We've heard a lot about how collegiality criteria offer faculties a means of firing colleagues who don't conform to political and social institutional norms. That's what nearly happened to KC Johnson, whose big crime was that he criticized the ideological one-sidedness of departmental decisionmaking and urged that merit, and not genetics, be the deciding factor in hiring.

And it's unfortunately what happened to Norman Finkelstein. Say what you will about his scholarship and his scholarly deportment, the fact remains that his case was scuppered the moment a dean decided to invoke collegiality as a reason to stall and eventually upset his case. There may be good arguments for why Finkelstein's scholarship is not sound--many have argued that his hostile manner of engaging his critics interferes with the quality of his work. But those arguments should have been made in their place, and should have formed part of the formal review of his work. Bringing in collegiality late in the game was a big mistake on DePaul's part, and set a terrible precedent.

Anyhow--that's by way of saying that there's another way departments justify getting rid of faculty members whose work may by all accounts be all that it ought to be and more, but who have nonetheless not managed to "fit in." And that, if I didn't just give it away, is to invoke "fit." "Fit" is a great way to get rid of faculty members one doesn't like, and it's an especially good way--broad, vague, by definition subjective and visceral and beyond quantification--to fire people who make one uncomfortable, whether for political reasons or for more procedural ones having to do with one's comfy, perhaps dysfunctional professional norms.

Consider the case of "Alison Wunderland," who pseudonymously explains why her hard work and measurable success as a teacher and scholar were not enough to secure her place at her first job:

By the time of my third-year review, I was feeling confident about my performance. My file was huge. In six semesters not only had I finished and defended my dissertation, I had prepared eight new courses from scratch with myriad tailored assignments and teaching aids, created a new concentration for the college curriculum, and spent hours mentoring students, including taking them to conferences and on field trips. But not to be over-balanced in the teaching area, I also had written nine articles and papers of various sorts, participated in over a half-dozen conferences and symposia around the country, served on college advisory boards, committees and panels, pulled strings from my graduate days to bring in important speakers, received five awards from top research libraries to work on my manuscript as well as interest from top presses, and got rave reviews from students and colleagues alike, inside and outside the college.

I wasn't nervous when Fuddydud told me she wanted to meet so she could convey to me the sense of the department about my performance. Again what she said astounded me. But now she had pinned the problem down a bit more. I was working "too hard," I didn’t know how to "prioritize," and what I was producing was "too good."

I couldn't fathom what she meant at first. I pressed her for explanations and examples, but got only vague and unsatisfying answers. Clearly there was an issue of "fit." I had heard about fit. When a department can't or won't be explicit about what they don't like about a candidate for tenure, it's about fit. So I didn't fit well with the department, but I didn't know why.

On paper at least, the fit looked great. I had all the requirements covered and then some. I got along well with my colleagues and had a growing following of devoted students. But as I pondered the few hints Fuddydud gave me and began to think seriously about the culture of the school and the department, the problem began to come into focus. It was exactly that I was exceeding expectations that was the trouble, especially in my teaching.

Then I took a good look around me and saw things clearly for the first time. I had colleagues who showed movies several times a week, some who routinely came to class 20 minutes late or not at all, and others who freely admitted that they prefer it when their students don’t show up. Students said that when Professor Slackjob assigned a 20-page paper, they usually wrote five pages and printed them four times. They got A's and B's.

What Wunderland is describing--however smugly--is a believable, recognizable culture of academic mediocrity in which the entrenched have all agreed to dumb down their standards and feel both threatened and dissed by a young upstart who doesn't buy in and whose hard work thus makes them all look lazy and bad.

Her nascent snotty attitude--palpable, even in this short piece--becomes a working piece of the problem, too. Once she notices that those around her are not exactly responsible, and once she realizes that she would be better liked and more highly evaluated if she asked less of students and did less herself, she can't help but begin to feel some contempt for the folks she so tellingly names--Professors Queenbee, Fuddydud, and Slackjob are all recognizable, in a classically Fieldingesque sort of way (if only there had also been a Thwackum and a Square).

"Fit is important for new faculty. It can mean a happy career or no career. To 'fit' in academia means to conform to the culture of the institution," Wunderland writes. And right there she hits the problem on the head. Did you catch it? She's identifying "fit" with conformity. She's acknowledging that the tenure system is really just a glorified club, and that the bottom line for entry is not the quality of your work, but the thoroughness of your assimilation into the local culture.

Mark Bauerlein is our best chronicler of how this works, in all its dirty dimensions. Check out his seminal article, "Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual," if you haven't already. Bauerlein is explaining how political outlooks get established as academic professional norms, but his analysis can be applied more broadly to general issues of competence. All politics aside, Alison Wunderland offended her colleagues by not being like them and by harboring different beliefs; her ideas about professionalism and competence did not tally with theirs, and made theirs look like the shams they were. She clearly wasn't a good fit. But that doesn't mean that she was the problem.