The Changing Academic Market: General Trends and a Berkeley Case Study

Contents

Preface

1. General Contours of an Academic Market

2. Market Dynamics: Selected Theoretical and Historical Themes

3. Organizational Responses to the New Market Conditions

4. Some Relevant Departmental History

5. Devising a Rational Recruitment Plan

6. The Rational Plan Confronts Reality

7. An Analysis of the Pool of Candidates

8. Some Reflections in Conclusion

Appendixes

A. ASA Footnotes

B. Guidelines for Evaluating Candidates

C. Personnel Committee Faculty Evaluation Form

D. Candidate Information Form

Index

Preface

This book concerns the changing academic market in the 1970s. Unlike most treatments of the subject, however, it will scan that market at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Because of this unusual combination, we should say something, before we begin, about the circumstances in which the book developed, our rationale for writing it, and how we have organized it.

In the summer of 1975 Smelser was beginning the second year of an assignment as Chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Content was beginning her third year as Assistant to the Chairman, a position which involved supervision of the non-academic staff in the Department (about eight in number) and coordinating most of the Department’s administrative business. Their two positions together constituted the center of the Department’s administration.

The Department, after having experienced an extraordinary growth of faculty in the 1950s and early 1960s, had gradually settled into a steady state in the late 1960s and early 1970s, averaging approximately one appointment each year after 1971, usually to replace some other faculty member who had retired, resigned or failed to gain promotion to tenure. That settling process reflected in microcosm the general no-growth situation in the University of California at Berkeley, and also reflected the dramatic tightening of demand for academics in general and sociologists in particular in the early 1970s. We had been made aware of this altered market situation not only by the restrictions on our new appointments, but by the increasing difficulty in placing our graduate students at other institutions as they were completing their doctorates.

The new market situation had not changed by the summer of 1975. By a series of circumstances, however, the Department suddenly found itself with the promise of five or six new vacancies over a period of two years, caused by the coincidental occurrence of two retirements, two non-promotions, and one resignation. The Berkeley administration granted the department permission to make three (ultimately, four) new appointments in the academic year 1975-76.

To appoint several new faculty members constituted at once a welcome opportunity and a matter of serious concern to us. The opportunity was straightforwardly one of being able to build departmental resources substantially for the future after a prolonged famine. The concerns were many. We knew that the work involved in processing the flood of applicants for several positions was going to be phenomenal; we knew how limited our own resources were for completing that work; we knew that we were already in an era of affirmative action, which imposed a number of complex procedures to be observed in any search-and-appointment process; and we were aware of a number of divisions and conflicts in the Department, which often ran so deep as to make it difficult for the faculty to arrive at consensus on any decision, including a decision to offer positions to specific candidates.

During the year that followed we designed a recruitment plan; secured the cooperation of numerous constituencies in supporting and carrying out that plan; carried to completion the evaluation of nearly 300 candidates who applied for the positions; secured a reasonable if sometimes precarious faculty consensus on several leading candidates; and ultimately filled the positions with the candidates of the Department’s choice. The story of that search constitutes a substantial portion of this volume.

An initial set of questions might occur to the reader: Why bother to document the search? What can be learned from a single search and appointment process in a single department in a single year? These questions occurred to us early, and we would like to voice several reasons why we believe our report might have some general interest and be of some general value.

First, we reveal in this volume a kind of information that is seldom made public. Academic departments do write down a great deal of information on great amounts of paper, but the business of department meetings—to say nothing of informal interaction in the corridors—is seldom recorded in written form. We hope to record a certain amount of information of this type, hopefully within the bounds of discretion. Beyond this, we conducted our search in a sufficiently systematic way that large amounts of comparable data on each of our candidates were recorded in the process. This kind of recording is also unusual in recruitment processes in higher education, which in many quarters retain their informal, word-of-mouth character. This abundance of information provided an opportunity to analyze the origins and characteristics of our pool of candidates, and to throw some light on prevailing knowledge, assumptions, and myths about processes in the academic labor market.

Second, we feel it important to communicate the results of our work to others who are attempting to fashion their own solutions in the contemporary market. During the course of our research we had occasion to talk with dozens of others in the recruitment business who were attempting to meet the exigencies imposed by the buyer’s market, by affirmative action, and by the generally uncertain situation in higher education. It is our impression that, consistent with the tradition of decentralization in American higher education, everybody is inventing the wheel anew, that there is little interchange of information on problem-solving, and that there is little effort on the part of institutions of higher education to learn from the successes and failures of other institutions. We believe that to report our experience will work modestly toward increasing the flow of information.

