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Not sure; I suspect the Test Clause was meant to forbid express legal rules imposing tests, not just discretionary judgments by the President or by Senators. But I'm not sure.
Eric Muller seems to think that there's more to be said about it; and, if James Dobson is summoned to testify at Harriet Miers's confirmation hearing, we could see the ground being laid for a more definitive answer.
Are we in"The Conservative Ice Age"? [video, humor alert] Thanks to Randy Barnett at The Volokh Conspiracy for the tip.
With that, my friends, I'm off for the weekend and away from the internet. The other Cliopatricians will be posting in my absence. The family and I will be in Louisville, where I will be installed in – get this – my high school's hall of fame. You sense how deeply desperate they are. Had the schools not been segregated, they might have claimed Mohammad Ali, Wesley Unseld or, even, Houston Baker. As it was, they get me.
I have to say, I found the Burke post on tenure close to worthless as a discussion of the topic. He is responding there to John Tierney's suggestion that tenure decisions reflect a level of cronyism in academia. The sum total of Burke's response to that is that in his opinion, they don't. And the sum total of the evidence for his claims of what "often" happens and what "tends" to happen (or not) in academia is that he, Burke, has not personally seen cronyism operating in tenure decisions.
The implication seems to be that if he hasn't seen it, why, it just doesn't exist--and anyone who suggests the reverse just isn't sufficiently familiar with the way academia works.
Come on. I've seen enough nepotism in academia to last me a lifetime--in tenure decisions and other contexts. If Tim Burke hasn't seen it, well bully for him, but his failure to see it doesn't gainsay what some of the rest of us have seen.
I should add that I have rarely experienced it in my own case (whether as victim or beneficiary) but I've certainly had friends in academia complain to me about their cases, and more often than not, I found merit in their complaints. I would also add that one of the unfortunate features of academic culture is that the most checkered features of academic institutions are shielded by the privilege of confidentiality. So even when one knows of cases of brazen nepotism--indeed, of members of tenure committees avowing it-- one is obliged not to name names for fear of violating confidentiality. To paraphrase Galileo: but nevertheless, they nepotize.
This issue didn't begin with Daniel Drezner's tenure denial and won't end with it. I really wish that senior faculty (or relatively senior faculty) would stop acting--and writing--as though their anecdotal experiences of the academic world were somehow the last word on what happened there. They aren't. Asserting something doesn't make it so.
Irfan Khawaja -
8/4/2006
To Timothy Burke:
If we're at a "stalemate," you've lost the argument, because you're the one doing the asserting and you bear the burden of proof.
At any rate, you are asserting that your anecdotes license generalizations about the academy as such, whereas I am merely asserting counter-examples to your generalizations. You claim that nepotism is not "common." I merely claim to have seen lots of it relative to my own experiences and those of my friends. I've taught at and heard stories from a variety of schools from Ivies to community colleges and much between. I haven't proven that nepotism is common and don't purport to have. What I dispute is that you're in a position to deny that it is.
I so far haven't seen anything from either of your posts in the way of evidence to bolster the sort of claim you are making. My anecdotes do the work they need to do. Yours don't. You simply haven't made your case.
Irfan Khawaja -
8/4/2006
On the burden of proof issue: no, my point stands whether you were responding to Tierney or not. Tierney made various claims for which he bears the burden of proof, but you made independent claims in rebuttal of him for which you bear the burden of proof.
What I offered was a mere rebuttal of your point modestly describing my (modest) experiences. I didn't offer an independent generalization about the academy. What you offered went beyond a mere rebuttal of Tierney but a separate and independent generalization about the academy. That's why I didn't discuss Tierney in what I said.
As for giving you more information on the cases I know, I tried to think of a way to do it without revealing details, but it occurs to me that there's no way to do it. In the nature of the case, nepotism involves connections between friends, and charges of nepotism are accusations (to friends) about how connections between friends affect various decisions. Were I to describe them, I would reveal identities to the relevant parties, and thereby break confidences.
