State university trustees should not be sole arbiters of who becomes faculty
It’s a scary time to be an academic in Florida. House Bill 999 was recently filed in the Florida Legislature, raising alarm among academics in the Sunshine State and across the country. From decisions over curriculum, the ability to review tenure— the thing that protects academic researchers from being fired for their research topics, and other provisions, it’s easy to see why people are concerned.
But the bill’s drafters are woefully ignorant of the higher education system and were sleeping in their introductory economics courses.
The bill states that the hiring authority for faculty rests with the university presidents and their boards. This is not a departure from the norm. What does differ, however, is that, “The president and the board are not required to consider recommendations or opinions of faculty of the university or other individuals or groups.”
This language creates the possibility that a university’s board of trustees could unilaterally fill all positions in all academic departments. This is problematic for several reasons and neglects three core economic insights.
First, they’ve forgotten the importance of knowledge in decision making.
Who is in the best position to evaluate candidates for faculty positions? What makes a “good” faculty member requires a lot of specific knowledge. This knowledge is tacit, difficult to articulate. This knowledge is also dispersed among many people in many fields.
Academic departments do not typically hire generalists. Job openings in any given year seek to fill specific department needs. For example, an economics department would not post a job advertisement for “an economist.” Instead, they’ll advertise for an economist with expertise in “time-series econometrics” or “labor economics.” Those responsible for evaluating application packages need to determine the level of expertise in these areas, as well evaluate a candidate’s ability to conduct and publish research, and their ability to teach.
Second, they’ve forgotten Chapter 2 of any economicprinciples book. People are more productive when they work based on their “comparative advantage,” or their strongest capabilities.
Most university boards do not comprise academics, but successful members of the business community. While they are likely the most appropriate people to fill the role of managing a large organization, are they the best suited to evaluate whether an economist’s materials are better than someone else’s? What about faculty positions in Bayesian statistics, aerospace engineering, ichthyology, organometallic chemistry, dance or combinatorial topology?
The authors of HB999 also fail to understand opportunity cost, the idea that every action requires us to forego some alternative. This is important in considering the amount of work that goes into the hiring process. Each open faculty position generates hundreds of applications. These aren’t just academic resumes or “curriculum vitae,” but research samples, teaching evaluations, cover and recommendation letters, transcripts, etc. Single applications may be hundreds of pages.
From these hundreds of applications, committees typically narrow the field to 20-30 to interview. From those interviews, they’ll invite two to four candidates from campus for an entire day or two of interviews with faculty, students, and administrators. The department then makes a recommendation to the administration. While they hold veto power, it’s rarely exercised.
All told, hiring a new faculty member may require hundreds of collective labor hours. When you consider that universities may hire dozens of faculty every year, how could a board ever have time to do anything else? Instead of running their businesses or being good ambassadors and major donors to Florida’s universities, they’d instead become the most inefficient hiring committees.
That is, unless they’re appointing some pre-ordained, preferred candidates. It is doubtful that this legislation is designed to turn over full control of the hiring process to state universities’ boards of trustees. So why the push? It seems much more likely that Florida legislators want to circumvent tested and reliable processes of academia to support those academics who support their policies. The threat of removal or being pushed out by statepreferred appointees would silence those critical of our elected officials. This is precisely what tenure and the hiring process are designed to prevent.
The belief that any board could staff an entire university without faculty input is hubris befitting a Greek tragedy. If HB999 passes, hopefully boards can find a good Greek literature professor to explain exactly what that means.