The Problem With Bureaucracies
I’m getting more and more annoyed at the application cycle for academic jobs. The problem is that is behaves like a bureaucracy, and it suffers from the near-universal flaw of all bureaucracies: a complete lack of transparency.
A bureaucracy is designed to streamline a large number of small, similar tasks. In and of itself it’s not a bad thing. It compartmentalizes procedures and provides standards for input and output for each compartment. It’s an assembly line. But people being put through a bureaucracy are not cars in an automotive factory.
The problem arises because all consideration is put towards completing the task, and none towards communication. Once you submit the required inputs there’s no information coming back out. Worse, there’s no meta-information about the process itself. Documenting the procedure is not the procedure itself, and so it’s omitted entirely.
As a clear-cut example from my own past, a couple years ago I taught for CTY one summer. I applied for the job because there was no information from my school about whether or not graduate students in the math department would be getting summer support. As far as we could tell, we weren’t, and we weren’t going to be told so. It turned out that we did get support for June and July, and we were told so after the beginning of June. Up until then there was no statement that we would or would not get anything, or that the matter was under consideration, or when we might expect an answer one way or the other. Nothing.
So now I’ve got applications out to over eighty schools for about 130 positions total. Fewer than half have even confirmed receipt of my application. A handful have told me an explicit “no”, but others seem not to be saying even that much. I know a number of the tenure-track positions I applied to are in the middle of having their short lists come out to give talks and interview and such. Since I haven’t heard from them, it’s clear that I’m not on that short list and have been cut from consideration without any notice at all. I even know some schools that have made hires already and, again, not felt any need to tell anyone else that the position is closed. There’s not even a hint of a date after which I can safely assume the answer is no.
I understand that departments are working under constraints of their own, and that they’re under no obligation to communicate anything more than the bare minimum back to the applicants. This isn’t about obligations, though. This is about treating applicants as actual human beings and not as widgets to be bought and sold.
Two great philosophers once summed up ethics as, “Be excellent to each other.” The application cycle for academic jobs is definitely not excellent.
