This post on the “Myth of Academic Stardom” really disappointed me.  I am often perplexed by how departments convergence on a small number of job market candidates when hiring assistant professors.  I’m also surprised that some fantastic advanced scholars remain “under placed” while others continually get job market offers.

Unfortunately, this post starts with a very odd claim:

“For brands to work as brands, it must be possible to rank them.”

Really?  This seem not only is a silly statement about brands.  Brands are meant to differentiate, but that doesn’t mean that they have to all be ranked.  It also seems like a terrible analogy.

The surprising part of academic stardom is that many of the “stars” don’t actually look that much different from at least some of the non-stars.

For example, when entering the job market, lots of ABD candidates have similar CVs.  There are lots of candidates from very good departments, have great letters, and have presented at numerous conferences.  What tends to differentiate many of the candidates is some unique training, such as methods or formal theory, or has the rare ability to publish while in graduate school.

As I blogged in the past (here, here, here, and here), it turns out that this type of training and publication in graduate school are actually becoming quite common.  43% of ABD candidates have some sort of peer reviewed publication.

At the senior level, it is easier to differentiate candidates in terms of research productivity, but there is a large pool of faculty that have very good CVs that include publications, teaching awards, service, and a record of training graduate students.  What explains the professional success of these candidtes (salary, department, rank, etc)?

What I think this article really gets wrong isn’t the overuse of objective criteria in hiring processes.  Ok, the bean counting of number of articles can be overdone (especially in the British REF), but I also think the “buzz” of market stars is what seems especially problematic.  This looks less like branding gone wrong and more like information cascades.