Sci Eng Ethics DOI 10.1007/s11948-015-9711-8 LETTER
Recruitment Processes in Academia: Does the Emperor Have Any Clothes? Behzad Ataie-Ashtiani1,2
Received: 30 September 2015 / Accepted: 14 October 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Abstract The final outcome of promotion and recruitment processes in universities should be conventional and plausible by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make a plea for the importance of the postauditing and quantitative assessment of the selection criteria. It is shown that for an example case the outcome of the post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the research competency. Keywords Australia
Promotion Recruitment Equal opportunities Civil Engineering
Academic institutions compel appointments policies, which commonly include fair and equal opportunity guidelines, for recruitment and promotion of academic staff. The selection principles have several components, which are difficult to be quantified fully and there is always room for qualitative judgements. In my opinion, the final outcome of these processes should be conventional and plausible, when judged by the members of the relevant scientific community, to affirm that the processes have been competitive and fair. The objective of this opinion letter is to make the case for the importance of a post-auditing and quantitative assessment of the relevance selection criteria for the universities’ recruiting and promoting processes of academic staff. I understand that the opinion can be provocative, but at
& Behzad Ataie-Ashtiani
[email protected] 1
Department of Civil Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, PO Box 11155-9313, Tehran, Iran
2
National Centre for Groundwater Research & Training and School of the Environment, Flinders University, GPO Box 2100, Adelaide, South Australia 5001, Australia
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University
University of Melbourne
University of Queensland
University of Western Australia
Monash University
University of New South Wales
University of Sydney
University of Adelaide
Curtin University
University of Wollongong
Flinders University
Griffith University
Swinburne University of Technology
University of Newcastle
Queensland University of Technology
S. no.
1
2
123
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
School of Civil Engineering and the Built Environment
Discipline of Civil, Surveying and Environmental Engineering
Department of Civil and Construction Engineering
Civil Engineering Discipline
Civil Engineering Discipline
School of Civil, Mining and Environmental Engineering
Department of Civil Engineering
The School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering
School of Civil Engineering
The School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Department of Civil Engineering
School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering
The School of Civil Engineering
Department of Infrastructure Engineering
Civil eng. related school/department/ discipline
Table 1 Research metrics for head of civil engineering disciplines of the Australian universities
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Associate Professor
Senior Lecturer
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
Professor
HoD rank
4—45—14
23—2055—155
13—649—163
12—488—70
5—224—10
14—503—75
2—14—14
21—1426—133
22—1900—230
14—663—101
31—3692—174
16—731—106
23—1633—175
13—486—68
Scopus h-index— NoC—NoD
9—361—82
28—2750—295
–
–
–
19—1313—164
–
27—2781—282
–
–
39—6738—419
23—2179—216
–
28—3621—341
Google Scholar h-index—NoC—NoD
B. Ataie-Ashtiani
Recruitment Processes in Academia: Does the Emperor Have Any…
the same time it is important to signal, particularly to the newcomers and younger researchers, that the processes are unbiased and credible. The major criteria and requirements for selection are generally focused on a commitment to quality teaching and supervision of undergraduate and post-graduate students, having active track record of high quality research outputs, successful grant applications and the ability to attract future funding, and an ability to provide academic and administrative leadership within the discipline. The quantitative indicators for most of the mentioned criteria, including the teaching quality assessment or grant applications successes, are not accessible and verifiable by an external observer who has not been engaged in the assessment process. Among the stated criteria, only the research competency component can be quantified based on publication records. To justify this letter and to provide an example, a number of Australian universities are considered here. The considered universities are among the top twenty universities based on the ARWU Shanghai Academic Ranking of World Universities Australian Rankings (2015). The universities that have a Civil Engineering School/Department/Discipline are considered. The publication indexes for the Head of the School/Department/Discipline (HoD) of Civil Engineering in each university are determined. Table 1 provides the information for each of the HoD based on Scopus and Google Scholar including: h-index, number of citations (NoC), and number of documents (NoD). The information is openly available on the universities’ web sites, Scopus database (2015) and Google Scholar (2015). As expected, the publication metric values are within a wide range. There is no definite check or minimum threshold for the values taken from the table of metrics. For the sake of comparison, the citation analysis of four general engineering fields for the Australian group of eight universities (2015) that was provided by Forbes (2014), based on Google Scholar, is considered. Based on Forbes’ study, approximately 96 % of civil engineering professors have an h-index above 15. Table 1 shows in some cases the metrics seem low for a Professor and a HoD (e.g., rows 10 and 14 of Table 1 with an h-index below 10). It shall be noted that the head of department has a position that may function as a role model for academic staff and research students in some aspects. The recruitment or promotion processes may comply with the universities’ policies, however, the outcomes of the present post-audit does not look reasonable from an external point of view, at least regarding the strong research competency. It can be more disturbing when the process of recruitment is not open. Apparently the processes cannot by fully quantitative and transparent, nevertheless this issue requires further considerations with a broader scope of universities, disciplines, and teaching quality and grant success metric values in order to acquire a resolution between quantitative and qualitative aspects to ensure equity and transparency. I cannot claim, ‘‘The emperor has no clothes’’, but it is reasonable to question, ‘‘Does the emperor have any clothes?’’ Compliance with Ethical Standards Conflict of interest The author declares no competing financial interest.
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B. Ataie-Ashtiani
References ARWU. (2015). (online) (cited: September 12, 2015). http://www.shanghairanking.com/World-UniversityRankings-2015/Australia.html. Forbes, G. (2014). Eng-citation. (online) (cited: September 18, 2015). http://eng-citation.com/. Google Scholar. (2015). (online) (cited: September 18, 2015). https://scholar.google.com/. Group of Eight. (2015). (online) (cited: September 18, 2015). https://go8.edu.au/. Scopus. (2015). (online) (cited: September 13, 2015). http://www.scopus.com/.
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