Particle Physicists Do It Transparently Through The Rumor Mill (Plus: Promote NCA Open Bar Transparency!)
Jim Brown has a little blurb up over at The Blogora about a new Rhetoric and Composition Job Wiki. It's MLA-centric instead of NCA-centric, but the idea is certainly right - give people a place to post where their schools are in the hiring process, from the initial job posting through offers/rejections until an offer has been accepted.
Theoretical physics has actually been on top of this for about a decade, and they've got one of the more amusing disciplinary mechanisms for distributing job information (it's also kind of adorable in that MIT prank war, "awww... geeks are so cute when they try to be mischievous" kind of way). Before we get to that, though, we need to have a little chit-chat about a broader kind of NCA transparency.
For far too long, NCA attendance has been divided between two camps: the haves and the have-nots, the big R1s and the small colleges, the privileged and the disenfranchised - the people who know where the open bars are and the people who don't. This needs to end. First, there's the social justice angle. Fair enough: equality, old-boys network, etc etc. But also, listen: something has to be done about this - the lines and wait times at the open bars of a certain bi-coastal Saturday night party are getting insane. Just surreal. It's the perfect example of how asymmetries in market information cause dislocations that screw things up for everybody. NCA needs a better system for helping destitute graduate students locate food and alcohol on Friday and Saturday night. There are always departments that for random reasons - recruitment, hiring, welcoming, etc - have decided to give back to the community on any given year. It'd be churlish not to help them. Send us your school's party info (or really, anyone's info) - where, when, quality of food, degree to which the bars are open - and we'll post what we get. This nonsense should all be on CRT-NET anyway, attached to ever CFP.
This message has in no way been endorsed by anyone affiliated with anything in any way.
How theoretical physicists do it, after the jump.
In 1995 a couple of BU physics students a rumor mill where they encouraged people - mostly graduate students on hiring committees - to leak how far along their departments were in the hiring cycle. Departments have a justifiable interest in holding on to information about who they're extending job offers to - if they get turned down in their initial offer, they don't want their next preference to have already gone elsewhere. Whoever that next preference is, of course, wants to know that they're not the top choice as soon as possible so that they can begin to make other arrangements:
Our motivation was threefold: first, younger people entering the field would have an accurate picture of the job situation and be able to make an informed career decision at an earlier stage; second, people outside of the Boston-area would have access to the same information we had and not have to endure as much mental and emotional anguish waiting months to hear about a job that had already been given to someone else; third, by openly publishing the list of people who were invited for interviews (the short lists) we would be exposing the departments that did a sloppy job of hiring.
Not to be overly celebratory on this point, but there are also just brute force egalitarian justifications for transparency. Part of the motivation for Dugan and Terning's Rumor Mill was to get information out from Boston - where graduate students could compare notes to get a pretty complete picture of the job market - to the rest of the country. In Habermasian terms, publicity prevents entrenched interests from leveraging their access and resources. Meritocracy is imperfect, but it's better than entrenched gender and geographical interests. And over time, it wins out:
The initial reaction from post-docs was generally one of delight, while the reaction of the tenured crowd leaned to the more hostile. Senior scientists tended to have reactions based on the tired refrain of "that's not how it was when I was young,"... (Such hostility kept me from openly associating my name with the project until I got my own permanent position.) Now seven years later, rather than being part of a rebellious counter-culture, the rumor mill has become part of the establishment. Physics departments often send job advertisements directly to the rumor mill, and some even send in their short lists in order to avoid any misunderstandings. Hiring practices have changed as well, although whether this has anything to do with the rumor mill is impossible to say. Faddishness remains unchecked, but the "old-boys-network" seems to play a smaller role, and some of the "old-boys" are now women.
The positive read is that departments started going to the Rumor Mill out of a genuine motivation to increase transparency. The somewhat less than equitable suggestion is that it established a situation in which the risk of holding on to information was greater than whatever the gains.
Without the Rumor Mill, a department has an incentive to keep its offers secret - they want to keep a second-place candidate guessing so that, should their top choice decline, they still have someone to go to. But now a department knows that at least some of their information will get out, but they're not sure that the information will be accurate - the worst case scenario is that someone leaks an inaccurate or early list, and the department's actual top choice, thinking that they've been declined, goes elsewhere.
Let this process go on long enough, and eventually transparency - and the accompanying fresh air and sunlight of publicity - becomes the norm. In this sense, the Rumor Mill stumbled into what's more or less the Habermasian gamble in BFN, which is a significant change from the older Habermasian project. The Habermas of TCA would say something like: "institutions should accept the norms of publicity because publicity is normatively desirable." By the time he gets to BFN, though, Habermas has recognized that normative desirability is too weak to compel people to bracket discursively and institutionally inherited power. So the challenge then becomes how to channel power by setting up institutions that work along valid principles de facto - in this case, how to structure departments' approach to the job market in such a way that publicity gets, so it where, smuggled in.
References:
* Job Listings Wiki for Rhet/Comp. [Blogora]
* Composition and Rhetoric Job Listings
* Habermas: The Ideal Speech Situation Is A Bad Model For The Ideal Speech Situation
Previously:
* Welcome to IIS
* Habermas's Peircean Fallibilism
* Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing
