SUSAN HAACK
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woman would not have been appointed had she not been a woman; even
when it is true, but she was the best candidate anyway-her usefulness as
role model is, not necessarily undermined, but potentially' tainted. This
may begin to suggest why attitudes to women in the academy now seem
less thoughtlessly dismissive, more uneasily ambivalent: an edgy combina–
tion of the overtly indulgent and the covertly hostile.
While I have been worrying about bad indirect effects of preferential
hiring, I have been assuming that it would, often enough, have the desirable
direct effect of getting the best person appointed despite her sex. This looks
obvious once one grants that there may be a systematic undervaluation of
women's abilities; nevertheless, I have a nasty suspicion that it isn't true.
Thinking of a systematic undervaluation of women's abilities by, say,
ten percent, we feel assured that, under a policy of preferring a woman
if
she is judged to fall within ten percent of the best, the best candidate
would get the job even if she's a woman. But this requires a further
assumption: that the best woman would get the job. As she
would,
if what
ordinarily happens were that a straightforward effort is made to appoint the
best person, skewed only by that annoying tendency to underestimate the
merit of women candidates. But this is by no means always what happens
(a thought that brings to mind the senior member of the department where
I earned my PhD who, after I was hired for that tenure-track job, was
heard to say of my new chairman: "poor X, forced to appoint on grounds
a
ment.....
f
.
")
Sometimes women don't get positions that they should; sometimes men
don't, either. The problem isn't only (though it is partly) that when there
are hundreds of applications, impossible to read them all, "contacts," those
off-the-record phone calls, and so forth, are bound to be significant. Nor is
it only (though it is partly) that philosophical ability is so subtle, so many–
faceted , and the criteria used often so narrow and so crude, over-valuing
the confident and the fluent and under-valuing the less flashy but deeper
thinker, over-valuing the "productive," as we say, and under-valuing the
slower but more rigorous or creative mind. Worse: the hiring process is too
often less a straightforward
if
ill-informed and clumsily-conducted effort to
identifY the best candidate, than an unseemly struggle of greed and fear.
Greed: we want someone who will improve the standing of the depart–
ment, who has contacts from which we might benefit, who will willingly
do the teaching we'd rather not do, who will publish enough so the tenure
process will go smoothly. Fear: we don't want someone so brilliant or ener–
getic that they make the rest of us look bad, or compete too successfully
for raises and summer money, or who will vote with our enemy on con–
troversial issues. We look, in short, for someone who "fits in." (The
foam-rubber PR term is "collegiality.")
