Should there be national boards for newly minted Ph.D.s? John Bruce says yes.

I'd be much more in favor of reducing the time spent on the PhD/postdoctoral treadmill and enable people to get on with their lives one way or the other before they turn 35. Adding on another 6-12 months to prep for and take a national licensing exam would be a huge step in the wrong direction.

In any case, I don't think that there's a real problem that can be solved by the sort of minimum-competency test that this would necessarily be. I'm not familiar with John Bruce, but with all due respect to him, the impression that I get is of a heavy blog reader who is under the impression that high-blogoprofile cases like Ward Churchill are the norm in academia, not just ludicrously extreme cases of genuinely problematic, but far less dramatic, overall trends.

(In a similar vein, one of his commenters jumps in with the Conventional Blogowisdom about Electronic Arts, as though that's all one needs to know about life in the software industry.)

No, just apply the Fair Labor Standards Act to Universities.

John Bruce clearly knows nothing about how hiring happens in the academy. I'm always amazed at how little people, even those associated with universities, know about how they actually work. (Case in point: check out Horowitz's moronic webmag for an article about being a conservative grad student -- the author's clearly never been a grad student.)

Imagine a position opening up in 20th century American literature at State U. Such a job will probably bring in 300-600 applications. Of those, probably 20-40 will be great candidates, and it will be impossible to say one is, in absolute terms, better qualified than another. So what does a good meritocrat do?

Well, any academic hire is always *really* more specific than "20th century American literature." The university may want someone who specializes in fiction or poetics, in regional literatures or wider "Americas" literatures. The university may want someone who could also teach drama courses or theory courses or material text courses or archival research techniques. Or, as with mny alma matter, they might want a workhorse, someone who will teach broadly across the field.

Those sub-specialties are generally used to reduce the 20-40 down to the 10 or so who are interviewed. The performance in the interview, the performance at the call back (teaching performance, job talk, basic social skills, etc.) will then leave the school with someone they feel safe about hiring.

A national exam would do nothing to help this process. A college wants three things from a professor: research, teaching, and service. An exam would not attest to one's ability to do any of those. Teaching is about far more than being able to answer questions about one's field in an exam setting. Research has nothing to do with memorization and on-the-spot argumentation. And service has nothing to do with one's field in the first place.

Finally, about the academy as a place of cronyism: what white-collar field isn't at some level about cronyism? All of my friends working in publishing or advertising or web design got those jobs in part because they knew someone already in the organization. Does that go against a meritocracy? No way. Every hire brings in tons of perfectly qualified applicants. Having a person alredy in the organization, a person trusted by those doing the hires, attest to your ability -- well, that's the whole point of "recommendations" in the first place. If someone whose judgment you trust recommends a job candidate who is clearly qualified, that recommendation is going to be worth a lot.

Get rid of tenure. It will amount to the same thing.