Third, we have an interest in candidates, present and future. In many respects they are the most evident victims of the current crisis in the academic market, since they are the ones who apply more or less cold to many institutions, who are kept waiting without word for sometimes as long as months, and who are disappointed after that wait. In our own search we came to appreciate how little information is imparted to candidates, how high their anxieties are, and how much brutalization they undergo in striving for positions. Much of this is inevitable, given present market conditions, but we believe that a report of the recruitment process from the point of view of those on the other side might provide some information and insight for candidates.

Fourth—and most important in our own minds—scholars and analysts seldom attempt to examine the interplay of large economic, political, and social forces now buffeting higher education in America at microcosmic levels—that is to say, at the level of the single organization and at the level of the individual human being. Those great forces are not above us; they impinge on our purposive daily activity and continuously have to be taken into account. We hope to communicate in some degree how that process works, and how we attempt to manage in an increasingly uncertain institutional environment.

Chapter One is a general analysis of academic recruitment in its market context, in which we argue that it is less economic than other markets because many values other than economic ones operate as determinants of market behavior, and it is subject to restraints on mobility and lack of information. We also identify a number of political and ideological dimensions involved in the recruitment of academic personnel.

Chapter Two concerns market dynamics. We trace the implications of some of the peculiarities identified in Chapter One, plus a few additional ones, for fluctuations in supply and demand. We note that the academic market is subject to extreme swings and to rigidity in the ability of supply to adjust to changing demand conditions, and we provide some empirical evidence of the supply-demand dynamics during the past two decades, both for the American academic market in general and for sociology in particular.

Chapter Three presents some evidence of the ways in which academic departments and other agencies have responded to the new, tighter market conditions. Our account is based on evidence gathered while visiting a number of sister institutions and interviewing individuals about their recruitment and placement policies and procedures. We conclude that the sociologists’ response has been somewhat sluggish, that old procedures and methods persist, that adaptations are minimal and incremental, and that very few institutions appear to be learning from what other institutions are doing or not doing to adapt to a radically different personnel situation.

With this general background, we turn to our own story, which begins with a bit of department history in Chapter Four, tracing the Department’s vicissitudes of growth and non-growth and some of the personnel procedures on which it has relied in the past. More particularly, we give a brief account of an unsuccessful personnel search conducted in the academic year 1974-75, a search which disappointed us, informed us of some of the current realities of the academic market, and instructed us of the necessity to change our ways in the coming year.

Chapter Five describes how our opportunity for a really ambitious search arose, as well as the early negotiations with the campus administration regarding that search. We also record our early thinking, especially the very extensive plans we made to generate an exhaustive and equitable search.

In Chapter Six we discuss how the plan we had generated unfolded in reality. We conclude that the search was a successful one, but one that was forever threatening to founder through lack of support, practical failures, lack of communication and miscommunication, and political conflict.

In Chapter Seven the characteristics of our candidates are described. We look at their institutional origins—that is, their Ph.D.-granting university—as well as the sources from which we learned about their candidacy. We show how many minorities and women were considered, where their applications originated, and how well they fared comparatively in competition for the several positions.

Finally, in Chapter Eight we draw a few lessons from our analysis and venture a few recommendations for others embarking on enterprises similar to ours.

In writing this account we have been as objective as we could, given our role as participants. We have also deliberately not concealed anything that might be regarded by some as Departmental dirty linen, though we have stopped short of including material that might be regarded as damaging to any individual. Therefore we have chosen either to disguise or not to reveal the names of anyone other than ourselves, though we realize that it would be easy, with a little detective work, to identify some of the persons involved in the search. We have asked many of those involved, either as candidates or as recruiters, to read the manuscript and advise us on its accuracy, appropriateness, and tactfulness. We responded as best we could to their reactions before preparing the final version of the manuscript.

We realize that in making everyone but ourselves anonymous, we risk creating the impression that we were the principal managers of the show, and that everyone else was lurking unimportantly in the background. Nothing could be further from the truth. The faculty was heavily and responsibly involved in the evaluation and selection process, as were a number of graduate students in the Department. The Berkeley administration independently authorized and oversaw the operation with a basically supportive attitude. And those candidates who were called upon to make decisions in response to our offers did so on their own. As our account will show, it was far from a controlled operation.

