Page 95 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg
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good, how well. (NL, SSH, M)
These committee members illustrate that, generally, candidates for assistant professor positions do not have many publications compared to more senior academics. According to the first respondent a publication can indicate what a candidate is “capable of in the future”. The second respondent argues that candidates for assistant professorships usually have none or just a limited number of published papers at the time of application. Therefore, he explains, the committee will look at papers in the “pipeline” and “the quality of the PhD” in order to assess the “worth” of the research in terms of the potential to get the work published in academic journals. The quote reveals that it is at the discretion of the selection committee to decide “whether they think this pipeline” is “publishable, and where, how good”. So committee members make a prediction about chances of getting the work published in the future. Most committee members confirm that a candidate’s research potential can be predicted by the track record of publications, even though this track record tends to be fairly limited.
Selection committees are thus charged with the task of evaluating the potential of applicants for assistant professorships. From the data we learn that this is not a straightforward endeavour. Some committee members reflected on the difficulty of assessing potential:
Anyone can say this is a young person with good hopes. But how can I make hopes accountable and codify them? (IT, SSH, F)
But the aim is clearly just the best scientist of that generation with, of which people think, we think, the selection committee thinks, the best potential to grow into a really good scientist. But that is really difficult to judge. So that is a very subjective process. That is absolutely clear. That is really absolutely very much constituted with all kinds of judgements, prejudices. (NL, STEM, M)
The first respondent acknowledges that she does not know how to measure “hopes” and implies that she struggles with applying this as a selection criterion for a “young person”. The second respondent first argues that the aim of a selection procedure is to “just” select the “best scientist of that generation” who has “the best potential to grow into a really good scientist”. He then realizes that this is not as easy as it seems and acknowledges that assessing potential is a “subjective process” inherent with various “prejudices”. Nevertheless, committee members suggest that they do not have
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