Page 96 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

94 CHAPTER 4
other ways of assessing early-career researchers than making predictions about their potential. Such “subjective” assessment influences if a candidate will be selected or not and can therefore have major implications for candidates.
Teaching qualities are also among the formal selection criteria for assistant professorships and thus assessed during the selection process. Again, research participants across all countries argue that candidates generally do not have much teaching experience. Therefore, committee members often evaluate the teaching qualities or potential of external candidates during a lecture or presentation that candidates have to provide during the selection process. Our data show that the criterion ‘administration’ is not assessed during selection procedures, because committee members argue that early-career researchers usually do not have previous experience concerning administration.
All in all, the formal selection criteria for assistant professorships seem hard to work with because of the short track record of early-career researchers. Therefore, the decision-making on whom to hire for an assistant professorship that might give a way out of precariousness in the long run, is based on a limited assessment of formal criteria, and an assessment of potential instead. Due to the short track records, committee members rely on other factors to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for the position. Our analysis reveals that multiple tacit criteria come into play when committee members discuss their preferred candidates, which give room for assumptions and subjectivities. Next, we will describe the complex interplay of gender practices found in the application of tacit criteria.
Tacit selection criteria – survival in the competitive academic world
In this section we elaborate on the four specific gender practices found in the tacit criteria committee members use to assess the potential and suitability of candidates for assistant professorships as well as academic work more generally. These practices are geared towards the assessment of candidates’ potential for surviving in what research participants call ‘the competitive academic world’.
Confidence. The first specific gender practice related to the general gender practice of assessing potential for excellence we found in the data is the perceived lack of confidence of women candidates. For example, respondents in Switzerland argued that modesty and a lack of competitive behaviour of women researchers is a reason for their limited survival in what research participants argue to be ‘the competitive academic world’. Modesty is often put forward as an argument for why women are expected to be unable to deal with the competitive culture in academia.