We should like to thank Betty Lou Bradshaw, whose research assistance was invaluable, and Christine Egan, who flawlessly coordinated communication between those of us working on the project and efficiently processed the manuscript at various stages of its development. We should also like to thank those several anonymous readers who were participants in the search for evaluating our material. Last but not least, we extend thanks to the Ford Foundation, which provided a grant to cover research costs, and especially to Peter de Janosi of its Higher Education Division for his support of the project.

N.J.S. and R.C.

CHAPTER 1

General Contours of an Academic Market

The market for academic services is something of a nightmare for economists. It is a honeycomb of ignorance, of economically irrational behavior, and of obstacles to mobility of resources. After a comprehensive study of market structure and patterns of mobility, the economist David Brown concluded somewhat mournfully that the academic market was a maverick, and ventured a number of recommendations that would bring its structure and functioning closer to that of a competitive economic market.[1] What are its imperfections, and what consequences do they have for market processes?

INGREDIENTS OF CLASSICAL WAGE THEORY

In the classical labor market, the firm is prepared to offer wages at a level in accord with the marginal value that the labor at a given level of skill will bring to the productive process. On the side of the laborer, he is willing to offer labor in given amounts, depending on the level of disutility that the labor involves and the level of monetary rewards offered. On each side of the market, the conditions of offer are thus informed by a kind of utility function—or economic rationality, if you will—which governs the terms of exchange. That exchange takes place, moreover, at an equilibrium point where the demand and supply functions intersect. In such a market, moreover, it is assumed that the primary sanctions are monetary rewards, that resources are more or less completely mobile, that both buyers and sellers have complete information about market conditions, and that neither buyer nor seller has the power to influence the aggregate output of services or the wage level at which they are exchanged.[2] On every count, the market for academic services complicates these assumptions, and in many cases deviates so far from them as to render them virtually invalid.

THE NATURE OF THE SELLERS AND BUYERS

By market for academic services, we refer to that area where institutions of higher education secure the services of persons who teach and perform related activities in those institutions. The buyers are the hiring institutions, and the sellers are individuals who have received graduate training in some academic field in an institution of higher education.

Immediately it must be noted that we have defined not a single market but a multiplicity of overlapping markets. Among the buyers, large research and graduate-training institutions are in the market for a different kind of service than are institutions which specialize in undergraduate teaching alone, and institutions which offer only two years of college teaching look for yet another range of skills in their prospective employees. These institutions could be subdivided even further according to whether they are large or small, public or private, secular or religious, and so on. There is also diversity on the supply side. We must distinguish, at the very least, between a market for people who will do research and train graduate students, and a market for people who will teach at the undergraduate level alone; these two markets overlap but are in some respects separate from one another.

In this chapter we concentrate mainly on the market for people with skills or promise in the area of research and graduate training, since that is the setting for our own case study. What are the distinctive characteristics of their services? First, these services have a long gestation period. Putting to one side the years of study that must precede entry into Ph.D. training programs, completing those programs requires from three to more than ten years.[3] Furthermore, the labor force—that is, the pool of Ph.D.’s—is highly differentiated by quality and extent of training, special fields of competence and interest, and relative emphasis on research and teaching. So divided and sub-divided has the market for Ph.D.’s become, Brown concluded, that its units lack interchangeability. This reduces the effective level of competition among Ph.D.’s.[4] Certainly it is rare for one academic discipline to hire outside its own ranks, and each discipline is divided into numerous groups of subspecialists who tend to hire their own but not other specialists (for example, econometricians hire econometricians, economic historians hire economic historians, and so on).

The market for academic services is further complicated by variations in the extent to which holders of advanced degrees are hired in the academic and non-academic sectors. The proportion of chemistry Ph.D.’s hired in industry and other non-academic sectors, for example, is much higher than the proportion in anthropology. Within the social sciences, Cartter calculated—on the basis of 1974 figures—that the percentage of anthropologists finding employment in academic institutions is 86.0; for political science 77.7; for economics 70.1; and for psychology 54.0.[5] For sociology, approximately 75 percent of doctorates have found employment in universities and colleges over the