ABSTRACT
The sense of confusion felt reading existing studies on the subject is only deepened by the rumors and anecdotes that circulate about hiring committees. Judith Lazar (2001) recently recorded her painful experience, putting down in black and white what, in France, is usually only exchanged in private conversation among academic colleagues and is in any case never overtly publicized-all the unmentionable arrangements that hiring committees, as she understands them, are open to using, committees that have made their decision before the hiring process even starts, committees that are not really in control of that process because in truth it depends on factors operating outside the committee-room: brief hallway exchanges, secret alliances, preexisting coalitions. This type of account-Lazar’s book is the most thoroughgoing example-is completely incompatible with another type, just as readily encountered, emphasizing the notion that these procedures are uncontrollable and extremely vulnerable. Seemingly insignifi - cant events-a statement made in a committee by a particular person, the uttering of a particular word, a missed meeting-are all it takes to shift the decision in one direction or another, all it takes for the candidate with the greatest support, most likely to produce consensus, to lose any hope of being chosen. In this understanding, chance and the arbitrary prove the real decision-makers, as Max Weber explained in “Science as a Vocation” (Weber 1946 [1919]: 131-132):
What has remained and what has been essentially increased is a factor peculiar to the university career. . . . Certainly chance does not rule alone, but it rules to an unusually high degree. I know of hardly any
career on earth where chance plays such a role. I may say so all the more since I personally owe it to some mere accidents that during my very early years I was appointed to a full professorship in a discipline in which persons of my generation had achieved more than I had. And, indeed, I fancy, on the basis of this experience, that I have a sharp eye for the undeserved fate of the many whom accident has cast in the opposite direction and who within this selective apparatus in spite of their ability do not attain the positions that are due them.
