January 2003
North American universities
have always competed for academic status. The selection of tenure-stream
faculty is a major component in that competition, especially in Canadian
universities where most tenure decisions are positive. In the early nineteen
seventies the introduction of public advertisement of all positions brought
about a significant change in the hiring process. This requirement at least
eliminated the cruder versions of the “old boys’ network” in determining
appointments. In principle, this reform increased the possibility
that academic merit (i.e., what a candidate knew) rather than favoritism
(i.e., whom a candidate knew) would be the basis of selection for academic
positions.
By the early nineteen eighties,
in addition to the goal of merit in appointments, the goal of “Aaffirmative
action” (in the USA) or Aemployment equity” (in Canada) was adopted to
a greater or lesser extent by North American universities. Since
then, many university faculty and almost all administrators have argued
that there is no conflict between merit and equity. (Recently, for
instance, the University of Toronto has adopted a slogan of “Excellence
through Diversity”.
Logically, however, the
claim that there is no conflict between merit and equity is undermined
by those many high-level university administrators who claim that they
seek a proper “balance” between merit and equity: balance is required only
between countervailing units. The claim is also undermined empirically
when, in studies like that described here, the patterns of results obtained
by emphasizing merit are different from those obtained by emphasizing equity.
In the ways that they deal
with such problems as finding the proper “balance” between merit and equity,
universities can be viewed as organisms that, guided by their academic
administrators, differ both with respect to internal motivational and external
environmental conditions.
For instance, with regard
to motivation, York University has a stronger commitment to equity than
the University of Toronto (witness: it is the only Canadian university
to have won a federal Equity Award). It is reasonable to expect,
therefore, that York’s tenure-stream hiring policies would place more emphasis
on equity, and its tenure-stream advertisements might contain phrases like
Aespecially welcome applications from women “rather than Awelcome applications
from both women and men.”
An example of different adaptations
to differing environmental conditions (strength of the economy) is the
contrast between tenure-stream advertisements in Western and Eastern Canada.
A phrase like “outstanding record of research publications” is a sign of
a stronger merit requirement than Ainterest in developing a research program.”
The former sort of phrase is more evident in advertisements from universities
in the West than those in the less affluent East of Canada. This
West/East difference in merit emphases appears to reflect reasonable adaptations
to differing environmental conditions.
It is possible to systematically
study the differential adaptations of universities (and even of such sectors
of universities as the hard sciences versus the huma-nities). The method
is to examine the phraseology of tenure-stream advertisements in order
to indirectly assess differences in degrees of emphasis on merit and equity
as factors in hiring.
To measure these emphases,
the study (conducted by the first author with assistants) employed the
method of Ajudgmental content analysis. 1 Raters use 7-point scales
to assess the degree of merit and of equity in tenure-stream advertisements
for arts and science positions (taken from University Affairs) from which
institutional and departmental identification has been removed. Previous
SAFS Newsletter articles have reported on some aspects of this Canada-wide
study [SAFS Newsletter, 27 (January 2001, 6-7); SAFS Newsletter, 30 (January
2002, 1-4)].
The present study is a closer
analysis of the situation in Ontario, primarily contrasting York University
and the University of Toronto. As in the Canada wide-study, the period
1992-1994 was compared with 1996-1998 because, in 1995, a “political earthquake”
occurred in Ontario, with the left-wing New Democratic Party (NDP) government
of Bob Rae being replaced by the right-wing conservative government of
Mike Harris (whose “common sense revolution” included abolition of employment
equity laws, at least in the private sector, laws which the NDP had strengthened
during its 1990-1995 tenure in government).
On the face of it, University
of Toronto and York appeared to react differently to the 1995 left-to-right
shift in the Ontario government. For example, whereas, at least on
the administrative level, University of Toronto maintained cordial relations
with the Harris government, Harris’s first minister of education was pelted
with tomatoes in a rowdy protest when he visited York, York=s administration
did not publicly apologize. Also, these two large Ontario universities
differ in the strength of their commitment to employment equity, and the
position of their average faculty on the left-right political continuum.
