Over at Inside Higher Ed, Alex Small suggests an improvement to the “diversity question” asked in faculty searches. He argues that it should be more specific and target concrete institutional goals by “ask[ing] faculty candidates what they have done and want to do going forward in order to help struggling, underprepared students.” I certainly agree that that would be an easier question to answer well, but I’m not sure that’s actually a useful thing to do.

I should note up front that I’ve never been part of a search that asked a “diversity question” of all candidates. I’m old enough that it wasn’t a thing when I was hired, and for whatever reason that hasn’t yet been something we’ve required of applicants in the searches I’ve been on. We’ve had a fair number of applicants include a “Statement on Diversity and Inclusion” in their materials without being asked, probably because a lot of other places do officially ask for one, and if you’ve got it you might as well send it. I can’t pretend to have seen any kind of representative sample of these, though.

That said, the few of these I’ve seen have been more or less as Small describes: trite and full of platitudes. And I can easily imagine that skim-reading a couple hundred of these would be wearying. I feel very confident in saying that, because skim-reading a couple hundred statements of “research goals” and “teaching philosophy” is wearying.

And I think you could make exactly the same sort of argument that Small makes about “diversity questions” with respect to the research and teaching statements. That is, the usual request for materials is incredibly vague, and mostly leads to trite and platitudinous statements about the importance of encouraging student interaction in class, etc. A more targeted request for specific pedagogical information would undoubtedly produce more focused and concrete essays in response.

At the same time, though, I’m not sure that would be an improvement in terms of the ability to differentiate between candidates than what we get from the current vague and open-ended questions. That is, the very fact that there’s a clear and obvious “right” answer (which Small outlines) will naturally lead to everybody writing versions of that. Which doesn’t help with the “skim-reading a couple hundred trite essays” thing, even if it does boost the mean relevance somewhat.

In a lot of respects, it’s the very open-endedness of those questions that makes them useful to determine which candidates are right for the job. In our specific context, the open-ended request for statements about research is a great weed-out question, because lots of people will respond with descriptions that are way too high-level, or say things like “with three grad students this will be complete in two years,” which is a dead giveaway that they don’t actually want a small-college position, or know what it means. We’d still get a few of those with a more targeted question, but mostly from idiots who would rule themselves out in other obvious ways. A format that led more of the applicants to more of a “right answer” wouldn’t be as useful.

And at the end of the day, “college professor” is a very open-ended job, with extremely nebulous requirements and evaluation standards. So asking vague questions of applicants is arguably appropriate, and a reasonable way to assess whether they’ll be good at the job. People who give trite and platitudinous answers will often be… fine, with all the faint-praise damning that implies. The rare candidate who finds a novel way to frame their answers, though, is really showing something about their overall “quality of mind,” as it were. Leaving the questions more open-ended gives those people a chance to really shine.

(Admittedly, there’s a bit of a “delta function above a sea of shit” quality to this, to use a memorable phrase from a past colleague. I think that’s probably inevitable, though, because most people, even professional academics, just aren’t very good writers…)

The thing that’s a problem is when you ask a vague and open-ended question but expect a very specific answer. I hit this with a former dean after my reappointment review: I was asked to provide a teaching statement, and found a way to frame it that I liked a lot, but that wasn’t the format she wanted. So we had a slightly testy meeting in which she disparaged my statement while I sat there and thought “If you wanted that specific thing, you should’ve asked for it.”

That’s mostly an attitudinal problem on the evaluator’s side, though– if you’re going to ask vague questions, you need to be open to the possibility of answers that take unexpected forms. In the case of most of the things we ask job applicants for, I don’t think we’d be all that well served by more specific questions that lead to more specific “right” answers.