What kind of colleague do you want? (Or, why we don't want passionate teachers and kind people as academic colleagues)

Imagine you're a tenured faculty member at an average sort of department, not super-prestigious but still with some aspirations for research excellence. You're hiring a new tenure track faculty member. Although people do sometimes move from tenure track positions, it is still a safe bet that a new hire will stay and will be your colleague for many years to come.

What kind of colleague would you rather have? Would you like someone who is ambitious, puts their research first in everything they do, certainly does not have a passion for teaching? Or would you like someone who is an excellent scholar but who also is kind, considerate, collegial, cares about their students?

Supposing you're hiring someone for a senior position, such as an endowed chair, or a Reader or Professor or Department Head (in the UK the latter is not uncommon). Would you like someone single-minded focused on their next excellent book with a prestigious press--OUP or Cambridge, perhaps a few select other publishers for subfields? Or would you like someone who is an excellent research but who is also caring, compassionate, who thinks about the wellbeing and prospects of the graduate students and about the department's wellbeing, who serves the department and puts other people's needs (regularly) above their own? 

Going by advice for cover letter writing and for writing letters of recommendation, it would seem we want a colleague like the former. We want the ambitious, single-minded person for whom teaching is a necessary evil. Take the following handy advice sheet for how to write letters that don't show gender bias, from the University of Arizona (pictured below).

Among lots of excellent advice, it warns letter writers to steer away from stereotypes associated with femininity for their candidates. Thus we should not, in our capacity as a letter writer, mention that a female candidate for a graduate student position or for a tenure track job is "caring" or "compassionate", as this evokes gendered stereotypes.

This is a missed opportunity, because letters of recommendation, due to their inflated prose, do not give much useful information. However, one piece of information a letter of recommendation could meaningfully convey is whether a person would be a good colleague to work with, and would be good for students. Thus, perhaps we should rather aim to have such information (when relevant) for male candidates, rather than have our letters for female candidates follow a narrow model for what potential or promise looks like in a candidate. 

Similarly, job market consultant Karen Kelsky, author of The Professor is In, explicitly warns against candidates against saying in their cover letter or teaching statement that they have a passion for teaching, or that they care about students. Her rationale for this is sensible: the 385 other candidates applying for the same position can say exactly the same thing so it does not set you apart, and it doesn't provide any evidence that you in fact care about teaching. Instead, she recommends candidates focus on facts, show rather than tell how they are good teachers. 

While the rationale is clear, the fact that "I am passionate about teaching" can make a cover letter weaker is diagnostic of a broader problem: except for very teaching-focused schools, we do not in fact seem to care to have a colleague who might be genuinely passionate about teaching. 

Why do we not care? The evidence is mixed on the question of how far the "office jerk" (or the academic equivalent thereof) actually harms or benefits the workplace. Robert Sutton argued with his No Asshole Rule that hiring an asshole isn't worth the costs: nasty workers aren't worth the trouble they cause in terms of cohesiveness and teambuilding within a workplace. Pilita Clark, however, thinks that especially male assholes often become very successful, and so in spite of their negative effect, they're unlikely to disappear. 

Obviously, there's still a lot of room for variability between jerk and saint. Take the other extreme: the academic saint. Always ready to help, pulling more than their weight for committee work and other administrative tasks, eager to look over your latest draft, and submitting their referee report always by the deadline, and preferably much sooner. Maybe we'd feel uncomfortable among a saintly colleague (see Susan Wolf's moral saints). Maybe a morally saintly colleague would make us feel our ineptitudes all the worse, the way academia has led us to cultivate what are arguably problematic traits, such as ambition and self-aggrandizement. 

But between jerk and saint, between the nightmare colleague and the colleague who makes you feel like a moral failure, lies the decent colleague. Don't we want a decent colleague? Looking at academia through an anthropological lens, it seems the main factor for hiring decisions in terms of social and personality factors of a colleague, is the social capital they bring. Social capital is a person's network and social relationships, often expressed in terms of membership of elite social circles. The more exclusive the club one belongs to, the more valuable the capital. Having one's PhD from a top-ranked department is, I have argued in a recent paper, a good indicator of social capital.

This explains the success of candidates from top-ranked departments on the job market, in particular, their ability to net jobs at other top departments. Lower-ranked departments are more inclusive in their hiring, and will often hire from lowly ranked or unranked programs. But even they (and my data bear this out) are attracted by the social capital that top programs provide. Social capital is also expressed in other factors: invited talks, editorial board memberships, publishing in top journals (which requires a savoir faire, a knowledge of the rules of the game). Next to social capital, we want colleagues who are research stars or have lots of promise to become research stars (indeed, people often conflate the two such that being at a top department means you must be a research star). So important is this within our academic life that also unranked schools aim to hire people who have the potential to become research stars (although there may then also be a flight risk).

