January 2002
In the long run, the quality
of a university’s faculty is arguably the most important determinant of
its effectiveness as an academic institution. In Canadian universities,
the most critical decision point about faculty occurs at hiring at the
junior (assistant-professor), tenure-stream level, because an individual
hired into the tenure stream has an excellent chance (about 80%) of obtaining
tenure. This contrasts with the very low tenure-granting policies of such
American institutions as the ivy-league universities like Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, and Brown, for which tenure-stream hiring decisions are not
so critical.
Until the late sixties, tenure-stream
hiring in North America was informal, with no requirement to openly advertise
tenure-stream faculty positions. Following the introduction of that requirement,
there began to be a demand to consider not only merit but also equity in
determining the winner of each tenure-stream competition for candidate
faculty members. In a report last year (Provincial politics fail to affect
employment equity commitment in universities, SAFS Newsletter, 2000, 27,
6-7), I suggested that the phraseology of tenure-stream advertisements
could serve as an indirect indication of a university’s commitment to the
conflicting principles of employment equity as against merit. Using a method
I have labeled “judgmental content analysis” of the wording of those ads,
I reported the results of testing a specific hypothesis, which was that
the “political earthquake” that occurred in Ontario with the change from
the Rae to the Harris government (a change that included the abolition
of employment equity laws for private industries) would affect the equity
wording of Ontario universities’ tenure-stream advertisements. The hypothesis
seemed intuitively plausible, if only because the major source of funding
for universities is provincial rather than federal. However, our results
conclusively failed to support the hypothesis, and I concluded that the
lesson for those such as members of SAFS, who are committed to advancing
merit over equity aims in higher education, is that they have to work independently
of the political changes that occur outside the university.
Aside from the possibility
of testing such specific hypotheses concerning the impact of provincial
politics, the project also offers an opportunity to evaluate the influence
of such factors as university mission (using the Macleans’ 3-level categorization
of universities: medical/doctoral, comprehensive, and undergraduate) and
discipline hardness (physical science, social science, and humanities)
on both equity and merit phraseology. As I indicated in my previous report,
the data examined (with funding from the Donner Canadian Foundation and
the Horowitz Foundation) were some 500 arts and science tenure-stream ads
in University Affairs; the ratings were carried out using a 7-point scale
on both equity and merit by student raters (in this study, they were Sean
Fidler, Yaniv Morgenstern, and Wendy Tryhorn), and the four factors examined
were university mission (using the Macleans’ 3-level categorization of
universities: medical/doctoral, comprehensive, and undergraduate), discipline
hardness (physical sciences, social sciences, and humanities), time (1992-4
vs 1996-8), and location (Eastern Canada, Ontario, Western Canada, and
Quebec). Analysis of variance was employed to assess whether these factors,
or their interactions, exerted a significant influence on either equity
or merit phraseology.
Viewed from the perspective
of the discipline of psychology, the phraseology of the tenure-stream ads
reflects collective or institutional cognitive functioning, which is clearly
affected by such explicit sources as advice from “equity” officers and
other administrators who favor what have recently been called “diversity”
aims in academic functioning. However, if an influence such as university
mission is also operating in affecting the wording of ads, then I suggest
that this is an implicit or latent influence, because, to my knowledge,
there have not been institutional-explicit references to hiring policies
that have taken into account a university’s mission, or the hardness of
the discipline, or the location (in Canada) of the university. Still, the
influence of a factor like mission may have a plausible rationale (e.g.,
merit requirements for faculty could reasonably be set higher for medical/doctoral
institutions than those devoted only to undergraduate education). It is
much more difficult to produce even an implicit rationale for those influences
that interact on ad phraseology. Such interactions, I suggest, indicate
the presence of irrational or unconscious influences on collective institutional
cognitive functioning. In this note and two figures, I present an example
each of how statistically significant (defined at a level of less than
0.05, i.e., that there is a less than 5% chance that the observed sample
difference is drawn from a population with no difference) main effects
of mission on merit and equity ratings were significantly qualified by
differences in location (West, Ontario, and East).
Figure 1 shows mean merit
ratings on the vertical axes of the graphs in the top and bottom panels.
The top panel shows the main effect of mission, with the medical/doctoral,
comprehensive, and undergraduate institutions being clearly ordered in
a way that could be readily rationalized — research-intensive institutions
require higher merit standards for their faculty than those where the emphasis
on research is less, or not even part of the professorial requirement However,
the significant mission x location interaction shown in the lower panel
indicates that whereas in the West (solid function) it is the undergraduate
institutions that are lower than the other two institutions, in Ontario
and in the East, the main difference is between the (higher) medical/doctoral
institutions and the other two sorts which do not differ from each other.
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One can speculate why the influence
of mission is qualified in this particular way by location (the data shown
in both figures excluded the fourth location, Quebec, as that province
had no advertisements for tenure-stream positions in undergraduate institutions),
but one would be hard put to provide a rationale for this sort of interactive
influence. For example, what rational justification could be given for
the medical/doctoral vs. comprehensive difference in Ontario and the East
disappearing (and even slightly reversing) in the West?
The interactive influence
of location on mission’s influence on equity phraseology shown in the bottom
panel of Figure 2 (mean equity ratings on vertical axis) is even more marked
than the location x mission inter-action on merit phraseology.
The main mission effect on
equity phraseology is that medical/doctoral and comprehensive institutions
are higher than undergraduate ones (top panel), and proponents of equity
or ‘diversity” may rationalize this as an indication that the more numerous
“equity officers” that are present in non-undergraduate institutions are,
indeed, valuable for keeping “diversity issues” front and center in hiring
policies. However, as the bottom panel indicates, there are three quite
different mission functions in the three areas, with only the West being
similar to the mission main effect shown in the top panel of the figure.
The function for Ontario (dashed line in the bottom panel) is particularly
aberrant, with the medical/doctoral institutions ranking lowest in their
emphasis on equity, and comprehensive and undergraduate institutions being
approximately equal.
The two interactions I have
depicted here are only a subset of a large number of significant interactions
that we have found (to be reported elsewhere in more detail), and some
of these were three-way interactions (among three factors), interactions
which are even more difficult to account for in terms of a sensible rationale.
It is interesting to note that for the experimental psychologist seeking
to manipulate variables defined in abstract, conceptual terms, interactions,
especially higher order ones containing more than two factors, are a bane
of existence. In the case of this non-experimental research into the nature
of collective, institutional activity involved in the writing of tenure-stream
ads, interactions illuminate the complexities underlying what, in fact,
is an activity that is influenced not only by stated policy formulations
of “equity,” “diversity,” or even “excellence,” but also by latent or even
unconscious influences that apparently affect not only the equity but also
the merit wording of tenure-stream advertisements.
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