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"Is academic hiring meritocratic? The author of this piece assumes that it is. As someone whose job it is to actually hire faculty, I can attest that merit is only a small part of the picture.
The single most important part of the picture is the existence of a position at all. In this funding climate, we can only afford to staff a few of the positions (whether faculty, staff, or administration) that we need. If the position doesn't exist, then the relative merit of the prospective candidates means exactly zero.
That may seem obvious, but it gets blithely ignored in the piece. Posted tenure-track faculty positions were down by double digits in most disciplines last year. Does that mean the merit of the candidate pool went down by double digits? Um, no."
More like this
This will probably cause some eye-rolling on the part of my local readers, but there's an interesting article in Inside Higher Ed on the real effect of merit scholarships, which is the term of art for "money given to stude
I have no time for a real entry, but if you haven't yet had your daily quota of sexist nonsense, check out these two links.
Rolling out big federal bucks to fund merit pay for teachers the day after a major report found no benefit from merit pay was probably poor
A must read for those in the midsts of a decision about their operating system.