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Bias in the Academy?
Christopher E. Hill
To the Editor:
Frankly, I’m tired of the constant barrage of articles in Academe about bias in the academy. In particular, the failure to distinguish between legitimate bias and unfair bias is troubling to me. I think we would all like to see smart, capable people hired into the professoriate. Can we agree that a bias favoring the smart, the capable, the accomplished, the hardworking, is okay?
Michael Shott, for example, in the September–October issue of Academe, presents data that suggest that hiring practices are different at liberal arts colleges than they are at research universities in his field of archaeology. To Shott, this is evidence of class bias at the liberal arts schools in favor of those of higher socioeconomic class. And that, of course, is a bad thing. And the magazine supports his assertion by printing the headline “How Liberal Arts Colleges Perpetuate Class Bias” with the words “class bias” in a font twice the size of the rest of the inflammatory headline. Shott offers a shoddy statistical analysis that pins the difference in hiring on the liberal arts institutions. The analysis of residuals that Shott performed could only show that the liberal arts colleges were the ones out of line with the norm, since with the hiring dominated 11 to 1 by research universities, the research universities define the statistical norm. So if he were to be fair, all Shott could really say is that hiring is different at the two types of institutions. Without knowing the makeup of the pool of applicants, the discrepancy could conceivably result from hiring bias against liberal arts graduates by research schools.
But the bigger issue is that Shott, as seems common in almost every article printed in Academe, assumes that if there is bias, it is illegitimate bias. I don’t think Shott’s thesis about hiring in archaeology is well supported, or even all that interesting if it were true. But if some colleges disproportionately did hire professors from a higher socioeconomic class, could it not be because those applicants were better qualified? Could it be that they hire based on capability and talent, and the retroactively measured “bias” toward a certain socioeconomic class just happened to be correlated? Does Shott have in his hands data that suggest there is absolutely no relationship between socioeconomic class and intellectual ability?
I’m tired of seeing those questions ignored as though they were irrelevant to the discussion. I support and appreciate the goals and history of the AAUP, but your magazine in the last year or two consistently annoys the hell out of me.
Christopher E. Hill
(Biology)
Coastal Carolina University
Michael Shott Responds:
Christopher Hill’s impassioned letter illustrates the part of my thesis about the reception of evidence of class bias. Let’s leave aside the many articles that annoyed the hell out of him and concentrate on mine.
I freely concede that Hill is a smarter guy than I, but his argument confuses. First, he concludes that data do not pattern. Then he explains the pattern whose existence he denies. However shoddy my analysis (and research universities do not “define” results any less than liberal arts colleges depart from them), correlation is not necessarily causation, a lesson that most of us learned in first-year logic. But it can be. Neither of us knows for certain, but in the absence of compelling argument—not Hill’s sunny view of academic hiring practices—concluding that liberal arts colleges “just happen” to hire better faculty (however “better” is defined and measured) is as risible at face value as concluding that George Bush just happens to be president because he’s the smartest guy in America.
Offering no evidence to support his view, Hill demands conclusive evidence supporting mine. Instead, I make a modest proposal that doesn’t require eating babies: from our different perspectives, Hill and I might collaborate on research to disentangle the separate effects upon standing of merit and class. Then we would discover who was more right than wrong, although many factors govern academic placement.
Perhaps Hill agrees with the first President Bush, scion of a family of inherited wealth and great social capital, who famously declared that America was a class-free society. What explained his high office? He just happened to be smarter than the rest of us. Apparently, to suggest otherwise is a bad thing.
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