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Comment by mocha_nate | Hacker News Reader

At a large university in Texas, I had two professors - one amazing in everyway, the other not. The amazing professor published great research, wrote well, and had great teaching skills. The other professor gave lackluster classes, published research that was routine, and shocked me that they could be teaching at this level (inspiring in a pessimistic way).

Both up for tenure - the amazing professor was passed on because the other had a more desirable background. Both women. As a grad student, I understood the difficult of hiring, but this was honestly incredible.

I thought of this when I read the following from the article: "I was startled to learn that academic achievements were not always what mattered most." and "only to fall short of securing a faculty position due to factors outside my control."

Just a different story from academia.

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Was the one who got tenure the one who brought in bigger grants? Unfortunately in the R1 Universities these days that is probably the most important thing, even more than your academic family tree https://academictree.org/

Sounds like academia is turning into another (internet) marketing agency where the best marketers also happen to be teachers and researchers as a side hussle.

If I were an Atlantic staff writer i would pitch “the rise of the twitter professor”.

Want a top 5 TT job? Find 10k followers. There are other paths but this is by far the easiest

Isn't it almost always the case when there's a job that there is more than one applicant who is qualified under a loose definition of the qualifications, and thus the decision makers have to come up with tighter and tighter definitions until there's one winner?

I suspect it's the case 99% of the time. You have some widget factory, some team leader leaves, and of his team of 10 you need a new leader. 4 of them are veterans and could do the work if you asked people who understand the business but are not involved in the decision. So then what? Well lets say you have to have published papers in the Journal of Widgets. Great, that leaves three. Now let's see how they do on random questions at interview. Fantastic, 4 of the 6 committee members think it's candidate B. Congrats.

It's an effect of the pyramid structure. People who can do the work have to be whittled away somehow, even if it's some silly criterion.

Academia seems to lean on the side of crap for the most part. That being said I've grown a keen, if naive, interest as I've enjoyed past mentoring opportunities. I remember reading a post of someone hosting a programming workshop at their local library and I feel it would be a worthy and approachable step towards feeling it out.

The problem with the community events approach is that the students you are mentoring rarely have the time to commit. It can happen, but it's rare.

If you just want to scratch that teaching and mentoring itch, you can opt out of most of the bullshit by avoiding the R1 tenure stream. A good route to take is Professor of Practice at a non-elite institution (just email the chair -- if you're an asset and don't want a TT position the wheels can turn surprisingly quickly), and if you happen across a grad student worth investing in sourcing a small grant and co-advising.

What does 'more desirable background' mean?

That she was part of a protected minority.

No. She had a wealthy family.

Either work. Though being rich is "only" useful when the family is willing to donate to the faculty/ university.

Just to be clear, donations help getting into a specific institution to study. Which does give a leg up to get a position later (most often in a different institution), but that’s a second-order effect. It does not directly help getting hired.

Sheesh.

Nepotism is raging, notably within academia settings particularly for "nepotism babies".

Even University of Texas exempt anti-nepotism for many positions.

https://independentprobe.com/2022/11/21/nepotism-and-undue-p...

What has this got to do with the topic of donations? Here the reason is completely different. Also, some university having a policy against it does not prove that it’s a widespread problem, it’s merely an indication that some problems happened that were high profile enough to make the institution react.

Very unlikely. I have never in my life heard of family wealth being a consideration in faculty hiring, and I've been on hiring committees.

It's not uncommon.

Growing universities with colleges that want endowments, faculty whose families are deeply entrenched in related institutions or culture, and generally prestigious and well-connected people are all necessary and make for perfectly valid candidates.

Academics isn't all academics. You need people who can grow and sustain development, attract desirable talent, work at the state and local level, and pull in students. People have to manage the internal administrative duties and external involvement of each school. Plus, some people make excellent teachers and leaders but awful researchers, and vice versa. Others are mediocre but consistent, don't have higher prospects, and take on administrative burdens. There's no real "ideal professor" any more than there's any ideal human.

You’re probably not alone thinking this because of all the noise about affirmative action. Academia is quite different behind the curtain than for students. Sure, they like hiring women because it helps improve their statistics, but the educational background, including institutions where the candidate did their undergrad and PhD is much more important.

technically there is one possibility: someone got into better schools due to AA, that benefits all things thereafter including possibly the case here. For those who lost the first chance due to AA, the lost is not over yet, unfortunately.

Legacy admits counted as much at many places that were segregated in living memory (so a more limited chain of legacies for formerly discriminated races).

This sounds like the same argument people make for AA. Except the discrimination happens before college rather than at college admissions.

Maybe she used a spell to get the job?

I watched this 8-part documentary where kids get invited to a special school to learn magic.

"Invited" is a strong word when almost all of those students were legacy admissions.

In academia, this typically means being attached to more prestigious institutions.

Or are likely to attract more lucrative donors.

It could also refer to diversity hiring.

Probably from a more prestigious university or family background, which can cause some of that prestige to “rub off” and can assist in fund raising.

In startups this phenomenon takes the form of hires, board members, or advisors with all the right names in their CV (Stanford, Google, etc.) brought in to pump up the company’s prestige points in the eyes of potential investors.

That's the history of most institutions. There's a mistake about believing in merit and skills when it's usually a combination of political skills, ability to game the system (which are not necessarily the most important for the actual job) and initial privilege/wealth (a bad simplification of the point I'm trying to make on personal circumstances that don't relate to effort, it's more nuanced).

It's not the end of the world as long as you're not authortiarian and inclined to believe that in any hierarchy, the more valuable/skilled/apt person is naturally at the top.

It's very hard to create a system that scales and doesn't show signs of heavy bureocracy and/or corruption (if you know about the internals) because, very soon, it's easy to find out a gap between working for your career and working to maximise the output value of your job.

Thanks for leaving the most important part out bro.

Which is?

Since you seem to know, what was the most important part?

The race of the two professors, obviously.

Why is that obvious?

Because the influential groups that care most about "desirable backgrounds" in academia are those promoting DEI.

Given that both were women, gender wasn't the deciding factor. And so race becomes the most likely desirable background to matter.

Some school systems are very explicit about this. See https://pacificlegal.org/california-globe-university-of-cali... for criticism of the UC schools on this. But as https://www.economist.com/united-states/2023/02/04/american-... makes clear, the trend is happening nationwide.

It's not at all obvious what he meant. Could be a number of things. So far in this thread, it's more of a Rorschach test.

Nah, this is a lot of projection. More likely fanfic: could be that the one who got tenure had the former advisor who would add her to grants and bring in a lot of $$, or who started a center that would bring in a lot of $$.

Routine research often is easier to get through funding committees and get published. Less "what journal does this fit in, I'm not sure our division should fund this, does the PI truly have the expertise needed to do research in this, this result doesn't clearly advance the field"

Which of the two knew where the bodies were buried.

The meaning of "more desirable background".

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