Hiring academics for departmental ‘fit’ is a disservice to disciplines

Two-thirds of people who start a PhD in the UK hope for a career in research. Three years after they finish, however, only about a third are still in academia. And permanent posts have all but disappeared.

This crisis of precarity has engendered calls for more, and better, jobs. Although heeding these calls is undoubtedly vital for the future of universities, what gets missed in this conversation is who gets the jobs that do exist, and on what basis.

Often, universities hire those they consider a “good fit”. But while this may seem prudent, it often serves to preserve the status quo rather than advance the disciplines on which universities depend.

Fit, at its simplest, means addressing an immediate need. A module needs teaching, a programme needs a leader, an administrative role needs filling. The department works out what it lacks and hires whoever matches the need.

But departments aren’t just administrative units; they are living, breathing intellectual environments. To remain relevant, they need to hire the best scholars they can find: ones who ask questions no hiring committee anticipated, reshaping the field and drawing students because their work is alive. Hiring for the gap might help deliver next year’s teaching but it can mean missing out on the scholar whose work would have attracted students for years to come.

That role in attracting students is important in another way, too. Universities also increasingly hire for financial fit. A hire has become an investment, and an investment must bring returns. But those returns are typically seen in terms of candidates’ short-term ability to win research grants.

This logic misses a scholar’s true contribution, of course. Work that matters can take decades to prove its worth and may never attract any funding at all. A third of the papers behind recent Nobel prizes, for example, had no funding. Funding is an input, not an achievement.

But the financial fit criterion fails even on its own terms. The least fundable work is often the most valuable: a book, a piece of theory, a slow rethinking of an idea that changes how we collectively understand the world. Such work earns no immediate overhead, yet in time it brings students, reputation and, ultimately, money.

Then there is the human fit. Every department has its habits and unspoken rules, and the easy hire is the one who leaves them undisturbed: collegial, reliable, “a safe pair of hands”. We assume this helps the department run smoothly. But is that really true? Fields advance through disagreement, through people who think differently and refuse to let a consensus settle. Knowledge advances through challenge; a department where everyone agrees has stopped thinking.

The same logic governs how academics judge one another: in one large study of a major funder, the researchers with the most original records were 31 per cent less likely to be funded than their “safer” peers. We reward people for posing no threat and call the result excellence.

Hiring for true quality, rather than fit, is harder. It requires reading the candidates’ work closely and deciding whether it truly advances the field. That takes time, as well as the expertise to recognise originality even when it takes an unfamiliar form. It requires defending that judgement in open debate with colleagues who disagree. That tension is not a failure of process; it is the process.

And it forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: the judgement on whom to hire is always subjective, no matter how many rubrics and boxes we use to dress that subjectivity. Fit appeals not only because it makes the decision easier but because it gives us the illusion of having been spared from taking responsibility for our choices. But the final decision remains unavoidably ours to defend. All the more reason for it to be based on true quality.

Every appointment is a bet on who will carry a field forward, yet we keep betting on whoever costs least, unsettles least and matches the current operational needs most closely. None of this decides whether the discipline advances.

A university is the custodian of its disciplines. Without them, it is nothing but buildings and a business plan. What might hiring look like if committees asked not “who is the best fit?” but “whose work will still matter to this field in 20 years?”

Peter Sutoris is associate professor in climate and development at the University of Leeds.