QOTD: Leonard Cassuto

Another recommended reading for anyone interested in higher education is Leonard Cassuto's The Graduate School Mess: What Caused It and How We Can Fix It (Harvard University Press, 2015). I've had the pleasure of meeting Lenny on several occasions as he served as a consultant/guest for events we hosted at Emory University. He has provided sage advice and has been gracious enough to listen to my own story in academia (mind you, our fields of expertise are completely different and I have never met him before these events). Anyone who has talked to Lenny about higher education will know immediately how much he cares about "the university" as an institution while simultaneously caring deeply about the graduate students' success and the need to reform the way doctoral programs are set up currently. To provide just a quick background: Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and is a frequent contributor to The Chronicle of Higher Education (see here). I highly highly recommend this book. It is thoroughly researched and includes ~50 pages of endnotes for all of you who want to pursue these questions further.

In the sixth chapter of his book, "Professionalization," I came across the following (likely resonating with many friends and colleagues out there):

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Hiring committees now routinely choose among applicants who have accomplished much more than their interviewers had at comparable stages of our own careers. At the same time, though, we've been calling for reducing the time that graduate students take to complete their degrees. How can we square that imperative with our hiring practices?

Just about everyone agrees that graduate students--and academic culture as a whole--would benefit if our Ph.D. students could graduate in fewer years than they do now. Deans call loudly and frequently for streamlined degree programs, and many, if not most, graduate directors have been asked to figure out ways to reduce the amount of time students spend in graduate school …

One important reason that graduate students take longer and longer to finish is because departments don't reward quick finishers with academic jobs. In fact, we do quite the opposite. In the search for the best candidate to fill an opening, hiring committees privilege the kinds of achievements that can be attained only when graduate students stay in school for more time, not less. We offer the highest prizes--full-time faculty positions--to the ones who stay longer.

Let's compare two hypothetical new Ph.D.'s. The specs can be adjusted by field, but the gist of the difference should be clear. Candidate A completed her Ph.D. at a rapid clip and has emerged from her program with a passel of recommendations attesting to the publishable quality of her dissertation and to her creativity, perspicacity, teaching ability, and enormous upside potential. Candidate B, who took three years longer, is also coming out bedecked with praise. She's done more varied and advanced teaching than Candidate A, and she has placed a couple of articles in leading journals in her field.

We would naturally expect Candidate B to have more to show for the extra years she spent in school, and we see as much in the form of her publications, enhanced teaching credentials, and (depending on what field you imagine her in) perhaps work on grants or even some administrative experience. That extra expectation is amply reasonable: if you take more time, you should do something useful with it.

What happens when hiring committees compare the two applicants? This is not a hypothetical question. Hiring committees find themselves presented with versions of this A-B comparison all the time. And if you look at the profiles of the assistant professors who get hired these days, you'll see that the nod almost always goes to those who look more like Candidate B

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In fact, many departments take it even further and hire assistant professors who have been out for two or three years or even longer. These midlevel assistant professors (who typically show up with an armful of publications and other achievements) for entry-level jobs are then encouraged to reset their tenure clocks backward. Although that adjustment is made post graduation, it essentially converts an experienced faculty member back into a recently minted Ph.D. and thus contributed to the same overall trend (You'd think that departments would instead bring such well-qualified new hires up for tenure early, but somehow that never happens.) To be sure, junior faculty members are themselves complicit in such retrograde moves. Most of those who sacrifice years of experience do so in order to rise up the academic food chain, move o a preferred geographical area, or both. But we can hardly blame them for choosing options that employers make available to them.

What does it mean for an institution to advertise an entry-level position and then pit new Ph.D.'s against applicants who have years more experience? To begin with, it amounts to a preference for concrete achievement over raw potential. It also creates inexorable selective pressure in that direction. After a couple of years on the market, Candidate A gradually metamorphoses into Candidate B.

Choosing experience over possibility can result from the lure of achievement--and the achievements of today's graduate students are indeed considerable. But it can also result from complacency: instead of relying on one's own judgment, one substitutes the judgment of journals and presses. An emphasis on attainment over potential further implies that an applicant needs to have experience in order to get experience: a classic Catch-22 that is bridged by the willingness of departments to employ their student apprentices far past the point of simply training them.

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A friend and I have a phrase for that Candidate B. We call them "fake assistant professors." This refers to the fact that such candidates are usually 3-5 years removed, with at least 2-3 years of employment elsewhere. To our minds, they are "fake" insofar as when they are compared with newly minted Ph.D.'s. They often have 3-5 publications in top journals, at least one monograph published (sometimes even more!) and are, for all intents and purposes, "associate" level, but the timing of their employment/tenure hasn't brought them to that point. It is somewhat disturbing that such candidates are applying for what is essentially supposed to be "entry-level," pitting themselves against other new graduates (mind you, as Lenny noted above, this is not completely their fault). How likely is it that a committee will consider the "potential" of a new Ph.D. over such overwhelming portfolios?