Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent, as it’s crunch time in a lot of ways at the moment, including our double tenure-track search. Which it would be inappropriate to talk about in any more detail than “Wow, this is a lot of work.”<\/p>\n
There are, however, two academic-job-related things that I probably ought to mention briefly. One is this Inside Higher Ed Essay about metaphors for the academic hiring process<\/a>, which rightly points out a lot of the problems with the “lottery” analogy that lots of people like to use. In fact, Gerry Canavan argues, it’s best understood as a game:<\/p>\n \nBut it’s a mistake to think that because the market is conditioned by luck it’s reducible to luck, or absolutely irrational in some maximum sense. There’s a lot about the way the academic job market functions that is quite rational, including (yes!) some genuinely meritocratic elements along the way.<\/p>\n If the rejected thesis is that the academic job market is meritocracy, and the failed antithesis is that the academic job market is a lottery, my suggestion is that perhaps the proper synthesis here is conceptualizing the academic job market as a game. Outcomes in games are structured by resources, strategies, and luck; games involve competition between parties with differing capabilities, using different strategies, interacting with a set of rules that may not make sense, much less be desirable, rational, or fair.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Specifically, Canavan argues that academic hiring is analogous to Scrabble, but I won’t spoil that explanation. Click through and read it yourself. And I don’t think it’s wholly inappropriate to say that this article put me at risk of spraining my neck from all the nodding along.<\/p>\n The other academic-job-related thing getting a lot of traffic was also an injury risk, in this case from the eyeroll-inducing headline Academic Science Isn’t Sexist<\/a>, applied to the op-ed version of a massive meta-study of women in academic science (60-pagePDF)<\/a>. On the one hand, you know, you’re not going to get a prominent placement in the New York Times<\/cite> without punching things up a little, but that’s really a bit much.<\/p>\n And, look, the truth is this: Academic science is complicated<\/em>. It’s perfectly true that you can use a particular set of aggregate measures to argue that gender issues in academic science have improved immensely in recent years. You can also look at the exact same dataset<\/em> in different ways and make the opposite argument<\/a>. Both of these are true, and both are false, because academic science is made of people, and people are complicated.<\/p>\n And really, there isn’t a whole lot more that can be said about that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Blogging will continue to be light to nonexistent, as it’s crunch time in a lot of ways at the moment, including our double tenure-track search. Which it would be inappropriate to talk about in any more detail than “Wow, this is a lot of work.” There are, however, two academic-job-related things that I probably ought… Continue reading Academic Science Is Complicated, Like Scrabble<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,47,28,11,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9657","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-economics","category-politics","category-science","category-socialscience","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9657"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9657\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9657"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9657"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}