Our practices of hiring someone who is a single-minded researcher, thinking only of their qualities as a researcher, without any regard for how they might be among students or colleagues are problematic. They do not reflect our lived reality in the workplace, where we do in fact care about colleagues being at least minimally decent. Worse, some instances I have heard of people who were hired who were known to be problematic, for instance, among female students, but it was overlooked because they were such excellent researchers. Given this, maybe we should re-evaluate practices whereby compassion, kindness and other qualities are coded by search committee readers as feminine and where they can hurt a candidate. 

 

Comments

[William Peden]

Colleagues come and go (even when they are in permanent positions) but a departmental ethos develops over decades, and it's fed by hiring people with good approaches to academic life.

For example, at the University of Stirling in Scotland, those at faculty meetings etc. still sometimes ask "What would Alan Millar do?", when faced with some vexing problem:

https://www.stir.ac.uk/people/256734

By contrast, a colleague who personalises arguments or habitually is absent (the latter is often caused by them having ambitions in "higher" places) can create an atmosphere of sniping or excessive individualism for decades. This is partly because PhD students, postdocs, Teaching Fellows etc. learn much of what is proper academic behaviour by looking at how permanent staff in their institutions behave.

I agree with your conclusion: we should see compassion, kindness, empathy, supportiveness etc. not as "feminine" traits, but as just POSITIVE traits in hires. (I've known people to infer e.g. that a supportive referee report was probably written by a woman, even in an area where there are relatively few female philosophers, just because the referee was so encouraging. But you don't need to have no dick in order to not be a dick!) Their impact on research and teaching is hard to quantify, but indisputably beneficial.

[Peter Furlong]

Hi Helen,

Thanks for the interesting post. At first I thought that wasn't quite right--that people do want caring and compassionate people, but that people advise against noting this in letters or recommendation and cover letters because everyone makes false claims about character (whether our own or that of others) with impunity.

Your last claim, that hiring committees hire people known to be problematic, got me thinking that I was wrong. Still, I wonder whether our institutional norms involve some mix of the following:

1) not valuing caring colleagues at all
2) not considering whether candidates are caring, because we don't think this should count in hiring
3) not considering whether candidates are caring, because we don't think we can accurately tell from a few letters and an interview
4) considering whether candidates are caring, but these considerations nearly always get trumped by other things (like research) that we value more highly (at least in this stage)

I do agree that we have problems in what we value as a discipline, but I wonder whether they are as uniform as it might seem.

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Helen: Great post!

I have a sneaking suspicion the phenomena you allude to here are more prominent at research institutions.

Having worked at and hired at a 'teaching' institution for a while now, my experience has been very different. My sense is that people at my school *really* want to hire passionate teachers and kind colleagues. This is one of the reasons I like working at my university. Sure, there are some jerks. However, by and large people I work with really are passionate about teaching, and really are pretty kind. This makes it nice to come to work--to, you know, work with people you actually like!

[Anon]

"I've known people to infer e.g. that a supportive referee report was probably written by a woman, even in an area where there are relatively few female philosophers, just because the referee was so encouraging. **But you don't need to have no dick in order to not be a dick!**"

I just want the record to show that this is a fantastic quote. Perhaps it should accompany all referee requests sent out by journals to men?

[Amanda]

Some of the advice to not say things like you are a "passionate teacher" has nothing to do with not wanting passionate teachers, but the fact that such cliche self-testimony is not informative. On the hand, there is something odd about the fact that personality traits are considered irrelevant, at least at research schools. The unsaid assumption at research schools does seem to be that caring about teaching is either, (1) utterly irrelevant, or (2) a negative because it takes away from research.

[William Peden]

Anon,

I have been phenomenally lucky with all my referee reports over the past ~2 years in which I've been sending articles to journals, but I would send it out to ALL referees. There's a lot of sincere hard work out there that doesn't get appreciated in the normal order of things; one should be encouraging even when rejecting an article - even if you think that it's fundamentally and incurably wrong. ("You have clearly invested an admirable amount of time and creativity into this article, but...")

As I said, I think we should put more emphasis on these qualities as good academic virtues. But not the ONLY academic virtues! A cold but respectful critic, who isn't caring in their criticisms but focuses their critical eye on your work rather than your person, can be a good colleague, even if they're not the Platonic ideal of an academic.

I would add a self-interested reason to hire people: you don't want to be known as "one of those X-people", where X is an institution with a philosophy department that's developed a reputation for unpleasant faculty, even if you're a great colleague within the university and more widely.

[SLAC tenured professor & chair]

I know I'll likely get slack for this, but I really want a colleague that engages with things outside of philosophy as well. A good colleague is one who can do all the things outlined above, but who can also turn off philosophy-mode and engage with others concerning other interests.

[Paul]

SLAC, I completely agree with you. I really don't want to talk only about philosophy whenever we have drinks or an event. And its much more likely that we'll be friends outside the office if you have other interests. And in my office we are fortunate in that many of us are good friends and I think this is beneficial for everyone. We work better together as a result.

But I think that this goes back to Helen's point: R1 schools want someone who singlemindedly focused on academic research, who works 12+ hour days and pumps out research like a machine. And in that case, who cares if they are kind? Wouldn't kindness be a detriment to ultimate productivity?