Thanks for the link to Critical Mass, which looks very sympatico to me.
You probably don't want to talk about academic freedom here, but I have some observations, so tough tookus.
1) In the articles linked to the Chronicle article, Reynolds proves himself, yet again, to be a passive-aggressive tool.
2) O'Connor's take is spot-on. If an academic wants to be a public intellectual who uses her position as an academic to inform her blog audience, it is and should be up for discussion when making a hiring decision, just as going on TV or writing op-eds should. Bérubé's take is pretty good, too.
3) Juan Cole wasn't denied tenure. He wasn't made a job offer. There are about sixteen explanations that should precede speculation over whether it was t3h blog, and all of them have to do with the fact that Ivy League hiring bureaucracy is ridiculously hard to negotiate. Maybe one of the departments broke ranks and expressed reservations during the senior committee meeting, because goodness knows that never happened at say, any philosophy department at Yale before ever. Cole had to get two departments -- that means two committees -- to recommend him, and it's not like the history department is small and has no factions.
(This goes for Drezner, too. I bet it wasn't the damn blog, but maybe, just maybe, that Chicago has a shitty tenure rate for junior profs and most junior profs know that and take senior offers elsewhere.)
Botching hiring processes seems to be the name of the game at the prestigious schools.
Should I feel a little bit of irritation in O'Connor's direction after she made such a big deal of how awful the academy was, then walked away from a tenured position in the Ivy League, only to return after a year? At least I want my admiration back.
2: This is true of any hiring decision anywhere, and is a pretty standard response to any claims of discrimination in hiring. The question is really a matter of setting the default, given the information we have. As there was a high-profile attempt, including denunciations in the WSJ editiorial page, to deny him the Yale job, I'm inclined to set "the PR campaign worked" as my default position.
Yale's is particularly difficult. They managed to botch a hiring decision to Peter van Inwagen when he was at Syracuse, and it wasn't due to any particular views he held (t3h crazy m3taphysics!), just that Yale's hiring process sucks and has several stages for botching it.
I'd forgotten about the WSJ piece. Still, I'm with O'Connor. It's not a blog about shoes or shuffleboard; it's about his work, and he wants to be a public intellectual. If Yale doesn't want a public intellectual on its staff -- which may indeed weigh in on his teaching, his research, and his relationships with his colleagues -- I think that's pretty dumb, but shouldn't they take that into account before extending the offer?
I'm still inclined not to default to PR campaign. It's not like Yale doesn't have any other professors who draw ire from the press.
3: She says she was downsized and in comments says that she would have stayed on had they been able to keep her. So, admire away.
Some of the ACTA stuff is another story.
Yale's history department had some contentious hiring stuff going on a few years ago, though I think they eventually hired someone very good. I only know what showed up in newspapers.
I'm starting to think it's weird to refer to errors on comments as kittens, kitten picture notwithstanding. I kind of liked the old Internal Service Error.
Or Server Error. I am single-handedly ruining this thread.
People should stop pretending Juan Cole's appointment was blocked for non-political reasons.
I admire Cole's response to the whole discussion.
I think 11 is correct, and I like kittens. So there.
People should stop pretending BitchPhD likes kittens for non-political reasons.
It must be true, 'cause it's in the Sun. But wait, I thought being anti-Israel meant that the academy would love you. Because of all the leftists. Except those leftists already in the academy and publishing articles.
It's certainly possible, and I don't doubt it was a factor. But the explicit fame-seeking probably weighed in more heavily.
Or, it's possible they didn't think his work was all that good.
It's certainly possible, and I don't doubt it was a factor. But the explicit fame-seeking probably weighed in more heavily. Or, it's possible they didn't think his work was all that good.
Again, any of these things might be true. And this is the same sort of problem that confronts women or minorities who claim that the Acadmemy overlooks them--there are always reasonable and good explanations available. And those explanations might even be true in any individual case. The question is which way you lean in the face of the available evidence. I don't know how the academic market works, but Cole was up for the job, so I would think there is a floor to how much he might suck. As for fame--dunno. I thought universities were into the famous these days.
Keep yer hands off him, B. He's saving himself for my mom.
Am I the only who thinks this whole Cole fiasco as has turned the entire internet into a single faculty lounge? These questions come up in any decision to not hire/deny tenure/renew contract/&c. Not that the speculation isn't fun, only that people who aren't familiar with the process may think this case and ensuing discussion unusual.
