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Academic hiring criteria are all wrong

The most important criteria are: mentorship, mentorship, and mentorship

Mar 7

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Let’s hope this arrives in your inbox as you’re prepping to head of to a Stand Up For Science rally today!

Sometimes science departments experience buyer’s remorse. They go through all the trouble of finding someone to join the department¹, and after they’re there for years, everybody looks around at one another, and says: hoo-boy, we made a big mistake.

I’ve seen several places with this problem, and have heard of plenty more. I’ve also seen plenty of departments who have problematic senior faculty that departments try to hide under the rug when they’re under scrutiny. While my sample size is well short of infinity, it’s not small. In every case, it’s the same problem: crappy mentoring.

Someone might not be that great in the classroom, or someone might have a struggling to get their research where they want it to be, but I think few of us would call those Big Mistakes. The Big Mistake is when you bring a person into your community who is charged with providing guidance, support, and opportunity to students but they end up working to shrivel and minimize these students, and grind them up, instead of building them up. Watching your colleague — one who you hired! — do this to your departments own students? That’s the worst.

These problematic places are burdened with the reality that some people are not carrying their weight, and that everybody else is picking up the pieces behind the absolute disasters caused by the bad mentor in their midst. There are many ways of being a bad mentor. We don’t need to create a full taxonomy of bad mentors, at least not at the moment, though I suppose it would be useful for identification purposes. All of these bad mentors are people who simply deprioritize the well-being and professional development of the people who are positioned to rely on them.

I don’t know why departments are so shocked when they hire bad mentors when the minimum publishing criteria for aspiring professors professor necessitates evolutionary arms race that selects against those who invest in the professional development of their students beyond their contributions to publishing.

stock photo of two people doing fieldwork together in a grassy field

Good mentorship takes time. Cranking out a ton of pubs takes time. Teaching well takes time. And effective mentorship is foundational for doing good DEI work at the faculty level. (Yes, I said it. DEI. DEI DEI. DEI! Let’s own diversity, equity, and inclusion as important priorities! University presidents are caving left and right, but this is literally what tenure is for. I don’t have to cave.)

While some places (still) have DEI statements on required for their job applications, where’s the Mentoring Statement? Where on the rubric for evaluating candidates, where in the discussions about who would be a better “fit” (ugh), are people talking about mentoring. About a history of working successfully with junior scientists to support their professional growth. About understanding what it takes to invest in people. About whether or not you have a candidate who prioritizes people over pubs. Who understand what steps are needed to foster a healthy lab community?

While some folks are better at mentoring than others, just as talents vary among individuals, being a genuinely crappy mentor is a choice. Choosing some priorities over others. The crappy mentors that I was talking about at the beginning are folks who are so focused on publishing, or getting money, or being famous, or their own recreation time, that the students get screwed over. It can be really hard to suss out these attitudes in folks at the interview stage, and if you look explicitly at mentoring, then you can see whether or not a person has been walking the talk.

So if you’re in the mood for a TDLR, I’ll humor you this time:

Hiring and promotion should involve looking closely at mentorship practices and outcomes
Explicitly including mentorship in hiring and promotion criteria is necessary to avoid hirings duds who are crappy mentors.

Have a lovely weekend.

Hiring a tenure-track faculty member typically involves a lot of labor, compromise, and strategic planning. Go through the all of the bureaucratic steps to get the green light to open the position and advertise, wade through many applications in the midst of one hard decision followed by another, winnow down a long list to a short list with a set of zoom interviews and more discussions and priorities, and then there’s a series of on-campus interviews. And sometimes the search doesn’t fail, and someone gets hired!

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