Page 65 - Through the gate of the neoliberal academy • Herschberg

SELECTING EARLY-CAREER RESEARCHERS 63
Also in line with university policy, the recruitment protocol and all but one of the job postings in the Natural Sciences department request good proficiency in English. Two job postings state that this is a criterion, because assistant professors are supposed to teach in English. This is similar in Nordic higher education, in which English language instruction has become commonplace (Airey et al., 2017), as Anglophone is considered the norm in higher education and non-Anglophone languages, different or peripheral (Meriläinen, Tienari, Thomas, & Davies, 2008). However, the recruitment protocol and job postings reveal that applicants are also requested to master the Dutch language, or do so within two years into the tenure- track. Job postings illustrate that this is a requirement, because assistant professors are expected to (also) teach in the Dutch study programme. Thus, the department requires internationalisation of staff; however, all tenure-track staff should invest in learning the local language, even though they have no guarantee that they will get tenured by the institution in the long-run. Being able to speak the academic lingua franca English is apparently not sufficient for tenure-track assistant professors. Here, the analysis illustrates how language policies are adjusted to disciplinary needs, which corroborates the finding of Airey and colleagues (2017), who have shown that the needs of a discipline weigh more heavily than university language policy.
In the Social Sciences department, the discourse of internationalisation is less prominent in job postings for assistant professors. In contrast to the Natural Sciences department, international work experience is not documented as a formal selection criterion. The macro-discourse and university policy have not (yet) trickled down to the formal level of the Social Sciences department. This seems to support Richardson’s (2009) findings that the value attached to international mobility differs per discipline. Indeed, she contends that researchers in the Natural Sciences (and Medical Sciences): “were more likely to see academia as an essentially ‘international’ profession than their counterparts in the arts and humanities” (p. S164). A small number of job postings in the Social Sciences department request a good command of English but do not explain why this is required.
Excellence
The results show that excellence encompasses multiple academic activities and skills. In the Natural Sciences department, excellence is related to communication skills, teaching, and research and reflected by words, such as “outstanding didactical skills”. In the Social Sciences department, excellence - or quality - is related to research and teaching and described, for example, as “record of excellence”. Similar to university policies, excellence is used as a multi-purpose adjective here too. In both departments,
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