So an expected result for this study was that there would be a differential
effect of the Rae-to-Harris political change on the two universities’ emphasis
on equity in their tenure-stream advertisements.
For comparative purposes,
the study looked at a third group of university advertisements for the
“rest” of Ontario2 so the design of our factorial study had Location as
a three-level factor (York, Toronto, and Rest). The second factor
was Time (1992-1994 vs. 1996-1998), while the third factor was Discipline
Hardness (hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities). Rated Merit
and Rated Equity were the dependent variables. Finally, there was a Rater
factor, the four raters (Yaniv Morgenstern, Joanna Mostowka, Carol Okamoto,
and Joanna Renata) providing the four levels of this factor.
The inter-rater correlations
for merit ranged from 0.55 to 0.76; for equity, the correlations were higher,
ranging from 0.83 to 0.93. There were statistically significant3
differences among raters in their mean merit (ranging from 4.30 to 5.02)
but not equity ratings. However, most importantly, no interactions
emerged between the four-level Rater factor and the other three factors
of Location, Discipline Hardness, and Time. That is to say, we can
be confident that differences among raters did not confound the interpretation
of what the raters were rating with respect to the three factors of Location,
Time, and Discipline Hardness.
A potential source of bias
was that, especially in the case of the most experienced rater who had
worked on prior studies, raters may have been able to identify York advertisements
even though, as in previous studies, the university and departmental identification
had been removed. To the extent that this identification was possible,
raters may have given higher equity ratings to York advertisements not
on the grounds of actual content, but on the grounds of expecting York
advertisements to be more equity-oriented.
To investigate this source
of potential bias, raters were asked to guess the origin of each advertisement
(York, Toronto, or Rest), and to express the degree of confidence in their
identification on a 5-point scale. Mean identification accuracy was
not above chance level, and the two raters whose confidence in their ability
to identify advertisements was highest were also the two raters who performed
at significantly below chance level in correctly identifying York advertisements.
Accordingly, it is unlikely that this source of bias confounded the results.
Another distinction between
adaptations is to classify them into those readily explicable or expected
in terms of institutional policies and/or the environment, and those that
are not so readily understandable in those terms.
An example of an expected
difference that has already been anecdotally mentioned is the York/Toronto
difference in their emphasis on equity. The results of the present
study’s judgmental content analysis were in line with this expectation.
York’s mean equity rating (3.75) was significantly higher than Toronto’s
(1.80).
Taken together, the remaining
Ontario Universities (Rest) had an average equity score that equaled that
of York (i.e., 3.75), suggesting that, on the average, those other universities
followed York’s rather than Toronto’s degree of emphasis on equity.
It bears emphasis that the Rest category contained universities that probably
vary considerably in terms of their equity emphasis. A more recent
example of an extreme equity emphasis was Wilfrid Laurier’s psychology
department which, in 1999, advertised a developmental psychology position
that was restricted to women only (see SAFS Newsletter, 23, November 1999,
1-3).
However, contrary to what
was expected in terms of differences in policy regarding equity, the Rae-to-Harris
shift had no effect on mean equity ratings, either in terms of the main
effect of Time, or the specifically predicted Location x Time interaction.
So, despite the marked York/Toronto differences in their commitment to
equity position on the left-right political continuum, and reactions to
the Harris government, the relative equity emphasis of the tenure-stream
ads of these institutions remained unaffected by the provincial left-to-right
political shift.
Still, when the merit results
were analyzed, a significant Location x Timeinteraction did emerge
as depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 1
As inspection of Figure 1
suggests, the source of this interaction was that, whereas over time (from
the Rae to the Harris period) York and the Rest increased their merit emphasis,
Toronto uniquely decreased its merit emphasis. So, contrary to expectations,
the Rae-to-Harris shift differentially affected Toronto and York (together
with the Rest) not in their equity but in their merit emphases.
