The criteria of staff selection: Do they exist?

ABSTRACT

The quality of a university is generally seen as a function of the quality of its staff. What are the publicly discussed and verifiable criteria for the selection of that staff? The paper reviews the major commentators, recent studies and writing on academic management but the material found, which is in any case sparse, is really about those who are already in the profession.

There is rhetoric about criteria, but little about those that are actually applied. Public statements about criteria are rare. Some universities publish generalities; and a little more specifically the CVCP agreed with the AUT in 1974 to be content with mediocrity. The only hard public criterion appears to be the due completion of a process of peer-review, a major part of which is a review of peers: a process that is conducted in great privacy.

The private criteria employed by the actors in this process can only be found by deduction from the results. It appears from evidence of disquiet about competence in both teaching and in research that training in either is not a general private criterion. An attempt is then made to deduce the private criteria used in the selection of staff at universities of five types by examining where the research training enjoyed by staff took place. Since this training appears to have taken place, disproportionately often, at the employing university or at another of its type, the conclusion is reached that factors unconnected with any form of academic excellence may play a part.

The difficulty of finding publicly discussed and applied criteria leaves the universities open to the sorts of suspicions that have led, in other areas such as financial management, to perceptible inroads on their autonomy. Some ways forward are discussed.