Starting a research center or think-tank inside of an organization that is potentially critical of business-as-usual at that organization and others is challenging.
Almost inevitably, the people who propose such an initiative are walking one of three paths: 1) fierce drive and intensity that makes their initiative compelling to administrators and funders who are acquainted with the leaders of the initiative, with the hope that existing ties will be enough to blunt any local troublemaking or will rest on the usual consultative and incremental grounds that pertains across the institution; 2) recruited from elsewhere due to their research and public advocacy for the prestige of the initiative, without much knowledge about the temperament of the recruited leadership and thus their likelihood of scourging their own institution; 3) awareness that the policy recommendations from the critique are likely to be industry-wide, outward-facing, and so comprehensive or expansive that they will not disrupt internal business-as-usual.
These aren’t just patterns in academia—corporations and non-profits also sometimes create internal offices or projects with a self-critical edge and some degree of autonomy in pursuing their remit. Timnit Gebru was fired by Google for pursuing that kind of independent approach to AI ethics, for example. Research organizations within corporations often are in tension with the main company hierarchy, despite the fact that they’re also proven to generate the kind of valuable inquiry and critical insight that most companies cannot achieve otherwise.
I’m particularly interested in how hard it is for academic researchers who work on economic and social inequality within higher education, or on higher education’s role in the reproduction or intensification of inequality, to fully apply their insights to their own institutions, especially within their own team or office. Last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education story about the economist Raj Chetty, whose Harvard research team has provided the most powerful analysis of how selective higher education reproduces socioeconomic hierarchy and intensifies inequality pretty well is the poster child for this problem.
Though it is in that sense also something of a non-story. The story details that Chetty’s group has used rankings of perceived institutional prestige to help decide who to hire, and that it demands long hours and intense dedication from its employees. No matter how the leadership of a center that has the potential of biting the hand that feeds it is put into place, almost nobody gets put into a leadership or managerial role in academia if they don’t sign on to the basic ethos of competitive meritocracy. If someone was given university funds to create a Center for the Study of Kind and Indulgent Treatment of Employees or an Institute for Post-Neoliberal Generosity and Communitarian Nurturing, they’d be expected to use standard meritocratic criteria in staffing up their new office and to evaluate employees the same way everybody else was evaluated across the institution.
I think the real take-away of the story is the extent to which rigid managerial consistency is the enemy of one kind of common-sense answer to inequality, despite the fact consistency of that kind within academia increasingly presents itself as a form of social transformation aimed at equity.
Chetty’s group, Opportunity Insights, uses a consistent ranking scheme to evaluate job candidates. The Chronicle story focuses on their weighting of the prestige of the institutions that candidates have attended, which the organization uses as a proxy for the rigor of the candidate’s academic training—with the aim of hiring staff who can right away meet the demands of a high-intensity office pursuing ambitious analytic goals. In some basic sense, this is completely correct—a graduate with an economics degree and a 3.9 GPA from Swarthmore is more likely to be able to function as a “pre-doctoral fellow” in that situation than a graduate of a badly underfunded non-selective public university with a 3.95 GPA. But that’s the thinking that reinforces the problem that Opportunity Insights studies.
You’d think that an obvious way to show a commitment to breaking the hold of highly selective universities and colleges over social mobility would be for a group like Opportunity Insights to pioneer some other way to identify people with potential and to use their office as a way to provide on-the-job training that can make up for earlier lack of access to highly selective education.
The problem is that this kind of Horatio Alger mailroom-to-boardroom vision of mobility has been condemned up and down by contemporary human resources offices, DEI administrators, and others as looking for a good “fit”, as the channel that lets good old boys hire people who are most like them. Their answer to that has been to build more and more rigorous systems that aim for consistency and that aim to present candidates and employees just in terms of qualifications, not in terms of qualities.
But that leads straight back to credentialism, which leads straight back to the underlying infrastructure of inequality that Opportunity Insights has documented so well. Applied in the current institutional style, consistency makes it impossible to see someone whose intrinsic motivations might make them more driven than someone with a blue-chip pedigree. It makes it impossible to see someone who might have insight into the study of inequality that comes from life experience first, academic training second. It makes it impossible to decide to offer someone a hand up instead of demanding that someone immediately be one more of the all-hands-on-deck working as if every day is an emergency.
Which really gets us around to something that Opportunity Insights doesn’t study and that mostly academia has become incapable of openly embracing. Maybe part of the answer to credentialism and accelerating inequality is not rethinking selectivity, it is embracing “good enough” as the basic economic and social ethos of a just and sane society. Maybe Opportunity Insights could do work just as valuable as what it does now by hiring a wider range of people but also by being less intense, less certain that it must be among the best and brightest. Maybe if we all unwind our operations to the extent that we can, we can make more room for everybody.
Maybe that’s what we all should be aiming for—a kind of strategic arms limitation talks across the entirety of our professional worlds and our economic management. Because I don’t think it’s about one office that ought to have some special responsibility to do better. It’s about all of us.
Yes, agreed. Michael Young’s Meritocracy book was so prescient that in the end “merit” would come to mean, and only mean, grades and school quality, because they are so tantalisingly quantified (not well-quantified, just quantified)
It's very plausible that we'd all be better off if the M&A lawyers and HFT engineers on all sides went home at 5 and spent less time trying to obtain an edge over each other. But surely that can't be true for Opportunity Insights!