not, then you're missing more than can be explained in a few sentences.

There are substantial duties outside of teaching and research. Tenure obligates faculty to some of these (eg- committee work) and frees them from others.

Additionally, many pillars are required to build stable colleges. A tenured faculty member has to have some measure of generalized aptitude and capability in addition to deep specialty and institutional knowledge. Many spend increasing time fighting their "other duties" and neglecting others as they approach retirement, placing burdens on their peers who have their own obligations or have taken on additional responsibilities in the college to juggle time for pay.

Good deans understand and attempt to manage this so they don't lose the faculty they would like to keep before an opportunity arises for the productive contributors to become tenured or tenure tracked. They stewards, past and present, who rely on information not available to the faculty at large.

Not being tenured doesn't necessarily mean you're poorly compensated or not highly valued, but it's a point of pride some can't swallow when they've given many years to an institution and have stalled in trajectory because their university couldn't justify adding a new line to their department. It's not about them, they know it, and the type of people who can't accept that, knowingly and incorrectly assign blame, and take everyone down with them like the author above are exactly who you want to protect the college from ever entering a tenured role.

But medical residency, fellowship, and faculty selection processes are carried out in much the same way as the tenure selection process is portrayed here. Your surgeon has been granted their position based on a variety of factors, including but definitely not limited to technical competence.

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