I can say, however, that I am not talking about the "star" professor phenomenon. The hiring cases are easier to describe than the tenure cases: I'm talking about people in a department who happen to be friends simply deciding, as a foregone conclusion, that they will hire their friend x for position y. They go through the motions of a national search, but those are motions. Eventually x is hired.
Similarly with tenure decisions: a coalition within a committee decides that they simply do not want X to get tenure. Evidently, they make that decision outside of committee, and then make arguments in committee that have an academic cast to them. Suddenly those who wanted to grant X tenure confront a group of strangely hostile people making rather odd but intense arguments about how X should not get tenure.
Well I guess I ended up describing some cases. But that's about the best I can do as a matter of description without details.
My main point is that to offer generalizations about the academy--as opposed to generalizations about one's own experience--you need evidence about the academy as such. I don't see that you've offered that. I haven't either, but in the nature of the case, I don't need to.
Timothy James Burke -
10/16/2005
But I think you do if you're going to hold the strict standard about generalization that you do, unless you want to say that no comments about tenure or hiring can be made save those which refer to objective data, which when it comes to questions of these kind, do not exist. The standard you enunciate binds you as well as me: by your lights, all we can do is say, "I haven't seen it" and "I have seen it" and shrug. Neither you nor I can say anything about how representative we are beyond that, given your standard.
This seems to me an unnecessary constraint. I agree one ought to be cautious generalizing beyond that: I've only got seven institutions where I have reasonably detailed anecdotal understandings of the tenuring norm. I think you're right that should make me cautious, perhaps more cautious than I have been, but I do not think it makes me categorically unable to speculate about general patterns. Part of my reasoning is this: if you see seven separate institutional cultures where one of the few commonalities is a kind of particular set of ideas about meritocracy (which, I hasten to add, have their own issues and insularities), where there is a kind of shared sense of disdain at the idea of hiring friends or relatives because they're friends or relatives, you have some indication that there is something bigger going on.
Indeed, that's how you analyze *culture*, national, institutional, community. The standard you're suggesting would forbid virtually all statements about convention, common practice, shared sensibility, distributed consciousness, in culture, because by definition it will never be possible to make a generalization about such things to which there are exceptions, which different people see differently from different perspectives. There's too much parsimony in your strong assertion about what can and can't be said. I accept the warning to be cautious about generalization and even the possibility that your experience may be far more typical and mine less so than I suspect. There are reasonable ways for you to push that line of analysis and prefer it over mine. But statements about institutional culture are not a logician's game, nor are they a scientific hypothesis. They're not cancelled out by the simple suggestion of a contradictory example.
There's also an interesting discussion whether for my reading or yours of how we know what we know about processes like hiring. One thing I have found is that what gets said about a given hiring process by all of the participants and what gets inferred by observers are often significantly at odds, but sometimes the observers are correct in identifying a principle guiding the deliberations which none of the deliberators make explicit, and indeed which they may not be consciously aware of. Some hires, for example, are subject to strong diversity requirements without anyone necessarily saying that up front, with it being understood. But at the same time, it's sometimes possible for observers to think they know what's happening and yet for their perceptions to have nothing to do with what is going on inside a decision process. Indeed, even when you get one of the people making a hire saying something explicit, you can't always be sure that sentiment is actually guiding or influencing the decision.
This is one of the points commonly made about these processes (hiring and tenure): the secrecy maintained around them makes it exceedingly difficult for anyone to authoritatively represent what actually happened in any given instance. Even when the full record is laid out in a given controversial case, as in a tenure denial, it often remains a Rashomon affair. But as in Rashomon, you don't want the existence of multiple possible interpretations to completely cancel out the fact that there is a "there" which needs discussing: an event which happened and which happened for some reason more than another reason.
