Universities must adopt best practices in hiring academic staff

A teacher assisting a student in class. Photo: Courtesy)

There’s something common with scholars who complete their graduate studies abroad. In their last year, after gruelling years in western universities, most want to return home.

Kenyan intellectuals generally want to come back home and help rebuild their country. While most western countries offer a first rate education and  unimaginable opportunities, it is a different thing pursuing an academic career there.

I do not think I have the proper competencies to discuss these merits here, but my fellow columnist XN Iraki did justice to this theme when some months ago he shared his experience as an academic in a US university.

What I readily related to, on reading his column, were the ambiguities faced by an academic educated in the west who wished to secure a position in a local university. 

Like Iraki, my final year as a graduate student in Germany was marked by an abiding desire to return home and join the troops on the ground for the work at hand. I was perpetually on the lookout for jobs, locally. And since I had a family to fend for, the search was extended beyond borders, just in case things failed locally.

I was particularly interested in the two oldest universities in the country. Coincidentally, a year before I completed my doctorate studies, the two universities advertised positions in my field. I submitted applications. I prayed that the short-listing and eventual interviews will be delayed until, possibly, after the actual completion of my study.

The prayers were answered in part. The first university did the shortlist and an interview was called exactly a month before my return flight. I called the university pleading for a ‘Skype’ interview or any mechanism that might take advantage of modernity and its advances in technology. The request was immediately turned down. 

Job at home

Meanwhile, I had already secured a post-doctoral research position at a South African University. All the paper work was done within weeks. The actual interview was executed online. But one of my professors wisely advised that a job at home provides a better rootedness, an important aspect in academic mobility.

The ‘delay’ by the second university in summoning the interview turned out a blessing. One morning, just two weeks before my scheduled arrival in Witwatersrand, I received a text message to show up for an interview. I was given one hour. The panel was waiting. That afternoon I was informed I had been hired. That ended the South African expedition.

It is worth asking if universities are getting the best of out of their current hiring procedures, and to what extent are they are keeping up with best practices in hiring of academic staff.

The most obvious problem is the advertising or the declaration of academic vacancies. Ordinarily, a head of department notifies the administration of the existence of a vacancy, triggering a process where a detailed description of the requisite candidate is drawn up, and thereafter advertised in a widely circulating newspaper.

In organised institutions, such vacancies are also published online to reach a boundless audience. However, there are universities where adverts for academic positions are never made. ‘Strangers’ merely show up with an appointment letter asking to be assigned duties. Such arrangements are the products of a patron-client relationship involving aspiring academics and well positioned godfathers/mothers.

In others, ‘friendly panels’ are cobbled up to interview a preferred, priori identified candidate. Often, the ‘vacancy’ is only known to the candidate and his/her patrons.

Lately, as a result of demands by regulatory bodies and a growing culture of standards, universities are required to advertise vacant positions. But this is still not enough to ensure fairness.

Short notices to appear for interviews and poorly placed adverts are common. In an age where universities would ordinarily want the best talent from any part of the world, these practices effectively lock out the Diaspora and other international talents.     

Evidently, most of our universities are largely conservative and few are bold enough to widen their hiring options. For most, it is much safer to hire inbreds, former graduate students who have internalised the ‘culture’ and who would not terribly disrupt ‘the faculty pecking order’. Worse, others are hideously tribal.

Devolution, once a promise of grassroots empowerment, has become effective in sanitising and legitimising negative ethnicity. A report released recently by the National Commission for Integration and Cohesion (NCIC) published shocking levels of ethnic homogeneity in public universities.

Most universities are not universal, after all. It is not uncommon to have departments where formal academic meetings are conducted in mother tongue.

As symbols of national unity and platforms where prejudice is shed, universities need to deliberately seek out diversity in hiring staff. Since knowledge is transnational, universities should attempt to have a significant percentage of internationals among their faculty.

Notably, in some of the published adverts, it is clear that we focus too much on fundamental, academic qualifications than on specific research interests.

Research vs teaching

This problem is also structural. Since we have failed to mark out research universities from teaching universities, most adverts inadvertently privilege a teaching, rather than a research expertise. As such, a candidates’ research orientation is scarcely a prerequisite in gaining an academic position in most local universities.

Consequently, since hiring is haphazard, academic departments gradually fail to develop a specific, deliberate philosophy with regard to how they position themselves within the broader research community. 

Hiring of academic staff must be based on special competencies. It must be both deliberate and strategic. It must be anchored in a research philosophy.

Universities elsewhere use digital technologies in hiring staff. Many universities now prefer to use paperless HR systems where positions are advertised digitally and are wholly processed online. Prospective academic staff make applications from anywhere in the world and those shortlisted are interviewed online. 

Finally, there is need to consider individuated remuneration during hiring. Scholars can be paid based not just on their titles, ranks and academic qualifications, but on the respect they command in their research communities and the value they bring to the hiring institution.

Thus, a prospective academic can negotiate individually with the university on their pay. Not only will this reverse local brain drain, it will also keep scholars off the streets clamouring for pay increases.

Collective pay is anchored on a false equivalence.

The writer is head, Publishing and Media Studies, Moi University.