Expectation as a Precondition of Success
"It’s not excellence which leads to celebrity, but
celebrity which leads to excellence. One makes one’s reputation, and one’s
reputation enables one to achieve the conditions in which one can do good work”.
– Michael Frayn
I love Michael Frayn’s writing. I often use his prose on death when teaching my large undergraduate class
on the subject. That’s a blog entry for another time. But the quotation above
got me thinking about the junior faculty hiring in which we’re engaged and the
issue of who becomes an academic star, this year’s hot commodity on the
academic job market. Many people think that because those people so identified
as intellectually HOT do go on to achieve great things that our ability to spot
brilliance is dead on. Some colleagues act as if they owned “genius detectors”
which allow them to judge on the basis of one good question, one brow furrowed
just the right way at just the right time or one speedy reply to a tough question
that so-and-so is really smart. But I often have a thought like the Frayn
quotation above. At least in some cases, the hot shots become real hot shots
because we expect more of them. We follow their careers, read their papers, and
attend their talks with heightened expectations. Of course, they also tend to
get jobs at pressure cooker universities with high research demands, little
teaching to get in the way, and a real “publish or perish” environment. A
colleague once commented that he suspected you could take any of the candidates
on the academic job market, plunk them down into that environment, with that
amount of attention and expectation and they’d go on to achieve great things. Years
after we could pat ourselves on the back, say what a good job we’ve done, and
note how well our genius detectors work.
I try to remember this humbling thought when I reflect on my
own academic success and attribute it to hard work. Hard work is part of the
story. But it was getting a good academic job in the first place made the hard
work rewarding. There were people in grad school with me who didn’t get tenure
track jobs at research intensive universities and their careers now look
different than mine. So I did work hard but I was also lucky.
An aside: Those of us concerned about equity wonder about
the epistemic basis of these quick and certain judgments. Our feminist dean
asks “Is the preference for the quick reply any more than an aesthetic
preference? Doesn’t it matter more how good the reply is, not how fast it comes?”
Others worry whether those of us socialized to smile our faces off—make others comfortable
and happy at all times—can ever really look smart in that deep, in thought, furrowed
brow kind of way. (Maybe someone should market brow wrinkling cream—a kind
of anti-Botox—for academic performance enhancement!) Our equity guide asks if we can “hear” soft
voices, southern accents, lilting speech as “smart”? Never mind the tendency to
discomfort if the candidate is disabled, outside prevailing norms for gender,
or clearly of a non-standard sexual orientation.
I’m thinking lots about hiring these days as we set out to replace the 1/3 of the department about to retire–able bodied, straight white men all. It’s an exciting challenge and I’m glad to be involved.