Timothy James Burke -
10/15/2005
Replying first to Irfan Khawafa. As David Silbey notes, I'm replying to someone else's generalization, so if we're going to run back the argument in that fashion, we'll very quickly be in a hunt for original sin. More, my own characterization is not intended as an ironclad declaration of a law of nature: if there are cases of nepotism, I don't think that necessarily invalidates my assertion that it's uncommon, atypical, exceptional, unusual. I'd also like to hear as much as you can provide of the examples you've got in mind so we can be sure we're talking about the same thing when we talk about nepotism. For example, the so-called "star system" for a certain kind of senior hire functions in a way that some might view as nepotistic at times. I don't know that I'd use that word, but its operations are certainly orthagonal to the normal pattern of academic hiring, and often distastefully so. I'd honestly like to hear more, for my own edification, of the specifics of the cases you've got in mind, identifying details obscured.
Miriam's objection is well founded, and I apologize for the way I tried to awkwardly frame this observation. I'm really thinking about non-state, small private institutions that serve highly local markets and live somewhat at the edge of financial viability in the current educational market. Again, we're talking anecdotes, but I can think of a number of cases, some of them public, where such institutions were revealed to have lots of administrative intervention into faculty hiring in a way that might be construed legitimately as "cronyism". But it's quite right to observe that public institutions have very tight straightjackets that prevent this, sometimes too tight. One major state system has just started requiring a formal peer review of some candidates *before* hiring--having to get strangers in the candidate's field formally attest to the candidate's qualifications after a decision to hire has been made.
David Silbey -
10/15/2005
"If we're at a "stalemate," you've lost the argument, because you're the one doing the asserting and you bear the burden of proof. "
Ah, but Dr. Burke is responding to John Tierney's assertion about cronyism in academia, which suggests, by the above logic, that the argument has been lost by Mr. Tierney.
Should we notify him?
David Silbey -
10/15/2005
Following up on Dr. Burstein's remarks, one of the things I find remarkable is how the oversupply of Ph.Ds has allowed second and third tier schools, both public and private, to hire people from Research 1 universities. At my school, a small Catholic college, we have Ph.Ds from Duke, Kentucky, Penn State, Notre Dame, and others.
Miriam Elizabeth Burstein -
10/15/2005
I especially thing that's probably true at less selective or lower-tier schools, where the labor pool becomes more heterogenous and the controls on the hiring process more slipshod.
Er...what? Second- and third-tier state schools, at least, give administrations far more control over departmental hiring decisions than do, say, the Ivies. And, the job market being what it is, our pools look a lot like the pools at more prestigious colleges--lots of applicants from top-10 departments. Now, private schools may be another matter; after all, the only example of "cronyism" I ever had the misfortune to encounter involved a low-ranking Catholic college (the hiring committee passed over the superior candidate--not me, I hasten to add--in order to hire someone who had no Ph.D. and no qualifications in the relevant field, but who had, at least, gone to graduate school with the people hiring him!).
Timothy James Burke -
10/15/2005
Well, I could reply by noting that you're using anecdotal evidence in reply. If that's all the disagreement is about, the conversation is checkmated at that point, because it is more or less all we have to go on. We're trying from opposite ends to figure out the shape of the elephant, to understand a process which by its nature is secretive and hidden, and the claim on the table is by its nature something impossible to objectify beyond anecdotal experience. I'm sure it's true that there are cases where something more classically like nepotism governs academic hiring. I especially thing that's probably true at less selective or lower-tier schools, where the labor pool becomes more heterogenous and the controls on the hiring process more slipshod. And it is hard to clearly distinguish where the influence of graduate advisors and reputational effects of particular programs slides into something that might be regarded as undue or unmeritocratic influence.
I simply don't think that what is classically referred to as cronyism is common in highly competitive academic hiring. Against that claim, your anecdotes are no more powerful than mine are in demonstrating it.
The central point of my essay is that what is being called cronyism within the political system is not what produces groupthink and insularity in the academy, which is Tierney's charge, that the two are more or less the same. Tierney is looking at the distribution of political affiliation in journalism and law schools as evidence of some kind of nepotistic practice. Insularity and groupthink are a problem, but the mechanism that produces them is not one Democrat looking at the affiliations of five candidates and deciding to hire the Democrat. It's more pervasive, institutionalized and complex than that. So I object to the comparison, which is to my mind scurrilously designed to take the heat off the White House by dragging in some favorite scapegoats.