Figure 1 also shows that
the merit requirements for York and Toronto were approximately equal, and
markedly higher than those for the Rest. This seems to be an expected
result that stems from the greater funding available to both York and Toronto
compared to the remaining Ontario universities (which include a number
of quite small institutions where externally funded research is not undertaken
on the scale of either York or Toronto).
The merit results also yielded
a significant interaction between Discipline Hardness and Time, and hence
another differential Rae-to-Harris effect not on equity but on merit.
This interaction is depicted in Figure 2. It is clear that there is
a marked and unique increase of the merit emphasis in the hard sciences
from the Rae period (when there was essentially no difference among the
three discipline-hardness categories) to the Harris period (where the marked
difference is between the hard sciences and the other two categories).
Moreover, as there was no three-way interaction between Location, Discipline
Hardness, and Time, this unique increase in the emphasis on
merit in the hard sciences appears to have occurred across all Ontario
Universities.
Figure 2
The increase in merit hardness
from the Rae period in the hard sciences alone is not readily explicable
in terms of explicitly formulated policies. It may, however, reflect
an “adaptation” to equity pressures by departments in the hard sciences.
Perhaps one result of the Rae-to-Harris shift was to produce more explicit
attention to the equity vs. merit issue in tenure-stream hiring, and faculty
in the hard sciences, who share more agreement about criteria for merit,
adjusted to the pressure from administrations and ‘equity officers’ for
‘inclusive’ language in advertisements by increasing the merit requirements
for positions. An indirect way of testing this interpretation would be
to survey faculty who were members of hiring committees in the 1992-1994
and 1996-1998 periods concerning their attitudes towards the merit/equity
“balance” and departmental policies on tenure-stream appointments.
Figure 3
The third and final significant
interaction that emerged from the merit results was that between Location
and Discipline Hardness, an interaction that is depicted in Figure
3. This interaction arises from a contrast between York on the one hand,
and Toronto and the Rest on the other hand. Whereas at York, social
science had the highest merit requirements, at Toronto and in the Rest,
social science had the lowest merit emphasis.
Some “local”, admittedly
anecdotal, knowledge may account for this apparently unique social-science
emphasis on merit at York during the nineties. During the seventies
and early eighties, a period of considerable expansion in the social sciences,
there was a perception of ‘softness’ in social science appointments.
In the mid- to late-1980s the Faculty of Arts administration revised and
standardized procedures for tenure and promotion committees. These
factors may have subsequently strengthened the emphasis on merit in advertisements
for positions in the social sciences.
To more systematically test
this account, it may be possible to conduct interviews with those in positions
of administrative authority at the time. Another approach would be
to apply the present judgmental content analysis to Ontario university
advertisements during two earlier sets of three-year periods (e.g., 1978-1980
and 1982-1984) to see whether the sort of interaction depicted in the bottom
panel of the figure emerges.
The method of judgmental
content analysis of tenure-stream advertisements provides a systematic,
empirical way of examining differences in the way in which merit and equity
in tenure-stream hiring are emphasized. Some of these differences
are either due to obvious differences in institutional policies, or to
marked differences in the environment in which universities operate.
However, there are other
differences that came to light that are not predictable on the basis of
‘armchair’ study. It is interesting that in this research these less expected
differences emerged not in the equity but in the merit emphases, and there
were unique aspects shown by the University of Toronto in the later, 1996-1998
period (Figure 1), by the hard sciences in the later, 1996-1998 period
(Figure 2), and by York University in the social sciences (Figure 3).
Finally, it is possible to generate hypotheses that may account for these
unexpected effects, hypotheses that are themselves open to further empirical
testing. These investigations, then, appear to be relevant to those
Canadian academic administrators who are interested in finding the right
“balance” between merit and equity, no matter where they are positioned
on the merit-equity continuum.
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