Faculty Hiring: Exercising Professional Jurisdiction Over Epistemic Matters

ABSTRACT

Faculty members are entrusted with great power to decide who deserves space within the academic profession. Given that the profession’s central mission is knowledge production, such decisions inevitably concern epistemic matters, and specifically, what constitutes legitimate knowledge. From this perspective, faculty hiring is not only a matter of inviting new scholars into the academy but an opportunity to welcome new, creative knowledge, or perhaps knowledge that unsettles what has been taken-for-granted. Through interviews with 33 research university professors, we explored how search committees approached epistemic matters throughout the hiring process. Our analysis surfaced three distinct approaches. Defensive committees acted as if their primary task was safeguarding their discipline and department from disruptive epistemic contributions. Inclusive committees foregrounded local community, especially students’ learning interests, and welcomed innovative even disruptive epistemic contributions. Conflictive committees displayed both tendencies, but ultimately favored scholars whose epistemic contributions would not disrupt the department or discipline. Across all three approaches, participants described how committees relied on conventions that generated both epistemic and demographic exclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Faculty hiring
• epistemic exclusion
• disciplinary logics
• academic hiring
• professional jurisdiction

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Many individuals contribute to knowledge production, including students, themselves, staff, and leaders. While knowledge is also produced in other spaces (e.g., communities, workplaces, etc.), colleges and universities continue to receive extensive support for knowledge work and faculty are expected and entrusted with the responsibility to create and share knowledge.

2. By epistemic matters, we refer to ways of knowing and ways of producing and sharing knowledge.

3. There is often sub-discipline or sub-field variation within a department, meaning a biology department will house professors affiliated with biology as well as more specific sub-fields within biology. However, a department is often bonded through a common broader disciplinary affiliation.

4. The men who taught in early colonial colleges fell into two broad categories: those who taught specific subject areas and tutors, who primarily worked with younger students and faculty. For readability, we use the general term “faculty” in this article.

5. Levine (2021) details how, by the early 1900s, there was regular “scholarly traffic” between the U.S. and Germany, which evidences that habits related to knowledge production and notions of legitimate knowledge were further solidified through such exchanges.

6. A few participants member checked their transcripts. We received edits and requests for heavy masking from two participants.

7. We refer to predominantly white institution(s) as “PWI”

8. Minority Serving Intuitions enroll large portions of racially minoritized students. Regional serving institutions serve the local region through teaching and research. There is often overlap between the two institution types (Crisp et al., 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a College of Education Seed Grant from Michigan State University.