It’s Time to Mandate Merit

In an August City Journal piece, my former colleague John Sailer wonderfully quoted an anonymous professor: “Every day, the universities wake up and break the law.” Just about every faculty-hiring process in America’s colleges and universities discriminates—sometimes barely legally, when it’s just political discrimination to ensure that only radical professors get hired. The education-establishment discriminators do that by drafting job advertisements with specializations that ensure only radicals need apply: a preference for environmental history, human rights, and/or social movements when they’re subtle, a specialization in genderqueer Palestinian sociology with a concentration on community engagement in Dubuque when they’re not.

Political discrimination as often as not is camouflage for breaking civil-rights law. Political discrimination as often as not is camouflage for breaking civil-rights law and straightforwardly discriminating by race and sex. The search for X Studies is meant outright to select a member of X group to get the teaching job—and to make sure that white men (above all) don’t get hired. National Association of Scholars (NAS) researchers FOIAed the hiring-committee professors’ emails, and they said outright what they were doing. Colleges and universities systematically discriminate, systematically undermine the principles of individual merit and freedom of inquiry, and break anti-discrimination laws whenever they can get away with it.

The search for X Studies is meant outright to select a member of X group to get the teaching job. Everybody knows what’s happening—but lawsuits mostly founder because the hiring process is a “black box” and plaintiffs can’t get conclusive proof of discrimination. The trick is to get information out there that makes it impossible for the education establishment to keep pretending to the public that they don’t discriminate. We need a Pinocchio Act. Or, close enough, NAS’s new model Faculty Merit Act.

The Faculty Merit Act requires state universities to publish every higher-education standardized test score (SAT, ACT, CRT, GRE, LSAT, MCAT, etc.) of every faculty member, as well as the standardized test score of every applicant for the faculty member’s position—of every applicant selected for a first interview and every applicant selected for a final interview. It requires everyone in the hiring process, both applicants and administrators, to affirm under penalty of perjury that they have provided every standardized test score.

An SAT score isn’t the same thing as being able to write an interesting book or discover something interesting in a lab. But a standardized test score isn’t a bad proxy for student merit in undergraduate admissions, and it isn’t a bad proxy for faculty merit in the hiring process. If the public and policymakers can see that a faculty search had 300 applicants, that the standardized test scores dropped during each round of the selection process, and that the person who got the job had a lower SAT score than 290 other applicants, then they can see that something is wrong. If they see that a “cluster hire” search had only five applicants, or just one, they can tell that the search process was rigged. Requiring applicants, search committees, and university leaders to affirm they have provided full information, under penalty of perjury, ought to deter the education establishment’s standard urge to bamboozle the public.

Even better, collecting and publishing information about standardized tests will help the victims of discrimination in the academic-hiring process sue colleges and universities. The Faculty Merit Act opens the black box of faculty hiring. It will give plaintiffs a fighting chance to win in lawsuits against academic discrimination.

And that means that college presidents who don’t want their colleges to be punished with stiff fines for breaking the law—to speak nothing of not wanting to be convicted for perjury themselves—will put a halt to systematic discrimination. Or, at any rate, reduce it very substantially.

A bonus of the Faculty Merit Act is that it will make public the decline in faculty merit that has resulted from systematic discrimination by the education establishment. You cannot discriminate against individual merit in faculty search after faculty search without that discrimination having a systematic effect to reduce overall faculty merit. The effect has been worst in the politicized disciplines, which have discriminated most intensively. The average SAT scores of faculty in ethnic studies departments are likely to be at least one standard deviation below the average scores of faculty in physics departments. The Faculty Merit Act also requires colleges and universities to post the average standardized test score of the faculty in every department. That requirement will make clear which departments have been worst affected by politicization and discrimination.

The Faculty Merit Act will make public the decline that has resulted from systematic discrimination. The Act also will make clear that the public and policymakers need not credit the professoriate’s claims that the public should defer to their authority in questions of how to run colleges and universities—and, indeed, to their authority when they speak on any matter of public concern. They inherited those claims from previous generations of faculty, who based their authority ultimately on meritocratic selection for professional competence. But the last generation of professors hired largely by meritocratic selection already is approaching retirement. The Faculty Merit Act will make it transparently clear that the newer generations of professors have not earned public deference, either on questions of academic policy or about any public matter.

The Act will make clear that the public need not credit the professoriate’s claims that we should defer to their authority. The Act’s effectiveness will depend on standardized testing companies not colluding in discrimination. Several years ago, the College Board considered disguising its real data behind “adversity scores.” The Board may yet soften its tests so much that they provide no data to distinguish faculty applicants from one another. Then, too, if the Act becomes law, both hiring committees and faculty applicants doubtless will work to game the system. But it’ll take at least a few years for them to figure out a workaround. The Act may not be a permanent fix, but it’ll help for a good while.

The Faculty Merit Act will make academic discrimination transparent and should deter the education establishment from discriminating so blatantly and so massively when it hires faculty. It also will make clear that a generation of faculty hired on grounds other than individual merit have forfeited their professional authority when they speak on any matter of university governance or public policy. It will function both as a Pinocchio Act and as an Emperor Has No Clothes Act.

The Faculty Merit Act can’t become law too soon.

David Randall is executive director of the Civics Alliance and director of research at the National Association of Scholars.