18: Okay. I wouldn't want to mess with your mom.
19: Isn't it awesome?
19: But isn't it rare that there is such a public effort by non-academics to go after a potential appointment in non-academic forums? Surely something similar is happening with all of the attention to Summers's removal.
I guess I'm just seeing Yale already having a bunch of controversial names at the university; it's hard for me to believe that the main factor is that the WSJ wrote a nasty piece about him. Oh noes, the media says Yale is liberal. Next they'll say what, that it doesn't allow the military to recruit?
The history department wields a lot of power at Yale, so I've heard, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the 'real' reason was a power struggle between the history department, the near eastern studies department, and the university administration.
The hiring market at lots of top universities looks like this.
1) First, you have to authorize a job search. This means petitioning the administration. This means having a full-time equivalent available. It looks like Cole's position took half a position from history and half a position from the other department. A junior prof is a half FTE, so if you try to make tenure at some Ivies, you are in effect competing on the open market for your own job. (This is why Drezner's complaint probably has nothing to do with his blog.)
2) Now you get to run a job search. The departments will have candidates in mind, and will carefully craft their criteria to target the candidates they want. Senior offers work by sending out the job description and asking other universities and department to name their top ten people who are good in that field. The department put together a short list, and start flying people out for talks and interviews.
3) The departments debate. In interdisciplinary hires, both departments have to agree on a candidate and vote.
4) Then it goes to the administration. Usually, this is a rubber stamp, but it's not always. The candidate at this point probably knows of the decision to send it onto the administration, if the departments are doing a good job courting him. If the wheels haven't fallen off the wagon at this point, though, they might here. Usually it's because one of the departments expresses reservations last minute; usually it's a prof with a chip on their shoulder that something didn't get discussed. With two departments weighing in, this increases. It's happened on non-controversial candidates.
The only thing that makes me lean in that direction at all is Yale's reputation as the 'Jewish' Ivy. If there's any truth to the rumor, the board of trustees might have been pissed off.
Just to second some of Cala's remarks, there are so many ways that a senior hire might fail that it's impossible to do anything more than speculate whether the blog stuff had any impact on the outcome in this case. In a sense the Chronicle feature is a terrible idea because everyone involved can say little more than, "only the Yale departments know for sure, but it could have been that...."
(Larry Summers is a good illustration, actually, since the women-in-science stuff wasn't at all the whole story, yet, from the outside, it looked almost as though he was canned for that reason.)
So it's entirely possible that the departments involved liked Cole enough to get him to the late stages of a search and then the whole thing fell apart for non-blog and non-WSJ reasons.
Interesting story: a friend of mine (who has a nice job) has been rejected in about ten different ways during various searches. Making hires can be like building a house of cards.
Interesting story: a friend of mine (who has a nice job) has been rejected in about ten different ways during various searches. Making hires can be like building a house of cards.
Gimme a break, FL. No one believes you have friends from outside of the set of commenters here.
Interesting story: a friend of mine guy I talk to at conferences (who has a nice job) has been
Was this an open search? I thought they were thinking of hiring just Cole. It's my understanding that for certain types of potential big-name senior hires universities will sometimes not do a full search and just evaluate the one candidate as if they'd already chosen a top candidate from a list of others.
Most senior positions are open searches, technically. They will do tricky things to target the person they want, like instead of making the area 'Epistemology' they'll put out 'Epistemology -- Reliability of Testimony & Philosophy of Religion' or 'History of Philosophy -- Suarez and Spinoza.'
Searches have to be open to preclude departmental incest, where the departments just pick a friend and try to hire him. So goes the theory. They do try to game it, though, and most searches go through the motions of bringing in several candidates even though they're focusing on one.
And the stupidest things can sink an otherwise qualified candidate. Note to senior candidates at Cala U: you may be qualified, but if you're an asshole when you meet the graduate students because we're not worth your time, rest assured that the others and I have very little problem with going into the department chair and making sure that's known.
From the outside, of course it's the blog. From the outside, of course Harvard fired poor Summers for daring to suggest that research programs that are going on should be ongoing... From the inside, it might be the blog but there are good reasons to think Cole's candidacy was sunk for other reasons. From the inside, Summers tried to turn Harvard into M.I.T. lite, tussled with the liberal arts faculty, and lost.